Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  I slam down the receiver as if it’s the enemy. The jolt in my forearm is like a live spark. I slam it three more times. Each slam feels better than the last, the hard impact, the surprised clang, the cradle’s arrest. On the final slam, I lift the receiver back out and yank, hard. There’s a pleasing pop inside the creaking silver cable, then another. I pull and pull, barely feel the receiver banging into my chest with each tug, although tomorrow sore little bruises will attest to it. The handset breaks loose and the cord falls and swings against the metal shelf with a scratching-swishing sound. I stumble backward into the wall of the booth, clutching the black receiver, which is suddenly light and small and silent.

  [Letter]

  Dear Andrea,

  [Note on Unfolded Bar Napkin, Notarized with Ring of Beer]

  LEASE!!!

  RYAN COATES* will live at 901 America Ave for the rent of

  $1/month for up to 3 mos. in exchange for honest labor to fix the shithole up.

  BUD HENDERSON will provide supplies.

  If either party fails to hold up his end of the deal, Donita will whip his ass behind the bar.

  Signed this day June the 20, 1999

  Bud Henderson—LANDLORD

  J. Ryan Coates—TENANT

  Donita Nyland—WITNESS AND ENFORCER

  [Letter (Sealed, Never Sent)]

  June 24

  901 America Ave.

  Bemidji, MN 56601

  Dear Lucia,

  I found a place. When was the last time I could say that? Feels good. I remember now. Doubt I’ll be here long, but still.

  I’m sitting on the floor of the living room. Under the greasy carpet I found oak in decent shape. The house is tiny, the kitchen is basically a lean-to cobbled onto it. It’s pretty wrecked. But it has solid bones and better yet a working shower. So this is the part where I teach myself how to fix up a busted house—a claim I’m not sure why I made, but I intend to make good on it. This guy Bud, I’ve known him a week and he’s handed me the keys to a house. It seems this is a town where people just trust each other. How novel.

  You’re not quite real yet but you will be soon. I’m real now but there’s a chance I won’t be, to you. Still, there’s something of me in you—I hope it’s the good part. I wish I could give you more than biology, but what do I have to offer? I had plenty of men in my life, in my mom’s life, and some of them were good and some of them weren’t. I liked the ones who talked to me like a person instead of a kid, who didn’t try to win me over. The stoner carpenter in Albuquerque, the newspaperman in Jacksonville. But they all lost their shine or my mom detected the shifty ground beneath them, and away we’d go. “Onward, Ry-ry,” she’d say. “There’s no future here.” The future was always falling away from people. She lived stubbornly on the island of the present, always being here now. What was right was whatever felt right in the moment. It wasn’t until I left home that she found the Colonel, this retired military guy who bought her a condo in Norfolk, Virginia, and sleeps in his old bed from the family plantation (don’t get me started), and she settled in for good.

  It occurs to me only now that all the moving around might have been for me. Maybe she thought none of the men were good enough for me. Maybe she didn’t trust their influence. Or maybe she wanted the influence to be hers alone.

  Whatever. That’s over. I am who I am.

  I’ll tell you this one thing I’ve figured out in my life: things recede so quickly if you let go even a little. For better or worse. Family members, friendships, old wounds, old futures. You can fight this and hang on to everything & let the drag accumulate until you can hardly move forward, like Andrea. Or you can open your fists and let go. Shed. Keep what you need for now & trust that what you need later will show up then. Keep your eyes on the road & you’ll be safe. Safer.

  Me, I’m going to sit tight and pull myself together. For a month, or the summer. I figure by the time you’re born, I’ll know what to do.

  Later, little stranger—

  J. Ryan Coates

  Part 3

  2009

  Borrowed and Blue

  THE WEDDING WAS IN AN HOUR AND ANDREA WAS STILL SITTING in her kitchen in an old black hoodie and battered jeans, empty glass in hand. She eyed the bottle of vodka on the counter—oh, for just one more Moscow mule—but she’d already had two, and Lucia had just appeared in the kitchen doorway. Instead, she climbed up on the counter and shoved the vodka, a precious leftover from her thirty-fifth-birthday dinner, back into its high cupboard. On her way back down, one knee of her jeans tore open.

  “Mom,” Lucia said, “you need to put on your dress.” Lucia had been wearing her flower-girl dress since breakfast: a thrifted white frock her aunt Robin had altered to fit and modernized with vintage ribbons and jewelry and a raw scissored hem. In the reinvented dress, Lucia looked like a smaller, lighter replica of Andrea as a kid—full cheeks, paler skin, hazel eyes, light brown bob. Reclaimed. But strangely cute and girly. Normally Lucia preferred T-shirts and jeans and mismatched brightly colored Converse sneakers.

  “Hello, fashion police,” Andrea said. “I had to unload and set up like a hundred chairs at Topher’s earlier and I haven’t even had a chance to walk Bullet. Poor girl.” A warm breeze came in through the open window, and Andrea inhaled deeply. “I hate weddings.”

  “Why? I think they’re fun,” said Sydney, Lucia’s friend and bandmate. Her wire-rimmed glasses and little overbite made her look so serious.

  “You would, Syd.” Andrea gave Sydney’s lapels a gentle tug. Syd was all lit up because she got to wear a suit for the occasion. Her pants were slightly too short for her skinny foal legs and her blue-and-yellow-striped socks flashed with every step. At ten, Sydney was still a string bean and fit perfectly in boys’ clothes; Andrea dreaded, on Sydney’s baby-andro behalf, the day when her straight body would begin to curve. Lucia turned ten in a month and was already four and a half feet tall. They had no idea how swiftly they grew. To them, it had taken forever to get to ten. They were already nostalgic for eight and nine, epic years. Five was archaeological. But hadn’t that been just months ago? Andrea was still wearing underwear she’d bought then.

  “But you still want to do this, right?” Lucia said.

  Andrea wrapped an arm around her daughter and rested her chin atop her head. “Of course I do, baby.”

  Lucia leaned back from her embrace. “Where’s Beatriz?”

  “She’s already over at Topher’s.”

  Sydney pouted. “I wanted her to fix my tie.”

  “I can fix your tie,” Andrea said. Syd glumly submitted to Andrea’s deft but clearly less exciting retying. When Beatriz fixed your tie, it made you cooler, like a secret agent on her squad; when Andrea did it, she was just a mom straightening you up. Andrea had accepted this. “There you go. You look sharp, kid.”

  “Mom, Syd says we need something old, something new—” Lucia looked to Sydney, who finished out the phrase: “Something borrowed, something blue. Do you have anything?”

  “Really, Syd?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Sydney said.

  “Where do you pick up these things?” Andrea marveled. Sydney’s parents were straight yet happily unmarried, with a faint but detectable whiff of polyamory. When they had their first kid, they changed all their last names to Juniper. They lived in a big royal-blue house two blocks off Alberta and grew all their own vegetables and volunteered at the rock camp.

  “Everyone knows that one, Andrea,” Sydney said.

  “Of course,” she muttered. The culture was waterlogged with this stuff. Anything having to do with marriage, babies, gender, it was like weather. You could board up the windows and bar the door for only so long—eventually you had to go out in it. And no matter how you tried to shield your kid, it seeped through every seam and shingle. “Don’t you guys want to run through your song a couple more times before the ceremony?”

  Lucia and Sydney were in a band called the Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs, on guitar and keyboards (which
also supplied the beats), respectively. Originally they had been called the Now, until Syd discovered it was un-Googleable. They had formed at the girls’ rock camp last June; their drummer dropped out on day three and Sydney and Lucia rolled with it as a two-piece. Sydney had recently decided she wanted to be a rapper, and they were struggling to integrate this into Lucia’s earnest guitar songs. But they’d managed to write one for the wedding. Andrea hadn’t heard it yet—they usually practiced at the Girls Rock Institute after-school program or at the Junipers’ house, thank god for the Junipers, while she finished up her teaching day.

  “We practiced all week,” Sydney complained.

  “We’ll sing through it while we look,” Lucia pleaded.

  “Fine, go plunder the basement. I’ll get dressed.”

  They begged to go search the attic instead, and Andrea gave in and dropped the trapdoor stairs for them. Up they scurried. “Don’t get too dusty,” she called after them.

  “We won’t,” they said, scrambling into the pleasant gloom.

  The attic was Lucia and Sydney’s favorite place to go, when they could, and now, on a warm afternoon in September, the air up there was temperate, even cozy. Lucia’s two-bedroom house was tiny, but the attic crowned its entirety, a vast low realm. It smelled like a habitat, or another dimension of time, a place where mysterious things could materialize. Sunlight filtered in from a small square window at each end, and a single overhead bulb in the middle lit up the wooden floorboards and the brown paper backing of the pink insulation stapled to the sloping ceiling. Here they had survived long seasons as orphans on dry pretzels and orange juice, had determined the fates of kingdoms with epic games of gin rummy, had plotted the first world tour of the Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs with an atlas and a red notebook, and had attempted to summon the new ghost of Michael Jackson with a Magic 8 Ball and a flashlight until they frightened themselves so badly they scrambled down the drop-stairs screaming in gleeful terror, causing Lucia’s mother to leap up from the table and send school papers scattering across the floor.

  These days, at ages ten and almost-ten, Sydney had to duck and Lucia could just barely stand up straight without grazing her head. They fell to their knees and headed into the shadow city of boxes and bins jammed into the depths. They opened a plastic bin full of baby clothes and blankets, three cartons of photo albums and boxes of negatives (“Your mom looked like a boy,” Sydney said with admiration, holding up a snapshot of Andrea with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses), a box of college papers and folders, and a bin full of shoe boxes containing laminated expired bus passes, tiny gumball-machine plastic figurines, broken necklaces, scraps of paper with a sentence or phone number jotted on them, lanyards from long-ago music festivals.

  Sydney said, suspiciously casual, “I think we should get a drummer.”

  “I like the beats you make on your keyboard. You’re better than a drummer.” After Lucia’s first summer at rock camp—where she ended up in a five-member band that had meltdowns every afternoon, and whose deeply angry eight-year-old singer had hit one of the bassists in the face with a microphone for trying to sing backing vocals—she loved playing in a band of just two. Sydney had more than enough opinions for them to deal with. Then again, maybe if they got a drummer, Lucia could gang up with her to outvote some of Sydney’s more dubious ideas.

  “Yeah, but I want to free up my hands so I can move around the stage,” Sydney said. “I’ve been watching YouTube to get new moves.” She swung her hands in front of her chest in an aspirational hip-hop gesture.

  “So you’d be like the lead singer then?”

  “No, only on the songs where I rap. And you could do the backing vocals.”

  “I don’t want to be a backup singer,” Lucia said. She and Sydney always traded off verses, and shouted or sang choruses in unison or harmony. Why would they change what worked so well? “Anyway, who would we get to drum for us? Or”—her stomach turned, she blinked hard—“do you already have someone in mind?” For example, a new best friend. The thought was devastating, to be demoted to Sydney’s second best while Sydney would always be her first best. Lucia had plenty of acquaintances but she preferred one true and total friend.

  “We could ask Nsayi,” Syd said.

  Lucia exhaled in relief. “Nsayi is, like, seventeen, Syd.”

  “But we’re so awesome. She would love it.”

  “Plus she plays guitar.”

  “I bet she could play anything.”

  “Good luck with that,” Lucia said. To Sydney, no idea was too improbable. It was both her best and her most exasperating feature. “What do we still need for today?”

  “There’s a bunch of old stuff over here, but we need something blue.”

  Lucia pushed herself up off her knees. “I’ll look down here.” She hunch-crept down to the far corner and pulled out an opaque gray bin. As she knelt to pry it open, she noticed a pristine brown cardboard box hiding behind it, square and squat, and taped shut.

  Lucia reached over to pick up this box, but it was unexpectedly heavy, as if it contained a block of stone. Instead she had to drag it into the light, leaving a sled trail across the dusty floor. She carefully peeled back the tape. It was dry and stiff—the box had never been opened.

  Under the flaps lay a blank square of brown cardboard. Lucia lifted it away to reveal a stack of ten-inch records, shrink-wrapped and glossy, all identical. The cover read THE COLD SHOULDER along the top and LOST EP at the bottom. In the center was a Polaroid photo of a wrecked blue guitar—a little blurry, the colors saturated. The guitar leaned against a black wall, broken-necked, splintered, strings limp. It was a blue Telecaster, like hers.

  Lucia removed the top record and peeled away the glinting shrink wrap for a closer look. How could it be? There was a thumbprint-sized dent at the bottom curve of the guitar’s body, rimmed by a crescent of bare wood. That was the dent she idly ran her fingers over while she was trying to think of lyrics or just spacing out. She knew it as intimately as the crosshatched skateboarding scar on her knee and the cowlick she twirled while she read.

  “That’s my guitar,” she said.

  “What?” said Sydney. “I think I found something blue. This ring. Or this could be the old thing. Or both! Come over here.”

  “Just a second,” Lucia said. The frets looked different. But along with the dent, she could clearly identify the one long and two short scratches on the cream-colored pick guard—scratches she knew well. Even though her guitar was now downstairs in her bedroom, safe and intact, the image of it lying there with its neck broken unnerved her. Who would have mauled it so brutally? And when?

  She flipped over the record. On the back was a photo of an empty practice room, and six song titles alongside grainy photo-booth head shots of three men. One had black hair and heavy lashes and scruff on his jaw. One had shiny hair falling in his eyes and a dimple in his cheek, a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a T-shirt, and was looking up and to the right. The third was pale-haired and -eyebrowed, gazing straight into the camera with an insincere scowl. THE COLD SHOULDER IS WAS: MATEO GOLD / BASS, RYAN COATES / DRUMS, JESSE STRATTON / GUITAR. The small print at the bottom said © 1999 Broken Zipper Music.

  “Two blue things,” Sydney announced loudly. “What’s down there?”

  “Nothing we can use.” Lucia slid the record back inside the box. Why was her guitar on the cover? And what was her mom doing with a whole box of these records, unopened, in the attic? Hidden in the attic? All their other records were shelved in the living room in a case that stood taller than them both. The mystery was enticing, and yet that broken guitar—

  Sydney started to sing in as low and booming a voice as she could muster: “Girl, you’re not a snail / Girl, you’re not a tor-toise / Doesn’t take an hour / To walk across an at-tic—”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  “Hey, don’t you think that could be our next song?” Sydney said, and began beatboxing.

  In the bedroom below, Andrea stripped
off her clothes and pulled out the dress she’d allowed herself to buy new, although deeply on sale, from a shop on Mississippi Avenue. She couldn’t really afford to shop retail—thrift stores, clothing swaps with friends, and hand-me-downs had kept her and Lucia clothed for years—but last month she’d impulsively walked into this precious gentrifying boutique, flipped through the end-of-summer sale rack with a mix of scorn and longing, and landed on this dress that—oh shit—draped beautifully on her body and felt unbearably smooth against her skin. For the wedding, she justified. There would only be one.

  The dress still smelled new, freshly manufactured and faintly sweet. It smelled like middle class. Like the clothes she used to receive for Christmas, and the clothes her parents would likely send to Lucia next month for her birthday—the grandparents her kid saw once a year, from whose weekend-long visits Andrea needed a month to recover, and whom she had very deliberately not informed about today’s ceremony. The stakes were too high.

  Footsteps thumped overhead as Andrea pulled on the dress. Lucia was exuberantly wound up about today, and for the child’s sake, at least, she had to cut the wedding Grinch act. Why wouldn’t the kids think it was fun? Lucia had seen weddings only in movies and on television. To them, this was a performance and a party. They weren’t hung up on the history of heterosexual privilege, and by the time they were old enough to want it, gay marriage might even be legal here, all the panic bans of the aughts just a freaky historical phenomenon like Prohibition or McCarthyism.

  So today, Beatriz, the love of Andrea’s life, a citizen of Brazil whose student visa would soon expire, would marry their friend Topher.

  The ceremony would be held in Topher’s backyard two blocks away, where Beatriz’s mail had been directed for the past five months. The staging had been elaborate and meticulous; Andrea had even borrowed her old post at the letterpress studio for a Sunday to produce a batch of convincingly twee invitations, mailed out with floral stamps. It was a citizenship marriage, a charade for immigration’s sake, and the vows meant Beatriz could stay here. But still, the whole thing had gotten under Andrea’s skin. She and Beatriz didn’t even want to get married. They wanted to change the whole system. Why should citizenship depend on one exclusive form of a relationship? What about love between friends, community, love of work? Knowing Beatriz would be legally hitched to Topher, not her, and that they had to perform this relationship for the nation for the foreseeable months, maybe even years, with a closetful of Beatriz’s clothes installed in Topher’s bedroom, tampons stashed in his big gay bathroom, a joint checking account and tax returns, and a walk to collect her mail every few days—it rankled. For all her queer theory antinormativity, Andrea had come to understand that she was debilitatingly, uncoolly monogamous. When she wanted, she wanted fiercely and solely. When Beatriz had first moved in a year ago, each letter and bill that arrived for her had felt like a small victory, another claim staked. Once they diverted the evidence down the street, Andrea couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like if Beatriz—god help them—actually left.