The Blurry Years

by Eleanor Kriseman

  Somehow the place seemed full of regulars, people who’d known and drank around each other for years, though I knew that couldn’t be true. The darkness was a welcome change from the glaring fluorescence of the lights in the terminal, though it was still just as loud, and I found an empty stool next to a woman in a suit, drinking a martini. It was pretty early in the morning still. I just ordered a beer. I saw the woman register my presence with a quick, slight look in my direction and I felt embarrassed by my outfit, my choice of drink. Compared to her, I just looked sloppy.

  She kept looking over at me until I realized she wasn’t judging me, at least not in the way I’d originally thought. Her gaze, made softer and less subtle by the martinis (now I noticed the empty glass beside the other one), lingered on my face, on the skin of my thighs showing through the rips in my jeans. She swiveled toward me, and smiled. She asked where I was headed, and I didn’t know quite how to answer that, so instead I just asked her the same question. It was easy not to reveal anything about yourself as long as you asked the right questions of someone else.

  Barbara was on her way back to Indianapolis, where she lived—she’d been in Florida for business. “Well, that sounds glamorous,” I said, wanting to take it back immediately.

  She laughed. “Honey, I’m sitting in an airport sports bar, waiting on a flight that’s been delayed… three times now. I barely left the airport hotel the whole time I was here. It’s quite far from glamorous.”

  “But you’re doing it,” I said. I was jealous. I couldn’t imagine having a job that would require me to fly to different cities on a regular basis—that I would ever be considered that important to where my actual presence was needed. “They want you there. In person. It must be a good feeling, to be needed that way.”

  She smiled, and flagged down the bartender with a gentle wave of her hand. “Another one of these, please? Actually, two.” The bartender walked away, and Barbara smacked her forehead playfully. “Here I go again! I just assumed you’d want another drink—and that you’d want what I was drinking. Stupid me.” I had an odd desire to comfort her.

  “No, no, I like martinis,” I said, only half-lying, not even. I wanted to drink this one, at least. If only to please her.

  “Thank god,” she said, and exhaled with a dramatic whoosh. “Now we know we’ve got at least one thing in common.” She raised her eyebrow at me and smiled. Barbara was flirting with me, I was pretty sure. It was an unsettling feeling. Foreign, but strangely familiar. And even more strange to find myself flirting back. Was I doing it out of habit, on autopilot? Out of a desire to please? Or for my own enjoyment? I was so out of touch that I didn’t even know the answer. So I kept talking, just to drown out any doubt that I had.

  “Oh, I’ve been a pharmaceutical rep for years,” she said, elbows on the bar, twirling the olive-studded toothpick from her drink between her fingers. “Used to be a man’s world, let me tell you. Not so much anymore.” I must have looked at her suit, her short hair, for a beat too long, because she added, “I don’t need short skirts or long blond hair to make my numbers. I’m that good.” Was she flirting? I noticed her ring finger was bare.

  Barbara was the kind of woman my mom would have made fun of, rolled her eyes after I’d told her about our conversation. “Pathetic,” she would have said, an expression of disdain on her face that I’d only recently come to see was strikingly similar to envy. I could hear her as clearly as if she were sitting on my other side, knocking back a beer and whispering sloppily in my ear. “Sure, she gets that paycheck every two weeks, bam. But you really think she’s happy, Cal? That kind of job is just going to make you miserable. Stuck at a desk all day; spreadsheets and meetings and phone calls where nobody says what they mean.” I wasn’t going to listen to her. How would she even know? She’d never worked an office job in her life.

  Made bold by the drinks I’d had already, I asked her how her boyfriend felt, if she had one, about her traveling all the time. Barbara laughed loudly. “I don’t think I’ve had a boyfriend since high school,” she said. “Not interested.”

  I pressed further. “Not interested in relationships?” She rotated in her chair, with great effort, it seemed, in order to face me more directly.

  “In men,” she said, and leaned back defiantly, as if she were waiting for me to act shocked, or disgusted.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I nodded.

  “I’m now sensing. From your reaction.” Barbara was punctuating the middle of her sentences now. ““That you. In fact are.”

  “I am what?”

  “Interested in men.” She exhaled in a way that made me think of a giant helium balloon losing air. “My fault. I just looked over and saw this beautiful woman, and you were wearing—” she gestured to my baggy jeans, the old t-shirt, the leather jacket hanging over the back of my chair.

  I bit my lip. This would be a different kind of rejection, less and more personal at the same time. Yes. I was definitely only interested in men, I reassured myself. “Oh!” I said stupidly, “Yeah, actually. I do like men. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Before I could finish, the music changed, and Carly Simon’s voice, tinny but loud, began to pump out of the speakers.

  Oh, mother, say a prayer for me. I was seized by an anxiety so powerful that I felt glued to the barstool. I hadn’t heard that song in years, not since I’d been in the car with my mom on the way to Eugene for the first time. This was the song we’d been listening to when we hit the rabbit. I felt an irrational fear that something just as sudden was going to happen to me now, on my way to Eugene just like we’d been the first time. Was it a sign? No. I dismissed that immediately. It wasn’t a sign. It was just a sudden and unexpected immersion in the past.

  “I have to go,” I said to Barbara, and threw some money on the bar for my beer. I heard her call after me, in a voice tinted with genuine concern, but I didn’t look back. I curled up in a row of empty leather seats by my gate and closed my eyes. I was twelve again, turning up the dial on that car radio, blissfully happy even though I had no idea what we would do next. That had been one of the last moments when my mother would seem like a hero, of any kind, to me.

  As a parent, you can try to keep things secret from your children. You can try to conceal the cracks in your life, the dirty and perpetual work that goes into making life just a little bit better, the cheap and dangerous shortcuts you take to experience something that could almost pass for joy because you’re terrified of actually trying to find it, and failing miserably.

  But as a child, you see everything. You already have all the pieces, the memories, the fleeting moments you bore witness to but didn’t understand. You don’t know that you’re just waiting for the day when you’ll know enough about your own self to assemble them. It won’t happen until much later. But when it does, it will feel like finally throwing away a map to a city you’ve been navigating uncertainly for years.

  I willed myself not to cry. This must have been the way she felt. Traveling blindly away from home, putting all her trust in the idea that someone—anyone—would be there. Not even waiting for her, just there. I could have been a better daughter, I thought. I could have been so much better.

  I stayed there long after the song ended, eyes still closed, until it was time to board.

  Shoving my bag underneath the seat in front of me, I glanced at my neighbor, a woman already settled in the window seat. She smiled wide, in a friendly way, but also in a way that suggested she was looking for approval, reciprocity, that she’d been smiling like that for so long that it was almost reflexive. I wasn’t sure if I was embarrassed for her or jealous of her—I’d been training myself to hide that kind of vulnerability for years.

  “Paula,” she said, with a heavy Central Florida accent, holding out her hand, impeccably manicured, in a pastel shade of lavender.

  “Oh!” I said, and realized she was expecting me to shake her hand, which I did.

  “Cal,” I said, imitating her. She smiled again and I saw a
smudge of lipstick on her front tooth. I didn’t say anything. That was the price you paid for vulnerability. She smoothed her denim dress and buckled her seatbelt, taking out a Danielle Steel novel while a flight attendant explained how the oxygen masks worked, how the cushions underneath our seats would double as flotation devices. Upon takeoff, I clutched the armrests so tightly that my fingers took a minute to uncurl. When I took out the safety packet, Paula tapped me lightly on the shoulder, and I startled, unused to touch. “If it’s our time, it’s our time,” she said. “The Lord does everything for a reason.” I wanted to ask her if she really thought that, if she would stay calm if the plane were truly going down, refuse to pull down her oxygen mask, be found amidst the wreckage, dead and bloodied, still buckled in, that serene smile frozen on her face. People were infuriatingly good at knowing what they would do until they actually found themselves in that situation. But I stayed silent. Paula went back to her book.

  I’d meant to read on the plane, but after the airport bar and Barbara and my mother’s voice in my head, I realized I was flipping pages without absorbing anything, reading the same paragraphs over and over. I wasn’t attracted to Barbara. I knew that, probably. But I wondered how many other times my mother’s voice had been in my head, quieter, a slight sinister background noise—how many times I’d let her, or my idea of her, make my decisions for me.

  I opened my eyes to see the ground slowly approaching through Paula’s window. “We’ll be landing in about fifteen minutes,” the captain announced over the intercom. “Welcome to Eugene.” I rubbed my eyes, coming out of the thick fog of a dreamless sleep. I was so close. The wheels slammed down, and we hurtled across the tarmac. I stared past Paula out the window while we waited for the rows in front of us to empty. As we filed off the plane, I had this feeling, like being on the edge of a diving board as a child, with a line forming behind you. You couldn’t turn back. You just had to jump, trust that the water would catch you when you dove.

  Even though we’d talked on the phone a lot after that first conversation, I was nervous to see Starr. I was supposed to call her from a payphone when my plane landed but before I did that, I found a bathroom by the baggage carousels where I washed my face at the sink, blotting my skin with cheap paper towels that made it rough and reddened. I took out my canister of dry shampoo and sprayed my hairline, flipping my head over and messing up my hair with my hands while I waited for the redness on my cheeks to fade. I still used the same brand of dry shampoo that Starr had handed me in her bathroom years ago. And every time I sprayed it, eyes closed, the scent made me feel like I was back in that bathroom, learning. Happy.

  19

  I still sleep in the guestroom, except it’s not the guestroom anymore, it’s my own bedroom, and most nights I’m sleeping in the master bedroom anyway. But it’s important to have boundaries, Starr says, and we try not to spend every night together. She’s older now, obviously, but she’s stopped wearing all that makeup, except for some peachy blush and lipstick on special occasions, and she looks kinder somehow, more relaxed. Her hair is still impeccable.

  She lives in the same house, but Russ is gone. “Kicked him to the curb pretty soon after you two went back to Florida,” she says with a heavy laugh, one that confirms another thing I didn’t want to believe about my mother. Starr’s done me the favor of not telling me the exact reason she and Russ broke up, but she didn’t have to say anything for me to know it had something to do with that check from Russ that my mom and I drove off with. She’s still working out of her house part-time, but now she’s doing hair and makeup for the local news station, and every weekday morning for a couple hours she’s at the studio, putting bronzer on the female—and male—news anchors, and making sure their hair stays in place the whole time they’re on air.

  I took the GED in Eugene and got my diploma, and started feeling less like a complete fuck-up. Starr found me a receptionist job at the news studio where she worked, and we carpooled there in the mornings. “Take your time,” she said. “Don’t just go out and get another waitress job. Figure out what you want out of life before you go jumping right back in.”

  On that awful, silent drive back from Eugene years before, my mom had dismissed Starr as a complete idiot. “She’s unreal,” my mom said. “She has no idea what’s going on around her. She lets people walk all over her.” I wondered then if my mom was talking about herself, but I didn’t ask. I was already in enough trouble. I’d never thought Starr was dumb, but talking to her now, I realized how much good advice she gave, and how much she knew and didn’t let on. Just because she’d gone to bed early didn’t mean she was oblivious to what had been going on in her living room. “It’s easier when you act like you have no clue,” she said. “Easier to surprise people. I like that.”

  She knew I wasn’t calling her to escape. I’d already done that. She sent me a plane ticket. “I know you’ll pay me back,” she said. “Doesn’t matter when.”

  “You’ll know where I’m living anyway,” I said, and we both laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a joke about my own life that hadn’t made me sad.

  I was learning, but Starr was patient and kind and comforting, and being with her felt so much more right than any of the men I’d fucked before. In a way, it was like I’d already had a map of her body for years, just with slightly different proportions, and once I thought about it that way, it felt almost intuitive. “I just love people,” she said, when I tried to make sense of her romantic past. “It doesn’t matter who or what they are.” I thought about that for a long time, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. You just want someone who makes you feel good.

  “You’re gonna kick me out of bed when I turn forty,” she said once, afterward, as we lay naked and sweaty in her king-sized bed. I laughed, and ran my hand down her stomach, her skin as soft as it had been when I’d zipped up her dress years ago. “Never,” I said, and meant it. She traced the constellation on my arm. I leaned over and kissed her, and she pulled me on top of her. Lying on top of Starr, my limbs mirroring hers, I remembered that night on Marcus and Daryl’s roof before we’d left Tampa for good, how I’d rolled on top of Marcus in that exact same way. How I’d begged for this exact feeling, too young, from the wrong person. How badly I wanted to be touched. How badly I wanted not to be lonely. Maybe me and Starr weren’t the most normal couple on the surface. Maybe it would take me years to figure out what I wanted from life. But I had this.

  Starr still does my hair sometimes. She rarely drinks anymore, and never during the day, but sometimes after we’ve eaten dinner and had a few glasses of wine, we take the rest of the bottle into the living room, leaving all the lights off except for the lamp next to the couch. She sits me down in a chair in front of one of the salon bowl sinks and wraps me in one of those nylon capes, snapping it into place around my neck. And I lean back, eyes closed, and wait for the spray of hot water, for her soft, strong hands to massage that same coconut-smelling shampoo into my scalp, working out the tangles gently, one by one.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my friends who read many drafts and iterations of this book, and to those who connected me to their wider community of writer friends, especially Amy Gall and Patty Cottrell. Thank you to Sarah Gerard, for your friendship, your practical advice and assistance, and your quiet confidence in me from the first day we met. I cannot thank you enough for how much you have championed my writing, and especially this book. Thank you to Matt Wise, for your advice early on. A major thank you to Dean Bakopoulos for setting me up with my wonderful agent, Amy Williams. And thank you to Amy, whose enthusiasm was enough for the two of us when it needed to be. It’s time for some celebratory coconut cake! Thank you to Eliza Wood-Obenauf and Eric Obenauf for taking a chance on me—in particular, Eric, for your patience and flexibility, and Eliza for the most precise and thoughtful editor I could have asked for.

  Thank you to Bryan Thomas, fellow Floridian, for letting me use your beautiful p
hotography on the cover. Thank you to West 10th, Bennington’s Plain China, and Joyland Magazine (in particular, Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis) for publishing various bits of this book before it was one, and for making me feel like there might actually be something to it. Thank you to Susan Minot, for your honesty, advice, and book recommendations. Thank you to the entire Greenlight crew, especially Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting, for creating the first space in New York that felt like home to me.

  Thank you to Jeff Clanet, for just Getting It. Everything is easier with you, in all the right ways. Thank you to N. Thoma, for knowing what questions to ask. Thank you to Allison, for being my other slice of pizza. Thank you to Lillian Weber and Haley Zoller for your Official Counsel (and for always picking out the jalapenos). Thank you to Camille Drummond and Rumaan Alam, for fielding the bulk of my frantic text messages. Thank you to A, for showing me how it’s done.

  Thank you to every student and teenager I’ve worked with over the last few years. You’ve made me more compassionate and courageous, pressed me to consider my ethical obligations and moral stances outside of the theoretical, and trusted me enough to reveal the most difficult and painful parts of your lives. I couldn’t ask for better clients—I only hope that I’ve done as much good for you as you have for me.

  Thank you to my parents, who are—and have always been—incredibly kind, supportive, and generous (and who believe me when I tell them that yes, this is fiction). I don’t tell either of you thank you nearly enough. Thank you to my mother in particular, for letting me sit in the back of her bookstore most summers, eating Taco Bell and reading instead of going to camp.