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by Kristen Tsetsi

  “Please,” Safia says, opening the oven. “Have something on the table.” Inside, almost-golden bread bakes in a tin. On the table: chips and dip and water crackers, and I’m painfully hungry. “No, thanks,” I say. “I just ate. But, thank you.”

  “So, anyway…” A woman with dyed black hair and a green-stone nosering returns to a story she must have almost finished before I came in. Something about a girl and a guy walking across New York state from west to east, but not making it past Buffalo. The girl, she says, broke off when she found out their first stop was to be with her boyfriend’s other girlfriend.

  “Did she at least have a warm meal ready for them?” says a man sitting on the left side of the table. His face is expressionless, and he wears a red flannel shirt and glasses and is older than the rest of us by what must be twenty years.

  The girl with the nosering laughs. “She didn’t say.”

  He shrugs. “At least they didn’t have to pay for a hotel.”

  Nosering sighs her relief at being newly single—“I’ve slept great since he left.”—and asks Flannel about his recent marriage. “Three weeks, already, right?”

  “I am blissfully happy,” he says. He sips his wine.

  Hands snatch crackers and lift glasses and I’m still waiting for a chair. I look with feigned interest at pictures on the walls. Many of the faces in a collage hanging above a wine rack belong to those at the table. Safia is absent from most of them; Paul is the one constant figure. I ask Safia if she needs any help.

  “No, thank you. Everything is done.”

  I study the table with a forced smile to leave no question of pleasantness. Their circle is palpable and frustrating in its inaccessibility to me; I feel like I’m standing just outside the reaches of a fire’s warmth.

  Jake was the only one I was ever truly comfortable with.

  Or am I making it up? I was more at ease with him—this is true—than with anyone else. But, was it like this? Like them? Strange that I can’t remember.

  “I want to know about Mia,” one of the women—Kim or Joni or Christine—says. She sits directly in front of where I stand, so her neck twists awkwardly when she looks at me.

  “What do you want to know?” My stomach burns, nauseous, and I scan the bottles on the table. Nothing white.

  “Well, anything.”

  Questions suddenly come at me from the ring around the table, a barrage of shouts and reporter-like inquiries that I’m sure they mean to be playful.

  “What do you do?”

  “What’s your social security number?”

  “How long have you lived in the area?”

  “Do you like pickles?”

  Safia appears beside me with a bottle. “Do you need more wine?” I hold my glass under the stream and swallow half of it, at least, when she pulls away the bottle.

  Safia says, “This is May—Mia,” she says. “Remember? The girl upstairs?”

  The table falls quiet, again, and the woman in front of me reaches for a cracker. “With the husband fighting in the war,” she says. “Right?”

  “M-hm,” I say, and the word “husband”…husband… Saturation is all it is, most likely. One more minute thinking about Jake, missing Jake, being angry with Jake, loving Jake, and I’ll either drown in self-absorption or come to fully detest him.

  Paul, still in one of the back rooms, calls, “Hey, love? I can’t find it,” and Safia excuses herself.

  “Sorry to hear that,” says the woman. “About your husband.”

  “It’s okay.” Husband!

  Flannel laughs. His face reddens to match his shirt and his eyes water behind his glasses, and I think of paintings depicting demons I don’t know are demons until I study the look in the eyes or the mark on the skin. I am asking him if I said something funny when Paul and Safia arrive with my chair. The group shifts sideways to make room, and I squeeze uncomfortably into the space.

  “‘It’s okay’, you said.” He takes a slow drag from a cigarette and exhales a white cloud into the yellow-brown light falling out of the shade. The table is circular, so there is no escaping their eyes, all of which rest on me, waiting. “It was the look on your face that made me laugh. It was clearly not okay.”

  “It was,” I say quietly to her, now sitting next to me, and she whispers that she meant nothing by it.

  He still smiles, his eyes shining. He raises his glass to me and I take a drink without returning the toast. He laughs again, his mouth opening wide and his face turning even redder. “She hates me already.”

  Nosering, whose mashed, chewed cracker clings between her top and bottom teeth, says, “Beth’s husband was going to join, remember? Last week, sometime, he said he was thinking about it. Guilt, or some such…” She looks at me. “Or something. But now he thinks this will all be over in no time, and he doesn’t want to waste three years of his life for nothing.”

  “It would be for nothing either way,” says someone else. “Things will just go back to the way they were. People can’t be forced to change.”

  Safia bends through shoulders to place a wood cutting board of cheese and bread in the center of the table, then takes a seat next to Nosering.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and they all stare at me, the authority on such things. I hold my glass tighter. “I mean, it seems like maybe they just needed a little help to change.” It doesn’t even sound genuine to me.

  “A boost over the wall, you might say,” says Flannel.

  “Yes.” I ready my glass for tossing. Whatever I might think of the war, I dare any one of them—Flannel Demon or Nosering or anyone—to say something about Jake, the military, their brav—

  “You can’t believe that,” he says, and instead of throwing my wine, I drink it.

  The woman sitting to my right says, “I don’t know how any of you can think it’s almost over. A statue falls and you think the President will withdraw the troops? The government didn’t spend all the money to send them over there just to bring them back less than three months later. They’ll be there for years. Bet on it.”

  “And like little toys,” says Safia, “they follow mindlessly, the winding knob on their back twisted until it cannot twist more.” She walks her fingers on the table, the ‘feet’ kicking straight up.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, but they’re laughing and don’t hear me. I yell “Shut up!” and Flannel’s smile turns kind toward me as the rest of them fall quiet. He says, “Hey, now,” and I say, “Never mind,” because I’m already back to being too weak to argue for something I don’t believe. And Safia might have a point, even though I know—I know—she doesn’t, not in the way she intends. Nazis, she meant, with her little finger-boots. But then I remember Brian, who didn’t follow, didn’t go. He found a way out. If being sneaky and cunning isn’t successful, there’s always Canada or conscientious objection. I once taught an excerpt from a Tim O’Brien novel…the excerpt was anthologized as an essay, and it was too long ago, so the title won’t come…about bravery, or at least one understanding of it. Was it bravery that turned his narrator’s boat around, away from Canada and back to the States for his trip to Vietnam? Or would he have been brave to continue to Canada as frightened as he was about what his family, his country, would think of his desertion?

  “I give it a month,” says a man I haven’t really noticed until now. He leans back in his chair, stoned-looking, and his hands, covered by the stretched-out cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt, are folded loosely on his stomach. “You’ll be out there like monkeys, screaming and pounding your chests, and with or without you, the end is already here.”

  “Are you going next Thursday?” Waiting for me to answer is a set of bright blue eyes like painted glass set in a pale, porcelain face. A living Pierrot clown with an orange scarf holding back frizzy brown hair, loops and twirls springing out, falling along her cheek to her shoulders.

  I ask her what’s happening on Thursday.

  “Not this Thursday. Next. You
don’t—? The campus protest. You haven’t heard?” She slaps the table and the stoned one turns his head. “See, Safia? I told you no one knows about it.”

  “She does not leave her apartment,” Safia says and smiles apologetically at me. “How is she to know?”

  “She lives right upstairs. You could have told her.”

  “People know. Trust me. Many will come.” She tugs at the end of one of her braids and studies the colorless hair flattened between her fingers. “Mia will come.” She smiles at me.

  The war has become a worn subject. Conversation turns more personal, and the music coming from the living room changes from Middle Eastern to American sixties folk. Flannel has a name—Frank—and he says, when asked about the progress of his new wife’s pregnancy, that he can’t wait for the baby to be born. The frizzy-haired one—Rose—is in the middle of finishing her master’s in art and complains about her unsuccessful formal appeal to change a ‘C’ to a ‘B’. “I can’t get a fucking C. But, of course, since he can’t be forced to change my grade, he won’t. The asshole. Now what am I going to do?” Frank suggests—without a hint of humor—that she try sleeping with the professor. “Or are you still waiting for marriage?”

  “Oh, Safia, I forgot!” says Nosering, whose name I discover is Jennifer. “You just had your first anniversary. How was it?”

  Safia gets up for more cheese, and Paul, smiling at his wife’s back, says it couldn’t have been better.

  I finish my wine—I can barely taste the red in it, at this point—and ask Safia if there’s more.

  The next few hours pass slowly. I can’t get rid of the nausea—the wine isn’t helping—and group familiarity pushes me out unless I’m reaching into the middle for cheese or a cracker, but I stay, anyway, drinking free wine and veiled in enough drunken confidence to eat the free food. I listen with waning interest to inside jokes and anecdotes, hoping for more information on the protest. I’ve never been to one and would like details about time and location—if they mentioned them, I’ve already forgotten—but it doesn’t come up again. I wonder what I’m supposed to wear and if I’m supposed to make a sign, but I don’t ask. I don’t want them to know it will be my first time.

  If the one in the sleeves is right, this will be my only protest because the war will be over soon, and it could be years before there’s another one.

  Over.

  Hot tears come and my breath catches and a scream builds in my neck. Over.

  Frank catches me smiling and smiles back. I hurry around the table and squeeze him tight and he smells like sandalwood. I fill my glass with the last of the wine on the table and light a cigarette and thank Safia for inviting me, then run upstairs.

  Chancey rubs his side against my shins under the desk while I wait for the internet to come up, then trots to the bedroom when my cigarette smoke drops to cat-nose level.

  There’s been no opportunity to check email for the past few hours, so there must be something waiting by now.

  “No new messages” appears in the screen’s bottom corner. The nausea crests and I shove my cigarette in the ashtray and run to the toilet.

  Afterward, I pour out the wine and mix a drink I can handle and open a page to begin a new message. My fingers move like they’re cold, landing on the wrong letters, and strands of my hair fall into the small, black crevasses when I lean in to better see the keys.

  To: Jake.Lakeland@army.net 09 May / 10:23pm

  Subject: You!

  Jake,

  You haven’t written back, so you must beb on a mission. You can’t be that mad, can you? You would’nt ignorn me, would you? Sometimes I thingk you’re lying when we say “I love you’. Are you ever think we stayt toghethr because we’re all we know anymore? Your lasst letter—letter, not emoil—you seemed I dno[tn know. Ih thought you dind’t agree with us ebeing over there/? Oh well! Diesn’t matter bercuase the wir is overl! Jake, you hear me? OVER! I finally feel like I can breathe and like smiling without caoution won’t get you shot. They didn’t sayk on the news that it’s over, but you can tellk by the stories. I cant’n wait to seew you agai, Jaike. We’ll gfet a new houske with no trees and nop spiders and live happilyyj evern after,. You wnt new, you got new. You want wall to wall carpting? You got well to weall carpetingl. You want a bababy? You gotr a babay. Antyhing youi watn, Jake, because you fought in a war. A WAR. Aand I didn’t nothing but sit here.

  Love ferver,

  Mia

  I send it and turn on the news and fall onto the couch. Images and anchors’ faces slip by like pictures on a View-Master, making me dizzy, so I turn to a movie channel and settle back and feel something poking my skin just above the waistline of my jeans. Some digging behind the cushion turns up a bent picture of Jake that came in the stack Denise brought. He sits with a skinny, big-headed puppy on an uneven but sturdy-looking wood-planked patio in front of a square brown tent. A sandbag wall surrounds the tent and everything else either is dirt or matches the dirt. He is smiling and his hand rests on the puppy’s back. I remember his hand. I remember it holding mine. Stroking my arm and curling around the back of my neck in the hangar before he left.

  I put out my cigarette and close my eyes. No rushing this, I tell myself, fighting the random images pushing their way through; daydreams speed forward like they’re on a movie reel, but this I want to experience in real time. He walks across the hangar toward me, one side of his mouth slightly higher than the other, his eyes steady on mine. I hear his feet hitting the ground, his pants rubbing with each step, his voice when he says, “God, I missed you,” and, “You’re smoking again, aren’t you?” I mumble no, I put it out, See? and I only get as far as circling my arms around him before falling asleep, the first easy sleep I’ve had since he left. In a hazy dream, we hold one another with forever behind us and I see his hands in mine and feel his chest against my cheekbone.

  ________

  Screwdrivers climb up my throat.

  Between flushing the toilet and returning to the couch, I check my email.

  Nothing. I write I can’t wait to see you and turn the TV to the news, falling back into sleep without hearing any of it.

  MAY 10, SATURDAY

  “…President warning the neighboring nation that…” I listen without opening my eyes, thinking it just another recommendation from the President that the countries bordering Iraq behave. Sunlight shines bright on my eyelids and the news anchor reads, word-for-word, a not-so-veiled threat to Syria: if it doesn’t something something and it doesn’t even matter what it is because it’s just another something the President wants, and we—we?—will do whatever is necessary to protect the interests of America, he says.

  We.

  Same as before, the same speech he gave before Jake left, and I feel sick again, the remaining vodka and orange juice rebelling against any lingering red wine, but I clamp my hand over my mouth and will it away. When I feel like I can, I open my eyes.

  “Many of the country’s natives rejoicing in the streets, but still others—Americans included—arguing against occupation. The President saying, in response, ‘It’s a democracy. You’re entitled to your opinions.’” Gray hair and a carefree smile—aimed at a well-groomed purebred—replace the anchor on the screen, whose voice continues behind the image. “Up next: The First Dog getting a special birthday tre—”

  Small sparks light, then disappear, and thick chunks of glass spray out like fireworks from his face. Cigarette butts and ash litter the floor in front of the TV stand. The ashtray, unbroken, rests lopsided where the President’s face once was. Or was it the dog’s face? I don’t remember. They’re gone, now, disassembled like a child’s puzzle and strewn across the hardwood, and when the anchor’s voice still manages to break through the hole in the box (“…and to this, Trippy barking an enthusiastic ‘Woof!’”), I roll off the couch and squint in the sun stream, blinded, but find my way to the television and pull out the ashtray. I push and pull the stand until it tips over and the TV lands with a piercing, heav
y thud and shards from the screen shoot around my ankles. The cord snaps from the outlet. I smash the ashtray—solid, heavy glass—into the back panel again and again and stop when smoke seeps from ventilation holes and the voice inside dies. I stare at it, half aware of my heavy breathing, and last night’s drinks—how can any be left?—come up so violently my nostrils sting. I run to the bathroom with my hands cupped over my nose and mouth to catch what I can’t keep in and bend over the toilet, kicking the door shut with my foot. I heave myself empty and crawl to the sink to rinse my hands, then use them as a cup and suck down water until the taste is gone.

  I rest my elbows on the edge of the sink, rest my chin on my arms. The sink is too white. And all the walls are white and the sheer curtain hanging in the window is white. I tug the curtain until the cheap, plastic rod springs off its metal hooks nailed to the window frame and clatters on the tile. I angle the window blinds to block out the blue sky and all the light and lie on my side by the heater, my knees pulled tight to my stomach. The discount-store throw rug is plusher than I thought, even downright comfortable, and I hadn’t noticed the red spots before. I touch one of them and it stays on my finger. I check my hands and face and arms, then twist to look at my feet. Blood-soaked bottoms, both of them. TV glass.

  Funny. It doesn’t hurt.

  I let my feet down and rub my cheek against the rug and stare at its loose coils, tall as mountains close to my eye but shrinking from row to row.

  “Mia!” Safia knocks, out there, out in the hallway. “Are you okay? I heard a loud noise.”

  I pull the curtain over me and tuck it under my chin and, with my fingertip, rub a cotton-and-nylon rug loop one way, then back again. Over and back. Over and back. My breathing comes in a shallow, bursting rhythm and the loops turn blurry and warm tears bridge my nose and wet my temple and drop to the rug. I can’t breathe through my nose, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to blow my nose and I don’t want to close my eyes and I don’t want to stop plucking the rug and I don’t want to stand up or even move. My body is at rest, not counting my finger and my lungs, and this is the way it is. This is where I am and this is my rug and this is my—