Sweet Home Chicago
Sweet Home Chicago
Delayed in the airport or need to get away from bickering siblings? Today’s literary diversions include a poem by Char Lee Lorraine & short fiction by dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoan Jessie Ann Foley.
It’s almost Thanksgiving. Get ready to field every writer’s favorite question: “Are you still writing your little stories?”
DISTRACTIONS
Concept Comic by Jessica Peri Chalmers
Today’s writing prompt: No one would have known if she hadn’t…
The Contents of Cold Milk
By Char Lee Lorraine
There is a Black man in the pool The pool past the zen garden just beside the Eucalyptus tree His skin shines against the water Beads of water splash against his forehead Dripping down caught by a thick wrinkle If he came all this way the water must be cool The Black man in the pool stretches his legs out fully We watch him from up here and we see him settled in His lips look pursed and his eyes are closed If you remove the Black man the pool will remain the same That is the safety of water contained Whims and wilds are tamed without losing a sense of freedom This is the good thing about the water Recognizable and fresh and cool Drain the water and fill it with milk instead He may not come to sit and stretch his legs The milk might be mistaken for sugar or paint Pus mixed in and blood mixed in Milk meant for a baby and carried across a field Making its way to the pool Pour it all, go ahead See if the Black man settles in Will his lips pucker as he closes his eyes? Comfort cut by the ghost of separation From up here we see it all and we smile From up here it is easier to consider him The blood is mixed in
Y2K FM
By Jessie Ann Foley
“Illusion never changed/ Into something real”
—Natalie Imbruglia, “Torn”
Dana crouches before a storage bin in a clammy corner of her basement, a glass of Chardonnay weeping a wet circle onto the ironing board cover. It’s long past midnight, and upstairs her two daughters have been asleep for hours. She doesn’t quite know what compelled her to snap shut her laptop and head down here in search of the pair of jeans she’d worn all throughout her senior year of high school. She suspects the third pour of wine had something to do with it, but she knows it’s more than that. It has something to do with her mindset lately: so dreamy and weepy and distracted that if she hadn’t been celibate for the past year and a half, she would have gone out to CVS and bought a pregnancy test.
Like the rest of her home, Dana’s basement is neat and sparse. When it comes to her wardrobe, she has always adhered to Oprah’s command that if she hasn’t worn it for a year, she has to donate it—which is exactly how she knows these jeans, which she hasn’t worn for twenty years, are down here somewhere. Time and time again, while culling her closet through the numerous moves of her young and not-so-young-anymore adulthood—dorm room to Chicago apartment to New York apartment and back to Chicago, into her and Rudy’s first home, then to their second, “forever home,” and finally to a different, rented home when forever turned out to be only a little more than ten years—she’d purposely hung onto them. Or at least she thinks she did: her memory has been for shit lately. Sometimes Dana wonders if it’s the nightly wine taking its toll, or the hundreds and hundreds of sleepless nights—both Leah and Melinda took years before they slept through without waking—or could her mind, at thirty-eight, already be showing the deteriorating effects of age? So when she discovers the jeans, folded neatly beneath a Christmas-themed table runner and still smelling— or is she imagining this too?—of Tommy Girl, she lets out a joyful little yip, her eroded faith in herself briefly restored.
The jeans are light-wash Bongos, size twenty-six, super low rise and bootcut, with rhinestone seaming across the back pockets. Dana is confident they’ll still fit her because over the past couple years she has somehow managed, through a combination of depression and distraction, to become skinnier than she was at seventeen. So she is surprised, when she drops her running shorts and pulls the jeans on, to find that they don’t. The legs, which once clung like onionskin to her plump, unmarred teenage thighs, hang loosely, but she can barely get the waistband over her hips. She has to use force to wrangle the button shut and yank up the two-inch zipper. Her white and puckered belly bulges out all the way around, and she wonders if people still say “muffin top,” if that’s still a thing.
She glances at her phone and winces—as usual, she’s stayed up far too late, and as usual, she’s going to pay for it when her alarm goes off in five short hours. She will battle her way through the chaos of the morning— the spilled cereal and packing of lunches and signing of field trip forms— with ten milligrams of Celexa and half a pot of strong black coffee. She tries not to complain about it, not even inwardly, because this is what she wanted; this is why she fought so hard for near-total custody of the girls. Still, she wonders sometimes, as she’s tearing the house apart in search of a Despicable Me water bottle—the one without the yellow lid, Leah reminds her with a passionate wail—what Rudy and Sofia’s morning routine looks like. Do they languish in their beds, scrolling through the news? Do they make avocado toast? Or do they save their time and energy for the kind of dream-like, quiet morning sex Dana would miss if the Lex hadn’t largely blotted out her ability to achieve orgasm?
Once she’s pulled down her T-shirt and struck a pose in the full-length mirror propped up against the concrete wall, Dana decides that despite her waistline issue, the jeans still look pretty decent. She and her Bongos always made a great team. How many times she’d worn them, complemented by a cheap going-out top with a name brand like Lipstix or Young Hearts or Chica’s Secret, and stepped out into the wild, unpredictable night! With the benefit of hindsight, Dana now sees that her teenage rebellions were mostly conventional and toothless, but at the time they’d felt so exciting, so wild and uncharted. There were always parties, and bars that looked the other way at passed-back IDs, and if they didn’t, she and her mildly delinquent friends could find a way to sneak in. With these friends, all of whom she’s since lost track of, there were intense cross-legged conversations about Bill and Monica, Kosovo, the Chicago fucking Bulls!; there was laughing until her mascara ran; there was bawling into the cordless phone, screaming across a Dominick’s parking lot at a rival group of girls from the grade below her, ducking away from a chucked flask of Rumpleminze at a warehouse rave somewhere in the beige wasteland of unincorporated suburbs ringing O’Hare airport; there was dancing in weed-clouded basements to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, one hand always trailing smoke from a Parliament Light, the other wrapped around a cold can of whatever Joey and his friends had managed to peg at the liquor store.
Dana had loved drinking back then, the way it unshackled her from all of her tedious sensibilities. Twenty years later she still loved it, though of course this was now something that made her feel immature and ashamed. For so much of a girl’s life, she must strive to be fun, until she reaches an age when “fun” becomes a pejorative, smacking of desperation and trashiness, bringing to mind the image of, say, an early middle-aged woman who thinks she might, despite extremely sporadic and not very taxing workouts at her local YMCA, still be able to pull off a pair of super-low-rise jeans.
“Mom!” comes the call from the girls’ room. Dana sighs. She reaches for her wine glass, holds the warmed, oaky dregs in the hot cave of her mouth, then heads upstairs.
Both of her daughters are awake, lying on their backs, their perfect faces upturned to the glow of the dark galaxy they’ve affixed, against landlord rules, to the ceiling of their bedroom. Seeing them there in the dark, waiting for her to come to them, fills Dana with a love so intense it overwhelms her. She senses the folly of pinning all of her joys on these two, ages five and nine, who might one day be sitting around at their own party or bar counter and wave away the offered sweating bottle, saying no, I hate wine, it reminds me of my mother.
But, for the moment anyway, there is nothing to forgive. They are hers. She squats down to place a loving hand on Leah’s forehead.
“Bad dream?” she asks.
“Mo-om!” Mel’s giggle pipes into the darkness. “What are you wearing? I can see your whole butt.”
Dana remembers reading somewhere that nostalgia begins to kick in twenty years after the remembered time, and if this is true, it explains a lot about her current state of mind. In the days after she tries on the Bongos, whispers of that particular era of her life begin to rise up all around her, like tongue-pierced, spray-tanned ghosts. One morning she gets in the car to go to work and discovers the radio has been switched from NPR to a station that used to do classical jazz but is now called Y2K FM and exclusively plays pop and R&B from the turn of the millennium. On her half hour drive to the office, Dana hears Ja Rule, Semisonic, Brandy, Natalie Imbruglia, and even that KC and Jojo song that in 1998 everyone pretended to despise but actually secretly loved. The words to all of these songs come back in totality—no worries of lost memory here!—and she finds herself shouting along in the gridlock, unselfconsciously and with real joy. By the time she pulls into her parking spot outside the firm where she works as a human resources manager, she is sweating and pantingly happy, wondering if she’s having a midlife crisis or perhaps experiencing the earliest signs of menopause. Then again, she wonders, why does it have to be a medical or psychological crisis? Is she not allowed to have simple, uncomplicated bursts of happiness anymore?
The next evening, while on a shopping expedition to Nordstrom, Dana and her daughters are flagged down by a gorgeous golden-skinned MAC girl with massive ear gauges and lavender lipstick.
“Mom,” the girl calls, brandishing a contour brush, “a minute of your time?”
Dana hates when anyone other than her children calls her “Mom,” which is even more desexualizing that “ma’am.” But she nods distractedly. She is so tired today, and she has to drop the girls at Rudy’s by six or he’ll scold her like she’s one of his more intractable eighth graders.
“Your features tell the most beautiful color story,” says the MAC girl, whose name tag reads FALCON. “I would love the chance to play around with your face.” This offer sounds so hostile and intimate that Dana finds herself ushered into a black director’s chair without much protest.
“I’ll bet,” Falcon says, opening one of her little drawers and handing over a long glass vial, “you remember this.”
“Wait.” Dana’s voice is hushed as she takes the cool cylinder into her hands. “Is this Lust?”
Falcon nods and smiles, her matte lavender lips peeling back over her teeth.
“They still make this?”
“Limited edition re-release. A few of our most popular Lipglass shades from the late ’90s.”
As her daughters gather around her, Dana submits herself to the tickle of Falcon’s arsenal of brushes, each doing its part to rehab the drab façade of her face. She even agrees, at Melinda’s pleading, to have fake lashes glued onto her eyelids. The Lipglass, the final touch, smells and feels exactly as she remembered it—chemically vanilla and tacky as maple syrup. Joey used to hate when she wore it—it left a mess all over his neck and mouth— but seeing as her kissing days are on hiatus, with no end date in sight, Dana doesn’t see the harm in accepting Falcon’s suggestion of a second coat.
“OMG, Mom,” shouts Melinda as Dana opens her eyes and looks uncertainly into Falcon’s mirror. “You look like a Kardashian!”
Dana smiles. She knows that, coming from Mel, this is the highest of compliments. She buys the Lipglass, along with some waterproof mascara and a criminally overpriced jar of wrinkle cream. “Treat yo’self!” her daughters yell as the purchases are rung up, and, after posing for a picture to appear on Falcon’s Instagram story, Dana and her daughters head for the children’s department, where she proceeds to buy them outfit after outfit after outfit.
As they’re piling back into the car, laden with bags, Dana’s phone pings. It’s a Facebook friend request, along with a short message, from her high school locker partner, who, like most people she’s not already connected with on social media, is a person whose existence she has completely forgotten. And yet, now that he’s reached out to her, she remembers George perfectly: his green rubber-banded braces, his chin zits, his unexpectedly muscled forearms. His insistence, for a period freshman year when they’d read “The Interlopers” in English I, that people start calling him Georg, using the two syllabled Romanian pronunciation.
“Who’s that?” Leah demands from the backseat. “Is that Dad?”
“No,” says Dana, reading. “It’s an invitation to my twenty-year reunion.”
“What’s a reunion?”
“It’s when a bunch of old people who used to hate each other get together to compare who’s ended up with the best life.”
“But why did they hate each other?”
“Well, lots of reasons. And also, no reason.”
“That makes me feel sad and scared.”
“Me too, kiddo.” Dana tosses her phone onto the passenger seat. She wonders why anyone would subject themselves to a party with people from their past when it’s so much easier to mull over one’s memories in private until they’ve been rendered tasteless and dry as overworked dough. Turning up the radio, Dana pulls out of the parking garage, and as the girls drowse in the backseat, wiped out by their mother’s spontaneous foray into conspicuous consumption, she lets herself remember the joyful searching need of Joey’s hands.
“Whoa,” says Rudy when he opens the front door. “Hot date?”
“Mom had a makeover!” shouts Leah. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Leah is always throwing her parents into situations where they are forced to compliment each other; unlike Melinda, she still holds out hope for a reconciliation, despite the fact that Sofia has already moved into Rudy’s new condo.
“I don’t think you wore that much makeup on our wedding day,” he answers, cannily sidestepping the question. “Girls, go on inside; the pizza just got here.”
Leah and Mel kiss Dana goodbye and, with a pang of loss she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to, she watches them race through the door, their quilted overnight bags flying behind them. When she turns to leave, instead of making his usual hasty retreat back into his building, Rudy steps out onto the front porch with her and closes the door softly behind him.
“Listen, Dane,” he says, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Can we talk?”
Dana squares her shoulders and takes a deep, bracing breath. Over the last several years, her talks with Rudy have not gone well.
“What?”
“I’m wondering if we can rearrange some of these upcoming weekend dates,” he says. “Maybe I could take the girls again next weekend, and you can keep them the two weekends following.”
“You want the girls two weekends in a row?”
“I’d like to take Sofia to Saugatuck the weekend of the twenty- eighth.”
“You can’t do that next weekend?” Dana pulls out her phone.
“Well. I could. But the twenty-eighth is our anniversary.”
She glances up from her calendar. “Anniversary of what? The day you started cheating on me?”
Rudy looks up at the painted white boards of the front porch ceiling and sighs wearily. He was never a yeller, always a sigher, which, in some ways, she’d found more upsetting. “Dane, I’m going to propose to her.”
Dana feels instant heat behind her eyes. Luckily her false lashes are like catch basins, and they block the tears from actually falling.
“I hope you’re okay with that,” he says. “I mean, I know I don’t have to ask your permission or anything . . . but I guess I’d still like your blessing.”
“Of course,” she murmurs, then adds mechanically, “best wishes to you both.”
Rudy smiles down at her benevolently. He’s tan, well dressed, still very good looking. He keeps active—he’s got the time, being only a part-time father. Sofia’s younger than he is. She’s thirty-three. She’ll want children. In a year or two, Leah and Melinda will have a little brother or sister to treasure, a sweet-scented sibling borne from another woman’s body, who will only accelerate the pace at which Dana’s daughters’ lives begin their inexorable divergence from her own.
“Unfortunately,” she says suddenly, “I can’t switch.”
“Oh?” Rudy’s smile fades. “You have plans?”
“Yes,” she tells him. “I’m going to my high school reunion.”
One of the downsides of social media and its constant tabs keeping, Dana thinks, is that it has robbed people of the right to lie about their whereabouts and expect to get away with it. Now that she’s told Rudy she’s going to her reunion, she feels like she actually has to go. And so, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, she wakes up in her silent rented home and spends the day doing things she can’t really afford. First, she sees a colorist for a single process rinse and blowout. Then, her hair shiny and squeaking with new chemicals, she heads to Nordstrom. With the help of a chic Russian stylist dressed in drapey black cashmere, she purchases a new outfit—a silk going-out top of decidedly higher quality than the spaghetti-strap tanks of her past, along with a pair of dark-wash high-waisted jeans. The brand is called NYDJ, which, Dana doesn’t realize until she gets home, is actually an acronym for NOT YOUR DAUGHTER’S JEANS. This makes her feel depressed: surely the Russian stylist could have done better than that. Dana wonders whether there is a corresponding NOT YOUR MOTHER’S JEANS brand, with sizes like 000 and Sexytiny, and whether in a few years Leah and Mel will wear them, attracted by the label’s promise to set them as far apart from her as possible.
Dana’s last visit of the day is to Falcon, who envelops her in a hug perfumed with woody, androgynous amber oil. Falcon knows just what to do with the color story of Dana’s face, and when she puts her brushes down and holds up the mirror, Dana sees that Falcon has succeeded in creating the illusion, if not quite of beauty, then at least of prosperity, which, at her age, can easily be mistaken for happiness.
Before she leaves for the reunion, Dana sits in her tidy white kitchen and eats two bowls of Kix for her dinner. Then she takes half a milligram of Xanax and pours herself a glass of Albariño. It’s a thirty-dollar bottle, far more expensive than what she usually drinks. It has a sharp, mineral taste, like sucking on pebbles gathered from a very cold, very clean stream. Dana enjoys it very much. In fact, she wonders why she doesn’t buy herself nicer wine all the time. Between Rudy’s alimony and her own salary, it’s not like she’s completely poor. But self-denial is just another kind of habit, and one that she plans on breaking with even more continued regularity. If Rudy can do whatever he wants without any karmic consequences, then why can’t she? Treat yo’self! She remembers the echoes of her daughters’ absent voices, and she sips her wine, missing them.
The house is so quiet that Dana can hear the soughing trees moving outside even though the windows are closed. To drown out the sound, she gets up and puts on Y2K FM. The house immediately fills with the chords of a Third Eye Blind song that was playing once when Joey had her pressed up against the siding of some sophomore’s house, his mouth on hers, two fingers plunging inside her until she bucked against him in ecstasy, making wild, guttural sounds; stunned, afterwards, at the discovery that physical desire was even better than beer at obliterating her native sense of shame. It occurs to Dana, as she pours herself another glass of wine, that to feel ecstasy now—to even want to feel it—would be as strange as craving milk from her mother’s breast. She wonders, as she often does, if this is normal.
She suspects not. She suspects that something is terribly wrong with her.
Her phone buzzes on the counter with a calendar alert: the reunion is starting. Right now, several dozen, maybe even several hundred members of the class of ’98 are filing into Ballroom B of the Ramada Inn and Suites on Cumberland Avenue. How many of them will arrive on the arms of spouses? How many of them will come with old friends they’ve still kept up with over the years? How many of them will show up completely alone? She swallows another Xanax, for fortification, and pours herself another glass of Albariño, for the road. But then she gets distracted by the stupid radio—Aerosmith!—and without meaning to, she finds that she has finished the bottle. She orders an Uber, and when she hiccups, her mouth fills with the taste of Spanish clay.
Five minutes later her ride arrives, and Dana steps out into the star- thick night. She’s all right, actually. She can walk straight, no problem, even in her brand-new stack-heeled booties. She waves happily at Imran, her five-starred driver who is idling in front of the house in his red Ford Escape. She feels wonderful. She is seventeen again, climbing into a stranger’s car, kissing her Lipglass into place, going to a party with all of the people she thinks she remembers having loved once.
At the check-in table, one of Dana’s former sort-of friends, Kerri Packer, is signing people in and distributing name tags. Kerri checks her off the list, looking up at Dana with sagging blues eyes and absolutely no recognition. Mortally insulted—they’d gone to see Titanic together!—Dana affixes her name tag to her silk blouse, swipes a fistful of drink tickets, and beelines for the bar. Her first sip of Chardonnay is acidic, lukewarm, practically undrinkable. She fears that the Albariño, clean and lovely, has ruined her on cheap banquet hall wine forever. It’s just another reminder, as if she didn’t already know, that every act of pleasure has its consequence. She considers ordering something else, but what’s the alternative? Beer? Vodka? Water? She clings to her glass hopelessly, her gaze swerving from left to right. Everyone is already gathered at high-top tables in tight, laughing clutches, and she can’t remember how this works: how is she supposed to break in? She feels a tightness in her chest, as sharp and cresting as a labor contraction. The Xanax isn’t doing its job, and now she’s having a panic attack.
Thankfully, the ladies’ room is abandoned, and Dana slams herself into a stall, collapses onto the toilet, dribbles out a dehydrated trickle of bright yellow urine, and holds her breath for a slow count of five. She flushes, gulps air, and comes out of the stall to wash her hands and drink straight from the sink as much cold water as she can swallow. Then, feeling a little better, she wipes her mouth and opens her purse. She’s slicking on a coat of Lipglass, giving herself a mental pep talk to get back out there, when the stall door directly behind her swings open. Dana nearly jumps out of her skin, and the nude gloss goes skidding up onto her cheek.
“Dana!”
“Patty?”
Like Dana, Patty McAdams is skinnier than she was in high school— scarily so. Her Lycra bodysuit hangs shapelessly over her torso, and her bangles are all caught up on the jutting bones of her wrists. When they hug, Dana is sure she can feel not just the knobs of Patty’s spine but the soft give of tissue in between the knobs.
“I can’t believe it!”
“No, I can’t believe it.” Dana laughs, but she’s aware that she is also gripping the side of the bathroom counter, her Lipglass hardening on her cheek. “Seriously. I thought . . . I thought . . .”
“That I died of a drug overdose? Yeah, you’re like the third person tonight to say that. No idea who started that rumor, but I’m very much alive, or as alive as one can be when they live in St. Louis.”
“St. Louis,” Dana repeats dully. “They’ve got a great children’s museum.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there a bunch. I’ve got a twelve-year-old. He’s a tennis prodigy. I’m a produce manager at Trader Joe’s.”
“I love their shaved Brussels Sprouts.” It’s the only thing Dana can think of to say. She’s trying to remember now, really remember, through the haze of liquor and alprazolam. She’s quite sure she didn’t just hear that Patty had died. She’s quite sure that she and Rudy attended the wake: 2007, maybe 2008. She’s quite sure she hugged Patty’s sobbing mother, Mrs. McAdams, and bent down and rested her hand against the tennis prodigy’s cheek, who was at the time just a tragically orphaned toddler. If only she and Rudy didn’t despise each other now she could ask him to corroborate, but what if she’s wrong? To misremember something so huge might cause him to question her stability, and then he might appeal the terms of custody, and to risk all of that just to confirm that Patty McAdams is ten years dead when Patty herself is standing right here in front of her, seems sort of gigantically stupid.
“So have you seen Joey yet?” Rummaging through her macramé bag, Patty locates a small bag of powder and taps a bump of coke onto the sink counter.
“Um.” As Dana watches her old friend’s long hair, gray at the roots, blonde in the middle, and Kool-Aid pink on the split ends, spill around her face as she snorts up her drugs, she feels reassured. Maybe everyone at this reunion is fucked up on their own bespoke combination of drugs, pills, and liquor. Here’s a thought: maybe Dana’s the soberest person at this thing.
“Wait,” Dana says. “Joey’s here?”
“I wouldn’t fault you if you didn’t recognize him. Sheesh. Though I guess I shouldn’t talk.” She laughs. “Gettin’ older’s a bitch. But it beats the alternative every time. Right?”
“Right,” Dana agrees. A small thread of blood is beginning to pool in the pit of Patty’s nostril. She must feel it, but she doesn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Well!” Patty reaches out her skeletal arms and gives Dana a perfunctory hug. “This has been fun. See you out there?” Dana nods, and as soon as Patty is gone she picks up her wine glass and gulps. It actually doesn’t taste so bad anymore. The memory of the Albariño has already begun to fade. Fluffing her hair with her fingertips, she steps back out into the reunion to order another glass, promising herself it will be her last one of the evening.
A million hours later, Dana awakens.
She’s sitting at the kitchen counter, her throbbing head resting on her arms. She looks down and sees that she is still wearing her silk top, her NYDJ jeans, even her stacked-heel booties. It’s early morning, 7:30 or so, though the gray, rainy sky makes it seem even earlier. Dana yawns so widely that her jaw cracks, then peels herself off her stool to chug orange juice straight from the fridge. She kicks off her booties, leaving them where they land, then relocates to the couch and allows the night to come bleeding back to her: the Kix and Xanax dinner, the Albariño and the Chardonnay, non-dead Patty McAdams and her bump of coke, and then Joey, thinned and thickened in all the wrong places but with the same soft eyes and dimples intact. He’d asked her to join him for a cigarette, and as soon as they’d stepped out of the stale, artificially cooled air of the ballroom and into the fetid humidity of the unseasonably warm night, it was as if they’d stepped into the past, where things still felt heady and possible. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in over fifteen years, but when he handed her a Parliament Light and she’d laughed, “Still?” and he’d answered, “Only on special occasions,” she held the smoke in her chest, where it curled inside her pink-again lungs like a long-missed dare.
“Look,” Joey had said, tapping his ash onto the cement. “Dane. I’ve got to ask you something. This whole MeToo thing? What do you think about it?”
“What do I think about it?” Dana exhaled. “I haven’t seen you in twenty years and you want to talk about politics?”
“I mean, I’ve got a daughter now, you know? So I guess I’ve been taking stock. What I’m wondering is . . . well, was I a shithead?”
Dana crushed her butt beneath the sole of her bootie. So this was the adult Joey. Earnest, soul-searching, shyly fat, and smelling of men’s three-in-one body wash.
“You know what I mean,” he continued. “Did I ever make you feel bad? Force you into things? Pretend not to understand that no means no?”
“I never gave you the chance to understand.” Dana had laughed. “I never said no to you.”
“Point taken.” Joey’s smiling eyes scanned the flat horizon of the parking lot. “I remember you being . . . eager.”
“I was eager.” Dana clutched her wine. “I was seventeen, dude. Not to mention, I loved you.”
“Dude?”
“Yeah. Dude.”
“Well.” Joey dropped his cigarette. “I loved you too.”
A pause, two seconds or less. The silent parking lot throbbed with intent. And then his mouth was there, tasting of damp ashes, which should have been unpleasant but wasn’t. It was an odd sensation, being kissed by a stranger who’d come from the land of the person you used to be. Maybe that was what it took—the echolalic strangeness—to cut through all the numbing balms Dana had ingested throughout the course of the night. Because when Joey kissed her, even though she was dimly aware of the wedding ring on his finger that had been there so long it was sunken into his skin like a gleaming ingrown hair, Dana found that she could feel every part of it.
For the first time in her life, Dana is glad her girls aren’t around. She spends the entire drizzling day on the couch, watching cooking shows and sitcoms with easy-to-follow plots. As the Saturday night encroaches, darkening the windows, she runs a brush through her hair, throws a hoodie over her braless T-shirt, and makes the short drive to the convenience store for a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a frozen dinner. As the meal spins in the microwave, she opens the wine, pours herself a small glass, and gathers up the courage to engage with her social media accounts. But she soon discovers that there is little reason to be nervous about what she finds. She does not appear in a single photograph from the reunion—not even the class photo she remembers clearly being herded into underneath an arch of blue and yellow balloons. Stranger still is that neither Patty McAdams nor Joey are in the photos either. She peels the film back from her plastic bowl of macaroni and cheese and eats pensively, considering the meaning of this. Maybe Patty really is dead. Dana knows that, with a quick Google search, she can easily solve this mystery. But what’s the point in searching? If Patty is dead, then Joey never kissed her at all.
Back on the couch, with another glass of wine poured and The Great British Baking Show queued up on Netflix, Dana feels herself starting to nod off. But like a recently concussed person, she’s afraid to let herself fall asleep. She knows what will happen if she does. She’ll sleep and she’ll dream, and the dreams won’t go anywhere and they won’t make sense and they won’t mean anything. And then when she wakes up, it will be morning and her empty plastic dinner tray will still be sitting on the kitchen island and her daughters will still be at Rudy’s, standing on either side of Sofia, helping her pour the pancake batter into the hot buttered griddle. Nothing will be different: Dana will not be returned to the past, or even to the future. She will only be, as she always is, relegated to the present, hitching along on repeat like a lost track on an old scratched CD.
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