by Liz Phair
I shrug. “Totally. I’m working at Ravinia with a couple of my friends. It’s going to be awesome. I don’t know, we’ll probably just party the rest of the time. Then I’m going away in August.”
“Oh, cool! Where are you going?” She shifts up onto her knees, manifesting the correct girl cues, so I’m comfortable speaking with her again. There’s a proper rhythm to banter between strangers, which must be observed in order to keep the chi flowing.
“We go to a house in Lakeside, Michigan, right around the lake? My cousins come every year, and it’s so much fun. It’s, like, right on the water. It’s so beautiful. I can’t wait.”
She has a couple of options here. She can say “Oh my God, how cool” or “Like, I’m so jealous” or even “We go to Wisconsin.” But she doesn’t say anything normal. She just looks wistfully off to the side and sighs, “I wish,” without finishing her sentence.
This is exhausting. I want my boyfriend to rescue me, but he’s leaning forward talking to the people in the front seat. All I can do is stroke his back, craning my neck around to see if there’s a conversation I can join on the other side of him.
“I’m sorry I’m being so depressing.” She turns to me, her brow furrowed. “I’m just scared.”
“Of what?” I strike a balance between polite and noncommittal.
“This is my last night.” She stares at me, her eyes searching mine. “I have to have an operation tomorrow,” she continues. “They’re removing part of my nose and my jaw, and the doctor says I’ll never look the same again.”
At first I think she’s joking, or lying to get attention. But then I see that she’s genuinely frightened.
“What’s going to happen to me?” She is begging me for consolation, looking at me as if I know what the fuck to answer, as if we’re already in the hospital ward waiting for the anesthesiologist.
“I don’t know.” I have no clue what to say. “That’s terrible,” I add, because I mean it. She’s one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be confronting disfigurement at her age, before anything has even happened to you; before college, before marriage, before everything. I’m paralyzed, standing on a high wire, halfway between what I thought reality was a minute ago and what she’s asking me to contemplate. It’s too much.
“I don’t want to go home,” she announces to nobody in particular. It’s like her thoughts are just spilling out of her mouth and she can’t stop them.
I don’t know how to react, so I just sit there, enduring the awkwardness. By some miracle, I manage to stay present. Looking back, I’ve always been glad that I did. She needed someone to confide in.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” Her voice quavers. It’s the query of an eight-year-old, desperate for validation. She obviously doesn’t want to be alone in her misery, but I can’t save her. I didn’t set the clock that’s ticking down. Her parents probably let her go out tonight because they wanted her to have a taste of all that she’ll be missing in the future, all the exciting wildness of being young. It breaks my heart that this boring car ride is her last big adventure, her last carefree experience as a teenager, with no one staring at her and a lot of guys who would kill to ask her out.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “Seriously. I wish I looked like you.”
It’s the right thing to say. She smiles, authentic pride breaking across her face, a vision of adolescent splendor. But her melancholy returns, like a cloud that steals the warmth of the sun on a brisk autumn day, bringing with it the chill of winter. She knows she has to let go.
“I wish I had taken more pictures.” She looks down at her fingernails. “I used to hate how I looked in photos.”
I wish this had never happened. I wish I’d never heard her story. I wish she’d never been here. But I can’t just wish her away.
“Will you remember me? Will you remember how I look right now?” She pleads with me, reaching for my hand.
“I will,” I say. I don’t know what else to do to make her feel better.
And I do, Magdalena. Even to this day.
I’m driving down to Oak Park to pick up my misanthropic friend Peter. We’re going on a road trip, heading back to college for our one-year reunion. I’m surprised he wants to party at our alma mater so soon after graduating, but I guess he misses his friends. He should have come with us to San Francisco. We all fucked off to the West Coast for a year. Peter went to write scripts in L.A., and my other friends and I settled in NorCal doing basically nothing. The Bay Area was even more progressive than Oberlin, and certainly a lot more fun than any rancid alumni weekend. Still, I’m up for anything that gets me out of the house for a few days.
I love my parents, but he and I both agree the worst part about living at home again is the boredom. I’m used to staying out late, roaming all over the city, and spontaneously meeting new people. My parents would like to see me take concrete steps to support myself, and that’s hard to align with on a daily basis. I want to be an artist. I’ve known I was destined to be an artist ever since I was a little girl, and according to everything we learned in art history class about the miserable lives of great painters and writers, that means hedonism, poverty, and ragged, raw brilliance. It’s not my fault that my profession reveres lunatics. I was enjoying a carefree bohemian existence in San Francisco until the money ran out. Now I’ve been recalled to Winnetka to do the thankless work of growing up.
I’ve been looking for employment, but there isn’t much that I’m qualified to do. I stare at the jobs section in the morning paper, inwardly recoiling at the descriptions. “Must have computer skills.” “Must own a car.” “Must be able to type 50 wpm.” Anxiety pools like acid in the pit of my stomach until I no longer have an appetite. “Art major” and “artist’s assistant” sound like items on a dilettante’s résumé in any city, and Chicago’s economy isn’t exactly roaring in the creative sector. The same disruptive thoughts keep getting me off track: How do I escape? Where can I escape to? I feel like I’m living in the wrong place, raised by the wrong people, born at the wrong time in history.
Sometimes Peter and I meet downtown and write jokes together. We’re supposed to be dropping off résumés and going for job interviews, but we end up sitting around all day in a café laughing our asses off. We want to put out a comedy fanzine, so we think up funny scenarios. We walk through the galleries at the Art Institute people-watching. He tries to get me all flustered by threatening to touch a painting or knock over a sculpture. I pretend to be a docent leading a tour; I explain works of art to people who don’t know why I’m talking to them. We dress up and take photo sequences of ourselves acting out the skit. I’m supposed to cut out our figures and place them into illustrations, like the media mash-ups in avant-garde magazines. Instead, I’ve been using them as covers for my Girly-Sound tapes, cassette recordings I’ve been making since I returned from the West Coast. I live off the money people send me to make copies of my music, but it’s nowhere near enough to rent my own place. If I live at home much longer, I’m going to go crazy.
Traffic is light, and I’m moving at a pretty good clip. I hate these stretches of nothingness on the sides of American highways. I think about all the people who live in the brown-brick apartment buildings, how they’d all rather be somewhere else. I try to picture myself moving into one of the rear units with the fire escapes and small balconies. At my age, conformity feels scarier than failure does. My goal is to stand out from everybody. I don’t care what distinguishes me, as long as it’s in the creative arts. I need to express all the emotions and ideas that are tumbling around inside of me or I’ll be angry forever. I have so much to say, but nobody’s listening. That’s my motivation—morning, noon, and night: to show others the world the way I see it. I’m having all these deep thoughts, probably because we’re on our way to Oberlin. I think I might need further closure on my whole college e
xperience.
I get to the part of the freeway that is under construction, and I need to pay attention. I’m driving in the left lane, close to a concrete divider. They’re doing roadwork on the median, so they’ve moved this barrier to the outside of the emergency lane. If I roll down the window and reach my hand out, I can probably touch it. It seems incredibly dangerous to leave no margin for error at such high speeds. I’m doing about seventy-five miles per hour, the same as everyone else. I put both hands on the steering wheel at the ten- and two-o’clock positions, and feel the bumps in the road testing my grip. We’re coming up on a long, curving bend to the right. It feels like the concrete divider is closing in on me and I need to outrun it.
I have a split-second thought, one of those random ruminations everybody has throughout the day. I wonder why nobody ever gets into a car crash traveling in the left lane. It still seems incredible to me that all these drivers of average ability pull off semidifficult maneuvers every day and nothing goes wrong. Millions of people manage to successfully navigate to their destinations without dying, despite the potential danger, especially in this inner lane where we go faster and make tighter curves. Just imagine the damage I’d do to all the other vehicles on the road if I lost control right now. That would truly suck for everybody.
About ten seconds after I have this thought, a town car that’s coming toward me in the opposite direction starts to spin out in its lane. Time slows down, and I watch the rear of the sedan swing all the way forward and continue moving through the spiral. Because of our relative speeds, I only catch a glimpse of the accident before I’ve passed it. I’m flowing along with the rest of traffic, as if nothing has happened. I can still picture the back of the driver’s head thrown against the window as the car revolved 360 degrees. I realize I may just have witnessed someone’s final moments. I want to stop the car, get off the freeway, and take side streets home, but I can’t. Peter’s expecting me. This is just the kind of last-minute flaking out he always worries I’ll do.
I met Peter on the first night of freshman orientation. We were in the same dorm. Neither of us liked breaking into little groups and telling strangers who we were. He teased me because I wouldn’t wear my name tag. I’d written my name on it, but I waved it around on the tip of my index finger for anyone who wanted to know my identity. As if my name explained anything. I could be friends with someone for months and not care what their name was. If I could look it up, I didn’t want to make space for it in my brain. I’d memorized data my entire life and never found it to be useful.
Peter and I ended up in very different social circles, but in those early days at Oberlin, we bonded over our mutual discomfort with the progressive atmosphere. We were both from conservative Chicago suburbs and had never experienced anything like what we saw on campus. Everybody had hair in places where we would have shaved it. Everybody took their clothes off in front of one another shamelessly. The books, music, and films we knew seemed unsophisticated next to the cultural references other students made in class. We both spoke less and listened more that first semester, even though we’d been gregarious, outgoing people where we came from. It was a relief to be able to laugh privately with someone, without worrying about being politically incorrect.
When I get to Peter’s house, I’m excited to tell him and his friend John what happened to me on the drive down. It doesn’t sound as astonishing in the recounting as it felt while I was experiencing it.
“Maybe you’re psychic,” Peter says, anticipating what I want him to say, but in a tone that conveys his skepticism. Peter’s father is the pastor of their church, and he is mistrustful of anything that smacks of religious self-importance. His manner is devilish, impish, in reaction to his upbringing.
“I am psychic,” I sniff, miffed that I bothered to tell anybody. Legitimately strange things do happen to me, but because I also have an overactive imagination, I have no credibility with my friends.
“I believe in that stuff,” John says. He’s being nice, but Peter scoffs, wadding up a paper towel and throwing it at him. He doesn’t want John to encourage me.
“What?” John says, dodging Peter’s missile. “I do! I had some weird things happen to me. Sometimes things are just too coincidental to explain any other way.”
We’re all hanging out in the kitchen waiting for Peter’s mother to call. They locked a frozen pizza in the oven when they accidentally triggered the self-cleaning mechanism, and now our only hope is for her to tell us how to get it out before the pizza burns into a disk of charcoal.
“You don’t fucking believe in that shit.” Peter wads up more paper towels and throws them at John.
“Yeah, I do.” John’s diving for the paper balls, trying to hit them back at Peter. “You don’t know what I believe.”
I’m listening to the two of them spar, reflecting back on the happy holiday gatherings my family had when I was young. I was the only girl in an extended family full of older boys, and I almost feel like I’m at my uncle’s house on Grandin Avenue again, standing on the sidelines in my Polly Flinders dress, knee socks, and Mary Janes, watching the boys roughhouse—jealous that I can’t join in. I spent a lot of family occasions hanging out by myself, playing with the pets or wandering around the grounds with my grandmother Winnie. It turned me into a tomboy for several years, until puberty brought me back to myself again.
I walk over to the sink to pour myself a glass of water. I can’t say what spurs this impulse—maybe I just want to insert myself into the action—but I dig around in the stack of dirty dishes and pull out a wooden meat-tenderizing mallet; one of those block-headed hammers you use to pound fillets. I pass the old-fashioned utensil to Peter, who takes it from me, bemused. I stare at the heavy mallet resting in his hand.
“That would suck if that hit you in the face,” I say, apropos of nothing, and go back to standing in the entryway to the dining room, leaning against the doorframe as I sip my drink. I can’t take my eyes off the meat-tenderizing mallet. I’m thinking how weird it is that we still use technology that wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval kitchen.
“That would definitely suck.” Peter uses the meat hammer to knock the paper-towel balls at John, who searches around for something he can use as a racket. He tries out a flashlight first, with limited results, then rolls up a magazine, which is infinitely more effective.
We’re all having a good time, ignoring the faint smell of burning pizza. I’m fixated on Peter’s swing. He’s having trouble timing his serve. He tosses the paper wad in the air but misses connecting repeatedly, because of how slowly the paper falls. Wind resistance. I’m about to offer coaching advice when another thought pops into my head.
“Wouldn’t it suck if that hammer flew out of your hand and blinded me?”
“What?” John laughs at my non sequitur. I turn to look at him standing by the stove. At that moment I hear a loud crack, and my vision shrinks to a pinpoint. It’s like watching a black-and-white television set turning off. I feel my limbs crumple beneath me. I muster every ounce of strength I have to keep from passing out completely. When I come to, I’m slumped in the doorway with blood pouring out of my nose. I look down at my shirt, which is quickly turning crimson.
“Holy shit!” Peter yells.
“Oh my God!” John’s mouth is hanging open.
Peter and John are so shocked that at first they don’t move. When they see me start to slip down further, they rush over, supporting me so I can stand. I have one thing on my mind.
“You guys heard me say that, right? You witnessed that.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.” John is right with me.
Peter looks miserable: guilty and frightened. “I’m so sorry,” he says, showing me the empty handle in his hand. “The head flew off. It just detached from the handle. I’m so sorry, Liz. Should we go to a hospital?”
“No.” Adrenaline is animating
me. “My dad is a doctor. I need to go home.”
“Do you think you should maybe stay here?” John’s worried I’m reacting too quickly. I’m still shaking. I go check out my face in the bathroom mirror. The bridge of my nose has swelled up to twice its normal size. The skin beneath my left eye is taut and pink, infused with fluid, and you can distinctly see the indentation where the corner of the mallet head hit my face. It missed the inner curve of my left eye by centimeters. If I hadn’t been looking at John, I would be blind. Then again, if I hadn’t called out the freak event, would it have happened in the first place?
“That doesn’t look so bad.” Peter is squeezing into the powder room behind me, peering over my shoulder. We both laugh. “I’m really sorry,” he says for the third time. He’s finding his emotions difficult to express.
“I know. It wasn’t your fault.” I believe this almost more than he does. I wonder if the car spinning out on the highway was meant to warn me that danger was coming for me, head-on and fast.
Most of the bleeding stops within five minutes. The inner membranes have swollen up to such an extent that blood is now trickling down my throat. On the upside, now that I’m not gushing, the guys will let me leave. I want to get out of Peter’s house as soon as possible. The last six hours have been very upsetting. I’ve already ruined most of his mother’s dish towels, and Peter has no qualms about handing over the last of her set with a bunch of ice wrapped inside—for the road. I’m sure they think I’m crazy as I wave goodbye. I barely turn around; I’m literally running out of there. It’s the end of an era. I’m sad to say this incident estranges Peter and me. On my part it’s all tangled up with my fear of omens and organized religion. I don’t like the idea of something invisible holding sway over me. For him, wrecking the face of a girl he liked was devastating.
Everybody thinks my song “Fuck and Run” is about sex, and on one level it is. But it’s also about these moments when real connection and feeling is abandoned in favor of self-preservation. We come together and fly apart like colliding billiard balls because, for whatever reason, we sense annihilation.