by Sarah Gerard
I lay on her floral-print couch vaping and texting with my RA, Shower Dave. I only ever saw him leaving the men’s communal bathroom wrapped in a towel. I hoped to sleep with him by the end of the semester. The competition was stiff among female residents on my floor. I sent him half a dozen thirst traps, and hours later, we had both cum repeatedly. By the time my mother came in, I couldn’t pull out.
I try to maintain a healthy skepticism toward any organized system of thought, Dave was saying. We’d transitioned from sexting to falling in love. I’m glad I wasn’t raised with a religion.
She was frowning, taking off her sneakers.
I’m the opposite, I said. I like being told what to do ;-)
“Who are you talking to?” she said, but proceeded into the tiny kitchen before I could answer. She left the lights off while she opened the cabinets.
“My roommate.”
Let’s test that theory, he said.
She extracted a jar of peanut butter and stood there, watching me as she ate it with a spoon.
My mom just got home, I said.
Is it crazy that I miss you?
Not crazy at all.
“How was work?” I said.
“Fine.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Send me a letter from Florida.
I will.
“What’s up?” I said.
She threw out the plastic jar. It landed hollowly in the bottom of the trash can. She sat against the counter. “Nothing,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just thought you wanted to see me.”
SHE ASKED ME to leave by the middle of the next day.
“I just need this time alone before I work for twelve hours,” she said, walking me to my father’s car. “People take time off because they know I’ll cover it and I won’t complain,” she said, hugging me. “Thanks for understanding.”
“No worries, Mom. You should rest.”
“I wish I could.”
A MONTH LATER, she met the couple who would become her new family. They invited her to live with them in the nudist colony, and by Christmas, for the first time since flying me to college, she invited me down for winter break. I’m sure she did so knowing I wouldn’t come.
“You know my mind works so quickly,” she said, praising her new polycule’s generosity, their openness, their radical acceptance. “I’m very blunt, I talk quickly, it’s just how quickly my mind works, and I’m not a bullshitter. They’re the only people I’ve ever met who can keep up with me.”
I was happy for her.
When my father learned about her relationship, the first since they’d separated, he plunged into a depression that lasted for months. There were days of him not answering his phone. When he did, he was slow, as if drunk. “I know you don’t like her,” he told me. “I know that I left her. You know that I had to. But your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT. Jared’s head is in my lap on the porch, lit orange by a streetlight. A skink slips through a hole in the screen, then tries to find its way out again but can’t, and slithers into shadow. The pulse of the darkness closes in, and I realize I’ve waited too long to walk home, that I will need to ask Jared to drive me. A mosquito lands on the back of my hand, and I watch it suck me, detached but fascinated. I kill it.
Jared’s breathing has slowed, but he wakes with my movement, and I comb my fingers through his hair.
“I’m just curious,” I say, as he opens his eyes. “What if you and I wanted to fuck?”
He considers it. He rubs his face with his palm. “I would talk to Seth about it,” he says.
“I’m surprised.”
“As you know, he’s never been open to any kind of nonmonogamy, ethical or otherwise.” He sits up. “It’s his upbringing. He doesn’t espouse Lutheranism, but he takes comfort in its traditions.”
“It’s frustrating.”
“It’s up to you whether or not you want to accommodate him. I’ve talked to Seth about polyamory. He does listen. He’s just a very fearful person. Trauma has lasting effects.”
“I’m aware.”
“His parents divorced and his father died less than a year later.”
“Is it always about that?”
“In some ways, that’s when Seth stopped maturing.”
Four
When I don’t respond to her email, my mother begins texting me.
Happy birthday, Nina! she says. I’m so proud of the strong, confident woman you’ve become. We’re constantly changing and evolving. Cheers to many more years of growth and learning.
I’m sorry I haven’t reached out. I know I’ve been distant for a long time and I feel like a terrible mother. I just went to the beach and remembered how we used to look for sand dollars together. You were always so good at finding them! Love you, dear daughter.
Remember that I love you, dear daughter! Don’t ever forget that you are loved!
I hope you’re having a wonderful day! I miss you!
MY MOTHER IS the only person who has ever hit me in the face. I was eight and we were walking back from the public pool. I had finally learned to swim. In the past, when my mother has guilted me about my life choices, she has found it useful to remind me that she “taught me how to swim,” conveniently ignoring that it was mandatory for children to take swimming lessons in Florida public schools at the time.
It was summer and the sun was directly overhead. I had been taking swimming lessons at summer camp for three years already. But I wasn’t a strong swimmer and I was happy, finally able to tread water for sixty seconds or more, excited that this new skill would be rewarded with ice cream. This was before Breyers became “frozen dairy dessert.”
I was swinging my bathing suit in a circle, stupidly. It made a sound like thwack! when it hit her—I didn’t know what had happened. Before I could apologize, she hauled off and decked me.
I fell on the sidewalk. I sat looking at how it sparkled. She told me that I would have to lie to my father about the black eye.
We never talked about it, and she never apologized or explained herself, and it never happened again, physically. Those who know her know that beneath her anger is tenderness, and beneath her tenderness is fury. She’s the youngest of three children, with two older brothers. She had to learn at a young age how to defend herself. “She’s the most difficult person in my life,” my uncle Jude once told me.
IT’S THREE WEEKS before the move, and my father asks to see me. I bring Odessa as a buffer, and Odessa brings her twelve-year-old, Maxima. Max is genderqueer, but they haven’t told their mother, and their mother still uses feminine pronouns—Odessa thinks nonbinaryism and transgenderism are trends, and says things like, “Is everyone gay now?” and, “I wouldn’t know what to do down there.” She tells Max, “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” I’ve tried to complexify and resist this idea in private with Max, but it’s hard to explain to a middle schooler how they’re their own person.
It’s half an hour to the beach condo, where we hope my father will feed us. A storm is blowing in from the Gulf. It could wash the red tide out or spread it around; there’s no predicting. They’ve identified the culprit as chemical runoff from agriculture and phosphorous mining. Greed selling us out in Tallahassee. It could take months to dissipate, and there’s nothing they can do to speed it up. You can’t Monistat the ocean.
We park beneath the stilted building and climb the stairs to the second floor, looking out over the churning, rust-colored water. Some diehards are out there in the shallows. Disgusting. My father answers in his work slacks with his shirt open and a bottle of cold-brew coffee in hand. Since recovering from my mother’s midlife crisis, he’s become a serial dieter, obsessed with wellness. “I’m no longer consuming free radicals,” he told me on the phone last night. Apparently these are unpaired electrons that cause oxidative stress. Now he’s on a low-carb,
high-antioxidant diet, of mostly nuts and berries. He looks fragile and bewildered, like a bird. The room smells pleasantly rancid, and it turns out he’s composting in a mini dumpster on the kitchen counter. I would say that my father needs to get laid, but he’s learned to be too happy alone.
He sinks into his calfskin recliner. Everything in his house looks brand-new, like he just remodeled. There’s something on his mind, I can tell by the way he adjusts his position, but instead of speaking it aloud, he changes the channel on the HDTV. Odessa and Max sit beside me on the Boca do Lobo sofa, and we all commence watching the last episode of the first half of the last season of Mad Men. My father likes Mad Men because he, too, used to be a drunk, over-the-hill ad exec watching the world leave him behind, and he remembers the sixties being an easier time for white men like him.
“Your mother called me,” he says, looking at me.
“I don’t want to see her.”
“You don’t have to.”
“She’s not moving back. It’s a test to see if I’ll stay here for her. She knows that I’m moving.”
He smiles at the television. “I’m not arguing.”
Odessa watches Max navigate to the page on their Instagram where they can see what their friends are liking.
“What?” they say to her.
“Why is Violet liking Jorden’s posts?”
Violet is Max’s girlfriend, but I’ve promised not to share this with Odessa. She thinks they’re best friends. “Consider that your mother may be a closet lesbian,” I told Max. “Maybe it would be good for her to see you living authentically.”
“Didn’t Jorden call you a retard?” Odessa says.
“In fifth grade.”
“That was only two years ago.”
Odessa was thirteen when she had Maxima. For the first ten years of Max’s life, Odessa was still a child. They lived with her mother, an ultraconservative cunt rag. It’s only recently that Odessa has been able to afford an apartment where they can live alone. They still share a bed, so when guys sleep over, Max moves to the sofa.
I barely talked to Odessa while I was in New York. It’s only since moving back to Florida that she and I have grown close again. My hypnotist has asked me why I continue to feel that I can extend myself to her, if I feel I’m in any way able to help her, or if there’s another reason why I let her in close to me. Does it mean that I’m compassionate? Do I have poor boundaries? Am I codependent? Am I infantilizing her? Am I in love with her?
“Do you want me to talk to Violet?” she says. “I won’t say anything about you. I’ll just be like, ‘How do you know Jorden?’”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
“I adopted a cat from the street,” I say.
“How sweet,” says my dad.
“Do you want to see a picture?”
I take out my phone and pull up a picture of Butters. She’s in the bathtub, lathered with shampoo. I combed the fleas from her fur for forty-five minutes the day I rescued her. They came off in clumps like tiny landslides.
“She’s cute,” says my dad.
“Yeah, she was a stray.”
“Where’s Seth tonight?”
SETH INVITED ME to Black Box the night before. I came in at the end of a demonstration by a local experimental dancer. She was a middle-aged woman with olive skin and close-cut hair, dressed in a black linen midriff two-piece, shoeless on the smooth concrete of the gallery’s floor. She practiced a kind of dance involving spelling with her body, and explained how the sound of a name is inherently linked to a precise lexicographical gesture, which she demonstrated with names from the audience. People were seated on risers. I recognized many of them as self-proclaimed “art workers,” owning property downtown or otherwise working in the nonprofit sector. The dancer assumed the position of an egg, on her knees, bent over herself. I stood near the back, in the aisle. The first notes of Janis Joplin’s “Little Girl Blue” came down from the ceiling, and the lonely guitar crept through muted darkness. The dancer broke open, like a flower blooming underwater.
After, Seth closed the gallery but left the risers up with the folding chairs on them. He extracted a tripod screen and projector from the closet where he keeps the mop, and cued up Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts. In it the wives of zoologist brothers die in a swan-induced car crash, and the men become obsessed with rotting. Paolo had suggested it. Paolo will be finishing his MFA in studio art in New York just as we’re arriving. Seth talks about him like he’s Jesus.
Seth visited Paolo last month while deciding whether or not to move with me to the city. For the first time, he sent me long, rambling love letters via email. The first came as I was finishing a twelve-hour shift at the Pizza Shack. You didn’t know I had noticed you pacing the halls of our high school like some animal in a cage, he said. I read it standing with one hand on the oven door. After you left for New York, I remember thinking of you from that great distance. I would try to remember what you looked like. I would conjure you in my mind, recall the shift in contrast between your freckles and your pale skin.
I walked home greasy and floating at three in the morning. I knew for the first time with certainty that he loved me. I read his emails over and over. I’d see your pale green eyes, forever piercing my thoughts.
A swan, a car crash, a woman maimed. Seth held my hand through the movie. He crept from my wrist to the waistband of my jeans. We saw a long, still, accelerated shot of a zebra decomposing.
Afterward, we stacked chairs and carried the risers to the shed in the alley. It was a thick, wet night, with fireworks going off over the bay. A storm was lowering, cool and heavy.
Most of Seth’s time is spent at Black Box, but most of his income comes from his part-time job at a kava bar on Sunset Beach. He has to be there at six in the morning. “I can’t stay, but I’ll walk you home,” he said.
HIS EMAILS CAME every day he was gone, each one longer and more embroidered. It began to rain, he wrote on the last day. We hadn’t talked on the phone for the duration of his trip; he hated talking on the phone. Instead, I’d imagine him sitting at a coffee shop, perhaps somewhere near Union Square, spending an hour or more of each evening distilling what he’d taken in since the last time he’d written to me. The sun falling over the wooden tables. Through the tall, clear windows, light spilling over a yellowing wall of magazines. I imagined him imagining me receiving him, taking his words into my corneas. I thought I could walk a straight line through Central Park, but I ended up walking a parabola from 85th to 80th, he said. I became disoriented while trying to return. Each line held metaphorical properties. And one redeeming moment came when I had to urinate—I pictured this; was aroused—I turned to face west moments before the sky opened up. Suddenly fireflies lit the walkway in daytime.
“IT’S GOING TO be a busy week,” he said on our walk home from the gallery, stopping at a bench beside a retention pond. We were midway between our apartments. He wanted to talk. “You may not see me much.” He had one week to finish bringing his senior thesis together to complete the BFA he’s been working on for six years. “Where are you hoping we’ll go?” he asked me.
I sat. “I know you need to go home.”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, why do you want me to move with you?”
“Why do you want to come?”
“I don’t know, Nina. I think New York has something to offer me, but it will also steal a part of my sanity. I have a community here. I have a reputation.”
I looked out over the standing water. Its perimeter was small and greasy, likely toxic, full of trash.
“I’m also thinking of you,” he said.
“That’s good.”
“That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, yes. I’m thinking about you.”
At home, I found Butters sleeping in a basket of dirty clothes. My bedroom was a mess of boxes and stacks of books and pictures taken off the walls leaning tog
ether, their corners wrapped in bubble plastic. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Butters climbed over my chest and I held her there. Her breath smelled sickly sweet.
Five
A week after the dance performance, I’m in the lobby of The Planet’s offices in Ybor. Brian has asked to see me. The floor is an open-style, bare-brick loft space, divided up with chic midcentury furniture and vintage cubicle walls. A neon sign above the sofa in the waiting area reads, DON’T GO VIRAL—START AN EPIDEMIC. This morning, I filed a story about health care for homeless people. It’s possible Brian wants to talk about it. It’s more likely he wants to see me for personal reasons. Since we began sleeping together six months ago, we’ve been doing it mostly in his car, or in public restrooms, or on the spongy floor of my termite-infested living room. Then, a few nights ago, he paid for an Uber to bring me to his house in Tampa. A blue craftsman on a brick street lined with oaks and Spanish moss; the middle-class domesticity of it surprised me. I had always thought of Brian as a boy, not as a man—a few years my senior, in his early thirties but by no means paying a mortgage or mowing a lawn. The stability of his living situation placed him in a higher category. I climbed a set of wooden steps to a shady porch with hanging plants and a red-painted door. The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” played inside the house. I looked down at my rolled-up cutoffs and V-neck and dirty black Converse, feeling underdressed.
Brian answered the door with a camera in his hand. It was expensive-looking. I guessed it was the one he had used to take the soft-focus pictures of his ex I’d seen on Instagram a month ago, just before they broke up. He had confided in me about his grief, and I wanted to be compassionate as he mourned the loss of their future. I vaguely wondered if his confidences were strategic, meant to draw me in, to show me how vulnerable he could be, but I fell for it anyway. I swiped through the photo set compulsively: Erin with her daughters, Erin laughing, Erin sleeping on a beach towel. Long after I stopped swiping, I still saw images of Erin projected onto the screen of my mind.