Meanwhile

One afternoon when she was 32 and nothing new had happened for years already, she sat on a countertop, hugging her knees in a little rented house. The sheer curtains billowed. An adjunct professor, shirtless in her kitchen and married to someone else, told her that he just couldn’t be a father, not this way, they needed to talk about this. Outside, the same blue-collar nowhere, pretty enough to shatter her. The man started to weep. There was no future in which her life was improved by a child, but he owed her this panic. She extended one foot and put her toes to his lips, saying okay, okay, okay.

***

There’d been a sense of something coming, for as long as she could remember. Something else was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? By the time she could drive, every free second was spent diagonally across her bed—headphones on, fingers drumming, awaiting the thing that was supposed to happen. Parties were radioactive, boys just factories of awkward hunger. Shoot her, please, before you make her take a phone call. High school was a chore, that’s all—she took those years out back and quietly killed them until the acceptance letters arrived.

With the brochures spread out on her bed, she sat cross-legged and calculated distances. 

“There’s a whole world of in-state colleges out there,” her father said, leaning against her doorframe, chewing something. “Any of them would love to put up with your brooding.”

“And you could come home on weekends!” her mother said from the kitchen, stirring something.

You must understand that I love you but do not need you, and only incidentally do I need your money, she told them, by choosing a college that put a million miles of brutal heartland between her doorstep and theirs. She spent the drive dodging the pink meat of dead things on the interstate.

It was a rural place, scenic, the campus squatting in the shadow of a mountain. Everyone was from somewhere else, and everyone was prepared to toil, resolute and tireless, toward the future they had in mind. She had planned no further than leaving home. But the natural career for her, she thought, was as an executive—the kind who wears high heels in tall buildings and makes subordinates cower. Which degree was that? With an aptitude for everything but an interest in nothing, she chose the course of study that seemed to hurt least. 

Early mornings when the sun was still cold and weak, smelling diesel and coffee at the shuttle stop, she could become sick with a yearning to travel, to see a strange coast before it was eaten by water and condos. Some days she skipped classes and sat under the campus elms, certain that if she spent even one more second not gallivanting around Europe she may as well be dead. 

When she was asked, she dated. Okay? She was bored enough. Among the things she learned was that certain men need speak for only seconds before she wished violence upon them. The worst ones drew the wrong conclusions from her smile, and those nights turned—she’d end up speed walking through dark parking lots. Some were merely boring, or needed her too much, or had embarrassing jobs. One lasted a year and seemed to be the answer to that midnight emptiness, that riddle solved, until the boredom set in there too, and then he wasn’t. Mostly, she was too good for the men she met, but unable to name the reasons.

She finished college, discovered that employers found her degree adorable and irrelevant, and settled into what she could find without going home. Her parents—eager to fund their first grandchild—were standing by to implore and advise. Every morning she swallowed something like heartbreak when she showed up to work dispatch at a plumbing company. 

And like that, something broke; she felt herself hemorrhaging youth. An unstoppable bleeding. Graduation was, what, six years ago now? Eight? Everyone she’d known before was fat and married.

The forces that were supposed to come for her were not coming. There had been an error, her paperwork lost; the world felt like a facility populated by people who’d fucked up in ways that she hadn’t. She was supposed to live in bright rooms, high above a crucial city—the world bending, asking nothing but her permission. 

Instead, she landed two towns from where she’d gone to school. It was one of those places they don’t let you leave—where your job pays enough to keep the cable on, but never enough to move away, and all the while you’re wasting the few years in which you're still young and attractive enough to have any fun at all. 

She could see it coming, the real horror, just a few years down the road. Her boredom would wither into a desperate loneliness. She’d join coworkers for drinks after work, learn to line dance in the smoke, take strangers home. The liquor cabinet would beckon. She’d run aground on the steps of a church, and become one of those people—miracle-starved and wasting her Sundays among the duped.

Meanwhile, all this nothing would keep happening.

***

The pregnancy wasn’t real; she wasn’t stupid. But it seemed like a good way to end whatever this was, and she stood barefoot on the porch when he drove away, the afternoon gold and glowing at the edges.

You could get too comfortable, was the problem.

She was still sending plumbers to unclog people’s tubs and toilets. But her car was paid off, and this house was okay. She took a weekend and painted the living room a color she didn’t hate; the light came through the curtains on afternoons like this and formed hands that cupped right under your heart.

A few more years in this town, maybe. 

She’d hired someone to cut the grass. The rain in this part of the country! She watched the water collect in the Igloo cooler the neighbors left out years ago. After storms, she walked along the ditch to look for frogs, and collected the nightcrawlers agonizing in the yard.

Here was a summer night that felt like the end of something. She drove to the boardwalk in shorts and sandals. Something new was coming, surely—the night felt laced with gunpowder.

Ice cream was twenty-five cents at the pier. Restaurants opened their windows and the smell could drive you to your knees. You could rent a canoe, take a date out on the lake. Watch the lightning bugs mirrored on the water. You might feel his lips on your ear, and his hand on your thigh. The night was still young, and so was she; it was wet, and loud, screaming something that wasn’t quite joy, but close.