The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  “So, did you come over to get me drunk?”

  “Nope, I’m going to turn Navid’s old studio into an oasis for you.”

  “I thought you were joking about that. I have a whole house of my own now. I was just going to let it be the room where the dog throws up and I don’t find it for weeks.”

  “Missy, trust me. You are going to need a place. A special room for playing music, meditating.” At this, I raise my eyebrows. “For whatever,” she said. “It’s already soundproof. I have a whole plan.”

  “I want to go to sleep. For a year.”

  “Come on, you can lie on the couch while I get to work.”

  Agatha cleaned out Navid’s old studio room and redesigned the space. She brought in a soft throw rug and a standing lamp that emitted a calming light, and placed several large ficus and cactus plants in front of the window. She set up a songwriting notebook on a music stand and placed my cello beside it. She adorned the walls with a framed poster from the Swearwolves’ first tour and a photo of Agatha and me in our twenties when she was in that all-dyke band from Portland; we were both onstage about to jump into a crowd, wearing lacy baby-doll dresses and boots bigger than our skulls. On the end table, she placed some smaller plants, a crystal that was supposed to be “cleansing”—I’d really try anything at this point—a book of illustrated birds, and a well-thumbed copy of When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön.

  I stayed on the couch, dozing with the dog, staring at the TV in blinks, not really absorbing anything, feeling guilty every time she popped in to bring me a glass of water or carrot sticks, slices of peach that lost their vibrancy, easing into yellow bruised sponges. She touched her hand to my forehead. She looked alive and sweating with purpose. I couldn’t remember how that felt.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered on occasion. “I’m an adult, you shouldn’t have to do this for me.”

  “I don’t mind,” she insisted. She put a few big crystals on the windowsill, even though I thought they were silly. Slowly, in my thirties, I had watched all my peers take one of two different routes, loosely described: they’d either become New Age—going to silent retreats, learning tarot, spending the money they used to spend on beer on hiking equipment and do-it-yourself kombucha kits—or they went full-tilt into the oblivion of their jobs, parenting, or substance recovery. Just as we were beginning to see the fruits of our labour, to see our dreams unfold, and to feel okay about where we’d come from, about how our childhoods had spit us out into our twenties, that was when the cancer started circling us, then miscarriages and car accidents. Time sped up as we attended fortieth-birthday parties and ten-year wedding anniversaries. And of course, divorces.

  Agatha let herself out when she was done, during one of my deeper moments of sleep. I walked into the room and it was beautiful. It was all mine. I sat down with the cello and played for a few minutes, but couldn’t feel it. Someday I would really appreciate it, but not quite yet.

  She had left me a note on the back of an unpaid bill on the kitchen table. It read: I’m giving you a couple weeks of mourning but then I’m taking you out to the Lexington and getting you drunk. You’re not dead yet and you need some joy! Plus, I have a plan for a new band and you are going to FREAK OUT. Call any time of day/night. You WILL be ok, I promise. xox

  A new band? Agatha and I hadn’t been onstage in years. I wrote and recorded music for a living, but I hadn’t been in a band since the Swearwolves disbanded, unless you counted the community orchestra I played in on occasion for fun. I ached for it sometimes. But this wasn’t the time.

  I woke up the next morning to a text message from Tom. Good morning! Life isn’t over! Soon it will feel like one of those weighted X-ray blankets lifting off your body, every decision will only be your own, and it will feel beautiful! He never said At least you don’t have kids, which was what everyone else said when they heard the news, like somehow the divorce should be a snap, with no strings.

  Forty-five minutes later, there was a knock on my living room window. I was listening to the Mountain Goats’ “No Children” on too high a volume to hear the knock, but Penny was standing on the top of the couch, barking and scratching at the window. I popped my head up.

  “Penny, it’s Tom!” said a voice outside. “Tell your mom to let me in.”

  I got up and opened the front door. “Happy divorce, doll. I think divorce should always come with some celebration, so—” He reached into his bag and handed me a small assortment of semi-crushed tulips.

  “Ah, yes, tulips, the official flower of romantic disentanglements.”

  Then he handed me a baseball cap and a hoodie.

  “Put these on, we’re going to have coffee outside of the house,” he instructed.

  “I can’t. I’m not wearing, uh”—I looked down—“pants.”

  “That looks like a dress.”

  “It’s a nightgown.”

  “No one can tell the difference. We’ll scare the gentrifiers.”

  I put the cap on, wrapped myself in the hoodie, put the tulips in a beer mug of water, and put a leash on Penny, then followed Tom out the door.

  We made for an awkward threesome ambling down the street. There was a new SoulCycle across from my house and I hadn’t even noticed. A spinning class was jammed into one room, visible from the street, going hard and nowhere like a tangible metaphor for the way I was feeling.

  I hadn’t seen Tom in person in a while, because he’d moved north of the city to a small house near Petaluma, only coming into the city to visit the kids. The youngest was now in college, something I found impossible to believe. The first few minutes of being alone together in person were a bit strange, like we had to remember how to speak in full sentences instead of quippy, infrequent texts. We walked two blocks to a café at Church and 30th. Penelope was so happy to be outside, she stopped to smell everything. Tom was mostly quiet, occasionally squeezing my arm affectionately.

  “I’m not a kid with cancer, it’s just divorce. Shit happens.”

  “Still, I know it’s hard. Even though we’ve all been expecting it for years, you know. Navid was never good enough for you.”

  “I never understand why people say that. He was a great partner.”

  “Was he?”

  “I guess I don’t have anyone to compare him to. He was the first person I settled down with. I just think it’s weird when people take sides.”

  “When I got divorced you confessed that you thought Cory was slow and unevolved as a woman.”

  “Oof, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It felt good at the time, though. I was so shocked when she left. I would have stayed forever. But I know better now, she was right. Plus, he cheated on you.”

  I hated when people brought that up. Made me feel like the righteous protagonist in a rom-com.

  We sat down at a sidewalk table, and Penny settled at our feet. Tom went inside and returned with coffees and smoothie bowls. I dipped a spoon into my bowl, revolted.

  “It looks like a pile of something someone already ate.”

  “I’m assuming you’re not eating much. I don’t have that problem,” he said, rubbing his ample stomach. “Remember I used to have well-defined abs back in the day?”

  “I still have a few outfits from the Lollapalooza summer that I keep for nostalgia but I can basically fit the skirt on one leg.”

  “We’re still cute, right?”

  “You are,” I said. He really was more handsome as a bear type. We both paused, watching a young hipster couple at a nearby table get up to leave, their perfect skin, their shiny hair.

  “Billy looks the same, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he’s got some freakish ageless thing going on.”

  “Maybe if you’re not prone to self-reflection you don’t get as many wrinkles.”

  “Yeah, maybe we just don’t have time for massages every day with all the time we spend caring about people outside ourselves.”

  “Good to know you guys still get along.
”

  It felt like old times, ragging on Billy together. The café music switched abruptly to “Untied.” This used to happen when servers would notice us, they’d put our music on. But it hadn’t happened in years. The song was nearly twenty years old, but because it got played in a 1990s nostalgia movie recently, I’d been getting bigger royalty cheques and I’d heard it in a CVS recently.

  “This is so weird.”

  “Totally weird.”

  “That bridge still bugs me.”

  “Me too.”

  Tom lifted up his coffee in a cheers.

  “I swear, divorce was the best thing to ever happen to Cory and me. Now I love the shit out of her and she’s my best friend. We’re better parents now. I love her new husband.”

  I’ve heard this all before. And it did help. I didn’t remind Tom that he’d bottomed out after the divorce, and ended up in the hospital after a suicide attempt. He didn’t like to talk about it, but sometimes I remembered how helpless I felt visiting him in the ward. How he looked like all the life was just gone from his eyes, and there was nothing I could do but remind him he was loved, he was talented, he would get through it. Eventually, he did, and he had been doing well for the past few years.

  “But I like having a partner,” I said. “It’s grounding. And I want a baby. I’ve been seeing a fertility specialist.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Remember when you hated relationships? When you broke hearts all across America? Like, literally.”

  “I think the band functioned like a relationship did back then, it was anchoring. Now I feel like a relationship acts as the same anchor. I like sharing my life with someone intentionally,” I said.

  “I don’t miss it at all,” Tom said. Tom was resolutely single. He had an occasional lover here and there, but he’d crafted this loner identity.

  “I doubt I’ll ever fall in love again,” he went on. “I know what I like. I don’t want anyone intruding on that. I have good friends, the kids. Didn’t Aristotle say something about platonic love being the ideal? I have you, I have Cory. I can have sex any time I want, basically. It’s not that hard.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. To me, Tom seemed lonely. He was the epitome of someone who could use a partner. He could wander off into the depths somewhere and never return. I thought that a partner might ground him, but I didn’t share this. No one wants to hear their obvious vulnerabilities exposed when they’ve crafted such safe narratives to oppose them.

  “So,” he said, changing the subject, “tell me more about this baby goal of yours.”

  “Well, I want a kid. I’m thirty-seven. I have no time to waste if I want to find someone to do that with.”

  “Yeah, don’t lead with that on Tinder.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I don’t think you want a kid, Missy. You’re just at loose ends. You’re not a mom type, you never have been. You’ll always put your music first and you can’t do that with a kid around. You’ll resent the kid. I’m just saying. I know you.”

  You’ll resent the kid. He said it so casually, forgetting I had a mother who ran away from home for that exact reason. But he kept going, and the more he emphasized my worst, most selfish qualities, the more I was certain that Tom didn’t know me at all. He knew my life history, he knew my talents and flaws, but he didn’t know where I was at in that moment. He was my music friend. Agatha was the person who knew me.

  I was pretty much done with this conversation, and I didn’t want to invite even more lectures from Tom, especially since he was my only shot at a donor at this point. Convincing him of that was going to take some time. We sipped our coffees in silence, and then he walked me home.

  He dropped me off as if I were a child, making me promise to eat some food, to text him if I felt sad.

  “Come up to Petaluma. Billy and Alan are coming to stay next week. We can record some songs,” he said.

  “Agatha wants me to join a new band with her, too.”

  “Oh, we could do a seven-inch together, two side projects. Remember side-project bands?”

  “It’s actually not a bad idea,” I said.

  “I heard about Agatha’s band idea, everyone’s talking about it.”

  “Everyone? Well, I guess that would make sense. She’s reached out to, like, every girl from every band from back in the day. I think she sees it as a sort of supergroup reunion.”

  “Join that band, you need a new thing.”

  Penny scratched at the front door, wanting to be inside. I pulled Tom into a hug.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said while walking away, “eventually.”

  “I know,” I said, but when I got inside, and watched Penny circle her dog bed three times, the way she always did, before falling asleep, I felt strangled by the silence of my empty house.

  Chapter 4

  carola

  the night before the memorial, I couldn’t sleep. It had been several weeks since I’d heard the news of Chris’s death, and I thought I had been processing it, but there I was at dawn, standing at the bay window and watching the bears be thwarted by Larry’s new locking system on the compost bin. They tumbled around. Frustrated, they came close to the porch to see if we might have left anything edible about, but they triggered the security floodlights—also a new addition by Larry—and ambled away. He was always one step ahead of whatever calamity might befall us.

  The day before any kind of trip anywhere, I always wanted to cancel. The thought that I could just stay home was soothing. I found the routines of my life with Larry and my work comforting to the extent that any interruptions threw me. I pulled my dusty plaid suitcase out from where it lived in the storage area in the rafters above the loft, vacuuming the outside before unzipping it and praying it didn’t house a family of mice. What would I even pack? I sat on the edge of our bed and stared into my closet.

  I hadn’t seen most of my Sunflower friends for over two decades, with the exception of Tegan. We all sort of reunited on Facebook, and I knew some of them judged me for leaving the way I did, especially since the commune was dismantled only a few months after I left. Tegan had long forgiven me, though. We didn’t speak for the first three years, but she showed up at the ashram one day in late summer. Taylor had died so unexpectedly earlier that year. I didn’t even know. I was so isolated there, and only Bryce knew where I was. I was so angry he hadn’t phoned me to let me know. We spent a week sharing my volunteer’s bunk. She was manic with plans, having just left Chris. She wanted to start an all-women’s commune on some land she’d leased in Quebec. She wanted me to come. I’d wanted her to stay at the ashram. But from then, Tegan and I kept in loose touch. She’d remarried—a woman this time; they owned a farmhouse in Vermont and ran a small press that published books about women’s health and feminism.

  The memorial was held at Tegan and Karen’s farmhouse on the lawn out back. Their two youngest kids were living with them at the moment: a daughter who was in high school, and a college student who’d come home for the memorial. I was one of the last to arrive, because even though I’d been up at dawn, I’d fretted about what to wear, what to pack, where to get gas, what snacks to bring. I parked on the lawn, among so many cars; I was surprised to see such a big crowd, people of all ages. I’m not sure why I expected it to be smaller. Tegan had made it sound like Chris was very lonely at the end.

  Bryce was there, thankfully without his wife, Rachel. The last time Bryce and I had seen each other was Missy’s wedding to Navid years earlier. It had been a bit of a disaster, at first, and then we’d slowly become friends again. I wondered if Missy had told him she and Navid were separated. I hoped she would talk to him about it. Bryce could actually be quite sensitive. He listened very intensely and took your feelings seriously without trying to fix everything. There was still so much shorthand between us. It was nice to know someone who had known me so long ago. I would always feel close to him, but the key to that closeness was the fact that we didn’t see each other o
ften.

  We stood in a circle and listened to Chris’s closest family and friends eulogize him, and then Karen set out a large buffet lunch and we mingled until the sun set behind the trees, and Chris’s kids lit a giant bonfire. I could see Chris in their faces at certain angles. He used to love the bonfire at Sunflower. Just the smell of wood burning in the air reminded me of him. The crowd got smaller and smaller until it was just us old-timers.

  I told the story of how Chris had spray-painted the living room green when I was pregnant. Tegan had forgotten all about it. She told the story about how when they were teenagers, he’d come into the grocery store where she worked and picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, brought her into the lemon-yellow Volkswagen he powered with vegetable oil, and they did doughnuts in the parking lot for five minutes. Then he carried her back inside to work.

  “That’s what it was like with Chris. You’d be doing something mundane, like unpacking a box of canned peas, and then you’d be twirling around in circles, half sick and half elated.”

  Chris had lived a hard life. The unpredictable nature that made him popular and enigmatic at twenty-one had made him unemployable and difficult in middle age. His freedom of expression, the self-actualized glow, hardened into poor boundaries. The fun nature that drew everyone to him became a drinking problem.

  His second wife, Lilith, had tried hard to keep him together, but eventually she left with their two sons in the early aughts. She stood stone-faced around the fire, not laughing when everyone else laughed. She didn’t speak at the earlier part of the evening.

  We’d all quietly wondered how he even made it to sixty. After Taylor died, he’d gone deep into a strange cult that was paranoid in its distrust of the world. Then in the last few years he’d switched from collective living to being mostly a hermit, working odd jobs at farms near where Sunflower had been, and living in a converted shed on the edge of town. In the end, it was Tegan who came back to nurse him, even though they hadn’t been together in years.

  “Don’t even think about asking me to do that,” I whispered to Bryce.