snorted.
“So I’m kind of pissed, but also, let’s face it, desperate and in love with him.”
“Sure.”
“So I turn to my friend Karen, who is the most fantastically slutty person I know, and I tell her, ‘However you dress me, that’s how I’m going to this party.’ She puts me in this gold dress, it’s a wrap dress, like a six-inch rectangle that ties in a tiny bow at your waist, and it’s all sequins. I was naked. I was naked, and I was sparkling. There was no room for anything but naked in that dress, is what I am saying.”
“I get it.”
“I put the cigar in my cleavage. Who knows what that even looked like, but that’s what I did. The Mine was a bar, just a double-wide trailer with a half-acre gravel parking lot. The kind of place that made you bring your own glass and sold one kind of beer and shots.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been in a bar in my life.”
“Everyone was there, the whole class, parts of the other classes. I’m thinking, I am never going to find John. Ever. Then I remember, I have a cigar as big as a baby’s forearm in my boobs, I’ll just spark it up and smoke him out.”
“Did he come?”
“Are you kidding me? It was like I had parted the seas. I leaned against The Mine, naked, and filled the air around me with seven-hundred-dollar burning leaves, and there was John, half-drunk, wearing a bowtie. He said, ‘You gonna share, Becky Mailer?’”
“I’m speechless. I can’t tell if I’m learning something or getting scarred for life.”
“This is not a parable, Calvin, this is life. This is my life. Just as real as your life. It happened, there is a way that it’s still happening, has always happened. Will continue to happen.”
I looked at my mom, her dark curly ponytail, her red plastic eyeglass frames, the jeans, T-shirt, and sweater she always wears. But all that pink had kind of magnetized around her, and I could see her. See the short girl with big brown curls and a sparkling dress. See how strong she was in the moment, framed in smoke and neon bar lights.
“What happened?”
“I told him I’d share if he danced with me, and for the first time ever, he grabbed my hand. I don’t think he had ever touched me before that moment. And it’s probably hard to believe this about your dad, but if he wants to, he can dance. That’s what we did, all night long, we danced and smoked that Gurkha, and because it was so stinky, there was this space around us, just for us to dance in. I laughed so much that night that the next day I had to take aspirin to get out of bed, my ribs were so sore.”
“But I thought you didn’t get together until some college reunion thing.”
“Nope. We graduated. He went to Cambridge for grad school. I started that radio internship. I never heard from him after that night. It was a really hard time in my life. That’s when I rented that room from the station manager and never really felt safe, got assaulted, moved back home for a while, worked at the public library. I thought I was going to start reading on the radio, work my way up to stories, have a syndicated program no more than ten years after graduation.
“I got the invite to the college alumni night and thought, Why not? I didn’t get out of the house much, and it was free. I saw John, and he looked the same. Just the same. God. Of course he did, it had only been five years, but for some reason it had felt like this whole life. This entire, endless life. Except, as soon as we started talking, I kept thinking, What happened? All that stuff we used to talk about until three in the morning, that was real life. All this stuff I’ve done since graduation? Didn’t feel real. Not while I stood there, talking to John Darling.”
I spun on the stool. I closed my eyes. I could see it, the expression on my dad’s face in a banquet room, his eyebrows pushed together like he was trying to get my mom into focus but couldn’t, because she was
“So I’m kind of pissed, but also, let’s face it, desperate and in love with him.”
“Sure.”
“So I turn to my friend Karen, who is the most fantastically slutty person I know, and I tell her, ‘However you dress me, that’s how I’m going to this party.’ She puts me in this gold dress, it’s a wrap dress, like a six-inch rectangle that ties in a tiny bow at your waist, and it’s all sequins. I was naked. I was naked, and I was sparkling. There was no room for anything but naked in that dress, is what I am saying.”
“I get it.”
“I put the cigar in my cleavage. Who knows what that even looked like, but that’s what I did. The Mine was a bar, just a double-wide trailer with a half-acre gravel parking lot. The kind of place that made you bring your own glass and sold one kind of beer and shots.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been in a bar in my life.”
“Everyone was there, the whole class, parts of the other classes. I’m thinking, I am never going to find John. Ever. Then I remember, I have a cigar as big as a baby’s forearm in my boobs, I’ll just spark it up and smoke him out.”
“Did he come?”
“Are you kidding me? It was like I had parted the seas. I leaned against The Mine, naked, and filled the air around me with seven-hundred-dollar burning leaves, and there was John, half-drunk, wearing a bowtie. He said, ‘You gonna share, Becky Mailer?’”
“I’m speechless. I can’t tell if I’m learning something or getting scarred for life.”
“This is not a parable, Calvin, this is life. This is my life. Just as real as your life. It happened, there is a way that it’s still happening, has always happened. Will continue to happen.”
I looked at my mom, her dark curly ponytail, her red plastic eyeglass frames, the jeans, T-shirt, and sweater she always wears. But all that pink had kind of magnetized around her, and I could see her. See the short girl with big brown curls and a sparkling dress. See how strong she was in the moment, framed in smoke and neon bar lights.
“What happened?”
“I told him I’d share if he danced with me, and for the first time ever, he grabbed my hand. I don’t think he had ever touched me before that moment. And it’s probably hard to believe this about your dad, but if he wants to, he can dance. That’s what we did, all night long, we danced and smoked that Gurkha, and because it was so stinky, there was this space around us, just for us to dance in. I laughed so much that night that the next day I had to take aspirin to get out of bed, my ribs were so sore.”
“But I thought you didn’t get together until some college reunion thing.”
“Nope. We graduated. He went to Cambridge for grad school. I started that radio internship. I never heard from him after that night. It was a really hard time in my life. That’s when I rented that room from the station manager and never really felt safe, got assaulted, moved back home for a while, worked at the public library. I thought I was going to start reading on the radio, work my way up to stories, have a syndicated program no more than ten years after graduation.
“I got the invite to the college alumni night and thought, Why not? I didn’t get out of the house much, and it was free. I saw John, and he looked the same. Just the same. God. Of course he did, it had only been five years, but for some reason it had felt like this whole life. This entire, endless life. Except, as soon as we started talking, I kept thinking, What happened? All that stuff we used to talk about until three in the morning, that was real life. All this stuff I’ve done since graduation? Didn’t feel real. Not while I stood there, talking to John Darling.”
I spun on the stool. I closed my eyes. I could see it, the expression on my dad’s face in a banquet room, his eyebrows pushed together like he was trying to get my mom into focus but couldn’t, because she was
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