“Val.”
“What? They aren’t even related to him.”
Beside her, a middle-aged woman crumbled her scone to a fine dust and talked loudly into her cell phone. “My only advice is don’t ever work at a prison,” she said. “You’re a prime candidate for falling in love with an inmate.” The woman flattened several crumbs with the tip of her index finger.
“I’m not even related to him,” Val said.
The rest of Val’s coffee went cold fast. Her friend’s drink was nearly gone, but in between sips she blew on it anyway.
“You’re in no position to own a dog.”
“To rescue a dog.”
“I’m not judging you,” the woman said into her phone.
“What does Zeke want from you?”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Okay,” her friend said. Her empty mug was stained bright yellow.
“Cut it out with this savior stuff,” the woman said. She pounded the table, but no one turned to look.
* * *
—
After her brother’s suicide attempt, the family therapist gave them all homework. The first assignment, he explained, was to practice expressing their wants and needs. He showed them a stack of cards, half of them labeled I WANT, half of them labeled I NEED. He’d filled a few of them in with examples:
New clothes
Democracy
“Some of them are personal and some of them are global,” the therapist said. “Soon you’ll be able to make your own.”
They took the cards home and Val spread them out on the kitchen counter. Her mother mouthed the words silently:
A dog
A psychiatrist
Val’s father picked a card up.
“Praise and affirmation?” He laughed a mean laugh.
The next week, he lashed out at the therapist. They weren’t paying this much for toys.
“Not toys,” the therapist said. “Tools.”
Sometimes the therapist asked Val what she was feeling, but she never said much. Mostly, she drew patterns in a sand tray with a miniature wood rake. When her mother squeezed her hand, she squeezed back. Val didn’t know the last session was the last session, but there wasn’t time to wonder why. She went off to college, which everyone said made them very proud.
* * *
—
At the end of August, Zeke spent the weekend with Val’s roommate in Connecticut. Val texted him too often. He said everything was fun or wild or dope. He said the bathrooms were elegant but small. He hadn’t seen the urinal or the bidet. After that, Val doubted herself. Maybe it had all just been a rumor. She sat in front of her portable fan until her cheeks tingled, wondering how many of her memories could be corroborated by reliable witnesses. How many were hers alone?
On Sunday, her texts turned from blue to green. Where were they, wandering in and out of cell phone service? Val pictured romantic scenes from movies. When she ran out of ideas, she googled professing love in film. She checked the weather in Connecticut to see if it was raining. In the best love scenes, it was always raining.
Val wondered if this was jealousy, but she didn’t really want to be a part of Zeke’s romance. She didn’t have the energy to be involved in the story she imagined for him. The story that took him from one coast to the other and maybe back again, that involved detours and dead ends and split-second decisions, that did not involve plans, because he believed what he had been told: it was the journey, not the destination. She resented him for believing in clichés, and envied him, too. Experience confirmed that kissing in the rain looked better than it felt. Water filled your mouth, dripped off your nose like snot.
The fan broke while the sun was setting, the sky watermelon pink. When Val masturbated, toggling between YouTube clips of cinematic kisses and bookmarked porn, her sweat soaked into the couch beneath her. The cushions turned from light beige to dark beige. She imagined Zeke sweaty, too—liquid pooling in the basin of his chest. She imagined her roommate bent over him, sipping from the basin. It was hard to find a place for herself in the fantasy. She imagined licking the sweat from their faces or their armpits or the creases behind their knees, but this just made her laugh. The only thing she could picture was sitting—cool and dry—in the corner of the room. She finished distractedly and closed the laptop, which by now was almost too hot to touch. What kind of person, she thought, fakes an orgasm to herself?
Val went to the bar without showering. The bar three blocks away instead of the bar on the corner, to convince herself she was making an effort. There were votive candles on all the tables and garnishes in all the drinks. Thinly shaved radishes, purple and green. The bartender looked relieved when Val ordered the cheapest can of beer. She bought him a shot of whiskey and he made her a cocktail that smelled like charcoal. She bought him a shot of nicer whiskey.
The couples in the bar leaned over their candles, as if they were warmed by the tiny flames. Confiding in each other, nursing their drinks impossibly slowly. The woman next to Val let the ice in her cocktail melt into fingernail squares. The next time she took a shot, Val threw her head back ostentatiously. The alcohol found its way into her nostrils and burned.
When the bar was finally closed—the surfaces wiped down, the sticky pour spouts left to soak in glasses of blue soap—Val had sex with the bartender in the refrigerated walk-in where the kegs were stored. Underneath his shirt, the bartender had a bird of prey tattooed across his chest and, below it, the lines of a poem she had seen all over Instagram. He sucked her neck and she worried about it leaving a mark. The cold made her less drunk. She tried to muster energy or abandon, and the effort made her even more sober.
While they were getting dressed, Zeke’s text arrived. A picture of the urinal—clean white porcelain, a golden drain. You were right. Outside, the bartender checked the lock twice and pulled the grate down behind them. When he asked for her number, Val thought about saying no, and then she said yes, already wondering how much time she would spend responding to his texts, then avoiding them altogether.
You’re always right.
And why was there no pleasure in that?
* * *
—
That whole summer, Zeke never once asked about her parents. Val didn’t mention her brother, and it occurred to her that there were hardly any clues he existed. A Polaroid of them as kids marking her place in a novel she hadn’t read in months. A contact in her phone. What a mean reward, she thought, for his survival: to be scrubbed out of her life anyway.
She wanted to explain them all—she wanted Zeke to understand them all—but she didn’t know where to start. Her father ordered cereal when they went out to breakfast. Her mother hated opening gifts in front of an audience. Her brother had a photographic memory, which he insisted was a curse. So much clutter in his head.
Who were these people, collaged together from her own partial memories, from scraps of details with glue stick smeared purple on the back? They sounded like characters from the salad girls’ stories, nameless figures moved around on a stage. She pictured all four of them in the therapist’s office, from above: the moles on her dad’s head, her mom’s silver roots, her own ponytail pulled too tight. Did her brother have long or short hair? A shaved head? For the first time, she felt not angry or sad but sorry.
“My mom’s saving up for a rhinoplasty,” Val told Zeke one night while they were drinking seltzer and getting stoned.
“A what?”
She didn’t answer. Their seltzer crackled. She wanted to make him feel this—how much she would miss her mother’s face, how much she wished for her to be happy—but already she knew that whatever she said would be incomplete.
“Never mind.” She finished the seltzer too quickly. Her throat stung. She burped loudly, so he would laugh.
When Labor Day arrived, Val offered to throw Z
eke a going-away party, assuming she would have to provide the guests. But Zeke had friends Val had never heard of. A boy with unlaced skateboarding shoes. The owner of the bagel shop down the street. A woman her mother’s age. Val felt betrayed.
“I can’t serve a teenager booze,” she said indignantly, pointing at the boy in sneakers.
“I’m a teenager,” Zeke said, perplexed.
She stayed in the kitchen for most of the party, pouring stingy drinks for whoever wandered in from the living room. A liter of Diet Coke erupted in her face. The hot apartment got hotter and hotter. Zeke opened all the windows, then gave everyone permission to take off their shirts.
“Not that you need permission.”
The bagel shop owner’s pectoral muscles reminded Val of supermarket chicken. One woman had an appendix scar, another had a belly-button ring. Eventually, everyone went off to a bar, and then Val was alone. She took a cold shower in the empty apartment, so she could imagine her pores contracting. She hated knowing that her skin was full of holes.
Val was taking big, effortful breaths—the cold made her lungs feel stiff—when the door opened and Zeke came in. The shower curtain was mostly transparent, with a map of the world in bright colors. She hid her pubic hair behind South America. His shirt was half on, one arm hanging out of its sleeve.
“Are we going to kiss before I leave?” Zeke said.
Val turned the water off.
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re my brother.”
“I’m not.”
Already, the heat was probably making her skin expand. She pictured the oil underneath it—yellow and industrial, like something you’d submerge french fries in. Zeke came right up to the shower curtain, pressing his nose into Greenland. His eyes crossed, staring down at the trembly line of its coast, and then he looked up, straight at her.
“You’ve thought about it,” he said. “Admit it.”
The grout between the bathroom tiles was grey with the beginnings of mold and there were orange rings where bottles had once been. A list of tasks took shape in Val’s head—steel wool and liquids that burned where they sprayed. The list reassured her.
“What does thinking have to do with it?” she said angrily, staring determinedly at northern Canada.
Zeke stepped back, and for a moment Val felt herself rush into the space that had opened up between them. Her nakedness thrilled her. Her breasts looked good, the way they usually didn’t.
“I can tell when you’re thinking about it,” he said.
And just like that her longing collapsed. She hated him. Hated that he was young and skinny and unironic, hated above all that he had made it so easy to say: You don’t know me. She could see the back of his head in the mirror behind him, the whirl of hair at the base of his neck. She could see the parts of him he couldn’t.
* * *
—
The morning after they didn’t sleep together, Zeke didn’t miss his plane and didn’t text her when he landed. Val never asked him to keep in touch. She cleaned the bathroom.
Things went back to normal.
She moved on.
Neither version was true, but Val tried to choose between them anyway. To figure out which one sounded better—backward or forward.
Sometimes, on the way to the subway, she experienced a moment of panic, convinced that her own movement was only an illusion of the bodies in motion around her. She walked the rest of the way with her eyes on her feet, proof that each step was getting her somewhere. At the station, she bought a new fare card every day, even though it was more expensive that way. It helped, to ask and receive.
It was summer again when her brother emailed her. She had a new ceiling fan and a new roommate. In the email, he told her he’d bought a ticket to California, where he knew someone with citrus trees and a fuel-efficient car. There were fires all along the coast that year. Val read about them jumping over highways and looked at pictures of hills turned volcanic orange. The day before her brother’s departure, his friend’s house had burned to the ground. He went anyway. He read the news from an air-conditioned motel room. There were homemade signs on the side of the road and at the grocery store, thanking the firefighters. First responders, he wrote—isn’t that a good term?
Val didn’t write back for a few days. It rained for a long time in New York, which seemed unfair. She closed all the windows and let the air inside the apartment get hot and stale. There was a website that showed the movement of the fires in real time, and Val watched the screen for hours, orange and red dots blinking, growing, engulfing everything they touched. In a dream, she rang the doorbell to her own house and everything crumbled to ash. When she woke up, she took off her clothes, damp with sweat, and checked the fires. The page loaded slowly. Please, she thought, and hated herself for thinking it, don’t let them be gone. The rain collided with her window. The dots danced in the dark.
BRENDA
.
Brenda lives in a trailer, in the driveway of the house she bought and razed and gave up on. The trailer has recently been cleaned and there’s tea lisping on the miniature stove, because one of her students is coming by. While she waits, Brenda scrolls through the afternoon’s major headlines and checks the expiration dates on the items in her minifridge. There’s milk and fake milk, a nub of butter, yogurt with a pool of yogurt water in the center.
The college where Brenda works is small, unbeautiful. Cinder-block buildings and a cafeteria that serves outdated things—Jell-O cups and croutons in every salad. She walks to class. What Brenda teaches is called creative writing. Not so long ago, it was called creative nonfiction, but the non frightened people off. The department head, a woman with silver hair and one elegant pair of earrings that she wears on all occasions, likes to remind Brenda that genre bending is fashionable. She says fashionable with a certain weariness. Men, she says with the same weariness, wouldn’t take a class called memoir.
On the first day of this year—her sixth year of teaching—Brenda announced that office hours would take place at her house. This is an unavoidably personal class, she told her students, by way of explanation, which is true. It is also true that Brenda avoids her office more and more: her colleagues and her deadlines, her dirty keyboard and her notebooks warped with spilled things.
In general, Brenda’s students fall into three categories. There are students with very dramatic lives, which they write about honestly, and poorly. They have endured floods and wars, big plots, evil characters. One of them has a long-lost sister. Then there are students who believe they have dramatic lives, who write at length about small mishaps and deliver the meaning of their stories—the meaning of their lives—in two or three concluding sentences. It is through these stories that Brenda comes to know the names of family pets and the predictable twists and turns of divorce proceedings. Finally, there are students whose greatest fear is that they have no drama at all. They come to Brenda’s office and tell her they have nothing to say—nothing worth saying. They write long, precise paragraphs about objects—a papaya, a riverbed, an old man’s chin—to avoid writing about other things. What they avoid most of all is plot.
Brenda likes these students best. She puts check marks in their margins. The slippery meat inside a melon. She insists: everyone has a story to tell.
* * *
—
When Brenda and her boyfriend Sam moved here, they worried about everything they were leaving behind. They had only ever lived together in big cities where there were thousands of restaurants, where the airport—the water—was never more than half an hour away. Sam could do his job from almost anywhere and Brenda, it seemed, from almost nowhere. There were only so many teaching positions. They took what they could get. The college was near the desert and near the mountains, but the town itself wasn’t much to look at. Gravelly yards and dinky pools, kid
s on fat-tired bikes careening through red lights. For the first few years, they rented apartments, buying new plants every time they moved. They couldn’t believe how affordable it was. Brenda filled an extra closet with blue jugs of water, because everyone had warned her about the tap. Like drinking pesticides, her students told her. The second worst in the country, they said, with a hint of pride. The plants, Brenda thought, all looked a little like weapons: sharp spines, leaves that could have been shields.
The realtor saw them hesitate. The future, he said, was a place they could choose to go. They smiled in spite of themselves.
They signed the papers, demolished the house, and stood transfixed by the size of the hole in the ground. There were a few good months. When the rain turned the hole muddy, they stomped in puddles like kids. They hammered with nails clamped between their lips and stepped on each other’s steel-toed boots for the pleasure of not feeling.
They couldn’t get enough of construction metaphors: knocking down walls, building a foundation. The sound of power tools revving to life was joy and fear.
“Like getting high,” Sam said, when the power saw had gone quiet.
“No,” Brenda said, sawdust in her hair and her eyebrows. “Like being alive.”
Then, last year, Sam left. He bought a plane ticket to New York, where his sister and her husband lived in an apartment they couldn’t quite afford. They were ambitious and always tired. They didn’t have an extra room, but they had a couch.
There was no especially good reason for leaving. Sam cried more than Brenda did. He might have been crying from guilt, or from pain, or just from the surprise of saying secret, unkind things out loud—the surprise of being a person you can’t admire and can’t escape.
It was impossible to keep building after that. The tarps flapped noisily at night and there were nails everywhere. Brenda made the trailer clean and spare, stared out the window while the light faded and the wood and bricks turned into ominous shapes. Suddenly, the metaphors were ugly. All they had really been doing was digging a hole.
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