The Optimist

by Sophie Kipner

  Moses at once released me and let me drop to the floor, turning to Milk in defense. ‘Dude,’ he said. ‘She’s sniffing me!’

  ‘It’s some bunny-boiler shit!’ the guy with the Afro said. ‘Glenn Close kind of cray cray.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I said enthusiastically, because I knew ‘crazy’ was just another way of saying, ‘This girl has mojo.’

  I got up and resumed my position. ‘I’m learning to work with your strength,’ I whispered to him as I drove my head into his front deltoid area, allowing the strength of our bodies to feed off of each other. Moses scowled at me briefly but he was only doing that to keep the class engaged and to uphold the ‘aggressor’ and ‘opponent’ personas he had so cleverly and artistically created, although clearly we were fighting for the same thing.

  ‘This is weird,’ Blondie piped in, twisting her hair away from her face. ‘Is she on something?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Milk said. ‘Moses, let’s move on.’

  Moses pinched the back of my neck and picked me up like a puppy. I loved it, but it hurt. I consider myself open but I’m not into S&M. I do have boundaries, after all.

  ‘You have to learn to read your opponent,’ he said to the class while holding me, legs dangling. The air to my lungs was being cut off by the way he was hanging me and I started to choke. Milk told him to let me go and at once he dropped me. When I looked up, Milk asked if I was okay, doing that annoying half smile thing he did again.

  ‘You see,’ Moses continued. ‘In a moment of distraction, I got her. You have to always pay attention because you never know when and how your opponent is going to attack.’

  ‘I—’ I started.

  ‘Shush!’ Moses snapped back. ‘So not only do you have to always think ahead, you have to be prepared for a million possibilities at all times and be ready to deliver when you need to take action.’ I perked up. He was speaking my language. That’s exactly what I was doing here: preparing myself so that I’m ready for when the lucky break comes. I’m putting in the time, the effort, the due diligence . . . because I know it’s going to happen to me and I want to know how to grab it when it does.

  The class nodded, all scowling and frowning in a shared sense of agreement with the words of wisdom dispensed by Moses while Milk stood at the back, arms crossed.

  ‘That’s so right, Moses,’ I joined in. ‘When you are pro­active, someone else will meet you halfway.’ I started winking so he knew to pick up the reference.

  ‘I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about,’ Farid said.

  ‘Who is this chick?’ Blondie added.

  I’m all for sisterly love but this girl was really being aggressive. I don’t know where it came from but from a deep part of myself leapt a ferocious animal. It was instinctual, like a cornered rat. I jumped, I barked, I screamed, and clawed my way towards Blondie . . . But I fell to the floor one foot too short of her.

  The floor padding smelled of clammy feet.

  ‘What’s going on, Tabby?’ Milk asked. The room was silent. I could hear the sound of feet sticking to the mat as the class shuffled in their awkward places.

  ‘I’m fighting for someone so that person knows he can fight for me, too,’ I shouted.

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Tears welled in my eyes and I started to cry. I didn’t know I even could cry; I would have even thought my tear ducts didn’t work until this point. ‘If I don’t fight for him in the first place,’ I sobbed, ‘he’s never going to know he can fight back and then I’ll be left alone to fight for the rest of my life like my mom and she’s so tired. She’s just so tired.’ I paused with a hiccup.

  ‘I think we’re really off topic,’ the Asian guy said.

  ‘Let’s pause here for a moment,’ Milk said as he walked towards me to help me up. ‘Farid, why don’t you practice with Isabelle for a minute. Moses, take them through the next form. Tabby, come with me.’

  I followed Milk into the back room with shoulders that hadn’t sunk that low in years. He opened the door to a small office where he instructed me to take a seat. He was so bossy. I’d never seen that side of him before. I thought he was going to yell at me. I prepared myself for it as I sank lower and more deeply into the uncomfortable, plastic chair.

  ‘You really should invest in better chairs,’ I sniffled.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ he said as he crossed his arms.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Moses is not the one for me.’

  ‘Brenda told me what happened to your mom at the gala. She seemed a little more quiet than usual when you all came back. It must have given you a scare. Is she feeling okay?’

  ‘Yeah, you know her. She gets right up again. And if you’re wondering, I don’t get panic attacks.’

  He took a moment to adjust in his seat.

  ‘So, I saw your dad the other day,’ he said. ‘Down at a bar in the valley.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, feigning lack of interest as my skin caught on fire. My eyes started to twitch and I felt a flood of emotion pouring towards those recently active tear ducts.

  ‘Is he still friends with your dad?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t think they’d still be friends, with how close my dad and your mom were and everything.’

  ‘Nothing happened between them and you know it. They were just friends.’

  ‘He went over there all the time without us,’ I countered, blood getting hotter.

  ‘My dad was there, too,’ Milk said. ‘The three of them. He just needed to get out of the house sometimes. To breathe a bit . . . do you understand what I mean?’ The skin under his eyes sank into half moons. Like frog eyes, deeply embedded, heavy and round.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stopped him. ‘I shouldn’t bring up your mom. It’s still so new. Like it was yesterday.’

  ‘She died over ten years ago,’ he said.

  ‘Was it really that long ago?’ It was so strange how it felt like a few weeks ago. Sometimes I feel like I keep waking up from dreams every day, as if I’ve just fallen asleep for an hour but find out I’ve been in another world for a year. Silence sat in between us.

  ‘So do you really own this place?’ I asked.

  ‘Have done for years now,’ he told me as the faintest outline of a smile crept its way out of the shadows once again.

  What the hell? Wait a second . . . Milk really owns a fight school?

  ‘Do you have a crush on Blondie?’ I asked.

  ‘Isabelle?’ Milk said. ‘Of course not. She’s a student.’

  ‘You were just paying so much attention to her, I thought—’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, lowering his eyes for the first time. ‘Let’s get something straight, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, confused by how in charge he was. ‘What?’

  He looked up and straight at me. He was staring so intently I, for a moment, wasn’t sure if we were playing the blinking game or not. I looked away then back again but his eyes hadn’t wavered.

  ‘You aren’t like normal girls. You’re different. Very, very different.’ His speech was slow and steady, but he kept taking big breaths as if he were running out of air. ‘And you aren’t going to have a life like most women because you’re not normal.’

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot, Milk,’ I interjected.

  ‘Will you just please shut up and listen?’

  I nodded obediently.

  ‘You’re special and special people sometimes have a harder time finding the one because most people are typical. They’re boring and they’re predictable. It’s easier for them to find someone because they are like most people so finding someone to be with is easy. So basically, it’s going to be trickier for you. But I promise you’re going to have a much richer, more interesting life than most and when you do get together with that guy who gets you,’ he paused, looking down, took a breath and fidgeted in his seat. ‘He’s going to be one lucky bastard.’

  He turned his head up and stared at me like no one has ever looked at me before. The twinkling wi
de-eyed glance was now softened, diluted. A sadness I hadn’t traced before had, for the first time in years, resurfaced. I wasn’t used to seeing him sad, and not knowing why made me feel even more unsettled. I lifted myself up out of the sticky plastic chair, my sweaty fat sticking to the seat, making a suction noise as I tore myself away from it. I felt the lines the chair’s crosses had indented into the backs of my legs, through my spandex. I rubbed them but knew that no matter how much I massaged my skin, no matter how much I tried to make the impressions disappear, there was nothing I could do but wait for them to go away.

  Those indentations were like all my experiences, all the things that hurt, that continued to dig into me, leaving marks that would only go away with time. I speculated, if only for a moment: was it a sign? Was I trying to speed up things that must wait? But then I snapped out of it before realistic thinking got the better of me. At least I knew one day the chair marks, like those other marks, would let up. That’s the only way you can think about it or else it can really bring you down.

  Maybe Milk wasn’t sad either, but just waiting for something like I was, and waiting for something you can’t even see in the distance can at times become quite lugubrious, even for the optimists. And then I drifted off, wondering what it was that Milk was waiting for.

  The Pretender

  Feeling nostalgic, I was going through some of my old keepsake boxes that I store under my bed, and I found a ticket stub from many years ago from the night when Chrissie Hynde cornered me backstage at The Troubadour. She said it was because she saw me trying to take some of her food, but I think it’s because I was the only one in the room who looked interesting. She needed someone fun to talk to.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked me, staring intently. Not moving. She was so intense I thought I might pass out. Her eyes were rimmed by her trademark black eyeliner, smudged in areas that didn’t make sense. It added to her mystique.

  ‘What?’ I asked. When I looked down, I realized I must have buried a handful of food into my bag: Coconut water, two Popchips, a gluten-free granola bar, nuts, and sweet potato chips. I was hoarding and I didn’t know why.

  ‘Whoa!’ I exclaimed. ‘How’d they get in there?’ I laughed wildly and potentially insensitively as her gaze never faltered. She eyed me up and down, moved her hips to the right, embodying sass and confidence. She would love Delina and Julia.

  ‘That’s my fucking food,’ she said. I had snuck in there because I knew the place. It was one of my first jobs after turning twenty-one, so I knew my way around this endearingly scummy music establishment in Hollywood. I knew that if I went up the stairs and pretended to go into the Ladies but actually dipped into the backstage area, no one would notice. It was the back entrance. The secret entrance. I’d seen all sorts of people, but Chrissie Hynde was the only one who spoke to me.

  I panicked about how to explain my unexplainable hoarding but then thankfully remembered reading something about how she was vegan. I said, ‘I was just so excited to see such a socially conscious array of vegan food that I grabbed a few to check the labels, you know, just to make sure they were ­cruelty-free.’

  Her eyes opened up. Finally, she was intrigued.

  ‘I am so against palm oil!’ I added.

  ‘Huh,’ she said, adjusting her weight to the other hip. ‘Me too.’

  ‘All those poor orangutans. It’s just awful. I can barely sleep at night!’

  And at once, because of our shared love of animals, she forgave me for stealing her backstage food and we became friends. I went to give her a hug, because it felt right, but she just stood there with her hands hanging limply. When I let go, she said, ‘Don’t touch me.’

  We sat down together and I thought, ‘This is a perfect opportunity to get some advice about love.’ I’m going to ask her because she’s talented and cool and tough and probably has it all figured out. But I’m not so sure she did.

  ‘Love sucks, man,’ she said, lighting a rolled cigarette, but I didn’t believe she meant it. How could she? Everyone wants to believe in love. Rock stars are no exception, but maybe she was just scarred and tainted, blasé and heartbroken one too many times, like Dorothy Parker. Beneath the wit and ­sarcasm, they were humans like me, wanting to connect with someone. She held out the cigarette towards me.

  ‘Want a drag?’ she asked.

  I took the cigarette off her with easy, graceful movements and hit it like nobody’s business. I was already cool, but bonding like this blasted me out of the universe. As the smoke flooded through my organs and circled around my brain, I was overwhelmed with affection for her. I kept trying to give her hugs but each time she told me to stop.

  I was so hungry, and then I remembered I had thankfully stuffed my bag full of vegan treats. That’s why I was hoarding! It was as if I secretly knew this would happen and I prepared myself for it. Luck favors the prepared, they say. People were milling about, buzzing around Chrissie, asking questions, but she kept ignoring them. Her eyes still on me, sharp. I was so glad we were friends.

  ‘You’re a pretender,’ I said, passing her back the cigarette, ‘like me.’ She was scowling at this point in my story, not understanding, so I hurried to make myself clear.

  ‘I mean, we’re all pretenders, until we don’t have to pretend anymore.’ She started nodding and bobbing her head in agreement, black hair moving about the room like a beginners ballroom-dancing class. Her heart was leathery, but in that way you’re drawn to, like the girl at school who sits behind you, her Doc Martens tapping against the back of your seat while she chews gum against the rules and smokes cigarettes in the parking lot. You think she hates you until you realize she’s an outcast, like you. Only you play the victim while she revels in not being like the rest. You start to see how much more power you’d have if you just sat up straight and let rumors and gossip fly over your head than try to bend your neck to hear them. Once you do, you get the cool girl’s nod and that’s all you need to get through high school. Chrissie was like that girl in high school whom you wanted to be friends with. You think she rules the world and has it figured out because she doesn’t give a shit but you know deep down, she does.

  ‘So are we friends yet?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. A hint of a smile unburied itself from the corners of her mouth.

  I cracked open a bag of Popchips and started stuffing them in my face. I’d never been so starving. ‘So really,’ I pushed with a mouth full of food. ‘Don’t you have any advice for me about being in love?’

  The cigarette was depleting, nearing her fingers, but the heat didn’t seem to bother her.

  ‘You’re really hung up on this love thing, aren’t you?’ she said.

  I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my age. It wasn’t about status or diamonds or weekend trips to Napa with a ‘husband’ or having a nice house with a dog and two kids. I didn’t care about those things. I wanted the kind of romance that would twist me inside out. I wanted a funky cabin on a small plot of land, with chickens and pigs instead of dogs and cats, and I wanted to wake up on Sunday mornings to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the voice of a husband who says, ‘Sugar?’ as he’s pouring your cup because he thinks it’s cute you change your diet daily. (Okay, I’ll admit it: I’d like to live in a Folgers coffee commercial.) I saw it: the person I loved and me, under the covers as our children – adopted, mixed, biological – ran into the room and jumped on our bed. Kids and mattress springing together. Joyous. I could see us all laughing. I could see it all so clearly that I could almost taste it, like the smell of croissants drifting down a Parisian street at 5 a.m. Just the smell of it would be enough to make you feel like you were having it. But eventually, your stomach would gurgle. You’d be so hungry you’d have to go into the patisserie and you’d have to buy one and eat it. I’d spent my life smelling romance and at this point I was clawing at the pastry chef’s doors.

  My eyes pleaded for her to go on. Please, they screamed. Give me something, Chrissie. A few mom
ents passed, and eventually, she looked around the room, taking in the crowd.

  ‘You see all these people?’ she said. I nodded, following. ‘We’re all looking for the same thing. Everyone’s a fucking mess.’

  At first, it delighted me, this camaraderie, until I realized – taking stock of the faces around the room – that in many ways, I was just like them: lost. The only thing that I had continued to hold on to was the belief that life could be as magical as I wanted it to be. We’re all born with that; they just let it go. They let it slip away. ‘That’s life,’ they’d say, but it wasn’t true. That Folgers coffee commercial? That really happened. Those butterflies? They don’t go away after the honeymoon. I clung on to the hope that we’re not all just going through the paces. Some of us are living.

  The room became smaller when I thought I was a part of it, like my dad in our house growing up, and bigger when I thought I wasn’t. When I looked back at Chrissie, she stopped me as I was about to say goodbye, see you later, nice to meet you.

  ‘You want to know my real advice?’ she said.

  Yeah, yeah, I did. I nodded furiously, eager for a morsel of truth, of guidance. She blew a ball of smoke towards me.

  ‘We’re all just little chickens waiting for a fucking rooster to love us. Do you know how mad that makes me to say? I’m tough, you know, but shit, there are times I want to be vulnerable. But goddamn, I don’t know how to be both without getting torn apart in some direction.’

  ‘So if you, the queen of cool, of rock, of badass, can’t figure it out, then what’s in store for the rest of us?’ I asked, scrabbling for the pieces of my heart that had started to fall onto the crusty, beer-spilled floor.

  ‘All I know is that your heart’s gonna get ripped open and that baby girl inside of you, she’s going to get hurt no matter which way she plays the game, so you might as well enjoy the ride.’

  I’m not entirely sure if Chrissie ever said this or if I imagined it because I loved her, but I’m pretty sure she did. I am completely certain, however, that something happened because I woke up the next morning on a pile of empty bottles of coconut water and covered in broken remains of Popchips. I remember thinking that maybe my heart had already been ripped open. That I’d already been hurt and broken, over and over again, so maybe the worst was over. But then, what if the ride was more fun than the ending? What if I was so used to the adrenaline that I wouldn’t be able to handle how it felt when the cart stopped moving?