I could recall every nuance of that afternoon more clearly than I could remember a single thing I’d done last summer.
If you studied stories long enough, you almost started to believe in plot, to expect your life would progress in a sequential order of events fitted neatly on a straight and narrow timeline. But childhood was not some point in history several miles of black line behind. Childhood was the kernel around which my adult self had been collaged. To age was not to mature but to accumulate. Achievements, expectations, experiences, disappointments—badges applied thin and too early lacquered in place, a mishmash of cheap decoupage. But under the miscellany—the adult I had made of myself—the original self would not be suppressed; she was as close and immutable and necessary as the muscle beating resolutely within my chest. And she wanted the same thing, always. From some internal wellspring transmitted a desire pure and unrelenting, masking itself behind a hundred ambitions, but driven by the same desperate desire of a little girl climbing a tree for her father, hoping, for just one moment, that he’d notice and be proud.
I ripped the photograph from Austin in half, my mother and brother and me on one side, my father on the other. I ripped his half into halves. Burying my face in my hands, I wept, mourning the years I’d wasted trying to please him. I wept in hatred for every birthday he’d missed, every Christmas pageant he’d failed to show. I hated him for not coming and then I hated him when he came. Those few appearances grew shorter and only left me strung out on hope, waiting with bated breath for the next unexpected visit, my daily life colored with suspense. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I convinced myself that somewhere he was watching and that if only I did something grand enough, he would come.
The performance anxiety that so powerfully propelled my ambition also rendered each resulting accomplishment temporarily rewarding at best. I could always do better; I could always do more. Society was no help. I wanted to be Something, but the one person I most wanted to impress was as elusive and changing as the measures of success the world threw my way. Every failure hammered through my skull in resounding unison with my father’s condemnation: I was not good enough.
All my adult life I’d worked hard to forgive him for not being there for me, but I had never forgiven myself for my inability to make him stay.
The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.
Now I clearly understood my real offense against heaven: the stubborn refusal to recognize that every failing I had—from the first—had been forgiven.
25
In summer Copenhagen slept. Natives reclaimed their rule. Parking spaces abounded. May melted into June, and June leisurely passed, an inner tube floating down a lazy river.
I graded ESL exams online;Wednesdays, I tutored at the campus writing center. But Zoë’s survival was my chief occupation. I set her alarm, I dressed her for work, and I practically force-fed her my best efforts at vegetarian home cooking. If she wouldn’t get out of bed, I’d call everyone on The Brewery phone list to find someone willing to cover her shift. And when she wept I sat with her until she was done, which seemed to offer some measure of comfort.
At first she did little more than sleep and cry and sleep again, the nights of naked grief punctuated by outbursts of irrational anger. She punched her fist in the wall after burning a plate of lasagna. She ranted for an entire hour one night about the idiocy of her father’s realtor. But slowly, visibly, Zoë was becoming Zoë again. In her second week home she gained color; in the third she gained weight.
In the fourth she came to breakfast a brunette. I stared at her. The hair was shoulder length and straight with fine, fringe bangs. She wore a pink barrette on the right. The wig could have easily been mistaken for her real hair had she not been sporting a pixie cut the day before.
She poured a cup of coffee. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She went to work in the wig, wearing it matter-of-factly, acting surprised when anyone cared to make an issue of it. Her wardrobe had always been inclined to drastic overhauls. She had a black phase, a lace phase, six months in which she never left the house without striped stockings. She systematically changed her jewelry and skirts. The hair, however, was a surprise to all of us.
She wore the wig for three days. By the time we’d all adjusted to her as a brunette she switched to auburn.
“How many did you keep?” I asked.
“All of them.”
She was in the shower. I sat on the toilet in a face-off with the mute wig head that now presided over our bathroom sink. Today auburn, tomorrow blond. In her closet the wig heads sat in silent rows.
The boxes had arrived the week she’d flown home. I’d assumed they contained the things she hadn’t been able to carry on the plane: shoes, jewelry, books—the entire collection of Zoë miscellany that had slowly migrated from our apartment to Chicago during her many trips home. She carried each box to her room and opened them in secret. “Just a few things to remember Mom by,” she’d said pointedly when I asked.
I’d meant she should take a few scarves or a bottle of perfume or a memorable necklace. But the hair?
“What could I have done with them?” she asked. “They’re real. Hundreds—thousands—of dollars of hair.”
“They’re very beautiful,” I replied.
She peered around the shower curtain. Her real hair stood spiked chaotically, her scalp white and naked beneath. “You know it’s not because I’m self-conscious. I don’t care about my hair.”
“I know, Zoë,” I said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”
That Zoë would hoard the artifacts of her mother’s illness was surprising. That she wore them was almost too much. But I understood her enough to know this was not a stunt or a cheap grab for attention. It would, perhaps, qualify as a Statement, but that was a good sign: If Zoë already had a Statement to make, she would be all right.
Strangely, the wig days were good days. In those beautiful and horrid relics of her mother’s illness she had found some mysterious source of strength. Together we perfected the art of leisure. We lounged in the living room over whole stacks of books. When we jogged, we jogged slowly. There were no deadlines to run to or prizes to win. We slept. We ate. We clung to each other and waited for our wounds to heal.
The postcard arrived in late June: Glorified Reductions, an exhibition of the Pendleton Residency. All the artists were participating in the final exhibition, a culmination of their six-week studio intensive. Eli’s name appeared on the list of showing artists, but I was disappointed that his work had not been included on the postcard. On the back he had scrawled: Would love to see you both. ~ELI.
He’d been careful to invite us both, but the postcard had been addressed to me.
I clipped it to my bedroom mirror so that his note was one of the first things I saw every morning. Zoë and I hadn’t talked about him. We didn’t talk about Michael, either. It was safer to talk about books and films, to keep our conversations in the abstract. But when I was alone, I wondered if his feelings for me had changed. My regard for him had only grown.
I’d been to the Pendleton Residency website a dozen times. It was a sparse, functional site, providing a brief description of the program (international), the grounds (stunning), and the people (renowned). The first photo album showcased the various studios, each furnished with the finest equipment. The second contained snapshots of every group that had lived and worked in the program since the 1980s. I was insanely proud to see Eli’s name listed on the roster.
Between the ostensible failure of his gallery and the fluke nature of his route to our doorstep, it had been easy to assume him a man of limited ambition. In all the nights I’d so painstakingly talked myself out o
f loving him, it had never occurred to me that his aspirations reached beyond firing clay pots in studio basements or that his appeal reached beyond the fawning of undergraduate art majors. He’d enjoyed Copenhagen because he made himself fit in it, because he knew when to bend to accommodate a circumstance. All the idle hours welding junk, drawing caricatures, and pulling espressos temporarily kept his latent talent at bay, but he had an energy our little town could not have restrained indefinitely.
How impossible it would be to ask him to come back.
I mentioned the exhibition to Zoë.
“It’s next weekend,” I said.
“It’s upstate New York,” she replied. “Isn’t that like eight hours?”
“Nine and a half,” I answered a little too quickly. I had already MapQuested the drive.
I waited for Zoë to say something. She was halfway through The Fountainhead. She’d been reading impossible books to stay preoccupied; she wasn’t listening to me at all.
“Do you think he actually expects us to come?” I asked her anyway.
“I’m sure he was just being polite.”
I might have written the note off as mere formality if not for a repeat invitation I found in my campus mailbox the following Friday. I’d gone in to clean out my desk, a ceremonial summer duty I hadn’t given two seconds thought until the library mailed me fines for the five overdue books I’d left in my office.
The Humanities Building felt empty despite the business of summer school. Everyone ambled, dilatory from the heat, dazed by the shock of air-conditioning. The women had retired their pantyhose and heels for sandals. The more flamboyant professors were wearing Hawaiian-print shirts; even the most reserved undid a button or two at the neck.
In the congested mailbox I found fliers and announcements and student essays turned in too late. I threw the formidable pile on my office floor and left it there the hour it took me to tidy my side of the room. After hunting down the overdue library books, I organized my pens in matching rows and dusted the knickknacks on the windowsill. I carefully ironed out the Cheetos bag with the palm of my hand before taping it front and center on Everett’s wall. He would be gone until July, parading sophomores across London for Summer of Shakespeare. He went every June. Every June I hated him for it.
At the now-empty desk I quickly shuffled through the pile of neglected mail. I didn’t get very far. On the very top lay a copy of the same postcard Eli had sent to the apartment. I turned it over in my hands, confused. On the back he’d written a note nearly identical to the one on the previous postcard. Why send two? The possibility that he’d worried the invitation would not arrive struck me as thoughtful. Maybe even as a reason to hope.
Would be great to see you and Zoë.
After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the card in the wastebasket. Nine and a half hours, I reminded myself. No woman in her right mind would go so far out of her way to attend a party without knowing the kind of welcome she would receive.
There were pay stubs to file, fliers to recycle, and halfway through the stack—unfortunately—a poem, five stanzas fit to bursting with far more openly expressed affection than I would ever wring out of a single sentence Eli had ever written me:
Untitled
by Anonymous
Love is like a pocketknife
With functions e’re so varied
For cutting through the heart
For getting couples married
For boring to the core of life
With its twisting corkscrew
For dissecting the soul
To something lovers cannot eschew
My love is a knife
Buried in my heart
Rending flesh from bone
Rending me apart
As the greatest love tale tells:
Love is a happy dagger
And this, my body,
the sheath in which it fells.
Never hide how you feel
From the one whom you desire
Fly through wind and rain
Fly through heat and fire
Cross the world o’er
To tell her how you love ’er.
The poem came with a note: For the end of the semester. I read it a second time. I tapped the bobblehead Garfield.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He bobbed his head.
“I agree.”
Enough was enough.
I found Anonymous working in the copy room.
“Lonnie, can I talk to you a second?”
He started. “Sure. Absolutely. I was just clocking out.” He rushed to clear a spot for me on the chair beside his. I sat down across the table, careful to keep a barrier between us.
“Working all summer?” I asked.
“Monday through Friday. I work at Blimpie’s now, too. You should come by. I give out free chips.”
I said I would have to think about it. In the ensuing pause, he took, predictably, to memorizing his sneakers.
“Since last semester started, I’ve been getting a lot of things in my mailbox—books and poems. I’m assuming they’re from you.”
“They’re not mine.”
“You’re the only person I know whose printer ink always fades two inches from the bottom.” I held up the poem, Exhibit A.
He bowed his head. His cheeks reddened, neck to ears. It was more a full-body hive than a blush. “I have to send them to a scholarship competition,” he mumbled. “I thought maybe you could edit them for me.”
I slid the poem across the table. “I’m not your English teacher anymore, Lonnie. And I think that—interacting—in this way is unprofessional.”
He snatched the poem. The folded paper disappeared under the table with his hands. “Ms. Gallagher, you shouldn’t think I meant anything. I didn’t mean anything, really … I like you and all, but I didn’t …” He blushed an even deeper shade of crimson.
Another professor walked in the room. Lonnie’s eyes darted nervously from me to the professor and back to the floor. I’d already thought of numerous ways to discourage this childish flirtation once and for all, but in the moment the rehearsed speeches failed me. I hated to shame him more than was necessary. “It must be ninety degrees in here,” I declared. “I was actually on my way downstairs for something to drink. Some company would be nice.”
At the snack machines Lonnie gave the off-brand animal crackers his highest recommendation. We took our crackers and Mountain Dews and sat beneath the overbearing oil portrait of Dr. Hoover, the building’s beneficiary and (some said) ghost.
“I have a theory about you, Lonnie.”
“Yeah?” He shook his hair out of his eyes. He was wearing a Ghost Busters T-shirt, stiff as the papers in the copy room and emanating a floral odor of Snuggle dryer sheets. My first kiss smelled of laundry. It was as if all the young men I’d known worked overtime to compensate for the funk of their bodies, that chemical party surging through their mind and limbs.
“You were born a romantic.”
He snorted. Either he disagreed or he thought the label funny. As usual, he was not a kid whose language—verbal or physical—I could translate.
“You want a girlfriend, don’t you?”
“More than anything,” he said with unabashed desperation.
“Have you ever had one?”
“In the second grade.”
“You don’t waste any time.”
“Annie Dobbins,” he said.
“What was she like?”
“Super smart. She had red hair and freckles. We got married on the playground. ”
“That must have been interesting.”
“Everybody came to see. At indoor recess we named our children. Spring and Autumn. Those were the girls. Lephen for a boy. We made that one up.”
“So what happened to Annie?”
“She moved. Her dad got a new job in Michigan. But I tracked her down in high school. Now she’s in Sacramento with her boyfriend.” He stuffed a few animal crackers i
nto his mouth. “She works at a Clinique cosmetics counter at the Florence mall.”
Creepy stalker knowledge. Fleetingly, I imagined Lonnie in his dorm room Googling Amy Gallagher.
“Lonnie, the difficult thing about being a romantic is that there’s only one person out there for you. One. Out of millions. So you shouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few years to find her.”
“How will I know if I find her?”
I parroted what my mom always told me, because for the first time I think I understood what she meant: “You’ll know.”
He took a last gulp of his soda before tossing the empty can at the wall above the recycling bin. It missed the bin and fell to the floor with a clatter.
“It’s not fair. I’ve been single for like forever. I haven’t even gotten to third base. I’m not even sure I know what the bases are.” He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms, pinched his eyes shut. “The girls in my hall don’t even know I exist.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They think I’m just some geek. Like I’m in love with Buffy or something. Don’t get me wrong, she’s about the most premium girl there is, but I’m not in love with her. I know she’s not real.”
“I’ve been in love with a lot of fictional men,” I said. “It’s easy to fall hard for people, for things, that aren’t real.”
“What about your guy?”
“My guy?”
“That dude with the tattoo who used to walk you to class.”
It was my turn to be embarrassed. “We’re not together.”
“That’s not what it looked like,” Lonnie persisted.
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