Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  But Flannery hardly wanted to abandon the table, so she cleared her throat and said: “Actually, we’re getting ready to order some more things.” She nodded, assuring herself. “Some different things.” As the man ambled off, Flannery listened to his strained asthmatic breathing, to the ceramic kisses of dishes jostling in the tub. Life. Was. Awesome.

  Flannery avoided the eyes of the table-seekers by rummaging through her backpack as if looking for some crucial missing item. She found her tube of raspberry lip stain, squeezed a dab on her index finger, and took a cautious look toward the men’s room as she dotted in on her lips: Who wanted to be caught in a moment of vanity? She stuck her hand in her backpack and covertly unsnapped her compact and angled it toward her face. Nothing in her teeth, and her skin looked pretty clear, but oh, God, her eyebrows were catastrophic. There was nothing she could do about that now, so she snapped her compact shut, took a long, shuddering breath, and pulled out Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights.

  Because this was something people did, a normal societal-sanctioned activity to fill a moment of leisure: They read while they waited for the next thing to happen. They held a book—thoughts and dreams and wood pulp—the Tree of Life slaughtered so that people could enter into a new world. Unless you had an e-reader.

  But she did not have that cozy feeling of holding a beloved book in her hands, and anyone looking at Flannery hogging a table at Nussbaum & Wu might wonder why she pressed the book to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut as if in desperate prayer before opening Wuthering Heights again and gasping, “Oh, Jesus.” They might wonder why a frown gripped the smooth, seventeen-year-old skin between her astounding eyebrows, why her mouth formed a drooping oval of surprise as she alternated between reading and flipping back to stare at the cover image of Cathy locked in Heathcliff’s rough embrace. The old cliché had morphed into a truism: You really couldn’t judge a book by its cover. Because the narrative Flannery had read in the bathroom at Sacred Heart remained. The moors were still vanished. It was still Miss Sweeney’s story.

  How odd it was to travel to Manhattan on a Wednesday morning with no possessions, with no need to worry about losing my phone or purse. The great, unsung freedom of empty hands! The back of the cab was gorgeously empty too, and I didn’t use the computer touchscreen to check the weather or traffic patterns, and I averted my eyes from the celebrity news that bannered across the bottom of the screen. I tried not to look at the time, I tried to blur my vision, but there it was: 10:37. I tried not to think about the parking lot of Saint Thomas More filling up.

  At 116th and Broadway, I stepped out of the cab: Columbia! World of joy! World of minor and major torments! World of knowledge, of bright, terrible mistakes! I walked through the entrance flanked by the granite statues representing Science and Letters, and right away wished I were still a student. Embarrassingly enough, I was the sudden poster girl for Those Who Will Not Grow Up; if only I were still living in the Berber-carpeted basement of my parents’ house in suburban Kansas City, the Portrait of the Malingering Millennial as a Young Professional would have been complete. I thought to go to Carman Hall, to wander inside like the Ghost of Duplicities Past. But one glance at the dorm and I envisioned Brandon—or was it a memory?—stretched out on our freshman twin bed, shirtless, his hands behind his head, his arms V-ed out, and his smile harsh and sarcastic: Hey, Cait. Where have you been? My cut-rate Dickensian impulses vanished; instead, a smothering grief started in my chest like asthma. So I decided to cut across campus and fortify myself by visiting Jayne Means. Jayne had been my advisor at Columbia, and her kindness and wisdom had guided me through freshmen year drama and beyond. Sure, you could argue that spending Ivy League money to teach high school—the yearly tuition more than your first-year teacher’s salary—is not an ingenious fiscal decision. But there’s only one place in the world where I would have met Jayne Means.

  Before I knocked on her open office door, I paused and watched her at her desk. She was squinting owlishly at her computer screen. In fact, with her soft, modulated voice, her ruffled blonde-gray hair, her solemn mouth and soft brown eyes, Jayne Means had always reminded me of a barn owl.

  Jayne Means looked up and hooted: “Caitlin!”

  She came to me; we hugged in the doorway. Jayne smelled aggressively of dark coffee beans and aloe hand sanitizer, and I closed my eyes and allowed myself the comfort of her—O, Ms. Clean Beans, Ms. Jayne Means—and the comfort of her office. There was the same Flannery O’Connor painting of a chicken hanging above her desk, the window that looked out onto the Harlem skyscrapers, and the dank, basemented smell of old books. But the coffee smell trumped the book smell. Along with her computer, she also had an espresso maker on her desk and a dorm refrigerator next to her filing cabinet.

  “Come in, Cait! I’m so happy to see you!”

  “I had the day off—Saint Somebody’s day!—so I came to the city.” My first lie of the day.

  “Here!” Jayne Means moved a stack of books off her extra office chair. “Sit!” She pointed at me. “Love the coat, but take it off and stay a while!”

  “Thanks. I got it on clearance at Boden, but it didn’t look quite so army green and full and multi-zippered in the catalog. If I wear it with a pith helmet I’ll resemble a dumpy Ernest Hemingway.” She laughed so kindly that I laughed along with her, but I didn’t take off my coat.

  “What do you want to drink? Latte? Espresso? Cappuccino? My brother got me this sleek machine for Christmas.” She patted the knobbed stainless-steel machine like a little puppy. “And now I’m my own barista. Yours, too. What’ll it be?”

  I hadn’t remembered her as being so swirlingly energetic; she was clearly making good use of her gift.

  “Espresso?”

  “Espresso it is, Caitlin.” She used a bean grinder, and it made that splitting-screeching sound.

  Flannery’s own trembling hands made Miss Sweeney’s words quiver as she read. She thought of her grandmother, who had Parkinson’s and complained that the hand tremors turned the joy of reading into an embarrassing chore: “Holding the damn newspaper is like shaking maracas,” she’d said to Flannery over pastries in the sunny breakfast nook of her condo. Flannery guffawed as if a progressive, debilitating disease were the very pinnacle of humor. She picked at her cherry popover as she listened to the soft tra tra tra-tra tra tra of the Saint Augustine Record in her grandmother’s hands.

  Because that was how it went. Life could yank the rug from beneath your feet at any time, and so, Flannery thought, whatever was happening with Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights, whatever magic carpet ride she was on, she would go with it; she would embrace the day.

  Flannery? Are you having some PDA with the day in general—there it was in her head again, unbidden, the voice of Miss Sweeney—or will you embrace Aladdin himself while you fly over the city on your aforementioned magic carpet ride? As in the old song: “Why don’t you tell your dreams to me? Fantasy will set you free.”

  Flannery looked out the window toward the Columbia campus up the block, where Miss Sweeney was right now, apparently, and thought how she should race back to campus to find her, and then she looked around Nussbaum & Wu for Heath, but Heath was not perusing the moving van and poetry-reading flyers on the community board, nor was he ogling the dessert case. I’ll just read a bit more until Heath gets back from the bathroom, she promised herself, and vowed to read fast:

  While I waited for my espresso I sat with my hands folded loosely in my lap, as if casually praying for the perfect cup. I looked up at the clock. It was almost eleven, which meant it was almost ten o’clock in Kansas: Brandon’s funeral was just about to begin. I tried not to think about it, but Dear Reader, my brain had a mind of its own and offered up cinematic visions of the priest walking into the church—all professionally sad eyes and dramatically folded hands and white vestments—flanked by altar boys. The pallbearers came next, but I didn’t know who Brandon’s friends were now, so I imagined them as generically ha
ndsome JCPenney models wearing dress blues, hoisting the casket. Jayne Means’s office filled with the smell of warm candle wax and the polished cherrywood of pews, but I didn’t hear the sudden majesty of the pipe organ’s first notes, and nobody was being raised up on eagle’s wings. Instead, I was possessed by an impromptu earworm from Hell, a bouffant-ed girl group singing: A tisket! A tasket! It’s Brandon in that cas-ket! I imagined Brandon’s dad arriving late, surprisingly handsome in a borrowed dark suit and tie, and looking like any other proud, devastated father, except for the telltale baby steps of a man in ankle chains and the uniformed sheriff’s deputy walking behind him.

  Jayne Means handed me a small, warm, porcelain cup. I was so grateful to hold something warm, to be distracted from funereal visions, that I thought I might cry.

  “Espresso, Caitlin! Espresso without the x! We are beyond expresso, beyond x! Caitlin, we are so cosmopolitan that we are sans x!”

  Jayne Means, my fellow native Midwesterner! We had always laughed about how people from Kansas and Ohio dream up an imaginary x in the word espresso. Jayne Means thought I would enjoy teaching high school and encouraged me to get my teaching certificate and take a couple years off before I went to graduate school. I didn’t hold a grudge about the crappy advice, and as I drank my joltingly delicious espresso, my Sans X, and as Jayne Means talked, I realized what I had missed that year at Sacred Heart High: smart adults.

  But now it appeared that she was staring at me expectantly, and so I started to talk nonstop.

  “Oh my God, this is wonderful! Yu-um! It’s the best. I’ve never had one so good. Ever.” And so forth. I tried to make my voice über-joyful, but anxiety arrived, unbidden, a fuzzy caterpillar inching around my brain, flipping switches with its deft antennae and pleading: “Caitlin, please clear your throat excessively! It’s not a weird thing to do at all! Do it! Do it now! And, hey, you’re welcome for the sudden sweat soaking your palms, making your cup feel awfully slippery, for the general feeling that you need to leave the room before you blurt out every bizarre thought you’ve ever had! You’re mighty welcome!”

  I had stopped taking my Nardil Monday night, the night before last, when I’d received an e-mail from Brandon’s mom. I hadn’t seen her in seven years but she obviously held a grudge. The subject line simply said: Bad news.

  My own mother had left a cryptic phone message late Sunday night: “Caitlin, can you call me? I need to let you know that, well … Life doesn’t always turn out the way we want it to, or hope it will. Sometimes we are unprepared for our … journey.” I had attributed her trembling voice to menopausal looniness and chardonnay, and had not remotely considered returning her call.

  Brandon’s mom’s e-mail didn’t include a personal note; there was just a link to the Kansas City Star.

  I clicked.

  Dear Reader, my vision is perfect, but what I saw—Brandon’s obituary—made me press my face so close to the screen that I could barely read at all, the letters jumbling into Zapf Dingbats as my mouth opened and closed in fish-like palpitations. Still, the words reached me and filled me all night long, and so of course I didn’t take my medicine—I was disgusted by the very thought of being babied by pharmaceuticals. I was going to have my brain cosseted and comforted while Brandon rocketed into the unknowable? Who was I to live in a tolerable, pillowed bubble of amped-up serotonin, to live in a world that no longer contained Brandon? Who was I to seek relief? But I’d tucked the almost-full bottle into my pocket before I left for school that morning; I hadn’t shed it with most of my other earthly possessions and wondered if I could survive the side effects of withdrawal I’d been enduring: the bundle of barbed wire unspooling in my stomach, the chills despite streams of sweat bucketing down my back …

  As Jayne Means’s office shrank into a miniature steam room, I rambled on and on about how I missed the city, how living in Connecticut was not that different from living in Kansas, and how I wanted to move back to the city like, yesterday, but the rent, the rent! I currently lived in a charming—white pine floors and bay window—studio apartment in a 1930s building, which of course would have been cost-prohibitive in Manhattan. But the coziness only made me lonelier: I should have rented a sterile one-bedroom in a stark new complex, a home that, in the parlance of real estate advertising from Sunday circulars, would “reflect the person I was, and the carefree lifestyle I enjoyed.” I told Jayne Means that I hadn’t sent off any applications to graduate school because I had been super-busy, but that I didn’t think I would return to teach at Sacred Heart again. I finished my Sans X. I was trying to dominate the conversation so Jayne Means couldn’t segue into the territory of Hey, do you ever hear from … She had been not just my freshman year advisor, but my confidante, too, when my mind had been a swirling mess. (Compared to the crystal clear discernment I enjoyed now, am I right?) I was grateful for her help and kindness, and we had kept up a friendship throughout my time at Columbia and after, too; we exchanged ironic holiday cards and the occasional e-mail.

  “Cait?” Her voice sounded fiercely casual. “You doing okay?”

  Now I raised my eyebrows and leaned toward her, as if about to reveal a personal horror, the big surprise. But no. I called upon my Midwestern gift of small talk: “I’m so glad to have the day off! God, I’m so not into Sacred Heart! But probably the main thing I don’t like about teaching is the other teachers!”

  Jayne Means nodded, empathetic.

  “Most of them seem vaguely mean and sluggish, too; they just don’t seem to be working very hard. But then again, a few of the teachers are ambitiously pretentious and entirely stupid—a charming combo—and bringing their A game each and every day.”

  She rewarded me with a bright, caffeinated giggle.

  “The math teacher is actually smart, and also a really good teacher, but she can’t be just a good teacher, she has to put some pseudo-feminist sheen on it: On the back of her van there’s a pink bumper sticker that says: I’M A WOMAN AND I USE MATH EVERY DAY! I can’t tell you how much I want to change that innocuous a in math to a jaunty e.”

  Jayne Means leaned in collegially. “The other teachers can be a problem here, too. The new hire? The Swiss poet? Beautiful, even with this sort of … statement hair.” She moved one hand to her earlobe, the other to her shoulder, frowning. “A retro bi-level bob with a Susan Sontag stripe of silver bolting down the side—she dyes it like that—and she’s a strident vegan. It’s not like I’m eating veal parmesan for breakfast. And being a vegan is good for the planet, being a vegan is more than okay. However…”

  Here she paused, a good person weighing the bitchy impulse to gossip against the high road of silent observation. Jayne Means! Her last name should have been Kinds. I thought to tell her how much she had meant to me, what an inspiring and brilliant teacher she was.

  She wasn’t a saint, though: “Something less than okay? Her stance on nonrecyclable feminine protection. At the last faculty party she got drunk and went through all the purses—I know!—and then proceeded to give an extemporaneous lecture about not using feminine protection manufactured by evil corporations.”

  I laughed for a long time! For too long, as I contemplated how laughter would not be possible without vowel sounds, and I was about to share this breakthrough theory with her, when Jayne Means said: “Where’s your purse, by the way?” Her voice was an accusatory shotgun staccato.

  I shocked myself with the next thing I said, familiar as I am with my own lying ways. It was the ease with which I called upon an actual blush, how I willed a physiological response as I coyly remarked: “I left it with a friend at the coffee shop.” When I said the word friend, I hooked quick hand quotes around the word and offered up an ironical smile, so that even I imagined I had some dreamy special someone waiting for me at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, but it also made me feel awful. I was disrespecting Brandon again.

  “Oh, Caitlin,” she said. “Good for you!” Her voice was packed with relief, with tenderness. Flannery O’Connor’s painted
chicken seemed to look at me askance.

  “Confession time: I’m doing Match.com myself. Do. Not. Ask. It’s completely humiliating. Seriously, don’t ask!”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, swelling my voice to an enthusiastic trill: “That’s great!” I felt the blood rushing to my face, but this time it was real. I was blushing on behalf of Jayne Means. When she’d been my advisor, and I’d been in the thick of my romantic drama, I’d thought of her as a role model, a paradigm shifter, just Jayne Means and her ironic tabby cats, Single and Lady, and how she’d laughed at all the get-married-or-you-will-die-lonely books, at the awful “authors” on the covers flashing their bleached teeth and emerald-cut solitaires. And now: Match.com?

  I couldn’t bear to think of Jayne being on the typically delightful Match.com date, the guy giving himself an after-lunch root canal with the frilled toothpick from his BLT while boasting about his twin passions: couponing and water-skiing. I understood the awful impulse of adult dating: the desire to put a sticky note on your forehead that said I AM LONELY. I recognized the accompanying desire to have the sticky note ripped off by another person: Touch me. See me. It was why I’d come to see Jayne Means. But Jayne was above Internet dating. I’m sorry; she just was.

  And I believed I was above it too. Not just because I’d been on a Match.com date with a guy who walked so haltingly that I suspected he had a prosthetic leg and felt a corresponding tenderness for him, for his tenacity in the face of trauma and grueling physical therapy—only to discover he had walked into the movie theater and sat down without once bending his left leg because he didn’t want to disturb Captain Ahab, the ferret napping in the roomy calf pocket of his maroon cargo pants. Mostly though, every Match man had been merely pretentious or boring, or a stupefying combination of the two, and so, Dear Reader, I had empirical evidence that proved the white-hot alchemy of true love only happened once. The clichéd lightning zigzagging across the night sky would never again form the same dazzling pattern. The world would never offer up another Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran. Or perhaps I had simply been poisoned by Emily Brontë, by the idea of everlasting soul mates? Because when I read in his obituary that Brandon had a fiancée—Megan Reynolds, a name so banal it sounded like an accessory shop at a low-rent strip mall—I felt no jolt of romantic grief or even girly jealousy, because I knew he still loved me.