“I just started writing,” I say. “I’m not ready.”
“That’s good,” Kelly says. She stretches out her legs in the sun. She has less makeup on today, and you can see how pretty she really is, freed up from all that pretense and effort. “You should wait. Too many people send out their stuff before it’s ready.”
“That’s right,” the other girl says. “Too many are focused on publication, not the writing. But if you rush the process, the writing isn’t good. You lose the whole purpose of having written.”
“That’s one of the things I love about writing,” Kelly says now. Her eyes are lit up. “I love the surprise. You never know where it will take you.”
I listen, rapt, excited. This. I want this. The first thing, other than boys, that feels meaningful to me, that I can feel in my veins, can literally feel moving its way through me like a drug. I go back to my room to work on my story some more.
The day Leif arrives, I’m ecstatic. I can’t wait to get my arms around him, to get him near me. I pace my room, making myself wait to take my shower and get ready. It would be unbearable to be dressed too early. I try to read, but I can’t keep the sentences in my head.
As soon as he arrives, we strip down and have sex. Then we go out for some food. He comes with me to a poetry reading that evening, but he fidgets beside me. I know he has no interest in any of this. So after the reading, when I would normally socialize with the other participants at the reception, discussing the reading and our own writing, I go back to my room with Leif. He takes out his guitar and noodles around on it for a while. I lie on my bed and watch him, then take out a book and try to read. But that restlessness moves right in again as though it arrived with him, a package deal. When he leaves, I am just a tiny bit relieved. Kelly, who has been hesitant to workshop her story, brings in copies during the final week. Having finished my rewrite, I too hand out my story. Kelly’s is about a girl whose father gives weekly ear cleanings. The writing is suggestive and harrowing, and it’s clear something terrible and lascivious happens during these ear cleanings. We all rave, impressed. By now, Kelly is the talk of the workshop, but not for her writing. The way she walks, her pout. All the men whisper comments to each other, the same way the boys did back in high school about Jeannette. The girls keep their distance. I feel sad for her. She overwhelms her talent with this need for attention. Her talent isn’t enough. The second to last night of the workshop, Kelly shows up to the reading wearing a tight minidress patterned with big red cherries. We all watch as she approaches, flirts with, and then leaves with the author who read. Before reading her story, I didn’t see our connection. Now I get how much we’re alike. She is me in bold print. I can’t know for sure whether her story is autobiographical, but it gets me thinking about my own past, about the lack of boundaries in my family. Is this why I’ve handed over my body to so many boys?
The next day, the teacher reads my story aloud. Listening to her read, I’m amazed I wrote it. It’s actually good. She congratulates me for progressing so much in the short time we’ve been together.
“You’re a real writer,” she says.
Her words feel like salvation.
Senior year. I turn myself toward writing. I find a fiction tutor since my college doesn’t have a creative writing department, and I start pumping out stories. As Dad warned, truths begin to slip out now that the war is long over. The long-standing fires in Kuwait, our country’s backing out of supporting the Shiites. Angry, I join other students to march and rally for peace in the Middle East. I take on an editor position for Clark’s alternative, liberal newspaper. I don’t know as much as I should, but it feels good to get behind something, to channel my anger into something real. Leif moves into an apartment with a mutual friend and her boyfriend, and I find an apartment by myself. I try not to focus on the fact that the girl Leif lives with is stunningly beautiful. I don’t want to be one of those jealous girlfriends who doesn’t let her man have friendships with other girls, beautiful or not. But almost immediately, it starts to get to me. What I really hoped was he would want to live with me. Instead, he opted to live with the prettiest girl on campus.
“What about with the bathroom?” I ask him when I come to see his new place. “Does she come out of there in a towel?”
“I don’t know, Kerry,” he says. “I haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m living with her and her boyfriend.”
I sit on his bed. I want something more from him, I’m just not sure what. To tell me I’m prettier? That he loves me only? That he’ll never love anyone else? I’m being stupid, I know, especially since I’m finding myself more and more bored with him. Our interests are too disparate. But this truth nags at me, making me cling tighter.
“Kerry,” he says, seeing the way I look, “this is ridiculous.”
“She’s very insecure,” I tell him. I wince inside. This girl I’m talking about is my friend. This is my friend whom I’m degrading.
“I don’t like her,” he says. “Can we drop it?”
I press my lips together, knowing he’s right.
Tyler’s getting married. Our father, in typical I-won’thear-it-if-it-makes-me-uncomfortable style for which we all make fun of him, calls me a month before her wedding.
“Tyler’s getting married,” he says with shock in his voice.
“I know, Dad. You do too,” I tell him. “We’ve all known for almost a year.”
But I can relate. It really is hard to believe. She’s made a point of being anti-marriage for a long time. A few years ago, when I told her I wanted to get married someday, even though our parents divorced, she said she didn’t.
“Mom and Dad never should have gotten married either,” she told me. “They were too different. Not at first, of course. But they went in different directions, like most people do over time. Humans aren’t supposed to mate for life. Patriarchal religions made that up so women would be under men’s control. Marriage is bullshit.”
But handmade invitations with sketches of herself and her fiance, Gill, that say, “We’re getting hitched!” arrive in the mail. Leif and I fly to Chicago for the wedding, which is really just a small party at a local bar she and her fiance frequent. My mother is there with her boyfriend. Dad and Nora are there too. My sister wears yellow cowboy boots and a black dress that shows off the many illustrative tattoos on her back. Gill is in a charcoal gray jacket with a turquoise bolo. They stand at the back of the bar in front of a painting of Spike Lee and thank everyone for coming to celebrate their union. Tyler looks happy, but also something else. Sheepish, embarrassed. I’m not sure what. I hug her and say I’m happy for her, but really I’m bugged. Maybe it’s because she’s doing this thing she was so clearly against. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously. Whatever it is, I feel angry with her, and also worried. When I tell Leif later, he shrugs and suggests I let it go. But I can’t. It’s all too familiar, her need for this security. She keeps it hidden behind her tough, anticorporate facade. She talks loudly about all the ways she’s getting screwed, about the environment, the government, everything but her real self. I know what that feels like, that kind of vulnerability. I know how scary it is to have it hang out there, how much I work to hide it too. In truth, I would marry Leif in a second. I would marry almost anyone in a second, if that would make me feel loved.
Just a few months later, Leif’s and my beautiful friend and her boyfriend break up, and Leif is left with no housing. I suggest he live with me, and though he is still hesitant, he agrees under one condition: We’ll keep separate rooms, like proper roommates. I hate that he wants this. He doesn’t want our lives to meld. But I am well practiced at taking what I can get.
The fact that his marijuana dealer just moved in one floor below me can’t hurt my cause either.
He takes the room I had set up as my office, but after a few weeks I work myself into that room too, and it becomes our shared bedroom. With Leif firmly in my grasp, I focus more and more on writing. I apply to MFA programs, my top choice in Arizona. Leif applies to music programs, including the same school in Arizona. On Spree Day, we lie in bed, listening to the excitement and music outside the window. Leif reaches for me, and we make love. But unlike last year, I feel restless. I lie beneath him, uninterested, wishing he’d hurry up. I want to get outside, into the world. I want to feel like I did last year, enlivened and full. I build a schedule. Every morning I wake at six a.m. On alternate mornings I write for three hours before my first class, and on the other days I run three miles around the indoor track at the gym. During the day I attend class, work at the local bookstore, and am
