The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  Besides, she had all that anger bottled up in her whine cellar. No sense letting it spoil.

  She spent the entirety of April angry at Hyun-Woo, avoiding him when possible and glaring at him when not. The catalyst for her anger was such a trifle as to be nearly forgotten, so why was she still angry with him? Well, because she’d been angry with him yesterday, and nothing had changed from yesterday to today. So anger remained the word of the day, the week, the month.

  As each mention of Hyun-Woo’s name resulted in a slight uptick in atmospheric pressure, Deirdre learned to stop poking at the sore subject. The no-go zone firmly established, she and Nur continued to deepen their relationship, partially by brushing up the thin, glossy bits on top. They’d staked out a few firmly off-topic zones, like Hyun-Woo and Kamal and sex in general, which increasingly left them with just the superficial bits. But they worked the hell out of these, and the felt themselves growing closer as a result. Not that they had many alternatives, if socialization was their aim. They each had casual acquaintances in their classes, but they’d regrettably put most of their time and energy into their respective dudes. And it turned out, for various reasons, those dudes were less than stellar investments of time. So now they had each other. Which was actually quite alright with the both of them.

  April showers bring May flowers, that was a little saying Deirdre’s teacher had taught them on the first day of the second month in question. It held true enough for them, though the flowers hadn’t gotten the message and pre-empted the merry month of May by a few weeks. Either way, in the first weeks of May the city was colorful and vibrant and fragrant, if one’s focus was drawn narrowly enough. Boston remained a city, and cities can only go in particular directions with color and vitality (fragrance knows no bounds, though). Nur and Deirdre took the air, breaking out the warm weather wear and strolling around the city, free and leisurely, in a way they hadn’t since just after their arrival.

  More accurate to say that it was in a way they never had before, actually. Because when they first landed, theirs was a contentious relationship. Whereas now, it was…better. There was still a riptide of antipathy lurking below the smiling surface, though what teenaged siblings don’t struggle with that, huh?

  By the middle of May, they’d become close enough to want to get drunk together for the first time. Together being the operative term, get the chief secondary. They’d both been drunk before, and they’d both seen each other drunk, when one or the other would come staggering back to the hotel after a wild night out. But they’d never gotten drunk together before, actually sat down and consumed alcohol in one another’s presence.

  But walking around Boston and taking paddle boats out on the pond in the gardens and going to free concerts at the Hatch Shell and playing the chimes at the Kendall Red Line stop, all that gets old after a while. It’s all fun and wonderful and Boston is a delightful city and what a privilege to be here and all that, but there exists a terminus at which the romp room runs out, and the only way to burst through is with a bit of lubrication. Besides, they had troubles and woes to be drunk away, didn’t they? Of course they did. And what better way to slip off their troubles like an old skin than the very same liquid lubrication?

  First order of business: acquiring said lubrication.

  BEEBOO BEEBOO DANGER DANGER DANGER cried the TAF/TAS alarm.

  The lubrication was metaphorical. Alcohol. They wanted to get drunk.

  BEEBOO BEEBOOoooooooo ALL CLEAR

  Neither of them being twenty-one, Uncle Bernard almost certainly being the sort of guy who would notice a lightness of his liquor cabinet, Uncle Bernard definitely certainly being the sort of guy who wouldn’t supply alcohol to minors…where could they get some booze?

  The hated face of Hyun-Woo, man of age, flashed like dry lightning in her mind. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and good riddance to bad rubbish.

  Though why so angry

  Nur turned the dilemma over in her head for a while, until she finally had an idea. She and Deirdre agreed that it was a terrible idea, and that they would give the problem another day or two of thought. If neither had any better ideas, they would try the terrible idea.

  Neither had any better ideas.

  CHAPTER 35

  A great deal of maturity had been attained at great emotional expense since last August. Nur may not have considered herself an adult just yet, but she did think of herself as having made atypically large strides towards that inevitable classification, and with atypical enthusiasm.

  So her idea, which was most definitely a terrible one, hinged upon this fundamental distinction: sneaking is for children. Rational, clear-headed discourse founded upon the points at which seemingly contradictory objectives overlap is the way mature souls conduct their business.

  Just the facts, then: Nur and Deirdre intended to get drunk in the very near future. Being underaged, the only means by which they would be able to acquire the dreaded beverages capable of facilitating this state were illicit. As they had no clearly defined avenues by which to avail themselves of said means, they would be forced to reach out to some of their classmates who struck them as the ‘illicit means’ type. This would open them up to unknown dangers, or perhaps act as a gateway to even starker outrages to family and country. Phrased less ornately, maybe the dude who scored them booze would come back next week with weed – anything for his two newest and somehow best customers. And in a fit of boredom, maybe they would accept?

  (This fantasy had little grounding in reality, but it served its purpose as thinly-veiled blackmail.)

  Besides, where would they go to do their drinking? They couldn’t do it out in public for everyone to see, and there were no safe spaces indoors to be found. So they’d have to retire to places of concealment, in the dark of moist, smoke-filled alleys or deep in the black throat of a culvert or in the shadow of a railroad trestle, and nevermind where they’d find those latter two in an urban environment.

  View the facts with a clear head, assess their implications rationally, filter all of this through the prism of individual objectives and bring the results to an honest discourse…do all of this, and the conclusions were clear.

  “You should buy us alcohol and let us drink it here,” Nur concluded in Seychellois Creole, trembling like the atrophied legs of a woman just off a year-long bedrest.

  Though it wasn’t just disuse that set her native tongue aquiver. The crashing brows of Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy had a whole lot to do with that as well. If the rest of their heads were anything like their foreheads, clarity had been buried alive beneath six feet of wrinkles.

  Nur had known it was a terrible plan to begin with. But she’d also entertained the idea that it was so crazy it just…might…work.

  Now? Not…so…much.

  “Go to your room,” Uncle Bernard suggested with thoughtful equilibrium. Nobody is more focused on not leaning one way or another than the tightrope walker without a net, after all.

  Aunt Amy nodded in assent. “Your Uncle and I need to discuss a few things.” That seemed needlessly euphemistic to Nur – they all knew perfectly well what the few things that needed discussing were.

  We’re all adults here, she intoned to herself desperately. She needed to be an adult now more than ever, because her Uncle had just told her to go to her room as though she were a child, and goddamnitalltohell if she wasn’t about to follow his order. Sorry, his suggestion.

  Upstairs, Deirdre was wondering how it was going. She heard Nur tromp up the stairs, watched her slink through the door and flop onto her bed, and then she started wondering how poorly it had gone.

  “I may have misjudged their maturity levels” was how Nur represented the exchange to both her sister and herself. Neither of them was convinced.

  After an endless two and a half minutes, a less sullen set of footsteps made their way up the stairs and knocke
d on the bedroom door. The person to whom the footsteps belonged was technically the one to knock on the door, but now was hardly the time to be picking nits. Besides, Nur had a sinking sensation that said the whole wide world outside this bedroom has melted into a singularity of off-limits. She had misjudged something alright, and it hadn’t been her relatives’ maturity. How could she have believed her Uncle’s fear of her parents would keep him from passing word of her limp ultimatum along? Hubris, that’s what this was. Plain and simple. She didn’t need alcohol to be making poor choices.

  So whether these sounds were attached to a person or were possessed of their own independent existences made little difference to her now. Two and a half minutes was plenty of time to place a quick call to Seychelles, and receive a parental decree most familiar to the Billy Batts’ of the world: keep them there.

  “Come in,” Deirdre called to the disembodied knock.

  The door opened part way, and Aunt Amy slowly poked her head in.

  “We’ll go in for beer, but no hard liquor,” said Aunt Amy’s head. “And you have to stay here while you drink it.”

  Keep them there.

  Nur tried very, very hard not to laugh out loud, and she was successful for as long as it took Aunt Amy’s sullen, defeated footsteps tromp back down the stairs.

  The mature, adult response to this situation would be a detached acknowledgment of a negotiation well executed. But, upon further reflection, Nur was happy to put off being an adult for just a few minutes longer.

  CHAPTER 36

  Dr. Bernard De Dernberg, never one to admit defeat in face of the facts, apparently decided that there remained a way to spin this humiliating twisting-of-the-arm into an educational moment: the beer he got them was Sam Adams, and he gave it to them on the condition that they listen to him lecture briefly about the little historical figure on the label. That on top of the other conditions about staying put and promising to drink lots of water before they went to sleep, to keep hangovers at bay. As if Nur needed to be told that last bit. She learned from experience.

  Perhaps hoping for a maximum of comprehensibility, more probably not wanting to give the girls any excuse to not listen to him, Uncle Bernard gave his little disquisition in Seychellois Creole. And, despite her best efforts, Nur found herself interested. Old Sammy Adams was far more instrumental in American history than she’d realized. He also apparently had owned a slave named Surry, but released her almost immediately after receiving title to her, like she was a used car. So that was only sort of shitty of him.

  Deirdre was far less interested in the historical context for her beverage. Beer was beer, the smiling white guy on the label was dead, let’s pour one out to his memory, and if the pouring happens to be down one’s own throat, then so much more honor attends the gesture.

  Bernard didn’t really conclude speaking; he just stopped talking. It took Nur a few moments of his silence to realize the talking was over and done with, and she’d been listening. After said few moments, he shrugged and pointed towards the fridge. “You can have two each,” he informed them in English. “No more. Understood?”

  They nodded dutifully, extracted four chilled bottles from inside the refrigerator and a magnetic bottle opener from on it, and made their way upstairs. Bernard raised a hand to stop their glass-clacking ascent, but Aunt Amy stayed him with a shake of the head. He had convinced himself that they would do their drinking under his immediate supervision, and was stunned to discover that nobody else wanted in on his self-deception.

  But all it took to throttle him back was a nod. Because despite feeling emasculated at having been played in this way (how could she have known he wouldn’t immediately tell their parents?), he was flattered that the girls had come to him with this, and proud of them as well. What he was doing now was kind of cool. It was a cool Uncle thing to do. It was also an illegal Uncle thing to do, but Bernard could think of significantly worse illegal Uncle things he’d read about in the paper before, so all in all this was really not that bad.

  And it was kind of cool. He hoped they thought of it that way. It had been such a very long time since anyone had mistaken him for cool.

  “I sort of feel bad for Uncle Bernard,” Deirdre said sort of sincerely as she levered the top off of her beer without breaking eye contact with Nur, like a pro.

  “Why?”

  “What does he do?” She passed the bottle opener to Nur.

  With some embarrassment, she found that she had to look at the bottle to guide the opener under the lip of the cap. “He’s a doctor.”

  “No, I mean, like, what does he do? With his life. Does he have friends? I feel like he’s only ever at work or here.”

  Nur shrugged and took a sip. “He’s got Aunt Amy.”

  “And what does she do?”

  This was a very good question. She sometimes rushed out of the house, like she had their first day here, but most often she was…at home. Where did she go on these outings? What did she do?

  They pondered this in sipping silence.

  For a while.

  About halfway through their first bottles, they were relatively well into it. Their tolerances were normal for young women of their ages, and they had further stacked the decks by making this a day of fasting. A little alcohol, therefore, went a long way. And they had only had just a little alcohol so far.

  “Do they need to do anything?” Nur wondered aloud.

  “To do what?”

  “Anything. We keep asking what Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy do, but do they need to do anything? They’ve got each other.”

  Deirdre gave this serious thought. “That sounds…”

  That serious thought trailed off into oblivion, but Nur had a plethora of conclusions in her back pocket. They were all variations on the theme of unfulfilling.

  She imagined having someone, and being had by someone, such that they could each be said to have each other. There was beauty in that. Getting to the point in a relationship when you can be with someone and not having to be doing with them, reading a book in the living room while he’s cooking in the kitchen, folding laundry in front of the TV while he naps on the couch, simply sharing the same space without needing to be entertaining each other constantly…that was the ideal state of romance, to her. The point at which you loved someone so completely, and were loved by them in turn, that you were secure enough in having each other that you could just be with them, and feel a rolling moment as full of romance as the grandest of jukebox gestures. The point at which the roaring cyclone of love finally passed overhead and wrapped you in the tranquility of its eye, you and your love, finally enveloped in an oasis of calm cleft from a pillar of bruise-black insanity, finally able to look them square in the eye and say we have each other, and feel the discharge of that ecstatic truth split the pocket of tension once and for all.

  Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy had each other, by all accounts. Nur had seen their wordless shorthand communications, she’d walked in on them doing the whole being-without-doing thing (so they weren’t really doing it when she walked in, but anyway), and she felt the warmth between them, devoid of any dramatic gestures or professions. They had each other. And all she could think in response to that was, so what?

  Once you had somebody and they had you and you had each other, how could you not still have your dreams and ambitions and passions? Surely the other person was a bonus, someone with whom you could share the good times and lean on in the bad…but they couldn’t be a substitute for living your own life. A sidecar was no good without the motorcycle, right? A frame’s just a piece of garbage without a picture. A…a fungus is nothing without its toe? Boy, maybe downing a whole bottle of Sam on an empty stomach wasn’t such a great idea after all. She had a whole second on deck…

  “How you doing?” she asked Deirdre.

  Her sister shook her bottle. “Just about empty.”


  They both laughed, even though there was nothing funny about that.

  Halfway into their second bottles, the De Dernberg sisters were still talking about their Aunt and Uncle. By this point, they were both at least flirting with the fact that they were just tracing their own abortive relationships by underlining the insufficiency of a successful one. They still believed what they were saying, and would do so even after the sun came up and their blood alcohol content went down, but the force of their professions was incommensurate to the intensity of their conviction.

  So what if things hadn’t worked out with Hyun-Woo/Kamal? Who needed them, right? Absolute best cast scenario, like, absolute best case, lifelong commitment and marriage and a house and a dog or a kid or whatever, and they all had each other…SO WHAT? They would still have ambitions and be no closer to achieving them. Maybe even FURTHER from achieving them! A family would be great, right, but what was so great about a family? That was just some stupid, atavistic imperative. The world was overpopulated anyway! More families? What Earth needed was fewer families! Love without families! What?

  “I said ‘love without families’!” Nur repeated.

  “But why not ‘love within families’?”

  “Ooooh, that’s good.”

  Deirdre shrugged. “I know.”

  There comes a point in every person’s life when pure, molten emotions overflow the lead chalice of reason and motivate him or her to say or do something completely unexpected. And that unexpected thing turns out to be so trite, cliché and played out that it seems completely devoid of the unstoppable sincerity that gave rise to it.

  Nur arrived at such a point when she drunkenly leaned over to her sister and said “I love you, Deirdre.” Because that’s what funny drunks always do in the movies. They get sappy and say I love you man and everybody in the audience goes aaawww and then chuckles approvingly. It sounded insincere because it was something she’d heard a million times from the mouths of highly paid actors reciting poorly written scripts, but it was sincere, goddamnit. She felt more love for her sister in that moment than she knew what to do with. So she repeated herself, but prefaced the refrain with “no, but seriously.” And through the strange alchemy of human communication, that time it sounded real to her. As real as it felt. Which was very real indeed.