What I’d believed was my reason—the someone brighter, the someone stranger, the someone I’d wanted to begin to become—was just some space at the center of myself that wasn’t me.
Mieszko refilled my margarita, then his.
“Dziękuję,” I said.
He nodded. “Dobje.”
I shook my head, I motioned at the margarita: “Nie dobje.”
He shrugged.
Curt said, “I’d like to hear what Stan thinks.”
The conversation they’d been having came to an agreeable pause. Curt was being inclusive.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” I said.
Everyone but me ordered entrees.
Back at the hotel, Dr. Madera insisted on tequila.
We sat in the same chairs from the night before, only more loosely, more heavily. I didn’t want to stay and drink, I didn’t want to stand and go. Dr. Madera poured out doubles. She told the story of the first time she drank tequila, a complicated misadventure involving a family picnic, a one-legged cousin, a garbage-choked canal, and an encounter with a local talk-show host.
“I wish we were at Green Door,” said Dr. Madera.
Golnaz, slightly drunk, said, “May I ask you a question?”
Dr. Madera laughed. “You may.”
“It is a sensitive question.”
“Please,” said Dr. Madera, goofy-serious, “go on.”
Golnaz sat up. She spoke carefully, fighting the slur that slanted her voice: “What I want to know is, what did you feel? On your first excavation. On the first day of your first excavation, afterwards. I am saying, was it what you expected? Was it not? What did you feel?”
Dr. Madera made a show of thinking about this. She uncapped the tequila. Golnaz finished what was in her cup, then held it out—Dr. Madera filled both their cups, then glanced at me.
I said I was good.
Dr. Madera leaned back. “What I felt after the first day of my first dig, above all, was disappointment.”
She explained how the dig wasn’t what she’d expected, experientially, even though it was exactly what she’d expected, procedurally.
“But it got better! I made it better. For myself.”
Golnaz said, “If I may continue. What you are saying, it is very compelling. But. It is not very specific. What I want to know is, to make it better, to make it better for yourself, what do you adjust? Do you adjust your expectations of the work, or do you adjust your expectations of yourself?”
“You’d think there’d be a difference between one’s expectations of the work and one’s expectations of oneself. There isn’t.”
Golnaz started to ask another question, one with the trajectory of an objection, but her phone rang. She staggered off to answer it.
Dr. Madera and I stepped out for a smoke. We stood by the bushes and stared at the parking lot, at the roar and glow of 55. I waited for her to keep talking, but she didn’t. She was as quiet as she’d been when we’d leaned on her hatchback and waited for the trooper to return with her papers. She might have been reviewing the day. She might have been trying to find a friendly way to tell me not to fuck up so much tomorrow.
“Sorry about today,” I said, and at the same time, she said, “I used to have a truck like that.”
Parked in front of us was a huge black pickup. All its windows tinted.
“Tinted windows, nice,” I said, as she said, “What?”
“Sorry about what?” she said.
I couldn’t tell if she truly didn’t know what I was talking about, or if she was pretending not to know. Either option embarrassed me.
She raised an eyebrow, meaning, Spill it.
“For my fuckups in the field. For a day of fuckups.”
“You call that fucking up? On a dig in Costa Rica, when I was a student, I was processing this ceramic figurine, it was a monkey. A constipated-looking monkey. I don’t know how it happened, but when I was cleaning it, I knocked the fucking thing off the table. It almost looked like I did it on purpose. It hit the floor and broke in half—you can imagine how I felt. It was awful. The field director, he was standing next to me when it happened, he told me to stay right where I was—he rustled up whoever was around to come to the lab to look at me with my broken fucking monkey. Most of the team was there. He said, ‘Because of her carelessness, Elena has just obliterated a link to the ancient world.’ He kept going, he was working himself up, he said some shit about the journey of artifacts through time and our duty as stewards of that journey—shit that I believe in, by the way—and then he dismissed everybody except me. He called me a cunt. He picked up the two pieces of the monkey. He waved them around. He said, ‘Well? What do you have to say for yourself, about what you’ve done to this artifact?’ and he didn’t want me to answer, he wanted me to just stand there and keep taking it.”
Dr. Madera waited for me to ask her what she did.
I asked her what she did.
“I said to him, ‘Now it’s easier for you to shove it up your ass.’”
She mimed shoving two pieces of a monkey up an ass.
“Curt was on that dig,” she said, smiling. “He didn’t believe me when I told him what I said.”
Golnaz puttered through the door, looking dazed, a hand-rolled cigarette in her mouth. I didn’t remember giving her one, or ever seeing her smoke. She lit up. It was a joint.
She took long, slow hits.
“I don’t miss my son and I don’t miss my husband,” she said.
She passed the joint to me. I did a short puff, offered it to Dr. Madera, who declined, and then I passed it back to Golnaz. Dr. Madera, trying not to laugh, gave me a look that said, Good for her!
“Why?” said Golnaz.
I turned my back to Dr. Madera and said to Golnaz that it wasn’t that she didn’t miss her family, it was that she loved what she was doing here. Being here was what she missed. Being here was what she’d been missing.
She brought the joint to her mouth but dropped it. It smoldered on the sidewalk. She stamped it out and said something in Farsi. She was crying.
“We have come to the end of what there is to be said about that,” she said.
We walked her back through the lobby, into the elevator, down the hall, and to her room.
I gave her a hug.
“Thank you,” she said.
She closed the door behind her gently, like she was worried she’d wake someone up.
Dr. Madera found all of this funnier than I did. “She’ll figure it out,” she said. “And if she doesn’t, that’s figuring it out, too. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen this. You know what this is about?”
“Her family.”
“Golnaz has it in her to be a great anthropologist.”
I agreed.
“The world wants women to clip their wings. Even worse, it wants them to do it to themselves.”
We walked to Dr. Madera’s door. She cuffed me on the shoulder.
“I want you on board for Central America,” she said.
The Central America trip, a four-week winter-break research intensive, was the trip that every grad student in our program wanted to be selected to take. The application process, which hadn’t opened yet, was even more competitive than it was for Cahokia.
“You’re good to have around,” said Dr. Madera.
Then the way we looked at each other changed.
We didn’t move.
The more we didn’t move, the more the way we looked at each other changed. I could have looked away, I could have moved. I didn’t. We were becoming two people who could kiss.
I kissed her.
She jumped back—her face twisted.
“No,” she said, chopping the air with her hands, disgusted.
For an instant my sight punched out.
The world was a dumb white wall.
“Mira que cabrón,” I heard her say.
“You have the wrong idea about me,” she said.
My sight broke back�
��she was still there, looking shocked.
Nothing had been changing in how we’d been looking at each other.
She wasn’t looking shocked: she was looking furious.
She was saying something.
“Okay?” she said.
She pointed down the hall.
“Go to your room.”
90
—Stanley’s Brother—
He took a half-day at work and drove the five hours from Chicago to Collinsville, and I got in the car, and he drove the five hours from Collinsville to Chicago.
“There’s some sausage pizza in the cooler,” he said. “From this new joint in my neighborhood, Slicer Miller’s.”
He ate a piece.
“They’ve got a kick-ass vegan pizza. I’m pretty skeptical of vegan ‘cheese,’ believe me, but dude, that pizza’s good. I don’t know how they do it! We should take Mom there sometime.”
“Mom’s a weekend vegan again,” he explained.
He put on music.
He put on a comedy podcast.
He put on a history podcast.
After a while he said, “You punched somebody, didn’t you.”
91
—Stanley’s Mom
My mom and I sat at the bar in the Chicago Brauhaus and waited for my brother to show up. We both knew that he was late on purpose.
He’d arranged the dinner, like usual. At first I’d said I wasn’t sure I could make it.
“What if you come as a favor?” he’d said. “A favor to me, your brother. Who does you favors?”
Later that week, our mom was leaving for her annual summer trip to Europe.
She and I ordered drinks.
“This year I have a conference in Kraków,” she said.
I asked her what the conference was about.
She told me.
The bartender brought two dimpled half-liters of bright beer.
“Na zdrowie,” whispered my mom, raising her glass sneakily.
It’d been a week since I’d quit the dig. My thumb was in a splint. I’d told T everything that’d happened, except for the attempted kiss, and from this sparked a fight that hadn’t ended, that’d flared and spat for seven days. T called my decision to leave Cahokia unacceptable. For her, it was as if I’d been cast in my dream show, only I hadn’t been given my dream role, I’d been given a challenging minor role, a character I wasn’t immediately good at playing, and instead of buckling down after a failed first rehearsal, instead of grinding hard to come up with what it took to rise to the occasion of the role, I’d quit. T had said, No one who does that can work in theater! and I said, That’s the point! and our fight, which had been about Cahokia, began to melt into other subjects—previous fights and complaints and issues—and my decision to quit the dig became a signifier for other actions and inactions, which brought us to how I’d announced my intent to propose, which brought us to how I’d admitted to having bought a ring, which brought us to what these facts revealed about the nature of our relationship. We fought in the apartment and on the street. We fought over text and through email. We improvised new ways to explain what we’d already explained, rehashing, replaying, redoing, and when something was said that set me off, I’d shout, This might be as “far” as we can “go”! and when something was said that set her off, she’d shout, How else do you become a “different person” but by taking “uncomfortable actions”! and my hands would clench, and my jaw would clamp, and I’d begin to be sure that at any moment a gash would tear open in my conscience out of which would gush an act of violence. T would leave for rehearsal in the high heat of one of the middles of our fight. The door would slam. I’d open our cabinet and pick a glass, a water glass or a beer glass or a wineglass, hers or mine. I’d stand with it. I’d see myself smashing it. I’d see myself throwing a plate and flipping a table and kicking a wall and punching a window and grabbing or pushing or slapping or striking T. I’d stop. Nausea would rock me. I’d be standing somewhere else, the glass in my hand—the bedroom, the hallway, the stairwell, the alley. I’d put the glass back. There’d been no work for me that week; I’d told Niko I’d be in Collinsville for the summer. He’d hired someone else. When T was at work or rehearsal, I sat on the couch, or under the red maple at Welles Park, or at the two-person tables in the Grind, the local coffee shop I liked, where the baristas, who recognized me, began to pretend they didn’t.
My mom said, “I’m presenting a paper on immersive learning experiences.”
We reached for our beers at the same time and drank from them with the same poky intentionality. We both moved a little like large domesticated animals. I resembled her, but sounded like my dad, and my brother resembled our dad, but sounded like our mom. It’d been that way since we were kids.
My mom looked like she usually did at the end of a semester: worn out and weary-eyed, but animated, already turning it around. A lightness lifted her. This was also how she looked when she was dating again, whether she’d gone back to my dad or was seeing someone new.
She waited for me to say something.
“Conferences are reunions,” she said. “I can’t wait to see my people.”
A server brought us a pretzel.
The bar and the dining room shared the same space, which gave the restaurant the feel of a private club. On a small stage, a pair of handsome elderly German musicians in folk costumes performed, one on an electronic keyboard, the other on an ornate accordion. Both appeared to be wandering into pleasant imaginary worlds.
“The next song,” said the keyboardist, “it is a song about a woman who is in love. She is very sad. She tells the world. Never before has there been such a song.”
I did and didn’t want to propose to T, and I knew I shouldn’t, and I knew I would.
My mom said, “You’re too private.”
Torrentelli had said: Tell her true things!
“Things aren’t good,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“I keep doing the wrong thing.”
“Like what.”
I stared at my beer. “I tried to cheat on T.”
“Does she know about it?”
“No.”
“Do you know how many times I tried to cheat on your father?”
Our phones chimed, faceup on the bar—a text from my brother: Parking!
My mom turned on her bar stool to look me in the eye. Her face was wide and square, like mine, but her default expression was open.
Her openness shut.
“I need to tell you something, kiddo,” she said.
At this moment I realized that she’d been drinking before we met at the bar.
“You’re a reasonable person,” she said, meaning, You need to start being more reasonable.
“You have a good heart,” she said, meaning, You need to start thinking about other people.
“You’re in your twenties,” she said, meaning, You’re a dupa jasiu.
“What is it,” I said.
“You’ve got plenty of time to find what you love.”
“Yes.”
“I’m saying that you’re right to walk away from whatever you need to walk away from. You get me?”
“You’re telling me to break up with T.”
She put her hand to her chest. “God no—I’m talking about archaeology, about how you left the excavation. I’ve only met the girl twice. I don’t know anything about her, about you and her.”
I looked away, at the stage, where the musicians were in the middle of another song. “I should,” I said.
My mother touched my hand. “No, Stanley.”
I was confused.
“Walk away from what you’ve got to walk away from, but with somebody you love, don’t get hasty. You’ll want to walk right back.”
“T and me aren’t you and Dad.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
I asked her to say what she was saying.
She was holding my hand now.
She said, “You’
re a difficult person. You’re a difficult person to love.”
I took my hand away.
“It’s all your brother and I—and your aunt, sometimes she calls me—talk about. How to get you to help yourself. You should hear us. It’d do you good.”
I rose from my bar stool.
“That’s a compliment!” she said, irritated. “Use your head. You think we don’t have other things to talk about? You think if you’re angry and bitter and touchy all the time, people are going to see through it to your sensitive side, and they’ll admire you, like your private life is a movie everybody can watch?”
I walked out of the bar and through the dining room and into the hallway, where I passed my brother, who was rushing in, mid-text, who didn’t see me, and it wasn’t until I made it outside, by the brick wall entrance and the sidewalk sign of a doofy stein-wielding chef, that I saw that I hadn’t let go of my beer glass.
Across the street, the fountain in the leafy plaza burbled. Moms and dads watched kids chase each other from bench to bench. An old man soloed on a clarinet. I leaned against the brick wall, which was warm, and chugged what was left of the beer. I’d always assumed it’d been my dad who’d kept coming back to my mom, every other year. Now I was sure that it was the other way around. I didn’t want this to make me mad, but it did.
The door opened. A furious middle-aged bartender said, “You forget something?”
I stared at him.
He nodded. “Just give me back my glassware, asshole.”
I unleaned from the wall.
“You gonna make me get it?” he said, straightening.
I turned the glass fist-wise, like it was a pair of brass knuckles.
The bartender twitched.
I punched the wall—the glass exploded.
PART III
LIFE IS BRUTAL AND FULL OF TRAPS
The Made-Up Man Page 18