I'm Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking

by Leyna Krow

  If she were in this diner with Alex, they would have ordered a Spaceman Waffle to share and laugh about and maybe joke-fight about who got to eat the last bite of ice cream.

  The trouble is, Alex had started drawing star maps before he ever met Katie. He’d drawn them when he lived here, in Portland, with another girl and had given those first completed maps to that girl. This means Katie only has a half set. Katie and Alex broke up six weeks ago at which time he moved back home to Boston. This means Alex will never make any more maps for her. Katie thinks this is very unfair to both her and the club.

  The Spaceman Waffle is the only space-themed item on the menu. In fact, it’s the only themed item at all. Everything else has a perfectly ordinary name, like Bacon Cheeseburger or Short Stack of Pancakes. Katie finds this to be a bit of a let-down.

  Katie loves anything and everything having to do with outer space. She loves stars and constellations and galaxies and black holes. She loves NASA and grainy pictures of the moon. She loves imagining what it would be like to be inside a space capsule, orbiting the Earth. When she was a little kid, she wanted to be an astronaut more than anything. But as an adult, this dream seems increasingly unrealistic, like wanting to be a dinosaur or a superhero. Of course, astronaut is an actual job that actual people do. But when Katie thinks of astronauts, she thinks of muscle-y men and women with perfect balance and perfect vision who look great in jumpsuits. These are not attributes Katie sees in herself.

  That’s why, instead, she goes to the Reno Amateur Astronomers Club and why she’s majoring in physics at the University of Nevada, Reno—to have a better understanding of the way the universe works, to feel closer to the stars and the planets. Unfortunately, physics, it turns out, actually has very little to do with stars and planets. It’s mostly just math. But that’s okay. If nothing else, Katie is very good at math.

  Katie had been dating Alex for several weeks when she confessed her love of outer space to him and he said, “Well, I’ve got something you should have then,” which turned out to be the first star map he ever gave her. It was so beautiful, so perfect. She took it with her that week to her Reno Amateur Astronomers Club meeting and everyone in the club oooh’d and ahhh’d and asked to see another next time. So Alex gave her another for next time. And then another each time he finished one.

  Alex once told Katie this former girlfriend in Portland had not been particularly interested in astronomy. Still, Katie imagines she must have known enough to affix the maps to her ceiling and to look up at them each night before she went to sleep.

  So, that’s what Katie has been doing in Portland for the last three days. She doesn’t know the former girlfriend’s address, or rather, she doesn’t know it exactly. She knows the former girlfriend’s name. And that she lives in the southeast part of the city. The phone book in the motel lobby lists addresses in this neighborhood for three people with the same name as the former girlfriend. Some online sleuthing has turned up two more. Each day, Katie sets out on foot through the Portland drizzle, city map in hand, looking for these addresses. When she finds one, she doesn’t knock on the door. Instead she sneaks around the house, looking in windows. She looks at the ceilings in each room. She wants to be sure she’s at the right place before she risks explaining her mission to anyone inside. So far though, she’s visited four out of the five addresses and no luck.

  She doesn’t really have a plan for what she’ll do if she sees Alex’s maps on someone else’s ceiling. She knows she should use the time she spends walking to come up with some sort of strategy, but as she wanders through the neighborhoods, all she can think about is what life was like for Alex when he lived here, in Portland, with the former girlfriend. She imagines Alex holding hands with the former girlfriend as they stroll through the rain together, not minding the weather at all. He’d have worn an absurdly bright raincoat, picked out for him by the former girlfriend, which would hang off his long, skinny torso, the hood up to protect his shaggy hair. She imagines Alex fucking the former girlfriend under her ceiling of maps. He would have done things with her that he never did with Katie—weird things, exciting things, and at all times of the day. Then they would lie on their backs and he’d tell her which maps were his favorites, and what he’d been thinking about as he drew each one, something he’d never done with Katie, even when she asked.

  So yes, Katie agrees, Darryl has reason to be worried. This behavior is worrying. Katie knows wandering on foot through Southeast Portland, looking in strangers’ windows, obsessing about Alex, skipping classes, spending her student loan money on gas and a motel room and crummy diner coffee is not wise or healthy. But Darryl doesn’t know what Katie is doing. All he knows is that she is going to pick up more maps from a friend of Alex’s in Portland. She is running an errand for the club. That’s all. Based on that information, there is no need for a phone call each evening. Even if he were her father or brother or boyfriend, it wouldn’t be necessary.

  The other thing astronauts have to be good at, in addition to balance, vision, strength, and jumpsuit-wearing, is being alone. Katie often thinks about Michael Collins, the third member of Apollo 11, who stayed behind while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the surface of the moon. As he orbited, Collins repeatedly lost radio contact with both Earth and the lunar module whenever he reached the backside of the moon. Katie imagines the only thing he was able to do during those times was look out the tiny windows of the spacecraft at all the beautiful stars and planets and hope that when he got back around to the other side, everything would still be all right. She believes there’s something heroic about being able to withstand that sort of isolation and thinks it’s unfair that Collins is by far the least famous of the Apollo 11 team.

  The description of the Spaceman Waffle has Katie in the mood for something sweet. But she doesn’t want to order a comically named plate off the kids’ menu. When the teenage waiter comes back, she asks to see a dessert list. He nods and returns a moment later with a cart covered in various slices of cake and pie.

  All the desserts on the cart look pretty much the same. Katie can’t even tell which are pies and which are cakes, which are berry and which are chocolate. She points to a plate on the far left end of the cart and says she’ll have one of those. “The Boston cream,” the teenage waiter says. Just fucking perfect, Katie thinks. But she doesn’t want to change her order. She nods and he leaves with the cart.

  When people who aren’t her closest friends ask Katie what happened between her and Alex, she usually tells them he went home to Boston—or rather, some crappy suburb of Boston—because he could not find a job in Reno after he finished his degree and so his only recourse was to move back across the country and live with his mom. She tells these friends she and Alex discussed the option of the long-distance relationship, but had together, mutually, dismissed it since Katie still has another year before she’s done with school and Alex did not know if or when he’d be able to return to the west. When she tells these friends this, she almost believes it’s really what happened—that she and Alex are still friends and still a little in love and it’s just the distance and the money that keeps them apart. She acknowledges this is an impressive leap of imagination since she was obviously present for all the arguments and the uncomfortable silences and the desperate make-up fucking and then the additional arguments (because desperate fucking never really solves anything) that preceded Alex’s departure.

  The teenage waiter sets Katie’s order in front of her and hands her a rolled up napkin with silverware inside. She thanks him. She tastes the pie. It’s just fine.

  Weirdly, Darryl is one of the few people Katie has confided in about her break-up. Not about the fucking, of course. But about the rest of it. One night, after a meeting of the Reno Amateur Astronomers Club, Darryl put one of his big, callused hands on her shoulder and said, “Katie, are you okay?” And then it all came pouring out of her, right there in the doorway of the grange hall where the club has its meetings. Darryl just listene
d and nodded and when she was done with her story, he’d asked for the first time if she’d like to come out to his house the next night and use his telescope.

  When Alex gave Katie her first star map, she thought she’d finally found a kindred spirit: someone who loved space just as much as she did. But this turned out not to be the case. Not totally. Alex liked stars okay, but only because they were something he could draw maps of. Mostly, Alex liked maps. He never went with Katie to the Reno Amateur Astronomers Club. If there had been a Reno Amateur Cartographers Club, he would have gone to that, he said, but there wasn’t. Katie tried very hard at the time not to be disappointed by this. She understood it was unreasonable for one person to expect to ever find another person who could be everything that first person wanted. When they were breaking up, Katie had reminded Alex of this universal relationship truth and he said, “But that’s not really the issue here, is it?”

  A man and a woman walk into the diner together and sit at the counter with their backs to Katie. Katie isn’t sure why, but she is absolutely certain they are the people who were fucking in the room next to hers. They are young—around Katie’s age. The woman is tall with short brown hair. The man is man-sized and wears a baseball cap. Although Katie cannot see their faces, she senses from them the kind of mutual contentment that can only come from fucking aggressively in a bed that is not your own in a city with which you are largely unfamiliar. She sees this in their shoulders. In their cheeks, still flush from their recent exertions. In the way they lean their elbows against the counter for support. In the way, after they both take their first sips of coffee, the woman puts her left hand on the man’s knee without looking at him. Katie decides she sort of hates them.

  It’s not like Darryl’s ever tried to touch Katie or do anything pervy with her. That’s not the problem. He just calls her too much. He invites her over to use his telescope too much. He favors her too much during club meetings, asking her to help him spread out charts or plot coordinates. He’s too nice to her. Katie thinks maybe if she had more friends like Darryl, Darryl wouldn’t seem so odd. But the fact is, Darryl is actually the only person to whom Katie has told the truth about Alex. And Darryl is the only person who knows Katie is in Portland. If he did try to get pervy with her, that would make everything easier. Then she could just tell him to go fuck himself. Then she wouldn’t have to think about how weird it is to be a twenty-two-year-old college student whose only real friend is an aging amateur astronomer with a ponytail. She wouldn’t have to think about what this situation says about her as a person.

  Katie decides she is done thinking about Darryl for the night. She will put him out of her mind entirely. And if he calls tomorrow, she will answer, even if the people in the room next door are fucking, and she will tell him she is fine and she has picked up the star maps and she is heading home the next day and will drive safe and stop frequently along the way to stretch and eat balanced meals. She will tell him this even if it is not true, she decides.

  Katie knows other things about Alex’s former girlfriend aside from just her name and her possible addresses. She knows she worked for a while (and maybe still does) at an art supply store, which is how she and Alex met. She knows she enjoys music, cross-country skiing, and cribbage. She knows she has curly brown hair that falls over her shoulders. She knows she likes to wear big sun hats in summer. Katie knows some of these things from looking at the former girlfriend’s Facebook page. And also because she used to ask Alex about her sometimes. Actually, if she is being honest, she used to ask Alex about her more often than just sometimes. Once, they had been discussing the former girlfriend and Katie said, “You’re still in love with her, I can tell.” Alex shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I’m starting to think you’re in love with her. You can’t ever seem to stop talking about her.”

  So maybe Katie had asked about her too often. But she couldn’t help it. She wanted to know what Alex’s life was like prior to being with her. Had he been different in some way? Had he been happier? Katie was convinced he was. After all, who could possibly be happier in weird little Reno with Katie than in super-cool Portland with a woman who wears sun hats? So yes, she asked a lot of questions.

  In the background of the former girlfriend’s Facebook profile picture (the one where she’s wearing a big sun hat), there’s a bright yellow, two story house. The house has white trim and a little garden in the front. It’s very cute. Katie does not know if this is the former girlfriend’s house, but she imagines it must be, cute as it is, like the former girlfriend herself. Katie has yet to see this house during her time in Portland, though she looks for it on every street, even when she is nowhere near one of the addresses she has for women with the former girlfriend’s name.

  Katie watches the teenage waiter lead a family—Mom, Dad, little boy—through the diner. He installs them in the booth behind hers. Before the parents even have a chance to sit, the little boy orders a Spaceman Waffle. Katie figures they must be locals who, bending to the whims of their small offspring, come to this crummy motel diner on a semi-regular basis. It seems like a bummer way to spend an evening—indeed, Katie herself is here and definitely having a bummer evening. But she can also see an upside in the parents’ case. They take the little boy someplace he likes, feed him a ton of sugar, take him home and let him run around all crazy and sugar high until he falls asleep on the couch. Then Mom and Dad can have some time to themselves. They can have quiet and contented sex, knowing they are, at the very least, okay parents and that their son loves them.

  Katie wonders how long it will be until the couple at the counter have a kid and whether they’ll take him to crummy motel diners just to make him happy.

  Sometimes Katie and Alex used to speculate about what their kids would be like, if they ever had kids together. Or, rather, Katie would speculate and Alex would agree with whatever she said. Katie thought their kids would be pale, nearsighted, and skinny as straws. They’d have his shaggy brown hair and her green eyes. They’d be good at both art and math.

  The Spaceman Waffle comes with a tiny plastic space shuttle sticking out of the vanilla ice cream. Katie sees this when the teenage waiter delivers it to the little boy at the booth behind her. It’s a nice touch, she thinks.

  If Katie and Alex had a kid together, they would have let him eat Spaceman Waffles all the time. They would have covered his bedroom walls in glow-in-the-dark stars. They would never have forced him to play sports or join church youth groups or even take baths if he didn’t want to. They would have been ridiculously permissive parents. The most fun parents ever, Katie thinks.

  The couple at the counter will not be fun parents. Sure, they’re having fun, with each other, now. But in a few years, they’ll settle in to a steady routine of pragmatism and practicality. They will be responsible, boring, normal parents. Katie pities them a little for their dull future, which will no doubt take place in a suburban tract home amid Ikea furniture.

  Behind her, the little boy is making airplane noises. “Eat your waffle before you play with your toy,” she hears the mom say.

  Katie gives up on her Boston cream pie. It isn’t just fine after all. The custard is too sweet and the chocolate on top tastes waxy and sticks to her teeth. She puts down her fork. She scoots to the edge of the booth, leans her back against the wall and stretches her legs out on the seat. Now she can see everything—the front door, the couple at the counter, the little boy and his parents. The little boy has eaten all of his ice cream but neglected his waffle entirely. When he sees Katie looking at him, he pulls himself up to the back of the booth seat between them. He pushes his space shuttle across the top of the booth. Katie imagines she can hear its tiny plastic wheels squeak when he does this, even though she knows she can’t. “This is called taxiing,” the boy says. “It’s what happens before take-off.” Katie shakes her head. “Space shuttles don’t taxi,” she says. “They take off straight up.” She points up with her finger. The little boy shrugs and keeps taxiing.


  This makes Katie think about why she, as a child, decided she wanted to be an astronaut in the first place and how it had nothing to do with stars or math or telescopes.

  When Katie was in preschool, her parents took her and her older sister to visit a state park that housed a Paiute archeological site. The park had a program where kids were given worksheets and instructions to visit various locations around the site and draw pictures on the worksheet of what they saw. Everyone who completed a worksheet received a toy pickaxe and a plastic badge that said “Junior Archeologist.” Katie filled out hers with the help of her mom.

  On the car ride home, Katie could not remember her honorary title. She reached for the biggest word she knew that started with the letter “A.” “When I grow up, I want to be a real astronaut,” she announced. Her sister, already too big to be interested in plastic badges and toy pickaxes, was quick to correct her. “You mean ‘archeologist,’” she said. “When you grow up, you want to be a real archeologist.” And because even as a little kid Katie hated to be wrong, she said, “No, I mean astronaut” and held to the claim for so long it became true.

  Maybe this was the reason she and Alex had broken up. Not because Katie wanted to be an astronaut, but because she hated to be wrong. Alex didn’t mind being wrong. And so whenever one of them had to be wrong, it was always Alex. Maybe Alex just got tired of having to be wrong all the time.

  Katie waves down the teenage waiter and asks him for a pen. He digs around in the pockets of his apron and hands her a blue Bic with a chewed up cap. She thanks him. On a napkin, she writes, “Things Alex Was Always Wrong About.” Under this heading, she adds, “1) the importance of astronomy 2) the importance of agreeing on how to raise hypothetical children 3) the importance of making his current girlfriend feel like she’s more important than his ex-girlfriend.”

  She wonders if Alex, at one point, made a list called “Things Katie is Always Wrong About,” since he was actually the one who broke up with her. She wonders if at the top of this list was “1) the necessity of pestering her boyfriend about the importance of various things.” She wonders now if Alex found this behavior, this constant questioning and speculating and comparing and pushing and doubting, to be oppressive. If he ever said so, she can’t remember.