Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  I raised my hands. “I can’t fight about this right now. I have to go to dinner.”

  “Just tell me when your appointment is,” he said, “and I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks, but I can do this on my own. I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s what you think,” he said. “You shouldn’t go there alone.”

  I pulled my hands deep into my sleeves. What did I know about Ryan after all? I knew his body, I could name all the places he’d lived and all the bands he had played in, I knew selected stories; I knew from his guitar that he could, on impulse, destroy something he loved. I knew he liked to have space. It was one of the reasons we had worked: I gave him infinite space, and he gave me easy doses of affection. So it seemed. But I had never wanted to talk about the girls I’d been with—I had to hold in reserve some queer part of myself—so I had never asked him about his. Now I wanted to ask, You’ve been there?, but held back. If he had, it wasn’t my business. And if he had, wasn’t I just another one—an ordinary girl, and biologically stuck with it?

  I tried to suppress a shiver as I zipped up my damp jacket.

  “You’re leaving now? After that?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your band, and I’m so sorry I messed up your life, and I’m sorry I got . . . pregnant, and now I have to go pick up a giant bottle of bourbon to bring to dinner.”

  “Of course. The family. I suppose they all know already?”

  “Hell no. You’re the only one I’ve told.”

  “Are you going to tell them now?”

  “It’s not my plan.”

  “You’ll never tell them, will you,” he said. “As if all this never happened.”

  “It’s not like that, Ryan.”

  “It did happen,” he said. “You can try to forget it if you want, but in real life, all of this happened. I was real.”

  I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes. “I know,” I said.

  “Were you even going to tell me?”

  One last lie. “Yes.”

  I left.

  Robin and Topher and Marisol lived in a house known as the Spawn, a lightly haunted, peeling pink Victorian on Southeast Salmon Street, not quite far enough away for me to fully compose myself en route. I opened the door agitated and shivering, whiskey in hand, and Topher caught me in the entry with his Polaroid camera and a bright flash.

  He greeted everyone like this, laying out the Polaroids on the coffee table to cure. Our faces emerged from ghostly to glowing. Summer’s cherry-red hair betrayed half an inch of dim roots but she was an expert at assuming a pose; when the lens turned to her she snapped right into a coy vamp, finger on glossy lip, until the click of the shutter released her immediately back into whatever she’d been doing. Marcy allowed a resigned smirk—You kids, her face said, even as she kept hanging out with us. Squinting Lawrence wore a Boy Scout shirt with too-short sleeves rolled above the elbow. Robin tilted forward in her pleather jacket, a long wavy strand of hair trickling over her shoulder, the glint of her labret piercing a hot little star in the flash. The flash gleamed off the pink dining room wall and Meena’s narrow glasses. Marisol was twenty-two but looked sixteen, with her plush cheeks and knee socks. In my picture, I was saying No! and reaching for the camera, eyes wide, lips round, hand a blown-out blur in the foreground, a moment too late. This would be me that night—both reaching out and begging no.

  Family dinner was Southern-themed, and they’d turned the heat up to the seventies, “for authenticity.” The tangy musk of barbecue sauce and humid sweetness of hot corn bread overrode the usual whiff of cat litter.

  When no one was looking I fixed myself a whiskey ginger that was secretly all ginger and prowled the kitchen, tasting everything until we could finally eat. My hunger astonished me. I loaded up biscuits with barbecued seitan and sweet pickles. My mouth watered, pooled. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the serving dishes, a jolt of hoarder’s panic every time someone forked off another slice of seitan. The greens, on the other hand, tasted bitter and sick to me. All I wanted was to drench everything in sight in that barbecue sauce. I offered to take the used dishes into the kitchen, just so I could devour everyone else’s last abandoned bites. Meena came in and caught me licking my plate.

  “Girl, your nose,” she said, and I reached up and swiped off a smear of sauce. “What’s up with you?”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t even know how to answer that.”

  Then Robin came into the kitchen and told us to clear out. “No cleanup yet! There’s pie.”

  “Pie!” I set down the plate. “We can help with that.”

  “Wait, what did you mean by that?” Meena said as we headed back to the dining room with dessert plates.

  “Pie? We’ll eat the hell out of it.”

  “No, what’s going on with you,” she said, but by then we were back in the dining room and I waved it off.

  “Nothing.”

  As inconspicuously as I could, I polished off two wedges of peach ginger pie, buttery and rich, oozing with orange flesh and thick syrup, and finished Lawrence’s half-abandoned slice of chess pie, a sticky, sickly thing I’d never heard of before and found visually repulsive but couldn’t stop eating anyway. I looked around the table at my friends, my family, to see if they noticed, and realized I knew the details of their faces so well I could draw any one of them without looking. I imagined being brought up among these people, what a weird good world that would be.

  “Smoke?” Topher extended a pack toward me.

  While I’d faked my way through my whiskey-less ginger, everyone else had hit the booze generously, and now they pulled out cigarettes and started to light up.

  I said, “I thought you guys didn’t smoke inside.”

  He said, “It’s okay, it’s family dinner. And it’s pouring out there. Light on up.”

  Summer set her elbows on the table, blew two perfect smoke rings, and raised her glass. “You guys, I have good news.”

  What would smoke do? I tried to summon the information from eighth-grade health. Drinking was bad, smoking was bad, what about secondhand smoke? Something about birth weight? How much did it take? Why did I care? “Can we open a window?” I said.

  Summer gave me an annoyed glance.

  Robin raised the dining room window an inch. “Is that enough? It’s chilly out there.”

  I said, “Maybe I can switch seats with Lawrence.” She sat closest to the window.

  “Okay.” Lawrence got up.

  “What’s up?” Meena said. “Andy’s acting bizarre.”

  “Nothing’s up.” I slid into Lawrence’s seat. “Go ahead, Summer.”

  “Look at her face!” Meena said.

  I pretended to wipe my mouth as I took a deep filtered breath through my napkin.

  Summer looked from Meena’s bemused smirk to my half-masked face. “Is this about your mono situation?”

  “You have mono?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I don’t have mono. I’m fine. Come on, Summer has news.”

  “What was it then?” Summer said. “Did you go to the doctor yet? Are you contagious?”

  “The doctor?”

  “Spill it, Andy.”

  Everyone looked at me. I couldn’t speak.

  Six faces on me. I had to come up with something. Think, think, I thought.

  Over the course of the Ryan affair I had trained myself to practice having a thought—I would come up with an acceptable thought to be having, and then set it aside in reserve while I delved into my real, inappropriate thoughts about my secret. Then if someone asked what I was daydreaming about I could grab the stored thought and present it. This cringey poster I’m supposed to make. That review of our art show in the Willamette Week. This one thing I read about hyenas. How when I was twelve a wood thrush hit the living room window and I stored its body in the laundry room freezer for a week.

  But they’d caught me now with nothing—only the truth came to mind. My heart began to beat so hard I fel
t it in my ears and eyes. “I can’t talk about it,” I said. “Another time.”

  Now concern set in. Was I sick? No, I said, not really. Had something happened to me? I looked traumatized. What the fuck happened?

  To my dismay, tears came to my eyes. I hid my crumpling mouth behind my hand and begged my body to stop betraying me. I knew one rip could take out a whole net, and all the fish would swim out just like that.

  “What the fuck? Oh my god, Andy, were you hurt?” Meena’s eyes brightened with fear.

  “No, it’s not that at all. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said as tears streamed down my cheeks. They had backed me into a cul-de-sac of concern. I had no way out.

  I said, “I’m pregnant.”

  A moment as they all silently translated the word. Meena looked like she’d been shot.

  “You’re fucking with us,” said Marcy.

  “I wish.”

  “How the fuck—”

  “Were you assaulted?” said Robin.

  “No, I wasn’t assaulted,” I said. I silently struggled to formulate a plausible case for immaculate conception.

  But Meena was already white-knuckling her fork, eyes narrowed. “If you’re about to say what I think you’re going to say—frankly, I would almost rather hear that you’d been roofied.”

  “Meena!” spat Robin.

  “Whoa,” Lawrence said.

  “Oh my god,” I said, “can we appreciate the fact that I’m unmolested, even if it means I did the unthinkable?”

  “Hold on now.” Summer swept her hands above the table as if spreading a tablecloth, and brought them down with a hard smack. “You fucked a man?” she said with an incredulous smile. “Super-lesbian Andrea?”

  Topher mimed falling out of his chair, then took it all the way and puddled at Robin’s feet. Robin reached down and petted his forehead. Marisol watched us all like we were a movie, eyes wide.

  “Not only did you fuck a man, you got pregnant?” Robin said.

  “How did you even do that?” marveled Marcy, a mix of disgust and awe in her voice.

  “I can’t even believe you would do that,” Meena said. “And look where it got you.”

  “Forgive me, Father, I have sinned,” I muttered.

  “It’s not funny. Who the hell is this cock-toter? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Hey now,” Topher grunted from the floor.

  “Why didn’t you tell any of us?”

  “Especially me, your housemate, who this would especially affect. I mean, you were the first person I told my news. Which I guess we’ve all completely forgotten about now.”

  “Please tell your news,” I said. “I beg you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Wait, we’ll get to it. We have to deal with this.”

  “I didn’t tell you because I was going to just take care of it,” I said. “And because of this. Because this is what happens. Now everyone’s upset, and I feel even more fucked up about it, which I didn’t think was possible.”

  “I’m upset because I care,” Meena said.

  “Yeah, that was my parents’ line too.”

  Topher’s face emerged above the table. “Back up, back up, back up.” He pulled himself into his seat. “Who is the dude? How did we get here?”

  I told them the barest skeleton of the truth, but it was clear the lie stretched back months. I could see them all rewinding, pausing, replaying. Even while we . . . As clearly as if subtitles scrolled across their foreheads, I saw them thinking, Who are you?

  If someone would just say it, I would answer, You know who I am. You are who I am. But what if they no longer believed me? I felt gelatinized with panic.

  “This guy Ryan,” I said, and Summer said, “The one who gives you ‘drum lessons’? The one who ‘cuts your hair’?”

  “For the record, those were not actually euphemisms.”

  “That guy? Is your inseminator?” Meena said.

  “We’re not in a hog unit.”

  “You mated.”

  “Oh my god, please, stop. Look, it was just an affair. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He was just, like, a friend with benefits. I was on the rebound.”

  “That’s a hell of a rebound.” Marcy was leaning back in her seat, swigging from a bottle she held loosely around the neck.

  “Well, I hope it never happens again, because I’m really not comfortable with dudes around,” said Meena.

  “You work with dudes,” I said. “You play shows with bands with dudes in them.”

  “That’s work. This is life.”

  “What about Topher?” said Lawrence.

  “I’m more masculine than Topher,” Meena said.

  Topher looked wounded and I hit Meena’s arm. She said, “Did you just hit me?” but Robin overrode her with, “It’s not about masculinity. Topher is othered too, and he’s conscious of his male privilege.”

  They looked at me pointedly. “Okay,” I said, “so is Ryan.”

  “Really. He’s white and straight. Like, how in touch with his male privilege is this guy?”

  “He’s vegetarian,” I fumbled. Groans all around. “He speaks Spanish better than I do.” Admittedly a sore spot for me.

  “I speak Spanish better than you do,” Meena muttered.

  Marisol swatted her shoulder. “Cállate. That’s not fair.”

  “I don’t know, he’s really pretty good, I’ve never heard him say sexist shit. He was raised by a single mom?”

  “Oh, Andy. Are you out of your mind?” Robin said. “Have you been away from straight men for so long that you’ve forgotten what they’re really like?”

  Summer returned to the table with what appeared to be a pint glass full of bourbon. “No, this is exactly the problem—she has been with one. She’s been acclimated.”

  “A, I’m done with him,” I said. “And B, Summer, what about all the men you get up on every day? Is that a problem too?”

  Summer snapped, “It is not the same, and you know it. I do it for money. I do it to make a living. And I don’t fuck them.”

  “Andy, what about those girls you went out with? Did they know?” Meena asked.

  “Men spread disease,” said Robin.

  Topher looked offended. “Excuse me?”

  “Lesbians get STDs too,” young Marisol, well trained, countered earnestly.

  “Not from each other!” Meena said, recoiling. “And if they do, it’s because one of them was either with a guy or slept with someone else who was. There’s always a penis at the root.”

  Summer made a gagging face. “Please never say that phrase again.”

  “Gold star until I die,” Meena said, and Marcy raised her bottle.

  “Andy is clearly insane, but also, fuck all y’all and your gold stars,” Summer said. “We don’t always choose.” Apologies rose around the table but she shook Marcy’s hand off her forearm and said, “No. Enough.”

  “I did have the choice,” I said. “I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I just wanted to mess around with someone who definitely, for once, had no chance of fucking any of my friends. And maybe I didn’t tell because I didn’t want to be judged by the Lesbian Mafia.”

  “You are the Lesbian Mafia.”

  “Not for long, I bet,” I said.

  “You’re still a lesbian,” Lawrence said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe you’re bisexual,” Meena hissed. We all winced. Bisexual was a word we seldom spoke outside of our initial coming-out phases. It was a beginner concept, for newbies and outsiders. You think it’s going to ease the shock, Vivian had warned me in college, but no. It just means that your mother will forever hold on to hope that you will one day come around and end up with a man. My mother. Stomach clench.

  “I am not”—I funneled my voice into a vicious whisper—“that.” I couldn’t even say the word. It sounded so mechanical. Or like something under a microscope, squirming on a glass slide. It made me think of nematodes. We knew girls who were bisexual. Or whatev
er. Girls who we thought were one of us who then went for a roll in the hay with a boy. Which was fine. We just didn’t necessarily want to know about it. Sometimes one would come to a lesbian party with her new . . . boyfriend, and you felt awkward for the guy standing there, being a good sport, and for the girl, knowing she must feel a little alienated among her own people, and you kind of hoped it would work out and kind of hoped it wouldn’t, and you just weren’t quite sure what to say.

  Because to us bisexual was the earnest white girl in your women’s studies class who had a nice boyfriend and wanted to clock in a little more oppression. The Riot Grrrls who hated that they wanted boys and sometimes professed their girl-love physically, an extension of their politics more than their desire. Bisexual was the way celebrities avoided it, or faked it. Or couples in the bar or the classifieds who wanted a third. Or women who remained happily married or boyfriended to a guy who was okay with their getting with another woman, or who just felt emotionally open to the possibility, who thought they could get into it if they gave it a shot, like hot yoga.

  “I’m a lesbian who experimented,” I said forcefully. “That’s all.”

  “Maybe we should get back to Summer’s news,” Lawrence said timidly.

  “It’s going to be hard to top this,” Topher said.

  “Fine. I’m moving out,” Summer said, stamping her cigarette butt down hard on her pie plate.

  “Because of the baby?”

  “No! I didn’t even fucking know about a baby! I’m moving in with Marcy”—Summer flung a hand toward Marcy, who braced her with a hand on her back and a worried smile—“which was what I was about to tell you all. But we’ve been a little upstaged.”

  “Well, I rather doubt there’s going to be a baby,” said Meena. “Andrea may be crazy but she’s not crazy.”

  I was so tired of Meena knowing me into submission. “Oh, you think?” I said, purely to mess with her. “What if I did have it?”

  “You can’t have it!” Meena said. “How would you even do that?”

  “Of course she can have it,” said Marisol. “It’s her body.”

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said.

  “God, if you wanted to have a baby you should have just used Topher’s sperm,” Robin said. “You could have had a nice little gayby.”