Everyone Remain Calm

by Megan Stielstra

  I went inside the house, up the stairs, and pulled down the trapdoor in the hallway ceiling, climbing its little ladder to the attic and out through the window to the roof. Down in my front yard, water climbed past the second floor, gentle waves lapping at the windows. I stood there, as high as I’d ever been, watching the flood across the city.

  Years from now, when somebody asks where you were on this day, maybe you’ll tell them about that flood. Maybe you’ll talk about the blizzard in August, or how snowflakes taste like Italian ice—but for me? It was the time I took a deep breath, plugged my nose, and then—wrapping my arms around my knees as I took off in the air—I jumped.

  09| Do You Want to Have Sex With Alan and Chloe?

  Years ago, on our first date, my husband and I went to Danny’s—this hipster bar in Bucktown—and we totally got hit on by swingers, which is complicated, ’cause, see, if it’s just you getting hit on you can accept or decline and be done with it, but when you’re a part of a couple, there needs to be a discussion. It’s like buying curtains. You can’t just get the microsuede, you’ve got to ask, Honey, what do you think about the microsuede? Same thing with swinging. You can’t just say yes or no, you’ve got to say, What do you think, honey? Do you want to have sex with Alan and Chloe?

  They’re the swingers from Danny’s: he’s in advertising, she’s a massage therapist, they met hiking in Colorado and so on and so on. We talked for over an hour and not once did I have any idea they wanted in our pants—although I’m not sure if they wanted in my pants or Christopher’s pants or if everybody would be in everybody’s pants, I wasn’t entirely clear how all that stuff worked so later I looked it up on Wikipedia and omigod there are so many options! Like:

  If Chloe and I get down and Alan and Christopher watch, it’s open swinging;

  If Alan and I go to one room and Christopher and Chloe another, it’s closed swinging;

  If I date Chloe while Christopher and I are together, that’s an open relationship, but—

  If I’m in a relationship with Christopher and Chloe then I’m polyamorous and—

  If all four of us date and have sex and live together on big commune it’s polyfidelity.

  —but Alan and Chloe didn’t bring up any of that.

  They talked about their new condo, their trip to Port Aransas, the new Will Ferrell movie—they love Will Ferrell—and then Chloe, this little brunette in head to toe Banana Republic, took a big ol’ swig from her vodka tonic and said, “So, do you party?”

  This is a question I’ve been asked numerous times over the past decade, always in relation to different coded things:

  Do you smoke pot?

  Do you do coke?

  Do you like girls?

  Do you take it up the ass?

  —I can never keep up.

  “Could you be more specific?” I asked, and Alan—total average Joe, this guy: jeans, T-shirt, Chuck Taylors—leaned forward and said, “What she means is . . . do you two swing?”

  Philosophically, I’m all for open relationships: I know tons of people have them and they can be very successful what with everybody’s needs being met every which way but people. There have got to be rules!

  Here’s what I’m thinking:

  The two primary parties in the relationship need to be clear on what they’re doing, as in: Are they going off and doing their own separate thing? Or bringing the thing home to do together? And is the thing in question just sex, or is love okay, too, in which case how far is too far and is there any crossing the line? And—

  The third party needs to be okay with all of that.

  These rules must be adhered to at all times. Any deviation may result in broken hearts and fucked-up friendships and all other variations of unpleasantness.

  This is what happened to me.

  I met Jen back when I was a cocktail waitress at this swanky bar in the Gold Coast. She was the bartender, and at the end of my first shift she put a bourbon in my hands and invited me out dancing. I was twenty-one years old—I only drank amaretto stone sours. “No thank you,” I told her, “I’ve got homework,” and I slid the drink back across the bar.

  As far as friends go, Jen was totally out of my league: older and independent and super-sexy. In fact, she’d been a pole dancer for a while at Crazy Horse—I think that place is called VIP’s now, right? Guys? Have any of you been to VIP’s? Anyhow, Jen slid the bourbon back across the bar, either not noticing or not caring that she intimidated the hell out of me. “Homework can wait,” she said. “You should try something new for once.”

  I tried a lot of new things with Jen:

  Bourbon;

  Pole dancing;

  Foam parties;

  Soft drugs;

  Other miscellaneous risk-taking that stopped just short of dangerous but still shoved me into life.

  Man, I needed that shove—facing my fears, trying new things, having fun. We’ve all had a friend like that, right? And eventually the friend becomes our friend/roommate so the fun can keep going 24/7 while also splitting expenses because let’s face it, fun ain’t cheap, and Jen and I were having a lot of fun.

  Until—

  So many stories end this way—

  She got a boyfriend.

  Matthew.

  Of whom you should understand three things:

  He’d been an Abercrombie & Fitch model, you know those guys? With the . . . chests;

  He’d grown up on a nudist colony—and I know I make a lot of shit up for these stories but that’s the God’s honest truth—the man grew up on the Ponderosa Sun Club nudist colony in Roselawn, Indiana. Feel free to Google it if you’re eighteen and over. My point is the guy was very, very comfortable being naked. Like, all the time. And it’s really difficult to not look at a penis when the penis is always there—penis in the living room penis in the hall penis in the kitchen—and did I mention I hadn’t had sex in over a year?

  What was I talking about? Oh yes:

  He hit on me. A lot. And not in a subtle way, this was no “Heeeey, what’s up?” that I could write off like Oh, that’s just Matthew being nice, hahaha, no—the man would sit next to me on the couch totally naked and say, “We should have sex,” the same way you might say, “We should make popcorn”—and yes, what I should’ve done is turn to him and say, “Matthew, that’s completely inappropriate,” and for the record I did do the whole turning to him part . . . which was as far as I ever got ’cause there was the penis and it was . . . you know, a penis, and what do you do with that?! It’s a steak in front of a starving woman!

  So I went to my friend/roommate. “Jen, can we . . . talk?”

  “Sure,” she said. She was cutting limes for margaritas. “What’s up?”

  What I imagined in that moment was something straight out of The Young and the Restless: “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I’d say—we’d both have lots of jewelry and really big hair—“but Matthew—”

  “Stop right there,” she’d cry, covering her eyes with the back of her hand—“I’ve known it all along!” Then she’d slap me, kill my child, drive off a cliff, and come back five years later with amnesia.

  Instead, she just reached for another lime and said, “And?”

  “And?” I repeated. “I tell you your boyfriend hit on me and you say and?”

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said, and then she put her lime juice in the blender, poured in tequila, and said, “We swing.”

  At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. I was imagining, quite literally, the act of swinging on swings—as done by small children on the playground. Not the complicated-looking contraption sold at the Pleasure Chest that you bolt to your ceiling.

  “It means,” Jen explained patiently, “Matthew finds women for us to have sex with together.”

  My twenty-
one-year-old self was not equipped for such things. I’d only had sex with one other person, how was I supposed to wrap my brain around three people plus? “And you . . . like that?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You like girls?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Do you like me?”

  And she said, “Yes.”

  We stared at each other.

  Have you ever had a moment like that with a friend? They say they’re into you or you say you’re into them and what happens next is decided with a single look. I thought of all the things she’d showed me, and maybe I did need to be more open, and we did love each other!—we were friends!—and as all those thoughts electrified the empty space between us, Matthew and his penis walked into the kitchen and said, “So what are we all talking about in here?”

  Here’s how I prepared for my very first three-way:

  I went shopping at the Midwest equivalent of Frederick’s of Hollywood. For future reference: don’t ever try on lingerie the day before you go to bed with a nudist and a stripper;

  I panicked. My only-ever boyfriend had suffered from that whole is it in there/is it not issue, therefore my sexual experience was . . . not much, so—

  I studied. Does anyone still watch Skinemax? If you haven’t had the pleasure, or would like to take a break from online thumbnails, Skinemax is a late-night soft porn channel with lots of nurses and secretaries accidentally falling out of their clothes in the janitor’s closet—it’s basically CliffsNotes for a ménage à trois; however, you do foster some rather—shall we say—unrealistic expectations. I pictured Jen, for some reason, dressed as a cat with the fuzzy leotard and fishnets; Matthew, a naked pirate; I’m the German milkmaid and we’re having sex in this anti-gravity chamber so we’re like floating in midair. . . . It was awesome.

  But it didn’t happen like that. It happened like this:

  The three of us were in Jen’s bed, our bodies wrapped together like a giant pretzel. It was dark. I couldn’t tell whose leg that was? Whose fingers were those? What was I grabbing? Mentally, I now compare this experience to a step aerobics class—Lift here! Arms there! Thrust this!—you’re sweaty and self-conscious but you gotta keep moving or else you’ll fall behind! It was seriously about as far from sexy you could get and, yes, I know a lot of it was my fault: I was young and awkward and just thinking too much. I remember wishing I could turn off my brain so my clitoris could do its thing without being interrupted with all this goddamn contemplation. Contemplation was not fun! And that’s what I wanted: every other new thing I’d tried with Jen had been so exciting, and this, here—

  We didn’t look at each other. Not once.

  After everybody came—or whatever the case may have been—I went back to my room. The next day, Jen and I didn’t talk about it. It was like it hadn’t happened.

  Until a week later when it happened again.

  Quick show of hands—who’s gone to bed with someone you know you shouldn’t be going to bed with? Why do we do that? Are we lonely? Are we masochists? I went to bed with Jen and Matthew for nearly three months—we lived together and slept together and grocery shopped together and argued about bills together—and I cannot tell you why. It wasn’t fun, we didn’t better ourselves as human beings, and we certainly didn’t grow closer together; in fact, I moved out when the lease was up and . . . everything just stopped. The relationship, the friendship, all of it. I heard that not long after, Jen and Matthew broke up and she moved to Cincinnati to wait tables.

  That was ten years ago, and as far as I know she’s still there.

  “That’s the most depressing three-way story I’ve ever heard,” Christopher said when I first told him all this. We’d excused ourselves from Alan and Chloe and were sitting at the bar, having that inevitable This is what I’m cool with/this is what I’m not cool with conversation—you know the one I mean? The one that goes:

  I’m not cool with being peed on, or

  I’m not cool with whips and chains, or

  I’m not cool with oral sex or sex on your period or sex in your mother’s house (in which case I’d say, dump him, girls ’cause that’s just so, I don’t know—Catholic?).

  What I said to Christopher was, “I’m not cool with open relationships.”

  “Good,” he said, “me neither,” and then he told me some stuff which—I can’t even touch that, he’d kill me—anyhow, the point is: we were on the same page. That’s what it’s about, right? Whether you’re polyamorous or monogamous or living on a commune, you’ve got somebody or many bodies that give you what you need. So when we went back to Alan and Chloe, we were all, “No, we won’t be partying, thanks, but tell us again about Port Aransas!” and it wasn’t weird or awkward. The four of us kept talking and had a few more drinks, and then they left to go do what they do and we left to do what we do.

  And if you think I’m going to tell you what that is, you people are fucking crazy.

  10| I Am the Keymaster

  Here’s the thing: I make $9 an hour copying keys at Ace Hardware. That’s a thousand a month after taxes. Subtract whatever for bills and there’s not much left for extras, let alone emergencies. Say your transmission falls out, or you need a root canal, or, in my case, you get in trouble—girl trouble—and it costs 400 bucks to fix even at Planned Parenthood which is supposed to be all cost-effective but I’m not some CEO or one of those Hilton sisters who can just charge their way out of a mistake. I mean, I save coupons. I go to Supercuts. I shop off Craigslist.

  Stuff I Got Off Craigslist:

  Dining room table $40

  Five dollar CTA card $4.50

  Unopened twenty-pack Colgate $14

  Bluebird paperweight, 10 cents. Not like I needed a paperweight, but ten cents? I earn that in less than one minute on the clock. You can’t pass that up! I carry it in my pocket and grip it when I think I’m losing my mind.

  Size-ten lady’s whole closet, free. I guess she died—Leukemia—and her husband couldn’t handle it. Please take ASAP, said the post. I don’t want to remember anymore. She liked the fancy stuff, this lady. I got a cashmere trench coat that goes all the way to the floor. Sometimes, when it’s slow at work, I imagine millions of keys lining the inside of that coat. I imagine riding the el and suddenly it screeches to a stop and all the lights go off. Something terrible is about to happen, we’ll be exploded by a meteor or beheaded by terrorists or something, and everyone is screaming and banging on the doors but I remain calm. I reach into my trench coat. I pull out a key. It glows softly in the dark and people back away in awe—“Look, Mommy, we’re saved!” cries a small, freckled child—as I unlock the locked door and lead everyone to safety. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but when you spend forty hours a week doing the same thing—find the key code, line up the keys, grind—you’re really spending forty hours in your mind. Forty hours thinking, and in my case it’s better to imagine impossible stuff than replay reality, ’cause, I’ll tell you what, the reality is sort of shitty.

  The reality is Dale, still wearing his Pep Boys uniform, sitting across from me at our Craigslist dining room table. His right leg bounces like it does when he’s nervous. “How can you be pregnant?” he asks.

  I think of that video from sixth grade biology with the cartoon sperm narrating how babies are made. “I don’t know,” I say, reaching into my pocket, grabbing the bluebird, squeezing it so tight the beak cuts into my palm.

  Dale’s knee bangs into the underside of the table. “Was it that time the condom—?” he stops before the word broke. “Or when we—?” Drank too much. “Or—” Pulled out, too fast, in the backseat, weren’t thinking, stupid stupid stupid kids.

  “Dale,” I interrupt, because we’re supposed to be making a decision.

  Except it’s already made.

  “He told you what?” said my sister Adelle. She goes to communit
y college and is right now taking a Womyn’s Studies Class. Womyn with a Y.

  “To get rid of it,” I said.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said, which got her all sorts of worked up. She talked like there was a whole press corps in her living room. “When are you going to stand up for yourself? When are you going to face these years of oppression and say to them, ‘Years, I will not be held back! This is the twenty-first century and I can, nay I will do it all! I will work my job and feed my young and wear a skirt while doing so because—’”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I told her, so she got off her fake pedestal and asked what I was going to do.

  “I already did it,” I said. That’s when I started to cry. Saying it aloud made me remember—last week, the waiting room, the paper robe, the You’ll feel some discomfort—so I tried to think about something else. Adelle has this big fireplace and I imagined that inside it was a door. I go to it, and then, I reach inside my coat and pull out a key and unlock the door and stretching out before me is a whole starry universe and all I have to do is walk through and I’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere away.

  Adelle patted my shoulder. “You need to protect yourself,” she said. “In case this happens again.”

  Starry universe, starry universe, I thought, rubbing the bluebird with my thumb.

  “You should really go on the pill.”

  I don’t have fifty bucks a month for the pill. I have rent and gas and electric and phone and school loans from that one semester before I dropped out and health insurance out-of-pocket and that loan from when I got my wisdom teeth out and the loan from when our mom died and the funeral, and my car and car insurance and groceries and beer and cat food and cat litter and the vet bill from when the cat ate a lightbulb and and and—