by Naomi Niles
Sean had an odd habit of waxing philosophical like this whenever we were alone together. It was a side of himself that he hid from most other people, but it always seemed to come out around me. I felt privileged, in a way, that he let me see it. Maybe because from the beginning I had seen more to him than just a shallow frat boy with a penchant for pranks.
Sean turned off the music. “And before you tell me I’m insane for believing in myself,” he said with a shake of his finger, “let me tell you a story about a young man named Bruce Springsteen. In early 1974, he was coming off the relative failure of his first two albums, which had underperformed. His record label was thinking about cutting him loose. He knew he had one last chance to break into the mainstream, or he was done. He’d be driving busses in Jersey for the rest of his life.
“So what did he do? He shut himself in with his band and spent a year crafting the album that would become Born to Run. He devoted six months to recording and rerecording the title track, and later when they asked him why he spent six months working on that damned song, he said, ‘Because I wanted it to sound like what I heard in my head.’”
“So, what’s the moral of the story?” I asked.
“The moral of the story,” said Sean slowly, “is that you never give up. Never, ever give up, even when your friends and family are telling you to throw in the towel, hang up the guitar, and go home.”
“Well, that might be true for someone like Bruce Springsteen: he was talented and driven, and one way or another, he was always going to make it. But not all of us can craft songs or make art at that level. For the rest of us, sometimes there’s wisdom in hanging up the guitar and settling down with a girl who makes you happy. Sometimes that’s the best you can expect out of life.”
By now, we had reached Lake Marion. A slight mist was rising up over the water, and in the distance, I could see a man oaring a rowboat to the far shore. Sean brought the car to a halt about fifty yards from the edge of the water. “Let me ask you just one thing: what do you want out of life?”
I shrugged; it wasn’t something I thought about often. “I guess I want to get married and start a family.”
“Is that all you want out of life?”
“You make it sound like it would be a tragedy if I ended up happily married,” I pointed out. “For some of us, that’s the best we can hope for.”
“I just want so much more.” Sean leaned his head on the steering wheel as though wanting to take a nap. “God, there are so many dreams lurking in this breast. We were made to do more than just reproduce. We were made for greatness!”
“But being in love is a type of greatness. Being able to take care of a family takes a special kind of talent, and unfortunately, not everyone has it.”
Sean sat up in his seat. “I guess I never thought of it that way. It’s just—all my life I’ve wanted to be the best at something. The greatest. And now I’m getting into my late twenties, and I’m realizing I’m not particularly good at anything. I wish you were born knowing the thing that you would be great at so that you could devote your youth to that thing and not spend years flailing around trying to figure out what to do with your life.”
I pulled off my cap and threw it into the floorboard. “Boy, if only it were that easy!”
***
We spent a few hours fishing on the shore of the lake and then drove to Montreux. I hadn’t eaten since the night before, so I was feeling starved by the time we sat down. Sean ordered the smoked chicken tacos served with jalapeno mayo and onion straws while I ordered Belgian-cut French fries and chicken schnitzel, a breaded chicken cutlet paired with a burgundy mushroom sauce, served over rice and asparagus. It was almost embarrassing how rapidly I devoured it.
On the other side of the table, though, Sean was still slogging his way through his quarter-life crisis.
“You know what I think it is?” he said in a shaky voice. “I think sometimes genius just comes with practice. When Bruce was composing Born to Run, he used to shut himself in the studio for twelve hours a day just scribbling down lyrics, sifting through the best ones, and practicing his guitar. Maybe that’s what I need to do. I’ll tell Gramps I can’t help him out in the lumberyard anymore. I’ll rent a garage or something, or I’ll borrow yours, and I’ll spend the whole day working on my music.”
I suddenly had a horrifying vision of Sean playing guitar in my garage at all hours of the night while I struggled to fall asleep. “Sean, this is some kind of mania,” I said. “You’re obsessed with Bruce Springsteen and wanting to become a musical genius. Lately, it’s all you talk about.”
“Listen,” said Sean, his eyes bright with conviction. “On October 27, 1975, Bruce landed on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. No musician had ever graced both covers in the same week. He was twenty-four. I’ll be turning twenty-nine next month. And what do I have to show for it? What have I done with my life?”
“You can start by finishing your tacos,” I replied.
In all the years I had known Sean, I had never seen him like this, and I was at a loss for how to handle it. When he spoke of his own greatness, he had the same half-crazed look in his eyes that my aunt Ruth had gotten when she thought UFOs were trying to contact her from the far side of Saturn. I remembered my parents talking in whispers, saying she had to be committed for her own good. Worried, I began casting around for something that would take his mind off of Bruce and his own lack of talent.
There were some guys sitting around a table playing poker toward the back of the room. Near the center of the table sat an older gentleman with a full salt-and-pepper beard who held a mug of ale in one hand. The others addressed him as “Tom.”
I motioned to their table. “We ought to go join those guys over there. It’ll be good practice for the festival tournament next week.” Not that I was particularly worried about the festival; the last couple of years, the guys I’d competed against had just been looking for an excuse to get away from their wives. I had beaten them easily.
Sean dragged himself out of his despair long enough to glance over in their direction. “They look sort of intimidating,” he said boozily, “like they could break us over their knees. Just the sort of guys we ought to be testing ourselves against. With the Las Vegas invitational coming up in a few months, we need all the practice we can get.”
“Finish your meal, and we’ll go over there,” I said.
After we’d paid for our meal, I went over and asked Tom if we could join them.
“Sure, go right ahead.” He motioned to a couple of empty seats on the other side of the table. “But I can’t promise you’re gonna like this.”
“Oh, I’ve been beaten before,” I said as I took my seat. “But not always.”
Tom nodded and began shuffling a new deck. “How long you been playing?”
“About eight years. I got started in college, the two of us and some other guys playing in the lounge when we should have been studying trig. God, sometimes I still have nightmares that I’m gonna fail a test because I forgot to do any of the reading. But once we figured out how the game worked, we started making bank off it, and that’s how I was able to pay for college.”
The other guys raised their brows looking impressed, which confirmed what I had suspected: that they hadn’t been playing nearly as long as I had. Tom had a foreboding manner, and he could probably run the table with these other guys, but in terms of experience, I already had him beat.
What worried me more was the guy seated to my right. River was younger than the others, in his mid-thirties, wearing a gray sleeveless t-shirt that showed off his improbably large arms. He had shaved every hair on his head—including his eyebrows—which gave his face an eerie, alien appearance. Early in the second round, he made a reference to having once beaten up some “illegals” who had cheated him out of several hundred dollars in Reno—the rest of the gang laughed uncomfortably—and I couldn’t tell whether or not he meant it, but I didn’t particularly feel like finding out.
&nbs
p; This put me in a dilemma, as I wanted to win money, but I didn’t want to win too much of it. I won the first round, but made a point of losing the second. I won the third and planned on losing the fourth, but at that point, there was so much money at stake—about 900 dollars—that I couldn’t refuse. I wanted it, Sean wanted it; we had to have it.
I laid out my hand, took the money, and thanked them all for playing. “Sean and I have to get going,” I said, already edging my way toward the door. “Sorry we couldn’t stay longer; it was a pleasure to meet you, a real pleasure.”
River rose out of his chair, flexing his muscles ominously. I was so transfixed by the motion of his arms and his weird, hairless face that I almost didn’t see Tom creeping up behind me.
“MARSH, LOOK OUT!” shouted Sean.
I turned around just in time to see a fist soaring through the air toward me. I ducked out of the way, throwing myself against the table. Tom, momentarily knocked off balance, staggered and fell backward.
With River on one side of us and Tom on the other, it seemed like there was no escape. Being young and in good health, I had never until that moment thought about how it would feel to be injured or dead (In the latter case, would I even feel anything?). As the gang encircled us, I experienced a moment of existential panic. Twenty-five years old, and I hadn’t done any of the things I had wanted to do in my life.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of wood splintering. A kindly observer from a neighboring table had broken a chair over River’s head. He stumbled a few paces forward and fell face-first onto the cold floor.
While the rest of the gang swarmed our chair-throwing companion, Sean and I decided to make a break for it. We turned and ran. We didn’t stop running until we had reached his Nissan.
“I’ll admit that was more intense than I cared for,” I said as I climbed in. “I prefer games that don’t come with a risk of being put in a coma.”
But Sean didn’t respond. Instead, he knelt down in the parking lot next to the car and expelled his lunch into a fresh puddle of rain. It was some minutes before he managed to recover himself and crawl back into the car.
“You want me to drive?” I asked.
“If you would, please.” He handed me the keys.
We were mostly quiet as we drove home through the rain-dogged afternoon. The gray sky above us and the marshes on either side of us seemed bathed in an uncommon light. Once we paused at an intersection adjacent to a small park, through the rearview mirror, I saw a dog sunning himself in front of an old, rusted swing set.
Chapter Four
Lori
One of the hard things about going to church in the South was the number of men telling me how I should and shouldn’t behave.
On Tuesday nights, I usually attended a Bible study for young singles at Summerville Methodist. We met in the church kitchen at around sundown and sat in a circle of brown folding chairs and drank lemonade out of clear plastic cups. The leader was a guy named Brian, who was only a few years younger than me, whose shirts were always immaculately ironed and who, as it happens, had recently married Olivia, a girl he had met in the Bible study.
Because I drove there straight from the bakery, I hadn’t had time to return home and change out of my work clothes. I had forgotten my Bible at home that morning, but I was carrying the book on Norse mythology, which I had been reading during my breaks at work. Neil had a way of enlivening a group of stories that had never much interested me.
There was a guy in our Bible study who seemed to think it was his job to police what the rest of us read and wore and watched on TV. His name was Alvin Barclay, and he was a stout man of about middle height with a beard that crept down off of his face and onto his neck. He liked to wear plaid, and on this particular evening, he had unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt so that a tangle of chest hair peeked through. He glared at me in disapproval as I came in as if already looking for something to be upset about.
But he didn’t corner me until after the lesson had ended when we were all sitting around and visiting with each other. He strode over with a self-important air, grabbed a chair, turned it around, and sat down with his legs on either side, using the upper back as an armrest. “What you reading there?” he asked.
Somehow, I managed to stammer out an answer. “It’s a book on Norse mythology. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Neil Gaiman, but he’s a genius storyteller. He wrote Coraline and American Gods.”
But Alvin had evidently stopped listening at the word “mythology.” “That don’t sound like somethin’ a girl like you should be reading,” he said with an air of suspicion.
“I don’t see why not,” I said defensively. Nothing irritated me like being told what I could and couldn’t read, and it had happened more times than I could count. “Mythology is really fascinating.”
“All evil is fascinating,” said Alvin. “That’s how the devil tricks us.”
I didn’t feel like this was true at all, though it was hard to form a logical argument when he was staring me down like that. “They’re just interesting stories from an ancient culture. Haven’t you ever seen a superhero film?”
“Yeah, I love them.” He pronounced “yeah” so it sounded like “yeh.”
“Well, these were the superhero movies of their day.”
I ought to have known by now that there was no winning this argument, but I still retained a modest hope that I could open his mind a little. “No,” he said with a slow shake of his head, “because mythology was created by the devil to sow doubt in our hearts and counterfeit the truth of the gospel. When Thor and the Hulk are fighting, I know what I’m seeing on the screen isn’t real. But the stories of Homer or whoever turned people away from the true God to worship Zeus and the Cyclops.”
“The Cyclops wasn’t a god,” I pointed out. “He was a giant monster, and no one ever worshipped him.”
“All the same,” said Alvin, “they should have kept their minds set on things above rather than wasting their time coming up with these weird stories.”
“Why do you watch movies at all, then?” I replied.
Alvin was silent.
That might have been the end of the conversation if Brian hadn’t come strolling over at that moment. He was one of those bland, cheerfully smiling men who seem to have a pre-rehearsed answer for everything. “Is everything okay over here?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s just,” Alvin pointed an accusing finger at me, “she’s reading books that a girl ought not to be reading. She should know better.”
Brian turned to me and raised an inquiring brow. I held up the book in question so that he wouldn’t think I was reading porn or something. A look of relief washed over his face.
“Well,” he said slowly, “if Lori wants to read about mythology, that’s her right. Some things are obviously black and white, but then there are gray areas where a person is allowed to make up his own mind.” I smiled in vindication, but then Brian added, “Reading this book might be pointless and a waste of her time, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sin.”
And before either of us could respond, he walked away looking pleased with himself.
When I returned home that night, the apartment was empty. I made myself a large cup of Twining’s Earl Grey and sat up waiting for Sam to come home, but she was still out by the time I fell asleep on the couch watching Midsomer Murders. I didn’t see her again until the next morning at work. She came scurrying in about half an hour before we were scheduled to open and found me sweeping the floor behind the counter.
“Sorry I didn’t come home last night,” she said as she reached for her apron. “Jamal and I made dinner, and I decided it would be easier just to sleep over at his place.” Although Sam and I technically lived together, she spent so much of her time over there that she might as well have paid rent.
“It’s funny how much I miss you during the nights you’re gone,” I said. “You’ve stayed over at his place enough that by now I should be used to it, b
ut it always feels weird when I have the apartment to myself.”
Sam tied back her hair and studied her appearance in the reflection of the window. “That was how I felt when you drove up to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving. Don’t take this the wrong way, but at first, I was looking forward to having a few days to myself—Jamal wasn’t flying in until the end of the week. But after about two days of not having to go to work and not having anyone to talk to, I just felt bored. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Even painting didn’t help.”
While Sam sanitized the kitchen and I cleaned the baking bins, I told her about my argument with Alvin Barclay the night before. “Why does it seem like everywhere I go, there are people trying to control how I look and what I wear and the kinds of books I’m allowed to read?”
Sam stood, rinsing her hands in the sink. “Maybe because you’re small and a girl, so they think they can walk over you. Nobody messes with me, but that’s because they know better. Maybe if you got a couple tattoos, they’d leave you alone.”
“It just feels like I can’t carry a book around in public—any book—without somebody walking up to me and telling me I shouldn’t be reading it and that I’m a bad person for wanting to read it. Reading is a good thing, and it doesn’t happen nearly enough. We should encourage it.”
“Maybe they feel like you’re judging them,” said Sam. “Because they know they should be reading more books, but it never occurs to them until they see you walking around with your nose in a book. And then they feel guilty because they spent the last week playing Halo or whatever.”
“I never understood the appeal of video games, personally,” I said sadly. I had tried to play The Last of Us once and found it unbearably boring. “But see, boys can spend all day playing games, and no one ever jumps down their throat about it. It almost makes me wonder if there’s some latent prejudice against girls who are curious and bookish and intelligent.”
