by Ilana Masad
At the motel, the truck stops and Nelly gazes up at Maggie’s face. Her lips look so soft, so utterly kissable, her eyelids heavy with booze and tiredness from a long and boring workday that was preceded by a full morning of classes, and Maggie wants terribly to lean in and just do it, but she doesn’t. She smiles, and scoots away. Nelly grabs her shoulder, and for a moment Maggie thinks, This is it, she’s going to kiss me, it’s going to happen, and she’s already ten steps ahead with her face in Nelly’s crotch, imagining her pubic hair and her thighs, but Nelly only says, “What, no hug?”
Maggie hugs her, tightly, and feels her own small breasts against Nelly’s, and she again flashes to the image of them both naked, pressed into each other. But she lets go. She smiles and waves, and Nelly and the others pull out of the parking lot.
By the time she gets into her room, Maggie isn’t turned on anymore. She tries masturbating anyway, imagining what sex with Nelly would have looked like. Would she like her nipples bitten? Would she like being fingered or being gone down on more? Would she eat Maggie out or would she turn out to be one of those bi-curious women who can’t handle other people’s vaginas? The thought is so depressing that Maggie gives up and pulls her fingers out of her underwear.
Her thoughts turn to Lucia instead. Who still hasn’t gotten back to her, not at all, not once. Lucia would tell her to drink water. She would tell her to take two aspirin. She would do everything possible to make sure both of them avoided hangovers in the morning. She would remind Maggie that by the time she’s also thirty-five, she’ll realize how the body changes and how important it is to care for it when you’re young. Lucia will never meet Iris, Maggie thinks. She’ll never get to see what Maggie might look like when she’s older—Maggie read somewhere once that people unconsciously made choices about longevity with partners based on their partners’ parents. If Iris were alive, Maggie could show Lucia how perfect her parents’ marriage is, how good Maggie could be for her forever, if she let her. Usually, Maggie pushes thoughts like these away—commitment, future, such serious and dull things—but the cross-fading, the head high and the buzzy-faced drunkenness, let her fantasize about being the steady partner of her creative-genius girlfriend, about cooking for her when she forgets to eat and kissing her nape quietly as people ogle her sculptures at a gallery and murmur flattering things about them. Except now, Maggie thinks, turning over, Lucia will know her mother was a cheater and her father a dupe. That is, if Lucia is even interested in her.
The last conscious thought she has before falling asleep is of Iris. It isn’t so hard to not cheat, even when you really want to, Mom. See?
AUGUST 26, 2017
When Maggie wakes up to a dry mouth, peeling lips, and a tongue that feels like it’s been turned to stone in the night, she knows she deserves it, a conviction that’s strengthened when she sees she has new texts from Allison, Gina, and Ariel, but nothing yet from Lucia. Her head is pounding from the inside, like there are people punching the walls of her skull trying to get out. She finds the little cups wrapped in thin plastic in the bathroom and fills one of them four times. Her stomach feels watery and sloshy as she takes a shower, avoiding getting her hair wet because it looks surprisingly punk with its dried gel and the back isn’t as flat as she expected it to be.
Nelly isn’t there when she checks out. Instead, it’s a pasty man with buckteeth and an unevenly balding pate. He’s excessively friendly and Maggie wonders if he’s a creep or just a social oddball. There is a little area in the lobby with stale bagels and undersized muffins and a few of those single-serving cereal boxes lined up on a shelf. She grabs a sticky corn muffin and the healthiest-looking banana from the sad fruit bowl and scarfs down both before she gets to the car. She texts Lucia one more time, starting to get a little bit worried, despite—or maybe because of—last night.
It’s not that Maggie has never stepped out—it’s just that the times she did are incidents she deeply regrets. Not because the relationships she imploded were that good—though she supposed she’ll never know if they could’ve been, really—but because she always hurt at least one person, often ended up hurt herself, and the drama was deeply exhausting and, at least in hindsight, not worth it. Occasionally, it happened because of a stupid misunderstanding. Once, her first year living in St. Louis after college, Maggie met an incredible woman who was in town on her book tour, spent three magical days with her, and then assumed that they were each going to go about their lives. But the writer had remembered their drunk postcoital conversations differently, and thought they were going to try to make things work long-distance for a little while since she only lived a few hours’ drive away in Chicago. When she drove down for a visit three weeks later, after they’d been texting almost daily, she was furious when Maggie told her about the woman she’d gone on a date with in the intervening time. “You’re such a bitch! This is why I don’t like dating dykes,” the writer had said, putting her shoes back on and grabbing her little rolling suitcase. “You’re all like dudes. Bi women at least have the experience of how shitty men are and try to avoid acting like them.” In retrospect, Maggie knows this woman wasn’t exactly the kind of person she’d want to be with, but she still hates hurting people when it isn’t her intention.
But then, of course, there was the time she’d cheated very intentionally on her only longish-term relationship other than Lucia, Sasha. But that was different, and Maggie barely counts it as a relationship anymore, because she’d discovered a few weeks after introducing Sasha to her dad—her mom had backed out at the last second, clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing—that Sasha had never stopped sleeping with her ex, an incredibly beautiful person named Lex whom Maggie had already felt super intimidated by. She’d always suspected something was still going on between Sasha and Lex but it was also the first time she’d ever spent the whole night in someone else’s bed, and she thought that maybe her jealousy was just in overdrive. Of course, when she’d turned out to be right, she was humiliated and felt small and insignificant. It was the only time she’d ever slept with a man, and only because she’d thought that maybe it would hurt Sasha worse if she did. He’d been a friend who she could tell had a crush on her, and it was cruel to use him like that. She’d lost him as a friend and Sasha as a girlfriend and had gotten such bad grades that semester—she was perpetually stoned in an effort to mute her feelings—that she’d been put on academic probation.
Lucia is too important, too special, too invigorating for Maggie to lose over a stupid night of drinking. So she tries to swallow her anxiety, tries to think of the hundred reasons she might not have heard from Lucia—she’s busy, she’s in a bad mood, something is wrong with her phone—and texts one more time. Miss u. Bit worried that I haven’t heard from u. How was the opening last night? She wonders whether she can blame grief for her neediness and then feels a terrible guilt sink in. Forgetting about Lucia’s show could be chalked up to being distracted by everything that’s happening but she was being stupid last night; that doesn’t equal grieving, does it?
Focus, Maggie tells herself, and drives back to the post office. She has to park a block away since the spots right in front are taken this time, but she’s relieved, because that means they’re open.
An old-fashioned bell hanging above the door rings when she walks in. There are two men in coveralls chatting in a corner, apparently puzzled over the requirements of the package slip they’re trying to fill out. Three people are waiting in front of the single open window at the counter, two clutching those orangey-pink slips the USPS leaves at people’s doors when they’re not home, and one holding a big envelope for sending. They’re all in their fifties or older, Maggie would guess, and the woman behind the counter is tiny and wizened and reminds her of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The wait seems to last forever, and isn’t aided by her pounding head or the fact that she keeps checking her phone.
When she finally gets to the front of the line
, she shows the woman the letter addressed to Harold. “Hi, so, um, this is kind of strange, but my mom left this letter for someone with this PO box number, and I was wondering if you could tell me where he lives? I’d like to give it to him. In person, I mean.”
The woman on the other side of the window just taps the metal plate between them, the kind that people put money and packages into so the clerk can turn it to retrieve them from behind the safety glass. Maggie wonders how many post offices were robbed or how many clerks were attacked to cause this to be the normal system—she remembers hearing about the rash of post office murders in the nineties, the origin of the phrase “going postal,” but is pretty sure those were internal, employees shooting colleagues, occasionally customers. Who is the glass meant to protect?
“No,” Maggie says, and puts the letter up to the glass. “I don’t want to mail it. Just—can you tell me if you know this man? Harold Lake Brooks?”
“Hell, Harold don’t live here no more,” a voice behind Maggie says. She looks over her shoulder. One of the men in coveralls in the corner is still there, now working on another slip. The clerk is just shaking her head and tapping the metal plate again, as if she hasn’t heard a word, so Maggie retreats.
“You know him?” she asks the man, excited.
“Sure I know him. Used to be my neighbor. Retired a couple years back, though, moved away from here to some old folks’ home.” The man’s eyes are a muddy brown and his cheeks are pockmarked and sunbaked red.
“Thank you,” she says. “You don’t happen to know which nursing home, do you?”
“Nah,” he says. “Whatcha need him for?”
She holds up the letter. “My mom passed away a few days ago and wanted me to give him this.”
“Sorry to hear that, miss. Want me to ask around?”
“That would be amazing, thank you so much, um—mister—”
“I’m Rhett,” he says. “Yeah, like Rhett Butler. My pops loved that stupid movie, and my momma loved the book.” He shrugs. “Here, write down your email, I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
Maggie is surprised the man is asking for her email address and not her phone. She tends to think all adults above a certain age are technology neophytes, which she realizes is hypocritical, since Peter is far more computer savvy than she’ll ever be. She writes down her email on the bit of paper Rhett hands her. “Thank you so, so much. You have no idea how much this means to me.”
“Sure I do,” he says. “My folks died a few years ago, my momma from cancer and Pops a few weeks later from heartbreak as far as I’m concerned. I know what it’s like. Last wishes and all.”
Unsure if she’s going to start bawling right there in the post office or if she’s going to throw up on the gray tile floor, she just nods and smiles one more time and rushes back out, run-walking to the car.
When she gets there, she finds a voice message from Allison. “Em, what’s up? Your girlfriend is freaking out, says she hasn’t heard from you. Something happened to her phone screen, she’s been trying to message you on Facebook and you’re not answering and she thinks you’re like, dead. It’s lucky for you I broke my weekend social media detox or I wouldn’t have seen she’d messaged me too. Anyway, hope you’re doing okay.”
Maggie frantically opens her messenger app, sees dozens of unread conversations, and smacks her forehead. “Stupid, stupid,” she mutters—she turned off all notifications except for calls and texts the other day, and hasn’t turned them back on since. She opens Lucia’s message thread, lets her eyes race over the explanation of her cracked phone screen and how she left it to get fixed and so only has her laptop right now, then the tentative check-ins, and hits play on the last one, a voice message from this morning.
“Heyo, love,” Lucia’s voice comes on softly, and Maggie ups the volume and starts crying with relief. Lucia’s tone is warm, not at all angry or upset. “I mean, well, you know, anyway. I hope you’re getting by okay, babe, would love to hear from you, hope you’ve been getting my messages and stuff. I had my group show opening last night. Wished you could be there. Someone bought one of my pieces, though! For a hundred and fifty bucks, which isn’t a ton but is damn good for a bowl that took me three hours to make. I miss you. Wish you were here. How is the journey going? Mwah.”
“Love.” Lucia called her that. The word hovers around Maggie’s brain and she listens to the message three more times. Then she sends Lucia a voice message of her own, wondering if the tearful smile in her voice will be audible to her girlfriend. She updates her on the texts she sent but doesn’t mention how freaked out she’s been. She also doesn’t mention last night’s events, just that she’s a bit out of it and tired. “I wish I was there too,” she says at the end. She wants to ask if she and Lucia are okay, if Lucia is upset with her at all, but manages to restrain herself. She learned a long time ago that feeling and showing insecurity were two different things, and that the latter was deeply unattractive to most people she’d dated.
Still, it’s with a much lighter heart that Maggie checks how long a drive it is to Vegas and how long to LA. Realizing she’s almost exactly equidistant, she decides to go to Las Vegas first and track down this Liam Ainsworth.
As she inputs the address into her phone and turns on its Bluetooth, it occurs to her—five letters. Iris wrote five. None of them to her family. Peter, Ariel, and herself are all chopped liver, apparently. Well, almost. Ariel got the rings, and she got the necklace, after all. Peter got absolutely nothing. Maggie takes a deep breath, trying to calm the pulsing anger beginning to flow through her—her head still hurts, and she’s still dehydrated and has a long drive ahead of her, and getting worked up isn’t going to help anything at the moment. She considers just going back to Oxnard again, but no matter how mad she is at Iris, this duty she’s taken on feels like a reason to keep moving, while the idea of sitting passively in the house for four more days fills her with horror.
She rummages around Peter’s glove compartment and finds the trusty emergency kit he always had in the car when Maggie was a kid. She pops a couple of store-brand ibuprofen for her tender head, smears some old and melting sunscreen on her arms because it’s approaching a hundred degrees and she’s going to be in the desert, and sets off.
* * *
• • •
FOR THE FIRST half of the drive, Maggie listens to a stand-up comedy podcast and tries to keep herself from paying too much attention to her hangover. Her sunglasses rest heavy on her nose and the contents of her stomach are uncertain of themselves. When she begins seeing signs for Needles, she decides to find a place to pee and get some more coffee.
The ubiquitous golden arches of a McDonald’s greet her at the exit. She pulls into a gas station to search for a café, and finds that the closest place is a Starbucks. Another twenty minutes away, though, is a firehouse-themed café, and she sets her GPS to detour there, hoping for better coffee, or at least a more interesting vibe.
The landscape on either side of the road is incredible. She’s never lived somewhere like this, where the desert is close enough to be a neighbor. Lucia lived in New Mexico for a while, and she always says she misses it, the majestic beauty of it. But for Maggie, even the suburban-city had been too much, or too little, the man-made isolation uncomfortable to her in a way that she only really recognized once she left and started living in a college town. She likes her elbows brushing up against people, against their realities.
Once, she asked her parents why they lived in Oxnard. She still isn’t sure why people end up one place or another. She supposes she could find some good, informative podcasts about this, and decides to dig her planner out once she arrives at the café so that she can make a reminder to look this up. Her parents’ answers hadn’t been particularly satisfactory. Peter grew up in Massachusetts, Iris in New York City, and Maggie had asked them why they couldn’t have raised her and Ariel somewhere cool like New York
or Boston. “Why did you have to bring us to this shithole?” she’d asked. Peter and Iris had looked at each other and laughed.
“Oy, baby,” Iris had said in that way that Maggie recognized led to a Jewish-sounding phrase. “You don’t know from shitholes.”
“Oxnard was affordable,” Peter had added, shrugging. As a teenager, Maggie was both confounded and infuriated by these responses. But now, there she is, still living in the place she went to college. She supposes inertia is a part of it, lack of funds to move somewhere cooler and more expensive another. But she’s also, by now, built a life for herself there, and she likes it; it feels like home. She wonders whether Lucia will want to move away at some point, though—she finished her MFA three months ago, and has a couple adjunct gigs lined up for the fall semester, but Maggie isn’t sure what comes after that.
For her parents, she guesses there was also a desire to live somewhere with decent schools and a low crime rate. Then again, what does she really know about the forces that drive people to do anything? Her powers of observation are clearly shit, seeing as how her mother was sneaking off to fuck men and she never knew. She’s also beginning to realize that the only way Iris could have had these affairs, especially if the men are so spread out, was if she was lying about at least some of her work trips, which means that the work ethic that Maggie’s internalized so well was at least partially a ruse.
She tries to breathe through the renewed tide of anger and reminds herself she’s only confirmed one affair, but the fact is she’s fully expecting the other men, if she finds them, to tell her similar stories. And she still wants to know why, and how they didn’t tell Iris to stop being a shitty person and go back to her husband and kids.
