This Place
You are always alone, which had taken some getting used to. You had spent the previous nine months pouring cheap vodka down your throat, elbow to elbow with two or three other confused, over-stimulated women your age, wearing lipstick that didn’t match your skin tone.
As if you had done something great, you’re home now, like Ulysses. It is 2007 and you were the least interesting person at your college. Your first-year roommate is living out these three months in her mother’s yurt, in Hawaii. Your other good friend is in Central America, seeking out a Zapatista convention. You work at Applebee’s.
No one can give you a ride this morning, so you’re biking with your uniform in your backpack down the sidewalk that runs along 17th Street. It’s not safe to bike on the roads, your mother tells you, and you have to pause and re-route several times for elderly residents that walk back and forth in front of the retirement complex that stretches down the block.
At work, they say you look nice. You must have gotten some sun.
Everyone at Applebee’s has to wear black and carry around steaks. The place smells like hot meat and cleaner and pungent milky dressings. Your job is to toss blue cheese or ranch or Caesar with lettuce in a plastic bag and shake it out on salad plates. The dressing sprays out of the bag and sprinkles white flecks all over your black shirt.
“Look,” you say to another server, Katie, around three pm, “it’s like a cotton galaxy.”
Katie does not respond.
You arrive home and take off your work clothes and wait for Dan to call.
After he admitted he had been in love with you since you were fourteen, Dan dumped you for the second time. That was a couple weeks ago. The second breakup letter was attached to a mixed CD. The title, written on the shiny disc in permanent marker, was “Glad and Sorry.” It included songs such as, “Glad and Sorry” by The Faces, Rod Stewart’s original band, as well as The Clientele’s “I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” and Graham Nash’s “I Used to Be A King.”
You had listened to the mix as you walked to Problems of Philosophy every morning, thinking about him, and then perception as the source of your reality, different from everyone else’s. All things becoming true because you told yourself they were true. You were eighteen, you were listening to Rod Stewart, and you accepted it wholeheartedly.
The next time you had seen Dan was in your hometown, under a tree after your shift at Applebee’s, not really inhaling the smoke from a Swisher Sweet.
He told you he was going away to Italy, that he was having friends over, that he would call you, that you should come.
The next week, as you are clearing the dishes of two young professionals, a spoon that slips from the dessert plate shoots across the air, far from their table.
“Oops,” you say. “Flying spoon!”
They laugh. You get the spoon from the floor and bus the rest. When you come back, there is a small tip.
The week after, work doesn’t start for twenty minutes so you go into the card shop in the strip mall a couple stores down from the restaurant.
“Hello,” you say to the old man at the counter.
You read every card under Birthday–Humorous. You move on to Birthday–For Her. The top left is a normal photograph of a yellow shoe. Inside it has a flap in which to put money. It says, New shoes kill the birthday blues!
“Who are you getting the card for?” asks the old man.
“What?” you say.
“Whose birthday is it?” he calls again.
You say, “Oh, you know, myself. It’s my birthday.”
He chuckles.
You keep reading through. Your favorite is a card that features a muscle man carrying a chocolate cake. It says, If you’re looking at what he’s got in his hands, you know you’re getting old.
Before you can leave your shift, you have to scrape away at a year’s worth of grime that has built up in cracks between wooden panels that make up the bar. The grime is deeply encrusted in the wood and booger-like.
You become heated as you clean, wishing you hadn’t gotten so used to typing ill-formed arguments in Word documents for a living, and raising your hand in class — but not as high as high school. There’s slack at the elbow, just so, as if you had deserved the rest.
Your manager kneels next to you to look at the job, smelling like the fragrance section of JCPenney.
He says, “How’s it going?”
You wait to answer because you are scraping grime. New shoes kill the birthday blues. “It’s my birthday today,” you tell him.
He turns his head, still squatted. “No shit?”
“No shit,” you say.
“Psh…. ’ey! You guys.” Two or three of your coworkers look over. “Is it really her birthday?”
No one knows. He turns back to you. You shrug.
“Can I leave early?” you ask.
“Is it really your birthday?”
“Yeah, it is,” you say, with a bigger smile this time.
He sits on the ground. “Aight. Get out of here.” But you stay on the ground with him to finish up.
“Go on, git!”
You walk your bike home.
Katie from work calls you as you’re walking. “Happy Birthday,” she says. “Is it today or are you just celebrating on the weekend?”
You wipe wet hair out of your face. “Um,” you tell her. “It’s today.”
“Do you want to go out?”
“Yeah,” you say. “I mean, I don’t know. I have this other party to go to.”
Today is Dan’s going-away. Perhaps that you said it was your birthday is a coincidence. The Problems of Philosophy: either nothing is coincidence, or everything is coincidence.
You eat a fourth of a jar of peanut butter. You eat it with a fork and it makes patterned rows after every bite. You try to keep the crop rows in circles around the jar, that way it looks nice, and you have to eat another bite to round off the ends.
I still look good in a bathing suit, though, you think.
You put on your bathing suit and go outside. You call Dan. He doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s eating dinner. You call again.
“Hello?”
“Dan. Guess what I’m smoking?”
“What.”
“Come on,” you say.
“What, Swisher Sweets?”
“Yeah! Of course.” He must be doing something else. He sounds distracted.
“And it’s my birthday,” you add.
“No fucking way. No it isn’t. Really?”
“Yeah.” He is quiet. “Haha, you fucking bastard,” you say. “I can’t believe you forgot.”
“Well, shit. Happy Birthday!”
“Thanks.” You are pacing in your backyard. “Yep, so, I was smoking these, and I thought of you. Are you still having people over?”
“Yeah, come on by. Come on by, definitely.”
“Okay…” Silence. “I’ll see you soon?”
“Yeah. We’ll celebrate together.”
You enter Dan’s house wearing a white dress, the one you wore for your high school graduation. You see Dan from across the room holding a wine glass, talking to a girl with short hair. You don’t know anyone else at the party. You stand by the bathroom. Dan is wearing a disco ball helmet.
Dan’s roommate, Chris, keeps saying, “Hi, I’m Christopher, have a drink…”
You keep saying, “Hi. Thank you, I will.”
You touch shoulders with him while the gin glub-glubs, and then the tonic, and they even have limes.
“So what’s your sign?” says Chris.
You laugh and go on the balcony to look for Dan, and then back inside, to his room with the old mattress.
Dan comes in holding a new drink, breathing hard after he fetched his CD book from downstairs.
Dan has changed his glasses from horn-rimmed to a thin, gold wire, so his brown eyes are visible. It appears he is no longer afraid of wearing shorts, and his thin calves glow pink and tan, with small white circles around the hair follicles.
You tell him what you like about every band he puts on, in a loud voice. You can’t tell if he is pleased but he keeps playing them, one after the other. He removes his disco ball helmet from his head, and puts it on yours.
You say, “Tell me about the music.”
“Tell you all about the music,” Dan repeats. “Some’s mine, some’s Chris’. I don’t know. It’s good. It’s all good.”
The short-haired girl that Dan was talking to earlier enters the room. You take off the disco-ball helmet and give it to Chris, who puts it on. Chris leans toward you, reflecting spots on your face.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers. “Don’t worry about Dan.”
Katie from Applebee’s calls again. She says she’s bringing her friends to your birthday party and she wants directions.
You say, “Which friends?”
She says, “Like, probably Mike, and Rob, and Austin. We can just have a few birthday drinks and fuckin’ rip it up, yeah?”
“Yeah,” you say. You wonder if you should tell them that this party is not your birthday party. You think of other ways you could spend this night, but nothing comes to mind.
Dan has left the room.
Right before you went to college, he told you he had liked you since the first time he saw you, but that it would never work. You would be too far away and not here, in your hometown, with him. Then you consented to sleep with him in the sort of half-attic that was currently above the two of you, pasted with Frank Zappa posters.
Katie and her friends arrive. You bring them to the basement. There are the three boys, Ross, Mike, Austin and another girl named Kelsey. You have never seen them before in your life.
The five sit around you lifting their glasses and saying, “Cheers, to the birthday girl.”
“What else did you do to celebrate your birthday?” Katie asks.
“Oh, nothing,” you say.
“Come on, you must have done something.” She is smiling.
“I’m here, haha.”
She says, “That’s something.”
Austin is stocky and wearing a yellow T-shirt. He stands up and claps once. “Let’s check on the upstairs, y’alls.”
Dan and Chris are lost in all the people and you are not as drunk as you thought, or you are and you don’t know it. Everyone is wearing black again and you are getting sweaty.
You tell Katie not to invite anyone else to your birthday party.
“I think it’s funny,” you say. “They’re all here and don’t know why.”
She nods. Maybe she can’t hear you.
Katie’s friends yell at everyone in their way and begin to play darts.
Dan is on the dance floor, with Chris and the girl with short hair. You look at him a lot over the floating heads. Here he comes, from dancing, winded.
“Come dance, birthday girl,” he says. “It’s my last night.”
Dan’s looking at you while you’re dancing, even though you’re red-faced and your hair is wet again. You keep your arms down but you shake your body a lot. Maybe you are drunk. You don’t know. Dan is, now. He’s sweaty, too, and dancing like a wild man. His skinny body flails and his eyes are half open and every once in a while he smiles his thin-lipped smile at you.
You ask him right in his ear, “Why are you going to Italy?”
“Because I got a fellowship,” he says back, close to your neck, and your ear heats up. “And I have to get out of here.”
“I know how you feel,” you respond.
“This place kills me.” Dan grabs you closer. “It drives me insane.”
“Me, too,” you say, and your blood is pumping as you’re pressed against him, and you see everything he sees. By all accounts, your realities are the same.
“Speaking of insane,” you say into his neck. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“My real birthday’s actually a few days away,” you tell him.
“What?” he repeats.
“I just said it to get out of work, and then kept going.” You laugh.
He laughs, and there is that gap of silence between songs.
“Why couldn’t you just wait until your real birthday?”
Because your pelvises were touching, and you were finally in the same place. He would get to peel off and never come back, but you had to stay right where you were. Even a few days, to you, is the same sort of eternity you find in novels and dreams, where time is distorted.
“The day is not the point of the birthday. The point of the birthday is the party!” You gesture around you.
Dan has sort of backed away, dancing bodies between you. That song, “Stuck In the Middle,” by Stealer’s Wheel comes on.
On your real birthday, you would also be working at Applebee’s. Your parents had even suggested meeting you at the restaurant after your shift, and eating dinner there.
You realize how sad all of it is. Problems of Philosophy would say it is only sad because you perceive it so, but there is also some part of you that would like to know if it is objectively this way. That it is not just you.
Dan disappears, and you let him.
Chris is sitting upright on the couch with the disco ball helmet on, asleep. The house is empty.
You walk home in the dawn. Your next shift starts in seven hours.
That afternoon, you call your college roommate, the one living in Hawaii. She answers, sounding muffled.
“Good morning.”
“Is your mouth full?” you ask.
“Yeah, I’m eating a pineapple I found on the side of the road.”
You say nothing because you are walking on the sidewalk on 17th street, pausing to let a wheelchair pass.
“You can do that here,” she continues, and you can almost hear the acid juice trickle into her cheeks. “There’s fruit everywhere.”
“Guess what I did last night?”
“What?” she says, chewing.
You contemplate telling her that it was your birthday, or perhaps that you told everyone it was your birthday, but maybe she will tell you that you are depressed, and you would rather not hear that from someone who is eating fruit off the side of the road in Hawaii. That was all over now, anyway.
“Nothing. Never mind. I wish you could be here.”
“Me too.”
“It’s this place,” you tell her. “We should drive somewhere. We should drive to Vermont, or something. This place is killing me.”
“All right,” she says. “We can go on a roadtrip when I get back. Maybe go back to school.”
“This place,” you repeat, and you try to forget the summer already. You want to forget it before it happens.
“You’ll be fine,” she says.
You watch an ambulance depart from the retirement home, lights only but no sound, in no hurry.
“I’ll be fine if I can just get out of here,” you say.
If you tell yourself it is true, it is. If there is sadness, it is only here. You will leave and everything will be better and different, because why not? Soon you will turn nineteen, and that’s the way your mind works.
On the way to Canada, the speed of Anna’s car makes the countryside colorless and cloud-like. You fall asleep often. You dream of you and your friends building a fire near a cornfield on the side of the road, crouching over it, letting it spread, burning the landscape down.
After two days on the road, you pick up Wendy.
“You guys look so tired and pretty,” Wendy says as you drive away from her mother’s house.
You note with pleasure that she is right; that if photographed from the right angle, smoke pooling out of the windows of Anna’s car, all off-the-shoulder tops and dangly earrings, the three of you could be an advertisement for bad examples on a billboard PSA.
Wendy sucks on a rolled cigarette and blows it out the side of her mouth. “Lara.” She grabs the top of your arm. “How was your summer, baby girl?”
Except for you, actually. You would be the one off to the side, hunched and lost, imploring the viewer to consider the benefits of the D.A.R.E. program.
“Stupid,” you reply.
Anna rolls her eyes. “Lara’s a Debbie Downer. Everything’s been bad and stupid.”
“But it was stupid, compared to both of your summers,” you say, and take a sip of vodka-bittered orange juice.
Anna had met a self-proclaimed shaman in Hawaii over the summer. He told her that evil spirits can be mistaken for dehydration. Anna didn’t believe him, but even after she consumed nothing but coconut water for several days, hot, dark shadows were haunting her mother’s yurt. She’d left Hawaii early. Because something evil was going to happen, Anna had told you, grinning as the two of you drove through Ohio. She could feel it.
You buy gas somewhere across the border and it is much more expensive than the U.S. The man behind the counter takes your credit card, watching your friends wash the windows of the car over your shoulder. You follow his gaze.
Over the year and a half that you have known them, their beauty has become a fact, something that happens all around you but you only remember once in a while, like photosynthesis or gravity. Lately it has become more pronounced. They had both gotten sun, and this way of doing things like they had done them a thousand times before.
From the backseat, Wendy talks about her summer in Central America. She didn’t go to that Zapatista convention. Instead, she found a former Israeli soldier on vacation. The two of them rented an isolated hut on a Colombian beach and didn’t leave it for ten days. Like a goddamn movie.
Wendy looks at you in the rearview mirror. “Now you tell me a story.”
You rack your brain. It is so difficult to distinguish from day to day.
“Well, in July sometime, there was this guy who left his number on a napkin and I called him up. So we end up going to Spangles, this fast food restaurant. Anyway, we went back to his house after and it turns out he was studying to be a male nurse. So we get drunk and we watch something and we start to make out.”
“Good!” Anna says, hitting the steering wheel. “See, this is good. No more Dan.”
“But then, he wants to, like, take off my pants,” you say.
“So?” Wendy says.
“And I let him, and he, you know, descends there with his mouth. But then I look over to his coffee table, and there’s this big book lying there. And I’m squinting to read the title on the spine and I realize that it says, ‘Vaginal Anatomy.’ The book is called ‘Vaginal Anatomy’ and this male nurse wants to, like, I don’t know, conduct a scientific study? Like maybe he has a test the next day?”
Wendy has already started to guffaw.
“So I left. I went home.”
The car is silent, just the hum of the wheels going over the highway, David Bowie turned way down. You recall the guy’s name was Michael, pronounced Mick-ale, or something like that.
“Sorry I called you a Debbie Downer,” Anna says, and you tell her it’s fine, you are.
“Well, it’s all over now,” Wendy says.
You want to reply, I hope you’re right, but that is a very Debbie Downer thing to say.
In Montreal, you are staying at a Days Inn. You spy an Applebee’s sign through the window, down the street. There are Applebee’s even here. You feel your skin leaden.
Your final day at the restaurant, your general manager, in lieu of saying goodbye and good luck, had held out her soft, white hand for a high five. Her name was Raz.
Raz would always ask you to have a cigarette with her. You don’t smoke, but Raz would say, “Come anyway,” and the two of you stood by the blue dumpster while Raz shook her head and said, “Motherfucker.” Raz would shift back and forth and never look at you but say things like, “You’re rocking this shift, you know that?” The sun would set behind the Applebee’s fence and Raz would blow out smoke and say, “You’re my star.”
By that, she meant that you learned to not make food-related jokes. You asked before you put lemon slices in the water. You wore the required T-shirt that said, “I’m a rib-publican.”
But that is all over now.
You and Anna and Wendy run in from the warm rain, lopsided with a case of beer. The automatic doors close behind you and Anna starts stroking the wall, which is covered by a blown up photo of a forest scene. She leans against it and says, “I love this.”
You drink beers outside when it clears up, because there is no air conditioning. After your fourth, you tell them, “I don’t want to stay at the Days Inn tonight. Why do they have Days Inn in Canada?”
“We have to,” Anna says. “My mom made reservations.”
“I want to sleep on the side of the road.”
“No.”
“I want to sleep next to the railroad tracks.”
You pour out your beer on the parking lot.
Anna mutters, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
You can’t remember. “I can’t remember,” you say.
“Well, stop it,” Wendy says.
“I can’t just stop — ”
“STOP IT,” Anna shouts in your face.
After a silence, Wendy says, “Let’s go out.”
You return inside and try on different combinations of each other’s clothes. Then you walk to a street lined with a rainbow buzzing of bars and clubs. You feel simultaneously saturated and out of place. All you know is basements, your co-workers’ carpeted dens that still smell like last week’s flood, where muted, pregnant teenagers cried on MTV in the background.
Wendy and Anna hook your arms on either side. Perhaps Montreal will change you through osmosis.
“You have to wait in line to get inside these places?” you ask.
Wendy, who is wearing shorts, cowboy boots, and a halter top, says, “We don’t. Come on.”
You follow her back, squeezing through thin bodies with glaring, sharp faces, conversing in French. This one is a perfume ad, you think. We are the women wearing the perfume, the ones who come into focus at the end.
Anna keeps saying, “Excusez moi, excusez moi.”
A bouncer is in front of you, huge, guarding a dark and throbbing door.
“Can we get in? We were here earlier, and we’re meeting a friend,” Wendy says, smiling.
“We’re American,” Anna says.
You just stand there, staring at him, willing him silently, promising that once you are there, your image will bleed into theirs. Open, open, you think. This is my chance. You realize you are drunk.
“Okay,” he says, finally, and lets the three of you through.
Anna waits to go in behind you and shouts, “Bon! Bon! Merci!” to the long line of people and you jog away into the cavernous levels, laughing and looking over your shoulder. The three of you say, yay! in tiny voices while shaking your hands, as you had gotten in the habit of doing to celebrate small victories.
“Canadians are very stylish but very shy,” you say loudly a few drinks later.
“I need a man,” Anna says, looking around.
“No, Lara needs a man,” Wendy says. “Our priority is Lara.”
“I can find my own man,” you say.
“Then do it,” says Anna.
“You guys just keep telling me to do things, these things take ti — ”
“Here,” Wendy interrupts, putting the rim of her glass to your face. “Drinky, drinky. You drink up now.”
You chug the gin and tonic, wipe your mouth, and look around. Three men of indiscernible age stand in a corner, wearing different versions of the same polo shirt.
You walk over, distorting your face in different ways, trying to relax it.
“Hello,” you say to them. Their teeth glow in the dark.
They say things you can’t hear over the music, which sounds like machines melting, or coming to orgasm.
You point to your friends. They follow you over.
“They’re kind of stupid,” you mutter before they arrive.
At the same time, Anna and Wendy say, respectively, “You don’t know that,” and, “Sometimes stupid is better.”
You are dancing with one of them, in a faster type of middle school slow dance. Your pelvises are touching.
“I’m American,” you’re telling him.
“Where from?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
“We’re from British Colombia.”
You are nodding. The music gets louder, and no one leaves. Anna has turned her back to her British Columbian, practically sitting on his lap standing up. Wendy is doing some type of square dance while her partner watches her, clapping.
“Your friends are very beautiful,” the man tells you.
“I know,” you say. Thank you, you almost add.
“You are also very beautiful.”
You feel yourself looking at him skeptically.
“You probably don’t hear that enough,” he whispers into your neck.
That freezes you. You wish you didn’t want to hear that. You think about people who have said similar things without really meaning them. Like Dan, for instance. He could mean it, but he also couldn’t. Either way, you could shove off and sit in a corner, drinking, and not make much difference to the room.
The British Columbian ceases dancing, and starts to look around. You see yourself in the corner. Two words, then, would follow you. Stop it, Anna had said.
So you do, and instead you are shoving your tongue down his throat. He is seeming to enjoy it, and you find yourself thinking, Taking one for the team, for some reason. The team being all those around you who would look at you and think, She is so carefree! Like Wendy and Anna for instance. They are here, and they deserve a friend like that.
And now, you are. You can feel them looking at you.
When you remove yourself from the British Columbian’s arms, you wonder if they know you are different now. It happened quickly, but sometimes things happen like that. Everything is different now. You’re shouting at Anna and Wendy that you wish they’d been there on your fake birthday, and your real one.
They’re shouting back, but you can’t hear them. They’re smiling.
As the night grows dimmer and more colorful, you’re only able to communicate in gesture. You and Anna and Wendy move in concentric circles, pointing at each other, imitating one another.
The next day, as the club closes, the three of you jog down the street in the dawn. The three of you had told the British Columbians you were going to the bathroom. That was your idea.
Anna shouts, “Bon! Merci!” to the passersby on their way to work.
You get in the car and leave Montreal, ripping through another cloudy, building-less horizon.
On a two-lane highway, a terrible sound grinds through the haze. You turn down a dirt road and stop at the nearest gas station, which appears empty and closed. Your tire has blown.
A woman emerges from behind the station. She’ll call for help, she says, but she doesn’t know how long it will take.
You look at Anna and Wendy, not knowing what to expect. At this rate, you will be late returning to Minnesota. School starts tomorrow. The air has started to move, getting colder. There’s no food, either.
Anna and Wendy sit on the curb close together, and watch the woman inside as she flips through a magazine. They share one of Wendy’s rolled cigarettes. You scoot between them and take a drag. Wendy lays her head on your shoulder.
“Someone should take a photo of us here,” you say. “It’d be funny.”
“The camera’s in the car,” Anna says, but you don’t move from the middle of them.
You feel heavy, but in a good way, weighted down against the wind. You tell them you don’t know why, but you’d rather not get up. After awhile, they don’t move either. No one seems to mind.
