Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  But what a silly way to put it. She released her handful like a magician revealing a dove. The soil looked like an extension of the dark tattoo on her forearm, like the ink was sliding off the skin.

  Because by shedding the hyper-restrictive construct of religious thinking—what some people call “losing your faith”—Stacey had gained the Universe.

  * * *

  Before leaving Ann Arbor that afternoon, she’d gotten coffee with Janet, and her primary advisor said something disturbingly insightful.

  “You view writing like those scenes of Bruce Wayne putting on the Batsuit.” Her eyes bulged in her peculiar, excitable way. Janet’s hands and eyes were always in motion, crumpling a used sugar packet, tapping the wooden stirrer against the side of her mug, peering over the rim of her matronly glasses at passersby, Stacey, and back to people watch. “Like those scenes with Christian Bale or Michael Keaton putting on each piece of the suit in this onerous process.”

  “Don’t forget Clooney and Val Kilmer.”

  “Body armor, click on; gloves, click on; cowl, click on.” She made the motion for each piece. “You need to learn to just sit down and write without putting this pressure on yourself.”

  Janet had become an English professor mostly to indulge the huge pop culture nerd hiding beneath her work on Faulkner. Stacey had yet to witness her in a conversation she couldn’t somehow turn to The Walking Dead.

  “It’s just getting past that feeling,” said Stacey, “of everyone being totally fucking brilliant and then the paralysis when I realize I’m not.”

  Janet rolled her eyes, a motion that took her entire head in a loop.

  “Chill out, Stacey,” she ordered. “You’re a first-year student, for Christ’s sake. Take a week off when you go see your parents. Write something nonacademic. Just write something for yourself.” It felt like Janet had pulled it out of her head: because she’d spent an awful long time writing something for herself the night before. It was now sealed in an envelope on the passenger seat of her car. “Give transnational modernism and ecocriticism a rest.”

  When she’d been casting about for a grad program, she’d chosen Michigan because it was by far the best school she got into, and now it freaked her out to think that had she chosen differently, she might never have met their horror- and sci-fi-obsessed Faulknerian, who had become not only a mentor but a woman with whom she was engaged in an absolutely shit-stomping case of hero worship.

  “Saw that Maddy dropped you off.”

  Stacey responded with a furious heat in her cheeks.

  “Hey,” Janet reassured her. “Literature and sex are the primary methods we use for demarcating intervals of our lives. You’re reading this person and fucking this person during any given period and they tend to change over with weirdly similar timing.”

  Stacey had no defense for sleeping with her ex, who was about to go chase adjunct positions in the wide blue world. Maddy had somehow dragged her back into her fold. When they first started hooking up, Stacey found her butch midwestern frankness appealing, not to mention those squat legs of a power lifter. Maddy had an awesome androgynous punk coif, and courted her by cutting Stacey’s hair into a sort of Mia Farrow pixie cut she was still in love with. When she began describing her embryonic notion of an idea for her dissertation—ecology and world literature—Maddy kind of scoffed at her first-year naiveté and asked if she’d ever read Goethe, who supposedly invented the genre. “The world at large, no matter how vast it may be, is only an expanded homeland,” she quoted. Later, Stacey decided she had to date outside the handful of women in her program, preferably a half-straight girl who never quoted anything.

  “Forget Maddy,” she told Janet. “I’ve got enough making me crazy right now. This trip home . . . It’s just like this total sense of doom. Like having to think ecologically all the time, it creates this impulse to barricade yourself in a house, town, region, country, planet—hell, that’s doom.” Stacey laughed nervously at her babbling. “Wait, maybe we should go back to who I’m fucking.”

  Janet smiled, her mouth two rows of gravestone teeth. Her professor could quell from her mind all eloquence, leave Stacey stammering, staggering around mentally like Gregor Mendel in his library during an earthquake, books beaming her on the head.

  “Anyway.”

  “Stacey, you’re wound tighter than the girdle on a Baptist minister’s wife.” Janet’s eyebrows danced. “This is your ex’s mom?”

  She’d already told Janet the story, editing out the more disturbing aspects. The parts she’d never told anybody.

  “Listen, Stace, the past only has power over us if we allow it that power.”

  “That’s easier said.”

  “And come on, girl, it’s not the mom that’s bugging you. It’s her, doy!”

  The night before when she hadn’t been able to sleep, while entertaining visions of ancient narratives racing across the coalescing and dissolution of stars, drowning in Deep Time, she finally realized her preoccupation with ecology and literature had a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to Lisa Han’s bedroom library. Stacey’s love of reading began with Lisa, who pulled books from her foldable shelves and pushed them on her like a drug dealer, the pile of unread tomes growing so vast that Stacey only finished all of them years later while traveling in Europe. Stacey doled out to herself this strategic reserve of Lisa’s favorite texts in careful drips, never reading two in a row. They were Stacey’s reward to herself, her way of connecting back to this person without admitting that that’s what she wanted. Almost all of them had Lisa’s dog-ears and margin notes. Jaunty, clever quips, occasionally filthy, always charming: A huge smiley face at a perverted scene in Lolita. A sarcastic “Thumbs-up, bro!” at a bit of misogyny from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A “Jesus I’m wet” next to a scene in Wuthering Heights. It had been during these pusher days that Lisa had handed her James Lovelock’s eco-classic Gaia, warning of its density but also its mind-blowing capability. “After you read it, you’ll be a totally new person,” Lisa told her. “You won’t look at flowers or lichen or dung beetles the same ever again.”

  Flipping Gaia’s pages in Lisa’s bedroom, a photo had fallen out. It was of Bethany, Lisa’s mother, swollen with pregnancy, holding her stomach and looking at the camera. “You in your mom’s belly!” she’d exclaimed. “She’s so pretty in this.”

  “Seventeen years and one kid ago,” Lisa snorted.

  Stacey flipped the photo over and squinted at the date. “Lis,” she laughed. “This is from the day before you were born.”

  Lisa took the photo from Stacey, gazed at it a moment, searching for an unspecified clue to no particular mystery. Then she shrugged and stuck it back in the book. Or she must have, because Stacey would find that photograph nearly five years later in Croatia when she finally got around to reading Gaia.

  She had never explained to Janet or Maddy or anyone that her preoccupations, what she wanted to write about, well, this girl from her hometown, Lisa Han, had always pointed the way.

  “My advice?” said Janet, rapping her knuckles on the table in the coffee shop, clearly buzzing from her daily overload of caffeine. “E-mail her today. Now. The hot ex, I mean, not the mom. The longer you haven’t spoken to her, the more anodyne and undramatic the e-mail. Just a cheery ‘Hey, howzit going, whatcha up to?’ Trust me, it’ll suck the power right out of her.”

  “That,” Stacey said, smiling, “seems an unlikely move on my part.”

  “We are all travelers, Stacey. The only difference is how much baggage we choose to burden ourselves with.”

  “Your aphorisms are always totally useless.”

  Janet blasted crazy air through her lips and flapped a hand like a bird caught in a tornado.

  “Not only that, but I’ve got three ex-husbands who’d call bullshit on that one. I’m nothing but baggage.”

  * * *

  Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without
even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.

  She followed Zanesville Road to the center of town and was surprised to see what looked like a gleaming, brand-new Walmart bursting like a diamond from coal out of a remote area where before there was nothing but farmland. There had certainly already been a Walmart in New Canaan when she’d lived there, but this new one made the Walmart of her youth look like a sickly mom-and-pop. Even at this relatively late hour the parking lot, only appropriately measured in football fields, held hundreds of cars, and people strolled shopping carts in and out of multiple sliding glass door entrances. It took about three hours to get from Ann Arbor to New Canaan with maybe another hour to reach her parents’ new home in Columbus, and along the way she’d have a choice of how many of these panoptic consumer centers? A dozen? A hundred?

  The CD in the stereo, Extraordinary Machine, a college love, began skipping. The passenger seat was a stew of candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, her purse, and the crisp bleach-white envelope. She scraped through the mess until she found Slow River and switched out Fiona for her high school boyfriend’s raspy tenor.

  Halfway into the opening song, she pulled into one of the slanted spots in the town square. The mechanical scratch of shutting off the ignition, followed by the thudding silence as the stereo went dead, filled her stomach with the queasiness of a hangover. When Bethany first e-mailed her a few months earlier, she’d read with fury, triumph, pity, more fury. It was all pretty confused. She told Lisa’s mother she had nothing to say to her, but the woman kept writing. All she wanted was to meet, she said. All she wanted was to talk, she claimed. Just a half hour of Stacey’s time. And maybe it was curiosity that led Stacey to agree. She told Bethany she could stop in New Canaan on the way to see her parents.

  Her boots—kick-ass, high, and black, with a zipper that nearly reached the knee pit, a ten-buck Salvation Army find—clopped over the street like a horse with two amputations. The square was surprisingly quiet, a few cars hesitating at the yield signs, distant stoplights winking through their programs. A small black purse on a spaghetti strap slung diagonally across her chest bucked rhythmically against her hip. An old man sat on a bench, one arm draped around a pink shopping bag that said BIG SALE, and she felt his eyes on her as she passed. Walking through the heart of town, she wasn’t sure what to expect. She’d let New Canaan take up such gargantuan psychic space that sometimes she forgot it was just a place, and life carried on here as it did anywhere else.

  Vicky’s All-Night Diner had been the favored greasy spoon in high school, the place to be after dances. It was blue-neon signage, strange artifacts of Americana affixed to the walls, and your choice of two rows of booths or a bar with stools made of that red sparkly plastic material. The game where you pump in quarters and try to grab a stuffed animal with an impotent mechanical claw still stood in the corner. One night after a basketball game, Ben Harrington tried for half an hour to win her a prize. She recalled him spending nearly eight dollars in quarters going after a pink elephant while the group gathered around the plexiglass cried out each time the toy slipped through the claw’s grasp. When a boy makes up his mind about you there is no challenge too trivial for him to peacock.

  A man in a red trucker’s hat and a green plaid shirt sat on a stool, a large expanse of fleshy white lower back and butt crack exposed to the harsh diner lights. An elderly couple occupied a booth near the door, eating in silence, silverware tinkling against a bowl of soup and a salad. A waitress pecked at the cash register. Another stalked back into the kitchen, her yellow sock-hop skirt bouncing behind a generous rear. A chintzy, prototypical hometown diner, decorated with the spare parts of someone’s cleaned-out grandfather’s house after he’s passed. Skis affixed to a wall here, a picture of Marilyn Monroe there, a sign in block letters that read ORANGE 10 CENTS hanging above a World War I–era gas mask. Americana without purpose. Detritus for the critic to sift through and puzzle over the symbolism. There was a young man at the counter, no meal before him, fidgeting with a credit card. He saw Stacey and fixed his eyes the way men do.

  She decided to kill time at the game Ben Harrington had tried and failed at so many times for her sake. Better that than waiting while this leering, rude motherfucker drilled eyes at her.

  * * *

  The first haunting piano notes of Slow River’s opening track played on repeat in her head. Between this and Vicky’s claw, Ben’s presence felt nearly material. His sweet grin, his compassionate laugh. In many ways Ben, the only guy she’d ever slept with, had also inadvertently built the road to Lisa.

  Until they finally started hitting puberty, she’d been taller than nearly every boy in her class, her father’s hearty Norwegian stock a total liability as an adolescent. She had a deep-seeded understanding of her awkwardness, how long her femur was inside the flesh, how razor sharp her elbows must have looked. It took her the first two years of high school to realize she’d become pretty. She’d carried her gangly, akimbo frame her entire life. Built like a collection of kindling, slim of hip and breast and ass, her figure filled out, and developing even the most passable bosom went a long way with teenage boys. That’s how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else.

  It was through volleyball that she fell in with Lisa and her friend of the assonantly awkward name Kaylyn Lynn, who was a grade older. Lisa and Kaylyn dated the crown jewels of the class of ’03, Bill Ashcraft (dark-complected, arrogant, black eyebrows as sharp and dangerous as steak knives) and Rick Brinklan (a football star, he looked like Stacey’s Jeep with fair farm-boy skin stretched around the frame), respectively. Their best friend, Ben Harrington, played on the basketball team with Bill, and they began hanging out by default and dating soon after. She well understood that by any measure Ben was truly gorgeous, a slender but chiseled teenager with a mop of gold hair, that lucky Caucasian skin that goes mocha in the summer, and a grill of teeth so white you had to make sure light didn’t reflect off them and hit you in the eye. Until they started dating the summer before her sophomore year, Stacey had been convinced she wouldn’t have sex before she got married. Sex ed in eighth grade was having couples visit from the high school to talk about what a gift it was to save themselves for marriage. Ninth-grade health class featured a woman who spoke of how deeply she regretted her abortion and the premarital sex that led to it. This assumption—one Stacey never questioned—proved ill preparation for when the smoldering Kurt Cobain equivalent of New Canaan High School suddenly took an interest in her, when he proved surprisingly sweet, and when he touched her in ways she’d not been touched before, around the ear and neck, in that way that tickled and chilled and warmed and made every last hair follicle stand at attention.

  Lisa and Kaylyn sort of threw Stacey at him, like ground chuck at a lion, and when the matchmaking worked out, the two of them immediately took to treating her like they’d all been best friends for years. Almost overnight, she stopped hanging out with her best childhood friend, Tina Ross, while Lisa captured the bulk of her attention—probably more so than the guy she was actually dating. Lisa had this odd habit where she tied small strings around her left wrist. Remarkably, she could do it using only the fingers of her right hand, and as the strings gathered in a braided clump, Stacey found herself fixated. Then her eyes would flow up the length of her arm. They found her athlete’s build—muscled shoulders and strong arms, very little curve to her hips, and a taut, round butt, difficult to not obsess over. They found the geometric tip of her nose, brown eyes like saucers of coffe
e, and thick, plum-colored lips. The tilt of her eyes gave her a perpetually mischievous quality. It was a face that knew how to razz people, fuck with them, knock them off-balance before they even realized they’d been standing. She could hold a person’s gaze well beyond what most people found comfortable, like she believed the longer she held your eye, the more she’d have access to your mind and memories. Beyond that, she was a fire starter. Smart and sassy with a graphic, volcanic mouth, and the first person Stacey ever met who was just unapologetically herself.

  At a sleepover with Kaylyn, Lisa gave them a description of her forthcoming autobiography.

  “Obviously, much of it hasn’t been written yet. It’ll have great lovers and adventures and all that, but the entire first chapter is just going to be about how I discovered masturbating. How I basically didn’t sleep from ages twelve to fifteen because I was staying up till three a.m. every night rubbing myself out.”

  “Twelve?” Stacey clucked. “I barely knew what my vagina did when I was twelve.”

  “I’m glad it happened that way.” Lisa lay on her side with her head propped in her hand, deadpan expression, like a bored queen trying to decide whom to execute for the laughs. “A couple years ago, my mom told Alex how he’ll grow hair on his palms if he touches himself. If she’d told me that I would have been checking my hands every day. My room was a pedophile’s idea of a good website.”

  “What will you do when your kids read about your rub-out parties?” Kaylyn asked.

  Lisa rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t expect a conformist New Canaanite for life to understand. I’m not having kids. I’m traveling the world and having Italian lovers and stuff. If I do have a kid, I’ll raise her as a single mom, give her a weird name, and fuck her up real good by dragging her around the globe.”

  Stacey asked what the child’s name would be, and Lisa looked at her like she was an idiot. “My kid? Darkheart McStabababy. Duh. Darkheart McStabababy Han. DH for short.” Stacey clutched a pillow, laughing in that way that scrapes the inside of your breastbone.