There Will Be Lobster

by Sara Arnell

  Chapter 10

  You Look Like Joni Mitchell

  The calendar had no respect for my decision to ignore it and pretend that time wasn’t marching on. It was July, and that meant that it would soon be September and then I’d be alone. It’s time to rise to the occasion, put my self-pity on a shelf, and have one final, amazing moment together before she leaves for school. Like the good ole days, I thought, thinking of our time seeing Levon in concert. Thinking of our multiple nights with Furthur. Thinking of all the music we’d listened to that became the soundtrack of our relationship and time spent together. It was the least I could do. It was most I could do.

  Canandaigua, New York, was a five-hour car ride away. We left from home in the morning so we could get there early and hang out before the show. Furthur was on their summer 2013 tour, and this would be our last concert before my daughter had to leave for college. I packed a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, a six-pack of bottled water, bug spray, hand sanitizer, and a blanket to sit on.

  “Don’t forget cash,” my daughter said. “You know there’s always someone making a good grilled cheese out of the trunk of their car.”

  This is what a road trip should feel like, I thought. My daughter was more friend than child. It felt good to be thinking about doing something together instead of thinking about how soon she would move out. I liked being together, and I liked not thinking about being apart. We made sandwiches on the dashboard and ate Combos and Cheez-Its from gas station convenience stores. I said yes to a detour that promised a more interesting route than a highway. I said yes to turning up the radio. I said yes to driving with the windows down. It felt good not saying no, which was my short, but complete, sentence of choice these days.

  We parked in a lot, and I noted our proximity to a large pine tree so that we could find the car in the dark when the concert was over. We walked to the vendor area, which was called Shakedown Street. It was full of people selling food, clothes, accessories, and everything and anything Grateful Dead. My daughter bought a handprint that was burned into an oval piece of wood. The hand was missing a finger.

  “Why would you buy that?” I questioned.

  “It’s Jerry Garcia’s handprint.”

  “He’s missing a finger?”

  “Yeah, where have you been?”

  I had no idea that he’d had four and a quarter fingers on one hand. Why would I, I thought, I never saw him play.

  A man hooked up to an oxygen tank that he pulled behind him in a red wagon was selling cookies.

  “Buy some cookies?”

  “What kind?”

  “Oatmeal.”

  He said he only had one container left and that he was twenty-five dollars short of the money he needed to buy a bus ticket to Seattle to go live with his daughter.

  I gave him the money he wanted and took the cookies.

  “Are you sure they’re not weed cookies?” my daughter asked.

  “I don’t think so. He didn’t mention that.”

  “Don’t eat too many,” she warned. “Just in case.”

  They smelled good.

  We split up at this point. I didn’t want to stand in the front, at the stage. I wanted to sit in the back and eat my cookies. The field was full of cow pies. I kicked some shit out of the way and put my blanket on the ground. The cookies were good. I ate three. They weren’t that big.

  The couple to the left of me stripped naked and lay down next to each other on their blanket. I tried not to stare but couldn’t help it. They were flat on their backs and motionless. Their arms were by their sides, palms up. I guessed that they were soaking in the vibes.

  The man with the oxygen tank came back selling more cookies. He told me the same story and asked for another twenty-five dollars. He didn’t seem to notice I was eating his cookies from the container he already sold me. I said no thanks, figuring I’d already done my community service. He moved on.

  I tried to use the porta-potty, but it was too disgusting. My daughter warned me about this obstacle. I took the napkins she made me stuff into my pocket and walked into the brush next to the field to relieve myself. I wasn’t alone.

  Someone was sitting on my blanket when I got back from peeing. “Hi,” I said. “This is my blanket.” He said he thought it was abandoned. “It’s not,” I said and asked him to get up. He looked at me for what seemed like ten minutes before he stood. He asked to sit on a corner of it, but I told him I was waiting for someone. He nodded and noted that it was a big blanket as he walked away.

  “Cool,” I said.

  The couple to the right of me reached over and handed me a joint.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  I offered them a cookie in return. They declined when I confirmed they were not weed cookies.

  The girl smiled at me. “It’s finally kicking in.”

  “Cool,” I said. Again.

  I wore a hat that night. I never wore hats. It was a floppy crocheted black beret that had been in my drawer for years—a regretted purchase whose time to shine had finally come. It felt like it was the right time and place to wear a hat. This hat. It tipped to one side of my head. I liked being out of my comfort zone at these concerts. I was an old hippie here with a lot of other old hippies, and it made me feel free. I would never wear this hat at home, I thought. I also thought that if I ever saw anyone else wearing this hat, I would laugh. The hat was ridiculous.

  The band played a song that made everyone stand up and dance. I joined in. A man walked over next to me. “You look like Joni Mitchell,” he said.

  I offered him a cookie.

  He asked me if they were weed cookies. “No thanks,” he said when I told him they were not. He said that he was really high anyway. He asked if he could kiss me.

  “No,” I laughed. He tried to dance with me, but I gave him no energy, and he eventually wandered away. I immediately missed him and wished I had been nicer. I liked the way the attention made me feel. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I felt attractive. I didn’t feel like me. I looked around for him. I would let him sit on my blanket if he wandered back over. I might even kiss him, I thought.

  I met my daughter at the porta-potties when the concert was over. A man selling balloons filled with nitrous oxide passed us. “Ten dollars a balloon,” he called out to the exiting crowd. “Get your hippie crack.”

  “They call them the nitrous mafia,” my daughter whispered.

  We watched a woman inhale a balloon then pass out and hit her head on the curb. She didn’t move. The people she was with ran over to help her. They pulled her up to a seated position and tended to her bleeding scalp.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was scary.”

  “Yeah,” my daughter said, “I don’t like the balloons.”

  I decided to let this go. Don’t question her, I told myself. She was next to me. We were together. It was all I needed to care about at this moment. She was leaving for college in seven weeks. I knew my next and last road trip with her would be to take her to school. I would be driving home alone. I would be living alone. I would be all alone. I wondered if anyone else would tell me I looked like Joni Mitchell if I wore the crocheted beret again. I wondered if I should wear it one day and see what people said. I could plan a reunion lunch with my team from the ad agency, show up in the beret, and hand out nitrous-filled balloons. Maybe it wasn’t as ridiculous as I thought.

  Later on, back at our hotel room, I put the beret on and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. The fluorescent light didn’t help. If I look like Joni Mitchell, I thought, it’s like no version of her I’ve ever seen on any album cover or in any photograph.

  I left the hat in our hotel room when we checked out in the morning. I had already got what I wanted from it. And now it would just be another unwanted bit of nostalgia to carry to the End of the World.

  Chapter 11


  Home Alone

  We took the long way, on a single-lane interstate instead of the more direct highway route to college, to the End of the World. We thought it would be more picturesque and allow us a calmer drive so we could talk. The three-hour trip went by in silence except for the random remark about a beautiful tree or a ray of sunshine that made the hills in the distance sparkle, or a noise that came from deep inside me that I couldn’t stifle. I wondered how she felt about all the time we’d spent together. How did she feel about my neediness and about my desire to do everything with her? Was college the exit plan she’d been dreaming of for the past two years? The drive home was less quiet, however, on account of my relentless sobbing. A pile of wet tissues filled the passenger seat.

  When I got home and opened the front door, I threw my bag on the floor and waited for my three dogs to notice I’d walked in. They eventually bounded around the corner to greet me. “She’s at college,” I told them. I wanted them to understand and pet me back. I wasn’t hungry, but I thought I should eat. I wanted to be normal. It would be normal to eat dinner. I decided to make meatballs in tomato sauce. When my kids were all home, I always had a pot of meatballs simmering on the stove. It was an easy meal. I wanted meatballs. I wanted to eat to be happy. I wanted dinner to sustain me emotionally, not just fill my stomach. I wanted to feel full in every sense. I had nothing else to do. I had the time to make meatballs.

  I thawed meat from the freezer in the microwave, grabbed a small handful of the slightly warm ground beef, added the requisite ingredients, and rolled a few balls. I threw them in a pot with oil and browned them. Next, I opened a jar of Rao’s marinara and dumped it over the meatballs to let them finish cooking in the simmering sauce. The smell was soothing and tortuous at the same time. It brought back memories of family dinner at a time when I was alone and had no family dinners in sight. I thought about setting the table, with a place for my daughter, as if she were just running late. I knew my thoughts were on the edge of unhinged. Stop it, I told myself. Get it together.

  When the meatballs were finished cooking, I ladled a few in a soup bowl to eat on the couch in front of the TV. During this process, I dropped one on the floor, and the white Maltese immediately stuck his face in it. I stared at the dog with his snout covered in marinara. I was unfazed. The larger spaniel pushed the little dog out of the way and gobbled up the meatball from the floor while the pug licked the sauce off the Maltese. I watched all this with complete disconnect. I was a fly on the wall in my own life. If food drops on the floor, if there’s a spill or mess in the kitchen, I thought, it doesn’t matter. I’m just an observer. The dogs can figure it out. I don’t have to worry. I don’t even have to clean it up. I can be as messy and careless as I want. This is the bright side of being alone. I thanked the pug for licking his brother clean.

  Halfway through the trip to college, my daughter had turned to me several times in succession saying, “What?” I had no idea what she was asking me. She said I was mumbling. Saying things to myself. I told her I wasn’t, and she said that I was driving and talking to myself so she interrupted because it was making her nervous, like I wasn’t really there behind the wheel with her life in my hands.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Just nervous, I guess.” But I actually knew I talked to myself. I did it all the time. This was the just the first time I was caught doing it. Since the agency had closed, I was alone in the house most of the time. I was the only one I could count on to have a conversation with. I didn’t realize I did it in the car, in front of her. She was the one person that I wanted to appear to be normal for—the one that I wanted to see me as reliable and stable and solid.

  But I was caught talking to myself, and that made both of us worried. “I’ll shut up,” I told her.

  “You can talk to me,” she said.

  “Right,” I told her. Maybe I’d been mumbling about Levon Helm, or about eighteen-pound tumors, or maybe I was just running through my usual self-admonishments of regret and resentment for what my life had become. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been something to share with her. I concentrated with all my might to appear stable and strong. To be something like the mother she needed on a day that was supposed to be her day, but that I couldn’t help seeing as mine. Today is the beginning of my life alone, I thought. Or who knows, maybe I mumbled it.

  Chapter 12

  Please Don’t Die

  Laura Garza was killed in 2008. She left a nightclub in New York City with a guy she’d just met. After he suffocated her, he stuffed her body in a laundry basket before disposing of it in the woods. Court evidence said the murderer was a pervert. A sexual deviant. The prosecutors said he saw women as “an assembly of body parts and hair.” There were forty-four examples of perverted or suspicious behavior presented in court. The month before he murdered Garza, he skipped three mandated sex-offender treatment meetings. Garza’s mother kept her cell phone by her side for sixteen months after her daughter went missing. The day she got the news that her daughter’s body was found, she turned it off.

  I kept a mental note of murdered girls. I watched stories on the news of women who were killed—wives, girlfriends, mothers; women who were found in fields, woods, rivers, abandoned places—or never found at all. This is what it was like to be alone with my thoughts. This is how I filled my time, thinking I was being informed and aware. When I called my daughter at college for the first time to see how she was settling in, I told her about Laura Garza. Stories of abduction, rape, and murder became my primary form of communication with her. Our conversations were as dark as the abyss I was staring into. I tried to scare her into being safe at college. I used horrific stories as life lessons. She told me I made her feel like I thought she was irresponsible and reckless.

  “Laura Garza thought she was safe with this guy,” I said. “Look at Ted Bundy. He was said to be charming.” Whenever my daughter told me about meeting someone or going somewhere with a new friend, I said something like:

  “Don’t get in a car with anyone you don’t know.”

  “People are usually murdered by someone they know. You can’t be too careful.”

  “There’s safety in numbers.”

  “Don’t walk alone after dark.”

  She very quickly decided that she didn’t want to talk about her life at college with me. She didn’t want to share her excitement and hopes, or the nervousness that she saw as exciting and new, not deadly. The topic of what was happening at school became all logistics. We talked about books, her professors, things she still needed for her dorm room, the forms that I repeatedly forgot to mail, and when she would be coming home for Christmas holiday.

  When our calls ended, I pictured myself like Laura’s mother, phone in hand and always on. Waiting.

  Chapter 13

  Gone but Not Forgotten

  With my youngest daughter away at school, the sadness I felt at home escalated until she returned for Christmas break followed by a month-long winter internship. She was home until mid-February, which almost made me forget that she would once again be gone before I knew it. Instead of being thankful and enjoying her presence, I worried what would happen to me when she left again for campus.

  Without her, no one was going to walk into the kitchen while I was cooking at the stove and ask me what smelled so good. No one was there to sneak up behind me and give me a hug or a kiss. Or wrap their arms around my waist and say, “I love you, Mom.” When I thought I heard a noise and turned around to see who’d walked into the room, I knew no one was there. It would just be one of the dogs. Or nothing at all. The house settling. A creak. After she went back for her spring term, the front door didn’t open anymore. There were no footsteps on the stairs. There was one plate and one fork and one glass in the kitchen sink that needed washing, night after night. I breathed in the silence and cried it out in tears.

  Everything I did felt wrong. All my plants died. I had to constantly
replace them. I shrunk clothes in the dryer. I burnt every piece of toast I made—the right toaster setting seemed to elude me. When I did see other people and attempt to join in conversations, no one seemed to hear me.

  “I just said that,” I told myself time and time again as I was passed over for my thoughts and remarks over someone else’s.

  I could sit home all day and not utter a single word aloud. Sometimes I would note to myself that I didn’t speak once during an entire day. I was lonely and longed to feel someone’s touch. I couldn’t even remember the last time someone I met gave me a warm greeting and a hug. Until I saw X. He was someone I knew from my early days in New York City, post-college. I had bumped into him outside of a supermarket a few weeks earlier. It was a nice surprise to feel good about reconnecting with someone from a carefree time in my life. He was a hugger.

  We went out for a drink. I listened for hours about his unhappy marriage, family issues, problems in general, and overall depression. We sat at a little round table and drank beer and did shots of whiskey. He was broke. I paid for another round. He was sad. I gave him a hug. He hugged back. It felt good. It was what I wanted. The place started to empty out. It was a weekday. Room at the bar opened up, and we relocated. Faster service. We had more beer followed by more shots. He pushed his stool closer to mine. He asked why we never got together when we were younger. He brushed a piece of hair from my face.

  “Thank you,” I said and smiled.

  Here it comes, I thought. I didn’t care that we were both drunk. I knew it wouldn’t happen unless we were drunk. He was going back to his wife. I was going to remain alone. He leaned in. So did I. We made out at the bar.

  “Let’s go to your place,” he said.

  We spent three hours together. It only took three hours to make me feel loved, desired, smart, interesting, and exciting; three hours to feel like a teenager; three hours to have my brain and body come back to life. He said we should do it again. He said it didn’t matter because he was going to get a divorce soon. I didn’t care. This wasn’t about him.