by Leigh Stein
Become a woman who can form an instant friendship with anyone who has lost a parent, child, friend, or lover. It’s a club. You’re a member. Though he rarely talks about it, your boyfriend also belongs; he lost his dad to cancer when he was twenty-seven. When you watch old movies together, he likes to guess which actors are gone and which, unbelievably, are still alive.
How quickly the membership grows. You memorize the line, Lovely to meet you. So sorry it was under these circumstances.
In Dodge City, Kansas, you attend the funeral of your thirty-two-year-old cousin, found dead in a basement apartment near a meatpacking plant. A few months later there’s a funeral in a cathedral on the Jersey Shore for a girl whose suicide no one is naming a suicide; her mother’s black flip-flops slap the cold marble floor. Your best friend loses both her parents in quick succession, calls you when you’re eating a sandwich in Miami Beach to tell you how her dad was found, and you go to Philadelphia to hear her deliver a eulogy and help transport an elderly cat. You do your best saying kaddish for your boyfriend’s grandfather who survived the camps, and go to Long Island on your twenty-ninth birthday for the headstone unveiling. After the service, someone hands you a big piece of cake.
“We don’t have weddings in our family,” your boyfriend’s great-aunt explains. “We have funerals.”
Get married.
Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen next?
You’ve been waiting for the end of this chapter of your life to present itself, like the finish line of a marathon, and maybe this is what you’ve been waiting for. Marriage seems like the happy ending your family wants for you. So why do you resist?
It’s not that you don’t love him, this tall, kind, private person whom you’ve lived with for one, two, three years, more. Soon you will have known him for even longer than you knew the boy who died. But a wedding wouldn’t change what you have or what you lost or who you are. Your getting over it does not mean an aisle where one him is replaced by another.
Signs
(2014)
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
Before I went back, I told everyone where I was going. And in response, they all said, You’re going to Mexico? By yourself? One friend sent an e-mail to say, Have a great time in Arizona.
It felt as if I was returning to a state that existed only in my mind. A mental state known as the Land of Enchantment. For almost three years I imagined what it would be like to go back there without Jason in the driver’s seat, without any way to reach him and say, Remember this? and it was trepidation that prevented me from making a move. I was afraid of how badly I wanted this return trip to mean something. But what if my expectations were dangerously high? What if I got all the way out there, stood under the banner of that sky, and felt nothing? What if that land was, just as my relationship with Jason had been, more beautiful in memory than in life?
When I get there, I thought, the sign that I’m where I’m supposed to be will be waiting for me. Even though I envied the signs Callista seemed to always be receiving from the beyond, I already had so many signs I could remember interpreting when Jason was still alive: signs that we should be together, signs that we should stay apart, signs that staying apart would never work and that in the end I would always be tied to him, for better or worse. And then there were the signs that he would die young, never see thirty, and he knew it.
Jason’s childhood sweetheart wasn’t at his funeral. I’d never met her, but I’d spent plenty of time jealously and obsessively imagining their relationship: how they rode the school bus together, how they rode the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier when she came to visit. She was his first love and she always would be, which might be okay, I used to think, as long as I could be his last. I blamed her for ruining my twenty-third birthday in Albuquerque by mailing Jason a romantic photo scrapbook (I was the one who checked the mail). He locked it in the briefcase he’d bought at Salvation Army, but I found the key and looked at it while he was at work. The birthday was ruined when I told him I’d seen everything, including pictures of her in brown lingerie.
“That wasn’t lingerie,” he argued, “that was her nightgown.”
At the funeral, I asked if anyone had called Becca to tell her.
“She’s nine months pregnant,” his brother told me. “We called her family but they didn’t want to . . . to jeopardize the pregnancy.”
Six months later, she sent me a message on Facebook:
You don’t know me. It took ten years, but Jason managed to make me fall for him, too. I’ll never forget what he told me one day (during the days he thought he was James Dean).
Jason: “I won’t live to be twenty-seven.”
Me: “Don’t say that! Yes, you will.”
(And then every day of my life after we stopped talking- he will live right? he’s still okay today, right?)
Gah, I wish I had called him one last time. I had long since married and moved on from Jason’s violent and crazy life, but he always hid deep in a tiny spot of my heart.
You don’t know me. I kept returning to this line. I knew enough. I wish I could say we were in some kind of sorority of exes together, Phi Beta Eros, but Becca had “moved on,” the way characters do in books—marry another man, have a baby. Without a husband or a child to hold, I was stuck cherishing what I’d lost instead of what I’d found. But maybe there was another ending waiting for me? Another kind of “getting over”?
As time passed, I did the most ordinary thing: I got older. I loosened my grip on this hurt, and my petty grievances toward Becca. When I finally went back to New Mexico, three years after Jason’s death, I wasn’t looking for signs that I was most beloved, treasured even from beyond. Still, I thought I would feel Jason with me, in the land that we called our own.
On the flight to Albuquerque, the baby in the row behind me screamed for three hours while I tried to read a book with the word empathy in the title. One of the book’s chapters was called “Pain Tours.” Was I embarking upon one of those? I made conversation with the man seated beside me, who also lived in Brooklyn. His laptop was open to a spreadsheet that had something to do with his health work in Africa that I didn’t totally understand. He was on his way toward northern New Mexico, to spend spring break with his wife and children. They were seated a few rows ahead with his mother-in-law, who had long gray hair and silver and turquoise jewelry on all her exposed tan skin. She looked like so many other women I’d seen in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Abiquiu—sun-stricken and stoic, O’Keeffe reincarnate, a vision of the aesthetic I fantasized for myself in forty or fifty years.
“And how about you? Work? Vacation?”
“I used to live in Albuquerque,” I said, “with my boyfriend. And then he died. I’m going back for the first time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I hadn’t made him uncomfortable: that was good. But this guy works with sick people in Africa, I reminded myself, he can handle it. I remembered the tattoo I had wanted after Jason died, the watercolor painting that I thought could be my shorthand, my beautiful transition into the same sad story I found myself telling over and over again. I hated making other people uncomfortable, but I also felt a compulsion to say those words and then he died to everyone, lest they not understand where I was coming from.
When I lived in New York the first time, at nineteen, I worked every weekend at a nightclub checking coats until four in the morning, in a basement hallway that should have been a fire escape. One night I got carbon monoxide poisoning and blacked out (at least I think it was carbon monoxide poisoning: I didn’t go to the hospital until the next day and they said it was most likely that, but too many hours had passed to officially test my blood). Then someone opened the door to the back alley and the smell of garbage and fish and
night air came in, and I woke back up, had to keep working until we closed. I was going through a phase when I only wore the color pink, and my boss called me “sweet.” In his West African accent he said, “Sweet, it’s okay to feel a little pain and push through it because that’s how you grow up.” And I thought, You don’t know anything about me or my pain. At that point, I had been medicated for depression for six years. I didn’t know how to tell him he was wrong about me. I also didn’t know that he was right: that there was still so much more pain to come, so much more growing up still left to do.
I’d always defined my adolescence by the depression and suicidal thoughts that shaped it. When I met Jason at twenty-two, the stories he told me of his own adolescence made mine seem so pale and ordinary in comparison. My twenties were ignited by his presence, and then clouded by the smoke of his absence. Although I could think of examples of how I’d “pushed through,” the narrative I told about my life usually went, “And then this happened to me.” I was ready for a future that was shaped not by what happened to me but rather by what I made happen.
In the airplane bathroom mirror, I found a new gray hair on my head and pulled it out. I was twenty-nine years old, a decade away from the girl who had passed out in the fire escape. If Jason was with me, he would have just had his twenty-sixth birthday. Unlike my lifeline, which felt like it extended toward the horizon indefinitely, Jason’s was fixed in time, a finite number set: April 5, 1988–July 21, 2011. With those set dates, I could build a calendar of anniversaries: birthday, death day, day we met, day we moved, day we moved back, last morning I saw him. I could still remember the soft texture of his hair, even though he’d so rarely let me run my fingers through it. I thought I could remember what the sun felt like in New Mexico, and I was going back to see if my memory was accurate. Maybe that’s what I use anniversaries for: to prick my memories, prove that I haven’t forgotten a single thing.
The plane landed at the Albuquerque Sunport. I said good-bye to the man and went to claim my suitcase from the baggage carousel. I picked up my rental car and rolled down the windows. The sun I loved was setting, and the lights of the city sparkled against the russet horizon. I drove north.
I stayed in Albuquerque for a few days, eating green chile breakfast burritos and catching up with old friends. I went for a run in the Bosque, along a path framed by cottonwoods. I drove down Route 66, expecting to see something that I had forgotten was there, but the most surprising thing was that everything I saw—bus stop near the fairgrounds, faded sign above the taxidermy shop, Del Taco by the train tracks—matched the blueprint of my memory. I’d been haunting myself with visions of this place, but it wasn’t gone or destroyed; the Land of Enchantment lived on.
And yet I found no sign of Jason anywhere.
None of the songs he loved played on the radio, I didn’t find his name written on any dollar bills, no sunset evoked his spirit, and I wasn’t visited in dreams. Had I really expected all that? Was that what I really wanted? I could try and convince myself that the absence of signs was, in itself, a sign: that Jason was finally leaving me alone, giving me his blessing to go on, but then I would have to admit that even from beyond he still had a say in my destiny.
I didn’t want to give him that power anymore.
Every day I drove around the city that I loved, but I did not go back to our old apartment, to see the door on which Vicky knocked, the hot tub where José told us about La Llorona, the parking lot where Diane taught me how to drive her truck. I did not go back to the diner and ask one of the busboys to make me a coffee malt. I did not go back to Walmart to see if the coin-operated rides were still outside the front doors.
Look at me, here without him. Not for the first time, but for the first time without Jason at most a phone call away. And Brian was back in Brooklyn, because this was my journey to go on, not his. So where did that leave me, without a man to show me what kind of woman I was?
Before Jason’s death, I was just starting to figure out the answer to that question—evidenced by the instinct I had to stop dating Brian when it wasn’t working for me, the confidence Jason recognized in me during his last visit, and the courage I had to finally ignore his phone calls, after months and years of wishing I could.
It wasn’t as easy as swapping out the bad guy for a good one. It was me. I was the one who had evolved, from the girl auditioning for every girlfriend role, trying to be so cool and nice and interesting and funny but also as beautiful as possible and sexy and never a nag or a victim or a drag, to the woman who could quit acting and just say, This is it. This is who I am.
Though we’d lived in New Mexico for only six months, Jason and I had spent years in a state of enchantment. In our isolated and sometimes beautiful kingdom, each moment was so intense and vivid, I felt spellbound to stay. Even when I recognized the cycle of abuse, I was convinced that if I left the lows behind I would never again have another high. The fact that my friends and family had such a hard time understanding this seemed like yet another sign that Jason and I belonged in a kingdom apart.
When Jason worked as a security guard for the movie studios in Albuquerque, he had a lot of time to sit around, so I checked out books for him from the library, or he read whatever I’d checked out for myself. For a week we shared a single copy of Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie, trading it back and forth every fifty or a hundred pages.
Toward the end of that week, Jason shook me awake in bed. “Do you think Charles is going to get her back?”
“Get who back?” I mumbled.
“Laura! In the book!”
I laughed when I realized he’d rather ask me, since I had finished the novel first, than flip ahead and find out for himself. “Not telling,” I said, and went back to sleep.
In this way, I used to want to know the ending to our own story. I collected signs as a way to flip ahead and predict the future.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to return to New Mexico to look for signs.
Maybe I was supposed to return to see how I could live without them.
Epilogue
(2015)
A few days before I finished writing this book, my bedroom at my parents’ house in Illinois caught fire from a candle placed too close to some window curtains. My mom and dad ran outside in their pajamas, but their beloved cat was lost inside the black smoke and did not come when called. The firefighters carried his small body out of the house shrouded in a towel.
When I got the phone call about what had happened, all I could think about was that cat, terrified and confused, spending the last moments of his life unable to hear or see a way out.
It was a day or two later before I began to mentally inventory what was also lost: the notebooks in which I’d copied Plath poems at thirteen, the shoe box containing Daniel’s letter to me on Beauty and the Beast stationery, my singing trophies, all my play scripts, the toy alligator souvenir, the books and bookshelves Jason once threatened to burn if I didn’t go back to him in Albuquerque.
On the wall of my bedroom, there was a four-foot-high panel of wallpaper depicting Gustav Klimt’s ornate gold painting of Adele Bloch—red lips slightly parted, her long neck braced with pearls. When this, too, burned, the fire left another image behind in its place. “Like The Twilight Zone,” my mom told me over the phone.
“What do you mean?”
She texted me a photo. There was another face now. Not where Adele’s had been—high, nearing the ceiling—but in the lower left-hand corner, at the boundary where the painting ended and the wall began.
I knew right away whose face it was.
It was my face. The plain dark hair, the bold brow and dark lashes, flat planes of my cheeks.
“It kind of looks like my face?” I texted back, implying doubt even though I felt certain, in case she didn’t see the same thing that I did.
“To me it looks more like Botticelli’s Venus. But yes, clearly a
face! So weird, right?”
I looked again. I didn’t see Venus. No, I wanted to say, you’re wrong. But maybe we each saw what we wanted to see. It was an optical illusion that symbolized how differently we viewed moving on. It was my mom who’d lit the candle that had set the curtains aflame, but she could overcome this tragic accident if she visualized the face of a goddess reborn from the ashes. I wanted to see a part of myself left behind in that room, so I could mourn her.
I know I’m a dweller. I ruminate; I replay memories. I knew Jason for four and a half years, and spent the next four unraveling our relationship and examining how it shaped the woman I’ve become. My mother is the opposite of a dweller. She is a healer, a fixer, a silver-lining seeker. When I was suicidal, a doctor’s appointment was made, medication prescribed. When Jason broke my heart, she ordered a self-help book. When we moved to New Mexico, more self-help books. Albuquerque became our family’s vacation destination once my complicated relationship was removed from the equation.
To a healer or a fixer, my dwelling might seem depressive and counterproductive, like I’m stalling the forward momentum of my destiny. But I’m at peace with the darkness in life coexisting with the bright spots. I can grip a fistful of losses in one hand, and still carry a handful of beautiful moments in the other.
In the summer of 2014, a few months after I went back by myself to New Mexico, Brian and I took a vacation to Prague and Budapest. There are photos of us standing on the Charles Bridge, sitting in a booth at the opera, riding the funicular down from Buda Castle. Brian’s arms are so long that our selfies look like they were taken by a stranger on the street.