Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “She stole your brother’s card, and that’s why you don’t talk anymore?”

  “No. That’s not at all what I mean. I mean she’s not— You don’t really know Kaylyn, Stace. You just don’t. Like there are issues at play. Alex’s card is just a good example.”

  Stacey didn’t believe that this story was anything more than a cop-out. Lisa was a bad liar, bad at masking whatever hurt boiled inside her, but she didn’t take it any further. Kaylyn was gone anyway, and all Lisa was saying was maybe that was for the best.

  * * *

  Leaving Vicky’s All-Night Diner, Stacey walked Bethany Kline to the same beige sedan she remembered from high school, the fender dinged, a hubcap missing. Bethany hugged her again.

  “Thank you so much for seeing me,” Bethany breathed into her ear. “Even if you don’t end up writing her, thank you for doing this. I know it couldn’t have been easy for you.”

  Stacey started to say something, stopped, and just said, “Yeah. I will think about it.”

  Bethany squeezed her hand and gave her a weak, hopeful smile. In her car, Bethany reversed into the square and gave Stacey a little wave before heading west, back to her house on Rainrock Road. Suddenly Stacey felt the tension she carried, her whole body coiled with some evolutionary pressure. She tried to release it, to picture foul water draining down a sink. The conversation had been nothing she’d expected yet everything she should have anticipated, and now one thing rang in her mind: Lisa had come home. She’d been back to New Canaan.

  She still had to deliver her letter, just a short walk from the square, but there she was: hesitating, and when she realized that hesitation was possibly guilt or pity or remorse for what she’d written, she loathed herself. To decide if this letter was something she wanted truly or just selfishly. This fucking town, she thought.

  New Canaan, sclerotic in every capacity. Slow to adapt to manufacturing’s flight to the far-flung corners of the Orient, to the progressive urges of a demographically shifting nation, and obviously to the tolerance of anything but heterosexual behavior. Bethany had simply reacted to her world, the closed circuit from which she came. Yet it was so strange for Stacey to see her broken like this, to see the fight drained out of her. The woman who’d stood outside Kroger’s handing out pamphlets to support Issue 1 back in ’04—how hard had it been for her to get over her own prejudices? Probably as hard as it was for Stacey’s younger self to admit to everything it took her so long to admit to. You make someone your devil for long enough, and you want to hold on to that. There’s something rapturous about hating another person, especially if you have a goddamned good reason. And had Election ’04 not been during her first semester in college, wouldn’t she have been right there beside Bethany, gathering signatures to get the “protect marriage” amendment on the ballot? Hadn’t her own parents gone with Bethany to pass out a few themselves? Hadn’t Patrick spoken on the issue in church? Stacey bought into the whole spiel back then. It seemed perfectly logical to her that people’s perversions were the result of wandering from the path of Jesus Christ. Too many people had put down the Bible and replaced it with hedonism and false idols: celebrities, musicians, all the other monsters under the bed. Hell, her first vote was for the reelection of George W. Bush. She could still hear some of the rhetoric coming out of her mouth as a teenager. Not that she went on about it all the time, especially not once she started dating Ben, who was not religious and was the first person she ever heard articulate why he was not. It’s a strange feeling: to be ashamed and embarrassed of who you used to be. Even with the excuses of youth, inexperience, and influence—her church, her parents, her older brothers, her friends, almost everyone she knew—it still made her deeply uncomfortable to think of herself back then, who she might have hurt without knowing it.

  You only get one childhood, one chance at formation, and Stacey would carry those lessons with her long after she’d ruled their conclusions bogus. Such lessons came conjoined at the heart, Siamese twins, to the dizzying sensation that settles in when a person of faith comes to understand that, after all this, it’s logical that only darkness awaits.

  She pulled out her phone. Before she could think too much about it, she wrote: Hey. Back in The Cane thinking of you. Let me know what you’re up to.

  And hit Send.

  * * *

  In Croatia, Stacey met a scientist giving a lecture at the University of Zagreb. She was finally reading Gaia at the time, when she saw a flyer on campus advertising a lecture on ocean heat by a professor of thermal and fluid sciences from Berlin. Hilde was in her midforties, with bags under her eyes to mark those years, but she was still striking, as tall as Stacey, with blond hair pulled back into a tight bun and sharp, V-shaped eyebrows. She wore neon-pink Nike running shoes during her lecture. Scientists in her field were gathering new data on ocean temperature using the “Argo float system” and now, she said, the trick would be to reconcile this data with the measurements taken previously by the inferior bathythermographs. When she looked up from her notes, her eyes kept finding Stacey. She needed only to wait for a few minutes following the talk before Hilde approached her. Stacey spent the next four nights in Hilde’s hotel room.

  “You are quite the conquest for me,” she said in her lightly accented English. The sexuality of the German accent never got enough credit in Stacey’s opinion. “An American coed is the hardest kind of cunt to eat, but also the sweetest. My father once said that.”

  Stacey burst out laughing. “What did you just say?”

  Grinning, Hilde explained, “We are a very bohemian family.” Propped on her elbows in bed, Stacey was staring at her and got caught. “What is it?” Hilde asked.

  “Nothing,” said Stacey. “You remind me of someone I knew once.”

  Hilde had wanted to be a dancer until she tore her meniscus, lost too much time, and had to give it up for ocean science. She bought Stacey expensive meals and cocktails, and they saw Zagreb together. She stank of cigarettes always, and to this day Stacey could not smell cigarette smoke without thinking of her. Beyond her sexual prowess, Hilde was impressive in every way—traveled, intelligent, fascinating. There was no subject she didn’t seem to understand in its minutiae, from the architectural design of Zagreb’s opera house, the HNK, to the Greek debt crisis. They were three of the best days of Stacey’s travels in Europe. For the first time since Lisa Han, she was astonished again: by food, by her orgasm, by the hard spring wind, by the pleasure of painting her toes an azure blue.

  “What were you doing at a lecture on ocean heat?” Hilde asked her at a café. “I saw you in the front row and pegged you for an American but also for a student.”

  Stacey showed Hilde the book she was reading. She did not mention the photograph she’d found still stuck in the pages: Bethany Kline, carrying Lisa in utero the day before she was born. She’d held the photograph for a moment, wanting to shred it and let the pieces fall in the wastebasket, but something stopped her. Instead, she went to the library where she pulled a book from the shelves at random and stuck the photo in its pages. The picture wouldn’t be gone but neither would it be with her.

  “But you in no way want to be a scientist?” Hilde asked.

  “No. I think if I go back to school, it’ll be for literature.”

  “Why literature?”

  “I don’t know. Probably because it interests me the same way ocean temperature interests you. The story. I once read this book about how literature was this vast conversation that mocked all the borders we normally think of: state boundaries, our own life spans, continents, millennia. That’s why I like this so much.” She tapped Gaia, sitting on the table between their cups of espresso. “It has this idea in it about how incomprehensible and ancient . . .” She searched. “ . . . We, this, us, it is.”

  Hilde pursed her lips around a cigarette, the lines around her mouth deepening momentarily.

  “Our birthright, then?” said Hilde. “Generations of imaginative, creative, scientific labor—
this journey we’re on, looking outward and inward. To our own psyche, our own subatomic structures, the heavens, all that?”

  “Sure,” said Stacey. “I don’t know. I had a weird childhood. It took me a long time to consider any of this. I’m basically just a dilettante trying to sound impressive.” And she laughed nervously.

  Hilde took a long pull of her cigarette, releasing the smoke from the side of her mouth. “You do that a lot you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “These self-denigrating comments. Especially as it relates to you being from your—how did you say? ‘Bumblefuck’ town? You should break yourself of that habit. You’re here. You’re curious about the world. You read widely. It doesn’t matter where you come from. Neither does it really matter where you go. It’s all the sex and sandwiches in between.”

  Stacey could feel her face turning as pink as Hilde’s Nikes, one of which she twirled in small circles beneath the table. Hilde reached out and thumped Gaia with the two sturdy, sexy fingers that held the cigarette. “In this book, this man Lovelock talks about his job in London during the Second World War where he checked the quality of the air in the shelters belowground. Have you read this part yet?”

  “I have, yes.”

  “So you understand the metaphor? Finding that vandals kept stealing the bolts holding the tunnel together in order to sell for scrap?”

  “Yeah, of course. He was afraid the tunnel would collapse. Just because it hadn’t yet, the thieves kept stealing the bolts. Figuring everything would be okay.”

  “That’s right.” She’d smoked her cigarette down to the filter and waggled the smoldering butt in the air before her face. “It’s not that I disagree with you that literature can mock our human life spans, but I question whether there’s any use left for what we call art or literature or culture—however you want to phrase it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You follow your heart, pretty American lady.” Hilde smiled. “Don’t let me persuade you differently.”

  “But what do you mean?”

  “I mean we are no longer cataloguing life with art, which is perhaps why art is failing. Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred generations to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We’ve put our birthright at risk because we don’t know how to control ourselves. Our lust.”

  In the years that followed, her memory of Hilde came with slices of imagined scenes: a bar’s low yellow lighting, the underside of a bridge at night, a lace slip tossed over an antique metal screen, smoky whiskey stirring in a glass—but it would also come with that word lust used to describe not sexual desire but a remembrance of evil not yet done. Without understanding why, Stacey found her feelings hurt. It was in that very specific way from childhood when the older girl you love so much suddenly turns to you at recess and calls you stupid for believing a thing that before seemed so self-evident. “No such thing as the tooth fairy!” That kind of thing. They walked the streets of Zagreb on their last day together and Stacey couldn’t think of much to say. Hilde had an early flight back to Berlin the next morning and woke Stacey only to tell her to sleep in. When Stacey finally did get up (too enamored of the plush hotel bed to not milk every last dream from it), she found a note leaning against a coffee cup.

  Stacey,

  Don’t listen to an old, bitter woman. The heat in the oceans cannot stop literature nor joy! Here’s some Yeats, lovely girl. Enjoyed our weekend together immensely.

  And beneath this a snippet from a poem. An artifact she planned to hang on to.

  * * *

  The stoplights all burned green as far as she could see. She opened the passenger door of her Jeep and picked up the envelope with her letter. Sharp white edges pricked the pads of her fingers. She felt in herself the rebellion of doing the hard thing yet again.

  She slipped the letter into her purse, ready to set off, but then, like an apparition, the zombie version of her freshman year homecoming date appeared before her covered in blood.

  Jonah Hansen’s sneakers patted the pavement, and as they approached, the dismembered horse clops of her boots mixed with these new percussions to nearly create a beat.

  It wasn’t the Jonah who had slipped the corsage on her wrist and then made a farting noise at his friends while all the couples’ parents took pictures. It was Jonah grown up, buzzed head of hair going chemo-patient bald and seeming to bulge in a vaguely alien way with one of those ridiculous beards now popular in exurban America, the kind where the sideburns grow in a thin line down the jaw, connecting at the chin. It was Jonah with blood coating his nostrils and streaming down over his lips and chin, a cravat of dried crimson on his T-shirt. They both stopped and regarded each other. Tears crawled from his eyes, comingling with the ruins of his nose. He didn’t say anything, so she felt it incumbent to acknowledge who each of them were.

  “Jonah? It’s Stacey. Stacey Moore.”

  He sniffed back blood and tears.

  “Hey,” he said, a noncommittal grunt.

  “Are you okay?”

  His eyes flitted evasively. She wondered if he had gotten jumped or hit by a car. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Your nose.”

  “S’fine.”

  She looked around the square to see what might be open. Of course, it was only the diner.

  “Here, why don’t we go into Vicky’s? We’ll get some napkins and ice.”

  He regarded her with suspicion.

  “Didn’t I hear you were a dyke now?”

  Her laugh was loud and surprised. “That has no impact on my knowledge of how to stop a bloody nose.”

  He chortled, the blood rattling in his sinuses.

  “C’mon,” she said, and he followed her back in.

  * * *

  Senior year Jonah Hansen had all the wildest parties. His dad traveled a lot (although he was a local real estate baron, so that didn’t make much sense) and his mother was a wraith, almost without presence (which usually meant a pill addiction). Jonah was popular by virtue of his family’s barn, which wasn’t a barn in the horse-and-hayloft sense but an enormous rec room decked out with a TV, surround sound speakers, a huge multi-couch seating area, pool table, and air hockey. In a factory and farming community like New Canaan, it was kids like Jonah who tended to command high social status, the “preps” as they were all called, and when you’re a teenager and have never read Marx, you just think in this tautology: “These are the popular people because they’re popular.” Only in hindsight do you understand you could probably correlate the cliques of high school directly to each family’s bank account.

  Like Stacey, Jonah was a Grover Street kid, and his family went to her church. At a party in sixth grade, he dealt perhaps the greatest, most horrific blow to her adolescent self-esteem when they were playing Spin the Bottle at Ron Kruger’s house. They’d already been through the first round of kissing without tongue. Someone suggested they leap to “feeling up,” and Stacey was terrified but not enough to object to this new level of intimacy. On the very first spin, Jonah landed the bottle on her, and he said—she would never forget—“What? How’m I supposed to get a feel on those mosquito bites?”

  Some of the girls gasped, some of the boys laughed, and Stacey sat mortified, smiled, and then allowed his hand to cup her training bra while they kissed anyway. She thought about this incident the rest of that year.

  When Jonah asked her to homecoming freshman year, she’d angrily thought of that moment, wanting to ask him if her breasts were sufficiently filled in for him now. But your first homecoming is an event where you’re already terrified of who will ask you, and she had it on good information that a rather unfortunate-looking boy named Amos Flood was plottin
g to corner her. Amos was acne-riddled, overweight, frighteningly sweaty, and to the previous point, poor. He and his cousins lived on a farm/compound and the parents were in jail or gone, the grandparents left to scrape for a pack of troubled kids. Stacey made the error of being kind to him in an eighth-grade home economics class, and she’d felt him longing for her ever since. To a freshman girl already petrified by the thought of stepping outside the boundaries, who had popular older brothers (one graduated, one on the football team) and was desperate to not be the weird little sister, Amos was unacceptable. Jonah at least made for a decent excuse to turn Amos down gently.

  Her parents—especially her mom—did not like the Hansens. Rarely an unkind word to say about anybody, she referred to Jonah’s dad, Burt, as “the used-car salesman.” When Stacey visited her folks after returning briefly from Europe in 2010, the Hansens had been a hot topic of conversation because her dad couldn’t figure how Burt Hansen had not lost his shirt in the crash. It made no sense, according to her dad, because there wasn’t a buyer left for all the housing developments Burt had financed over the last ten years, yet they’d heard from the Eatons that he’d just bought a new boat. Such was the way of the Hansens, though.

  “Some people are just impervious to bad luck,” her dad said.

  It was from Jonah’s homecoming party their senior year that Stacey pilfered a bottle of vodka from his stash. She and Lisa had gone stag, made a brief appearance at Jonah’s, then slipped away to Lisa’s house. They had to wait for Bethany to go to bed before cracking open the vodka, and Stacey remembered Bethany gently cleaning the makeup off her daughter’s face. (“You look so beautiful the way you do this eyeliner, you’ll have to show me that.”) Even though all Stacey wanted was to go up to Lisa’s room where the vodka waited in her overnight bag, and even though Lisa’s constant carping had taught her to view Bethany as an odious old troll out to ruin all their fun, Stacey watched and thought about how mother and daughter looked, for once, at peace and in love.