Indestructible Object

by Mary McCoy

  I sit down at the desk, push the plates to the side, and begin to flip through the pages of the passport. Not a single stamp.

  If you weren’t going to use it, why get it at all? I wonder.

  But of course, the obvious answer is that he had meant to use it. Until I came along.

  I open the desk drawers and begin to dig through them, through the stacks of old notebooks, filled with drafts of his plays; the pens he likes; the old checkbooks. Then I go through my mother’s desk on the other side of the room. Does she have an unused passport, too? Were she and my dad about to run away together before I came along and ruined everything?

  She almost never uses the office, so her desk is more symbolic than anything. Some kind of Virginia Woolf thing about having a room of one’s own in which to make art. The drawers are empty, except for the bottom one that only opens halfway. I reach inside and my fingers wrap around the spine of a small, thin book with a rough paper cover. The cover sticks in the drawer and tears a little as I pull it out.

  It’s a collection of poetry. My mother’s poetry, titled Map Room Love Songs. Unlike the rest of her books, I’ve never seen it lying around the house before. Unlike the rest of her books, it’s not professionally published. The cover is a screen-printed image of a man lifting a coffee cup to his mouth, cropped just beneath his eyes. There’s a notation on the bottom corner, 1/25, which I realize is probably how many copies were ever made. I feel bad about ripping the cover of a limited edition. There is a date inside, the year I was born, and a dedication that reads, For Greg, for everything.

  * * *

  Here is the story, as I’ve always been told it: my parents met in college, at an artists’ salon that they and their friends started, and after they graduated, they found out that my mom was pregnant, so they decided to get married and have me.

  “It seemed like a subversive thing to do at the time,” my dad said.

  “It was very romantic and exciting,” my mom said.

  “And we were very much in love,” my dad continued.

  I put the passport and the poetry book back in the desk, in the drawer that only opens halfway.

  Fuck being subversive, I think.

  Like anyone was watching the poses you struck. Like anyone cared.

  Fuck romance.

  Romance was a lie you built with another person. It rotted your judgment.

  And while I’m at it, while I’m heartbroken, while I’m sitting in the sad remains of my stupid life, fuck love, which took away all your choices and tied you to another person and made you forget who you were without them.

  Fuck love, because it always ends up the same way, because it always ends.

  CHAPTER 3 Hot Mess Island

  I go back to bed, I don’t know for how long, before I become hazily aware of my mom standing in the doorway to my bedroom, saying, “Lee. Lee. Are you up? Hey, Lee, are you up?” over and over, until I stir and rub my eyes and sit up.

  “What is it, Mom?” I ask, equal parts groggy and annoyed.

  “Lee, I listened to the podcast. I came home as soon as I heard.”

  This wakes me the rest of the way up. She comes in, sits down on the edge of the bed, and strokes my hair.

  “You poor girl. That was… hard to listen to. It was a lot of your heart to spill out on the pavement.” She says it with a pity that pisses me off, but which I also sort of appreciate.

  “Yeah.”

  “What I’m saying is, how’s your heart, Lee?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  Poets won’t let you get away with saying you’re fine. I mean, why do that when you could drag a rake over the coals of fine and stir up a nest of cinders? My mother takes my hands, folds them into hers, and waits for me to excavate my feelings for her.

  “The two of you had made a lot of plans together. Are you angry with him?”

  “I don’t want to be,” I say, and that part is true. When I said I wanted him to be free in the world, I meant it.

  “But you are.”

  “Mom,” I say, and that’s all I get out before my voice cracks and I start sobbing, my tears landing on her hands. She wraps her arms around me and holds me until I stop crying.

  “You’re allowed to be angry, sweetie. Even if you still love him. Better to be honest about it.”

  There is at least one wonderful thing about having a poet in your family, which is that when you suffer some ordinary human setback like heartbreak, they can generally rise to the occasion and whip up some good tempestuous feelings on your behalf. Besides, my mom is definitely a person who can say something like “You can be angry and still love him” and sound like she’s speaking from experience.

  “But I wasn’t honest,” I say. She frowns, not quite understanding, but I don’t feel like elaborating and she doesn’t press.

  “When does he leave?” she asks instead.

  “A week.”

  “Ugh. Well, get up. I’m taking you out for treats.”

  “Can we have treats here? I don’t really feel like leaving the house.”

  “Understandable,” she says. “Hot Mess Island, then?”

  Hot Mess Island is the name we made up for The Bachelorette, a show where a woman with perfect hair and very white teeth seeks her ideal life partner from a field of shirtless hunks, all of whom are down to wed. Our love for this show is intense and secret. For two seasons, we didn’t even let on to each other that we were obsessed with it. I watched it on my phone in my room, and she watched it on the iPad in the living room, until gradually, we began to drop cryptic, exploratory comments at the breakfast table: Tyler wore the salmon jacket again. A dream date on a horse is objectively less romantic than a dream date on a boat.

  My dad would look at us like we were spies. But my parents announced their separation right before the new season started, and now my mom no longer cares about concealing her trashy television-watching habits from anyone. We watch it openly together, on the TV in the living room.

  I don’t think there’s ever been an artist in love on The Bachelorette, but the intensity with which the contestants talk about their romantic feelings makes Lee Miller and Man Ray look almost boring by comparison. As my mom and I watch the most recent episode, both of our romantic lives are in shambles, and yet, we are totally stone-faced, while the contestants on The Bachelorette are sobbing over people they barely know.

  At the beginning, they go in joking and self-aware. I’m looking to make a connection, they say, but they have no idea what they’re in for, what that even means in the context of The Bachelorette. Three weeks later, after all the rose ceremonies and choreographed dates, they’re completely bewildered by the power of their feelings.

  This is real, they insist every time.

  “If I got paid to live in a mansion, drink wine, and snorkel, I’m pretty sure I could fall in love with a management consultant from Boca Raton too,” my mom says.

  We’re almost to the end of the episode when my dad walks in the door holding his afternoon cup of coffee from Java Cabana, the shop down the street. He pauses in front of the television for a moment, then asks, “So, what’s happening on Hot Mess Island?”

  We ignore him until he leaves the room. Only we are allowed to call it Hot Mess Island.

  When the episode ends, my mom says, “I’m taking you out of this house for treats now. Real ones.”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “It’s four in the afternoon, and you haven’t left the house all day. Besides, I need to talk to you.”

  And you don’t want to be here with Dad, I think.

  Grudgingly, I go to my room, pull my hair back, and put on a sundress, for reasons of survival rather than aesthetics. The moment we set foot outside, I’ll be engulfed in the thick, raw hamburger–smelling humidity that is Memphis in the summertime. Maybe Vincent wanted to escape that, though is the weather any better in Washington, DC? And god, you don’t even get Congressional representation if you live there. It’s like throwing your
vote away—what a stupid place to move.

  For our first treat, my mom takes me to the nail salon, where we both get pedicures, a bright blue polish for me and black for her.

  “Are you goth now?” I ask, teasing.

  “Actually, I was thinking of joining the Church of Satan,” she replies, much too loudly for a Midtown Memphis nail salon.

  The woman who’s doing her nails sucks in a breath and closes her eyes, and I see her lips moving, as if in prayer. Growing up with my artsy, heathen parents makes me, if anything, more aware of how much we don’t belong in Memphis. People go to church here. They say sir and ma’am. They have monogrammed towels, and while they think that Midtown is a nice place to go out to eat or see a show, you wouldn’t actually raise a child there. As a city, Memphis is just big enough to accommodate my mother’s strangeness, but even so, at least half the people who meet her suspect she’s not entirely on the level.

  After our nails are finished, she takes me to our favorite dim sum place for steamed buns and tea, even though there is a leftover casserole in the refrigerator that we are supposed to finish. My dad hates wasting food, hates when we deviate from planned menus, but my mother insists. It will keep another night, she says, and besides, it would be cruel to feed tuna casserole to someone with a broken heart.

  “Lee,” she says, pouring each of us a cup full of jasmine tea, “I wanted to talk to you about the separation. The timing’s horrible, and I’m so sorry, baby.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” I say. Like, were they supposed to stick it out another six months to spare my feelings? Then again, if they’d already stuck it out this long, what difference would another six months make?

  “What I mean is, I’m leaving town tomorrow,” my mom says. “Just for a week or so. I’m going to teach a workshop in New Orleans, do a couple of readings, give your dad some space. But we’ve agreed that when I get back, he’s going to move out of the house.”

  I wrap my hands around the cup of tea, let the heat sear my palms as her words sink in.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Are you moving too?”

  “I don’t know, but for now, he’s going to get a new place, and I’m going to stay in the house. You can stay too, as long as you like.”

  “What if I’d rather live with Dad?”

  It’s a petulant and bratty thing to say, and as soon as the pained expression crosses her face, I know the only reason I’d said it was to hurt her.

  “I thought you’d want to be closer to school. But of course, you can live wherever you want,” she says quietly. “I’m taking the train to New Orleans with Maggie. She and Sage and Max are already on their way from Chicago. They’ll be getting in late tonight.”

  Maggie and Sage are my parents’ friends from college, and Max is their son, whom they adopted when he was eight. He’s my age now and going to college in the fall like I am, though his plans were never as crisp and ironed as mine. Over the past three months, Maggie and Sage have told us that Max is planning to major in theater, psychology, global labor studies, and video game design.

  “Why are Sage and Max coming?”

  “Sage is going to stay with your dad, help him look for a place.”

  “If I’m supposed to be Max’s driver and tour guide, I feel like someone should have talked to me about that.”

  I’m doing it again, being difficult because I can, because I am an objectively wounded party, whose bad behavior could briefly be excused. I don’t even mind the idea of having Max around. We only see each other once or twice a year, and so every time we’re a different iteration of ourselves, but all of those versions more or less get along. At the heart of it, we knew what it meant to grow up with parents like ours, how art museums were cool, but sometimes you wanted to be taken to Disney On Ice without your family having an aesthetic crisis over it.

  However, the last time Max came here, he spent the weekend playing video games in my room while Vincent and I camped out in the attic, working on the podcast. And the last time Maggie and Sage came to visit, he’d just turned eighteen, and they let him stay home on his own. Which makes me wonder why he’s coming along this time.

  “Max will take care of himself. We didn’t think these plans would affect you when we made them. Honestly, I thought you’d probably be off with Vincent most of the time,” she says with an apologetic wince, like she’s not sure she should have uttered Vincent’s name around me. “In any case, it would be kind of you to entertain Max a little bit, if you’re feeling up to it, but I’m sure he’s not expecting it.”

  Maggie and Sage were a couple in college, too, though unlike my parents, they spent a decade traveling around the world, living in Berlin and New York before Maggie’s sister—Max’s biological mom—died, and they moved back to Chicago to raise Max.

  Maggie’s family emigrated from the Philippines before she was born. Maggie grew up in a quiet Chicago suburb until someone slipped a Flannery O’Connor novel into her aspiring-writer hands and she ended up in Memphis out of macabre fascination. She’s intense, like my mom, and writes doorstopper-thick novels about nineteenth-century women in desperate circumstances. Sage is white and grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and still has the thick, drawling accent to prove it. They’re a tattoo artist now, their arms covered from shoulder to wrist in dragons and whorls and waves that look like stained glass, ending in a dagger on the back of each of their hands. Sage has identified as nonbinary for as long as I’ve known them, and though Maggie used to identify as a lesbian, she pretty much uses the term “queer” now.

  When Maggie and Sage visited, or any of the other friends from that college literary salon circle, my parents always turned into completely different people. They acted happy and youthful and fun. They stayed up too late, drinking wine and smoking weed in the backyard, having deep, intense conversations on the front porch until two in the morning.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re at least getting a party out of it,” I say.

  My mom looks stung. “That’s not what this is, Lee. This is getting the people we love most together to hold us upright, because this is really hard.”

  “I’m sure Maggie will be holding you upright on Bourbon Street.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve left you with the impression that I expect to enjoy any of this.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  “Because I’m afraid that if I don’t, neither of us ever will,” she says.

  After we finish our tea, I say, “We should get home. I have work in a little bit.”

  “Lee, I didn’t mean to talk so much about your dad and me. I don’t want to drag you into our stuff. Really, I wanted to talk about you this afternoon. How are you doing? Are you going to be okay?”

  I let out a short bark of laughter. “What choice do I have?”

  “There’s something I want you to do for me while I’m gone,” she says, smiling sadly when I tense up, already unwilling to comply with whatever her request is. She continues anyway.

  “You were planning to make things when you thought Vincent would be making them with you. I think you should make things whether he’s here or not. Make something for yourself.”

  We drive back to the house in silence. At a couple of red lights, she starts to turn toward me like she wants to say something, but she always changes her mind. My dad isn’t home when we get there, which means that Harold must have taken him out for a drink. More college-friend stuff. They have been doing this since I was little, and to my knowledge, Harold is the only person who can nudge my dad out of his grout-cleaning, four p.m. coffee-ordering routines.

  I go up to the attic to pack for work. I run sound at Java Cabana, for their weekly open mic nights, poetry slams, songwriters’ showcases, and other gigs, and while the soundboard and monitors stayed in the coffee shop storage room, I treasure my microphones and cables too much to let them out of my sight. I know how people treat gear that isn’t theirs.

  The attic feels haunted, and my eyes flood with tears a
s I look at the side-by-side chairs where Vincent and I had worked just hours before. We were never going to be like that again. I was never going to be like that again. Which is upsetting because that’s the only person I know how to be.

  The podcast and my job at Java Cabana were my only extracurricular activities. I can’t remember the last day that had passed without me thinking about Artists in Love, without writing for it, recording it, mixing it. What was I supposed to do with that part of my brain, now that the thing it was used to doing, the thing it was good at doing, was gone?

  I log into the social media accounts for Artists in Love. Vincent designed all the graphics for them, but I did all the posting because his parents hovered over his shoulder anytime he used the internet, like they were waiting to slay any demon that slipped through the screen to corrupt his soul.

  I haven’t even used my own social media accounts in a year. Anytime there was something clever or interesting I wanted to post for myself, I posted it to one of the Artists in Love accounts instead. Eventually, it was easier to let all my personal accounts atrophy and throw my energy into getting more followers for the podcast until my personal brand was indistinguishable from Artists in Love. I was it, and it was me, a thought that didn’t seem gross or problematic at the time, but does now.

  Sometimes I got the feeling that Vincent thought most of the work I did was just clicking buttons and tuning virtual dials, that he was the artist and I was the engineer, though of course, not a real engineer. I wonder if Vincent will have to do this kind of work during his internship, whether he’ll think there’s any art to it when he’s the one doing it. Then again, I won’t be there. I won’t get to know.