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My brain searched for similar smiling-thoughts while I sat in that clean bedroom, but Melisa had gone off with some guy or some girl, and parties always make it hard for me to breathe, and I couldn’t stop hearing the noise outside and watching the moving feet.
Maybe that was the problem — all those feet kept moving, going somewhere, and I couldn’t stop sitting alone in a boredom-bedroom with my thoughts skewing far too faux-insightful and political for a nineteen year-old girl who would never aspire to much in either category.
My brothers had those aspects of life covered. Even in 1992, as he lingered with unrest in high school, I knew Preston would find the success in politics he had both an innate talent for and utter disinterest in pursuing (though Mother had a lot to say about that). Dave, for all his junior high fucking up (and, if Preston’s letter and answering-machine messages held the truth I suspected, he had just committed the biggest fuck-up of all), had proven himself capable of unexpected insight now and again.
But that had been back home, in the city, where I had sat on the edge of my own unmade bed and stared at my own door-crack. There, I had decided to stay hidden away and avoid the crumbling structure of modern family on the other side. Now I sat 380 miles separated from the family home, that apartment with the uncanny ability to shrink in size year-by-year until two people couldn’t fit into the hallway at the same time without coagulating together into a blood clot, shaving another year off of the family unit’s lifespan.
The door opened. In that moment, such a simple, ordinary action seemed so detrimental to my very existence. I wanted to scream and fall out of the window and climb down a tree and run, run, run until cornfields became graffiti-coated alleys, and the homeless men multiplied and gained sharper teeth, and the stars stopped shining so bright. Then I remembered how much I loved those silver-shining stars, and the flat land, and the way no building seemed capable of having more than three stories. Regardless, I felt the pressing need to hate the skinny guy standing in the doorway for obliterating both the captivating door-crack and my extended period of introspection.
“Why did you open the door?” I asked without really looking at him (because, sometimes, looking at anyone is terrifying).
He said, “This is my room,” then paused and added, “isn’t it?”
I could tell from his voice he was trying to present himself as the cool guy from Beverly Hills 90210, but he came off more like the ugly one who looked twenty years too old to be in high school and had that horrible, curly mullet-in-progress. I started to get so paranoid of him having terrifying Ian Ziering hair that I just had to look. I did, and what I saw wasn’t so bad. His hair was more Brian Austin Green, and he wore a black t-shirt and jeans, and he didn’t have either ear pierced, and he didn’t have a huge belt buckle (I had found these to be far too prevalent in my new rural world), and he didn’t look like he wanted to murder me and not tell anyone about it.
“I’m gonna regret this question,” he said, and I noticed he wasn’t holding a drink. “But why are you sitting on my bed?”
“Lying down felt like an imposition,” I said. I decided, in true college-student fashion, to base my entire opinion of the interloper on his reaction to my offhand sarcasm.
He smiled in a way earnest but dopey, showing too much teeth for his facial structure, and said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to be rude, would you?”
That clinched it: he wanted to have sex with me, but he probably didn’t want to force me into it or kill me. That wasn’t much to go on, but staring at that lit-up door-crack and thinking about home had gotten half of me so lonely in a stupid, little-kid way. I didn’t really want to talk to him, but I really didn’t want him to close the door and walk away, so I said, “Close the door, and don’t walk away.”
He looked at me long enough to make it clear he found my behavior more than odd, but he closed the door anyway. I set my mind to forgetting the party outside existed, while he set to small-talk-seducing the cute girl who had fallen into his bed.
I talked when he talked — to do otherwise would have been more than rude — but my mind drifted to other things. Only it didn’t drift so much as shoot back and forth like a pinball bouncing around that Dracula machine Dave used to love at the pizza place on the corner. The interloper gave his name as Henry, and I thought about Dave playing pinball, how happy he had been to watch the silver bullet-ball shoot toward Dracula’s coffin for the high score. He talked of his disapproval toward frat guys, and I thought about Preston, back at home, taking care of Dave, trying to coax him out of that bedroom without Mother knowing about the Very Bad Thing. Henry came to sit on the bed next to me, and I forgot his name was Henry for a moment, because I couldn’t stop wondering if Preston still listened to my old Walkman, the one Dad had given me in middle school with a Beach Boys cassette inside. Henry said something, and I couldn’t hear it all, too busy picturing Mother washing dishes and playing classical music from the counter-mounted radio, Mozart and Mendelssohn, Gorecki and Gershwin, Verdi and Vivaldi, and everything in the room sounded like the sorrowful singing set to booming music, and I forgot Henry had ever come.
“Hey,” Henry said, the simple word being the first in a while to work its way into my ear, “are you alright?” Then, when those words produced no reaction: “Something bugging you?”
I knew he would come to regret such a question.
“Well,” I said, taking in a deep breath after expelling the word, “there’s a lot, I guess. I keep thinking I’m gonna forget what the city looks like, and some mornings everything smells like manure, and that’s been happening for two months now, but I still don’t understand why. A lot of people here seem to be illiterate, but I keep getting happy. Then I feel shitty about being happy, because the boys are back home, and I’ve left them with her, and she’s such a bitch, haven’t you ever noticed? And I keep thinking about things that didn’t happen, and people who didn’t happen, and I really wish Preston would pick up the phone, because of the thing with Dave and the bat, and I feel like I’m gonna go home and not recognize anyone, like it’s gonna take years for me to get there, and when I do, everything’s gonna be different, and I’m gonna be like Odysseus. I’ll have to kill all their suitors. It’s going to be miserable. And I don’t want any of that. I just want to listen to Don’t Worry Baby and do what the fucking song says.”
About Jonathan Persinger
