by CJ Hauser
Henry examines two different reels of gardener’s wire, trying to decide which to take and which to leave. He throws both in.
“I called my parents,” I say. “They said you should come over for dinner if you want to.”
“That’s nice,” Henry says. “I will.”
“You got everything?” I say.
“Just one more bag,” Henry says. He lays a hand on my shoulder as he angles past me, back into the house. He’s packed just two bags, but he’s bringing the good pruning shears. Henry could live for a year with nothing but snacks and those pruning shears.
I wonder if I will ever go back there, for good. I try to imagine putting on high heels and rushing to catch the express train. Watching it pull away without me because I wasn’t aggressive enough on the stairs, and saying “Shit!” loud enough for everyone on the platform to hear. I try to imagine sitting at my desk at the Gazette, covering the low public opinion polls after the mayor institutes a new cigarette tax, and working on a retrospective comparing this year’s Whitney Biennial to the past twenty. I imagine going out with the other writers after work and hashing through all the office gossip. Who didn’t even get considered for the section-editor job. Whose piece got killed for suspicious reasons. And I can imagine myself doing a very good job pretending to be interested in all this, but wondering why the bar we were in didn’t have a jukebox, and if it did, why I couldn’t find Patsy Cline, or Carter Marks, in it. Why there wasn’t a red-haired girl banging on the side of that jukebox, saying, Hey, Leah, take a look inside this machine. Do you know this machine ate my quarter? Just so I would give her another one. Just so she could play Guns N’ Roses. Just so she could dance with her girl.
Coming up here as a newlywed, I got confused, I think. Between my husband and this town, maybe I only had enough resources to fall in love with one. To make one fall in love with me. I was so worried about Niagara Falls, but somehow it didn’t occur to me to worry about the pull of an entire ocean.
It’s not too late for us, I don’t think. We’re just good at reinventing wheels. At taking the long way. A mulligan couple. We are not good at many things, but we try to be. We are very good at continuing to try.
Henry comes outside and hefts his bag into the cab of the truck. “I’m happy to move the bags to the back,” he tells me. “If you wanna ride along.”
I say, “Send me a postcard. One with the Empire State Building on it.”
Henry nods, rubs his beard.
“Come here,” I say. I stand up on the steps and he comes. He puts his arms around me. He kisses my face. My cheeks, my forehead, my nose.
“Bye,” he says.
“Come back soon,” I say. He has his hands on my shoulders, my Henry. He kisses me once more, properly. He gets into his truck. He turns the engine over and I listen to the tires breaking up the clamshells. At the end of the driveway Henry honks and waves. I wave back at him.
AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK, I am reading someone’s old paperback, sunk into the couch in the living room, nursing a whiskey. I hear the front door swinging open. So soon, and already Henry has come back to me, I think.
I leap up and go to the kitchen, not running quite, but not walking either.
Charley is putting her keys down on the counter. She is carrying a six-pack. “I’m inviting myself over,” she says. “Where would you like to entertain me?”
I gesture at the house. Anywhere. The whole thing.
“All right, then,” Charley says. She marches into the living room and puts the beers on the coffee table.
We open the windows. There’s a thrumming buzz of insects just born or waking up for the season, and the crash of the waves behind it. I sit cross-legged on the braided rug. Charley packs some new Marlboros against the flat of her palm, opens them, and peels back the foil. She opens some cupboard I’ve never noticed before, from which she pulls out a big turquoise ashtray shaped like a seashell. Then she sprawls, taking up the whole couch.
“I quit, really,” she says as she lights one. “I’m just making an exception for tonight.”
“Me too,” I say as I do the same.
Charley and I drink our beers and put out stub after stub and she tells me about her romance with the printer, and I tell her about Quinn going to Florida, and we both place bets on how long it will take Henry to come back. Charley bets too high, too boldly, two days, max, and I know she is trying to cheer me up. Sooner or later we start to plan things for the paper, hammering out what to do this week and then the next and how it will be when Quinn gets back. What we will all do then.
When Charley heads out, around eleven, she leans heavily against the doorframe and says, “I better see you Monday at nine, Lynch. Don’t think I’m going to start doing you any favors.”
50
Quinn
Looking at Maine’s rear end in the car mirror shouldn’t make you lonesome for it. Not if your genes are wired right. But on my way out I counted doughnut shops (six), men in sleeveless shirts (three), elbows out the driver’s side (a dozen), and about a million custom Red Sox license plates (BOSXFN, SOXNTN, WKDSOX), and it gave me a true pang.
I’m headed down south. My plan is to stay in Florida just long enough to piss off Rosie’s ghost. Seeing her parents should be plenty, but I figure I’ll do things right. Because if I hang around long enough, if I drink frozen virgin cocktails and wear long shorts to the beach, if I track down Hemingway’s five-toed cats and mail Leah postcards, if I bird-watch pelicans and flirt with girls at NASCAR races, Rosie will have no choice but to start haunting me.
That’s all I can hope for really. For Rosie to haunt me just a little bit. I imagine her tailing my car even now, complaining all the way. Saying, What do you think you’re doing, exactly? Do you know how interminable a drive this is? Have you even brought any provisions?
I imagine her at every rest stop. Telling me not to buy cigarettes, please, and do I really think I’m going to be able to eat that and drive at the same time?
I’m a big fan of hauntings, as it turns out. I would take Marta’s please to heart and let her tie her ghostly twine around Carter and me all over again, if I could.
That crafty wench. I miss her. She would have loved a Florida road trip.
My family portrait: There’s me in the center, seemingly a random girl, alone in the frame. But squint. There behind me, all silvery like spider floss? Marta. Next to her is Rosie, loving how she looks all shimmery. And in the corner, just barely edging into the frame, is a guitar player’s miraculously gnarled hand. Carter, sneaking his way in.
Driving down the coast like this, you see a lot of places. You look at them and you think: Maybe I could live here. Maybe I could have a pickup truck and a Rottweiler puppy, a studio apartment with a king-sized bed, a colonial home with chickens in the yard, a double-wide with satellite TV. You think maybe I could Live Right Here Forever.
I could pick any of these places if I wanted. No one’s going to stop me from settling in Massachusetts, or West Virginia, or Florida, and starting all over again. But whenever I think about going someplace new, I think about Carter. I think about that little room with the lilac blanket that looked like it had been waiting for years.
I’ve blown out of towns enough to know what normal missing feels like, and what it means to have a magnet strapped to your back. Waves know what that’s like. To be drawn out, and to be called back home again.
I would place a bet, a big one, that Menamon, Maine, will be seeing my sorry face again.
If you hop a tall fence, electric in your mind
You’ll see Saint Rosie of the high watts, Saint Rosalind.
If you find a tin box, buried, lost to time
Might be Our Lady of Penobscot’s, Saint Rosalind’s.
51
Leah
Sifting through the mail at the kitchen counter, I find a postcard mixed in with the envelopes. The picture is of a sunny little house with a dozen cats asleep on the porch. On the back, Quinn’s handwriting:
Back soon. This place is a dump.
I stick it to the fridge. The phone rings. Charley says she’s coming over for dinner, and what am I planning on making?
AS I LEAVE Deep’s, paper sack in my arms, I spot Carter Marks across the way, his foot up on the rail of the carousel. He is talking to Frank, who is not paying any attention to the horses careening by. Carter is holding the brass ring, twisting it in his palm so it goes all the way around and winds up at the beginning again. I start over to tell him that I heard from Quinn, but then I see it. In his back pocket. A postcard sticking out, something like a snapping alligator on it.
AT HOME, I put a pot of water on to boil and go sit on the front steps to wait.
The light gets bluer and in the dimness the clamshells in the drive glow white.
Then I hear it. Listen. The buoys, gonging in the dark.
How many times did June hear that sound while Hank was on the boat, and have to trust that he would make it home? How many times did she stand by the window, and just listen? I imagine that Henry, who is miles down the coastline, afloat in his truck, will also hear it. I know he is too close to too many rocks, but he will hear the buoys, and he will know to turn around.
Acknowledgments
I have long thought that there should be a kind of town hall message board for the universe where a person like me, who is lucky enough to have received help and kindness from an absolutely silly number of people, might post a notice of public thanks.
This is going to be a long scroll unfurling . . .
There are not enough lobsters in Maine to thank:
My editor, Kate Nintzel, for choosing The From-Aways not once, but twice, and for her brilliant edits, which pushed me to make this the book I hoped it would be. (Also, for pointing out that there was a totally unprecedented amount of underwear swapping in the first draft.)
My agent, Meredith Kaffel, with whom I am in cahoots. Good writers have wise voices whispering in their ears and I am forever grateful that Meredith whispers in mine. As an agent, Meredith, thank you for some Arthurian-legend-level shit. There is no one better. As a friend, I am so lucky to know a person as beautiful as you.
Margaux Weissman at William Morrow, for being the kind of lady who could hang at the Uncle anytime.
Much gratitude is owed to all the good people at DeFiore and Company and William Morrow, without whom there would be no book at all.
Cora Weissbourd, my mortal enemy at first and best of friends thereafter. You are my first and favorite reader. You knew, when I didn’t, that Leah and Quinn belonged in the same book. These two women, you said, they could be friends. Thank you for dispensing this crucial wisdom, and for then taking me to the bar, and for being you, which is the only reason I can write about a friendship like Quinn and Leah’s and know what the fuck I’m talking about.
Janice “be still my heart” Garvey, a teacher without equal and even better friend, who once struck me with an (abridged) OED, who first taught me Yeats, and who recited the Saint Crispin’s Day speech with such glee that we all knew we were in for something special.
Jennifer Natalya Fink, the baddest-ass lady at Georgetown University. Thank you for reading all my miserable early stories compassionately, and for pointing out the path I might walk down next.
The late, great Alvaro Ribiero, S.J., whom I remember and miss every time I draw a whale around a student’s run-on sentences.
Jacob Appel is owed a great debt of thanks for making sure I did not starve over the past seven years. Jacob, those samosa dinners, and words of advice, and reiterations of your totally batshit-crazy conviction that I would publish a book were just what I needed, and you knew it.
Josh Henkin of Brooklyn College once drew a diagram of Leah and Henry’s marriage on the blackboard. At the time this drove me bananas. A year later I realized Josh was right about everything. Thank you, Josh, for this, and for being the kind of teacher who truly cares about his students and sends e-mails that start: I was thinking about your novel again the other day and . . .
Ernesto Mestre-Reed, for sending me on a spiritual-novel-finding mission with Juan Rulfo and Somerset Maugham as guides.
The many other wonderful teachers at Brooklyn College who have helped me along the way: Michael Cunningham, Amy Hempel, Myla Goldberg, Ellen Tremper, and Jonathan Baumbach.
Other helpers, friends, and early readers who are owed a crustacean or two:
Nicole “where’s my tea?” Aragi, John “djellabah dancin’ ” Freeman, Kelly Farber, Rachel Perry, Joe Gallagher, Tasia Hanmer, Tanwi Nandini Islam, Anna Carey, and Jake “there’s nothing wrong with the present tense” Lemkowitz.
The good people of McSweeney’s, but particularly Vendela Vida and Jordan Bass, for the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award—the funds and emotional kick in the pants from which helped me finish this novel. Amanda’s work is the very best, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’ve wound up being published by her same house.
The ESPY Foundation and the people of Oysterville, Washington, for setting up the most civilized writing arrangement I’ve ever had: stories for oysters, every Friday.
The Florida State University crew, for giving me a new writing home, and for making all the terrible jokes about Florida in this book that much more funny.
Everyone back home, I am thankful to you for teaching me how to cut up, and how to drink whiskey. As you’ll see in these pages, you all owe the town of Menamon a two-hundred-dollar fine.
My students, I love you even when you are driving me crazy and I say things to you like: “You Are All Driving Me Crazy!” Your voices and enthusiasm make reading and writing new for me every day, and I thank you for that. Particular shout-outs to my Gotham students, the Writopians, the ladies of GirlSummer, and everyone I met at CUNY.
My writing group—Ruth Curry, Snowden Wright, and Nadja Spiegelman. You came into the life of this book when it and I were at their most broken. Thank you for the love and tough love, the bourbon and cigarettes, for making me laugh and laugh and laugh. (Special thanks as well to Lindsay Nordell and Nadja Spiegelman for recording this novel’s first-ever audio edition.)
The Trout Family of Writers, particularly David Greenwood, Stephen Aubrey, Erin Harte, Wythe Marschall, Chloe Plaunt, Chris Roth, Helen Rubinstein, Liz Stevens, Lauren Belski, and James Donovan: in many ways this is a book about the family a person is not born to, and so has to find along the way . . . the people in life you recognize as part of your karass . . . I am so lucky to have found you all.
All the Hausers in Maine and beyond, thank you for reminding me every Thanksgiving that there is a very particular tribe that I belong to.
Thank you to Goca and Tijana Igriaé, and especially Randall Joyce, who gave me my first-ever book of poems.
My grandparents Ed and Maureen Joyce. Thank you for reading me all the Oz stories, thank you for telling me long, complicated recipes over the phone, thank you for giving me my first guitar, and thank you for indulging me when I say: Can you tell me the story about X again? Again? Again?
My sister Leslie, without whom I wouldn’t last a day in this world. Thank you for understanding everything, and for thinking things are funny when no one else does, and for cocking your head to the side and giving me that look that means really? when I need you to. I love you so much. It’s SCIENCE.
My father, for teaching me the beauty of Naturlangsamkeit, the slowness of nature. For making me a good listener and a keen observer of the world. For telling my petulant ten-year-old self that the art of writing is what, Christina? The art of rewriting, Dad.
My mother, for whom an apple is always a Granny Smith green apple. For whom no moment is too small to deserve a narrative. You have always shown me how the world works through stories. You are the best storyteller I know. Thank you.
End of acknowledgments (but the thanks go on and on . . .).
CJ
P.S.
About the author
Meet CJ Hauser
About the book
/> The Story of Lavender and Leopold
Read on
Down East Recipes
Late Night at the Uncle Jukebox with Patsy Cline
Quinn's Songbook
About the author
Meet CJ Hauser
CJ HAUSER is from the small but lovely town of Redding, Connecticut.
Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and Esquire, among other places. She is the 2010 recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and the winner of Third Coast’s 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction. A graduate of Georgetown University and Brooklyn College, she is now in hot pursuit of her Ph.D. at Florida State University.
Though ever and always a New Englander in her heart, CJ currently lives in a small white house under a very mossy oak in Tallahassee, Florida.
www.cjhauser.com
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About the book
The Story of Lavender and Leopold
WE WERE SMALL, my sister Leslie and I. We were five and eight and on Nantucket for the summer. My family used to go there “before it was spoiled,” which is what everyone calls the time that begins with the moment they themselves start spoiling a place.
