by Chris Vola
She’s coming to see me tomorrow.
Upstairs, there’s a reverberation of something shattering, followed by either a quick shriek or a snuffed-out giggle. Alaska’s found my grandmother’s collection of porcelain geisha masks she bought during a trip to Nagasaki when my Grandpa Phil was stationed there.
I feel a warm wetness dripping down my wrist and realize I’ve been fingering the blade of a whalebone-handled carving knife that must have been lying next to the clean plates on the kitchen counter, sliced my index finger.
I picked it up when…
I roll into my room, hit the brakes in the doorway. The beige Duvet cover, the same matching pillows. The bare blue walls. New car smell, closet doors slightly askew, the North Face backpack fluffed and parked ambiguously under the half-drawn window shades. Too clean, the sterility of absence.
I toss the pile of newspaper print-outs I’ve been carrying onto the bed. The computer desk looks the same – open laptop, Ambien pile, half-drained liter of bourbon. As I wheel across the beige carpet an iPhone I hadn’t noticed starts vibrating, rattling next to the pills.
There’s a Google message box blinking on the laptop’s screen.
THE PHOTOGRAPH’S AN old one, tributaries of folds and creases, covered in what looks like Doritos’ residue. A Kodak print from days when kids still carried around disposable cameras, when you had to wait an hour to see whether or not you forgot to click on the flash button. The actual picture, slightly fuzzed, is of Lauren and me, our soaking, baby-fat-tinted bodies locked in a grinning, rough-housey embrace. A generic New England treescape sullies the background. It’s from the first summer after we’d started going out, her first weekend visiting me at my parents’ house. Most of the other similarly mangled photographs in the sneaker box on my lap are from the same roll, taken almost five years ago.
I keep replaying this one summer day from the photograph over in my head, pressing rewind, looking at it backwards and in slow motion, because I can – it’s that clear.
Davis took the picture.
The three of us had gone upstate in his dad’s car for the afternoon, driving away from the clusters of apartments and strip malls towards quiet green woods and tobacco fields, to a rope swing on the banks of the Connecticut River near the Massachusetts border where Davis and I had wasted away most of our teenage years getting wasted, Tom and Huckleberry playing with dime bags and flip-phones instead of boxes of Injun gold and runaway human property.
We were 21 and sprung and all I felt was the high-on-life tour-guide adrenaline, Lauren in the back seat, smiling, nodding, happier to see me than any local landmarks (The historic O.J. Williams Tobacco Company barn) in the periphery. She was from Westchester, it wasn’t like she’d never seen trees before. But these were my trees. I remember wanting to be real in her eyes, more than just the semi-serious boyfriend from somewhere in Connecticut. She needed to feel Connecticut.
Davis was in the driver’s seat, Bud bottle squeezed between his thighs, the sideways smile letting me know that even the slightest yielding to effeminate weakness, a.k.a. acting like a little bitch in the presence of my new, clearly impressionable sweetie would be grounds for a huge ripping-on session when she left to go back home. I was keeping it cool, though, whatever that meant. And I remember thinking that Lauren was probably cooler than both of us.
She and Davis hit it off instantly, I remember.
Even though the next few hours are now mostly blurred – driving over the pothole-shocked dirt trail winding past a shabby Little League field, parking at the boring little beach and smoking another joint, the thirty-foot nylon and polyester string attached to the top of a huge oak tree that bent perfectly over the river, jumping out of the tree (Did we convince Lauren it was safe?), the OCD scatter-banter of a muggy afternoon – I can recall an accurate image of Lauren in her blue and white halter-top bikini grinning and staring at Davis’s bathing-suited backside as he climbs the wooden planks leading up to the jumping platform. Is that the irresistible ass of the alpha male? I thought, swimming to shore, watching the exchange. Had there been a shift in chemistry? Was she going to forget about me, the reason for her visit, because my rich friend who she’s never met had some kind of rectal tractor beam that created an eerie level of familiarity between strangers? No, no, I told myself, you’re more than a little stoned.
And I remember the moments before the picture was taken.
It was late, almost seven, and Lauren and I had collapsed on the hard-packed clay of the river bank, next to a rarely used circular firepit, fending off mosquitoes and making sure we didn’t roll across any of the pieces of fossilizing beer glass, cardboard, used condoms, and cigarette butts scattered across the clearing like the contents of an alcoholic’s wishing well. I didn’t know why I’d told her this place was so beautiful when we were at school.
Davis climbed up the bank, dripping brown river muck, stretched his zero-flab torso between us, his toes dangling near the exposed roots and the water.
Eyes closed, he whispered something, maybe to himself. Lauren rolled over.
“What are you mumbling about?” I flicked away a horsefly that was resting on one of my chest hairs.
“Yeah, what?” Lauren asked, still giggly from the third joint we’d passed around.
“What do you call this decade?” Davis repeated.
“I don’t know,” I said, “the first decade of this century?”
“Obviously,” he said, “but what about the years? Are they the Two-Thousands?”
“Obviously,” Lauren repeated, a little snarkily.
“I’ve always said the Zeros,” I shrugged, “but that doesn’t sound right.”
“What is right?” Davis asks, “Is it the Ohs, the Zeros, the Oughts, the Naughts, the Oh-Ohs? No one has a clue, not even the radio – The Best of the Eighties, Ninties, and Today! They’re afraid of specifics, of a definition. Do you know why?”
“Because this just happens to be an awkward decade for slogan writers?” My back was goose-pimpled. I was thinking about a last plunge from the swing, a fearsome descent possibly featuring a cannonball or inverse jack-knife as a finale to break the tractor beam’s pull, but Lauren’s grime-covered legs inching toward Davis’s silenced my body. I glanced at my backpack, dangling over a nearby log, stupidly wondering what charms might be in it that would bring her back in my direction. B-b-but we’re already out of weed! I could only see the back of her head.
Davis let out a low-pitched growl. “No!” he said. “That’s not it. It’s because this decade is a nameless amorphous creature, a vacuum, a sterile computer-chip refuse pile that’s allergic to any specific attitude, to any real passion.”
“Whoa,” I said, “a vacuum. Amorphous. Heavy words.” I stood up, brushed the mud off, sat on the log next to my backpack, unzipped it. Lauren swiveled around.
“You define it then,” she challenged. “What will we remember?”
“Iraq,” I said, fighting back a bad feeling. Billy'd been gone. “Technology.”
“The Internet was the nineties, actually the sixties,” Davis said, slithering up into a crouch, “and as for war, Vietnam didn’t define the seventies. It was the people, the attitude, the music, the style. It wasn’t so much current events, as a current flowing, one most people could understand, like, organically.”
He was hovering over Lauren now. She was staring up at him, twirling her hair absentmindedly, paying full stoney attention.
I found the disposable camera, faced him. “You weren’t even alive in the seventies.”
“True,” he shrugged, “but it was the same in the nineties. Take any album that came out of the West Coast from 1990 to 1996. That was real aggression, real frustration, real passion. It was the sense of, Somebody has to do something and if they’re not going to do it, we’re going to curb-stomp their asses and do it ourselves!” Lauren nodding like a bobblehead. “The last remnants of the Flower Power era had failed, unquestionably. Here was a generation that anointed itsel
f, that collectively understood that it had been chosen, was destined to stretch and break the limits of what we could do, how we could communicate.”
I decided to play the pseudo-intellectual moron card, too. Not an original move, but I remembered how lovingly Lauren’s hand had stroked the coffee-colored, baby-animal-skin interior of Davis’s father’s G Class wagon a few hours earlier. “So if this decade had a more palatable nickname, I asked in a Midwestern Republican-senator voice, “our identity crisis would be solved?”
“I’m not saying it’s everything, but…”
He made the unexpected swoop, snatching up Lauren horizontally and pressing her to his chest in a motion that resembled an ideal bicep curl. Her eyes bugged out and looked at me but she didn’t fight back. The giggles started. “Just listen,” Davis murmured, looking at me while talking into Lauren’s belly, “think about that hard, masculine Nnnnn, that nice ring. Nine, nine, Nineties, 49ers, ninety-nine, nine millimeter, Nine Inch Nails, nine lives, nineteen-year-old pussy…”
“Stop!”
“Huh?” Davis twisted Lauren around and plopped her down in front of him, let her go. “What’s up, dude? We were just having –”
I threw my backpack down, tossed him the disposable camera, and pulled Lauren’s silken-moist body against mine.
Still laughing at Davis, she pretended to wriggle out.
“Instead of trying to brainwash my girlfriend,” I said to Davis as I tried to put squirmy Lauren into a headlock, “do something useful and take a picture before she gets away.”
I TAKE A long pull on the Maker’s Mark, lift it to my forehead. After I’m cooled off, I wipe a shiny smear of sweat and sawdust from the ice-filled glass.
We’re in the front yard, surrounded by discarded chunks of plywood – two-by-fours, four-by-sixes – a pair of battered circular saws, spools of measuring tape. Billy’s taking a break from his six-pack of Buds to pound in the last few nails into the wheelchair ramp I’ve been pretending to help him build all morning.
I look at my watch. “You want to take a break?” I ask. “It’s after one already. I’m starving, let’s grab some Subway or Mickey D’s or something.”
Billy wipes his face, reaches for the equally sweaty aluminum can resting near his flip-flops. “I’m on a roll, bro,” he says. “Haven’t come close to hammering my fingers since my hands stopped shaking after the third beer.”
I provide the obligatory snicker.
“Give me fifteen minutes here, then I’m so down for like three, maybe four double cheeseburgers, fries, too. Remember that time I ate so many that I couldn’t shit for –” He’s interrupted by the quiet rumble of a black Lincoln Towncar pulling into the driveway behind the Audi.
He stands, stretches his back as he slides on his flip-flops. “Maybe now is a good time for a break,” he says. “Shouldn’t keep going on an empty stomach, right? I’ll get you a couple cheeseburgers, come back and finish up, unless you guys don’t want me to…”
“No,” I say, “that’s cool. Get an extra salad or something.”
“OK.”
He hurries toward his truck that’s parked next to the curb, waves at the car. He says something that sounds like Last night, I drew a devil face in the sand. I sip the Maker’s Mark, casually. The back door opens and there’s Lauren, so tiny she has to sort of hop out onto the grass. She’s Manhattan-pale, even this late in the summer, too thin in a black tank-top and matching short-shorts, a bunch of shopping bags from the outlets in West Fairport, eye shadow darker than I remember. Amazing.
As she starts to walk across the lawn to where I’m perched on the chair, I smile, raise my glass weakly.
She drops her bag and the tears burst.
“AGAIN, THERE WAS no engagement,” she says, faux-angrily, as she crumples the Whole Foods wrapper into a ball. We’re watching a Real Housewives of Wherever marathon. Only five more hours! Outside, under the acid-clear November sun, the constant sound of hammering is only broken by an occasional “FUCK!” when Billy’s fingers slip. The final tinkering on a backyard gazebo he’s been building for us, determined to have it ready when we get back from the court house in a couple hours. Small chance of that.
Lauren throws a black pea-coat over her shoulders, reaches for a half-empty glass of Zinfandel on the dining room table next to her warm goat cheese salad sweating through its post-consumer-recycled-plastic container. “When John gave me ring…” she says, “I told him I’d have to take the weekend to think about it. I mean, we’d only really been together for a couple months. You and I went out for, for…”
“Four years and two months next week,” I say in between bites of my hand-fed shrimp taco.
She gives me this look, adjusts her collar. “Uh,” she says. She reaches for her iPad, carefully licks cheese fragments off her hand, skipping the rock on her left ring finger. My mother’s ring from 1974. Even though I could afford something bigger and better than a modest-slash-pathetic quarter-carat trinket, I figured the self-consciously cliché gesture might be a good move. It seems to have worked. Enough of an impulse for her to quit her job and her life in the City – the twice-repressed domestic urge.
Lauren sinks back into the story. “…hanging out with some of his friends from the firm. One of them got really drunk, a phone number they had for these two escorts, about one time at John’s apartment, how they got them so coked-up. In detail…sounded like something they’d done way… I thought about you,” she places her iPad-free hand on my dead knee.
I laugh so hard that Organic Raw Kombucha tea sprays onto the tablecloth. Maybe an inadvertent twitch from the Carisoma I took earlier.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I say, taking her hand into mine. “Sorry. I just want to get this over with today.”
She nods, shrugs. “After that,” she says, “I told John it was over. He’d planned a celebratory trip for us to go Vancouver the next week. He ended up taking the dickhead…Wells, that was his name. I moved in with Susannah in TriBeCa. I heard about the accident, I got so mad. I thought you’d been ignoring me on some big cross-country…another binge or something. With Davis, and then to find out…it was, it was too much.”
“It’s fine,” I say, trying to smile. “I didn’t either.”
The hammering’s stopped. Billy must have re-discovered the laced joint I hid in his toolbox. “…and you may be asking yourself, ‘How do I get back to the old Weather.com…’” a meteorologist in a blue sports jacket is saying on the flatscreen, the volume low. I notice a bottle of Lexapro on the mantel below the TV. “…and if you still can’t change your temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit, don’t worry! There’s an app for that.”
I can’t stop staring at the Lexapro bottle, honey bathed in bloodshot sunlight. The off-white, starched lab coats and cottony –
“Are you listening?” The impatient tone I’ve heard so many times, goddamn.
I grunt.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Our daughter. Duh. Where is she?”
Lauren rolls her eyes, twists her hair a little. It looks like she’s used curlers or something. Normally it’s straight. She stands up, moves behind me.
“Shit,” I say. “I forgot. Billy’s watching her outside. She’s probably getting sawdust on her dress. He’s probably giving her –”
I try to stand up but whatever’s beneath my waist cracks, a pair of soggy toothpicks, and I slouch back into the chair with an ugly thud.
“Easy,” Lauren murmurs, pressing her belly against the back of my head. “You had an accident.” She stresses the word like I’m a toddler and it’s OK to shit myself. Then she snickers. “Josh as father,” she says. “Still a scary thought after this long. She’s lucky I’m here.” She moves back to her iPad, realizes something, looks out the bay window.
“Where are your car keys?” she asks. “We’re going to hit traffic on 95. Even my mother won’t forgive us this time if we don’t make it before the lamb stuffing
cools off.”
“Your mother.”
She purses her lips. “We talked about this. The re-immersion program? You’re starting to melt into this room, like furniture. It’s not healthy. Anyway, I want Mom and Dad to see how much weight you’ve put on.”
“Your keys are on the dresser, upstairs.”
“Sure.” The nose scrunch. She lets go of my hand, bounces out of the room.
When I hear her feet on the stairs, I reach into my pocket, fish out a couple of loose Xanax, swallow them both.
17
Vola
DRAB GUSTS OF air are blowing in from the Sound, swirling up mini-tornados of frost-bitten leaves and KFC wrappers, making me want to cup my hands around my mouth and blow out of instinct. The withered stalks and dead seed pods of garden flowers rattle against the bay window like a posse of uncouth snare drummers.
Alaska, in matching pink sweats and top, is sprawled across the hardwood of the living room floor, surrounded and covered by a plastic oil spill of old LEGO pieces. She’s too young to follow any sort of instructions to make a pirate ship or Robin Hood’s tree fort. Instead, she’s shaken out the contents of the boxes for all the old models and become the godhead of her own pirate/spaceman/soldier/cowboy yellow-skinned, square-headed world. Her latest project is a massive four-sided tower, an asymmetrical, leaning kaleidoscope of colors in no particular scheme. The ends of mismatched pieces jut out sporadically like an autistic Jenga set-up. She’s named it, appropriately, THE PIT.
Her favorite activity (what she’s doing now) is “Discipline Time”. She places a fistful of LEGO men and women – knights in gray armor, aliens, Revolutionary War types (she doesn’t discriminate) – on the tower’s highest dimpled precipice, their identical heads and backs bent over the edge. Looking into the black pit below, possibly contemplating their collective demise. Alaska kneels behind her prey, Predator-esque, whispers something into each of their trembling necks, screams “DISCIPLINE!” and backhands their insignificant plastic bodies into the pit, where they join a growing pile of comrades in a four-year-old's vision of Hades.