by Julia Kent
“I don’t know what I am.”
“But you’re clearly upset.”
She shrugged.
“Confused?”
“Gettin’ warmer.”
“This isn’t a game of Hot and Cold, Darla. We’re not kids. We’re adults who need to communicate like adults.”
“Okay, Susan.” That’s my mom.
“If you think I’m insulted by being compared to my mother on this, you’re wrong. Now, you can either talk to me like normal people, or I’m going back to the studio to practice and let everyone know about the date change.”
She just sat there, shoulders low, brow furrowed.
Fine.
I started to leave.
“You were right.” The repeated words had an introspective quality to them, her voice a little keening. I stopped.
“Why is that so important?”
“Because so much of my life is built on accepting the inevitable. That I can’t get what I want, so I need to work with what life offers me.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re upset.”
“Don’t you see? It turns out my entire way of operating in the world is fundamentally, at its core, wrong. I don’t feel like it’s okay to ask people for help, or to ask to change dates like this, or to ask if what I want can be fulfilled. It’s like I have to have someone else validate all the reasons for making a change. Trevor, what I want isn’t okay if all I want is to want it.”
“Say that last sentence again.”
“What I want isn’t okay if all I want is to want it.”
“What else is it supposed to have to be okay, Darla? Just wanting something doesn’t mean you get what you want, but it’s always enough to ask for what you want. You matter, too.”
And with that, she let out a strange little sound of defeat, of despair, and some part of my heart broke.
JOE
Just my luck.
I walked into the apartment to find Darla crying, Trevor fuming like he swallowed fire, and when she glanced up and caught my eye, she looked at me like I ate her kitten on Facebook Live as a promotional stunt.
“What did you say to her?” I asked him, hackles up because even though we’re all friends – more than friends – when Darla cries I always assume it’s Trev’s fault.
When it isn’t mine.
“I told her she matters!”
Not what I expected to hear. Anger swirled inside me, searching for a safe haven. This couldn’t be my fault, so I scrambled inside, emotions in a blender, trying to figure out how to navigate this land mine and emerge unscathed.
Darla sniffed.
Too late.
“What’s wrong with... that?” My voice went lower as I scanned Darla and realized I had no internal category for this emotion. She was sad, but it was more than that. Melancholy came close, but wasn’t right, either. My vocabulary for emotions has expanded since we’ve been together, but it was directly related to Darla.
I didn’t have new words for Trevor’s feelings.
That was because Trevor is a man and what you see is what you get. It’s like penises and vaginas. Our internal states match our genitals.
Vaginas are wet. Women cry a lot.
Penises just hang out there and aren’t really useful except for peeing and sex.
The inner emotional life comparison to that externality is really obvious.
There isn’t one.
Guys really are that simple. Pee when the bladder is full. Look for wet things to put our penises in.
That is our inner emotional life.
There is no difference.
This is why women are so confusing.
“I know I matter to you two.” Sniff. “But it’s so hard to fight with years of conditioning from living a life where I thought I was gonna have to carve out tiny little oases of happiness and suck it all up like a camel. I thought I’d need those little blips of happiness to be hoarded, to get me through the long slog of the rest of my life. So I learned to just not even bother, you know?”
Trev finally met my eye.
We both gave each other looks and shrugs.
No. We didn’t know. But now was not the time to say that.
“Darla.” I knelt down and touched her knee, looking up under the curtain of loose blonde ringlets framing her face. A teardrop hung off the end of her nose, poised perfectly at the center of the tip, mesmerizing.
“Hey.” Her body moved slightly as Trevor stood behind her and rested his hands gently on her shoulders, right by her neck, which was tight. She was holding so much tension, but there was also a vibration in her body, a ripple in her muscles that wasn’t her typical fidget. It was as if emotion were playing an instrument inside her – a tuning fork, a triangle, a gong – and I was feeling the long, sonorous tone at the end of a song.
Or, maybe, the beginning.
“And with you two, I know I can ask for what I want in bed!” Exasperation filled her voice, red-rimmed eyes rolling up. “That part’s easy. And I can steamroll over you when it’s all because of common sense and you’re being snobby and condescending. It’s real life that’s hard. I can stand up for myself and what I want when someone’s made it so I have no choice.” Her voice dropped. “It’s different when I don’t have to fight someone for it.”
“Fight someone?” Trevor asked, taking the words out of my mouth.
A few short sobs came out of her, like cleansing breaths. I had the clear sense that she was the center of a storm, and we were bystanders watching it roll in.
“The purple shack,” I whispered before she spoke, remembering the little garden shack at the trailer park where Darla grew up. The first time I met her, I went to her little town of Peters, Ohio, to rescue Trevor. He’d eaten a bunch of my peyote and ‘shrooms (which, I admit, I had stolen from the drug evidence room of a Boston police station – but that’s not significant) and somehow hitchhiked six hundred miles, where Darla found him on the highway, naked and wearing a dog collar, carrying a guitar.
I came to rescue him, but it turned out Darla rescued me.
“What about it?” she asked, giving me a guarded look.
“It symbolizes what you’re talking about. You took what most people use as a storage place for dirty but functional equipment used to make everything look nice on the outside and turned it into your own private refuge. You made that whole little ramshackle space yours with castoffs and secondhand stuff. Other people’s seconds became your firsts... and you made them... ”
My breath turned to pain in my throat as I said that, a singular despair filling me with more emotion than I thought I should have right now.
And yet, I couldn’t help it.
“I made do,” Darla finished for me, although that’s not what I was going to say.
But she was right.
“I remember how weirded out and impressed I was,” Trevor said, reminiscing. “I was still half high, but it felt like a little world of its own. Outside there was a three-legged kitten and all these tarp-covered, broken down cars, trailers falling apart. It was like something out of a movie set, or a bad cable TV movie.”
I glared at him, hard. Where the fuck was he going with this? Was he trying to make her feel worse?
“But then you took me into your little space. Made me your version of an omelette. Brewed coffee. You took me into your little haven house and gave me everything you had, just so I’d feel safe, too. Taken care of.”
Loved, I thought, wondering where that word came from.
Darla’s lips began to tremble and tighten in an erratic pattern, her neck curling in, then out, as if her heart were trying to climb up and out of her body but got caught.
Trevor slid his arms down her front, wrapping her in an embrace from behind. “You didn’t just do the best you could with what life gave you back then, Darla. You did better. You went above and beyond, because you have a heart that is so big, it can’t be held back by anyone.”
I was starting to malfunctio
n.
Turns out I have a vagina.
Because my eyes were getting wet.
“That don’t mean this shit ain’t hard, Trevor,” she said through hitches and sobs, sniffles and hesitations. “I spent most of my life hoping and hoping that if I just hung onto that piece of myself that could make good out of any bad thrown my way, I’d be okay.”
“And you were right,” I said, my voice fiercer than I expected.
She gripped my hand, hard, fingers pressing into the tendons on the back of my hand like she was playing a chord. “I know that now. I didn’t know that then. And there’s a whole lot more of me on the inside from then than from now.” Her eyes closed and she took a deep breath in. “I got all these years of struggling and suffering and scrabbling inside me and they were good years. Some of them. Well, okay – if I piece together enough of the good parts, I can make a patchwork of a few good years.”
Trevor’s eyes widened and he looked at me, helpless.
I just squeezed Darla’s hand harder.
“And I’m fine,” she added, wiping her eyes with her free hand. “I really am. I don’t want you two to think I’m weak or crazy or –”
“Stop,” I declared, reaching up to cup her jaw, my fingers resting right under her ear. “Don’t you dare try to explain away how you feel. We think you are amazing the way you are. Exactly the way you are, confusion and struggle and all of it.”
“Every drop,” Trevor echoed.
I felt it – the release of a layer of some burden she’d been carrying, like a weighted blanket on top of others. Darla’s entire body just dropped a few millimeters, lower to earth, closer to us.
“You can ask for what you want. You don’t have to settle for what life hands you.”
“I know that here.” She pointed to her head.
“We want you to learn that here,” Trevor said, pressing one index finger over her heart.
“That takes longer,” she replied, sniffing hard, breathing more evenly.
“I know,” I whispered.
“You guys are nice for saying that.”
“It’s not the same,” Trevor murmured in her ear, quietly. I could hear every word, our bodies were so close. “But Joe and I have our own version of it.”
“Of what?” she asked.
“Of knowing you can’t ask for something just because you want it. That the wanting isn’t enough to even ask the question.”
“Huh? You guys do it all the time. I see you do it.”
“No, you don’t. Because we’ve had it beaten out of us to even try. Or, at least, we did.”
I interrupted him, the impulse flying out of me like a demon. An angel.
Or something in between.
“Until you came along, Darla.”
“Me?” she peeped. “What?”
“I would never in a million years have imagined my life would be like this at twenty-five. My path was set out by Mom and Dad so clearly. Law school was it. Then a junior associate job at a BigLaw firm. Hundred-and-twenty-hour weeks. Partner. The rest – I was supposed to find the right woman. Get married. Have a modern marriage. Spit out two kids.”
Trevor nodded. “Same here.”
“And look at us now,” I said kindly to Darla, wondering where all of this emotion inside me was coming from. The words were all mine. I felt them in my bones, coming out of me as if these truths were waiting in the wings all my life, just biding their time until I was ready to say them.
“It’s not that our parents’ vision for us was bad. It wasn’t. But it was theirs. Not ours. And we couldn’t say, ‘I don’t want this.’ We couldn’t do the opposite of what you couldn’t do.”
“Huh?” She shook her head like a wet dog. “You’re confusing me.”
“You couldn’t ask for what you wanted. We couldn’t deny what we didn’t want.”
Her eyes slowly drifted to the left, intense and deep in concentration. With each breath her long tendrils pushed forward, as if seeking us slowly, pendulum swing by pendulum swing, always coming back to her cheekbone after each puff of air. Her face was flushed, eyes the color of green hills in the rain, lashes wet and gathered in small clusters, freckles standing out like a welcome mat at the curve of bone under her eye.
She was so beautiful, some part of me ached, as if all the muscles and blood inside me yearned to touch her simultaneously, to crawl into her and become part of her so she’d never feel alone.
So I would never feel alone.
Trevor cleared his throat and held my eyes, the skin around his eyes triangling until all that was left was pure color. “We met you, Darla. You showed us another way. How to say no to our parents. How to reject what they wanted and fumble our way into what we do want.”
“And now you need to find your way. Find your path, honey,” I said, my mouth feeling numb. I frowned. “Wait a minute. What triggered all of this? I walked into the room and you were crying, but why? Not just because Trevor said you mattered.”
“It’s because I asked her to change the dates for Vegas,” Trevor explained. “So I can watch Rick while my parents go away.”
“That’s it? I don’t get it.”
Trevor sliced his hand across his neck.
Oops.
“I know you don’t get it. Both of you,” Darla replied. “But I called and they said yes. Even upped the pay rate by ten percent and offered all travel expenses.”
“You negotiated that?” My eyebrows hit my hairline. “That’s impressive.”
Her eyes went shifty. “You know me. I drive a hard bargain.”
“Great job,” I said, still trying to understand.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said, with the kind of smile that isn’t about being amused. “You two talk about your parents. Plural. How they were a united front and always pushing you. Maybe they aren’t perfect people, but you had both. I only had Mama, at least, after I was four. My memories of my daddy are light. I have some, but…”
“Is this about your dad somehow?” Trevor asked. “Like, you accept what life gives you because it can be taken away at random? So you don’t ask for more because why bother?”
She tensed up, making me worry Trevor had gone too far. His words were cogent. I didn’t have any emotions attached them, but it was clear Darla did.
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked slightly, and then she sniffed. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know. What would not having a daddy have to do with the band getting what it wants in Vegas?”
“Then why the tears?” I asked, even more confused.
“Because I asked for something on my own, for something based on our wants, and the guy said yes.”
“And...”
“And it made me realize I’m my own biggest damn obstacle.”
Ah.
Trevor and I simultaneously embraced her, coming in without planning, without choreography, and without guile.
“Aren’t we all?” I whispered into the soft curve of her neck, inhaling a mix of her scent blended with Trevor’s aftershave. “Aren’t we all.”
CHAPTER THREE
DARLA
C alling Mama was an art form. If I called too early in the day, she’d shoo me off the phone so she could watch her ‘shows,’ and let me tell you, being booted for The Price is Right carries a certain sting to it. I’m no Drew Carey, but I’m her only daughter, so you’d think I’d be more important than someone winning at Plinko, but whatever.
The phone rang and rang until I knew I’d get her voicemail box, which she’d never really set up. Nothing personal ever greeted me, plus I knew she never, ever checked it. Might as well holler into the westward wind and have my voice carry forth.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t text, see above. Mama checked her texts, like, twice a month. I’d get random replies to texts I’d sent two weeks before.
Mama’s a snail when it comes to communicating.
Just as I was about to give up, the phone crackled.
“Yes?”
Hold up. That ain’t how Mama answers the phone.
“Mama? It’s Darla.” I was in our bedroom, chilling. Trevor was in the shower, and Joe was out buying groceries, and by “groceries,” I mean beer and chips.
“Darla! About time. You fall down a toilet or something? I tried to call you nine times last week and you never answered.”
“You did?”
“Damn right. I resorted to calling Josie and she told me I had your number wrong in my contacts. Looked it up and she was right. I was calling one of Calvin’s suppliers, a guy named Dunlap, the whole time. Bet he loved messages about my diabetes and how Marlene’s finally in rehab for her opiate problem.”
“You called the wrong person the whole time? How was I supposed to answer those messages?” Even though you know, and I know, that I wasn’t responsible for not replying to her, I felt guilty.
Guilt can be irrational as fuck. It’s like the toddler of emotions, tantruming when it doesn’t get the purple cup for its apple juice, or when someone else’s mistake is suddenly on you.
“I know you didn’t get my messages,” she said gruffly. I heard a long drag on the other end. Shit. She was back to smoking. “But I still can’t shake being angry at you for not answering.”
“That don’t make sense, Mama.”
“Feelings don’t make sense, Darla, but we’re stuck with them. Now talk to me about good stuff so I can let this all go and be back to normal again.”
Normal.
I snorted. Couldn’t help myself.
“Tell me you got some good news, baby girl. I got some, too, but it’s mostly mixed in with the bad.”
“At least you got some good news!” I said, all brightness.
“What in the hell is that supposed to mean? I got plenty of good news.”
“But you just said –”
“Darla, just tell me what’s goin’ on.”
“I will. But first I wanna hear about Aunt Marlene. What do you mean, opiates?”
“Please. She’s been addicted for a long time. And she finally got stupid enough for someone to force her into rehab.”
“Like, how stupid?”
“Criminally stupid.”
