Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  “Hey, you!” a man yelled out after her. But she ran. Down the concourse toward the restroom where she had seen the cleaning woman. Sweat poured down the nape of her neck and started to burn as it bubbled up on the palms of her hands, under her arms, in between her legs. It was like she couldn’t quite move fast enough, as if she were running through a pan of cement, already hardening around her.

  The Star

  ON STAGE SHE burns like a star. She’s always seen herself like this—as a star. We’ve always known this about her, her tendency to shine so brightly, like a star, of course. For what else is there for an actress to be but a star? A star burns, then twinkles, then shines and shimmers, then burns even brighter. Then it burns out. Like a star, she is always burning.

  In life—which is not onstage and is different—she burns as well. But it’s a different kind of burning. It’s a burning that’s a kind of living, as she’s living on the stage while she’s burning. She can live and burn simultaneously onstage, just as the stars in the sky do so well. But stars don’t live and burn at the same time. The star in the sky is burning as it is dying. For it to burn and twinkle and shine and shimmer and burn again so brightly, it must also give itself up to dying.

  So she’s dying onstage. Even while she’s living, she’s dying. We’re clapping because she’s dying. She dies so brightly that she is burning to live.

  Habitat

  PEGGY FOUND OUT about it from Jill on the phone. She then told the entire Potsdam crew: Ryan, Lucy, Jay, Chloe, Tandice, Lea, and myself in a group e-mail she started, which was then followed up by a conference call organized by Jay and Chloe, who’d gotten married after they’d met through Jill in Potsdam.

  After Jill told Peggy how she met Mitch, Peggy added her own flourishes in the e-mail. I almost felt like I’d already heard the story even before I finished the e-mail because it was just so Jill. The whole thing. And Peggy always has this way of selecting the most potent details, peppering them throughout her recounting so we always have something to grab on to. She really has a knack for that.

  Jill had moved to Alaska from Potsdam, Germany, where she had been doing some child psychology work for the Department of Defense while her boyfriend, Flap, performed grounds maintenance on the golf course at the American army base located there. After she left Potsdam for Alaska, she began work as a park ranger for the Tongass National Forest, which is the same kind of work she’d done in Oregon before Potsdam. Her coworkers in Alaska all liked her, but she had been complaining to Peggy on the phone that she wasn’t really making friends.

  “What do you do up there in your spare time?” Peggy had asked Jill before Jill had met Mitch.

  “Besides drink?” Jill had answered.

  Who could really blame her? People in Alaska seemed to have intense, often volatile relationships with alcohol. Jill was committed to having as much fun as possible, especially after having escaped Germany and Flap. For her that meant being able to go out for a couple of drinks to see where the night might take her. Flap was an ex-Navy SEAL who had emotionally and (from what we’d heard) physically abused Jill while they were living together in Potsdam. He had suffered brain damage years ago after getting hit in the head by a hammer in a bar fight that he himself had instigated, so there was also that.

  “Jill panic-leaves. She panic-left Alabama for Oregon. Then she panic-left Oregon for Germany. Then she panic-left Germany for Alaska. She’ll panic-leave Alaska too, I’m sure of it,” said Lucy.

  Lucy had coined the term panic-leave based on the various times that Jill would pack up and bolt practically overnight—breaking leases, leaving behind furniture, changing addresses like regular people change their sheets. It’s no wonder anyone would have a problem taking Jill seriously when she kept saying that she wanted to settle down in Alaska. It wasn’t in Jill’s nature to settle down anywhere.

  But no one could fault her for wanting to reinvent herself. And what better place to do that than in a state where no one knew who she was and the ones who did were too far away to remind her of who she was? This was Jill we were talking about, though. At the end of the day, no one ever really changes that much.

  “Why Alaska? What is she doing there?” Ryan asked. We all wanted to know.

  According to Peggy, Jill had met Mitch on Halloween night. She was wasted at one of the only bars in town, wearing a sheet with holes cut out for her eyes like she was a ghost.

  “How inventive,” Jay remarked.

  “You know Jill,” said Peggy.

  Apparently, she had been drinking her cocktails that night through the sheet. Not lifting it up to pour drinks into her mouth but actually drinking them through the fabric, which made us all laugh. A woman covered in a sheet with holes cut through sucking down mai tais. Again, classic Jill.

  “Well, at least she wasn’t dressed as a slutty nurse or a slutty vampire. I hate that,” Lea said.

  Jill was coming up to strangers and standing there, completely still and silent, then howling like a crazy person, trying to scare them. Then she ran around outside in her costume, flapping around, trying to scare people from coming into the bar.

  “Which is when she fell, right?” Jay asked on the conference call.

  “Exactly,” Peggy answered.

  Jill fell down and split open her chin. Blood spurted through the sheet, which made the costume scarier. But she didn’t even realize she was hurt. Folks thought she was just a bloody ghost. It was Halloween, after all.

  So this guy named Mitch came up to her and asked if she was okay.

  “ ‘You’re clearly bleeding’ is what he said,” Peggy reported to the group. Mitch was a sober recovering alcoholic and turned out to be the exact person Jill needed to run into. He drove her to the emergency room and stayed with her until one of the doctors on duty could examine her.

  “Jill’s health insurance is amazing,” Tandice said.

  Which is good because the cut on her chin required four stitches. And she was so wasted that the blood wasn’t clotting properly.

  “What was she wearing underneath the sheet?” asked Tandice.

  “Thermal underwear and a black lace bra,” reported Peggy.

  “In Alaska? In October? Oh, Jill…” said Tandice.

  “I know, right?” said Peggy.

  After they got her stitched up, Jill somehow convinced Mitch to continue the night with her. They went to a different bar where, now that she had sobered up somewhat during the trip to the ER, Jill insisted on having a couple of nightcaps.

  “No one has a ‘couple of nightcaps,’ ” Jay said. “It’s supposed to be the one nightcap. Otherwise it’s not called a ‘nightcap’; you’re just drinking more and it’s late.”

  But she did drink more, and then Mitch took her home and then, well, they got together after that.

  “Of course they did,” Lucy said.

  BEFORE JILL PANIC-LEFT Potsdam, she was doing quite well there. So well, in fact, that she’d become sort of the connective tissue between all of us wayward Americans, each trying to eke out a life abroad. As wild as she could be, Jill had a stable, nurturing side. She always took in strays—not pets but people. The only thing most of us had in common was that we knew Jill in one way or another. When Jay proposed to Chloe (after she had introduced the two of them more than a year before), Jill offered up her place to host an engagement party since Chloe’s mom and sister were both so far away. Even her apartment felt almost like a home away from home. Who hadn’t crashed at least once on her couch?

  Her child psychology work, while challenging, also had been rewarding. She had a way with the more damaged kids, the problem children. She didn’t give up on people, something that was clearly a valuable attribute in someone handling those types of kids. It made her a good friend too.

  Her boyfriend, Flap, on the other hand, was floundering in Potsdam. He had begrudgingly come over there with Jill after receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Navy for almost killing someone in a bar fight. It wasn’t
his first time in Europe, but he still didn’t feel like he fit in there.

  “There was something so off about him. I hated when she used to bring him to parties,” Chloe said.

  “Yeah, he would just stand there with all those tattoos, looking so bored. If you tried to strike up a conversation with him, he’d look really uncomfortable. Why would she bring him in the first place if he was just going to stand there like a statue?” asked Jay.

  But Jill liked Flap. She thought his tattoos were cool, even though to us they were too obtrusive. He had stars tattooed on his face around his eyes. It was trashy.

  “Was he in a gang? I mean, what was that look?” asked Lucy.

  Flap was a recovering alcoholic too. He swore he never touched the stuff anymore, even though Jill was sure he wanted to. Especially when the winter came, blanketing snow over the golf course on the base where he kept the grounds, shutting him out of any work until spring.

  “What exactly happened to their relationship?” Lucy asked. “I never quite got that story.”

  “He started drinking again,” said Chloe.

  Jill and Flap had decided to go to Estonia for a small holiday. Jill was calling it a “holiday,” but it was clear to both of them that it was a last-chance kind of thing to see if they could save their relationship, which, like Flap, was also floundering.

  They were in a restaurant in the center of a small town in Tallinn, Estonia, having dinner and drinks. That was when things started to go wrong.

  “What happened?” Lucy asked.

  “Flap said something to her about Mormon girls. How they really know how to fuck or give head or something,” said Chloe, not without the requisite tone one affords a friend who’s been betrayed.

  “Does that mean he was sleeping with someone else?” asked Tandice.

  It didn’t really matter whether or not it was true. Jill has a natural hair trigger for infidelity, seeing as how her father had been a major womanizer, sleeping around on her mother for years back in Alabama. So she threw a glass of beer in Flap’s face in the middle of the restaurant. He pounded his fists and threatened to jump over the table and strangle her. They were quickly asked to leave.

  “It was the alcohol,” Jay said. “He’d never been like that when he was sober. Just quiet and antisocial.”

  “They were only drinking beer,” Chloe said.

  The two stumbled down the street toward the inn where they were staying, both completely wasted. That was when Flap pushed Jill, who then tripped on a curb and fell into a ditch.

  “I really hate hearing about this,” said Lucy. “I hate violence against women.”

  “Does anyone like violence against women?” asked Tandice.

  “We all have a type,” Peggy said.

  Jill said Flap told her to get up, but she was drunk and couldn’t move for some reason, so Flap kicked her.

  “This is making me feel very uncomfortable,” Lucy said.

  “Imagine how Chloe, Jay, and I felt when she was telling us the whole story back in Potsdam. I had to restrain myself from shaking her,” Peggy said.

  When Flap and Jill got back to the inn, she went into the bathroom. Flap knocked on the door to be let in because he had to pee, but Jill took her sweet time. When she finally came out, Flap was peeing in a glass. Jill took the glass and threw the pee in his face, like she’d done earlier with the beer.

  “She certainly knows how to make people mad,” said Ryan.

  “What happened to her after that? I almost hate to ask,” Lucy piped in.

  “Let’s just say she found her way back to Germany by the skin of her teeth,” answered Peggy.

  JILL AND MITCH started dating exclusively after their Halloween together. We thought it was all rather sudden. Jill hadn’t been single all that long after she’d left Flap and Germany and the trauma of that relationship. None of us thought she should’ve jumped into a new thing so quickly.

  “What’s the deal with Jill and recovering alcoholics anyway?” Tandice asked.

  “Who knows. Her taste in men is so shitty. Have you seen pictures of the two of them on Facebook? Mitch is not attractive. Like, at all. I don’t get it,” Peggy said. “There’s something a little Downs-y about his face, quite frankly.”

  “That’s really mean,” responded Tandice.

  “Well, look at him.”

  Mitch was a couple of years younger than Jill and didn’t have a lot going on in Alaska. He worked in a liquor store, which, to all of us, seemed like a rather unfit job for a recovering alcoholic.

  “Why would he put himself in that kind of a situation, where every day is a big struggle against relapsing?” asked Lucy.

  “Maybe he thinks it makes him stronger,” said Ryan.

  “They’re certainly taking a lot of pictures together and posting them all over Facebook. I can’t say she looks unhappy,” Peggy said in a group e-mail. Always sort of boiling it down for us like she had a PhD in Jill Theory. Like we should all defer to her on this subject exclusively.

  There was something different about Jill now, though. Those of us who’d known her in Potsdam probably sensed it the most. She appeared to be “nesting” with this Mitch guy. There were no more pictures of cocktails with her and her friends, each of them tagging each other on Facebook as the lime, the chunky ice cubes floating on top; Jill, the long pink straw.

  “Staying in tonight with my man…” her status updates now said. “Woke up this morning, and I love my life. Mitch made me French toast!” along with a picture of said French toast served on a bamboo tray and a wilted violet in a red Solo cup. We all “liked” it on Facebook, so she must’ve thought we approved.

  “God, isn’t he classy?” said Tandice.

  It was Peggy—again—who broke the big news in a group text. “Everyone, check Jill’s Facebook right now. Like right the fuck now.”

  “Mitch and I would like to announce that we are—wait for it—PREGNANT!!!!! We’re completely thrilled to be welcoming a baby into this world!” Jill had attached a picture of her First Response pregnancy wand, or whatever they’re called, with the little pink line indicating that she was, in fact, pregnant.

  “She basically just posted a picture of something she peed on,” Tandice replied to all.

  “Why is she telling people this early? Aren’t you supposed to wait at least three months?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s Jill,” we all replied.

  We tracked Jill’s pregnancy through her Facebook posts. We saw pictures of baby stuff they were buying: a crib (that looked somewhat used), rainbow pyramids with stackable plastic rings, a bag of diapers.

  Peggy asked if she could throw her a shower. Jill replied that she didn’t want everyone to have to travel all the way to Alaska to celebrate a baby that was roughly the size of an olive. She did, however, send Peggy a small list of items they needed if anyone should want to send a gift.

  Two months into the pregnancy, Jill posted that she was sad to report she and Mitch had lost the baby and were going to try to work through the grief together. And then maybe try for another one.

  “That’s why you don’t put all that stuff out there on the Internet. It’s so much worse now than if she and Mitch had privately lost a baby that no one knew about yet,” said Jay, who had group-texted Chloe, Ryan, Lucy, and Toby to discuss what had happened.

  “Dare I say this might be a blessing in disguise?” suggested Lucy.

  ACCORDING TO PEGGY, whom Jill was talking to on the phone regularly, Mitch had started drinking again after he and Jill lost the baby.

  “Alcoholics use any excuse to start drinking again,” Tandice told her, uncharacteristically stating an open dissatisfaction with the way Mitch seemed to be treating Jill.

  “All she wants to do is stay home and try to grieve over the loss, and all he wants to do now is go out to the bars and get wasted,” Peggy reported back to us.

  “This is very worrisome,” said Lucy.

  “Didn’t she say he’s just drinking beer?”
Chloe asked.

  “Yeah, that’s always worked out well for her,” Jay remarked.

  Jill threw herself into her job. She began working on a conservation project for some land outside the Tongass National Forest that was the unprotected habitat of a species of wild fox. She was spearheading a campaign to get the species of wild fox on the protected list, a tall order in Alaska but not an insurmountable one. With Jill on the case, the foxes had found a lifelong ally. Jill was nothing if not fiercely loyal.

  Which was why everyone was (happily) stunned when they checked out Jill’s Facebook status a month after she and Mitch had lost the baby: “To everyone: I want to let you know I’ve decided to part ways with Mitch because of reasons that are quite obvious to him.”

  Peggy called her almost immediately and got the full scoop. Apparently, Mitch had been chatting up an old girlfriend from California via e-mail on Jill’s computer. Jill found his open account on her computer and read through the e-mails, some of which had alluded to a tryst they had while he was already together with Jill.

  “What an idiot,” Tandice said.

  “Are you really that surprised?” Peggy said.

  After Jill read through the e-mails, she called down to the liquor store where he worked and said he could come by and get his stuff within twenty-four hours or he could find it all on the front lawn. When she was gone the next morning, Mitch stopped by and picked up his clothes. It was her house, and after she kicked him out, he had to go live with his brother ten miles outside of town. He also lost his job at the liquor store because he’d been so drunk one night after drinking practically half a handle of whiskey that he had thrown beer bottles at a couple of women who were shopping for wine.

  “He sounds psychotic. I’m glad Jill finally wised up,” said Ryan.

  “I know. Thank God,” Lea said.

  When Jill went “dark” on Facebook, we all simply thought she was taking a break. Lucy theorized that perhaps Jill had finally learned her lesson about putting so much out there on social media, especially after the double blows of the miscarried baby and then Mitch’s betrayal. Everyone felt better that she’d left that relationship. “Maybe she’ll come back East,” said those of use who’d ended up in New York after Potsdam. “Maybe she’ll move back to Potsdam,” said those who were still assigned there. Or Oregon again. We all agreed that this time she wouldn’t be panic-leaving but relocating, on her own terms.