Jamie is back from outer space. He goes every two weeks and comes back balder. I ask him what he sees out there and he sips slowly at his coca cola and waits to answer. He is thinner each time he returns; his dimples are like holes, burned into his cheeks. He says Space is nothing like what most people imagine: cold clots of rock orbiting quietly through the dark. No, he says, it’s more raucous than that. Wilder.
The sofa is too soft and makes our backs hurt and the old wood table is full of sugar-stains. The effect of poor housekeeping, sponges lamed by prior mildews, an aggressive strain of laziness.
Jamie’s tired these days, when he gets back. Sips at his Coke and tells me things. Like Saturn’s rings are made of shattered moons and Venus is hotter than Austin in August and Mars isn’t red but a dusty sulfuric gold and there aren’t any trees.
I say I don’t believe it’s not red. Of course, it’s red. It’s always been red. But I’d never once thought there might be trees. Maybe cacti—things prickly and reticent, holding water, dark and secret.
*
Jamie likes to do role-plays sometimes. It started months ago, after a long time away, visiting the gaseous skirts of Venus. He returned an older man and then I found myself changed, too, beneath him.
He’d seen things I couldn’t compete with. The ribs of the universe, moons crushed into hoopskirts and all those dead debutante stars glinting secrets to him through the sky. So I became as young or as undercooked as he needed me to be, and then I liked it. And then I craved it. And then I knelt before him and begged for it. Supplicant. Dizzy. Sashaying my quiet light through the dark of our apartment and praying he’d realize how much easier it was to breathe in an atmosphere with me in it.
He plays a rotating cast of priests and professors, coaches, and conquistadors and I play slightly different variations on the same young girl—some Nabakovian nymphet in white stockings. In fact, I’m nothing Humbert Humbert would have wanted. Broad and thick-limbed; a woman who would, by all accounts, seem more suited to a competitive softball league than coquetry and lace dresses.
Last week, he was a rabbi, aiding and abetting my Bat Mitzvah preparations with his wizened, scholarly cock. Tonight, he’s my gymnastics coach, on a team straddling the rocky, illicit precipice of failure. Contorts me into various positions, tests the limits of my skin; takes the weight of my faux-pubescent breasts in his hands and mouth, assessing, adjudging, Asks me about sleepovers with teammates as he watches me touch myself.
There’s a thickness in his throat, my own breath quickening, as he slides my underpants down my hips with great gentleness, fingers planting heat into the flesh of my waist.
It’s like jumping into a pool for the first time without water wings. Or driving wild through a cornfield in the pitch-slick dark. This is always how it feels when, finally, we’re on the floor, fucking. Never comfortable, really, but always like the choice most likely to lead to more Life. Life lived less afraid, lived better, lived believing the body is somehow, against all odds, impervious to decay. That, when it dies, it will share the fate of carbon and shimmy straight into the star-fleet, more beautiful than it was when it started.
After, we sit on the wood floor together holding hands. We eat gourmet potato chips out of the bag and watch the snowdrift out the open window and he asks me about work and I don’t tell him I’ve lost another job, another and another and another, because I’m impetuous and stubborn and can’t stand a single minute of not doing exactly what I please, because I feel death in every moment of unhappiness, a sense of its cold fingers edged into every table I wait, every register I count. I tell him little beyond fine and great, and he does not press. Goes back to space and leaves me in our rental with the sticky counters I won’t clean and I miss his hands. I just miss holding his hands.
*
The phone calls start coming one month later, as winter makes the Northern hemisphere into a giant ice rink and only people who aren’t always losing jobs can afford the skates necessary to go outdoors. So, I stay in, and Jamie floats along in the deep-black of space skimming Saturn’s broke-moon neckwear and it snows and it snows and the garbage piles up and lucky its so cold or it’d stink much worse than it does.
I’m eating a banana about to go to rot, in the dark, the slithery wetness of peel draped over my hand. There’s a whooshing skid-sound of skates from outside my window that makes me lonesome for something human to lay my hands on, and through my dance with silence and soft-fruit chewing, the phone cuts in:
BrrrrriiiiingBRRrrrrriiiiiiing.
“Hell-o?” I am expecting Jamie, though I also know better. He always tells me he has no way to reach our line from where he goes.
“Oh.” A woman’s voice.
Silence.
And then, she hangs up.
I wait for her to call back, but she doesn’t. From the sofa, I stare at the white wall, streaked with the blood of a mosquito Jamie killed last summer. I still can’t bear to clear its guts off the wall.
*
The calls come several more times, always when he’s gone. There is always snow, and always garbage, and more and more there are bananas draped over my hands, not so different from skin, but slimier, quicker to rot.
“Hello?”
” .”
Blunk. Hang-up. Nothing more.
I begin looking forward to the calls. Think the woman does, too. After I greet her, we remain together in our silence, and in that thickness something happens, some kind of brief community where nothing more is expected of us, and we can just. Be. It’s simple. We are simple.
BRRRIIIINNNNNNNNNGRIIIIINNNNG.
“Hello, you.”
” .”
” !!”
But after a while, I can hear her trying to muffle sounds of crying on the other end. And then she stops trying to muffle them. And then she blubbers: “OOOHHHHHHHH. OOOHHH.”
And I say, “I know. I know. I know.” I know everything she knows. I am some wise, improbable Buddha. I am absolutely certain of my position in the world.
I open the door to the refrigerator. Empty, mostly. A fallen stack of bananas. A tub of cream cheese. I pull it from its shelf and put it on the counter. Inside is crust and a yellow-skin grown over what might still be edible. I put it back. Return to the sofa. Watch the light change from blue to black through the window, dappled by the plumping acne of snow.
BRRRIIINNNNNNNNGBRIIINN–.
“Hello, my friend. ”
“AAARRRRaaaahhhhhgOOOOOhhhhhOOOOHHHH. ”
“Just let it out. Let it out. ”
She sobs a while. I don’t try and stop her.
“It’s horrible,” she says.
“It sounds horrible. ”
“He takes so long to come back.”
“What?”
“Hello?” the woman asks. “He isn’t with you, is he?”
Winter’s suddenly entered me from every one of my holes. I’m cold everywhere, there’s creeping blue ice and sleet-rain. Said ‘oh’ the first time she heard my voice. Expected him, got me. Silence I perceived as community. She expected I expected—
Him.
We both expected him and instead received each other.
“No one is with me,” I finally say.
“You don’t own skates, do you? He doesn’t own skates. I don’t know how he gets around out there.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“It won’t stop snowing.”
“I don’t know anything,”
“Well, do you know when he’ll be back?” she asks.
I hang up this time.
•
I go out for the first time in a long time. A dog’s year, hyperbolically. Wade through waist-high snow in tennis shoes, soaking them through. Two pairs of socks, ruined, salt-rimed and snow-thick. It’s okay, it’s okay. Sometimes this is the only thing I can tell myself that actually changes the real thing going on—the maybe not-okayness.
It’s okay, it’s okay to not be okay, which might make it okay, all of it, at least for a while. The bar glows in the distance, fogged-up windows showing smudgy people inside, playing pool and swilling drinks in smudgy glasses and not thinking about whatever it is they want not to think about.
There’s thrill in the center of me. My hair is mussed, my skin dry, my bottom lip cut with a scab formed over the cut. Inside is dim like you want a bar to be in winter, or anytime. Inside is lonely as the dark innards of Jonah’s whale; everyone looks to be approximating seamen or are actual seamen. Their sticks hit cue balls and they curse something wicked when they flub. They have so much hair, so much fur, so much wild in their eyes. I could let them devour me each in turn. I could show them beneath my long skirt and how it is bare except for the outgrown jungle-y pubic parts. A pubic party.
Their beards, my lady-beard, our drunk mouths. So much fur.
I order whiskey and feel lucky to be on earth. It is luck that made me legged and hungry. If I was not hungry, I would be dead. My legs might go off first. I am lucky for being a human earthling with hunger. I am lucky just now to be alone.
The bartender pours whiskey with a shaky hand, half blinked-off Christmas lights the rows of liquor bottles’ sole luminescence. He must know those shapes and smells entirely by heart. The feel of each curve and ridge. He’s got mushroom-y bowl-cut hair, white-blonde, clean-shaven or non-shaven by lack of necessity. He doesn’t look like a bartender. He looks like a brother. Not like my brother, but like someone’s brother. I don’t even have a brother. If I did, I would call him every day. I would bake him birthday cakes every month and mail him long letters. I would be a good sister. I would love long, in the way that siblings love. I would mourn him quietly each day we were apart, the way family must separate so each member can become herself, on her own little plot of land, but it’s still damn lonely to do so. I would carry a photo of him in my wallet, like some lost love gone to war. It would all be very exclusive. No one else would know us the way we knew us.
I wait awhile for one of the seamen to quit pool and sit beside me, but their cue balls keep rustling into pockets and they’re too frustrated by it to work up the separate fury of sex. I fix my gaze upon the bartender and he tosses his blonde hair like a pony and I think he might be the one I get out of it all. The little plastic prize that comes out of those dinky machines at the grocery store, after you slot your quarter inside and twist the metal piece counterclockwise till it clicks.
I stay put like a creep until everyone else leaves and I say, Bet you didn’t think I’d be the last man standing, and he says, Oh, but it’s always the ones you least expect.
I help him shut the lights out, pull the metal grate down as far as it’ll go in the snow mound and secure the padlocks where the need securing. He wraps me in his peacoat as far as it’ll cover us both and we trudge together to right outside his apartment, where he kisses me long on the mouth and says he’s got to wake up early. He gnashes the edge of one ice-skate against a frozen plank built up over the ledge of his door frame. My feet are so cold they almost feel like nothing, or like they’re off somewhere, living their own lives separate from the rest of me.
I say that’s okay, I have to wake up early, too. And he says, I mean really early, and it’s really late, and I say, Does that mean I can’t stay, and he says, Yes, that’s what that means. Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind about the last man standing. Or maybe he only kissed me as a consolation prize, for my help closing up the bar, for my help getting him home and leaving him at the door, where I was to go no further.
He kisses me again and then on the neck for the first time and I shiver the half-mile home, wobbly and sore and on what must just be stumps at this point because these feet seem to have definitely flown the coop, so to speak.
I rub them when I get home until I fall asleep, still rubbing them, and it’s good just to have something real to do. It’s very good.
*
“You haven’t been practicing your algebra,” Jamie says.
Tonight, he’s my math teacher. More weeks gone by. The garbage stacked more neatly for his return. Put in bins and beneath cabinets. We are preparing for the SAT. There is still snow on the ground. I have not returned to the bar, or any bar. I’m still not a drinker. He’s older than he has ever been. Balder. His skull shines like ice beneath streetlamps.
“I practice every night,” I tell him. “Every fucking night.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to speak to your teacher that way,” Jamie says. His big hand flutters near the zipper of his pants. “You’d better explain to me how you plan to multiply this binomial.”
Eyebrow-wiggle, wink-wink. The casual facial movements of a man who leaves too long to know what he’s missed.
“A woman has been calling here, while you’ve been away.” I push my palm flush against his hand against his zipper against his dick. He yelps.
He grabs the dick-hurting hand and uses it to swing me around the other side of his lap. Presses me there, belly down over his knee. Lifts my skirt. Lowers my bloomers.
“Number One.” He wets his palm, rubs cold circles around my buttocks. “Multiply the first two terms of each binomial together.”
Whack with the flat of his palm. “Followed by whack the two outside terms. And then whack the two inside terms.” He sucks on his two fingers, presses them slowly inside of me. “And what do you think comes next?” He pushes his fingers in and out inandoutinandout, making circles, making moons. “I want you to do this one.”
Circles moons circles moons. “I don’t know,” I say, sharply. “I didn’t study because I was too busy looking at pictures of you in last year’s yearbook and masturbating.”
“I’m only being so hard on you,” he says, “because if you mess this up on the SAT, well, you can just forget about college.” My solar plexus, pressing against his thigh, is starting to ache.
“Someone is looking for you,” I say, trying to shift away from him. He holds me there, arrests my wrists behind my back. “She calls a lot. Sometimes she cries.”
“I can see you still aren’t getting how important this is,” he says. But when I look at his eyes they’re not his eyes. They’re math teacher eyes, and math teachers don’t know shit about weeping women on telephones.
He lowers me softly to the ground. Holds my hands behind my back and fucks me on the floor.
We don’t hold hands after. We are out of chips.
*
I was a virgin when I entered college, but I’d given a blowjob once. It was to the boy who’d made my fake ID. He had loose skin around his belly and a line of hair bisecting his whole torso evenly down the middle. After it happened, I was led into a blank room with a big blue screen to stand in front of. The boy snapped my picture with a digital camera and told me not to smile. I’d wanted to smile so badly then. I’d just swallowed his semen and it was my first semen and it felt like a prize. When the picture slid out onto the printer tray, he affixed it to a special, flimsy plastic, smoothed laminate paper over it with the fat edge of his palm and placed it still warm in my hands. It was a West Virginia ID and worked under the scanner lights of bars and liquor stores. In the photo, I looked like I was trying not to batch my pants. He knocked the price down from one-fifty to one hundred because I’d had his dick in my mouth.
*
Jamie’s extra space suits hang in the closet—crimpled and silver like tinfoil, studded with pockets and zippers. I found balled-up napkins in one of them, once. A book of matches and a hangnail, jagged at one end. Three dirty pennies and one dime and the torn corner of someone’s business card. A pay stub from Quimby’s comic book store for $139.94.
*
BRRIIIIINNNNNGBRIIIIIIINNNGGBRRIII—
“Hello.”
“I wanted to tell you,” the woman begins—
“Okay,” I say. My heart is very loud in my chest. “Please tell me.”
“I had the wrong number,” she says. “I was trying to reach my daughter-in-law. My ex-daughter-in-law. I thought you—my son—he’s been gone a long time. But I found him. He’s back in Minnesota. He’s safe. I’m so sorry to have bothered you.”
Three banana skins cling to the arm of the sofa. “No,” I tell her. “I’m just glad he’s safe.”
“You take care,” she says. “You know, the government is giving skates out on subsidies now. You’ve just got to apply. It only takes a couple of weeks.”
“Give him my regards,” I say.
I hear her muffle the receiver with her palm, but not entirely. “Richard!” She shouts, probably up the soft-carpeted stairs, or into the warm hearth of their kitchen. “A nice woman sends you her regards.”
Oh.
Richard.
A nice woman.
When did she decide?
*
I still think about that small plain room sometimes, the sound of the printer spitting out my new face. How young I was and how much I wanted. I left home planning never to come back, and I didn’t. Just stayed away until my away-ness took up residence in place of my there-ness and became what I was. The Away person. When I call my mother, she sometimes takes full seconds to recognize my voice.
*
Jamie goes to space and comes back more and more tired. He’s almost entirely bald now—his skull reflects moonlight off the dark walls of the bedroom.
Tonight, the first night he’s stayed the night in many nights, I find his body in the middle of the bed and his big gleaming head and we shift and turn and plug into each other, mute and uncertain.
“Hi,” I say to him, as he presses against me from behind.
“Hi,” he says, and his eyes reflect the moon like his skull reflects the moon like he’s full of moon milk and it’s streaming now out of every part of him. And I’m just the lost mortal beside him, made of regular earth-stuff, like bananas and tap water. And Richard is home now, but soon he’ll be lost again because he was lost once, and people always repeat themselves. And I wish I could reach through the phone lines to Minnesota and shake Richard and tell him how lucky he is, to have a mother there to keen for his return. Maybe a brother, too, to bake cakes for, to send letters to, to worship and adore. I just don’t know. I will never know.
I wish I could shake him.
Jamie plugs his chin to the top of my shoulder. There are some people you have to love, for these small things they do. It’s not fair, it just is. And you are lost to it. And it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Of course it is. Okay.
Kate Weinberg is a Baltimore-born & bred artist, performer, writer, and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems and stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in places like Armchair/Shotgun, the Saturday Evening Post, the San Pedro River Review, the Liar’s League (London), Bohemia Journal, Chicago Literati, the Quotable, and BlazeVOX. She is a graduate of DePaul University’s Theatre School in Chicago and the pseudonymous author of two YA murder mysteries.
