I shake my head, realizing that answering this question comes with its own perils. If I say the adult equivalent of “Ew, no, gross!” I’m insulting someone she thought enough of to sleep with. Just because that list isn’t exclusive doesn’t mean it’s not an expression of her taste. I decide to stick with my go-to response—playing dumb.
“I don’t think he’s hitting on me. He just lent me a book.”
She levels a “You’ve got to be kidding” look at me. “He’s hitting on you. He’s a professor and he gave you a book. It’s never just a book.”
“Well, even if he decided to hit on me, now that I know about your past with him, I would never consider it.”
She raises her glass. “Sisters before misters!”
Even her aphorisms are better than mine.
Karmen waits until we take our celebratory drink before stepping up to the table. “Ms. Ray?” She’s different here at Ollie’s, less sullen, almost docile. She must really need the tips. “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but could I ask a favor?” I nod and she glances at Jeannie with what looks like embarrassment. “Could I borrow that book?”
“Which one?”
“The Herbert Mann book, about the Nihilism movement.”
“That Professor Trachtenberg gave me? Sure, but I’ll warn you, it’s not much of a read.”
Karmen sighs. “I know but I need to come up with a topic for next month’s paper and I’m thinking that might be an interesting one.” As we talk, Jeannie pulls out her phone and busies herself, but I know she’s listening. “I thought I’d just check it out,” Karmen says. “I mean, the topic. That book isn’t in the library.”
“Probably because it’s not much more than a pretentious four hundred-page hand job.” She laughs harder at my joke than it deserves. “Let me guess. This paper is for Professor Trachtenberg’s class. You know he’s into it; it’s a nice way to curry a little favor?”
“Yeah.” The admission embarrasses her and I wish I hadn’t spelled it out like that. “I’m still in the doghouse with Trachtenberg. I could use a bump.”
Either Jeannie is reading something hilarious on her phone or Karmen’s words strike a chord with her because I can hear her bitten-back chuckle over the bar’s music. No doubt Karmen can as well.
“Yeah, of course,” I say. “No problem.” Karmen’s embarrassment bothers me. “Just run by the office tomorrow.”
“Um, is there any way I could get it tonight? Is Mrs. Michener still there? It’s just that I may be getting off early tonight and I’ll actually have some real time to read it. I could just text my boyfriend to run by and get it before Mrs. Michener leaves. He’s, um . . . ” She waves over her shoulder toward the bar as if that will explain something. I’ve never met her boyfriend and the little she’s told me about him doesn’t suggest he would be helpful in any sort of endeavor, much less a campus favor on a cold afternoon, but that’s not for me to decide.
“Sure, just tell him it’s in my office. It’s—wait.” I tap the table to get Jeannie’s attention. “Where did you put the book?”
“Huh?” She looks up from her phone with a smile. Nice try.
“The book. Where did you put the book?” She keeps up the wide-eyed stare but this is one area in which she can’t compete with me. She doesn’t play dumb very well. “The book that Ellis lent me. You picked it up before we left. Where did you put it?”
“Oh, uh, I think, your desk? Or no, maybe that thing with the things on it, the boxes of whatever those blue things were. You know, by the glass partition.”
“Mrs. Michener will know,” I tell Karmen. “She knows what book you’re looking for.”
“Thanks, I promise I’ll bring it back in one piece.” She’s walking away and texting her boyfriend before I can say anything else. By remarkable coincidence, whatever Jeannie has been busy with on her phone has conveniently wrapped up at just that moment and she smirks at Karmen’s back.
“I guess it doesn’t matter how big the school, brown-nosing is everyone’s major.”
I prefer my beer over her tone and I take a deep drink. “She’s a good kid. She could probably use a break. She’s pretty talented.”
“Yeah, but which talents is she planning on utilizing?” Before I voice my protest, Jeannie holds up her hand in surrender. “I’m just saying she’s barking up the wrong tree. Ellis has his faults but he does not sleep with students. She’s going to have to get her grades up another way, because that is a line he will not cross.”
“Of course not,” I say, “he’s too busy ethically sleeping with married women.” She glares at me. I laugh. “Don’t tell me he didn’t know you were married, Professor Fitzhugh-Conroy. Lah-tee-dah.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? It is my professional name.”
I would snort but I’ve just gulped a large mouthful of beer. As I swallow, it occurs to me that I didn’t have any of Meredith’s sausage dip, my food hasn’t come yet, and all I’ve eaten today is a cold chicken leg. The waiter catches my eye, noticing my less-than-half-full glass, and gives me the universal gesture of love that asks “Want another?” I nod and he’s on it.
This isn’t my first visit to Ollie’s.
This also isn’t my first drink with Jeannie and we know each other well enough to sidestep each other’s little aggressions. I can diffuse Jeannie’s tendency to lecture and smother; she knows how to maneuver around my early-buzz aggressions. I’ll take a few more jabs at what I see as an affectation—Professor Fitzhugh-Conroy is not just pretentious-sounding and difficult to pronounce, it’s also kind of funny when you know my cousin’s predilection for infidelity. It’s a little irritation but Jeannie brings so few with her that the ones I notice stick out. Especially when I’m drinking.
She’s forgiven me my jab and is telling me about what transpired between her and Trachtenberg. Okay, this is another thing about Jeannie that does irk me—her tendency to over-discuss her relationship issues, even if said relationship lasted just a weekend. She has a teenager’s need to over-analyze every nuance of her interactions with men to the point where I sometimes expect her to pull out a glitter pen and start practicing her married signature.
I’m feeling like a bitch because I’m hungry and that hunger has reached that well-known point where it will either be sated or drunk away with a steady application of booze. I can’t really go with option two, or I shouldn’t, since I’m in public and I’m with Jeannie. On the other hand, it’s February 17. This is a week dedicated to blackout drinking. Jeannie’s on a tear of her own, regaling me with issues that doomed her relationship with Trachtenberg, which sound to me like so much high school drama. He was clingy, too serious; he wanted more; he couldn’t keep up with her in bed.
All of these issues have one significant similarity—Jeannie is always on the best side of them. Just once I would love to hear her say something like “I think I bored him,” or “He wanted someone hotter in bed.” But of course she won’t. Who would? Even if it were true, nobody likes to tell bad stories about themselves, stories in which they were found to be lacking.
I certainly don’t.
Pepperoni rolls arrive along with a basket of fried pickles. So does my next beer and the waiter waits for me to finish the glass in my hand. I swallow and hand it to him.
“Thanks for taking that away,” I say solemnly. “I wouldn’t want people to think I drink.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Springfield, Illinois
2012
Jeannie Fitzhugh-Conroy, 31 years old
Anna Shuler, 26 years old
“Do you realize that you’re twirling your hair?”
“I am not!” Anna jerked her hand away from the piece of ponytail she had wrapped around her index finger. She failed at holding back her grin. “Maybe I’m twirling it a little.”
“Oh my god!” Jeannie leaned across the table on her el
bows, “Tell me every single thing. Spare no details. Oh my god, tell me it’s not Kevin. It’s not, is it? I mean if it is, obviously, I’m going to back you up, but oh god, if I have to sit through another one of his short films about the burden of mediocrity chafing his delicate soul, uuugh.” She dropped her head back and whispered to the sky. “He is such a pretentious dick!”
When she looked back down, her cousin wasn’t smiling.
“Kevin asked me to marry him. I said yes.”
Jeannie froze, searching for an impossible solution to unsay her tirade. Anna didn’t blink. Fully prepared to throw herself on the knife, Jeannie sighed—and Anna laughed.
“How could you possibly think for even a second that I would marry Kevin? Being a pretentious dick is his best quality!” Jeannie buried her face in her hands as Anna ranted around her laugh. “Do you really think I would marry a guy who made me take a shower before we had sex every single time? He has fourteen hand towels in his bathroom. Fourteen! He refuses to eat cheese of any kind and he insists that Goethe was pronounced ‘Geth.’ The man collects can openers and you thought I would marry him?”
“You slept with him!” Jeannie protested, grinning. “Be honest. The cheese was the deal breaker, wasn’t it?”
Anna nodded solemnly. “It was. I had to draw the line somewhere.”
“Well thank god you saw the light.” She tapped her wine glass against her cousin’s. “Now let’s get to the good stuff. Who is he?”
Anna smiled down into her glass. She looked different since Jeannie’s visit last February. She looked healthy; she looked happy. She looked like she was in love.
“His name is Ron. Ron Ray.”
“Ron Ray?” Jeannie swirled her wine. “Sounds like a super hero. Or a porn star. Or is that the same thing?” When Anna giggled—an honest to god giggle—Jeannie knew this was different. Her cousin wasn’t going to pass this one off as a meaningless hookup or dismiss him with her “slightly better than a vibrator” shtick. “What’s he like?”
Anna finally looked up from her wine and smiled. “He’s nice.”
Something loosened in Jeannie’s chest, something she’d held clenched for so long. Anna had always preferred difficult men. She called them complex; Jeannie found them troubled at best. Painters, sculptors, musicians—it didn’t matter their medium. Anna gravitated toward men who would bully her with their art, talking over her, talking down to her.
Jeannie never understood the attraction or the dynamic. Her cousin would hook up with these men, put up with their shit, but for no apparent reason. She never claimed to be in love. She rarely even approved of their art, secretly judging them with her often more educated viewpoint, but she never let them know. She saved her eye rolls for private discussions with Jeannie and hardly seemed to notice when one man left and another rolled in.
Not once had she described any of them as nice.
And she had certainly never twirled her hair while saying it.
“Go on,” Jeannie coaxed. She didn’t want to push, but hope bubbled up inside of her. “What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a high school English teacher.” Anna kept smiling. “I knew you’d like that.”
“You know I do.” Jeannie wanted to hug Anna, to thank her for not picking another sculptor or director or social-protest graffiti artist. That she’d chosen someone in the same field as Jeannie, well, that touched her. And not to sound like a snob, but that he taught on a lower level than she did made the likelihood of pretentiousness wither. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
Anna grinned and shifted in her seat, like the idea of all this happiness made her uncomfortable. “Good. He’s meeting us here for dinner when he’s done at the school. He has to monitor detention this week.”
“How cute!” Jeannie knew she gushed and didn’t care. Teaching high school, grading papers, monitoring detention—all such gloriously normal and stable ways to spend a day. She could already picture Anna sitting with him in the bleachers, cheering on the varsity basketball team or helping him organize car washes. They could vacation together over summer break.
If nothing else, maybe finally Jeannie wouldn’t dread setting an extra place at the table for Anna’s date.
She knew she was getting carried away and didn’t care. Anna was happy so Jeannie was happy. Then Anna dimmed her daydream.
“He’s also a poet. A good one.”
Jeannie ran some quick calculations. A poet with a normal full-time job probably trumped an angry welder-slash-bartender or unemployed indie director, right? She thought she hid her concern until Anna’s smile slipped.
“What?”
“What?” Jeannie asked, going for innocent. “He sounds great.”
Anna didn’t fall for it. Jeannie had never hidden her opinions of Anna’s choices. “He’s actually talented. He’s not a pretentious dick. He’s a very nice man who happens to be talented, okay? You’ll see when you meet him, okay? He’s different. He’s funny and he’s nice and he makes me laugh. And he also writes poetry that is occasionally amazing. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jeannie said. “Okay. I will trust you on this. I can’t wait to meet him. Really. But you know”—she winked at Anna, trying to lighten the mood—“all poets are nuts. You know that. They are crazier than a bag of bees; it’s been scientifically proven.”
“Thanks for the warning. I’d hate to bring any kind of mental illness into the family.”
Anna finished her wine and reached for the bottle. Jeannie knew this place with her cousin, this familiar territory that could turn into a fight or a cold front if either of them chose to go too far. A sarcastic jab or a well-worded criticism could do it. Each knew the weaknesses in the other’s stronghold. They loved each other but sometimes that love felt like mutually assured destruction. Jeannie recognized it; Anna must as well. It was the same dynamic their mothers shared.
The moment passed as it always did. Anna poured them both more wine, punctuating the change of tone. Mental illness didn’t make a great conversation starter.
“Have you heard from your mother?” Jeannie resisted the petty urge to start that question with “speaking of which.”
“Of course.” Anna nodded. “The Natalie Shuler Library of Unopened Letters continues to grow. I wish your mother would stop giving her my address every time I move.”
“I gave it to her.” Jeannie didn’t flinch at Anna’s hard stare. “She’s your mother, Anna. Not getting mail from her is not going to change that.”
“Again, thanks for the great advice.”
“Are you ever going to read them? Or are you just going to keep boxing them up and carting them around?” Just because she wanted to avoid a full-on holocaust didn’t mean Jeannie could or would resist needling the occasional soft spot. Sometimes the temptation to go too far sang a sweet song.
I wake up in the tub.
This is as uncomfortable as it sounds. I took off my pants at some point; they’re turned inside out and jammed into the corner behind the door, one hiking boot still trapped in a pant leg. That must have been pretty to see. The fact that I’m freezing accounts for at least half of the jerky shakes that wrack my body. The bath towel I apparently thought would keep me warm and comfortable has done neither. Instead its creases have dug into my hip and ass and feel like they’ve been grafted to my skin. My bra is unhooked beneath my shirts and when I finally pull myself up into sitting position, I have the sensation of my body collapsing beneath my clothes.
Items clatter at my feet. I try to ignore the sharp spikes of pain that shoot down my neck. I have a bruise at the base of my skull from bracing it on the edge of the tub. I know how much that will hurt in the days to come; I know how long that bruise will last.
My toothbrush is in here with me as well as an open tube of toothpaste that has smeared its contents under the drain plug. At least I had the foresight to bring a plas
tic tumbler along with me, rather than glass. I’ve made that mistake before. Glass cups and ceramic tubs do not make good bedfellows. I sniff the plastic tumbler to make sure there is no booze in it—another mistake I’ve made before—and when I smell nothing, I fill it from the spigot. Drunk Me can be very considerate this way, anticipating my thirst.
The water cramps my stomach and does little to put out the fire in my mouth. My teeth feel loose from being ground so hard and a little voice inside my head warns me that one of these days I’m going to break them and lose them.
I slam another glass. I won’t throw up. I never do, not since I stopped drinking whiskey. Now I stick to beer and wine. Like some psychic investigator, Sober Me performs a hands-on examination of Drunk Me’s energy field, piecing together the events that brought me to this tub.
Wine. Wine after beer. What’s that old saying? Beer then wine, feeling fine. Well, that’s bullshit. I don’t know what time Jeannie and I got back here. We were in that sober-drunk stage, that level of performance that requires years of functional alcoholism to attain. It rests somewhere in between being able to handle your liquor and being intoxicated so frequently in public that people don’t recognize it as drunk anymore. If we had called it a night then, I probably would have woken up in my bed with a light thirst.
As if.
Instead, we came home and opened a bottle of wine. After lots and lots of beers. Not because we don’t know when to say when (well, not entirely because of that). No, we decided to open a bottle of wine because it was February 17. That’s why Jeannie is here. That’s why I’m in the tub. That’s why I do stupid things like deciding to check my mailbox before we came up the steps. It’s almost like I want to see what’s in there.
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