I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  When we grew tired of the garlic landlady’s busybody nature, Marcos, Santiago, and I rented our own apartment down the road from Gaudi’s Park Güell. My room had giant windows overlooking the city, and from my bed, which was two twin beds shoved together, I could watch the sun rise over the old red city and feel grateful.

  As the days carried on and I settled deeper into the new culture, I realized I was more comfortable in Barcelona than I had ever been in America. It was an odd feeling. The siesta and drinking and late dinners and cigarettes, the bread stores and meat hanging from the ceiling of the butcher’s shop. The old people playing bocce ball and men in tight jeans. Chattering teenagers on the subway. The little smoke shops with roll-up doors, the trains and taxis and “motos.” The history and museums and heartbreaking cobblestone of the gothic quarter. The haunts set deep in stone, telling their stories of war and occupation and Moroccans and Rome. America felt silly and immature, like a teenager who hadn’t yet realized what mattered in life. When I had a kidney infection and spent a day in a Spanish hospital, the doctors took care of me, and when I left, the receptionist handed me my paperwork and said, “We don’t charge students.”

  Spain felt old and wise.

  On Friday afternoons, when Marcos and I had money, we’d run over to the student travel agency after not going to class, and we’d see which deals they had for the weekend. They’d say, “Paris or Rome or Vienna, but you have to leave in three hours and come back on Tuesday at two a.m.”

  “Perfect,” we’d say, and we would go.

  I sat in the gardens of castles outside Vienna with nothing to do but watch the people pass, and drank beer on fountain steps in Italy. I watched opera in Paris, drank homemade wine in Sevilla, and stood at the southernmost tip of Spain, where they say you can see Morocco. Every day in Barcelona I stopped by a café to write in my journal, unable to catch all the ideas and colors and hope flooding through me. I drove a rental car up the coast of Spain with my mother when she came to visit. We had to stop to let a shepherd cross the road with his flock, and we ate shrimp in a village with buildings all in white, and we took a wrong road that ended at the ocean—simply stopped at the sand, though the map showed it continuing to the left.

  I missed flights. I stayed in hostels and slept on benches in train stations. I rode mopeds in beach towns and hailed taxis in London and bumped cocaine from glittering necklaces around the necks of gay men in Madrid.

  The first time tourists asked me for directions to Park Güell while I walked home, mistaking me for a Spaniard, I smiled in the knowing that I was truly, finally home. I realized I could not leave. It would be difficult to tell my parents, but I could not catch that flight back to California. My plan was to simply stay and explain it later.

  I never made that phone call, though, because a week before my scheduled flight home, I found myself reading a letter from our landlord saying we hadn’t paid the rent in three months and the police were coming for us. My student loan was gone. I had spent every penny on “partying” and had no reserves. My family had given me plenty. There was no way to ask for more. I packed up what meant anything to me, rented a motel room with Marcos, who was my only friend left, and waited for the days to click by. I had a plane ticket. I had enough money to buy cigarettes and beer for the next few days.

  I had banished myself out of the country I was meant to live in.

  Still, I swore I would return. I knew it in my bones. Like the haunts in the gothic quarter.

  Eight months after returning to America, I was pregnant.

  • • •

  “We have reorganized the copy room and the masking tape is now beneath the binder clips.”

  Joyce, a more senior administrative assistant at the office, was very serious in her coral cardigan and khakis. When another secretary raised her voice to argue with her about the suggested tape placement, I slowly lifted my eyes toward them and let my head fall to one side, refusing to hide how much I hated this moment. They finished in time for someone to bring up parking validation.

  The waist of my black slacks cut into my belly. As I looked down to adjust them, I noticed my shoes were navy blue. I thought, Wow, I can’t match shoes with pants. Guess we’re there now, huh? My shirt was faded purple and probably a polyester blend. I looked ridiculous. A fat roll spilled over the top of my pants, and I considered pulling the waist down beneath the roll, so the fat bubbled out in one billowing mess. It was more comfortable that way, but felt like giving up. I sat up straighter and pulled my shirt away from my stomach, trying to hide my bulges in that classic self-conscious fat person gesture.

  Perhaps there was going to be more.

  Between emails at my cubicle and commutes home, I dreamed of nights in Barcelona. No, I dreamed of some. Because there were failed classes, lost friends, mornings of regret and shaking desolation. Twice I escaped being raped. Once, barely. I was pinned against a wall in a bar’s cellar while a man lifted my skirt and pressed his body against me when my friend “had a bad feeling,” came downstairs after me, and began shouting and pounding on the door next to my head. It startled the man long enough that I could shove him off, unbolt the door, and run out. As my friend walked me out of the bar, she said, “I’m tired of taking care of you. I’m tired of wondering if you made it home okay.” She got in a cab and didn’t call me again.

  Once, I couldn’t speak on our couch. I must have done too many or the wrong drugs. I tried, but couldn’t make my mouth move. My roommates stuck me in a freezing shower and slapped my face while they looked at me, bored.

  There was all that, plus nights of empty insomnia, which I spent scratching in my journal and at scabs on my legs, but what you remember when living in a house that can’t be told apart from the others is walking the brilliant streets of a European city on a bright morning on your way to the subway, realizing that nobody is treating you differently than all the Spaniards around you. If you want, you can walk into any café, order a “café con leche,” and smoke a cigarette—and you’ll know it will be right, and you will fit, and life will move in luminous color. What you remember is the feeling that life was going to happen, or that it is happening now, and that it would always move in meaningful directions. But I couldn’t stay.

  Mac, are you going to go to college? You don’t earn enough. We have no benefits.

  What are we going to do, Mac?

  Why are you just staring at me? Why don’t you care?

  We need to extend the warranty on these five computers.

  Yes, I’ll hold.

  Okay, here are the serial numbers.

  I lay on my back while we fucked and stared at the ceiling because I was not drunk enough to make it interesting, or sober enough to make it satisfying, or wasted enough to deny that it had been so long I couldn’t run anymore.

  The pills gave me just enough to get my body into the car to drive twenty miles and listen to the guy from NPR, and on the way home, just enough to stop at the grocery store to buy one, maybe two bottles of wine. Walking down the liquor aisle, I’d tell myself, Janelle, you just can’t drink so much again tonight, and dammit, you can’t wake up with that hangover like you did today, or put your kid to bed half passed out. One glass, maybe two.

  The pills carried me to the moment I drank my first glass and it all started feeling manageable again, the stucco and lake and office chair and gorgeous blonde-headed child. Another must be okay (of wine, that is). With the second, it was so much better still. Mac would seem witty again, and television would make me smile, and reading Ava a story would entertain me. Who needs Spain? Who needs love? Who needs what I thought I needed?

  If I go to the store and buy a bottle of rum, I’d think, I could drink it fast, and things would be that much better still.

  Even still!

  Until the morning, when I would wake up and swear I wouldn’t do it again, not this time, because I can’t keep living like this. Again. Again. I’d take some ibuprofen, make some coffee, and shuffle into the car fr
om behind sunglasses, where I drove and smoked and listened to music, loud, almost like the girl flying down the rails listening to the Grateful Dead, wondering where the end of Spain is, and how long it would take to get there.

  • • •

  Once a week, I would call my mother to inform her I was leaving my marriage. She would listen, genuinely fascinated, and then suggest I talk to him, really explain how I was feeling, and I’d recall the seven hundred and fifty thousand conversations he and I had endured to the bitter end, and she and I, too, to fix her marriage or mine. They never worked, but what the hell else does one do with a failing marriage other than talk about it incessantly?

  Well, Mac and I would go out together. Grandparents would watch Ava while we concentrated on our sole purpose, which was to get hammered at a bar with no windows. Unfortunately, since he worked weekends and I worked weekdays, one of us was always going to work hungover, but that was a risk we were willing to take. We did it for marriage. It was like a commitment to therapy, but for alcoholics. I’d wedge myself into jeans and drink wine while he got dressed. I’d paint on makeup and style my hair, and we’d smoke cigarettes on the way to the bar, with our best songs playing and each other.

  Occasionally we would visit my mother in Mendocino for the weekend, and she would babysit while we went to the Caspar Inn, which is a bar in the middle of the five-building town of Caspar, across the street from a nineteenth-century church. It was packed on Friday and Saturday nights, smelling of whiskey, convenience store perfume, and alcoholism. One night we went to hear Tommy Castro, a local blues-rock band, and out on the deck in the fog we met a man named MYQ, but not pronounced “Mike.” His name was pronounced “M-Y-Q,” as in the letters themselves. He was making a coffee table book of his facial hair configurations. At the time, he had a spade shaved onto his chin.

  A few minutes later, down at the end of the bar, MYQ, Mac, and I met a seemingly homeless man with a kitten in his jacket. Impressed, we bought the man a drink and became fast friends, though I can’t remember his name. The kitten’s name was Rufus. After talking for a while, we bought him a couple more rounds, smoked a few cigarettes on the misty porch, and shut the bar down. Rufus’s owner needed a ride home, and we figured giving him a ride sounded as good as any plan ever sounded, so we hopped in my car and drove north on Highway 1 along the ocean, eventually turning east, into the mountains, then right down a little dirt road. He said he had some beer in the “main house,” so I killed the engine.

  “Come on in,” he said. “But these people are a little weird.” Considering he went to bars with a cat in his jacket, I was intrigued to meet somebody he thought was weird.

  When he opened the front door to the house, I faced a wall of indiscernible material to the ceiling and a smell I can only describe as “absolutely not.” There was a single trail through the house, forming a reeking canyon of trash.

  I forced a laugh and said, “No thanks,” turned around, and walked out. They must have been hoarders. A few minutes later, Mac and Rufus’s dad brought out some beer. Did we just steal beer from hoarders? I thought, grabbing one.

  Our new friend walked us over to his home, which was a converted school bus on the other side of the property. The inside was covered in quilts and packed with wood carvings and stained glass and paintings, trinkets from every town in northern California. While we sat with him, he filled a little bowl with tofu and pulled a plastic sack out of his pocket. I thought it was bee pollen. Sprinkling it on the food, he said, “Rufus eats tofu with brewer’s yeast on it. It’s the only food he likes.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, seeing the dirt under the man’s nails and his thick, filthy fingers sprinkling the yeast in a little mound right in the center of the bowl.

  “It’s hard for me to get to Fort Bragg to buy it, but it’s so expensive in Mendocino.” I almost offered to drive him there right then, but I knew it was a three a.m. idea, and three a.m. ideas are almost uniformly bad. Rufus devoured his dinner.

  “I’m a stained glass artist from Humboldt. I used to travel around to shows with my old lady, but she’s gone, and there isn’t work anymore. I have this beautiful place though.” I watched him and tried not to look around, tried not to be the one to break it to him that his bus was not beautiful.

  When we went outside, I realized he was not talking about the bus. He didn’t care about the bus. He was talking about the little river below, so close you could hear it from inside, and the ferns and redwoods, the thick fallen trunks and moss, the scent of ocean in the distance. The silence.

  Mac and our friend and Rufus went back inside, but I stayed alone and looked out at the little river and the stars and trees, which were mostly sound and shadows in the dark, and I thought about his kitten, and that I had little idea where I was, and I wondered if this was how people got cut up and eaten by axe-murdering psychos. But he was not an axe-murdering psycho. He was a misunderstood stained glass artist who fed his cat brewer’s yeast.

  I loved Mac on those nights. I loved our adventures, our chemistry, the way we seemed to attract endless weirdos. Everywhere we went, the misfits came running. Reno. Davis. Tahoe. San Francisco. Santa Rosa. Caspar and Mendocino. How many nights had we spent with the outliers of those towns, the loner eccentrics?

  Mac and I were friends. We were young, lightly renegade partiers, but we had our baby, and we loved her, and when the mavericks at bars would ask about our lives, we told them about her. We told them how smart and beautiful she was, and we seemed to have a better life than them because she existed, and we had each other. That dive-bar life was a tiny piece of a brilliant whole. We had a real life out there in the world with stucco houses and cubicles and cement lakes and neat lawns, where the sane people live, as opposed to the ones making coffee table books out of facial hair photography and stealing beer from hoarders.

  And yet, I needed the misfits to exist. I needed to party with them and drink with them and inhale deeply with them. I needed to shut down bars with the local drunks, because next to them, we were a millionaire family. Next to them, we really had our acts together.

  We navigated the crazies just fine. It was only at home we lost our way. We tried, though. We talked. Sometimes I’d get my hands on some cocaine and we would really talk then. High as kites, I’d encourage Mac to wake up, liven up, go to school, do something! Grow up, son!

  He’d get excited too, and after a few lines, he’d come up with a plan. “Tomorrow,” he’d say, “I’m going to join the rodeo circuit.”

  “Yes! You should do that, Mac. You can do it!”

  It was a three a.m. idea, but it was all we had.

  6

  Rocketship Rock-On

  After two years at the firm, I got a promotion and raise that made me question the institution of marriage as a whole. Janelle, I thought, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Your big fucking break. Time to get out on your own and soar.

  I found a little house in a 1940s neighborhood of Sacramento and rented it alone, again, announcing my departure one evening while Mac finished his spaghetti. But this time, I explained, he could not come with me because our marriage wasn’t working.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, and then it was my turn to stare silently into the void.

  I was horribly confused by his confusion since we had discussed that exact topic every week for two solid years. And we had only been married three.

  “Mac, you’re not going to change and I need a future, a life.” I was pontificating loudly, but lost some gusto when I added, “I’m not sure I love you anymore.”

  “I still love you, Janelle,” he said in a sort of whispered resignation.

  I scowled, thinking, Who would say such a thing at a time like this? His eyes were wet and the same as the night we met, and I wanted to love him but could not. I was looking for something lost. I was looking for Barcelona.

  “Mac, look at the way I drink every day. I am miserable. I’m dying like this.”

  “I don’t think
you should go,” he said, holding my eyes. I felt like I was smacking him with the back of my hand while he crouched behind a table, and I think somewhere I knew he could not defend himself or understand or even beg. Life washed over him. He seemed like a boat without a rudder, and I was simply a current that came along once.

  One week later, I was gone. I took the furniture and left him to pack up the house I had rented without him, returning a week later to get the last of my belongings. I found him sitting on the floor in the empty living room, leaning against a wall with his knees up in front of him, watching a movie on a laptop. From the loneliness of that view I had to turn away quickly, but glanced back when I opened the door to leave. He was looking across the room at me with hungry eyes, but I felt only rage.

  I couldn’t hear his voice again. His broken, thin words. His even-toned flatness. His control. His agreement. He would tell me a hundred times that it would be different. He would do something new. He would go to college. Get a different job.

  We would grow close again. We would not sleep together in machine-like coldness. We would rediscover love.

  Ah, fuck your tears. Fuck our voices.

  I gotta go.

  I am a master of beginnings, and this—this is a goddamn grave.

  • • •

  My new home had old wood floors and a front porch behind a sprawling oak tree. The only time I had to look at the address box was the first time I pulled up and thought, Well, this place is damn adorable. It was white with blue-gray trim and had a big lawn out front and a huge backyard with a fountain and lavender plants where bees buzzed. Inside there were two bedrooms to the left of the living room, one in the front and one in the back of the house, with a bathroom in between with tile floors and a pedestal sink. It had a big brick fireplace, and a kitchen with barely any storage or counters. It was perfection.