The Sarah Book

by Scott McClanahan

  She was wearing a black turtleneck and tights with a black skirt and black boots that came up to her knees. She looked like a cartoon character and she had big-big, big-big, big brown eyes. Her nose was small and her mouth was tiny like a dot. The dot turned down in the corner like a frown, but fuck descriptions.

  I drank my Mountain Dew and she said, “You know that has yellow 5 in it? It’s been known to shrink penises.” I took a chug from a big bottle and said, “That’s why I’m drinking it. Need to take a few inches off.” She laughed like this: Say, O my god. O my god. Then say it for a million times.

  * * *

  The first time I heard Sarah Johnson tell a story was a few minutes later. She was talking about one of her roommates and how the roommate was getting her bean tickled that night. So Sarah was going to stay out and give her roommate some privacy.

  I said, “Her bean tickled? What’s that mean?”

  Sarah smiled, pointed down to her crotch, and waved her hands up and down like they were pistols from the Wild West and then she said, “You know? Get that bean tickled. Gotta love them beans.”

  Then she winked at me.

  Then she asked me if I liked beans.

  I said, “Yeah, I like beans.”

  Sarah said, “Who doesn’t? God bless beans.”

  So the first time Sarah Johnson touched my hand was just a few minutes after. I was in a rolly chair and Sarah was in a rolly chair too except she was rolling back and forth from her desk to another desk. She reached and grabbed my hand and pulled me to her. We rolled in our chairs around the room.

  I said, “What the hell are we doing?” Sarah smiled and said, “I’m chair dancing and you’re doing it with me.”

  She told me there was a play she wanted to see that night and we should go together. She wanted me to go with her and I said, “Ok.”

  * * *

  The first time I went on a date with Sarah Johnson this happened. I was 19 years old and she was 24 and I realized I’d never been on a date before. Never. She came by my room and I had a cut off t-shirt on and my teeth were fucked up because I’d broken one of the front teeth in half. I had shaved my head in the sink that week.

  I offered her an Old Milwaukee. I was running behind. She looked at me and said, “Well, it doesn’t get any better than this.” Then she looked at the dirty room. Books everywhere, empty cans, papers scattered all over. She asked me why I didn’t clean my room. I told her that I get depressed sometimes and then we talked and made jokes about using tampons as Christmas tree ornaments. Sarah laughed and I laughed. I knew right then that I liked making her laugh more than I liked anything in the world.

  I put on a shirt and a tie and we went to a play based on Mark Twain’s Eve’s Diary. In the first act, we watched as Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden. In the second act, we watched Eve and Adam grow old. We watched Eve lose one of her sons. This was called aging. She looked at her face in the reflection of rivers and Eve imagined how it used to be. She worried about growing old. Adam told her that all flesh was a liar and we’re just human now and in the end flesh fools us all. When Eve died we watched the actor who played Adam cry and when Adam buried Eve at the very end he said, “I used to think it was our great sadness having to leave the garden from so long ago, but now I see that I was wrong. Because you can only love what you lose. For I can see now that I never missed the garden from where we were banished. I can see now that wherever she was, there was my Eden.”

  Sarah turned to me and I rolled my eyes. I put my finger down my throat like I was going to gag and Sarah shook her head at me and smiled. We left before the play was over and went and talked.

  Sarah told me later that night it had been a hard couple of years. Two years before she was driving home on the interstate and she had to pull over because she thought she was dying. She thought she was having a heart attack and the paramedics did too, but it was only a panic attack. They raced her to the hospital and left her car pulled beside the road and she was too afraid to do anything after the hospitalization because she was afraid she might die. So now she pretended she wasn’t afraid but brave. She told me this was the story of the world—pre-tending. Then she asked me if I thought the play was stupid. Sarah said that if there was only one man and one woman in the beginning of time then we were all committing incest. The first generation of children would have to have sex with one another or with mothers and fathers to produce children. We laughed and she asked me if I liked the play. I told her it was corny and I told her I thought it was full of cliches. Then she laughed again and said, “Cliches. Just like our lives.”

  * * *

  The first time I kissed Sarah Johnson was three days before Thanksgiving. I came over to her house and we watched a movie about a school bus full of children who died and then we watched a re-run of Jeopardy. I thought, “Movies about dead children are always good for romance.”

  I kept thinking if I should try it.

  I kept thinking that.

  I moved my head and kissed her on the cheek. Her face turned towards me and I kissed her on the mouth. It felt like: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzip.

  We kept kissing and she said, “Why are you keeping your eyes open? It’s weird.”

  I told her I was sorry. Then we kissed more, but I opened my eyes again. It was then that I felt like I was falling. Then I felt the cliches. I felt like I was falling with the cliches. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and there were fingers choking me. Falling, suffocating. Everything was fine, as fine as ever, but then her stepbrother walked in.

  Sarah said, “I thought he was gone.”

  Her stepbrother was embarrassed too. “O I’m sorry, Sarah.”

  Her stepbrother quickly walked up the stairs and Sarah and I sat up straight and Sarah told me she was sorry.

  I told her, “I’m glad he didn’t come in a few minutes later or he would have seen my little white ass bobbing up and down.” So Sarah told me to shut up and then she told me I was an idiot. She was right. So I shut up, idiot style.

  But what did Sarah not know? I was 19 years old. I’d never kissed anybody. I drove home that evening and I thought, “Maybe I won’t die because I’ve kissed someone now.”

  As I drove through the mountains, I wonder if I knew I would marry Sarah ten years later and we’d raise children together in the house I just left. I wonder if I knew that one day I’d be writing about how we met and how we only love what we lose. And how this chapter would end with a line from a play that two people saw so long ago. It would end like this, I wouldn’t say I was sorry about what happened. For wherever she was—there was my Eden. In the memory we laughed and rolled our eyes and pretended we were gagging because it was all so corny and stupid. And it was all such a cliche. Just like our fucking lives.

  But who was she? Her name was Sarah Johnson and she was born in 1976 in West Virginia. She was the daughter of Elphonza and Corrie. She had a brother named Jack who I never liked but who I always said I liked. I never liked him though and I’m not putting him in my book.

  But if I really wanted to tell you about Sarah I would probably tell you about her first memory. Sarah was four years old and she was taking a shower with her aunt Sherry. Sarah was so short she only came up to Sherry’s waist. They had come back from swimming at the beach and Sarah had sand in her little girl hair and sand in the folds of her little girl skin and sand around the edges of her little girl bathing suit. And Sarah was young enough to not be ashamed of taking a shower with he
r aunt Sherry. Sherry slipped off Sarah’s bathing suit and Sherry took off her own bikini as well and the two of them stood naked together beneath the falling water of the shower head. Sherry scrubbed Sarah down with a washcloth and then lathered up Sarah’s hair and rinsed it free of sand. They switched places and Sarah stood and watched her aunt Sherry wash. Then Sarah saw something dangling between her aunt Sherry’s legs. It was a white string. Sherry leaned her head back and rinsed her hair clean and Sarah felt only one impulse now. She wanted to pull the white string dangling from between her aunt’s legs. She found herself repeating, “I want to pull the white string. I want to pull the white string.”

  So Sherry looked down and laughed at the little girl Sarah because Sarah had no idea that this was a tampon string. After the shower aunt Sherry told Sarah about the future and her aunt Sherry told her that some of us only bleed on the inside, but women are so alive that they can bleed on the outside too and make life. Like gods. So Sarah smiled and said she couldn’t wait to be a god. But then one day she realized just how stupid this was and how her aunt Sherry was full of shit. This was a torture. And so after the shower Sarah went and sat with her father who she loved more than anything in the world.

  His name was Elphonza. One morning, years later, he woke up after visiting Sarah. Sarah was a grown woman now and on the last day of his visit Elphonza started gathering up all of his stuff in the guest bedroom and was getting ready to leave. A few nights before he got up in the middle of the night and ate some tiny containers of ice cream Sarah kept in the freezer. The next morning, he told Sarah she needed to throw out the ice cream in the freezer because it had freezer burn. Sarah told him, “No it doesn’t, Dad. You ate the ice cream I keep for the dogs. Frosty Paws.” He didn’t think about this now or how Sarah always laughed at him. He shaved and shat and packed his bags and finally showered after spending seven days with his daughter. Then he left. Later that afternoon Sarah went into the guest room to strip down the sheets off of her dad’s bed and wash them. She pulled off the bed spread and the pillowcases and then tossed the pillow cases on the floor. Then she pulled down the rest of the sheets and something fell out. What the fuck? It was a giant chunk of cheddar cheese with denture marks around the edges.

  So Sarah picked up her phone and called her dad. “Dad, were you sleeping with a giant chunk of cheese in your bed last night?” Elphonza said, “Hell yes. I was wondering where that chunk of cheese went.”

  When Sarah was a child, Elphonza sat in the evenings and drank his scotch and listened to Willie Nelson’s version of “Always on my Mind.”

  The room filled with smoke and he watched TV some more. He watched car races and TV shows. He learned on a TV show about how there is no such thing as new water. He learned that the original water came from the Milky Way millions of years ago. It was carried on the back of a giant meteor and this giant meteor collided with earth and so life began.

  And so we are all made of water then. We are all made up of what came here and collided and allowed something to be born and none of it is new. But he also learned if you wanted to buy the things that make up our bodies it would cost about as much as a candy bar. And that’s all we are. Candy bars and stars.

  Of course, Sarah knew if there was one thing Elphonza loved more than anything in the world it was Sarah’s mother.

  Her name was Corrie. One day Sarah and her mom went to go get pedicures and they were sitting in the pedicure chair and soaking their feet and then they put them on the pedicure footrest so the mani pedi woman could begin. The pedicure woman started rubbing the skin off the heels and the balls of the feet. Then the woman started working in between Corrie’s toes.

  The pedicure woman shrieked and stood up.

  What the hell?

  Sarah’s mother had a tick in between her toes. And it wasn’t just any tick. This wasn’t a new tick that had been there for only fifteen minutes. This was a tick that had been there for days. It was the size of a giant ass shooter marble and packed fat and full of blood. It was pulsing and bulging and vibrating and growing and glowing fatter full of brightness and shining a rosy red.

  “It’s a tick,” the pedicure woman shrieked and she walked away cursing.

  Sarah’s mom said, “O what’s wrong?”

  Sarah’s mom looked down at her foot like she didn’t even know what the pedicure woman was talking about. Sarah felt like she was going to gag. “Mom, there’s a tick between your toes.” Sarah’s mom looked down at her foot again and inspected the chestnut sized tick between her toes. Then she said, “Oh I guess I didn’t notice it.” This was Sarah’s mother.

  But then one day everything changed in Sarah’s life. Sarah and her mother decided to do a production of South Pacific at a local community theater. I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.

  Sarah’s mother was the lead in the musical and she never wanted to live in the mountains. She never wanted to be trapped and yet she didn’t know that everything that winds up living in the mountains ends up getting trapped there. So Sarah watched her mother act in the musical and she listened to her mother sing in the musical and then one night she saw her mother see another man at rehearsals for the musical. She saw her mother’s eyes shine alive again. They sparkled and shined, shined and sparkled. Then one day Sarah imagined the man from the musical was at Sarah’s house and her father wasn’t home. Don’t tell your father.

  Her mother and father got a divorce. Her mother moved out and her mother was gone. And Elphonza grew old. He was having heart problems and Sarah was afraid. She was ten years old and she thought her father was dying. So she snuck into his bedroom each night and sat at the foot of the bed and made sure he was still breathing. One night she listened to him breathe and snore and then breathe and snore some more but then Sarah fell asleep and forgot to watch him.

  When she woke up a few hours later, she couldn’t hear anything. She panicked. She hopped up off the floor and ran to the side of the bed and shook her father. “Please don’t die, Dad. Please don’t die.” Her father woke up and said, “Sarah?” Then Sarah smiled because her father was still alive. Sarah smiled because he wasn’t dead. He was just sleeping.

  * * *

  So Sarah grew up. She went shopping and she smoked pot and she went shopping and she hung out with her girlfriends. They were the type of girls who never worried about the world yet and who you would call this word: Gorgeous.

  They went to parties and did mushrooms and fucked boys who had cars and boys who had jobs and they looked up into the sky together and talked about the boyfriends’ beautiful cocks, big beautiful cocks, and Sarah reached up and picked the stars and put them in her pocket still high on mushrooms.

  When Sarah was 16 she got a job working in the candy shop at the mall. One afternoon there was a little boy with his mother and they were walking towards Sarah’s candy store counter. The mother of the boy was short and mom-fat and she did the talking for the boy who was skinny and had big teeth and glasses. Sarah watched as the boy stared at her.

  He was carrying a bag from the bookstore and inside the bag a book that started, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The little boy looked nervous and Sarah didn’t know this yet but the little boy was always nervous. He thought about dying sometimes and he thought about going away. The mother of the boy asked him what he wanted. He whispered to his mother what he wanted.

  He wanted candy raspberries and a medium blue raspberry slushie. The mother of the boy ordered them.

  Candy raspberries.

  Candy blackberries.

  A medium blue raspberry slushie. So Sarah got the order for them and the mother paid and the boy and his mother walked away. And Sarah didn’t think about it ever again. Nothing stood out. She forgot about it just like we forget everything in the world, but the little boy grew up and wrote this book.

  So twenty five years later we started to fight. We fought abo
ut this and we fought about that. We fought about this and we fought about that. We fought about this and we fought about that. And we fought about that and we fought about this. We fought about money and we fought about where we lived and we fought about how much I was travelling and we fought about how I was drinking and we fought about what I was doing.

  We fought about all the tiny things. We fought about nothing and we fought about everything. It was glorious.

  The worst fight we ever got into was the day when I came home and destroyed our computer. I walked through the door and I could tell Sarah was mad but she wouldn’t tell me what she was mad about.

  “Are you mad?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you mad?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You’re being quiet and you have that totally pissed look on your face. Your mouth is all scrunched up like a butthole.”

  Sarah said, “Telling me that my mouth looks like a scrunched up butthole is probably not the best way to cheer me up.” She told me to never use the word butthole in association with her face again. So I sat down on the couch next to her and tried to talk, but then I fucked up. I touched her shoulder and I touched her face and then I saw a little piece of fuzz on her chin. It was just hanging there. A little piece of fuzz, like a piece of dust, hanging there. So I reached over to pull it off. I put my fingers together to reach for it and then I pinched and pulled, except it wasn’t a piece of fuzz.

  It was a hair on Sarah’s chin. Immediately her face formed into a face of fucking fury and Sarah started shouting, “What the fuck did you just do? What the fuck did you do?”