Authors: Dean Bakopoulos
Claire is not a regular runner, but she is an occasional one, and when she wakes up from a dream that same Friday night in late May, she feels like running, wants to run until she loses her breath and sweat slicks her limbs. Perhaps she too can blame the pulsing muscles and buzzing bones on the prairie spring, that sudden flux and flow of energy that comes when the body finally understands that winter is actually gone.
She is sleeping in her daughter’s bed. Wendy, who is ten and has already inherited her father’s insomnia and her mother’s capacity for worry, sleeps next to Claire. Wendy lies in bed each night and worries aloud—bedbugs, bullies, shark attacks in city pools— and Claire lies down and tries to remain calm beside her, listening to her daughter’s dark rambles, an emotional sponge. Sometimes, Claire sings to Wendy, the classic rock B sides that her half-drunk father used to sing to her three decades before. Eventually, Wendy falls asleep; often Claire does too. Wendy cannot fall asleep any other way. For over eight years, Claire has lain next to her daughter until sleep has come.
At Christmas last year, they bought Wendy a double bed because of this, and before that, a white noise machine since every noise beyond the bedroom caused Wendy to bolt upright and say, “What was that?” The double bed, the noise machine, lying beside her singing “Simple Man” and “Shelter from the Storm”—was all this indulgence or necessity? Claire didn’t know. It just was. Once your kids are older than five, you stop wondering, you stop reading
the stack of contradictory parenting books, enjoy what you have as you have it, seeing the maw of the teenage years just a few steps away, realizing all of your new strategies and revised plans will simply evaporate with time anyway. A new obstacle will emerge and your routines will be useless.
On this night, the night in question, Claire has a dream that she is back in New York, seventeen again, smoking on the rooftop of a friend’s apartment; “The Love Cats” plays on a boom box. Her life is before her, still shapeable and unknown, and the thrill she has from looking out at the skyline is palpable even when she wakes up, as is the craving for a cigarette, though she has not smoked in three years.
The dream is not just a dream, really, but a dreaming of a memory, a flashback to something that happened in real life, as vivid and clear as reality. Her brain becomes a time machine. In this memory, it is cold, and Claire is wearing a massive parka, and she hears herself saying, “I will never leave this city,” before she takes a long drag on a cigarette and watches her friends raise their beer cans in agreement. “Never fucking ever,” they say. They drink. “Besides,” says Anna Holowka, who’d been, since birth, her best friend, “where the fuck would you go? Iowa?”
How do you ever know what you will do? How easy it seems, at seventeen, to shape a life with clarity, ridiculing all the possibilities that seem impossible.
Claire gets out of bed and a thought stays with her:
I was a different person then.
And then:
where did I go?
For mothers, there is a daily, or nightly, choice: sleep or solitude. You can rarely have both, and for most of her parental life, Claire has chosen solitude. She’s woken early to write, has done yoga while babies napped, has stayed up until three or four binge-watching a television series all her friends on Facebook have already seen. The
dark circles under her eyes will confirm this, though she is still pretty enough, she knows, and for a woman almost forty, happily, she is still fit. Lately, she likes to have that confirmed. She dresses with less modesty than she did even in college (though in 1995, admittedly, billowing sacks of cloth were the rage); this summer’s swimsuit, just ordered online with the help of a virtual mannequin whose expandable curves fascinated Wendy to no end, will be a two-piece. Claire does not fear the gaze of men the way she did when she was younger. She does not welcome it, not exactly, but she also doesn’t mind the flirtation or the second looks she sometimes gets. It is, she knows, part maturity, part fearlessness, and part vanity—but how happy she is to lose the constant chatter of insecurity she heard her first two decades of adulthood.
This is the best part of middle age, she thinks. Or maybe she doesn’t think this. Maybe she has just read it in
O
magazine, while soaking in a bath a few nights ago. It is a bad habit of hers—possibly the curse of a blocked writer—to believe that she’s come up with ideas she’s read elsewhere only a few weeks before.
Claire goes to her bedroom and undresses, then slides on running shorts, a sports bra, and a white tank top. She finds her running shoes in the back of the chaotic closet. Stuffed inside them, a pair of athletic socks. Shod for a run, she checks in on Wendy, who is in deep sleep, and then listens at Bryan’s door; she hears a soft snore. Bryan is her oldest, now twelve, grown sullen and moody in the last six months. He sleeps with the bedroom door locked. He does everything behind a locked door. If he can look at a screen, he will. This makes her sad—all of the parenting books she’s read about raising free-range kids have been rendered impotent by the iPad his father bought him a year ago, on an unaffordable whim.
On the first floor, she shuts her laptop, closing first the eleven open tabs of distractive drivel that occupy her browser, then closing a document called NovelNewStartMay12_2012v39, and logging off to password-protect her computer. After this, in the
kitchen, she looks down the basement stairs, sees the blue light of the TV and faintly hears the sound of a cable drama, the sound of televised gunfire. Her husband is watching his favorite show, a series about a sheriff in Kentucky; he has been trying to get her to watch it.
“I don’t like to watch miserable things,” she always reminds him, to which he always says, “But life is miserable.”
He means it as a joke; she does not like his jokes anymore.
She does not go down the stairs to check in with him, to let him know she is leaving. He will look at her, puzzled. He might take it personally, somehow, that she won’t slip in next to him, cuddle against him, graze his thigh with her hand. But the last thing she wants right now is to cuddle someone reassuringly. This, she has begun to believe, is the curse of her life: everyone around her demanding reassurance, as if there is a bottomless well of it, as if there is nothing that scares or overwhelms her, as if she is a source of endless cuddles, back rubs, and soothing tones.
She slips out the door.
She walks a block, then runs a block, then walks again toward campus, finally making a long diagonal dash across the abandoned lamp-lit green. The students are gone now, and most of the professors too. The campus feels abandoned, which is when she likes it best. She is almost never on campus in daylight.
Downtown, she jogs through the wide, empty streets. There is no traffic; the businesses—the café, the movie theater, the Mexican restaurant, and the sports bar—are all closed.
The only illuminated sign is ahead of her as she turns right on Fifth Street and sees a brilliant red, moth-flocked sign that reads
KUM & GO
. Years ago, when she came to Iowa from New York for school and saw this sign, she thought she was passing by a porn shop, one of those interstate smut dens for truck drivers and closeted suburban dads. But no, it was a convenience store, earnest and well lit (which, she thinks, describes most of the Midwest).
She had taken a picture of the sign back then, and had the picture
made into postcards that she sent to her friends back in New York.
Wish you were here
, she hand-lettered across each one with a Sharpie. On the back, she wrote only:
Where the @#$% am I again? XO Claire.
She stops running in the parking lot, puts her hand on her hips to catch her breath, almost tasting the cigarettes she’s about to buy, and from the sidewalk, she looks at the store and realizes that she has no cash or credit card with her.
This is why she begins kicking the ice machine.
Charlie Gulliver has been driving through the verdant yet desolate fields of I-80, through deadbeat postindustrial corridors oxidizing in the hazy spring light.
In Casper, and again in Denver, and again in Omaha, he stops to call old college friends, offering surprise visits, a fine time, beers and burgers on an outdoor patio somewhere—the winter is over, he texts, and I’m passing through town—but he can reach no one. Calls go unanswered, texts unreturned. It is so easy to feel ignored when you are carrying a cell phone on a road trip, sending out missives to friends who are pretending not to receive them until you have rolled safely past.
But how can he take this personally? The world is busy, just as he used to be busy. Now Charlie seems to be the only person in America who has time to kill.
These meandering and endless thoughts suddenly redeem themselves with a wild, spilling sunset in his rearview mirror, a melting of the sun into the horizon, blasts of purple and orange that make him forget all of this and focus on a sun pillar pointing up to the heavens just over his left shoulder, and so when Charlie pulls into the Grinnell Kum & Go not long after witnessing this, he feels happy as he parks his old minivan, given to him ten years ago by his mother, by the ice coolers.
The Check Engine light had come on near Des Moines and he’s glad the vehicle has made it to Grinnell, glad too that his debit card still works, the modest balance of his account having been
decimated by the high cost of gas on the three-day trip. He buys a twelve-pack of Moosehead. He buys bread. He buys bologna, sour cream and onion chips, and a small bottle of yellow mustard. Suddenly, feeling hunger swelling his tongue, he buys a box of day-old doughnuts and a can of coffee and some cream. He is back in the Midwest and he intends to eat like it, a thought he says aloud, as if he has an audience, and then he feels a soliloquy emerging, like he’s back onstage doing a show.
But he is done with shows.
In the coastal cities where he’s lived these past ten years, New York, L.A., Seattle, Portland, Boston, as he’s drifted from one sublet to another, every so often sleeping, for a few days, in his van or on a filthy couch, every fellow actor he’s met pretends to like junk food, claims at Monday rehearsals that they
binged
on pizza and cupcakes all weekend, but binges in the Midwest are not followed by three-hour workouts the way they are on the coasts. You can’t call something a binge if you try to undo its effects the next morning with a juice fast or herbal cleanse or three hours of hot yoga. Bingeing had to involve a deliberate decision to live with the consequences of the binge.
He takes his loot to the counter, tossing in some cheese dip and a bottle of Coke before he gets to the register, as if he means to cement shut the end of his acting career through the consumption of empty calories.
He recognizes Ashlyn Harms behind the counter. Ashy, whom he’s known since kindergarten, works the register as she did a decade ago, when Charlie was still in high school. She’s heavier now, her hair shorter, but her smile is the same.
He pretends not to recognize her, because he is a dick.
Still, she begins to scan the groceries and, without looking up, starts a conversation.
“How you doing, Charlie?”
“Good. You?”
“All right.”
“Rough week?”
“I guess.”
“You look rough.”
“Do I?”
“Mooseheads, are they dark?”
“No. They’re light. See, green glass?”
“Do you ever hang out? You go to Rabbit’s?”
“I’ve been away,” Charlie says.
“Oh yeah? How long?”
“Six years. No, even more.”
“We should hang out.”
“My dad’s in a nursing home. My folks got divorced last year and he got this thing right after that. So there’re some things I need to do.”
“I think I heard all that. He has Alzheimer’s?”
“It’s like that, but different. Lewy body dementia, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s unpredictable.”
“Weren’t you an actor or something? I remember hearing that. Were you in anything I’ve heard of?”
“
Hamlet
?” he says. “Seattle Shakespeare.”
“Didn’t see it,” she says.
“That’s okay.”
“Dude, it was a joke. What’s next for you?”
“I’m between things,” he says.
“Between what?”
Then her smile drops away and she looks beyond him to the windows and says, “Ugh, do you know this woman?”
Charlie shakes his head no as he takes in the vaguely familiar woman—short blond hair, lean, wearing running clothes and holding her hands on her head as if she’s sucking wind, short on breath.
“She’s a total bitch,” Ashy says. “I think she’s a professor.”
And, almost as if she hears Ashy say this, that running woman, who had been pacing outside, kicks the ice machine as hard as she can, and keeps on kicking it.
“Oh, FML,” Ashy says.
“I got this,” Charlie says, and he goes out after her.
For ABC, the simple fact that Don Lowry actually follows her is somewhat thrilling, because though she talks to Philly every day, nothing worth telling Philly about has happened to her in months. ABC can sense Don Lowry behind her, so she pauses and waits for him to catch up. Standing still, without turning around, she waits for him and then when he doesn’t appear at her side, she turns and sees that he is almost a whole block behind her. He has also stopped.
Looking at the still-dimming sky, the draining of its last light, she says, “Philly, you’re so fucked up!”
She turns and waves him along. He looks up and down the block, then walks toward her. She’s surprised by the strength of his posture, the fine slope of his shoulders—handsome, and, like a lot of men his age, maybe even more handsome than he used to be, in that brief sweet spot in the ascent toward middle age when one can appear suddenly sexy with gravitas and some gray at the temples, a salt-and-pepper stubble. But despite his attractiveness, he seems less arrogant and sure than the man she’s seen on real estate signs all over town.
“You talk to yourself,” he says.
“You walk slowly,” she says, when he finally gets to her. “It’s hard not to walk fast in Iowa. It’s so flat. You have to decide to go slow.”
He laughs, a nervous breath forced out through his nose and teeth.
“I guess,” he says. Another of those hard breaths. “Does it bother you?”
“Does what?”
“The flatness?” he says.
She’s considered the virtues of flatness before; eventually, with nothing at all on the horizon but corn and clouds—no mountains, no sky, no smell of sea salt—you forget that there is any place left to go. Your desire to wander leaves you. You settle down and accept whatever there is to be accepted. You assume something will come to you instead. This is why ABC had returned to the prairie last fall. It was wide open and free of ambition. She’d come from Los Angeles and its sprawl of human struggle smack between the majesty of mountain and sea.
“I like this landscape, Don Lowry,” she says.
“You do?” he says.
“Yes. It doesn’t try to alleviate your pain with splendor, some constant reassurance that the world is bigger than your grief.”
“Are you grieving?” Don Lowry says.
“Don’t you love that word?
Grief
?” she says. “It almost stops too soon, fading out before its time, almost like it’s losing energy, that deflating after the long
e
—it feels like a sigh of defeat.”
He shrugs. “I . . . ,” he says, then nothing else.
“Fff,” she says, “eiffff.”
“Like the wind that comes off the prairie,” Don Lowry says.
“Yeah!” she says. “That constant wind. Does it ever stop? Come the fuck on, wind.”
She runs on ahead. What she’s just said is something Philly once said during a storm, in the middle of campus, drunk and stoned and beaming with something ABC knows exists nowhere else.
At the house, they walk into the foyer and she notices Don looks over his shoulder before shutting the front door.
“Are you worried people will see you?”
“I’ll just tell people Mrs. Manetti wanted an appraisal. If they see me.”
“I suppose if you’re a realtor, you can have an excuse to be in anyone’s house,” ABC says. “Not that you need an excuse.”
“I’m married.”
“No shit. I just want to get high. But if you want to leave . . .”
“No,” he says. “No.”
They walk by the den where Ruth is dozing in front of the television, an episode of
Law & Order
. As they walk up the stairs, ABC wonders what Philly would say right now. She’d be delighted and horrified. She’d say, “Oh my God! Don Lowry! The realtor? You smoked pot with Don Lowry
?
‘It’s your home, but it’s my business!’ That guy?”
Sometimes ABC and Philly would joke about the parts of rural Iowa that they found funny—the way the clerks at the grocery store might say, “Well, that’s different,” when they came in with blue hair or a vintage disco dress to buy beer before a party; the way you could get stuck behind a tractor on Highway 6, ambling along at twenty-five miles per hour, and nobody would be in road-rage mode, laying on horns. Everyone would just be calm, as if it was perfectly okay to obstruct the productivity of the world in order to grow corn. And they laughed about the strangeness of the dive bars—meth heads and farmers and blown-apart high school football failures all drinking together, an invented family held together by bad decisions and muted rage and the occasionally intense night of karaoke with undergraduates.
And once, when they were lying in bed, after sex, stoned and sweaty, ABC had said (for no reason she could recall, maybe to get the morbid reassurance new lovers sometimes need), “What will I do if you die?”
Why had she thought to say this? What had she known? Had she felt it coming? No, of course she had not: it had only been that strange kind of postcoital conversation, those moments of
intimate vulnerability unimaginable in the public light of day.
Tears down her face, a real crack in her voice. She had started shaking. Philly had wrapped her arms around ABC and had whispered: “If I die? Well, I’ll come back for you. I’ll come get you and take you to the spirit world.”
“How will I know? How will I find you?” ABC had said.
There was a long pause and Philly’s face grew grave and serious and all you could hear were the crows gathering in the locusts and a distant storm rolling up from Missouri, and Philly looked ABC dead in the eye.
“I’ll send Don Lowry,” she said.
“Who?” ABC asked.
“Don Lowry! ‘It’s your home, but it’s my business!’ I’ll send that guy.”
A fit of laughter came next, the kind of laughter they always shared when stoned and the kind of uncontrollable fits of it ABC so missed now. She had never had a friend so funny; she feels she never will again. Shaking with that laughter, they howled with pleasure until they cried and then smoked another joint and made love again then fell into the easy winds of sleep. Just before that sleep came, Philly had turned to ABC: “I just thought of something! Why, if I die now, you will have been the love of my life!”
But how had she said it? And had she really said it?
Was it possible that she was forgetting more than the exact words Philly had said? Was she forgetting Philly’s voice? Was she remembering the voice she heard in videos, in the desperately saved voice mails? What was her real voice like, the voice she used when her mouth was up close against ABC’s neck? That voice. Was she forgetting it?
What do you do with grief like that? When you can still hear her laughter, still taste her tongue? What do you do? Why do anything? Why work? Why read books? Why cough or refrain from
coughing? Why fix a sandwich? When you have had and lost the love of your life before the age of twenty-five, well, fuck! Why wake up, ever, at all?
“Do you live upstairs?” Don whispers.
“Pretty much. Ruth moved to the first floor. Actually, she can still do the stairs. I guess we’re planning ahead.”
“Of course,” Don says.
“There’s a sleeping porch out back where we can smoke,” ABC says as she points Don through the master bedroom. “Give me a minute. I gotta pee.”
“I know the way. I’ve been here before.”
“Have you?” ABC says.
“I used to do odd jobs for the Manettis. I used to cut their grass, hang their storm windows, all of that stuff. In high school and even in college; I’ve done odd jobs around Grinnell most of my life. I think I was probably the last person to paint some of the walls of that sleeping porch.”
“You grew up in town?”
“I did.”
“And you went to college here?”
Don nodded. “They give two local kids scholarships every year. Those two kids, when I graduated from high school, went off to the Ivy Leagues, so I got lucky. I sailed in off the wait list.”
The long, rectangular sleeping porch is furnished with a freestanding hammock on a stand by the west windows. In the middle are two large armchairs; one of them looks as if it has been shredded by cats. Don sits in the sturdier of the two, a big maroon chair with a slanted back, though he still feels uncomfortably large. He pulls the fabric of his shirt, to lessen the obvious curve of his newly rounded gut.
ABC pulls a small baggie of weed and a metal pipe from a
cigar box stashed in a hollowed-out flowerpot that holds an artificial plant.
“Pretty sneaky, sis,” Don says.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Don says. “Just a line from an old commercial. From when I was a kid. It wasn’t funny.”
“A commercial for what?”
“A game called Connect Four,” Don says. “Have you played it?”
ABC lights the pipe and smiles at him while taking a hit, sly and sideways, as if he has just asked the silliest question in the world. She hands him the pipe. They pass it back and forth a few times, in silence.
“Where do you get it?” he asks.
“The librarian in Newton. There are books you can request. Anything by Updike will get you weed. Nobody reads Updike anymore. She knows what you mean if you request him.”
“Nobody reads Updike anymore?” Don says. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Have you read Updike?”
“No,” Don says.
He giggles into his hand, softly and in a sort of hushed chuckle, and finally ABC says, “What’s Connect Four?”
“Pretty sneaky, sis,” Don says and they both snort with laughter.
“That’s really a game?”
Don stands and walks to the hammock. He slips off his shoes, sporty brown leather slip-ons that make his feet look too small, and he sets his shoes neatly against the wall, then flops in the hammock, rocking it turbulently until the whole works calm down, and ABC is watching this realtor she’s just met swinging slowly in the hammock, barely moving, reminding her of a tiny child who’s fallen asleep in a baby swing on the park set.
This is when ABC climbs in beside him, curling up in a kind of fetal position against him, which, from the way he stiffens his body, she can tell shocks him. He doesn’t expect it but there’s no protest.
The hammock sways gently with the weight of them and outside the breeze of evening begins.
“When I saw you under the sycamore, you looked like you maybe were dead.”
“Did I?” ABC asks.
They lie there in the darkness, silent. For a long time, it seems there is the sound only of cicadas and breath and the distant roll of passing cars on Highway 6.
“Are you gonna be funny now?” ABC asks.
She hears his breathing, labored, slowing. She turns her face toward his, her mouth an inch or two from his cheek. His eyes are closed.
“You were supposed to be funny, Don Lowry,” she whispers. “What happened?”
Don Lowry doesn’t answer. Don Lowry is asleep. And soon ABC falls into sleep too, so deeply that she begins dreaming and in her dreams, there is Philly, who has not been in her dreams before, though she has longed to dream about Philly, has prayed to see Philly in a dream. But Philly is there now, standing at the edge of a rocky beach, white-foamed blue waves, chunked with white stones of ice, crashing behind her. She waves to ABC and in the dream ABC waves back, so happy.
“Philly!” she says, turning over, moaning near Don Lowry’s ear. “Philly! Is that you?”
But Philly is gone, and Don Lowry remains motionless, almost as if he is dead, as if he has died instead of her, and she knows now that she has dreamed of Philly because of this man, this Don Lowry, who had once been a joke to her, and to Philly, but was not a joke at all anymore.