by Mary McCoy
Instead I found my dad, passport in his hand, and ambivalent about the whole thing. I found my mom crying at her own engagement party, settling for the only guy who wasn’t leaving.
This is the kind of story where even if I dig up all the pieces, nothing could put them back together.
It’s like Greg Thurber said. Love is just an unceasing maelstrom of drudgery and obligation. It’s a fantasy; it’s a figment of your imagination; it’s a story with the same shitty ending every time.
Nobody wants that kind of truth.
“Huh,” I say. I lean forward and eject the tape, but I don’t take it out of the VCR. I sit there, staring at its peeling paper label and half wishing I hadn’t watched it.
Risa cups her hand over the back of my hand. “Are you okay?”
I’m not sure how to answer the question.
“Do you want to go to my house?” she asks.
That one’s easier.
* * *
Risa lives in a neighborhood in Memphis called Sherwood Forest, where all the streets are named after characters from Robin Hood. Her house is on Maid Marian Lane, on a block of redbrick houses, each one almost identical with white shutters, carports, and concrete steps.
When we go inside, everything smells like flowers, real ones, not air freshener. There’s a vase or a pot on nearly every table I see. The couch has a floral print, and even the walls are covered with sprigs of dried lavender and heather.
I was quiet in the car most of the way here, but I feel better as soon as I set foot inside. It’s hard not to feel at least a little bit of fascination and delight when you’re in Sherwood Forest.
“You can leave your shoes here,” Risa says, pointing to a pile of no fewer than a dozen pairs of sandals, boots, wedges, and stiletto heels.
“Does someone in your family have a shoe problem?” I ask.
“The boots are my aunt’s. The sandals are my mom’s. They share the heels.”
I look around for some sign of them, but the house seems to be empty except for us. I follow Risa to the kitchen, and she fills the room with conspiratorial small talk while she gets glasses down from the cupboard.
“They both had dates tonight,” she says. “You should have seen them two hours ago. They were doing their eyebrows and saying judgmental things about each other’s outfits. And then they started saying judgmental things about my outfit, and I was, like, leave me out of your straight-lady psychodrama.”
So she is queer, I think.
“Their dates were named Bear and Bragg. They probably showed up wearing Grizzlies jerseys.” She seems like she’s winding up for another rant, then catches herself and giggles. “But I’m rambling and you didn’t come here to talk about my mom’s love life.”
“You’re not rambling,” I say. “Or if you are, it’s endearing.”
She hands me a glass of water. “This might be an odd thing to say given the circumstances, but I’m glad you came over. Are you feeling better about the video?”
“It was a lot to take in,” I said, “but I can take it.”
I think about what we saw on the video, how raw and confusing it was, how private and sad. Am I okay? I wonder. Or has it not sunk in yet?
It must show on my face because Risa puts her glass on the countertop and takes me by the shoulders.
“You know, it’s okay if you’re not okay,” she says.
Her hands feel like they’re grounding me, pulling me out of my head and back into the rest of my body—pulling me back here with her.
“I don’t know if it’s the right time, but I have something to show you,” Risa says tentatively. “It’s for Objects of Destruction.”
“What is it?”
“Something I made.”
“Then I definitely want to see it,” I say.
For a second, she hesitates like she’s going to change her mind and take it back, but then she says, “Okay, then. Follow me.”
She leads me down the hallway to her room, which is an explosion of cables, stereo equipment, and gear. There’s a knee-high practice amp by the bed, next to a guitar stand with an electric and an acoustic propped up on it. When I see her desk, my heart leaps because I see the makeshift home studio setup, not dissimilar to my own.
I’m struck by a desire to be as bold as she is, asking for my number, sending me songs.
“When you said you wanted to hang out, did you mean as friends, or like a date?” I ask.
“I know you date guys,” she says. I can’t read the expression on her face, can’t tell whether she’s hanging back because she doesn’t want to lead me on, or because she thinks I’m straight.
“Not exclusively,” I say, eager to set the record straight.
“I also know you’re not terribly exclusive,” she says, and my face burns.
“How do you…?” I’d always prided myself on never getting caught, but I don’t finish asking my question because as soon as the words leave my mouth, it occurs to me that it’s nothing to be proud of.
“Lesbian whisper network,” Risa says. “Bi girls to watch out for.”
I feel like I should defend myself, but Risa isn’t looking at me like I’m a bi girl to watch out for. Whatever she thinks about my reputation, at least in this moment, she seems to be smiling about it. So I decide not to make a big deal out of it either.
“For what it’s worth, I think my cheating days are over,” I say.
“You’re embracing monogamy?”
“I’m embracing honesty.”
She takes the chair at her workstation and motions for me to sit on the bed as she picks up a pair of headphones.
“Well, then I’d like your honest opinion of this piece,” she says. “It’s the theme music for Objects of Destruction. Or at least I’d like it to be.”
She slips the headphones over my ears and hits play, and immediately, I’m in love. It sounds like the song of an old music box that you might find tucked away in an attic, creaky and haunted. And then the chords turn shimmery, like shards of glass catching sunlight one by one. There are gentle, winding lengths of it, perfect for layering under a monologue, or nesting between segments. There’s a spot that builds and explodes, just the way I’d imagined it.
She doesn’t watch me, doesn’t listen along. Instead she follows the sound waves on the computer screen, and only when it’s over does she look at me.
I’m so thrilled that she made something for me, thrilled by the fact of her, her home recording studio, her house full of flowers on Maid Marian Lane.
“It’s like you pulled the ghost of a song out of my brain and made it real.”
“Then you like it?” she asks.
“It’s perfect,” I say. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”
We’re both still, and I can tell there’s something other than the song hanging in the air between us. I feel like I should break it.
I feel like I should lean over and kiss her to break it.
The only reason I don’t is because I’m thinking about what happens after.
I’m thinking about the second time that Claire and I hooked up. It was a month after the night in the storage closet, long enough that my conscience had begun to ease up, and instead of feeling guilty about what had happened, it almost seemed like it hadn’t happened at all.
But then Claire and I worked another closing shift, and it was just her and me in the shop, and I felt this prickly, rangy energy coursing through my body, and when she asked, “Do you want to see if there’s anything interesting in the storage closet?” I followed her.
There’s something about the moment you decide to hook up with someone, especially when it’s accompanied by a little voice that asks, “Is this a good idea?” It’s so hot to push that voice aside and lose yourself in a bad idea, in someone’s kiss, and let the momentum carry you as far as it will.
Every time I cheated on Vincent, there was a moment when I realized it was a bad idea and did it anyway.
Not that hooking up with Ris
a would be the same thing. I wasn’t sneaking around. I wasn’t lying to anyone. But my emotions had been jacked up all night, from the interview with Greg, to getting caught outside Vincent’s house, to watching the videotape of my parents unhappy at their own engagement party. It would have felt good to obliterate those difficult, twisted-up feelings and replace them with something nice. That was what held me back: Did I like her, or did I just like getting lost in someone who wasn’t me?
“You look like you’re having some thoughts,” Risa says.
“I want to kiss you,” I say. “But I shouldn’t. I’m a flaming wreck of a human being right now.”
Risa laughs. “How bad could you possibly be?”
“When you texted, I was sitting in a parked car outside my ex-boyfriend’s house having an existential crisis.”
Risa stops laughing and her face turns serious. She doesn’t say anything, so in the spirit of honesty, I decide to keep going.
“ ‘Taking time off’ from Java Cabana to work on my podcast was not my idea. My boss pretty much fired me because my ex got into a fight with the guy I hooked up with the night after we broke up.”
I decide I’m going to keep talking until Risa says something, or tells me to stop, or kicks me out.
“I cheated on him, more than once, with Claire from work. My parents are splitting up, I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t know what love is or if it exists. I thought I understood love, I thought I had my life figured out. I liked that feeling, and now it’s gone.”
At first, she doesn’t say anything. There’s a loose thread on the edge of her bedspread, and she picks it up and starts to pull at it, slowly unraveling the hem until the thread gets stuck and goes taut. She glances up at me, like, I’ll be right with you, but first I need to see what happens with this bedspread, and then winds the thread around her fingertip and yanks it until it snaps.
As she unwinds the thread from her fingertip, she looks up at me and gives me a grin that might be pitying or exasperated, or that might be kind.
“Thank you for telling me all of that,” she says.
“Thanks for not telling me to get the hell out of your house.”
Risa gets up from her chair and sits next to me on the bed. She puts her hand on top of mine and says, “I appreciate your honesty, but just because you’re a flaming wreck of a human being doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and instead of answering, Risa leans over and kisses me.
It’s not a shy kiss, or a soft one. Risa kisses like she plays the guitar, like she has one chance to deliver an urgent message. She kisses in a way that makes me think, in the middle of kissing her, that if I hadn’t done this, I’d walk around for the rest of my life with some kind of regret whose origins I could never entirely place.
My fingertips explore her jawline, her neck, the tendril of hair that cradles her earlobe. It is the opposite of my disappointing parking-lot hookup with Ian, the opposite of my furtive cheating with Claire. It’s like I just picked a lock, threw open the door, and what came tumbling out was the rest of me.
The next thing I know, she’s pulling off her T-shirt and throwing it over the back of the desk chair. Inspired by her daring, I do the same thing with my sundress, and then we’re on our knees, facing each other on her bed. I reach for her again, and when we kiss this time, I feel her hands run down my sides and land at the small of my back.
She pulls away and looks me up and down. Before I have a chance to feel self-conscious about being on her bed in my bra and underwear in unflattering, bright overhead lights, she says, “You look so pretty.”
“You look so pretty,” I say, admiring her.
I love the way she’s looking at me, the way she’s admiring me. It puts me at ease, lets me know that whatever my body looks like, whatever effect the lighting is having, it’s good.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m also terrified.
Because I know what it’s like to be touched by people who are bad at it, or lazy, or indifferent. While I’m touching her, the part of me that isn’t melting with pleasure is frozen in fear that I’m not doing it right.
We lie down and kiss some more, our arms wrapped around each other, our bellies pressed together. It’s languid and dreamy, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so good. If Risa told me I could stay with her exactly like this, for the rest of the night, I would do it in a heartbeat.
But then I wonder, should I be doing something else? Does she want me to go further? I feel good about everything we’ve done so far, but I can feel the anxiety building inside me about where it’s all heading.
I pull away for a moment and look into her eyes. On the pillow, our faces are so close I can count her eyelashes. Near the foot of the bed, our toes touch.
“How are you doing?” she asks. “Is this okay?”
I think about the way I felt the mornings after I’d hooked up with Ian, with Claire. I’m pretty sure right now that when I wake up tomorrow morning, I’m not going to feel regret about anything that’s happened between Risa and me. But given the tumultuous quality of my life, I know better than to make predictions about how I’m going to feel about anything.
“It’s very okay,” I say. “How about you? What would you like to happen?”
“I’d like to keep doing this,” she says, then adds, “but we should probably stop. I don’t know what time my mom and aunt are getting home from their dates. And besides, this is a lot.”
“I’m glad it happened, though,” I say.
“So am I.”
As I put my bra and sundress back on, I think about the joyless and cruel conversations Claire and I started to have after the second time, conversations like: this didn’t mean anything; this won’t happen again; don’t tell my boyfriend.
“So, what happens next?” Risa asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, “but I like the honesty thing. Can we keep doing that?”
“Like letting me know if you drive past your ex’s house?”
“I’m going to try not to do that again.”
“I like that you didn’t promise you wouldn’t. Very honest.”
“I know myself. I’m weak. Some people have even called me a bi girl to watch out for.”
Risa rolls her eyes at me. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”
I don’t know what’s gotten into me, all this giddy nonsense. If I’m not careful, I’m going to piss her off.
“I’m sorry. I’m being weird,” I say.
“You are worth the weirdness,” she says. And I kiss her again, kiss her until we hear her aunt’s car pull up outside, and she walks me to the foyer so I can put on my shoes and exchange awkward family introductions with a woman whose lipstick and hair are as tousled as ours.
I’m looking for the problem, for the thing I’m going to feel rotten about tomorrow, and I can’t find it. But maybe, I think, instead of looking for things to feel guilty about, I could just feel happy.
I’m a flaming wreck of a human being, I think, but I am worth the weirdness.
CHAPTER 22 Never Just One Thing
There’s this movie cliché where people fall into a deep and immediate slumber after fooling around. I don’t know what that’s about because when I get home from Risa’s house, I’m too wired to sleep. It’s after midnight and Max is already in my bed when I come home, his snoring drowned out by the air conditioner. I go up to the attic so I can sit for a minute with everything that happened tonight. It started with me antagonizing the man who might be my biological father, and ended here, my lips swollen from kissing, my heart racing every time I catch the scent of her still clinging to my skin.
I can’t wait to hear how Risa’s song sounds in the mix. She’s given me so much to work with—dreamy synth parts, electric guitar riffs. It doesn’t sound like noodling, though. It’s a composition with a theme it keeps returning to. When I get this done, I think, I’ll have her over and she and Max and I can listen to it toge
ther, this thing we made.
When I finally go downstairs, it’s almost three in the morning, and I almost have a rough mix of the first episode. I love my house around this time when it’s a still, tiny kingdom with a population of only me. Except tonight, it’s not only me. My dad is sitting at the kitchen table, writing in his notebook. He looks up and waggles his fingers at me in a sheepish, we’re-both-up-too-late kind of wave. I join him at the table, knowing I’m not going to get a lecture about staying up too late. We don’t do that at my house.
“What are you writing?” I ask.
He shakes his head and closes the notebook.
“Nothing important,” he says. “How about you? What were you working on?”
“Just messing around,” I say.
“Are you getting enough sleep, Lee?” he asks. “It’s important to sleep when you’re under stress.”
“Said the man who was up at three a.m.”
“What did you and Max say to Greg earlier?” he asks. “He looked queasy when he came down from the attic.”
“The same questions I’ve been asking the rest of you. Don’t worry. Greg didn’t answer them either. Your secrets are safe.”
My dad folds his hands on the table and gives me an exasperated look.
“Lee, honey,” he says. “I don’t know how to talk to you about any of this.”
“It’s your story,” I say. “You can talk about it any way you want.”
“That’s the problem,” he says. “If I decide on one way to tell you, then the story becomes one thing, and the story of me and your mother was never just one thing. Not ever.”
“I know that.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“It’s late,” I say. “I should try to get some sleep.”
I’m getting up from the table when he says, “One more thing, Lee. I don’t want to get in the middle, but I think you should call your mom.”
“If you don’t want to be in the middle, don’t say things like that.”