This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  Liv Barrett patted herself down. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a card with me.” She stopped there, but Bee blocked all incoming signals. Opening her purse, she took out the Creole shrimp-soiled napkin along with a pen. Writing her name, her phone number, and Playdate, she pressed the greasy napkin into Liv Barrett’s hand, which was not unlike giving her a used tissue.

  Outside, Liv Barrett let the napkin fall away, and the autumn wind picked it up and rushed it along until it stopped, caught in a drainpipe.

  Deliverance Barrett did not call, and Bee grew despondent. Whatever Jonathan suggested to lift her spirits—Take in a movie? Go for a pizza? Scrabble?—had no effect, except to make matters worse. When, on the following Saturday night, he said, “Come on, sit and watch some television with me,” she stomped off and slammed the bedroom door behind her, but remember: when the Lord taketh away, He also delivers. Come the next Tuesday, Kirby White stopped by her office, just to say hi, and there was something of a kick to that, to a cute boy taking a shine to her. Not that there wasn’t a tediousness too, interacting with a boy that age. In the chair beside her desk, unable to contain his enthusiasm, as if who wouldn’t be thrilled to shake a can of beer, puncture it, and swallow it all in the jet spray, he said, clearly beside himself, “It gets you so wasted.”

  “That’s because you are getting more alcohol per unit time,” Bee explained.

  Who knew knowledge contained valuable information? “Awesome,” Kirby said.

  Awesome. Now there’s a word we could easily do without; yet Bee was as charmed as if he’d said something thoughtful. His eyes saved him from vacuity, the eyes hinted at something, like maybe his father died when he was a kid or maybe his mother was a drunk.

  Two days later he was back again, and Bee asked, “So what’s on the agenda for the weekend? Another party?”

  “No. I’m going home. I go home lots of weekends.” Home was in New Hampshire, in a town of chain-link fences, boarded-up storefronts, vacant lots, shotgun houses, an abandoned mill, and a girlfriend who worked the front desk at an auto-parts store. Kirby’s mother worked in a nursing home. Nine years ago his parents divorced, but they still lived together because his father was unemployed and had nowhere else to go. He slept on the couch in the living room. “My girlfriend wants me to quit school,” Kirby said. “Move home and get married.”

  Bee was appalled. “What kind of future could you have without your degree?”

  “Baseball,” Kirby reminded her. “Last year, a scout from the Houston Astros said he was gonna come back and look at me again this season. For real.”

  “Just promise me you won’t quit school,” Bee said, but that’s not a promise he’d keep given the opportunity to go pro, and why would he? The only reason he came to Middle River College, on a baseball scholarship, was for this, this chance, which for him wasn’t as slim as it might’ve been for another boy. Since Little League, he’d been told he could make it to the big league. Kirby White, he could throw a baseball.

  On the Tuesday following Kirby’s weekend home, he took his seat in Bee’s office and said, “So, we broke up. Me and my girlfriend.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Bee said, in that way we do when really we couldn’t care less. “Are you okay?”

  “I dunno. We were together for six years.”

  Bee leaned in toward him, to tell him that there would be plenty of other girls, that he was very young, that it was better this way. She took his hand in hers, to console him, but like the way a car is hot-wired, as the ignition wires touch and it starts up, Bee purred. The distance from her lips to his was that of an instant, which was not enough time to talk herself out of it.

  A kiss. What could one kiss matter?

  Together they stood up, face-to-face, arms at their sides, not touching but for their mouths, their mouths touched, the tips of their tongues touched, and who can think straight when need and want and a vital life force funnel like a tornado?

  Oh yeah, a kiss could ruin a life but good. Bee sank to her knees on the carpet the color of liverwurst, unzipped his jeans, yanked them, along with his boxer shorts, down to his ankles. The tails of his oxford shirt rested on her head like a veil.

  During her office hours on Thursday, Bee graded quiz papers while waiting for Kirby. She waited until well after dark, when she gave up and went home. Another week went by, and, a shade off her rocker, Bee went to the cafeteria looking for him. He sat at a table with six or seven boys, and coming up from behind, Bee tapped him on the shoulder. “I need to speak with you,” she said.

  Kirby pushed away from the table and walked off with Bee, but not far before he said, “What do you want?”

  He had a good five inches on her, so she had to stand on her tiptoes in order to cup her hand around her mouth to whisper in his ear. She whispered no words, but her tongue flicked out and around in a way that mere days before caused paroxysms of pleasure. Now he did not groan but pulled away as if stung. “Cut that out,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” Bee asked, and he told her, “Nothing.” Then he walked off as if Bee were nothing too, and in that moment, something ruptured. Not her heart—she did not love him—but perhaps her pride, which might be located next to loathing, in the spleen.

  The Middle River College library had fewer books on the shelves than empty space. The laboratory facilities were not equipped for anything more complicated than the rudimentary dissection of a fetal pig. The teaching load was heavy. The pay was chicken feed. What the college did have, aside from a winning Division II baseball team, was a façade. Sturdy elm and maple trees flanked red brick pathways that wound around lawns and gardens. Stone buildings that were a century or more old. The white Congregationalist chapel was officially baptized nondenominational during the brouhaha of the 1960s, but no one was fooled. The chaplain was, as the chaplain always was, a Separatist at heart. Middle River College appeared to be a fine institution of higher learning, the way plywood and paint on a Hollywood set can appear to be San Francisco.

  On a February afternoon when a barometrical fluke sent the mercury soaring to a balmy fifty-eight degrees, as if spring were just around the corner, a group of boys were having themselves a game of touch football out on the lawn alongside Barrett Hall. On that same afternoon, at the start of her two o’clock section of Anatomy and Physiology II, Bee went to open the window, to let in a breath of air on this false-spring day—almost cruel it was, juxtaposed against the certainty that the next day would be cold and bleak—when her gaze fixed on Kirby White. It might or might not have been his golden hair that made it seem as if he were under the high beam of a spotlight as he took a few steps backward to toss the football, which spun as it went, as if rotating on an axis. Another boy leapt to make the catch.

  Inspired, Bee turned to her class and said, “Let’s do fieldwork today.”

  Like ducklings, they followed their professor down the stairs and out the door to the far corner of the lawn, where Bee instructed them to scour the wet ground for specimens that they could later examine under the microscope: dead leaves, bits of tree bark, a bug, all of which had jack shit to do with A&P II.

  It took a couple of minutes, but Kirby did see her there, at the sideline. Bee was sure of it because as the other boys zipped left and tacked right, ran forward and around, Kirby was as fixed as a pillar of salt looking straight at her when two boys collided like a pair of hands clapping with Kirby in the middle. Down they all went, and right away the two boys got up, but Kirby was writhing on the ground, screaming, “My shoulder! My fucking shoulder!”

  As with all accidents, there was that moment when time froze before it started up again, before one boy sprinted to his backpack for his cell phone and called for an ambulance. Another rushed off to get the school nurse. The girls who were watching the game surrounded Kirby like a clutch of Florence Nightingales, carrying on as if his neck had been broken instead of his clavicle.

  And Bee, she slipped away, as if she’d never b
een there, as if she’d played no part in this accident, which was hardly life-threatening, although it did mess up a fine pitching arm, and all that went along with it. She went to the parking lot and got behind the wheel of her forest-green Saab or Volvo, whichever, where she sat and wept from the shame of longing for this boy. The shame of the truth as she believed it to be, but—get real—we all, with unrelenting frequency and vehemence, lie to ourselves like braided rugs. Mostly about big-ticket items: love, happiness, desire unfulfilled.

  Lynne Tillman

  —Sadness, that’s normal, it goes with the territory, but becoming bitter, bitterness is to be avoided, he said.

  —Be a saint instead, she said.

  Instead, he’d live from the largesse of a common madness, not just his own, not just from his sadness, he’d lament and move on, lament and move on.

  My lament, can’t do it, my way.

  Clay wouldn’t ever want to relinquish internal rhyme, rhyming was a mnemonic device, too, and venerable for a reason, and, along with that, he relied on the beautiful histories meshed inside the roots of words.

  —We don’t determine what words mean, they determine what we mean, Clay said, later. We don’t determine much.

  Cornelia was a film editor and also translated documents and titles for a movie company, she also plied her insightful eye as a photo researcher and archivist for a wealthy eccentric, who never left his house and liked to know what was going on, but only in pictures. The eccentric hated to read.

  —It would be great if pictures told a story, Cornelia said, but they don’t. They tell too many, or they don’t tell any.

  —Words, also, he said.

  —Images are easier to misread, she said.

  —I don’t know.

  Subtitles crowded the image, she explained more than once, they changed the picture, even dominated it, and besides, reading words on a screen disrupted the cinematic flow. He wasn’t sure that was all bad, but then he was suspicious of images, which he didn’t make. He was wary of words, too, which he used and tried to remake, so he had reason for anxiety. In her business, they talked about “getting a read on” a script, on meaning, sort of instantaneously.

  A place for words, orphaned, wayward, no words,

  no images, what then.

  The lovers argued about the small things, about cleaning up after themselves in their apartment, as responsible adults do, supposedly, and petty problems, at work and with relative strangers, and also the large things, love, politics, history, friendship, art, poetry, which he wrote, when inevitably inconsiderate matter that had earlier settled in words and sentences extruded layers of their pasts, lived together and separately.

  Code, just for now, when you mean its opposite,

  bright lust of sullen night.

  He’d been stunned by an obituary: “To my dear friends and chums, It has been wonderful and at times it had been grand and for me, now, it has been enough.” The man—it was signed “Michael”—had had the presence of mind to write and place his own death notice, it resonated a unique thoughtfulness, sad and mad, was he a suicide? And, on TV, a Fuji commercial declaimed a new longing for the fast-escaping present: “Because life won’t stay still while you go home and get your camera.”

  Writing death, perpetual, language like a

  house, an asylum, an orphanage. In a dream I

  wasn’t, argued with someone or myself, so lost.

  Perpetual death of words, writing.

  He wasn’t his dream’s hero, but there are no heroes, just cops. Clay stopped to watch two beat cops, surreptitiously he hoped, while they canvassed the street for errant civilians, ordinary or unusual, and the cops, they’re ordinary and they’re not, and out of uniform they’re nothing, or they’re nothing just like him, dumb mortals compelled by ignorant, invisible forces, which happened to be, in their case, part of the job. A police car sped by, like a siren, in time or too late to stop it, the robbery, murder, the robber, murderer. He asked the butcher for stew meat but studied another butcher at the bloodstained chopping block who expertly sliced off a layer of fat, thick and marbled, from a porterhouse. Fat enriches the meat’s taste, his mother taught him, and also she warned, it’s better to be dead and buried than frank and honest. She said she knew things he didn’t that she hoped he’d never know, it was the part of her past she wouldn’t tell him.

  —At the end of the day, everyone wants someone to cook for them, a woman, who was probably waiting for the porterhouse, announced to a man by her side.

  The man appeared to understand and nodded his head, a gesture that presumed a semblance of understanding. Clay wondered if giving the appearance of understanding was actually understanding, in some sense, and if duplicity of this sort was necessary for a society’s existence, maybe even at its basis or center, and not the ancient totem Émile Durkheim theorized. People regularly don’t understand each other, but if that were constantly apparent, rather than gestures of tacit agreement and recognition, a stasis, punctuated by violent acts everywhere, would stall everyone for eternity.

  “Security has now been doubled at the stadium, but people’s enjoyment won’t be hampered, officials say.” The radio announcer’s voice sounded out of place in the warm, yeasty bakery, where he now was, doing errands like a responsible mate. The baker tuned the radio to a station that gave bulletins every few minutes, which some people listened to all day long, so they knew the news word by word, and Clay imagined they could recite it like a poem.

  An epic, way to remember. A gesture, song, war,

  a homecoming. Fighting writing my death,

  persistent oxymoron. Perpetrator. Victim.

  Terror to fight terror. Fire or an argument with

  fire. Firefight. Spitfire. Lawless, Eliot Ness,

  childhood. Fighting against or for terror, lies

  in mouth. Can’t leave home without it. Get a

  horse instead.

  People expected the unexpected, unnatural and natural disasters, a jet crashing in the ocean, all lost, hurricanes beating down towns, all lost, bombs doing their dirty work, lives lost and shattered, houses destroyed, and attentive listeners needed to know, instantly, for a sense of control or protection, and for the inevitable shock of recognition: I’m still alive.

  The baker’s son Joey, dressed in white like a surgeon, the skin on his florid cheeks dusted with flour, asked him what he wanted, then bantered with him as he always did.

  —Sun, Clay, ever see it? You’re pasty-faced.

  —You’re flour-faced. I want a sourdough loaf, and the recipe.

  —Forget about it, Joey the baker’s son said. Family secret for five generations.

  —I’ll get it.

  —You’re just like your mother, Joey said.

  His mother had played the violin, and when he couldn’t sleep at night, to quiet him after a bad dream, she’d stand in the doorway to his bedroom and pluck each string with adoring concentration. A lullaby, maybe, some song that consoled him for having to leave consciousness at all. He was attached to her concentration, like the strings to her instrument, and this specific image of her, mother violinist bent and absorbed, resisted passing time’s arbitrariness, its uneven dissipations. Her face, for a long time now, rested only against walls or stood upright on tables in framed photographs, and he scarcely remembered a conversation they had, just a sentence or two.

  Here, waiting. Can’t leave home, without a

  horse. Get a read on. Long ago, here, a drama

  with teeth, reneging, nagging. Cracked plates,

  baseball bats, stains on home room floor, same

  as before, stains like Shroud of Turin.

  Jesus bled, writing death, fighting terror.

  He hadn’t moved away from the old neighborhood, waiting for something, teaching English and American literature at the high school he attended, while he grew older in the same place, without stopping time, though he found his illusions encouraged and indemnified by traces of the past, like the in
dentations in the gym’s floor, and, more than traces, bodies, like the baker’s and the butcher’s, and their children, who would replace them, and stand in their places, in a continuity Clay wouldn’t keep up, even by staying in the neighborhood.

  Cornelia believed the cult around the Shroud of Turin demonstrated that people do appreciate abstraction, an image instead of a body, though it wasn’t exactly an abstraction but close enough. Even if the cloth had once rested on a body, theirs was a reverence for an impression, drawn from but not the same as the body—even if the body wasn’t Christ’s, since scientists carbon-dated the cloth much later than his death. The cloth was just matter, material separate from and attached to history.

  Not the thing, the stain, palimpsest of pain.

  Life served with death a sanction.

  Sometimes Joey the baker’s son let him go into the back of the store to watch other white-coated men knead dough, their faces also dusted in white, their concentration, like his mother’s on her violin, complete, and he viewed them as content, absorbed in good work. Their hands knew exactly how much to slap and pound, when to stop—every movement was essential. Then Clay ruminated, the way he always did in the bakery, about being a baker; in the butcher shop, he thought about being a butcher. He wanted to be like Joey, they’d gone to school together. If he were, he’d know simple limits, why an action was right or wrong, because the consequences would be immediate, and as usual he rebuked himself for romanticizing their labor and imagining an idyllic life for, say, the old baker and the baker’s son he’d known since he was a child, with a life better than his, because, he told Cornelia that night, their work was what it was, nothing else, its routine might be comforting, his wasn’t. In the moment, as he watched their hands and smelled baking bread’s inimitable aroma, he also felt that the bakers dwelled, as he did, in fantasy, that it enveloped them daily, and that what they did might be something else for them, too. Joey thought he was funny, but Clay loved the way Joey treated him, he felt Joey appreciated him in ways no one else did.