where we grew up it was happening all around
The Emerald Inn is empty. The waiters are sitting at a table in back, and an old man is sitting with his pint at the bar, and two stools down a woman’s eating dinner and that’s it. I sit at the corner stool and order a Wild Turkey. The bartender looks like he was picked on as a kid, like he’s mid-flinch. There are TV’s all around.
I’m waiting for The Girl I Knew Since I Was Ten. I met her in the street two days ago and she gave me her number, gave me a hug that was strong and close. She was beautiful and gaunt even as a kid. Her mom killed herself while the family was away in Holland. The Girl I Knew Since I Was Ten was just seven.
I order another.
She comes in and smiles and hugs me the same way. She keeps her scarf around her neck. Her forehead shines sweaty. She just had a yoga class across the street, so the bar I chose is perfect, she says. She orders tea. I leave it alone. When the bartender puts her glass down, tea bag floating, I touch glasses with her anyway.
We catch up.
She’s working as an executive assistant. She’s being phased out of her job. She’s worked for her boss for nine years so it feels like a bad marriage. She’s looking forward to being free of him, looking forward to doing some things she wants to do. She likes to draw and she’s started drawing again. She wants to write. She’s taken some classes in the past but wants to try again.
We mention some names, kids we grew up with, went to school with, fill in whatever bio facts we know, and then she mentions the man she’s seeing and it’s out there. I was waiting and now it’s out there and I just hold her eyes. I tell her I always thought she was beautiful so that’s on the table too. We went out one time and it was a disaster. She was a wreck. I kissed her goodnight and she almost wilted from fear. I tell her this and she says she knows, she’s trying not to be like that anymore. I tell her she liked me and she says she did, she does, and her arms are folded and I call her on it, smile at her body language, and she smiles and unfolds her arms. Her boyfriend is the oldest of seven. He’s Italian. He left home at an early age. They’ve been dating for six years with periods of turmoil but these days, the last months, since they broke up and reunited, since she broke off the engagement but didn’t give back the ring, since she bought the wedding dress and realized she’d never wear it and if they did get married she’d go to the justice of the peace with a few friends and maybe a dinner afterward, these days she’s happy, happy and comfortable, and they’ve brought each other back together.
“That’s how I did it,” I say. “Justice of the peace. We had the first slot in the morning. We got married in our winter coats and went out for breakfast. Eggs and bacon and toast in a crappy diner and in the pictures we look happy. Eight months later we were done. She knew I didn’t want to marry her even before we got married, but I wanted to try it. Maybe it was a bucket list thing. I hate that expression.”
“I hate it too.”
“I checked it off and we got divorced.”
“Are you still friends?”
“She’s not even in the top five of women I’ve loved, or women I’ve been close with. I was with a great woman for six months recently and we broke up. I was with a woman I deeply loved for three years before that. Now I’m free.”
She holds my eyes for a long time. Her arms are crossed, but she’s holding my eyes.
“I visited my house recently where I grew up,” she says. “Where we grew up. It was strange. They’d changed it. The new owners made it look almost tacky.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“I didn’t feel much.”
“It has to be hard going back. With what you went through.”
And now I’ve put that on the table, on the bar, solid as my hand next to my Wild Turkey. It would make a good photo. The Emerald Inn, my hand and the wood bar and the brown whiskey. I don’t take out my phone to take the shot. I don’t need to. My camera that’s not a real camera is always there.
“What did you know about her?” she says.
“I remember her. She was very beautiful. She was always smiling. That’s what I remember from my kid mind.”
“She’s beautiful in almost all of my memories,” she says. “Everybody remembers my mom as being full of life. What did you hear about her? I mean about how she died. My sister and I have been talking about that. My family changed the story. Really it was my mother’s sister who changed the story. Suicide was a shame back then.”
“I can tell you the story I heard.”
“Tell me.”
“I know you were in Holland. I heard your dad was away, and that you and your sister were at home with your mom. I heard your mom locked herself in the bathroom and slit her wrists in the bath.”
The Girl I Knew Since I Was Ten smiles. Then her eyes go away like she’s back in that day, in Holland, her dad was on sabbatical, her family was in Amsterdam, her dad was out for the day, and she’s banging on the door with her older sister, screaming for her mother to come out of the bathroom. Then she’s back with me, sitting next to me.
“That’s pretty close,” she says. “I’m glad you heard that. I’m glad you know the story. She didn’t cut her wrists. She took downers and got in the bath and put a plastic bag over her head.”
We sit there. On TV the Rangers are skating on outdoor ice, a rare outdoor game, their breaths smokey, and the camera moves across faces in the crowd. Everyone is breathing smoke, and red-faced cold.
“Thank you,” she says. “For talking about it.”
“I always thought suicide was a brave act.”
“I don’t know how I feel about it. They have a foundation for survivors of suicide victims and I went to some meetings. There were so many people they broke us into groups. I was in the Mothers Who Commit Suicide group. I went for a few years, but I haven’t gone lately.”
“Where we grew up it was happening all around.”
We run down the names. Both parents of a girl we went to school with. The mother of a girl we went to school with. A girl always ostracized in high school who hung herself in her college dorm. A popular kid who became a drug addict and blew his brains out in his parents’ bed. A dentist on our street who drove his car into the woods on a freezing night and froze to death, natural causes, so his wife would get the insurance money.
“It’s a long time ago,” she says.
“My friend killed himself. He was my only male friend. I met him when I moved here. He was bigger than life, big and strong and handsome and funny, and we laughed all the time. He’d lived a hard life. He never graduated high school. He was in juvie. He beat his dad up when he was fifteen. He hustled and stole. He taught me some things. I bailed him out of jail one night in New Haven. He had a roof company, a one-man, one-ladder operation and sometimes I’d help him do jobs in Manhattan. Then he moved back to LA where he was from, and he started getting religious. He came back to New York just to talk to me. He wanted me to think about Jesus. When he came back, every time he swore he looked up to heaven like he was asking God for forgiveness. I told him to stop. I told him his sense of humor was what made him special and God wouldn’t want to take away his sense of humor and his irreverence. But he was too far gone. We lost touch. A little over a year ago I looked him up on the internet. I wanted to see if there was anything about him. I found his name and next to it, in parentheses, it said deceased. It was April Fools’ Day, it was April 1st when I looked, and the word deceased went through me and I knew it wasn’t a joke. I tracked down his daughter. I knew he’d had a daughter when he himself was practically a kid. I found her, she was still living in California, and she told me he went out to the mountains near Hollywood and hung himself from a tree.”
The Girl I Knew Since I Was Ten doesn’t say anything. She knows there’s nothing to say.
“I didn’t see the signs. I don’t know if you saw any signs with your mom. I know you were only a kid. But I didn’t see any signs. We talked about it, or really we joked about it, or we did before he got religious. We’d say we were jaded, had seen it all and done it all and what was the point, we might as well go out on our own terms. But he did it. To face that, to take it on your own, that takes balls.”
“I remember seeing some signs,” she says. “I’d try to wake my mom up to play with me. I’d tell her she had to get up and get dressed before we could play. I was aware she wasn’t connected in some way. I was only seven, but I knew she didn’t want to face her days. We were in a small town on the outskirts of Amsterdam. She must have felt very alone with two kids and her husband at work, but to do what she did, I don’t know if it took bravery.”
“Your dad must have been wrecked.”
“He was. We came right back to the States. He asked his younger brother to help take care of us. His brother had recently gotten out of the army and he came and did so many of the mother things my mom used to do.”
“That’s the title of your first story,” I say. “Mother Things. About the man who took care of you.”
“I like it,” she says.
I write it down on a beverage napkin and give it to her.
“Thank you,” she says and I can see the kid I remembered, not seven but fourteen, beautiful, long-limbed, sad faced, and I want her under me, and I’d fuck her slow and slow and slow and sad, more slow and sad than in any American movie, and I don’t know the end of the movie, it hasn’t been made, but I know the end of our little scene: I’ll walk her to the subway, she’ll go back to her boyfriend, she’ll be happy then less happy, and she’ll stay with him. When someone leaves you that young, you must want to stay with someone, the someone who replaces that someone, for as long as you can. The first time I saw her she was scared, couldn’t take my kiss, couldn’t take anyone’s kiss, especially not mine, a too-experienced kiss, hand behind neck, moving her to me, my movie-move, which made it colder, harder than she needed. This time I won’t kiss her.
She goes to the bathroom.
I check my texts to see who’s around.
She comes back. I ask if she’d like another tea and she asks if I’m going to have another drink and I say Yes and order another and the bartender, still looking mid-flinch, says this one’s on the house. He pours a steady, healthy count into a rocks glass without too much ice.
“I drink scotch sometimes,” she says.
“It’s bourbon. It’s better. Share this with me.”
“I won’t share it, but I’ll have some.”
I hand her the glass and she sips.
“It’s good,” she says and smiles, a kid surprised.
It is good. But I haven’t been kid-surprised, haven’t been excited taking a sip, taking anything, for a while and I remember when she was fourteen and I was a senior, young, strong, new young strength in me, in my legs, in my walk, in my arms that I flexed with wonder, in the surprise of suddenly having that power, aware of me but new aware, a kid’s narcissism so different from my look-at-me poses now.
We finish the drink. We come up with some titles for stories she’ll write if she starts writing. She tells me her boyfriend stopped drinking. He was drinking too much and stopped. She asks what I’d like to do, a big question, about life, and I tell her I’m doing what I want to do. She has very steady eyes. There’s tired under her eyes, two shadows of all she’s lived, but her eyes are clear and her mouth, just parted, is right there, more than movie, and I could kiss her, right now, right now, but don’t.
I walk her to the subway.
It goes the way I knew it would go. Just walking. Small talk coming in. She hugs me, not as strong, not as close, we’ve left whatever we’ve left in the bar, and she goes into the station. I start walking uptown, start looking in the windows of other bars to see who’s out.
Adam Berlin
Adam Berlin has published four novels, including Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s/The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award) and Headlock (Algonquin Books), and a story/flash collection All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights (Livingston Press/Tartt First Fiction Award). His non-fiction micro-chap And Paris Is Beautiful Too is part of Bull City Press’s INCH series. adamberlin.com