Mostly I wondered about the Marines, the specifics of his day-to-day life. Did Brandon have friends? Were they close? Was he constantly terrified? Did he feel lonely and disconnected around civilians, as Marines so often did in books and documentaries? But that world was locked away, left off the bar napkins.
Dear Reader, he didn’t write back with any further instructions about meeting in NYC. But that was okay. To know that he drunkenly dreamed of being in Manhattan with me would suffice until further notice. He was back in Afghanistan, and I would hear from him again soon, I knew, my confidence born of that magic phrase: You have always been in my thoughts. I knew in my heart Brandon would never marry this “beautiful and intelligent” Megan person if she even existed. (I wondered why he had omitted “kindhearted” from the trifecta of desirable womanly traits: Why couldn’t angelic Megan be an NFL cheerleader, a Fulbright Scholar, and a kidney donor?)
I knew that Brandon and I were soul mates, and that we would find our way back to each other.
Nine days later I received the e-mail from his mother.
But the days in between receiving Brandon’s bar napkins and that e-mail?
My body enshrined in a plank of gold light cutting through the blinds of my classroom windows. My weird neighbor walking her manic, slobbering Irish setter and calling out to me: “I am bananas about your darling coat!” A blizzarding, bright snow day of morning storms and afternoon sunshine. Buying groceries with my face tucked down and turned to hide my huge smile, and me not caring if it looked like I was flirting with my shoulder, such was the depth of my private joy.
All the unheralded minutia of my daily life was rendered dear as I imagined it from afar, from my new life with Brandon: Oh, you mean back then? Back when I had to figure out what that bomb-ticking sound in my car meant, back when I snuck glances at the clock during curriculum meetings and wished I had brought a bottle of water, back when I was lonely as an eighteenth-century poet, back when I waited in the drive-through lane for my cheeseburger and fries and laughed out loud, Dear Reader, because there was someone across the world who held me in their thoughts, someone who had loved me once, someone who loved me still.
Flannery ran her hand along the vinyl-topped banquette where they sat, where Miss Sweeney had laid out Brandon’s napkins. Oh God, how weird and depressing to think of Miss Sweeney toting around a Ziploc bag full of napkins, how awful that she knew the brutal loneliness of post-Cathy Heathcliff: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”
Dear Reader, now it was up to me to find him, and I would! Invigorated by Brandon’s words, I carefully put the bar napkins back into the Ziploc, zipped my coat, and headed out of the Broadway Hotel and Hostel. I tried to keep my thoughts from what had happened in Kansas City that morning, the rituals that belonged to the old, known world: the priest in his white vestments, the uniformed Marines, the grim drive to the cemetery after the funeral, and then the sad-sack buffet in the church basement at Saint Thomas More. The urn of coffee and the packets of powdered creamer and sugar, the little towers of Styrofoam cups, the stacked Chinet plates and the Costco bottled water, and the grieving, who, in their goodness would stand in sad semicircles quietly admiring the cold cuts and sweets the Altar Society had laid out:
I’ve always liked those honey-baked hams.
Somebody did a nice job on those pecan brownies.
Brandon’s mom was a vegan and she also didn’t eat sugar. But of course it didn’t matter if she ate a Dijon mustard sandwich or a few Wheat Thins because for the rest of her life, anything she put in her stomach would sit like scrap iron.
My cheer vaporized pretty quickly.
I headed back down Broadway, trudging along as my wily brain chemistry cooked up a new scenario to find Brandon. I would not remain enslaved to my previous peripheral vision theories; I was going to make brief, meaningful eye contact with every person I saw on the street. I would need to focus, to be able to quickly spot Brandon, no matter where he was on a crowded Manhattan street or what form he had taken.
I do not mean that I would plop down next to a squirrel on the sidewalk and gaze intently into his nut-brown eyes on the off chance that the great love of my life had morphed into an urban rodent. I simply knew that it was time to really LOOK for Brandon, to open my eyes wider, and this seventh-inning corneal stretch seemed crucial, and made perfect sense to me as I walked down Broadway, a romantic on a hero’s journey. I was Huck Finn; I was Holden Caulfield; I was Sal Paradise roaming upper Manhattan until I stopped into Starbucks to get a latte and use the bathroom and … Oh, great.
Dear Reader, What do young, male adventurers NEVER, ever need to do when they are covering ground on a personal quest? Think it over for a bit—this is for the win—but perhaps the answer is obvious?
YOU ARE CORRECT! GO TO DUANE READE AND BUY A SMALL BOX OF PLAYTEX TAMPONS! All those literary dream boys would miss the freewheeling pleasure of skulking right back into Starbucks with their hand plastered over the tampon box—slightly too big for their coat pocket, an inch of Barbie-doll pink packaging showing against black wool—and then getting back in line for the ladies’ room!
But here’s what they would miss too: the transgender woman in front of me wearing a long, highlighted wig, leaning against the wall and texting away. I peeked and saw her sentences punctuated with the four-leaf-clover emoji, and wondered who was the recipient of her good wishes, and then worried that I’d said my thoughts out loud, because she turned around sharply, as if about to tell me to mind my own business, but then seemed to reconsider. Her eyebrows were so severely waxed that I winced; how hard it was to be a person in the world, to make your way through.
She went back to her texting, shouting in all caps, which made it easier for a rubber-necker to read: OMG LINE FOR LADIES ROOM AT STARBUCKS IS A DAMN FREAKSHOW. MY TIMING IS EXQUISITE.
But then she turned around again.
“You okay, girl?” The bathroom door opened and she held out her hand. “You go on ahead.”
They would miss that, too.
“Thanks,” I croaked out, her sudden and lavish kindness nearly undoing me. I went into the Starbucks bathroom and cried, both from the generosity of a stranger and because I remembered how discovering I’d started my period in another public bathroom had once given me such a zenith of bliss—cooling, sublime hallelujah choirs rising in my heart, in my veins—that I experienced a bathroom stall epiphany at Bed, Bath & Beyond at the Great Plains Mall: I would never, ever try heroin.
It had just arrived in the Kansas City suburbs, and my friends Emily A. and Rebecca O. had gotten drunk and tried it, and reported back: minds decisively blown. But whatever, because nothing could match the distilled rush of joy I knew when I learned that I was not, in the classy vernacular of reality TV, 16 and Pregnant. My period was a week and a half late. Yep, the old drama. One night in early spring, Brandon and I “should have been a lot more careful”—a grammatically awkward phrase perhaps better suited to describing generic regret about shoddy precaution, like burning your hand while quickly draining spaghetti from a pot of boiling water or forgetting your trusty all-weather jacket on a wuthering day. (Euphemism for the win! Sorry.)
Yes, Dear Reader, I was a smart girl, but not quite a rocket scientist there in Brandon’s truck parked on the dirt road beyond the baseball diamonds: popcorn trees offering up a clumped canopy of exploded white blossoms, the scent and rustle of wild lilac bramble, a fuchsia-orange sunset fading to pink, and Brandon’s mouth at my ear, softly. “I should probably drive to Walgreens, Caitlin.”
“O … kay,” I whispered, enthralled to pure sensation: the cool, ridged vinyl of the truck seat, his calloused hands—he never wore gloves when he lifted weights—pausing politely on my rib cage while he waited for a more definitive reply. I tilted my head back and sighed out, “Waaalgreens.”
And … curtain!
Cut to the next month, Brandon and I sitting in his truck in the Kwik
Mart parking lot after school (school was almost out for the summer, but guess who wasn’t envisioning her anxiety-ridden self poolside in a black bikini?). When I told him about the looming possibility, he took a long, hard drink of his Tropical Cooler Slurpee, and then nodded. “Okay. It’s okay. Shit. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. I mean, I guess. I was there too.”
“You probably aren’t, though.”
“Oh?” We could both hear the relieved lilt in that syllable.
Brandon took another draw off his Slurpee, the chemically bright liquid rising, rising, turning his clear straw to Windex blue. I watched the slight bob of his Adam’s apple in profile as he swallowed.
“Well … Caitlin. Usually people think that they’re … pregnant … and then? They aren’t. They really aren’t.” Brandon even sounded a bit like a doctor! Okay, in truth, like a doctor not yet seventeen and currently fulfilling his science requirement with a class known as Rocks for Jocks, geology as taught by the semi-alcoholic football coach at Holy Angels High School. But then he looked out the window and quietly said, “Usually.”
It was my turn to suck down my Slurpee with vigor, the therapeutic crunch of tiny ice crystals in my throat as I swallowed. Brandon was my first, but his list was longer and possibly included both the beautiful but dim Emily C. and, more horrifyingly, the beautiful and also kind-of-smart Emily N. I tried not to think or care about the romantic tribulations of his past because I was Brandon’s present; I was Brandon’s future.
“Don’t worry,” he said. He stuck his drink in the cup holder and started drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Because you know what?”
He looked over at me, his blue-green eyes clear as the most pristine lake, and who wouldn’t want to drown in new love? “If you are, everything will be fine, Caitlin.” He amped up his steering wheel drumming to a heavy metal solo, a crescendo he ended by accidentally honking the horn, startling us both into nervous levity.
But when Brandon stopped laughing, he started planning. “We could get an apartment. You know those remodeled ones by the riverfront? I know you like hardwood floors, Caitlin. And our moms could take turns watching the baby while we’re at school, and then the three of us could go off to college together and it would be fine. It would be great. So great! I mean, I love kids.”
Dear Reader, how quickly my heart turned cold as Christmas. My inner dialogue was definitive: That is never, ever going to happen. I said it not only to comfort myself, but to mercifully quash the optimism of a potential zygote perking up its undeveloped earbuds: There is no way in hell that scenario is going to take place. I will never let myself get trapped. Never, never, never. But how could I tell Brandon that I was not the sort of person who had a baby in high school? Really, it was something he might have noticed on his own.
But three days later in the ladies’ room at Bed, Bath & Beyond on a rainy Sunday afternoon, all agony vanished. I swung open the door and cut through the expensive heart of the store, buoyant as a moon-walker, such was my joy! Vacuum cleaners! Coffee machines! Machines to turn fresh fruit into dried-up fruit in plastic bags! All those miracles of housebound happiness were not for me, no thank you!
I headed to the bathroom accessories in the back corner, past the scales and towel holders and waste baskets and met my mom in the shower curtain section, where she pressured me to choose between taupe and lavender stripes or interlocking watercolor circles. But the shower curtain was for my bathroom, and so I made my own triumphant selection: a bold map of the world on clear vinyl! (At home, free of its appealing packaging, it would never entirely lose its toxic odor.) And now I had no touristy daydreams, no interest in those bright, colonized continents I used to gaze at while I shampooed my waist-length teenage hair; now I was purely an explorer—hapless but passionate—and I would not stop searching until I found Brandon.
I walked out of the Starbucks bathroom and made eye contact with the generous stranger—her Latisse lashes so impossibly long, so soft-looking—and waved good-bye. She was already hurrying into the bathroom, but she raised her hand—the silvery jingle of bracelets, the flash of garnet nail polish—and waved back, and as she had already clearly established who she represented on my journey—uh, duh!—I would not have been the least surprised to see the stigmata there on her wide palm.
And then, I was back on the street, walking and watching. Here and there confused winter birds studded the sky, or maybe they knew exactly what they were doing: Maybe they chose to stay and brave the NYC chill for the familiar pleasures of pecking gravel from window-boxes, of scouring the sidewalk for pan au chocolat crumbs. Two stylish college-aged girls were walking in front of me, one wearing a belted khaki trench coat, the other in a cardinal red swing coat. The trench-coated girl was telling a story that made the swing-coater laugh and say, “Right? Precisely!”
I was shivering, my lungs shuddering in and out, taking extra-curricular breaths in between my actual life-sustaining breaths. I followed the girls for blocks, wanting to ease under the umbrella of their friendship. I remembered how I had walked into Carman Hall and seen Nancy for the first time. I was late for check-in so she was already in our dorm room when I pulled open the door.
Nancy Ping: glossy black hair hanging to the middle of her back—a Pantene commercial come to life—and skin so flawless it looked like a canvas. An orange sundress and sparkly silver flip-flops brightened her already considerable beauty; she was her very own chrome filter. After the requisite small talk, we had given our brief bios: “I’m from New Jersey,” she said apologetically. “Kansas,” I said with even greater remorse, and we discussed the cafeteria plan and electrical outlets and all the while there was the mind-blowing subtext of meeting a stranger I would now sleep ten feet away from every night, but that was the autumn experience of lucky, privileged eighteen-year-olds.
Her parents came into the room, their arms full of Nancy’s numerous belongings, and they seemed a tad alarmed that my own parents were not milling around too, while of course Nancy seemed chagrined that her mom and dad even existed. Her parents obviously loved her dearly, for they were either talking too loudly in their valiant efforts to appear super upbeat about the college drop-off, or too quietly, and swallowing with pronounced effort, the lumps in their throat threatening to bloat into goiters. I thought they seemed pleased with me, though, and I imagined their conversation in the car on the way home: That Caitlin seems nice, doesn’t she? But bless them, for they didn’t know the half of it. They didn’t know I had a boyfriend stashed at the little coffee shop/bookstore downstairs eating his overpriced untoasted two-pack of blueberry Pop-Tarts with trembling hands.
We had been out late the night before at the Five Lanterns Inn. Brandon was sad that our week of private reverie was ending; he felt more nervous than I did about school starting. The beautiful bartender kept tilting her head and half-smiling at Brandon, her harlot’s faux-shyness fooling nobody. She gave Brandon free shots and free, breathy advice: “Try this: I added fresh, grated ginger, just for you. It’s sooo good for allergies. This one is flavored with cranberry. Thanksgiving in a shot glass, am I right? I wish I had a plate of turkey and mashed potatoes just for you.”
I was all jealous umbrage, and Brandon and I had some predictable back-and-forth:
She’s tantalizing you with the promise of a warm holiday dinner? It figures, actually. She’s got grandma hands—the veins all popped up like blue snakes. And I’ll bet rattlesnake grandma is thirty-five if she’s a day.
Oh, Cait, why are you always so mean? She’s only twenty-four.
Oh my God, Brandon, she told you how old she was when I was in the bathroom? Does she know that you are underage and that she could go to JAIL for serving you liquor?
Captain Caitlin, you are correct. You should make a citizen’s arrest.
Et cetera.
But on the three-block walk to the old Broadway Hotel and Hostel, our home away from home—I had to guide him, my arm around his back, because he was stumbli
ng, and he whispered, “I love you I love you.” I loved him, too, and Brandon had every right to be nervous about school starting as his lodging was a bit up in the air, depending on how cool my roommate would turn out to be.
Nancy Ping was very cool indeed. Dear Reader, she was the friend I had always wished for in high school, when I was waiting to find my people.
Flannery sucked in her breath. It’s me. I knew it was me. I’m the Dear Reader. Miss Sweeney had named their mutual longing. In her peripheral vision Flannery saw Heath look over at her, but she kept reading.
Nancy was kind and smart and funny, more so than me; she was inured to group thinking and generous with her wardrobe. (I imagined the girls walking down the block in front of me with their coats switched—the swing coat would be a swing-blazer on the taller, trench-coated girl.) I also loved Nancy’s parents a little, just from meeting them that day at the dorm. As we talked more, Nancy’s mom grew increasingly sarcastic and fun, and though her dad was working the unfortunate middle-aged hipster look in his red Chuck Taylors and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot T-shirt, he was so sweet. He looked devastated when he appeared in the doorway lugging in the last box before he and Nancy’s mom would drive back to New Jersey, the backseat of their car vast and empty as the moon. And that last box? It was filled with individual cups of organic applesauce.
“Dad!” Nancy whisper-shrieked, “There’s not room for all of that!” She flung her arm at her desk, already piled with sulfate-free shampoos and body wash and prescriptions and Ziploc bags of makeup, chargers, her blow-dryer, and her Sonicare toothbrush and Waterpik.
“Well now, Eric,” Nancy’s mom scolded brightly, anger in her smile. “No wonder you were so keen on packing the car by yourself last night. You and that goddamn Costco are just full of surprises.”
Dear Reader Page 16
