Sex & Violence

by Carrie Mesrobian

  My dad and I were like two grizzly bears on the same mountain. Circling, snarling, trying to stay out of each other’s way. He acted like he was this new dad, a tough guy, someone with expectations and plans. He wanted to know where I was going, who I was going with, what we were doing, when I’d be home. I told him mostly the truth, but I doubted he’d know what to do with the data I gave him. It was like he was just doing drills, practicing being a father.

  Mostly I was with Jordan. Sometimes Jesse, when he gave me shit for being a pussy-whipped douche, but mostly Jordan. I went to her house after school; we ate lunch together; we hung out on weekends. For taking crazy pills and being in therapy, Jordan was fairly normal, though she didn’t play sports or do much beyond reading. For entertainment, she liked to go for long drives where she blasted music and drove really fast. After school, we’d get in her VW and drive out into the country. Past farm stands selling pumpkins and apples. It reminded me of hanging out with Tom—so wholesome. We’d sit under trees until the sun went down, doing homework or playing Frisbee—she was unnaturally good at Frisbee—and sometimes making out a little, though always at a PG-13, sea turtle pace.

  “We’re worse than senior citizens,” I told her one afternoon, when the weather turned and we ran to her car to get warm. “Too cold to be outside. We might as well sit in wheelchairs and bird-watch from the sunroom.”

  “Don’t criticize me; I flunked my French quiz today.” She started her car. “So, I’m practicing self-care,” she added, all sarcastic. Her shrink used the same kind of dorky phrases as Dr. Penny, and so it was a little joke between us.

  “Evan, please validate and affirm my feelings.” She peeled out of the gravel turnout and floored it. “Evan?”

  “Sorry, I’m just busy inhabiting the fear,” I said back.

  Fridays, Jordan’s mother would come home from the hospital and pour a glass of wine and make really complicated foods from scratch, like apple pies with lattice crusts or vegetable curry. She said cooking relaxed her. Jordan thought this was ridiculous, but I liked coming around on Fridays to see what Jordan’s mom would make. Sometimes I’d even help her out.

  One night, after Jordan’s mom made homemade pizza in the hearth on their deck, Jordan and I sat out there on a lounge chair under a big blanket. Stuffed full, I couldn’t stop blabbering about how good the pizza was. Finally, Jordan just put her hand over my mouth.

  “I get it, already, Evan!” she said. “You liked it.”

  “I know, but that cornmeal on the crust …”

  “My mother can’t hear you, you know, in case you’re trying to get in her pants with all your compliments.”

  I told her to shut up.

  “I mean, you probably could,” Jordan continued. “She loves you, Evan. She thinks you’re the best thing ever.”

  Compared to Jake, of course, was what went unsaid. Of course I was better than Jake, the Almost-Rapey Ex-Boyfriend. Who I didn’t enjoy discussing, though Jordan brought him up occasionally. Because she wasn’t supposed to stuff her feelings; she needed to let her trauma work its way out.

  “My luck with older women isn’t too bad, actually,” I said.

  Jordan sat up, her face bright and shocked. “Really?” she asked, as if I’d just confessed to a murder. “How old was she?”

  “I was fifteen; she was nineteen or twenty, maybe?”

  Jordan was like a little kid, all excited.

  “Oh my god! You’ve got to tell me everything!”

  I sighed. But if I felt so unsure, why did I fucking bring it up?

  “Wait, no. I’m sorry—you don’t have to tell,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’d appreciate it if you’d respect my boundaries, Jordan.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “Sexuality is a personal matter for every individual.”

  “Thanks for honoring my method of processing.”

  “It’s important to have a foundation of trust when sharing vulnerabilities.”

  For a while, we were like a machine that made psychological bullshit. Then the subject changed, and I forgot about the Cupcake Lady. Looked up at the stars and thought of how much brighter they were out on the lake. Concentrated on Jordan and her unidentifiable-but-good girl smell and how lazy and comfortable it was to sit under a blanket with a full stomach and nothing to do, nowhere to go.

  But I wanted to tell her. There was something nice about telling a girl shitty things about yourself and having her laugh and ask you little questions, instead of being quiet, like I usually was. It made me feel like things in my life weren’t just shitty. They were just stories, things that had happened. A woman in a cupcake shop. Mandy and the movie theater. Stacy and the rash cream. Collette during chapel. Lana and the Dumpster. Baker and the chicken stir-fry. Just stories.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I never really thought about holidays before. Thanksgiving was hit or miss. Christmas we had presents, of course. Both times, though, for food, my father would hit up an upscale grocery store and pay for turkey or spiral-cut ham and all the sides. Cub Foods even offered meals like this, and the people who ordered that shit were usually about ninety-nine years old and one minute from death. The whole concept depressed me so I decided to cook for Thanksgiving.

  Our kitchen was nowhere as nice as Jordan’s mom’s, but it was big enough. I thought I’d make turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and some pie. Fridays at Jordan’s had busted my conception of pie making as being difficult. I decided to do a pecan pie, since the gooshiness of fruit seemed too messy.

  Thanksgiving week, I was looking online through a million recipes and turkey-roasting methods when Tom messaged me.

  Kelly = my Everything Girl.

  I messaged him back:

  Nice.

  To which he replied:

  I know, it’s good. But she thinks she’s going to hell. And take my advice. Don’t go to the same college as your girlfriend. Baker had it right with the non-monogramy thing. There’s a million hot chicks here, and they all offer Everything right away. I’m dying here.

  On Thanksgiving, I made two boxes of instant mashed potatoes (give me a break; I made pie crust) and we didn’t have a serving bowl that fit all of it. I was considering other uses for mashed potatoes—could we spackle the walls? brick up a chimney?—when my dad came downstairs and told me that my Uncle Soren was on his way.

  “What? Now? How do you know?”

  “Because he just called me from the road,” he said, looking somewhat happy but also nervous. “He’s coming for Thanksgiving.”

  I nodded. My father nodded back. We were hell on the nonverbal communication, he and I.

  “Looks like you’ve made enough food,” he said, trying to sound jolly. “When’s the turkey going to be done?”

  “In a couple hours.”

  “I’m running to the liquor store for beer,” he said. “If I can find one that’s open. You need anything?”

  “No,” I said. He got his keys and left. I stood in the kitchen without moving for a minute. Soren? Here? Was this first Thanksgiving going to be a drunken throw-down, where my uncle would finally ream out my dad for being a wife-stealing bastard? Maybe I could convince everyone to get along, Pilgrims and Indians-style, just until we could choke down all this food I’d been freaking about making all day.

  The nice thing about cooking is that you’ve got to keep moving. Stuff’s heating up and other stuff needs to be started and you’ve got to set the table and make sure the pie won’t come out burnt—Jordan’s mom had coached me well on pie crust—and so I just kept working through my list of recipes like a robot. Hoping my uncle wouldn’t think I was a pantywaist for fussing over it all. Maybe he’d just ignore me while he and my dad would have their big brother-to-brother moment.

  I was half done with the stuffing when there was a knock on the door. I went to get it, flour all over my T-shirt, still in my bare feet—I’d been cooking since I’d woken up—and there was a man who looked just like me, s
o it had to be Soren. My uncle. Standing in the doorframe with a giant duffle on his shoulder, looking totally normal.

  Looking just like me. With shorter hair, though, like he buzzed it every morning. I was sort of surprised. I’d imagined him some wilderness guy, bearded and scraggly. But then he was a marine, so I supposed he’d been trained to be tidy. Soren was as tall as me, and I could see under his jacket that he wasn’t unsubstantial in the muscles department. Nothing like my dad, who was shorter than me and had a round little belly going.

  “Evan,” he said. “You’ve grown a bit.”

  “My dad’s at the liquor store,” I said. Like he was some door-to-door salesman, and I’d been given strict instructions not to let anyone in.

  “Good, I hope he finds one that’s open,” he said. “I could use a drink.”

  Soren kind of shoved his way in and set his duffle on the floor and I just stood there, until he said he needed to use the bathroom. I went back into the kitchen and privately freaked out. Wished I could call Jordan. I’d told her about my Uncle Soren, but she was at her grandmother’s.

  “Adrian said you’re quite the cook,” Soren said, startling me. He nodded toward the disaster of food.

  “You want a glass of water?”

  “I can get it,” he said.

  “You know, your grandma was a cook too,” he said, digging in the cupboard for a glass while I just kept standing there. He probably thought I’d been dropped on the head as a child.

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “Well, it smells great,” he said. “Been on the road for a while, and nothing but greasy gas station food. Awful stuff. It’s been a while since I had a real meal.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming to see us.”

  Soren shook his head and drank his water. It was the most manly method of drinking water I’d ever seen. I could even see the muscles in his neck working.

  “Typical Adrian,” he said. “Avoiding anything upsetting. I hope you’ve not inherited that from him.”

  My face felt hot, because, of course I had. I wondered now if my dad’s trip to the liquor store was like those stories of fathers going out for a loaf of bread and never coming back. And I would have to live with Soren, the Scary Former Marine.

  Soren sat at the counter across from the mess of food prep. Slowly, I went back to work, and he started talking. He’d been in Montana, with a buddy of his from the marines, helping build a house. Had meant to go back to California, where he lived, but thought some time at the lake was in order.

  My hands busy, I relaxed a little, and Soren asked me a bunch of questions. Did I like Pearl Lake? Did I fish? Did I like the little balcony on the second floor? He and my dad sneaked out of there sometimes, down the trellis. The trellis was gone now, he said, like he was sad about it.

  “No, but I found enough trouble without it,” I said. “It was kind of a crazy summer.”

  “Life on the lake is different, no doubt about it,” he said.

  My dad came back and he and Soren shook hands and I panicked, but then the worries of setting the table and getting all the food set out took over and there was no time for confrontation, for plates smashing or angry words. The three of us sat down and just shoveled it in. I realized I was starving. Hadn’t even had breakfast in my quest to get everything made. My dad talked about his work a little, kept shuffling beers from the fridge to all three of us. I tried not to guzzle mine, but when I saw how quick Soren and my dad knocked theirs back, I figured what the hell. Kept up with them, then. We ate almost every bit of the mashed potatoes and all of the stuffing. The turkey sat in the middle of the table, and we just picked off it like vultures. Soren belched. My dad stretched.

  “Good food, Evan,” Dad said. “I’m impressed.”

  I ducked my head. “Better than takeout, I guess.”

  “Much better,” Soren agreed.

  We slumped the dirty dishes in the sink. My dad made coffee and Soren asked him if he had any whiskey and they both kind of smiled at each other and I watched them dose their mugs with it. I hadn’t had whiskey in coffee since The Cupcake Lady of Tacoma, and the idea made my stomach turn.

  “I guess we’re on KP duty, A,” Soren said. He kept calling my dad that: “A”. I suppose that’s the best nickname one can get from a name like Adrian.

  “What’s KP duty?” I asked.

  “Kitchen patrol,” Soren said. “Military slang.”

  “Isn’t this the part when we fall asleep in front of the TV?” my dad asked. “And the women clean up?”

  I tensed at the word “women.” Had my mother been there, would she be pestering us to help her? Was I the woman in this whole holiday now?

  “I don’t see any women, so I say leave it,” Soren said. And so we did.

  Soren went to take a shower and was gone so long I wondered if there’d be any hot water left. My dad lay on the couch, and I turned on the TV. There was a choice of football and bad chick movies and more football. My father was fiddling with his phone, smiling at the screen, like he had gotten a good message. He seemed completely content, which was fucking weird. Maybe he was just drunk.

  “How come you didn’t tell me Soren was coming?” I asked.

  My dad looked up quick. “Well …”

  “Because you were avoiding him?”

  “I just … ” he stopped. “It took a while for him to convince me it was okay.”

  My dad went back to his phone, and I turned back to the TV, holding my bottle of beer tightly. At first I wanted to smash it on his head. But then I just looked at him, all bald and defenseless, his feet in socks in a curl beside me, and I felt like it was dumb for me to be mad.

  Later that afternoon, after more football and a round of pecan pie that we all forced in with ice cream and more beer, my dad got up and said he was taking a walk. With his phone.

  When the door closed, I looked at Soren and said, “He’s going out to meet whores. Or get his drugs.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just kidding,” I said. “He does that a lot. Disappears with his phone. He might be a government agent. Breaking codes with computers. Who the fuck knows.”

  “I bet it’s that woman. The professor.”

  “Brenda?”

  “Yeah. She’s been calling him.”

  “Really?”

  Soren laughed a little. “God, Adrian never changes! Secretive motherfucker. Yeah, that’s what he told me. We’ve been talking for the last few weeks. How else you think we’re able to be in the same room without the fur flying?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I hoped it was just friendship, he and Brenda. Because the idea of Baker becoming my sister after I’d felt her boobs was pretty gross.

  Soren clunked his beer on the coffee table, put his feet up. He was barefoot, too, like me.

  “You know the whole deal with your mother, then? Or not?”

  “No. Well, sort of. But not from him. From … well, you know that island? Story Island?”

  He looked a little alarmed. And a little impressed, as I told him how I went out there with a girl, exploring the Archardt House. How I found his name and my mother’s name on the tree. And his book. I ran upstairs and got it for him. I watched him look through the blue book, and it was the first time I thought his easy composure might crack. I stared at the muted football game on the television and wondered if the thunder and lightning had finally come.

  “Melina didn’t want to stay in Pearl Lake,” he said. “She hated it here. It didn’t quiet her mind like it did me. Just made her restless. She was a curious girl. Not weird-curious. But just always reading, always looking past me, like she wanted something else. Not that she didn’t love me. I knew she did. But I wasn’t enough. Somehow, Adrian was.”

  I laughed. Thought of my dad. His boring clothes, his belly paunch, his bald head. “I don’t get it.”

  “I never wanted college,” Soren said. “I wanted a simple life. I moved out to the cabin after high school and just ex
pected that Melina’d come with me. We’d been together since we met working at the Kiwanis Camp, when she was fifteen and I was seventeen. I just figured she’d go to college and then come back and play house with me. I’d catch our fish, and she’d cook them. That kind of bullshit. If you want any success with girls, Evan, don’t take that approach, is my advice.”

  “But what did she see in my dad?”

  Soren laughed. “Well, they were the same age, and they both went to school at the U in Minneapolis. And I suppose since it’s a big place and they didn’t know anyone else, that’s maybe how it worked. I mean, my brother isn’t an idiot. Just sort of slow when it comes to people. He doesn’t see what’s in front of him half the time. How things cycle back. Just like nature or the seasons. Doesn’t think he should be stuck in a box like that. I mean, that lady he’s talking to? That gay sheep farmer dumped her last month, and I’d bet money she’s talking to Adrian wanting more than just a shoulder to cry on. But my brother’s still acting like Melina’d be mad at him about it.”

  “Keir’s really gay?”

  Soren looked confused. “Who’s Keir?”

  “The gay guy.”

  Soren blinked, like it was a given.

  “But Brenda wants to be with my dad?”

  “That or she’s just into phone sex,” he said. I made a face, and he laughed.

  “Anyway, he’ll never admit it to you. He’s ashamed of the whole thing with Melina. Thinks it’s his fault she died. Like he deserved it, because he stole her. But she wasn’t something to steal. She wasn’t an object. She was a woman with her own mind. I didn’t get that for a while. Took me a war to figure that out. Figure out I wasn’t god’s gift to womankind.”

  “You were in a war?”

  “First Gulf War,” he said. “Which lasted like two minutes, so don’t get excited. That war wasn’t shit compared to the next one. But one day, I was sitting in my rack, waiting for orders to move out and thinking about it. Melina was pregnant with you, and she’d written me a letter—she always kept in touch, even though I refused to attend their wedding—and I realized I was being an idiot. I was as bad as a girl. Romantic, thinking she’d come back to me. Stewing on Story Island the year she went to college and started being with your dad. Acting like Peter Pan out there in that crumbling old mansion. Like she’d see me fixing it up, and that would change her mind. And here, though I didn’t like war and it was hotter than hell and we had a job to do, I knew it was no life to just sit around on the porch and watch the seasons change. There had to be more than one beautiful place on Earth, and I currently wasn’t seeing it in Iraq. I had to quit wasting all this time.”