My fixation on staying off any path that looked walkable also meant finding wonderful secret music and books and films wherever I looked. Because I had to look or be culture-free. I started to see that there was art and food and even colors to match not just the big emotions like love and grief but their small adjacencies. I became an expert at recognizing odd-shaped emotions, and accessorizing them, and finding the talismans to evoke them. A curator of my own life. This is where the world opened up and also where my future troubles began.
* * *
Soon after graduation I saw the Louis Malle film Damage, in which the married British politician Jeremy Irons has an obsessive affair with his own son’s fiancée, played by Juliette Binoche. At the end, having ruined pretty much everything ruinable in every character’s life, Jeremy is living in self-exile in a bare, whitewashed flat in a Mediterranean town. The last shot pulls back to show him sitting penitent in a hard wooden chair in front of a wall-sized blowup of a photograph taken of himself, his son, and Juliette, just before all the lying and hiding and fucking on hard marble floors and untimely deaths began.
It’s meant to be a chilling conclusion, and it is. But for me it was also a kind of curation porn. The leather sandals on his feet, the single apple and wedge of cheese on a plate, the curtainless window and bleached wood floor. Only Louis Malle could make exile look so chic. But the simplicity also called to me—the notion that the objects around us could signify who we were, especially if we wiped the slate clean first. I thought about the core objects I carried from apartment to apartment. A postcard from a boy I’d loved but hadn’t seen in years, inscribed with lines from a Billy Bragg song. The woven coin purse a friend brought me from her home in Caracas, with a few centimos inside for luck. The Swiss Army Knife I’d bought in Switzerland thinking it wasn’t sold anywhere else in the world. I thought that these objects together gave me some sense of who I was, though I couldn’t have put it into words. Which didn’t stop me from trying. For the next several years, I tried to write a story about a woman who sold everything she owned and started over in a single room. I never got very far, because I couldn’t figure out what objects she would put in that room, because I had no idea who she was. But there was some satisfaction in starting her story over and over and over again, thinking each time was the time I’d get it right.
* * *
I spent the months after that first sober dinner out making ever-more-troublesome mocktails at home: zesting Meyer lemons, boiling sage leaves into syrup, chopping pineapple for agua fresca. But at some point my Mocktail Fever had to break, if only because it was so much work. Soda with a few drops of bitters—and maybe a squeeze of lime if I could be bothered to slice one—became my new norm. John stopped drinking six months after I did, and maybe he was just trying to spare us a second round of lunacy, but he was much calmer about restaurants than I was. One night at Mamnoon, a sleek Middle Eastern place in a hipster-dense part of Seattle, he said to our waiter, “Can you ask the bartender to make me something nonalcoholic that isn’t sweet?”
I stared wide-eyed at him. “You just asked for that.”
John shrugged. “We’ll see what I get.” What he got was a coupe glass filled with something that tasted a little like tea, a little like soda, and a lot like belonging. It was delicious.
Sometimes I try those same words in the same casual tone, but the results aren’t as thrilling. I’m more likely to say, “I’m fine with water,” and mean it. Because I just don’t really care what the liquid in my glass says about me anymore. I’d like to tell you it’s because sobriety cured my need for specialness. I’d also like to tell you I invented the stapler and can start fires with my mind. But no.
In some ways I became one of those kids from my hometown. I know how to have money and spend it. I can pass without visible effort in the world of mainstream luxury and “belong.” But I still hate those crass little fucks and everyone who reminds me of them. And I’m convinced they see through my veneer of belonging to the awkward, unsexy, merely middle-class kid inside. So I skirt the edges, camouflaging myself with baby turnips and bleak movies so no one can spot me and kick me back out of the club I’m not sure I wanted to join in the first place.
At this moment I’m drinking a coffee I chose because the café chalkboard said it had “notes of marionberry” and I love weird berries. The coffee was made with an AeroPress, the most low-tech way imaginable to make a five-dollar cup. When I first excitedly described AeroPress coffee to John, he stared blankly at me and then said, “That’s camping coffee. You won’t even sleep in a hotel without room service and you’re going around drinking camping coffee?”
I’m wearing plain black flats that look like all the other plain black flats in the world, but these are from Belgium. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve said of a film, “It’s a B movie, but in the exact right way.” I’ve made an argument for “Hairshirt” being the best R.E.M. song. I’ve purchased a mascara in the shade Too Black, just to see if it was true (it’s not). Sobriety didn’t end my love for the road less traveled. How could it? It is the road less traveled. And once you’re already on that road, the side paths look more like trampled vegetation than anything officially sanctioned. Land planners call them desire lines, which is a kind way to say The places we didn’t think it made any goddamn sense to walk. That’s where you can find me, if you want. And if you don’t want, that’s fine, too. I don’t really want to hang out with you anyway.
The Barn
“You realize everyone thinks we’re a couple,” Mindy says as we leave the Airfield Estates tasting room. “Because you keep saying ‘we.’ ‘We love Viognier!’”
“We do both love Viognier,” I say. “I’m using the English language with efficiency and precision.” Mindy unlocks her SUV, and we each hoist a case of wine into the back. It’s over a hundred degrees out, and I have the unscientific thought that the compressed heat in the car could actually shatter the bottles.
She shuts the hatch. “I’m just making you aware that we sound like lesbian life partners.”
“A lot of women would be proud to have me on their arm,” I say. We turn back to face the strip mall of tasting rooms we’d just come from. “Dusted Valley next?”
At Dusted Valley the pourer offers Viognier right away. “I love Viognier!” I say, and wave a hand at Mindy. “I don’t know what this person likes.”
I love the taste of wine, but I hate wine tasting. For one thing, even though I’m a diligent spitter-not-swallower, it still gets me a little buzzed, and I have no interest in being anything other than a lot buzzed. But I also don’t want to be like those tasters who spill out of limos, all red-faced and loud and looking like the kinds of people who use “hot tub” as a verb. So I’m stuck being me—someone who pretends to like sipping tiny amounts of wine, when really she wants to hunker down, alone, with a bottle.
I hardly ever know what to say about the wine. Generally, my evaluation is that it tastes, you know, good. If the pourer looks expectant, sometimes I’ll grab onto a word from the tasting notes. “Oh, yes, granite!” I try hard to appreciate the subtleties. I want to, desperately. If I learn to experience the whole world of wine in one sip, maybe that will be enough. Maybe I won’t finish the whole first bottle, crack a second, and stumble to bed ashamed. Again.
* * *
Mindy and I are only on this romantic wine jaunt because of a shared refusal to take a predawn plane ride for a day of corporate training. She’s a fearful flier who only sucks it up for better destinations than Kennewick, Washington, and I have a blanket policy against getting to Sea-Tac by 5:00 a.m. for a thirty-minute flight. It is a four-hour drive from Seattle to Kennewick, which allows us to leave at a civilized hour and pass through wine country on our way home.
The Washington climate changes dramatically on the eastern side of the Cascades. It’s much hotter in the summer, with stretches that look like desert. “Except for almost everything, we could be Thelma and Louise,” I remark around Ellen
sburg as I watch tumbleweeds bounce by.
“Corporate Drone Thelma and Louise,” Mindy says.
We didn’t always feel like drones. When we met six years ago, we were raring to go, the kind of people who would hop on 5:00 a.m. flights without question if that’s what the company asked us to do. I was direct from the Midwest then and lurching around Seattle like a lost dog. My jeans were too baggy, my shoes too flat, my phone too unsmart. My office building was seventy-six floors high, and I got disoriented just navigating the various elevator banks to get to meetings. “I spend my days riding around in a series of tubes,” I said in an e-mail to my former boss in Michigan, hoping he would beg me to come back.
I was overwhelmed and barely able to contain my panic. I was responsible for three times as many people as I had been, with a much broader scope of work, yet there was no training or orientation, and I had maybe thirty minutes a week with my boss, at most. Mindy and I reported to the same vice president, whose jolly-midwesterner persona hid a tendency to turn on people fast and hard. The way he could rain praise on me one day and make dark comments about my future the next slammed me right back to childhood.
Mindy terrified me, too, by being beautiful, math fluent, and preternaturally calm in an environment so pressured I’d seen people’s hands shake in meetings. One day she invited me to coffee, and after a few minutes of small talk I hesitantly confessed my sense of full-spectrum wrongness.
“We all feel like that,” she said. “This place feeds on fear. It has nothing to do with you.”
The relief of realizing it wasn’t just me allowed me to temporarily overlook the fact that my new employer was notorious for feeding on people. I internalized it soon enough, though. It wasn’t that the people I worked with were mean (except for my boss, that is, when his Mr.-Hyde-in-Dockers side came out). It’s just that the scope of the company’s ambitions far outstripped the resources available to achieve them, and that was mostly on purpose. It was assumed that each employee could do the work of two or three people via “ruthless prioritizing” or “smart trade-offs” or other rational-sounding methods that in reality panned out more as working through weekends and answering e-mails at midnight knowing you’d wake up at 6:00 a.m. to a flood of new ones. It was possible to hold it together for a while if you were young and adrenalized with ambition, or if the only person in your life to let down was you. But as people got older (for example, over thirty) and especially as they started families, some of them looked around, decided that feeding themselves into a meat grinder every day was no longer bearable, and hit the road. Women left in especially large numbers, sometimes to stay home and raise kids but more often, in my experience, for other companies. And those of us who stayed got used to being the Only Woman at the Table.
Being the Only Woman at the Table means spending a lot of time trying to talk, because there are mere microseconds between one man finishing his thought and the next one jumping in and no one bothers to read nonverbal cues, or talking and seeing half the room choose that moment to look at their phones. It means being interrupted over and over until you either give up or resort to saying “Can I please finish my thought?” like a prig who can’t just roll with the discussion. Or, finally expressing a whole thought and having the conversation pick back up as though you hadn’t said a word. It means that no one will meet your eye, how could they when they’re too busy staring each other down, and if they do, it’s with an irritated blankness; they aren’t listening, just waiting for you to stop talking so they can start again, the way a table of adults will humor a child tediously recounting a Pixar plot. And this is what it’s like with the good guys. Most of the men I worked with were good guys who knew intellectually that women deserved to be at the table and be heard, even if they couldn’t get their lizard brains to play along.
Sometimes the good guys around me seemed to feel odd or even guilty about the dramatic imbalance in our numbers. Mindy and I once constituted the female 8 percent of a corporate retreat group where, during introductions, many of the men took pains to mention their wives. “I run Consumables for Europe,” one man said. “But the real boss is my wife, who manages me and our kids.” Or, “I’m general counsel for North American retail. My wife is also a former lawyer who promoted herself to CEO of our household when the kids were born.” Mindy and I had avoided sitting together, lest we be seen as a massive, threatening bloc of femaleness. Now we swapped glances across the conference table as man after man explained how his work paled in comparison to that of his smarter, stronger, kinder, more organized better half. It was hard not to wonder if this was some corporate Kabuki they were putting on for us.
* * *
After dinner, Mindy and I head back to our motel in nearby Prosser and then decide to go out for a drink, which is when we realize that Prosser is a daylight town. Everything along Wine Country Road is closed except for one big red building set back from the road.
“It looks like a barn,” I say.
“It’s called the Barn,” Mindy says. We look at each other, shrug, and pull into the parking lot just as the Barn’s shuttle van is pulling out.
“Oh goody, a bar with its own shuttle bus,” I say, because my standards involve driving drunk in my own car, very carefully.
It doesn’t smell like a barn, though it does smell like wet carpet and frying oil, and the only thing in the lobby is a busted ATM that you can tell has been that way for a while. We walk down a short hallway into the bar, or perhaps it’s the set of The Accused. The room is full of men, and every single one of them stops talking and turns to look at us. “Jesus,” I say under my breath. But Mindy and I are genetically coded by now to not run from rooms full of men. And there’s two of us. And we want a drink. There are two seats open at the bar, and we take them while the men stare as though their space has been invaded by antelope on pogo sticks. I nod at the two on my left, gray-haired guys still in their reflective construction vests, and they nod back. “Ladies,” one says.
Now that we’ve claimed space, I survey whatever I can without turning my head and being obvious about it. It’s just a bar, with signs for low-end beers and rolls of shiny lottery tickets and no windows (but also no stripper poles). Dim lighting, Toto on the jukebox, vinyl seats patched with tape. What I think of with no self-awareness whatsoever as a Drinker’s Bar. The kind of place you go specifically to get drunk. The kind of place I never go, because I don’t consider myself someone who ever sets out to get drunk; I am someone who sets out to enjoy a glass of wine or two, and then things sort of snowball from there. We order some local Pinot Gris (in wine country, even Drinker’s Bars have good wine lists) and relax a bit as the men absorb the disturbance in their field and return to their conversations.
Most of them do, anyway. The man next to Mindy leans over and says, “Y’all sisters?” He looks like a younger but much more weathered Kris Kristofferson.
“No, we’re not sisters,” Mindy says. Other than both being dark-haired human women, Mindy and I don’t look anything alike. I’m tempted to ask if all the men in the bar are brothers.
“Leave them alone, Carl,” says the guy next to me. “Don’t mind him. He’s harmless.”
“It’s fine,” I say. Carl has put his head down sideways on the bar and is staring at Mindy. I raise an eyebrow at her to say, Do you want to go?
“It’s fine,” she says. So we stay and gradually get into normal bar chat with the guy next to me and his friends. “Y’all aren’t from around here, are you?” he asks. No, we tell him, we’re from Seattle, in town for work. The men also work nearby, mostly in logging, and live in the RV park behind the bar.
“I can show you my trailer,” Carl offers.
One of my tricks for steering a conversation away from whether I want to see someone’s trailer is to become deeply interested in its least sexy details. To that end, over two more glasses of wine I pummel the men around us with questions about their specific logging jobs, the logging industry in general, Prosser, and the rest of t
he Yakima valley. And they seem to like it, or at least they give me real answers. Maybe it’s a novelty having a woman want to know so much about them. I’m about to delve into the types of trees they cut down when I notice Mindy staring over my shoulder.
I turn to see Carl, standing by a barrel-shaped cooler of beer with his T-shirt pulled up. He’s grabbed two handfuls of ice and is rubbing them on his nipples while grinning at us and doing some sort of hula.
I drop my investigative-reporter act. “What the fuck,” I say.
The man next to me shrugs apologetically. “Try to take it as a compliment,” he says.
I’ve been advised to take a lot of strange behavior as a compliment. When a boy shoved me on the playground, it meant he liked me. When guys dumped me, it meant they knew I was way too good for them. When men talk over me in meetings, it’s because they’re threatened by my intellect; when they catcall me in the park, it’s because I’ve still got it. I’ve been surfing a wave of male aggression all my life. But the nipple icing was a new one.
“We should probably head out,” I say to Mindy. No, no! the other men protest. Ignore Carl. Just one more round, on us.
Well, in that case.
That’s the thing about this bar: no one will bat an eye at how much I drink. No one will want to leave before I do, or switch to soda because they’ve got an early meeting tomorrow. They’ll go as long as I do, or longer. It thrills and scares me, just as it thrills and scares me to be getting drunk with a bunch of men I don’t know. These men don’t hide or apologize for their drinking, and they don’t expect me to, either. In those other rooms full of men, I am always polished and on guard: just female enough to be unthreatening, just male enough to be visible. Here, I could get sloppy if I wanted to: drink from the bottle, commandeer the jukebox, throw up. Maybe the most chivalrous man in the bar would try to sober me up with black coffee at some point, or maybe the creepiest would try to take me to his RV. But no one would think, Now there’s a chick who needs to get her life together.
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