by Leigh Stein
The Proposal
(2007–11)
A couple of months before Jason and I moved to Albuquerque, when we were still living in suburban Chicagoland, we went to a Memorial Day weekend party he’d heard about through a friend of a friend. At one in the morning, we knocked on the door and a giddy blonde girl answered and told us she’d been doing Jägerbombs with her mom, who was now passed out upstairs. Then she walked away. Thanks to the sleepovers of my childhood, this house was the kind of suburban split-level ranch I knew how to navigate without ever having been there before. We walked through the dining room and kitchen and let ourselves out onto the concrete patio in the back. The night was humid, heavy with the hum of air-conditioning units. Jason took a shot and opened a beer. I stood by, sober. Before the party, we’d gotten into a fight and I’d tried to break up with him; he’d suggested I stop drinking because it made me too emotional.
Within a few minutes of our arrival, the doorbell rang. A gangly boy peeked over the privacy fence and saw cop cars parked out front. Everyone at the party was underage, except for me, and, presumably, the girl’s mom. There was knocking on the door. There was nowhere to run. The fence was too high. The blonde became hysterical and said we should all hide in her basement.
“And you think that will make them go away?” Jason swallowed the last of his beer and said he would answer the door. The more the blonde begged him not to, the more revved up he got.
I followed the two of them into the house and then stood off to the side, as Jason opened the door for the two police officers standing on the front porch.
“This your party?”
“No, sir,” Jason said, and pointed at the girl.
“Are your parents home?”
“No,” she said gravely.
“Better call them, then,” the cop said.
For the next two hours, everyone had to take a Breathalyzer and decide whether to call their parents and tell them what had happened, or spend the night in jail. A teenage boy and I were the only sober ones; we sat at the dining room table quietly while everyone else took the test and called their parents. The blonde kept her cell phone to her ear and insisted that her mom wasn’t home. No, she didn’t know when she’d be back (we’d find out later that her mom was coaching her by phone from the bedroom to say she wasn’t home, so she wouldn’t be arrested for serving alcohol to kids). I wasn’t allowed to get up from the table and go talk to Jason, who was waiting in line to be Breathalyzed, but I knew he wouldn’t want to call his dad and I didn’t want him to sleep in jail. So when it came time for his turn, I stood up and asked if they’d let me take him home, since I was twenty-two, sober, and we were living together (loosely defined by my sleeping over at Jason’s one-bedroom apartment every night since I’d “won” him from Veronika).
“I’ll take responsibility for him,” I said.
“What are you,” the cop sneered, “his mom or his girlfriend? If you were his wife, I might say yes.”
I felt belittled and frustrated, but before I could think of anything feisty to say in return Jason dropped to one knee. He took off the ring he always wore, a plain band soldered from a motorcycle part, and asked if I would marry him. I laughed and said yes. He put the ring on my finger. Both cops gave a slow clap. I touched the ring, felt how warm the band was from being close to his skin. I spun it in a loop around my finger. I knew I would have to give it back, but I wouldn’t have wanted to keep it anyway. The ring had been a gift from his first girlfriend’s dad, a motorcycle mechanic, who’d made them a matching set. It was too big for any of my fingers.
“Sorry,” one of the cops said, “but we’re still going to have to take you in,” and made Jason turn around while he put the handcuffs on. Jason was all yes, sir, no, sir. I was all out of ideas. They hadn’t put the cuffs on anyone else, but all the other kids had called their parents.
At last, after all the kids were sobered and gone, they let Jason go. The whole thing had been a show, for a scare. They said we could go and we had to say thank you. I still had the ring. In the car, I gave it back. We stayed up the rest of the night, driving, smoking, talking, replaying the scene, what everyone’s faces had looked like, how brilliant we were, until it turned from night to day and McDonald’s started serving breakfast.
This was the story I told his family, in his grandmother’s living room, the night before his funeral. When I arrived at the part where he gets down on one knee, everyone laughed. They could picture the scene. For a brief moment, I’d brought him back to life.
Then his mom passed around a Ziploc bag of the things found on his body at the scene of the accident. A wallet with a single dollar in it. A mini flashlight. The same ring from that night. I almost couldn’t believe I was holding it again; the only time I ever saw him take it off was when he proposed. I was shocked that they weren’t going to bury him wearing it, but couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You give that back. How could I say this to his mother, whom I’d only just met?
I made eyes at his ex-girlfriend Lisa, whom he had dated for years after we broke up, and we went to sit in the corner together, conspiratorially, like girls at a dance. Lisa was petite and funny and charismatic, someone I’d become fast friends with if only I had met her under other circumstances. “Don’t you think he should be buried with the ring?” I whispered.
She nodded. Then she said, “But you know he wouldn’t have wanted to be buried at all. Jason told me he wanted to be cremated.”
I didn’t remember him ever telling me this, but it was also possible that he did and I just forgot. I liked Lisa (I wanted to like her) but I was not ready to admit she might know anything about Jason that I did not. And what if she was wrong? Not wrong, but misremembering?
“You’re right,” I told her. “I’d forgotten that, but he told me, too.”
Then I excused myself and went to the kitchen to make myself a taco plate. Not only was I the only one who seemed hungry, but my hunger was embarrassingly insatiable. Food fast-forwarded time for me: first tacos, then bed, then the funeral, then I would fly home. I was scooping seconds onto my plate when Jason’s grandmother and I started talking about his recent obsession with diet and exercise. I told her I remembered all the vitamins he took from a gallon-sized Ziploc bag when he stayed with me in Brooklyn. The last e-mail Jason ever sent me was about research he’d been doing on how antioxidant supplements could combat the daily accumulation of free radicals and prolong life. The last line of the e-mail: Immortality ahoy? I’ll let you be the judge.
“I still have one of his fruit smoothies in the fridge,” she said.
The fridge was right behind her.
My first thought was, Can I see it?
My second thought was, Why do I want to see it?
Because his mouth was on that straw, that’s why I wanted to see it. And because his finger was wearing that ring until they removed it from his body. Because when I think of Jason the first thing I always think of is his body. That night, for the last time, his body lay aboveground. I could easily imagine him rising from his coffin and coming for us, demanding we return the ring before he’d go anywhere. I thought, He’ll never let us live this down.
Dawn Patrol
(2007)
In Albuquerque, Rick and Vicky lived in the apartment across from ours with their two daughters, Scarlet and Tana—these were the girls I’d seen thrown in the air at the pool on the day before I flew back to Chicago. They were our neighbors and, for a few months, our friends. One night after the girls were in bed, Vicky and I dispatched the guys to Blockbuster to rent Death Proof and popped fresh cans of Coors Light. Alone together for the first time, we quickly spilled the stories of how we’d gotten to where we were, our shortcut to the kind of intimacy between friends who’ve actually lived through each other’s lives. Vicky told me she was originally from Milwaukee, and had ended up in Albuquerque via Baltimore, because of a government job
testing anthrax on monkeys.
“What about you? Did you guys move here for a job?”
“Well, Jason said he would work while I wrote a book.”
“About New Mexico?”
“No,” I said. “It’s about a guy who has an affair with his daughter’s babysitter.”
Vicky had a tough, scratchy laugh. She looked a little like Toni Collette, but with a spotty complexion. “Just ask my husband,” she said, and then got up for another beer before I could ask a follow-up question. Rick, her husband, had once been a plumber, but now he stayed at home and watched the girls while Vicky worked. He hid his baldness under caps.
One afternoon Jason went to fly kites with Rick and the girls in the park across the street, and came back to report that Rick carried a Big Gulp cup filled with whiskey and ice with him at all times.
Whenever I had the night off from waitressing we’d go over to their place, drink beer, and watch Rock of Love with Bret Michaels on VH1 (Vicky was Team Heather; I was for Jes), while Scarlet and Tana played dress up in scarves and necklaces and sat in our laps, begging me and Jason to save them from bedtime. When we were all on the couch it was hard to tell, but Vicky was taller than Rick.
Just ask my husband—I couldn’t get this line out of my head. Each weekday morning, as I sat writing at my desk, I watched the same young blonde woman cross the parking lot and go inside their apartment. She wore a rotation of velour tracksuits. Her face was very pretty and symmetrical, like a reality show contestant’s, but I never saw her smile. I never saw her without a cigarette either. She looked so lethargic I thought she had to be on drugs. In the afternoons, she’d be back outside, making slow laps around the parking lot with a blond boy I assumed was her son, who looked about twelve, and who rode his bike without paying any attention to the cars coming in and out.
“Well, it’s obvious what’s going on,” Jason said, when I told him about my spying.
“What’s obvious, that they’re having an affair? But Rick is home with the girls all day.”
“I’m going to ask him if he’s sleeping with her.”
“Oh my God, don’t.”
“I’m going to,” he said.
I tried to be optimistic: maybe Rick and Vicky had some kind of arrangement. A couple of weekends in a row, I’d seen her around our apartment complex with another man. He was tall, nice-looking. Unlike Rick, he wore his shirt tucked into his jeans. Scarlet and Tana and Vicky all took turns holding his hands.
The next time I was alone with Vicky I asked her about the blonde woman.
“Oh, that’s just the girls’ babysitter’s daughter,” she said. I tried to understand why they had a babysitter to begin with, if Rick stayed at home, not to mention why her daughter would be at their apartment for half of each day.
And the other man?
“He’s a friend from work,” she said. I got the sense that it would be rude to press. It was none of my business.
“Now can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you come from money?”
Her question stung—after working with kids for twelve hours a day all summer to save money for our move, I was now waiting tables and dipping into my savings to make sure our rent and utilities were covered each month. And between moving expenses and our security deposit and my plane ticket home to Chicago, my savings were almost completely depleted. Far from “supporting” us, Jason’s paychecks always seemed to spend themselves—on gas and cigarettes, fast food and weed. He was like my teenage son. In fact, he was a teenager, but I needed him to grow up faster. Jason had recently quit his maintenance job because he said it was too physically exhausting, and it was a couple of weeks before he got a new job, canvassing for the environment, which meant standing outside all day and flirting with women until they donated money.
“No,” I told Vicky. “We moved here with my savings and now we’re both working.”
Only years later would I understand the subtext of her question. Vicky saw that the decisions that had landed us in the city where she lived had been made on a whim. She recognized that Jason and I had enough support, somehow, somewhere, to make big leaps without thinking too much about the consequences. But at the time, I didn’t feel like I had any support. In Albuquerque I so often felt like the sole party responsible, the only adult in the room.
A few days after my conversation with Vicky, Rick knocked on our door and asked Jason if he could borrow twenty bucks. Jason didn’t have it either. He asked me.
“Why does he need money?” I hissed.
“He says to buy a carton of cigarettes. He’ll pay you back.”
I found it inconceivable that he didn’t have twenty dollars, and that he would come over and ask me for it. Did Vicky think I was lying about where my money came from? All my waitressing tips were on my desk, in a purse shaped like a Chinese takeout container. Jason knew that’s where I kept them, and even that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to open my purse in front of Rick.
While I was deliberating over what to do, Jason seized the opportunity. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” Rick said.
“It’s kind of personal. Maybe we should go in the other room.”
“Jason,” I warned. “Don’t.”
“I’m not going in the other room with you, man.”
“I’ll go in the other room, then.” I started moving toward the bedroom.
“No, I want you to hear this,” Jason said. “There’s this blonde woman we see walking around the parking lot—”
“Crystal?”
“Is that her name, Crystal? Are you sleeping with her?”
Rick was standing in our kitchen. He looked cold, furious. “Even if I were,” he said, “it would be none of your business.”
I told Rick I was sorry, but I didn’t have any cash I could lend him, and he left.
Autumn in Albuquerque was bright sun and crisp air, chile ristras hanging to dry from all the eaves. For days leading up to the international hot air balloon fiesta in October, every time Jason said fiesta, I replied, “¡Olé!” We stayed up all night so that we could arrive at the park before sunrise, grabbing breakfast burritos and hot chocolates and then finding a spot to sit in the damp dawn grass. Our breath blew clouds in the cold. Across the dark field, the balloons weren’t yet lit.
“Someday I’m going to marry you,” Jason said.
“What do you mean ‘someday’?”
“I mean I’m young now, and I have to go and have other experiences. But just you wait.”
Actually, I didn’t want to wait. It wasn’t that I wanted to get married to him immediately, but I wanted to know how our story would end. I felt acute panic at the idea of him having “other experiences” without me, at the thought of being left behind. With Jason, I felt like I was standing under stage lights—it was too hot, maybe even uncomfortable, but everyone sitting in the dark could see me. With him, I was a bright young thing. And when I forced myself to imagine life without him, he got to stay onstage but I had to go back and sit in the shadows and watch.
One by one, the balloons were ignited and the Dawn Patrol began. It was beautiful to witness the launch of these huge, glowing bulbs. Close to us, on the ground, the balloons appeared as big as houses, but as they rose into the sky they grew smaller and smaller until they were just resplendent thumbprints. With my disposable camera, I took a picture of Jason, wearing his Ray-Bans, fingers pointed. Behind him the sky was a corona of blue.
A week before Thanksgiving, Jason woke me in the middle of the night.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Vicky is here. She says she wants to talk to you.”
I found her standing in our living room in a Looney Tunes sweatshirt and a pair of socks, hugging herself, crying and wiping her nose on her sleeve. Drunk. It was Rick’s
fortieth birthday, she said. She’d started an argument about getting a divorce, the fight had escalated, and Rick had taken the batteries out of her phone so she couldn’t call the police.
“Then I kicked him in the balls and he started hitting my legs with his fists like this,” she said, violently demonstrating.
“I’m calling the police,” Jason said.
“No, don’t,” Vicky said. “I’m so humiliated. Please don’t.”
“Why do you let him treat you like this?” he said. “You deserve better than him. He’s an asshole. You need to leave him. You should take Scarlet and Tana and go to a shelter.” He lit a cigarette and paced around the kitchen with a cause to fight for. I rubbed Vicky’s thin back.
“Can I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure,” he said, and handed her the pack.
“I have to work in the morning. This is so humiliating.”
I felt humiliated for her. Her cheeks were flush with gin blossoms, her eyes swollen from crying. I didn’t know what to do. The phrase domestic violence popped into my head and hung there, like a banner above a carnival scene. If she had come over when I was home alone and begged me not to call the police, I never would have. But I wasn’t home alone. Jason was there, and he called 911 to report a domestic dispute. After enduring an adolescence locked up in treatment centers and wilderness reform programs, Jason was galvanized by any opportunity to be on the offensive. Rick’s behavior gave Jason the opportunity to play the hero.
While we waited for the cops to arrive, Vicky pulled herself together. She went in the bathroom and splashed water on her face, lit a fresh cigarette, prepared for her performance. First we saw the siren lights through the patio doors, and then I watched through the peephole as the cops walked over to Rick and Vicky’s. I opened our door. “Over here,” I whispered. They turned around.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been here, is it?” the female cop asked. Vicky said nothing. When prompted, she told them the same story she told us, except when they hinted at arresting her husband, Vicky changed her mind and said forget it, she’d sign whatever they wanted her to sign as long as she could go home.
