Kate Petersen
Say we met in a bar like this one, and you ordered a Smithwick’s and I ordered a Newcastle, or the other way around, they’re both on tap, and I said something about the half-court game Detroit plays, and you agreed, said you’d buy any girl who talks basketball like that in December the next beer, and tonight that’s me. Or maybe we decide to trade rounds and got to telling war stories: Broken limbs, bike falls and trips to the ER, all the strange-but-trues. The part I would leave out is how my family threatened to commit me when I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t breathe, the weekend my horse was killed in a highway wreck eighteen states away from me. The whole family went to see Finding Nemo in the theater that afternoon, and when they passed the popcorn to me I ate it, because I couldn’t taste enough to want to throw it up, and I didn’t cry once during the movie because then they would commit me, or at least they’d try.
Say I met you at the lunch table in that food court across from the office. Maybe it’s you sitting alone, shoveling in noodles from a styrofoam box. So you don’t pack lunch either, I’d say. Too little time, you’d say, or maybe you overdosed on PBJ as a kid. I never brought PBJ to school, and how many kids can say that? If you didn’t pack it up right then, I’d tell you I took the same thing for six years: Turkey and lettuce on potato roll, yogurt or string cheese, and apple juice. A feast for the color blind. Often I threw the whole sandwich away because the bread was soggy from the cool pack my dad put in to keep things chilled till fourth period, and if karma goes like this, I will probably come back as a sack of soggy potato rolls. Maybe you’d try to make me feel better. That’s okay, you’d say, lots of kids don’t eat it all, and besides, no one comes back as soggy potato rolls, not even dead potato rolls. But what would you say when I ask how will I ever take care of him back?
Say I met you going somewhere. Asked where you were going on a train, commuter rail, calling on points west. And maybe you’d come up out of your book, paper, computer to tell me your destination–home or abroad. If you asked me too, I might not tell you straight, instead just how I met this one boy on a train years ago, red line outbound. I was waiting tables in Boston that summer and subletting a room near the station. We both got off at Porter, talked the whole escalator. I took him home that fall. Don’t worry, I’d say, it was a phase. We’d talked three hours on the platform in the rain, my apron from work wadded in my purse, and emailed a few times, and when I drove to the airport in Phoenix to meet him, I was afraid I wouldn’t remember what he looked like. We didn’t know each other’s middle names or criminal records but I rented a hotel room in Sedona. One bed or two, she’d asked. One, I said. I had no idea. And you’d say: No one takes home the man they meet on the subway. And I’d say, nineteen. I was nineteen and he was twenty-nine and he’d served in Korea and Kosovo but I was the one who had it all planned. I drove him up the Oak Creek Canyon highway and parked at a trailhead, and in the shadow of the red rocks he swung me up on his hips like the soldier from Ohio in the movies does to the girl he loves. It wasn’t like that, except for the part where he picked me up, my legs around his waist, my arms draped around his neck perfect as a bandolier.
For laughs, I might tell you about later that night, watching hockey over his shoulder in the hotel room as he tried to get me off, and that I don’t remember his lips or chest or how the game ended, just his hand, how it covered my whole cunt, how nothing happened. It didn’t even occur to me to unbutton him. And afterward we went to dinner and apologized to each other by listening to stories about family members we didn’t plan to meet, using our salad forks first, then toothpicks from the hostess stand. I guess you might not laugh. The part I’d keep to myself is how good it was to come out of the shower and be naked with a man in the other room, how well my jeans fit around me then.
Say I met you at a party where people were wearing sweaters and dipping carrot sticks in something thickened with ranch. If we got to talking, then moved out into our own orbits of small talk, chances are I’d find you later and tap you on the shoulder. Leaving early, I’d say. If you asked why, I’d say another party, maybe, or early day tomorrow, but I wouldn’t let on that this is the norm for me. That last Christmas Eve I left a party with roasted duck and Asian dipping sauce to buy an eight-inch carrot cake at the Safeway in Mesa and throw it up in the bathroom of the Safeway off Frank Lloyd Wright, dipping forkfuls in a tub of margarine as I drove with the other hand. Danish trays, granola bars, single-serve donuts in cheap butter spread are all easy. Sugar cookies and brownies don’t come up as well. I’d park, radio on, engine and cabin light off, and as soon as I finished I’d put the trash bags in the bin outside, and go back through the automatic doors. Return customer. Staples in Pacific Beach was probably the best place: Empty parking lot, restroom in the way back that no one used, manual flush. That bathroom at the Frank Lloyd Wright Safeway was pretty good, too: Paper towels always stocked, clean, and distance—a door some ways from the checkers—which is what you want, because even if you can’t hear yourself after a while, good heaving is louder than you think.
Doesn’t matter how many carrots or beers in, I wouldn’t go close to other parts of the truth: I have probably bought two thousand dollars’ worth of Safeway pastries and thrown them up in four different hometowns. That I’ve left parties with homemade cookies wrapped in napkins just to go spit them up in a supermarket, stayed home from work some mornings with tubs of ice cream spread around me on the carpet and Frasier reruns on in the background as I retched. You wouldn’t believe me, anyway, if I told you there is no fear like finding the only drug store open past midnight and having the clerk tell you there’s no public restroom. She’s sorry. You want to rip open your body very elegantly for her, like a trench coat flap pulled aside to show watches for sale, you want to show her that she must be mistaken: You are not trouble, see, no track marks. No, you’re a refugee, you’ve just eaten twenty dollars' worth of cheese danishes and pound cake, you need the asylum of plumbing your roommates can’t hear. Sometimes after midnight, I’d drive through the canyons, work in four hours, to the 24-hour copy shop in La Jolla where the clerk wouldn’t knock or even look up when I left.
Most likely, though, I’d meet you at a bar. That’s the way these things have gone. And were you to get talking about an old love, another round in, I might let slip some things about my first boyfriend. How it started as a standing shopping date on Sundays at the Safeway in Tempe, each of us pushing the cart with one hand, splitting packs of deli meat and frozen corn. Or how it was to fall asleep to the whir of his computer, the screensaver our nightlight, the way I smelled the orange blossoms on campus better those mornings. I’d tell you how I came back early to campus from my parents’ house that Easter in my church dress still, but the rest of that day I’d keep to myself: Standing at the door to his dorm in my knee-length blue question, then open, a latching—lift your arms, he said, an assent—how our mouths sounded nothing like hymns, how the thick curtains kept the day out of the room so my body was just a place for the shadow of him to go.
I wouldn’t say that the first thing I ever threw up on purpose was trail mix his mom had put in his Easter basket. Third-floor bathroom, freshman dorm. Or how he broke things off on move-out day, as our fathers waited in separate minivans downstairs, ready to trundle our computers and mini-fridges home to opposite sides of town. It was clean, no one cried, not till I was some Hungarian wilderness away with nothing but woods and time to think of the smooth hello of his skin and my face, lately touched.
Maybe you’d say it all sounds a little nice. That everyone has vices. You do, surely. Maybe you’d ask, what are mine? Basketball, I’d say, looking at the TV, Detroit down by seven going into the half. But that’s just because it’s true, and quicker than saying a thick syrup in a brown bottle they don’t sell over-the-counter anymore. I wasn’t getting it all up anymore, that summer after my horse and soldier, and sometimes I’d go to sleep with so much in my belly that my skin felt raw in the morning, like all the sugar couldn’t fit into the cells I had. I’d heard the story a hundred times: Ipecac had saved me once, when I ate toxic flowers from my mother’s garden. I think it was vincas, age two. I’d gone out the doggie door when her back was turned. And she would tell how she called poison control, and made me vomit on her feet as she held me in the shower. When she told it, the story came out funny somehow, maybe because I made it okay, or the dog had eaten the flowers, too. But every time I bought the little bottles I thought of her, and how it must have felt to watch your kid gag uncontrollably, the sad power of holding her head and feeling her spasm in your hands because when you said open up, she did.
When I started, they sold it in first aid, next to the charcoal and iodine tincture. By the time I stopped, most of the drug stores and grocery stores had taken it off their shelves. If I said any of this, you might ask what I still ask: Did they stop stocking it because of me? I started out with the recommended dosage—a teaspoon—waited the magic twenty-five minutes until the heaving began, all over in under an hour. Easy. But soon I’d have to drink the whole bottle for it to work, and sometimes even then I’d have to use a paper towel to start. In bed at night, having drunk water and milk to wash the taste of the syrup from my mouth, I’d think up lines for the next time I had to buy, since it’s a purchase that raised eyebrows. They were never very good, the lines. Most checkers didn’t say anything, but some would. Oh, sick baby? That was one. Wow, I didn’t know they still sold this. Hope the little one feels better. That was another. And I’d have to look them in the eye and nod like a mother with a sick kid would nod. A mother buying cinnamon rolls while she was at it.
But this is ordinary stuff, the way we do ourselves in, hardly bar material. The only drama in it is the fiction, the emergency crew I conjured the couple times a paper towel got caught too far down, how they would bring the stretcher in past the bakery and lean it up against the paper towel holder as they pulled me out. And for those few seconds of frightened silent coughing, I wondered what people would say to my parents when they heard I had drowned in a supermarket, in a toilet bowl full of coffeecake. I never came up with those lines.
Instead, I’d tell you the good things: That my mom took me to watch the NBA draft at a movie theater downtown when I was nine, and that in first grade, my next door neighbor Andrew and I spent months extracting the entire contents of a fishbowl that my parents had tossed in the gravel in my backyard, thinking we’d found a great vein of turquoise. I could tell you about watching a mare give birth in an empty barn one morning before church, or about my California boyfriend, whose last girl had been a fire-eating hula dancer he’d met at a pig roast, and whose bedroom contained one mattress and three surfboards. You’d say everyone has a story like that. For you, maybe it was the woman who fixed violins, the one with the bad skin and good fingers, and when she held you, you could feel how her hand wished it were a violin neck she was holding.
And if we were being reckless and trading firsts, I’d tell you that I was first undone one February morning to that song Hallelujah, the Jeff Buckley version, snow coming down and the window of his bedroom cracked because the radiators stayed on seventy-eight all year long in that house, and after, I wanted the whole weight of his body on me. And what was yours, I’d ask. You’d draw the girl for me in broad strokes—big chapped lips, painted nails, the pale hair that clung to the back of her neck, the smooth hot fear between you in the car, or the den, or your bed with the posters still on the walls above you. You’d just tell me most people don’t really lose it to music the first time. It’s not like in the movies. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because he doesn’t remember what was playing. And what could you say to that?
Say I met you on the dance floor. I’d tell you about that girl I knew who could dance. Melanie. How she danced and kept these beautiful sketchbooks with illustrations of steeples and bacteria, but none of that stopped the van that didn’t stop for red, riding her bike in Tucson three years ago, early morning late December. Finals were over but her roommate said she was on her way back to campus, must have left something in lab. What I wouldn’t say to you then over the din of the music is that I had forgotten Melanie until just now. Three years of not remembering her at all—not that night at the bar in Budapest when I first saw her dance, or how she was a binger. At eighteen, the rest of us were impatient with weakness and just rolled our eyes as she paced up and back the bus aisle eating our snacks, leaning over our young and private conversations to help herself, can I have one, her fingers feeling along the luggage rack for the shape of sugar, getting sloshed against the seats as the bus made its way across the Hungarian countryside, can I have one, but that night we all envied the way she held her arms above her head and closed her eyes and bled rhythm.
You might stop me to remind me we’d never meet that way, because you don’t dance. Well anyway, to Melanie. You’d lift your glass, too. I probably couldn’t find words to say that I thought I’d never forget her, the habits I despised so much, how she acted more stomach than girl most days. And then like that—all the reckless eating undone by that driver three winters ago. Three years it has taken me. And I didn’t remember until I became her.
Say you ordered a pilsner next. I’d think Czech, maybe ask you about your regrets, how much of this you’d give back if you could. If you asked mine, I’d offer another toast: And this is to the man who married the woman he should have, same toast I made on his wedding night four years ago, except I wasn’t there. He was stateside, me in some expat bar in Prague along the river, same pale beer, same half-smile certain that things went as they should. Before all that, there was an autumn of walks and letters in winter, and questions—his—what could you know about someone after five years, or five months, and did the laws of physics or probability permit him to feel something for me but love someone else full and well? Ones I fielded all right, for the rookie I was.
Maybe if you looked a certain way then, at me, or into your beer, I’d admit that I think about him on that night every year and that he is my math problem, the one you waste all your time on, showing how you arrived at the square root of the quadratic of something, but it’s the wrong equation altogether and you don’t finish the test in time. That I haven’t gotten points for showing my work since tenth grade. That I might have loved him, if either of us had thought to ask.
Here’s the part I couldn’t say: That when he wrote me years later, saying he might have loved me, he could see that now, that was the day I promised I would stop putting paper towels down my throat. But by the next week, I was buying drugstore cookies and taking trash bags filled with vomit to the curb, because I had a weak toilet and no garbage disposal in that apartment. I wouldn’t admit to you that of all the things he told me, the follies and his short history of failed romances, I remember best when he told me he liked how thin I was. It wasn’t what mattered, and he knew it, but he did. I was on the portable phone in my parents’ guest room, and I think I told him that’s okay, that’s all right to feel, but who was I to say? And if we saw each other again, would we hello or just a nod, the kind that says he made the right choice.
Next round, an eye on the TV to keep us sober, you might say that it’s the fourth quarter and my hair is just now dry. At this point in the game, it’s okay to admit you noticed. I’d tell you how I’ve never dried my hair, even when I was little, how my dad was in charge of combing it before school on mornings my mother was gone on business. He’d use this really fine comb, and little flakes of his own dandruff would come off in my part, which he’d get straight after several tries, the times I’d let him finish it at all. Other times, impatient for what, I just got up off the stool in the bathroom and went for a hat, leaving him there with his tie draped over his shoulder and the pale green comb in his hand. And now if I could go back, I’d let him part it anywhere.
Maybe I’d touch my hair then, like I’ve said too much, or you would, tuck it behind my ear and tell me it reminds you of wheat, barley, hops. And I’d tell you that my boyfriend’s scalp smells like leaves waiting to be raked, like home, and you’d say: Boyfriend?
So, I’d buy the next round.
By then we’d be slowing down, probably sneaking olives from the garnish tray. Someone wiping a chair down with a rag. And if you asked then, I’d say no, no kids, but that if there are kids, I want them soon because I remember sitting on my mom’s sewing chair, asking her why they’d had me so late. I was nine, maybe ten, I cried and so did she when she said they had thought hard about it, but had wanted me very much. And now the difference is I’ve stopped asking, but still I am living perched on that chair, watching their lives pull in to themselves, like wings to a body, like landing, and still I am sitting there, stretching my legs toward the pedal as if I could mend all this, no longer asking why but how long. How long do we have.
Game over, or closing time. Detroit rallied, though neither team broke a hundred. We’d wrap it up, coats from off the chairs, help with the collar. There are only so many things you can keep from saying before the spaces spell out leaving.
And I kept them all till we left, though I think you knew, that small look you gave me as you tucked dollars under your glass seemed to say I'd left a few things out, but I just said home? And you agreed, home. A door held, a street between us, then gone, and no time to ask you where that is, if it is anywhere near mine, which is in a place like before—before the head rushes and sore throats and empty pie tins—a before I can almost recall: Leaving Budapest by train, slipping across Bavaria into France in a car full of strangers, lonesome miles I wouldn’t know how to purge. A bicycle ride along the canal, my trousers slipping down on my hips, eating salmon baked in tinfoil at Laurette’s and running through the wheat fields behind her house in the mornings, the colorless stalks purpled with daybreak. I mean home as a remembered motion, another kind of weight: The sag of cherries on their July boughs, the swish and ease of my legs moving through all that unmade bread, a time when under my ribs, in the small captivity of my body, my heart felt like the heaviest thing.