by Alix Ohlin
Also by Alix Ohlin
Dual Citizens
The Missing Person
Babylon and Other Stories
Inside
Signs and Wonders
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2021 by Alix Ohlin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Several pieces originally appeared, some in slightly different form, in the following publications: “The Point of No Return” as “Quarantine” in The New Yorker (January 23, 2017); “Casino” in Guernica (May 1, 2012); “The Universal Particular” in StoryQuarterly (January 2017); “Risk Management” in Kenyon Review (July/August 2017); “Money, Geography, Youth” in The Missouri Review (April 18, 2017); “Something About Love” in The Sewanee Review (Winter 2018); “FMK” in Story (March 2021); “The Brooks Brothers Guru” in Ploughshares Solo (March 18, 2015); “The Detectives” in Windmill (December 2016); “Service Intelligence” in Southwest Review (January 2016); “Taxonomy” in TriQuarterly (July 15, 2014); and “Nights Back Then” in Five Points (Spring 2013).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ohlin, Alix, author.
Title: We want what we want : stories / Alix Ohlin.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020029524 (print) | LCCN 2020029525 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525654636 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525654643 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3615.H57 A6 2021 (print) | LCC PS3615.H57 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029524
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029525
Ebook ISBN 9780525654643
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by Yevgen Romanenko / Moment / Getty Images
Cover design by Janet Hansen
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Child. We are done for
in the most remarkable ways.
—Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Contents
The Point of No Return
Casino
The Universal Particular
Risk Management
Money, Geography, Youth
The Woman I Knew
Something About Love
FMK
The Brooks Brothers Guru
The Detectives
Service Intelligence
Taxonomy
Nights Back Then
The Point of No Return
Bridget lived in Barcelona for a year. First she stayed with her college friends Maya and Andrew, who were trying to be poets, and then she sublet from a man named Marco, whom she’d met at a grocery store. She had a fling with a woman named Bernadette, who was from New Zealand and shared a flat with a Scot named Laurie, whom Bridget also slept with, and that was the end of things with Bernadette. She smoked Fortuna cigarettes and wrote furiously in her journal about people she’d known and slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or slept with and then been rejected by. She was twenty-three years old.
One night at Marco’s apartment, she was awakened by loud knocking. Still semi-drunk from an evening with Maya and Andrew, she stumbled to the door and opened it to find three junkies standing there, asking for Marco. She knew they were junkies because Marco was a junkie—he’d told her this—and all his friends were junkies, too. They needed Marco’s furniture, for reasons that were unclear, and they shoved her aside and began moving the kitchen table, the futon. For junkies, they were robust and rosy cheeked, and she didn’t put up much defense. Somehow this incident was all her fault. Marco kicked her out and she went to live in a cheap hotel, drinking anise in bed and staring at the peeling wallpaper. Later, Marco made her file a false police report saying that his laptop had been stolen. He said that it was the only way she could make up for her transgressions.
The person who rescued her from the cheap hotel was Angela, whom she’d met at the restaurant where they both waitressed. Angela was from Vancouver, and some dewy freshness that Bridget associated with the West Coast seemed to cling to her always, even when she was sleep deprived or drunk. Angela had a German boyfriend with a face so feminine that he looked exquisite, like a porcelain doll. His name was Hans, or maybe Anders. He was always nice to Bridget, and when Angela brought her home he made up a little bed for her in the corner of their tiny living room, a pile of blankets and pillows, as if she were a stray dog. Once, in the middle of the night, she woke up to see him crouching in front of her, staring.
“What are you doing?”
“I wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”
“I’m comfortable,” she said, and he went back to bed with Angela.
* * *
—
Angela and her German boyfriend were little parents. They liked to make a fuss over people and put on elaborate dinner parties, and then they’d get drunk and spend the night bickering. It was tedious, and yet you had to indulge them, because you could see how much they enjoyed it, this performance of adulthood. Bridget stayed with them for two months, and would have felt guilty about mooching, except that they so clearly wanted to gather around themselves a collection of misfits to take care of. In addition to Bridget, they often hosted an assortment of hard-drinking Germans from Hans/Anders’s work, whatever it was, and Mei Ling, a Chinese Canadian woman who had a little cluster of grey whiskers on her otherwise smooth cheek, like a tuft of crabgrass thriving on a lawn. Mei Ling’s reasons for being in Barcelona were unclear; whenever Bridget talked to her, she scowled and left the room. Angela said that she was very depressed.
Bridget would have stayed there indefinitely, but one morning Hans/Anders brought her coffee in her dog bed and said that they had to talk. “We’re leaving,” he said.
“For work?” As usual, she was hungover.
He shook his head and patted her shoulder. “Angela and I are getting married and moving to Canada. You can come visit us anytime.”
“Does Angela know this?”
He laughed. “It was her idea,” he said tenderly. “Everything is always her idea.”
Bridget was stunned and a little irritated. She was used to a constant exchange of friends and lovers, and the idea that one of these relationships should be considered permanent struck her as inconsiderate. It went against the way they were all trying to live: stepping lightly on this earth, skirting the folly of human certainty. That night, she and Angela went out for drinks. They sat in an outdoor courtyard eating tiny meatballs and cockles in tomato sauce. Angela’s blond braid nestled against her neck. She and Bridget had once showered together, had swum naked together at a beach in Sitges. Angela had the kind of flesh so pale that if you pressed a finger to her thigh the skin blushed dark pink, as if embarrassed by the touch. Now she was drinking cheap rioja, her teeth turning purple. “I’m going to enroll in an education program and get certified to teach kindergarten,” she was saying. “Hans will work with my father once his paperwork is settled. The business is very secure. Like my father always says, empires may rise and fall but people still need lightbulbs.”
In Bridget’s stomach, the cockles swam restlessly in a river of wine. “You seem young to get married,” she said.
Angela shook her head, and her braid flapped against her shoulder. “Oh, we won’t get married for at least a year. We have to plan. Not to mention book the church. The flowers alone! You have no idea.”
She was right about that. Bridget let her go—from the conversation, their passing friendship, the country of Spain. She found another place to stay and, when Angela hosted a last dinner party to say goodbye, Bridget said that she was sick and didn’t go.
* * *
—
To her surprise, she herself was back in Canada within six months. Marco stopped by the restaurant one day to tell her that her mother had been calling, and, when she called back, her mother didn’t even scold her for being hard to reach. “I have some news,” she said tightly. “Your father isn’t feeling well.”
Bridget held the receiver in her hot palm. She was on break, a stained white apron around her hips, her armpits still dripping from the evening rush, and a table of three men eyed her with the impersonal but aggressive sexual hostility she’d grown used to. She burst into tears, and the men rolled their eyes and turned to a better target. As if in one movement, she hung up the phone, untied the apron, collected her passport from Maya and Andrew’s apartment, and went home.
Her father lived for a year so dreary and relentlessly full of pain that she was forced to wish him dead. He had been a jokester, her father, spilling over with inappropriate remarks. Since she once wore a bikini at age ten, he had called her Bardot, after Brigitte, whom she did not resemble in the slightest. He gave whoopee cushions as gifts. He did impressions so terrible that no one ever guessed who he was supposed to be. In the hospital, tethered to a bouquet of chemotherapy drugs, he gritted his teeth and attempted to make light of the situation, but there was no light to be made. His body shrank; he was smaller every morning, as if repeatedly robbed in the night. Bridget wanted only for his suffering to end, and, when it finally did, she sobbed so hard she felt as if her lungs were liquefying. Her mother was a husk, dried out by grief. She didn’t want to stay in the house alone, so she sold it, bought a condo downtown, and took up choral singing. One day, she pressed her cool palm to Bridget’s forehead and said gently, “What will you do now, dear?”
Bridget hadn’t thought that far; she had conceived of herself as a source of support and nothing else. Now she saw that her mother needed her to go, and she felt abandoned. In the year of tending to her father she hadn’t worked and had lost touch with most of her friends. Sitting in a café downtown, she wrote a letter to Angela, the kind of letter you write only to someone you haven’t seen in a long time and perhaps never knew well, the kind of letter you probably shouldn’t send at all. Angela replied within a week. “My heart is with you,” she wrote, and Bridget’s eyes swelled with tears.
Angela and her German had not gotten married after all; he had met a girl named Mavis and moved to Edmonton and “You know what? Good riddance!” Angela no longer wanted to be a teacher; she was training to be a masseuse instead. She invited Bridget to visit anytime. “We’ll cook and have long talks just like we used to,” she wrote, a revision of their history that Bridget found sweet.
* * *
—
She didn’t visit. She went to law school and made new friends and when she graduated she got a job in labor relations for a midsize corporation. She wore suits to work, with kitten heels, and saw her mother every other weekend, whether her mother wanted her to or not. In the evenings, she still sometimes wrote in her journal, but the entries tended to turn into grocery lists, so she stopped. She was not unhappy. She liked being an adult, being good at her job, owning a car, painting the walls of her apartment on a Saturday afternoon. She didn’t know why she’d ever resisted it.
When the invitation to Angela’s wedding came, Bridget stared at the envelope for a few minutes before she remembered who Angela was. She sent her regrets and forgot about it until the phone rang at eleven o’clock one night and on the other end was Angela, weeping.
“I knew I must have offended you,” she said. “I have to explain. We both know you should have been a bridesmaid, but Charles’s family is enormous—I swear he has ten thousand cousins—and, you see, in their culture things are quite different. I wish I could explain—”
This went on for some time. Finally, Bridget said, “Angela, it’s fine. I wasn’t offended.”
A pause, a sniffle. “So you’ll come, then?” Angela said. Her voice was tinny, a child’s, with a child’s manipulation edging around the distress.
Bridget felt trapped. “Of course,” she said.
She and Sam, her fiancé—he was also a lawyer—decided to treat it as a vacation. They hiked and swam and went zip-lining at Whistler before ending their trip in Vancouver. “How do you know her again?” Sam asked in the hotel, where she was steaming her dress, feeling nervous for reasons she couldn’t define.
Bridget smoothed the dress with her palm, as if stroking her own lap. “I barely do,” she said. “It’ll probably be dull. Forgive me for what we’re about to experience.”
“Oh, I’ll make you pay,” Sam said, smiling, and kissed her.
The wedding, though, was not dull. Angela’s husband turned out to be a Nigerian cardiac surgeon and his large family was raucous and witty. Everybody had to meet everybody. Nobody was allowed to skip the dancing. At one point Bridget found herself sitting with an elderly uncle, telling him a long story about her father, as he nodded and listened gravely, his wife meanwhile instructing Sam in a dance. Angela came up behind Bridget and put her hands on her shoulders, her cheek against Bridget’s cheek. She was still blond and fresh faced but skinnier now, her dress a severe column of white, no frills or lace. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon. Grown up, she was all geometry.
“Thanks for being here, Bardot,” she whispered in Bridget’s ear. “It wouldn’t have been the same without you.” Bridget squeezed her hand, touched that she’d remembered this old nickname. And then Angela was swept away by a crowd that lifted her to the dance floor and demanded she perform. She danced gamely, but her hair was coming loose; she kept lifting a hand to poke at the strands, and her smile tightened each time she felt the disarray.
* * *
—
Bridget and Sam moved to Ottawa and had two children, Robert and Melinda—Bobby and Mellie. Their kids were joiners; they hated to be alone, and every weekend they wanted to see their friends at soccer, birthday parties, figure skating, hockey, dance recitals, sleepovers. This took up much of life. Bridget began to dream of travel: spas in Costa Rica, yoga retreats in Scandinavia.
“I think I’m burning out,” she said to Sam, and he thought she meant on work, but she meant on everything. Sam was stable and good for her, absorbing whatever she threw at him, the tofu of husbands, but it didn’t help. She considered an affair, but it seemed like too much work. Anyway, her days were full of meetings and carpools; there was no time for malfeasance. Instead, she spent more hours than she should have online, seeing whose life had turned out to be more dramatic than her own. That was how she found Angela, who maintained active accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. Angela was still in Vancouver and, judging by her pictures, she had one child, an astonishingly beautiful boy who was a perfect combination of her and Charles—her eyes, his nose—as if they’d divided up the genes by legal agreement. Angela photographed him playing soccer and baking muffins; she pinned recipes for organic pancakes with hidden spinach and discussed the importance of fish-oil supplements. She redid her living room and posted the swatches; everything was off-white. She said that her favorite color was bone. Bridget clicked “Like.” Within a day, a message from Angela popped up in her in-box, frothing with six years’ worth of news. Much of it was already known to Bridget, from the internet, but she pretended it wasn’t. As it happened, Angela
was coming to Ottawa for a conference, and they made plans to get together. Bridget asked what kind of conference it was. “Medical,” Angela wrote.
On the day they were to meet, Bridget went straight from the office, in her pencil skirt and heels, to the bar at Angela’s hotel downtown. It was a modest hotel that catered to visiting bureaucrats. Angela was sitting in a booth, wearing jeans and a light cardigan. A bone-colored cardigan. Her hair was cut in a pleasant bob, and she was still blond. When she saw Bridget, she stood up and flung her arms around her, pressing herself against Bridget’s chest. It was the way Bridget’s children had hugged her when they were little, holding nothing back, and Angela’s body felt like a child’s, thin and pliant and eager.
Bridget asked what kind of work she was doing at the conference, and Angela waved her hand shyly. “I’m not working these days,” she said. “The conference is for people who have my illness.” The illness was one that Bridget had never heard of. Angela described a set of diffuse symptoms—fatigue, muscle aches, cognitive impairment—that defied diagnosis. Doctors were perplexed. Much research still had to be done.
“What kind of cognitive impairment?” Bridget said.
“Oh,” Angela said, smiling. “I’m in a fog most of the time.”
She didn’t seem in a fog to Bridget. They sat drinking wine and discussing the annoying habits of their husbands and children, the dirty socks left on couches, dishes unscraped in the sink. Angela’s son had bought a frog at a pet store and tried to sleep with it in his bed. Her husband was always at the hospital. He’d suggested that her symptoms were psychosomatic.
“Men always say that women are crazy,” Angela said vehemently, “but men have been in charge for most of history and look how that’s turned out!”