by Zoe Lee
As we began a cycle of sun salutations, every few rounds adding a new part so that the sequence grew longer and more complex, I let my five years living in Nashville run through me. At just shy of nineteen, a girlfriend and me had moved away from Maybelle to Nashville. Thrilled to be on our own, my friend had become a bank teller and I’d found a job in catering at a three-star hotel. It had been magnificent and I’d never felt more independent. Within a year, I’d become an assistant banquet manager, and then I’d met Karl and fallen, hard.
My concentration wavered and I lost control of my breathing.
I swiped sweaty tendrils of hair off my face with a jerky movement as the instructor spoke again.
“Alright, now we’re going to do some warrior poses. This might have a name that makes us think of fighting and maybe aggression, but I want you to think about how a warrior is different than a fighter. A warrior is trained and has a purpose, like a soldier; this is someone who is prepared and in command of his or her body, well-trained in body and mind. Let’s do warrior one, and relax, knowing we’re in control. Powerful.”
I reached for relaxation, trying to imagine what feeling powerful and in control of my mind and body felt like. But as I moved from warrior one to warrior two, all I could think about was falling in love with Karl, which had been like a crazy plunge into the deep end of the ocean of love. It had been volatile, but I’d mistaken its volatility for true passion, caught up in a tsunami of romance.
With a growl, I shook my head and tried to do what the instructor said.
“We’re about halfway through the practice and I know that you may be starting to get tired, and even if it’s satisfying, it’s a distraction. Your mind may be wandering, so I want you to remember yoga doesn’t ask you to stop thinking, it asks you stop focusing on those thoughts, stop dwelling on them. They’re a part of you, circling through you like your blood and your breath. So let them happen, but just let them be.”
My mind wandered while I tried to let things fall into the background.
Karl and I dated for barely a year before I ditched my friend to move into his place. By then, I was a banquet manager, busy and proud of the job I was doing, and my fights with Karl started to change tenor, so slowly I hadn’t noticed. After a few months, they had become about his jealousy of my success, something he attributed not to my hard work ethic but to my looks. I’d thought it was romantic that he believed I was so beautiful that I could use it to my advantage, but since I didn’t see myself that way, I never really heard what he was saying.
By then he had taken a job as a concierge at the hotel where I worked. At first it was wonderful, since to me he was charming and an expert on Nashville. Then people started to look at me sideways, and coworkers and a few managers pulled me aside to tell me all these awful rumors going around about me. Someone said you slept with Bob to get the job, people said over and over. Some were outraged on my behalf, while the ones who passed along the rumors—the ones I’d thought were also making the rumors up—were vindictive and gleeful.
“…did great. Now ease into child’s pose and let your breathing go.”
Dutifully, I let my eyes drift across my view of the room, skewed from child’s pose, my butt on my heels and my chest and cheek pressed over my thighs and onto the mat, my arms heavy along my folded body.
“Like a child, just be comfortable in this strange position.”
Leda, I need to speak with you. I’m in a very strange position here. Serious allegations about me and my behavior towards you have come to my attention.
I shivered as I remembered.
Poor Bob; he’d been a decent man and a really good boss, encouraging people during work and disappearing when it was over. Unlike a lot of the rest of the hotel’s large staff, he didn’t go out for drinks or party with anyone from work, but he wasn’t snobby about it.
I’m so sorry, Bob. You know how much I respect you. I swear I don’t know how the rumors got started, but I’ve been telling everyone they’re lies. I—
He’d interrupted. I have a department to run and so does the front desk manager; we can’t have these sorts of… wars… happening between our employees.
The floor had dropped out and I’d heard a ringing in my ears as I stammered, What do you mean? My voice had risen and cracked.
Oh… Bob’s face had turned red and I’d seen sweat pop out on his skin. Oh, Leda… I’m so sorry, I thought… The rumors were started by Karl.
That’s impossible, I’d cried, eyes filling with tears as I jumped up.
Bob had just looked at me, full of pity. We can’t have this sort of disruption among the staff, so I’m afraid we have to let you go. Karl too, he’d added. I’ll still give you a great reference, I promise.
God, I’d run straight out of the hotel, still in my uniform, my purse and clothes in my locker, but I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of going back for them. I’d begged a waiter on his smoke break to get them, then I’d driven back to our tiny studio apartment, hardly able to see, I’d been crying so hard. I’d shoved everything that was only mine—nothing I’d bought with Karl, no matter who’d paid for it—into garbage bags. After I’d thrown them all into my car so that it looked like a landfill, I left Nashville and drove home. I’d gotten to Maybelle during a terrible thunderstorm like in some awful movie, defeated, heartbroken and furious.
“And now,” the instructor interrupted softly, touching my shoulder gently, “let’s return to our first standing pose… and… Namasté, ladies. Thank you.”
“Namasté,” I murmured along with the other women.
I hurried to the locker room, where I ducked into one of the few private showers.
I drenched my hair and covered my face with my hands, my torso collapsing around my belly button as I sobbed silently. I wasn’t over what he’d done to me, and the way he’d hurt me had never healed. So sometimes at yoga, when I was trying to be strong, trying to expel the negativity or whatever someone wanted to call it, those wounds tore open all over again and I cried like a little girl in the shower afterwards. It took thirty minutes to calm down enough to get out and dress, towel dry my hair as best I could, reapply my makeup, and get the hell home.
When I got there, I was cranky and really hungry.
My younger brother Seth was at the stove of our childhood home, which we shared with our older brother Aden, something sizzling in a frying pan as he chopped up some red peppers.
“Hey,” he said without looking away from his task. “How was your day?”
I shrugged and sat on one of the stools at the island. “Kind of weird actually,” I said candidly. “I had a Tourist Board meeting after lunch and Moira was telling me about a great book, said I could run into her place and grab it. So I did. Only I bumped into Jamie Houston.”
Seth finished gently herding the pepper chunks off a cutting board into the frying pan and then looked over at me. “I’m so out of practice at remembering the names and relationships among the entire population of the county,” he observed. It made sense; he had been traveling the world since he quit Juilliard five years ago and had only moved home in July. As he flipped the veggies and beef chunks in the pan, he snapped with his free hand. “Tristan’s uncle, right?”
“Yeah, the one who’s Aden’s age.”
“It’s hard to imagine having an uncle less than ten years older than me,” he commented.
I shrugged and felt my stomach rumble from how good the sizzling food smelled.
Seth smiled sweetly at me. “I made enough food for both of us. I thought you were going into Wild Harts for a while, so I was going to put it in the fridge. But this is better.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled as I stood up to grab a couple of plates, forks and a couple of beers, explaining as I worked, “Tristan’s dad is the oldest and had Tristan when he was a teenager. And I think he’s like ten years older than Jamie, with Moira born halfway between them?”
“Alright, I’m remembering the family now,” Seth said. �
�The youngest is about my age and lives in New York now, right? And Mrs. Houston—she intimidated me.”
Snorting, I made a noncommittal noise. “I’m sure Alice called you ‘well-mannered’ and liked you fine.”
“Could be,” he said carelessly, probably since I’d never yet met a person who disliked him.
He scooped the stir fry onto the plates and rejoined me on the breakfast stools. We dug in, plowing through half our servings in companionable silence and enjoyment of the food before he returned to the topic at hand. “You didn’t say why seeing Jamie Houston was weird.”
I didn’t usually talk about my feelings, unless my feelings were anger or frustration. But Seth was a musician and a songwriter, and so he had always been deeply in touch with his well of emotions. And he was good at expressing them, while Aden and I sucked at it—although Aden was getting better at it, now that he was dating an awesome woman instead of his fucking harpy of an ex-girlfriend.
So I rolled my shoulders as subtly as possible and began, “After Aden graduated, they did a class trip to a music festival. I tagged along with Aden and Dunk and Jack, but before it was time to drive back home, I got into a fight with them. I can’t remember it now.” I waved it away with my fork, almost flinging a shitaake mushroom across the room. “They asked around for someone who had space in their car to drive me home so I could cool off, and Jamie did.”
“And something happened?” Seth prompted when I didn’t immediately continue.
“Yeah. Well, no.” I took a drink of my beer and tried to think back to that first conversation. “It was just a ride home, maybe five hours long. He played football with Aden and Dunk and I had a couple of classes with him, so I kind of already knew him, in that high school kind of way you know all your classmates. So it started out with awkward small talk, mostly about football and where he was going to college, if he was going to play football there too.”
“The usual,” Seth supplied, nodding.
“Yeah. But somehow, it just got really…” I paused, trying to come up with a word that wasn’t too melodramatic, but it was impossible. My heart started beating a little faster as my mind returned to that day. “Deep, I guess is the only word I can think of. We told each other secrets, things we’d never really talked about with our friends or siblings because it was new or it didn’t… fit in with who everyone else thought we were. It was the first time I felt like someone outside of our circle really… heard what I was saying and understood it. And he wasn’t like… framing it with everything else that he thought he knew about me.” I groaned and slumped a little, then practically whined, “I don’t know, I was sixteen. It was big.”
Seth gave me another one of his sweet smiles, the kind that showed me that he understood me too, that he loved me. “You were a lot more open back then.”
I almost snapped back that it had been before Nashville had crushed my naïvete and immaturity, but I didn’t want to see his eyes dim with sadness for me. It was too close to pity.
With a long, slow breath, I took a second before I answered. “We’ve had other conversations like that over the years, after I moved back here. Not too many, and the last one was a couple years ago, at some house party where we wound up on the balcony. You know I don’t like talking politics or whether I think a college degree has value, whatever, but we’ve talked about all of that. It’s like, with everyone else, I just get so caught up in our day to day lives that all the talk is always gossip, who’s dating who, who changed jobs, or my squabbles at the Tourist Board meetings. With Jamie, we don’t have to do that with each other. And I also don’t have to explain every person, or the context of my perspective because he knows it, since he grew up here and his family keeps him up to date on the county. We can just kind of…”
“Talk about yourselves?” Seth supplied softly. “It was one of my favorite things about traveling and touring, all of that, you know. I loved meeting someone at a bar or waiting for a train and spilling all of these truths about yourself. You learn so much about someone else, and can really listen to someone else, when all that shit about catching up about everyday things doesn’t clog up the channels of conversation. There must be thousands of people out there who know my darkest moments, or who know that I dated Catie Yeats but don’t know that she moved to Seattle, has four kids and breaks her mother’s heart because she doesn’t call enough.”
He was absolutely right. Knowing everything about everyone and having to talk about it and rehash it all of the time were probably the worst things about living in a small town. But I had learned to value it in the three years I’d been home again, surrounded by people who understood where I grew up and that Wild Harts was mine and my brothers’ legacy.
“Do you miss it?” I asked quietly. “Playing your music all over the world?”
“It’s not the same anymore,” he replied, almost a whisper, his voice tight.
I dropped my head onto his shoulder, but I didn’t have a fucking clue what to say.
In June, right before he’d come home, his first love Hedda, who had become his best friend and writing partner, had died in a car accident near her home in Germany. He’d come home quiet and contained, his defensive wall like noise-canceling headphones that protected other people from seeing or sensing how much he was hurting. I’d met her only once and she had been so unlike anyone I’d ever met, it had made me so jealous of Seth’s glamorous life. But I would never want all of that if it also came with the catastrophe of losing my best friend.
“I don’t want to forget a single moment of that life, even the worst ones,” he offered, “but I’m trying like hell not to let remembering trip me up so that I never move forward again.”
I took a moment to appreciate what he was going through and how hard he was working to build a new life here, but he was so tense next to me that I knew I shouldn’t have asked.
So I blurted out, “Jamie’s single. That’s really why it was weird.”
His face cracked with relief at the abrupt detour back around to me and my stupid problems. “Do you have a crush on him?” he asked, lightness slipping back into his eyes.
“I don’t get crushes,” I scoffed. “Besides, he’s a serial monogamist, everyone knows that.”
He laughed outright at the horror in my voice.
I twirled my fork and stabbed the last piece of beef off his plate and popped it in my mouth. He made a face at my thievery and I grinned, mouth opening wide to gross him out like I had when we were kids. “I didn’t even tell you that when I went to Moira’s house to grab a book, I heard her guest shower running. I freaked out and called her like, Is there a serial killer at your house right now!? We figured out that it had to be Jamie, so I busted in the bathroom and pretended like I didn’t know it was him, and I threatened to flush the toilet so that his ass roasted.”
Seth laughed again, this time fondly, and shook his head. “Only you, Leda.”
“Whatever. Do you want to watch some Law & Order and eat popcorn?”
“You bet,” he agreed with a quick smile.
A PREVIEW OF A PERFECT FIT
Daisy
Daisy rolled the coat rack out from behind her secondhand folding screen with the faux watercolor crane on it. Its wheels squeaked, as did the uneven floorboards as she positioned it roughly in the middle of her studio apartment. With her hands on her hips, Daisy gave the dresses that hung off it a glare, her nose wrinkled in disgust.
“You have so many,” Stephanie marveled enviously, sprawled out on Daisy’s unfolded futon. “I swear I’ve never seen half of those before.”
“They’re so cute,” Karen gushed, stroking the one on the far right.
Daisy’s shoulders slumped for a fraction of a second, but then she swung away from the offensive rack of flowery, sunshine-y, pastel, A-lines and tea dresses.
“Karen!” Stephanie chastised. “Daisy doesn’t want to be cute anymore.”
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” Karen apologized. “It’s just, they’re
just so…” She trailed off helplessly, her eyes darting over to Stephanie for help.
Daisy heaved a sigh. “I know. They are cute.”
“And you hate them all,” Stephanie reiterated.
In her robe, with her hair already wrestled into a complicated braid crown, she stabbed a finger at the offensive dresses. “I am five-one with D cups, girls. I feel ridiculous in these. One, I’ve had most of them since I was nineteen, and I’m twenty-six. Two, they’re all little girl colors with flowers and bows and lace. And three… I hate every cute one of them!” She pulled off the cutest one and shook it at them. “Look at it! This isn’t me.”
Karen bit her lip and reached out to stroke the lace overlay.
“I totally get your feelings,” Stephanie said, firm and supportive.
“But?” Daisy prompted.
“But,” Stephanie said with an ominous shrug, “you’re not going to this reception as a guest, you’re going as one of the bridesmaids. What would you wear if not one of these bubbly, oh-my-gosh-it’s-your-special day dresses? Some skin-tight snakeskin printed sheath with your boobs up to your chin and four-inch stilettos? C’mon, Daisy.”
With a melodramatic groan, Daisy started to flop onto her futon, but pinwheeled her arms and screeched, catching herself before her updo was crushed by her big head.
“Wear this one,” Karen suggested as she held up a watermelon pink cotton poplin dress. “It has pockets!” she chirped, tugging open one of the hidden pockets.
Daisy squinted hatefully, but Stephanie had made a valid point. Tonight was not the right time or place to debut a newer, sophisticated look.
“Guess the hair will have to be enough,” she grumbled, then ducked behind the screen to wrestle her boobs into one of her sturdy bras, slip on a thong, and tug on the dress. “Zip me up?” she asked.
Once Stephanie had done up the zip, Daisy began rummaging through her jewelry.