I was still wearing sweat pants under a dress coat when I got to The Countess’s house. I hadn’t changed since I got home from school and I’d run out of the door and down the street on converse high-tops, purple, inscribed with Smiths lyrics, boys’ initials, and that Oscar Wilde quote about the gutter and stars. January needled my lungs and numbed my fingers. I must have looked horrible, all greasy-haired and sniffling when I barged into her kitchen. She looked like a vision—all white and gold– a coronation Queen Elizabeth I in leggings and oversized sweaters and a Christmas-themed apron. She was slicing a pecan pie. Her specialty. I said, I’m having the worst day of my life. I wish I were dead. Which, because I was sixteen, was both gospel truth and complete hyperbole at the same time.

The Countess wiped her hands on a tea towel. She pulled three bottles from her father’s liquor cabinet, and poured a generous slug of each in three different Wedgwood teacups Vodka. Whiskey. Tequila. Drink each one, really fast. Then put this on. She held up a tube of lipstick, blood red.

 I was a novice drinker, then, and the tequila—would there be worm bits in it? – smelled highly suspect, but I cowgirled up and  took the shots. While my eyes watered and esophagus burned, she gestured again with the lipstick. It’s critical. I applied the lipstick by my reflection in the kitchen window. I thought it accentuated the gap between my front teeth and made the rest look yellow. I felt warm and woozy.

Better? She asked.

My reflection blurred into something inoffensive. I nodded. I was.

The Countess hollered at her little sister. If Dad comes home, tell him I forgot something at school. She put on her father’s barn jacket. I felt in my pocket for cigarettes and we went out to the car.  

*

The Countess was not really a Countess. She looked a painting or a Renaissance princess and aspired, above all, to beautiful things and perfect hospitality. We spent hours driving around fancy neighborhoods, imagining which houses we might live in and how we might entertain once we did. A garden party, I think, she’d say. With champagne cocktails and portrait hats. The men would wear seersucker suits and mascara. She’d smile, pleased with her own cleverness. She liked transgression so discreet as to require a double-take, Was it? Could it?  It would be years before I knew she stole that line about the seersucker and mascara from someone else.

In general, subtlety was not The Countess’s strong suit. She had big moods. She made bold statements. She climbed the stage at morning convocation in her preppy flats and white dresses—she  only disaffected teenage girl in the 90s that preferred white clothes—and report on church signs we passed on our smoking circuit.  According the Woodfin Baptist Church, only the wide awake Christian can sleep with Jesus. What do you all make of that? Then, after a beat, she’d  stride grandly off the stage as if she’d dropped a mic in front of the Nobel Committee.

*

 She drove too fast, squealing into the bend, shooting out onto the Avenue, where the speed limit was an impossible 25 mph for everyone but The Countess, who thought nothing of passing a slower car as if it were rush hour on the expressway. We listed off bullet points about each of the mansions on the right.  That’s the house where Emily lived. That’s where Susan lost her virginity. That’s the so and so’s dad had  sex party. Hand to God.   The strange stone art deco villa in the ivy? Owned by a socialite tarot card reader. The Countess lit another cigarette with the lazy dash lighter and when she opened the window, she flooded the avenue with music. She liked spirally songs with ethereal female vocals. Cocteau Twins.  Lush. A bunch of other bands we’d later call shoegaze, or shoegaze-adjacent. She also had a weakness for Enya, which was hilarious. From my bedroom, I could hear her approach to Orinoco Flow played at death metal volume up the narrow corridor of ranch houses that led to my house. We’d moved there after my parents divorce divested us of the big house by the lake.  My mother and sister hated it there. I understood that the smaller, shabbier house under the mountain felt like a step down, but I liked where it was. I could walk to the grand hotel around the corner or  downtown and when I said the name of my neighborhood, people imagined I meant one of those Gatsbyish summer cottages clinging to the curves of  Sunset Mountain. The ones Thomas Wolfe wrote about.

I didn’t correct them.

*

The Countess lived at the bottom of the hill in a stone and shingle cottage, scarcely grander than my house. The summer previous, I’d run down the hill during a soon-abandoned flirtation with jogging. She flagged me down in her front yard. She’d had mono, she said. She’d been desperately bored, horribly lonely. Had I heard from anyone? Was I still hung up on Poetic Bangs? Had I really gotten a car? Would I like a dinner? Could we sit in the smoking section because God she was dying for a cigarette.

We fell immediately into that intense I can tell you anything for hours at a time thing that can make you go all “Anne of Green Gables”  bosom friends after twenty minutes and a shared plate of nachos at the Mexican greasy spoon. I let her smoke in my car. Then I started smoking in my car because I drove her to a school. We pooled the gas money our parents gave us and used it to buy cigarettes, coffee and doughnuts, but only when the HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW sign was alit at the Krispy Kreme.  When the Countess pointed out that I wasn’t actually inhaling the smoke, I did and became an actual smoker with a preference for black coffee, because The Countess had, like, zero time to wait for me to  add cream and sugar.  After I totaled my car, she would come for me after hours in her Dad’s jeep and  stand outside my bedroom, banging on the window with a downed tree branch, until I dressed and joined her. Sometimes we’d walk up the grand hotel lobby to do our Latin homework. I’d imagine the entry to Aeneas’ underworld looking like the big stone fireplaces on each end of the lobby. The Countess would coerce a lonely, aging tourists to buy her vodka tonics at the bar. She never got busted[1]

*

I’d known The Countess since we were babies, but she spent part of her childhood in parochial school. When we were reunited in the fourth grade, she was unusually tall and seemed in all ways about two decades older than the rest of us. I went to her house for a play date. She gave me a cool appraisal at the door and announced that she’d recently come into some blazers, shoulder pads, and silk blouses so we’d be playing Divorced Businesswomen. Pretend I’m Cybil Shepherd. You can be Kathleen Turner or Diane Keaton or something. She handed me a wine glass full of Fresca and started complaining about her imaginary ex-husband, Mark.

Our friendship didn’t take then, probably because I kept trying to get our Divorced Businesswomen to fight wizards and dragons outside the swanky Upper East Side Apartments the Countess imagined they’d live in. The Countess would give me a withering gaze and explain that there were no dragons on the Upper East Side. This was accurate. Dragons are definitely more of an Upper West Side thing. But I hadn’t even been to New York City yet, so how was I to know?

*

I didn’t really feel the alcohol until my second cigarette. By then we were most of the way across town and The Countess had just Evel Knieveled her way over a curb  onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. I told her I felt lightheaded and she asked if I was going to puke. I said no. She turned up the Slowdive, a gift from some dude  she was seeing. He was older.Sometimes she said he was twenty-one. Sometimes she said he was twenty-six. She was so over men our age.

She rolled down the windows once we outran the city lights. The black shadows of pines lorded over us on either side of the road. It was cold. She tapped the console. I brought a flask, she said. But the cold i good for your skin. Fresh air prevents wrinkles. I rested my head against the door frame and looked up to see if I could make out the moon.

*

The Countess found academic endeavor a largely dull affair, though she was not, strictly speaking, a bad student. Our school was full of smart kids and rich kids, and a few rich, smart kids. Neither the Countess nor I were rich enough to slack off entirely, so on the multitude of days we called in sick together[2].  I helped her with her papers and she helped me lie to my mother. Her dad was rarely home and seemingly oblivious to the Countess’ agenda when he was. As time progressed, her house became a one-stop for whoever happened to be out and looking for a place to hang out unscrutinized, often with a crowd.  A wander into her living room on a Saturday night usually meant you’d run into a motley assortment of Day Students and a bunch of  kids from the public high school I’d naively  believed I’d never see again. The latter were mostly boys, and all, at best, indifferent to me, unless I had money to throw in for beer or pot, like, even five bucks would help.

Those boys would send their girlfriends home and come over to have a cold one before curfew. None of them dated The Countess. She’d obtained the sort of capital R Reputation prim mothers caution their daughters against somewhere around seventh grade.  I never questioned the stories I heard and the assumptions people made about her because everything about the Countess hinted of sophistication. She was the kind of sixteen-year-old that could mix a perfect martini from memory and apply lipstick without looking in the mirror. It stood to reason she was also a libertine. We’d been friends for about three hours when she told me her actual greatest sin had been hitting puberty a few years before the rest of us, and being a pretty girl who  genuinely liked hanging out with boys.  Her romantic experience, in those days anyway, was scarcely more controversial than my own.

And yet those boys, the same one that had gossiped about her in the halls, showed up at her house and lounged with cases of cheap Fake ID beer, while she held court with elaborate desserts she made from scratch, while they still ogled her every time she stood and still talked the same old shit about her every time they left her house.

Why do you tolerate it?  I’d ask.

You don’t really understand about men, she’d say and she’d be right. I didn’t really understand about men. I didn’t understand about a lot of things.  My failure to grasp the convoluted social protocols the Countess rigorously adhered to—even at sixteen she sent thank you notes, even when the party ended with her swinging, half-dressed, from a front porch column, lip-synching Madonna and drinking convenience store champagne straight from the bottle—seemed in danger of upending our careful equilibrium

*

The best Parkway overlook was the one two up from the river, far enough away from the city below that there wasn’t much traffic, close enough that could skedaddle back to civilization if the Parkway turned out, as my mother suggested, to be a hotbed of psycho killers trolling for victims. I took us there first in my car. Then she took us in her car. And once the second overlook became a popular make-out destination, she’d shine the headlights of her new car through our friends’ fog-covered windows, park ranger style, to see who she could startle in flagrante delicto.

 *

It occurred to me, at some after-dance party, during senior year that every after-dance party was at The Countess’ house, which, by then, we’d started calling the Sodom and Gomorrah House. This was because of the lack of parents. This was because the Countess always had plenty of alcohol and an inclination to experiment with cocktails. Have you ever had a Gin Rickey? Let’s try daiquiris! This was because the Countess never went to the dances herself.

It’s not that she couldn’t have. I’m sure she was invited. She was beautiful. She was popular. She was funny. She was fearless. She was magnificent.

*

That night, we were the only ones up there.  The Countess turned off the car. We sat in silence, puffing out curlicues of smoke.

“We could talk about your bad day,” she said “If you want to.”

*

There are stories about The Countess that beggar belief. Some of them are true. Most are the stuff of legend soon lost on the infinite palimpsest of local rumor. Those stories are not mine to tell. And at some point, the Countess herself stopped telling her stories, or, at least, telling them to me.

I would come home from college and hear conflicting reports. She was married to a British lord. She was a nanny for a family in Ohio. She’d moved to Hollywood. She’d opened a boutique in Georgia. All seemed equally plausible.

What I want to tell you is that I’d had best friends before The Countess, but The Countess was the first real best friend I ever really had.

*

Every time a high school reunion comes up, and they do every five years at schools that rely on alumni donations, there are a few names I always look for on the RSVP list. I tell myself, I’ll go if they do, even though, especially though, I know they won’t.

I know she won’t.

I still dream about The Countess. I think it’s because we never actually got to be thirty-something businesswomen, bitching about our exes, battling the dragons, drinking actual white wine, being real grown-ups.

In my dream, she is always hosting a dinner party in one of those old mansions we used to drive by. I’m so happy to see her. When I come in she’s wearing a variation on this green velvet party dress she used to wear at all sorts of non-party dress events—to the grocery store, around the house, to the punk rock coffeehouse downtown. That dress made her hair look like shiny copper. That dress made her look like an empress.

I told her that once.

She said, this old thing? It’s basically a rag.

*

 I didn’t really need to talk about my bad day. So we didn’t. We just sat and smoked and  watched the stars, for long enough that my cheeks went numb with cold, until I worried about homework, until I worried about my mother worried about me, until I could tell The Countess was bored.

You’ll be okay, she said, finally, before she turned the key.

I believed her.

.

[1] By contrast, I got busted repeatedly for trying to sneak upstairs in the hotel on a pilgrimage to the room where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to stay in the hotel, because at the point in my life, sixteen, early seventeen, I still believed in the totemic, transformative power of places. If I could touch this doorframe, that maybe he once touched, then maybe just maybe that would make me a better writer.

[2] “Did you know that you and [The Countess] have broken a school record for simultaneous absences? I just want you to keep that in mind given that you’re in the final stretch of your last semester“—Dean of Students, Senior Year.

In the beginning, the Radio Club had a radio station. It was a closet shaped room at the bottom of the stone stairs that opened like the mouth of hell under the old wrestling room and led to a concrete landing. To the left was a cinderblock storage room, home to long-abandoned student art and occasional band practice from the students most likely to get expelled. To the right was the day room, a brick cave that perennially smelled like old sweat, smoke damage and teenage boys. Some of the pubescent male funk may have seeped through the mats upstairs during the curiously intimate rites of violent masculinity performed each wrestling season. The rest came from the Day Boys, who in those days still outnumbered us Day Girls by a small margin, and some untold number of boarding students whose use of the right-side sofa and nook behind for hands-on sexual education encouraged advance knocking and  loud I’m coming in, now, perverts.

It was rare to see people coming and going from the radio station, which leant the Radio Club a little additional glamour. The general consensus seemed to be that they only really existed as a yearbook photo and vehicle to DJ school dances the administration was too cheap to outsource.  Sometimes, during a free period, we might hear a bassline, or the mumble of a voice through the wall. This was the only evidence we ever had that the Radio Club was doing anything like radio. The station had a frequency number, but whenever we tried to access it, we heard only static. It’s a very small broadcast area. Just campus. Fair, but no matter where we put up an antenna—in the dorm common rooms, in the classroom building, at the top of the stone stairs, in the hallway immediately outside the radio station door, we could never get a signal. Like, are we sure the station is even connected? Like, maybe the administration turned off the signal years ago, probably once they realized it was easier than dodging faculty and FCC complaints every time some fourth-form edgelord tried to dedicate “Fuck Tha Police” to the Headmaster live on-air. It would be pretty crooked to pull the plug on free expression without ever telling the people doing the expressing that you had.  But those were exactly the kind of  Machiavellian shenanigans we expected of grown-ups (in general) and school administrators (specifically), which probably accounts for why that theory picked up such traction. The Day Boys were particularly fond of it. I’d see them swaggering past the Radio Station door, shaking their heads with pity, like, Poor bastards don’t even know they are just playing records and talking to themselves about music. Nobody’s listening.  I remember thinking, that sounds pretty dreamy. Maybe I should join the Radio Club.

 II

I’d known most of the Day Boys years before I started at Boarding School, because they lived in my neighborhood. A few straggled in from the rural counties that, unlike my own, actually looked and behaved like Appalachia. A few came from the local Catholic School. Most came from the same public schools I had, places without day rooms, where no one in their right mind would dream of leaving their backpack unattended or locker unlocked. I knew exactly what flavor of fuck-up they were long before the Dean of Students stood on a small dais in the middle of the Day Room, her hand trembling with wrath, as she pointed to the still smoking, ash-blackened remains of the sex couch and asked which one of them had set it on fire. “Have the self-respect to turn yourself in now or tell me who did, because I promise I will find out.”

The Day Boys took her tirade with almost Zen-like tolerance, without a single incriminating smirk. She exited threatening vengeance for the incinerated furniture. We knew it was an empty promise. I don’t know which Day Boy burned the sofa. It might have been the one that drove me to school every morning and never spoke to me. It might have been the one with the curls that every girl in the spring play went moon-eyed over. It might have been the one that just shrugged when the Dean left and said, “I mean, it smelled like cum and was infested with ants. It’s not like anyone in their right mind was gonna sit on it.” It might have been the one I’d known since I was ten, when he observed me feeling left out at his sister’s birthday party and challenged me to the first of several games of Battleship on a rainy fall afternoon. It didn’t matter. The Day Boys had coalesced into a collective. In some sense, they had all burned the sofa.

III

The Day Girls had little time for the Day Boys. The school boasted a wide variety of young men with a wide variety of exotic haircuts, accents, favorite bands, and passport colors. There seemed little reason to hang out with, say, the guy that used to kick your seat while reciting long passages of Eddie Murphy’s “Raw” in the back of your mom’s car on the way to sixth grade summer band, when there were, like, four other continents in the mix. I was into this boy with skinny arms and a curtain of bangs that I interpreted as somehow poetic. And by into, I mean, into. I mean, critical, irrational, embarrassing infatuation so intense that I’d shelved any reservations about him being a moralistic theatre kid who over-articulated every word and took everything very, very seriously, because he’d walked into the first day of a creative-writing extracurricular in Chuck Taylors and an old R.E.M shirt with guitar hands and a tattered volume of James Joyce shoved in his tattered jeans pocket, talking about words like other people talk about sex and said, as I fluttered and flushed and complimented his story, that you seem to have a hard time making eye contact with me which was weird kind of creepy but I was fifteen and when I looked at his eyes they were so blue and  Girl, let me just tell you.

When it hits like that—like a fucking anvil made of sparkles, butterflies, and pure hormones–you tend to forgive a lot, up to an including the fact that cool Work Tour t-shirt aside, Poetic Bangs had the musical taste of divorced Dad at a fern bar. So I listened Paul Simon and Dan Fogelberg, stayed late for Amnesty International, and sat transfixed as he sat on the theatre stairs strumming original acoustic ballads about deforestation and new age spiritualism, oblivious to the fact that there were at least four or five other girls hanging on his every stupid word, as infatuated as I.

Poetic Bangs wasn’t the boy I was supposed to like. I’d spent the year previous in public school cultivating a quiet, black ballpoint pen-doodled crush on this quiet, black-haired skateboarder that sat across from me in Civics class and writing stories in the margins of my notebook about decrepit big city dystopias full of quippy revolutionaries with punk rock haircuts. I didn’t think I’d be spending my sophomore year listening to Poetic Bangs’ favorite Billy Joel songs and trying to compose piano ballad that would express my undying devotion to him. The only thing more embarrassing than the intensity of my crush was the person I was becoming within said crush. I’d have these moments of clarity, fleeting though they were, and think, this? This is what I want?[1]

 Reader, it was.

 IV

Everybody was in the winter play that year, even a few of the Day Boys. I tried to do my homework in the green room and not hang desperately on Poetic Bangs’ every word. He liked to play improv games, which usually ended with him kissing a girl. Somehow that girl never ended up being me.  I mulled over it a lot. I bought more of his favorite records. I learned four chords on my mother’s old guitar and played them until my fingers blistered. I read the books he talked about. At that point, I still believed I could make a boy love me by imitation. I had yet to figure out that there was, perhaps, a crucial difference between wanting someone and wanting to be like someone. That realization came years and several unfortunate forays into hardcore and beat poetry away. At fifteen, though, I was too busy trying to cleave to his narrow tastes to stop and figure out my own.

We were in the green room sometime in January. Poetic Bangs had just slid onto the old orange sofa between me and another girl and just leaned over and kissed her hard, just to see what would happen. She blushed, clearly shocked, but didn’t slap him, which I innocently, jealously took to mean she’d liked it.

The Day Boys showed up in a clamor, and I was happy for the distraction, because it reminded me of all the noisy why not? days that preceded the dull myopia of unrequited love. They’d decided to test out the old stereo moldering away in the corner. They thought a few tunes might shake things up. None of us had the heart to mention that things were pretty well shook by the whole spontaneous kissing thing, and Poetic Bangs predictably told them they shouldn’t do it, that some of us—he pointed at me, I’m sure I glowed at his acknowledgement–were trying to study their lines and take practice seriously. The Day Boys had exactly zero time for Poetic Bangs and ignored him, experimenting with speaker wire and power cords,. Once the light came on, they shoved a cassette as Poetic Bangs sighed like a disappointed parent. You’re just going to get in trouble, said Poetic Bangs.

 The room filled with the opening chords of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’d heard the song; it was certainly the first time I registered it for what it was. It was catchy and crunchy, and I’d always had a weakness for minor chords played fast and loud. I looked over to check Poetic Bangs’ reaction, hoping he’d like it, so I could like it, but he scowled, this song makes fun of everything I care about. And the Day Boys just grinned, like, yeah, that’s what makes it so fucking great, and turned it up until my ears hurt and I could hear it in my teeth. They managed to get in about twenty seconds of joyously pogoing around the room before the Drama teacher screamed in and pulled the plug and threatened them all with detention.

V

In the high school movie version of events, I’d have walked away from Poetic Bangs because the Day Boys were more obviously more fun and definitely had better taste in music and one of them probably would have been played by John Cusack in a Clash t-shirt. I didn’t, because I was an idiot who didn’t know herself. Also, the Day Boys were jackasses. Not a Lloyd Dobler among them

At the school, all of the students were expected to give a small regular donation toward OxFam, to help the starving children. This was likely to instill some trace notion of social responsibility, which for the class of people typically associated with boarding school, would henceforth be framed as a tax-deductible charitable donation, ideally to the school’s own annual fund. But we weren’t all bound for philanthropist-level wealth, and the Day Boys took particular umbrage at being asked. They’d been on collection strike for several months when the Dean called another meeting in the Day Room to chide us for our collective failure to raise even a desultory fiver for the less fortunate. Every other dormitory, every other hall, every other group of students has a 100% participation rate, and you Day Students have barely donated anything. She brought Poetic Bangs with her, as a representative of the campus philanthropic community. He gave an earnest speech, reminding us of how fortunate we were, while children were starving. The Day Boys chuckled, self-satisfied, and saw Poetic Bangs make eye contact with the back of the Day Room door, upon which an installation of sorts had been erected, a collage of trash and speech bubbles parroting school demands for donations encircling the head a Baby Jesus-style illustration of a starving child like a halo. It was grotesque and offensive, like most of the things the Day Boys found hilarious, but in the split second he saw it, before he had the space to perform theatrical indignation, I watched Poetic Bangs suck on his cheeks to stifle a laugh. The dean, barely civil with inchoate rage, could not even fully process the back of the door. “I will find out who burned that sofa,” she said. “I will figure out who keeps stealing the clocks. And when I do, all of you will be sorry.”

Two days later, the last remaining sofa in the Day Room mysteriously caught fire.

VI

I found myself alone in the campus post office with the only girl I knew for sure was in the Radio Club. She was a senior from Washington, DC, which seemed very cool to me, and wore lipstick just barely far enough away from black to pass dress code. She sat on the table beside the mailboxes, legs dangling, thumbing through last month’s Spin. A blue-haired Kurt Cobain in a green shirt and sunglasses stared out at me from the cover. She saw me looking and asked if I liked them. I looked around to make sure Poetic Bangs wasn’t around and nodded. “You want it?” she asked. “I’ve already read this one.” I took it from her and said thanks, because I couldn’t quite find the words to ask her about the radio club and whether the station was real or hypothetically, how a person like me might join.

VII

The weekend before Valentine’s Day, the Radio Club hosted a dance in the Day Room. They moved the furniture away, slid the dais into the corner like a DJ booth, and played off a stereo on the old test proctor’s desk. The Day Boys stayed away. In fact there weren’t many Day Students there at all, because why return to school on a Saturday night? But I had come in a furry, fuchsia sweater, which I believed to be the prettiest thing I owned ,trying to find Poetic Bangs. I had some notion that night that something huge might happen. I interpreted it as he will realize he loves me. In actuality, it was I will slip and fall down the stairs, smashing my face up and getting a concussion in the process after realizing he doesn’t love me and never will.

Before all of that though, I stood at the edge of the crowd of dancers in the dark, sweaty day room, watching the flashes of colors in shirts and the dimmed dance lights at the DJ station reflect in the dark windows across the northern wall. I didn’t see any friends. I didn’t have a dance partner. But it wasn’t music that required one, and whatever Radio Club representative behind the table was playing “Temptation” by New Order, which had, in the days before Boarding School and Poetic Bangs, been one of my favorite songs precisely because it conjured some vague sense of the teenage life I thought I wanted to have. I wasn’t sure I was still allowed to like New Order, because it didn’t strum earnest chords on an acoustic guitar, nor did it snarl in fury and threaten to tear the room apart. Like most great pop songs, it bubbled up beneath me until I felt I rode weightless on crest of a wave that could carry me anywhere I wanted to go instead of careening toward inevitable disaster for long enough to dance badly in a dark room with mostly strangers singing Up, down, turn around Please don’t let me hit the ground as I half bounced breathlessly in place. Oh, you’ve got green eyes/Oh, you’ve got blue eyes/Oh, you’ve got grey eyes.

When the song ended, the  DJ put on one I would recognize the song week later, watching Teenage Fanclub play “SNL,” as “The Concept.” It would end up becoming one of my favorite songs for a while.[2] But at the time it was kind of a mood killer. The crowd cleared the dance floor, skulking off into the corner where the sex couch used to be. I remembered why I was there and turned to leave. I passed the girl from the Radio Club in the landing. The door to the station was open. I saw light, a table, some cords. She was balancing an orange milk crate full of CDS on her hip.

“Weird choice ,”she said of the song playing in the Day Room. “Don’t worry. I’m going to play something more dance-y. You should stick around.”

I think I told her I was going to get some fresh air. That sounded logical and she nodded. Even in February, it was swampy in the Day Room. I said I’d be back. I half-meant it. Poetic Bangs wasn’t big on school dances, but perhaps he’d consider it. Maybe somebody in the radio club had Thompson Twins or OMD or Peter Gabriel  or whatever song played in the movies when a crush had a happy ending.

I wish I’d stayed.

Coulda. Woulda.

Maybe Radio Club girl played Beastie Boys. Maybe she played The Cure

VIII

Sometime in the spring semester, the school drew up plans for a fancy new dining hall and student center to stand on the site of the old wrestling room, beside the arts building. They’d have to tear down the old building, including both the radio station and the Day Room. And thus, when we returned from Spring Break, not only was the Day Room inaccessible, it was gone.

Day Student lockers were moved to the first floor of the class room and over the next few semesters we were granted provisional use of various underutilized classrooms, and briefly the faculty lounge, before it was decided we didn’t need a Day Room at all. At each of these announcements, I swore I saw a flicker of triumph in the Dean’s eye. She’d bested the Day Boys, moving them inch-by-inch closer to her own office, until they had no place to hide. By the time I was a senior, we had no place at all save a classroom hall full of messy lockers

The Radio Club existed, in theory, through the end of the year. When the school hired a local band to play the prom and they blew the power on half of campus, with the first notes of their first song (a cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”), members of the radio club were dispatched to try and salvage the situation. And we hundred odd teenagers in uncomfortable formalwear sat in the murmuring in the darkness until they were able to find enough batteries for a boom box. They gave it their best with Prince and De La Soul but the stereo sounded impossibly small and tinny under the gothic arches of the dining hall without an amp behind it.

I went to prom by myself that year in baby pink damask Jessica McClintock, which was maybe the last time I ever wore that color of pink. I sat with a couple of friends in the dark and tried to make out Poetic Bangs and his date across the room. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I still pined for him. I couldn’t help it. A few weeks, when he graduated, I wrote him a shitty, passive aggressive note. He responded by sending me a letter basically telling me that he hoped we never saw each other again. We did actually see each other again, but it was such a brief nothing of an encounter that I imagine it never happened.

I got over him.

I found new crushes, new heartbreaks, and whole vast universe of songs to soundtrack them all. I never did join the Radio Club though. When I came back Junior Year, it, like the Day Room, had disappeared, as if it had never existed at all.

_____________

[1] A couple of years later, I was so caught up in embarrassment over my crush, the way my crush played out, and the person I had a crush on, I could barely bring myself to talk about it. We turned in journals for English class, ostensibly to provide commentary on reading, but my teacher senior year was this salty, brilliant woman who was old enough to be my grandmother, but I loved her. I wrote about everything in my journal. She gave plenty of advice and book recommendations in the margins. When I finally wrote this long, incredibly tortured entry about the crush, its aftermath, and how humiliated the whole thing made me feel even years later, she responded simply, “Poetic Bangs could have been anyone’s Heathcliff. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

[2] Enough so that twenty-seven years later, I would stand in a crowded ballroom in a renovated mill, singing along as the band played it for a whole room of middle-aged people drunk on shared nostalgia almost as heady as a New Order song when you’re not quite sixteen.

I’m not now nor have I ever been a rich person. But I’ve spent enough of my life rich person adjacent to know that the whole College Admissions scam is only surprising in that someone actually got busted for it. The whole story is hilarious–almost hilarious enough that we forget about the still-acceptable legacies, the “here’s this new wing for the library” beneficiaries, or (more modestly) the kids (and I knew many of them) whose parents would shell out thousands and thousands to pay for expensive extracurriculars and high school internships, purchase plane tickets for international service work, or hire tutors to push almost-perfect SAT scores to perfect SAT scores, so already smart, rich kids can secure academic scholarships (for the prestige, not because they need the money). Sometimes this self-corrects (I knew plenty of legacies that failed out of competitive universities after a semester or two), but it usually doesn’t.

If you know me in real life, you may have detected a chip on my shoulder roughly the same size and shape of the absence of an elite college on my resume. I’m trying to get over it. Really I am. I can’t tell if the situation is made better or worse by the fact that I live in a college town, surrounded by smart people with degrees from the kind of schools that either wouldn’t let me in or give the financial aid necessary to attend. I like that they think I’m smart enough to hang, even though I lack their credentials. I still hate it when people ask me where I went to school when do people stop asking where I went to school?, because it’s a journey, and nine times out of ten, I have to deal with their reactions when I answer. These tend range from pity to Really? Sometimes, I swear I can see their reappraisals of my character or intelligence play out in real time across their faces.

My mother would tell me, and most certainly has, that all of this is just my own insecurity. “No one cares,” she says. “The only thing that matters is that you graduated.” But the market value of my BA is far, far less than it ended up costing everyone. I feel hugely guilty about that.  I’ve yet to have a job that, strictly speaking, required it. I made some dear friends along the way, but I didn’t make any critical connections in the professional or academic world that helped on the job market. If anything, my high school experience, as a financial aid kid at a moderately competitive boarding school, has been marginally more useful. And that’s grading on a real curve.

The school you go to is more than status symbol. It’s opportunities and connections. It’s access. It’s a pretty good way to size up who you’re actually competing against—whether they’re really smart and talented or really fucking rich and lucky or all of the above.  Plenty of smart people that went to great schools end up working the same shitty jobs at the same shitty wages as the rest of us. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance. It’s unlikely that I would have ended up hugely successful even if I had gone to Harvard (which was, to be absolutely 100% clear, never in the cards for me). I never wanted to be a world leader or a titan of industry. I wasn’t interested in making great scientific breakthroughs or inventing whole new ways to live. I always just wanted to be a writer and write for a living. Which I am (sort of)  and do (technically). Might I have sold a novel or gotten a job at the New Yorker had I come out the kind of tiny, weird liberal arts college in the Northeast I dreamt of at eighteen? Maybe. It’s equally possible, though, that I would have  just gotten way more into cocaine and performance art on my way to a job in the advertising industry virtually indistinguishable from the one I have now. I don’t know. Neither do you. And now my bra strap is totally showing and my accent is slipping and you can see exactly many shades I blush when I have to talk to you about college. Sorry about that. I’ll buy the next round and hope you don’t remember how petty I look when I’m feeling sorry for myself.

I made plenty of mistakes in school. I sweated so many nights away worried about not being good enough. That kid that got admitted instead of me? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she never had to, because it never mattered if she was good enough, or even good at all.  The system was rigged from the start. The system has always been rigged. I knew it then, even then, especially then, as I applied for college among rich people, but I didn’t really know it, not until long after the acceptance letters were sent. So while I read about the admission scandal, I do laugh and gloat with the rest of you, but it’s with resignation, with fury, and something that feels almost like relief, but much, much uglier.

The first thing I saw out my bedroom window was the car—black with a long nose and curved where most cars were squared, so shiny it reflected the rosy summer dusk. I was eleven, not the kind of kid interested in cars, but that car was something else. I skittered down the stairs in my nightgown, through the cocktail party melee and haze of their cigarette smoke, out the front door, across the green lawn. The car was parked beside Mom’s fat white peonies. I stepped closer to inspect the tiny shiny silver woman perched on the hood, her wings spread as if she was about to take flight.

“She’s the spirit of ecstasy,” said an old man, in a tweed cap and a white silk scarf, with a silver tipped cane. He stepped around the car and smiled. “You can touch her if you like.”

I told him I loved his car. He said he did too. She was a 1961 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. He opened opened the door to show me the interior. It smelled like leather and pipe tobacco and the wooden dashboard gleamed. The steering wheel was on the left side, which seemed wrong, but he assured me that was only a matter of perspective

He pointed at the RR stamped into the logo. “I’m also RR. And this nice lady standing behind you is my wife. She’s also an RR.”

I told him I was an AF and that the suspicious looking woman standing on the front porch was KF, my mother, and she’d probably force me to bed before even had a chance to get to know each other.

RR raised his eyebrow and twirled his cane like Fred Astaire. “Oh, well, we can probably do something about that.”

That’s how I got to stay up drinking Shirley Temples and talking to RR about typical fifth grade stuff—how I loved Benetton, European Royalty, 20^th century American Architecture, and how I was planning to become the youngest editor-in-chief of The New York Times.

RR found this to be a perfectly reasonable. He might still know a few people at the Times. He definitely knew some folks at The Tribune and the Sun-Times, if I wanted to hone my skills in the Windy City. He’d been an Ad Man at Leo Burnett, part of the team that created the Pillsbury Dough Boy. “But honestly I’d rather be remembered as the man with the largest collection of books about Leonard DaVinci east of the Mississippi.”

Mom finally nudged me off to bed when she caught me nodding off just before midnight, but not before RR wrote down my address and told me to keep an eye on the mail.

**

The first things that came were a series of elaborate certificates and pronouncements  from dignitaries ranging mayor of Flat Rock (where RR had become perhaps the second most notorious Chicago transplant) to President Reagan (another RR), all formally naming RR (henceforth known as “Uncle Bob”) honorary uncle to me and my sister. I had my doubts that  Justice O’Connor or the Secretary General of the UN had actually taken the time to write me, but I’m pretty sure that letter from Tip O’Neill was for real.

Next came books. Leatherbound tomes about British Royal dynasties, coffee-table books about Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Strunk & White, “Tales from the Algonquin Round Table.”

I sent talky letters about how miserable I was being a child because I never got to go to decadent parties and how the girls were mean to me at the pool.  Then I sent him poems about cats and New York City, my two favorite things. He responded long, annotated critiques of my poetry with book recommendations, silly puns, and a wall-sized architectural map of Manhattan.

Sometime in the fall, he invited  out to the house for the first time. Uncle Bob took me out to the garage to visit the car, and while there took me on a guided tour of his department store shopping bag collection that he had strung from clotheslines like pennants. If he yanked on the string by the kitchen door he could make them dance. I was delighted. I told him I wanted to start my own shopping bag collection. He told me that was sensible hobby and let me pick half a dozen of his own to start. He followed me around his garage like a wine connoisseur, “Oh, that’s an Excellent Choice. Saks Fifth Avenue, Christmas 1963. A very good year!”

In between letters, he continued to have us out to his house every now and then, usually with other families. He liked to prod the children into antiquated games—he was particularly fond of the egg toss, for all its humiliating potential. He had a mercurial streak. Sometimes he wasn’t very nice. I went out once for a holiday party with my parents and he hardly spoke to me the whole time I was there, except to say that he’d decided he wanted at least half the books he’d given me back and hoped I hadn’t ruined them. Two weeks later, he wrote back and said he was kidding about the books.

I suspected my relationship with Uncle Bob had a timeline. I was getting older. His letters were shorter.  I had tumbled headfirst into ugly adolescence. People had stopped referring to me as either cute or precocious. And Uncle Bob himself was leaning hard into retirement. “I think he’s becoming more eccentric,” my mother said. That wasn’t comforting  “Eccentric” in the south is a big tent of a euphemism, including everything from “wears white after labor day to homicidal maniac.”

In the summer of my thirteenth year, I wrote from sailing camp about feeling horribly alone and scorned by my cooler, more sophisticated bunkmates, he sent a note back telling me that at least I wasn’t in the Bastille and a box containing a three volume history of the French Revolution and about twenty six packages of TWA roasted peanuts. I spent the next three weeks immersed in salty, waterlogged pages about the  Committee of Public Safety. It was not what I wanted, exactly, but perhaps what I needed. It’s hard to feel bad about being the only girl in your cabin without boobs when Danton is about to be executed.

When I got back home, Uncle Bob summoned us to this house for a picnic. He reserved most of a local park. He’d bought food and gifts and games for a whole bunch of honorary nieces and nephews. When it came time to leave, his wife loaded up the wicker baskets and coolers full of sodas and wine. He counted us off—five total and told the parents that the kids would ride in the Rolls Royce with him. We were thrilled. I’d spent countless hours exploring the car, but I’d never ridden in it. Bob slid in and directed all of the small children to the capacious back set. I was oldest, so I was got the passenger seat.

He told the parents to follow him and went zipping off down the road. Once on the highway,  he pulled over onto the shoulder and instructed me to slide the wheel. I balked. I’d never driven a car before–let alone a Rolls Royce. Uncle Bob reminded me that I’d been sailing camp and that cars were probably much easier to drive than boats. I couldn’t argue with him.

The steering wheel was more sensitive than I’d suspected, but generally, I thought I handled myself and the car pretty well. I only almost drove off the road or into oncoming traffic seventeen or eighteen times. Uncle Bob just grinned and laughed. My mother reports watching Bob’s car with mounting horror as it swerved left to right across the narrow, winding highway. She wondered aloud how many Bloody Marys Uncle Bob had consumed before getting behind the wheel and whether it was, in fact, irresponsible to let him convey the children to the park. I think it was my dad that finally pointed out that Bob was in the passenger seat—you know, right hand steering wheel—and that I, AF, was driving the car.

I was giddy when we arrived at the park. I hopped out of the car, feeling as if I could accomplish anything. The parents started unloading the food, the games and the gifts and just as we were about to sit down to eat, Bob announced that he and his wife would be leaving. He said he was tired and didn’t want to deal with any of us. He demanded the children give back their gifts.. Some of the little kids were crying. I was surprised, but you know, honey, Uncle Bob is getting increasingly eccentric.

My parents took us for cheeseburgers in Hendersonville and tried make us feel better about the ruined day. But I got in the car headed back to Asheville, sad about my lost friend. “Uncle Bob will be back,” said my mother. “You know how he is.” I did. That’s I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hear from him again. I got a card when I graduated from high school with an illustration of the lion from the Art Insitute of Chicago on the front. It was signed, simply, “Congratuations, RR.”

I figured I’d never see him again.

***

After I crashed and burned in my early 20s, Uncle Bob asked my mother to come in and lecture a group on Southern Women. He had volunteered to teach a class on “Life Below the Mason-Dixon” for his fellow relocated yankees at the local College for Seniors. He was older, close to ninety, and even more ornery.

I remember being deeply irritated that day, hurt that he’d asked me, because I never talked to him about the south, except for how much I didn’t like it I hated being referred to as a Southern Woman and all the fiddle-dee-dee-isms that entailed. I never wanted anything but out. And yet, at I was still in the south,  back living in Asheville. I hadn’t studied the Jacobins at the Sorbonne. I hadn’t become the youngest editor of The New York Times. I hadn’t ever even lived in New York.

After the lecture, I asked Bob about the car. He said he hadn’t taken her out in the while. I thanked him for being a friend all those years ago. I told him how I liked to tell people that  the first time I ever drove a car was the last time I’d ever drive a Rolls Royce.

I didn’t think he’d heard me and or that he hadn’t paid attention, so I gathered my coat and started to walk out the door.

“Last is an awfully final word, AF,” he said. “I’d suggest a more ambiguous ending.”

I don’t remember for sure whether he smiled. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even look back. But I’m going to tell you that he did.

My first little sister got married in September of 2017. It was a a prolonged rosy gold twilight at a Lowcountry beach resort and a masterclass in production. Every piece of the event was at peak photogenic, but even without the scrapbook, the whole wedding weekend lingered in the collective memory like a slightly salty confection in Maxfield Parrish colors, something close enough to perfect that it would probably pass the blindfold taste test.

Second Little Sister spent First Little Sister’s wedding at a slump. Maybe it was that Second Little Sister was the only one of the three of us without a theater background and a well-documented crinoline fetish. Probably it was that weddings are the kinds of things people give a fuck about and Second Little Sister famously has few fucks to give. I don’t mean this to sound critical. Second Little Sister is not some snarling punk on a mission of destruction. She is in fact, so exceedingly chill that she once spent a whole Christmas Eve day napping in my mother’s flowerbed because the Elaborate Production of Holiday! occurring inside Mom’s house was harshing her mellow and hey, the sun was out.

And then Second Little Sister got engaged. She’d been with the same guy for nine years. They’d bought a house together. “We’re doing this for tax reasons,” they said, but it would be a wedding not just an elopement. The announcement came days after First Little Sister started posted wedding photos to social media. Sisters, I thought.

I was the oldest by a distance. I didn’t  grow up anticipating whatever befell the next sibling would soon come to me. I felt protective of both of them, even if I did prickle with occasional resentment in the rearview, like the proverbial codger carping about uphill, both ways, in the snow. When I was your age I was an unmarried renter making a few bucks above minimum wage at the record store and shaking coins out of thrift store couch cushions for beer and taco money. A wedding? Jeez. When I was your age I couldn’t even figure out how to get my wisdom teeth pulled.

DAY ONE

I am an unmarried renter, traveling to Utah with my mother, stepfather and my ninety-four year old step-grandmother, for Second Little Sister’s wedding. It is the end of October, cold and dark and 4:30am in my hometown, to which I have repaired, because beggars don’t get to choose their place or time of departure or means of conveyance.

The last time I flew into Nevada was to attend my one of my best friend’s weddings in Reno fifteen years ago. I spent the whole time trying to figure out if I shouldn’t catch a ride to California and stay. In those days, I still operated under a faint, if persistent notion that I must cross the continent and try to manifest some destiny for myself else risk becoming a cautionary tale. San Francisco had always seemed like the sort of place people like me ended up passing through on whatever instructive peregrinations were required of aspiring young American Bohemians. Even then, though, I suspected my internal compass was fixed stubbornly eastward. This made sense. I come from people that crossed the Atlantic several centuries ago and all stayed within a couple of hundred miles of a ship back to Europe, in case things get too weird here. The most enterprising among us, a great grandfather on my mother’s side, tried to break the mold twice. First by attempting to cross the country first on a bicycle in the last decade of the 19th century. He rode from Floyd, Virginia with his best friend, both on some one-generation-removed-from-a -penny-farthing contraption and made it all the way across the Mississippi  to St. Louis, before he was felled by pneumonia and had to be shipped home. Then again, a decade later, he and his young wife headed out to start a new life in Oregon. They built a home. They planted crops. The rainy green peaks ringing the Willamette Valley were just similar enough to home, I imagine my great-grandfather believing, he could almost, almost pretend they were, like his own immigrant ancestors had squinted at the Blue Ridge Plateau and conjured their native Baden-Wurtemberg. But the West is most disorienting at the moments it seems most familiar. Over time, the differences appeared more stark. My great-grandfather and his wife made it three years before, they packed up their household and their first child and came home to Floyd.

I never made for Gold Country. Maybe because I couldn’t figure out why anyone would willingly choose to be a pioneer. I found Westerns violent and ugly. I was continually disappointed that Laura Ingalls didn’t run off with a charming peddler or a bunch of carnies and end up some place with theatres, bookshops and bluestockings. Maybe, like my great-grandfather, I worried I wouldn’t be able to stomach it, that I would fail at a three-thousand mile remove and my ignominious return would be all the more obvious for it. Better to stay close to port of entry, in case things get too weird, in case I stop being able to pretend it’s familiar.

**

It’s brilliantly clear, warm, and dry in Las Vegas. I take in the baked landscape, the strip, the distant range of chocolate brown mountains. I get a nosebleed. It will last for the rest of the trip.

We cross into Arizona and wind through monster-faced cliffs. I hum “Peer Gynt” and wait for one of the mountains to sass back. I read a dumb historical romance when I was a kid in which one of the protagonists spent her days contemplating the craggy peaks of the Himalayas and imaging them impossible palaces. I grew up in a place where the mountains always looked like napping giants, covered in soft blankets of varying seasonal hues. For the first time, in the back seat, in Arizona, taking in the natural architecture, I understand how you might mistake a sunny crag for Shangri-la.

In Utah, my stepdad rented a house in a resort community across the highway from the state park where Second Little Sister will be married. The sun catches the side of the canyon at dusk and turns the canyon walls a nearly Ringwald-ian pink. I try to tell Mom how I associate that landscape with crime—tv shows about drug deals, movies about outlaws, books about massacres—but she’s caught up in the Georgia O’Keefe of it all.

DAY 2-3

It’s a staggeringly beautiful day, clear and bright. I go for a run down a bike path across the highway from the rental, in half-pursuit of a white bellied peregrine falcon, who soars over me and nearly sparkles when the sun hits her pewter colored wing. I discuss matters with the horses I pass. I take pictures of a large rock formation about halfway down the hill toward St. George. I see a lizard and wonder if he ever feels unfairly victimized ,given the town’s namesake.

Littlest Sister plans to tie the knot atop a petrified sand dune called The Big Galoot. We drive over to determine whether Stepgran can climb it and do a little sightseeing. I walk out over a web of ephemeral creekbeds, through rattling sage and ancient blackened lava beds and ignore the fact that my mother is hollering at me, as if I were a child. I feel like a child. I hang out on this giant rock, contemplating the indifferent sand, stone, and, if I’m reading park signage correctly, a wide variety of improbably fluffy bats. I stare at the opposite canyon wall and try to ignore the distant, tinny voice of my mother as she pleads with me to don’t go to far, don’t go somewhere dangerous. I think, I am forty-two years old. And this is my life. A wind knocks through the canyon, rattling the branches of leafless desert branches and small spikes of cactus. The desert says, Fat spinster. I say, Do Better. It says, Failure. Loser. Coward. I say, There you go. Now we’re getting somewhere.

I shimmy down the side of the rocks, past hikers and climbers actually dressed for it who take one look at me like, are you bouldering in shiny gold Vans and statement earrings? I give them the side-eye and ascend even further up the side of the giant red hill where my sister plans to marry. I try to make like I’m not panting by the time I clear the top and recline over the ridged surface.

I find Stepgran on the way down. She’s perched on a lower ledge, canyon wind ruffling her white hair. She tells me she sees faces in the rocks and she’s right this time because I see them too.

“They have to move the wedding site,” says my mother. “We’ll never get everyone to the top of this hill without a disaster.”

I reach down to knock some of the red dust off of my legs and find the rocks have shredded the back of my pants like run pantyhose from knees to upper thighs. Black jeans are not great for red rocks. No matter what Bono may have you believe.

**

In town, Stepgran goes for sensible shoes at a store in the outlet mall. I replace my ripped pants at a with a pair of heavy, uncomfortable Levis, which feels exactly like the sort of thing a put-upon city slicker would do.

We head back to the canyon for the rehearsal. The vast majority of the wedding party is either 27 and outdoorsy or 60+ and retired. Second Little Sister leads the rehearsal in board shorts and sports bra, yellow mud clinging to her legs and the top of her wooly socks. We file up the side of the hill, careful of nettle-like cacti and possible snake holes. Her fiancé tries to organize things. He’s a twin and a redhead, but temperamentally neither. I stare at his boots because they’re beautiful brown leather. I had a professor who advised me that you could tell a lot about a person by their shoes and that I would do well to keep that in mind when picking a mate. I thought, neither for first nor last time, Second Little Sister is no dummy.

I sit on the rock rehearsing Beach Boys songs accompanied by a soft-spoken black-haired guitarist and friend of the bride and groom from back east, who comes with a comprehensive repertoire of Irish drinking songs and the complexion to match. He shields his forehead against the sun and notes that he burns easily. I take a swig of illicit beer and head off another nosebleed at the pass, temporarily grateful that there is perhaps one other person here as constitutionally ill-equipped for the desert as I am.

The rehearsal dinner is held in the private dining room at resort clubhouse, a terraced joint on the edge of a unnaturally green golf course surrounded on all sides by Martian red desert. I stand out on the patio, watching the sun set over the canyon, drinking gin and trying not to feel weird about the fact that I’ve been seated with the grown-ups. I go to the bathroom and read articles on the internet.

Mom comes out to find me. We sit for a while in a ghoulishly arrayed, empty bar. The resort  staff has decorated the clubhouse for Halloween. A white chiffon wedding gown grimed with convincing dirt, blood stains and rubber intestines, hangs over us. “I’m tired of weddings,” I say.

Mom clearly thinks I’m worried about being single. I worry she’s going to give me a pep talk about finding a man. She doesn’t.

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” she says. Maybe this is true, but I feel lapped by everyone several times over. I am a disaster. I am broke. I am lonely. I am old enough to have prom babies with PhDs and I’m still not saving any money and wearing thrift shop dresses. The notion that I am weird or arty or at work on some grand project is frankly belied by my actual output. I have accomplished nothing. I am nothing.

I think, I really am having a midlife crisis. I think, I really am having a midlife crisis in a desert. Could I be a bigger cliché? The desert whispers back, Come out under this red rock. And I’m like, why? so you can show me fear in a handful of dust? I know how that poem ends.

**

Our rental house has a back patio connected to a bunch of other back patios across a field of liver-covered gravel. We discover a roadrunner living out there. My mother loves him. She calls him Bob. She tries to lure him with promises of crumbs while I search the skies for the falcons.

Curtain call for wedding pictures is a couple of hours before the ceremony. Second Little Sister has gone with a Hawaiian theme, which allows bride and groom to get married in jeans and His and Hers Hawaiian shirts. I look precisely like a palm-printed beach cabana in size and shape, a no-necked, middle-aged monster with a bloody nose and cellulite thighs. I am the only fat person amid the lithe young bodies. I feel tender and bitter about it all at once. I can’t decide if they’re being haughty or I’m being awkward so I drift away and I take pictures. The Canyon walls. The Carolina blue sky. A little girl standing on a park picnic table performing to an invisible audience in a gold and black Batgirl tutu.

At wedding o’clock, I sit by the guitarist again. We sing Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older as what passes for the wedding party ascends over the rise. Second Little Sister’s stepfather performs the ceremony, a breezy secular thing. They recite their vows, things like, “be my partner in mischief.” Second Little Sister has her hair down. It’s long and shiny, like dark gold silk. Her husband is still wearing the good boots. I think, good for them they’re so good together. I think, if I got bitten by a rattlesnake, how long before I died? The desert groans, long enough for you to ruin your sister’s wedding like an asshole. I blink on my way out, hopeful that no one sees me give the finger to a pile of rocks.

The wedding party takes their time getting down to the reception site. I call my best friend in New York from a picnic table overlooking a rusted camper.

She seems surprised to hear from me. “Aren’t you, like, literally at the wedding?”

I tell her yes, “But it’s weird, I feel so weird, have I told you how weird all this makes me feel? I’m like the Lone Ranger here.” I start laughing because the setting sun makes the canyon looks like a matte painting Silver might heigh-ho off into.

The sun slips starts to slip behind the canyon before the young people reappear. We fix plates and give speeches. I sit with the bride and groom, the groom’s brothers, the bride’s other step-siblings. I read something I wrote on my iPhone in the back of the minivan. I tell second little sister that she’s a hero of mine because she seems capable of being wholly, unapologetically herself. I mean every word. Second Little Sister would never find herself alone, tipsy atop a picnic table at someone else’s wedding talking to the desert because she’s not sure she can be honest with anyone else.

The dance party starts. I talk to friends of the bride and groom about how I used to be a music writer at a publication they’ve heard of, and realize that was so long ago now that they were still in elementary school when I worked there. I have a couple more drinks. I dance badly. At some point, I feel a wave of drunkenness pass over me with such force that I find my mother and tell her I want to go home. She sees  I’m staggering and helps me to van. I stumble down the path. I drop my phone into the unrelieved darkness of the canyon. I drop my phone. When I lean to pick it up, I pitch forward and land face first on the gravel. I taste blood. No surprise. My nose has been bleeding since I landed. I believe I have knocked out a tooth. I think, at least with a missing front teeth, my grandmother will stop insisting I correct the gap between them.

I hear both worry and embarrassment in my mother’s voice, this “Get up, Alison. Get up”. I am a caricature of a drunk. “I didn’t drink that much,” I say. This is true, but irrelevant. Because I drank enough to act like a caricature of a drunk. Get up, Alison. Get up. I haul myself into the minivan. Blood runs down my face. I swear I can smell the shame wafting of my mother. I think that if my life were a movie, this would be the moment that I’d end up in rehab. Which hardly seems fair. I imagine a life measured by support groups and self-denial. Will I have to find Jesus? Will I have to start smoking again? And because I am still drunk, everything feels inevitable.

At the rental house, my stepfather’s sister comes downstairs. She clucks over me as Mom dabs at my busted face with a wet towel and an icepack. Stepfather’s sister is a conservative lady, a church-goer. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking because I’m too busy asking Mom if I’m more like Bradley Cooper in “A Star is Born” or James Mason in “A Star is Born.” Mom wisely does not answer but helps me up the stairs to bed. I fall asleep.

I wake up at 3am, sober-ish and headachy. I take some Advil before I look at my face. It’s swollen. There are scabs on my cheek and on my eye lid, a jagged, Harry Potter-ish cut on my forehead, mostly hidden by my bangs. My face looks a bit worse for the wear, but it could be worse. The last two times I wiped out trail running left a glossy crescent of an incipient black eye. I’ve had plenty of experience getting the side-eye from curious passersby, no doubt thinking I’d been victimized, because I’m a woman, and no one ever thinks the woman is into boxing or bar fights. I suppose this time would be no different, except that everyone will have saw me fall and seen me drunk and God, was I that drunk? I’ve never been that drunk. I didn’t even think I could get that drunk. I briefly consider running away. Can you run away at forty-two? Then I think perhaps I should kill myself. Then I think, what if by killing myself in Utah I get stuck in Utah for all eternity with all the other people stuck in Utah for all eternity. Eternity this far inland. With Mormons. What if everyone in the afterlife is an outdoorsy polygamist except me?

DAY FOUR

I’ve been awake for a while trying to suss out whether I should go downstairs when my mother knocks and comes in to see how I’m doing. “I’m fine. Embarrassed, but fine.” I mention that I do not know how what happened the night before happened. “I swear I didn’t drink that much.”

Mom nods.  She wonders if I noticed how heavily the bartender was pouring. I told her I felt like I’d been dosed. She assures me no one saw what happened. She promises that no one is trying to trundle me off to rehab. She tells me to get dressed for breakfast back in the canyon. I shower. I pat my battered face dry which manages to look both better and worse than it did at last appraisal. I apply stage-make-up level pancake to cover the carnage.

Wedding breakfast takes place in the same campground as the reception. Everyone looks tired but happy by light of day. Shockingly, no one saw me fall. I return to the rental house and the pool, which is completely empty but me and the imaginary 18th century nobleman whose memoirs I’m reading.

Second Little Sister and Good Boots come by to say farewell on their way off. She strips off her clothes by the side of the pool and jumps in while her husband stands fully dressed beside more. “I hope I haven’t been too much of a Bridezilla,” he says. I tell him he hasn’t  Second Little Sister takes her time on the way out of the pool. She changes in the restroom and emerges with a fist full of sopping underwear and a shrug. “I didn’t really think this one out,” she says. “Oh well.”

The drive off in a caravan of trucks full of friends, dogs and bicycles to embark on a group honeymoon through several national parks. They are followed by Stepgran and Stepfather’s sister, bound for Seattle. I wave, relieved that it’s over, relieved that I have no more sisters who can get married, or at least, get married for the first time. Next will be children: nieces and nephews. I take my book and sit in the hot tub. When I return the marked page, I’m gratified that the Reign of Terror has finally begun in earnest.

DAY FIVE

My stepfather drives us out northeast from St George, through a ramshackle town called Hurricane. We wind up a mountain and emerge on this broad barren plateau guarded by witches hat peaks topped with elaborate rock formations that look exactly like castles in the south of France. . Mom observes that it looks a little like Argentina, in the Andes. I haven’t been to Argentina. I think it looks a little like Mordor.

It’s a dreamy ride out, dreamy in all that it entails: beautiful and terrifying. We pass from canyon to canyon, through vast monoliths, high bridges over chasms, gray brown wastelands surrounded by cliffs, end of nowhere convenience stores and Navajo women selling jewelry off card tables on the side of the road under impossible rock formations . We drive deeper into the vastness of Northern Arizona, with cliffs menacing high plains like stony tidal waves.

The landscape is so astonishingly out of perspective with the tiny humans and their shabby motels and gas stations, I consider the pure, outrageous oddity of anyone imagining they could just have it. The desert feel haunted by gods and monsters, who are stingy with food and water and barely tolerant of human awe. It feels like the most insane sort of hubris to even imagine that humans, especially humans from far away, could bend it to their will. I get pretty mad about western expansion a couple days and a few centuries too late.Then I get pretty mad about not being mad about it all the time because it’s easy on the East Coast because there’s almost nothing left to remind you, idiot. I mulled over it and looked out the window at smug looking rock formation. Oh great, I thought, the desert’s back with incisive commentary.

Then we pull through the gate at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

**

2018 has been a brutal year for anyone with a soul, I think. My catalog of small calamities and trivial disappointments is just that, no matter how epic that catalog may feel sometimes. I’ve struggled to talk about the despair because I don’t feel particularly entitled to it. People with grief greater than I can imagine, they carry on everyday. They put on their shoes, if they have them, in the morning and look forward to the next hour, to the next week, to the next year. They endure.

I have a my warm home and full cupboards, a wholly decent day job, a family I love. And yet, I struggle under cover of sadness and regret so thick that I’m pretty sure I’ll never need one of those weighted blankets people keep going on about. I know I should want to endure. I don’t always know why.

I stand in a bathroom line in behind a group of chatty Malay women in brightly colored, ingeniously visored hijabs. One of them turns to me, points at her face, and asks, in broken English, if I fell off the canyon. I reach up and realize the minimal make-up I applied earlier has long since evaporated and the unremitting wind at the rim has forced back my bangs into a kind of Adam Ant al fresco situation. I try to tell the woman that I fell, but at a different canyon, bu then a stall opens, she darts off and the woman behind me clucks as if to say, that’s what all the battered women say.

It’s a relief to hear other languages. The Grand Canyon feels a bit like a theme park. After five hours of contemplating the loneliness of the expanse, I’m almost giddy to be in a crowd. I follow a bunch of Italian teenagers down to the Historic Watchtower, where Mom reminds my stepfather of her crippling fear of heights. She can look at the Canyon so long as she stays five or six feet from the edge and doesn’t look down.

I’m not afraid of heights. The Grand Canyon itself, however,  freaks me out—the vastness, the absence like a wound, that high raspy wind. It’s two days from Halloween and even with a Times Square’s worth of Bucket Listers mulling around me, I am 100% convinced that this is the creepiest place I’ve ever been.

Mom made us a dinner reservation at the El Tovar which looks like a cross between the Overlook Hotel and a ride at Disneyworld. The menagerie of stuffed and mounted animal heads on the walls of the lobby do not start singing when I walk through the door. I find this nearly surprising. We go for cocktails as the sky pinks with dusk. I walk out, though the wind is bitterly cold and I am dressed for a milder season. By twilight the cavities and crevices soften and the fading sun flickers against the stone like filigree. Fine, you’re pretty. The canyon preens in full-on disco colors: fuschia, purple, electric lavender. It’s like, Remember when you used to want to write serious, important things? You can do better than pretty, Fields. Turn a goddamn phrase. But don’t have any more words or time to get hazed by beautiful scenery, so I retreat to dinner.

My stepfather reserved the last room left in the park, thus I am staying in the same room as my mother and stepfather. The last time I shared a room with two parents at once was 1987, when Mom and Biological Dad took me to New York. Like everything else about the Grand Canyon, sharing a room with parents is also weird and slightly unsettling.

I’m bone tired and surprise myself by falling asleep at nine. Sometime later, I wake to a cold breeze and realize the hotel door is open. Weighted with sleep, half-dreaming, I cannot rise to close it. I hear feet padding on the floor, the panting breath of a dog, as something furry and black noses past the night stand. The bed rattles when the dog jumps up beside me onto the mattress. He settles near my feet, warm against my legs, and begins to lick his paws. He is friendly and soft, but not mine, possibly wild and the door is still open to whatever else might be skulking about in the moonlight. I call out to my parents in the other bed. I worry that if I’m too loud, I might freak out the dog, so I keep calling, until I hear mom saying, “Wake up, Alison. You’re dreaming. You’re dreaming.”

I move my legs around to search for the dog, to prove Mom wrong. The door is shut and the room is warm. There is nothing around my legs save Clorox scented sheets. I go back to sleep

DAY 6 & 7

After days of grand western vistas, we check into the Bellagio, which looks exactly like an outlet mall crossed with a mega-church and is thronged with the sort of people I assume enjoy cruise ships. I walk through a crowded atrium scented with perfume piped through the vents to conceal the everywhere scent of cigarette smoke, French Fries, old booze, cheap cologne, and the tears and sweat of thousands of miserable people desperate to project that they are having the Best. Time. Ever.

We’re up on a club floor because someone believes we’re high rollers.  We’re not. My room has his-and-hers bathrooms and a spray of still wrapped condoms, strewn like flower petals, on the floor beside the bed. I look out the window at Caesar’s Palace, which seems to wink at me, like, maybe you’ll get lucky.

I’m not a lucky person. That’s why I don’t gamble. Also I’m broke, partially because I’m unlucky and also because I don’t gamble. The week before Second Little Sister’s wedding, one of my best friends observed that I should take more risks. I told her I took risks all the time. I eat too much. I drink too much. I live outside my means. I run alone in the forest. I walk home alone late at night. I am attracted to argumentative men with complicated politics. I enjoy doing things people tell me I cannot or should not. But those aren’t the risks my friend means and I know it. “Sometimes”, she said. “I think you play it safe and don’t change all of things that purportedly make you unhappy because you’re actually pretty comfortable being unchallenged and mildly dissatisfied.” I kind of thought she was being an asshole. I also kind of thought she was right.

I pull on tight black pants and yellow high heels and tell myself I look sexy and dangerous. I think maybe, maybe, I’ll get lured into some sordid adventure off the strip and end up drunk with some washed-up scoundrel with pretty eyes and no future in some seedy room that smells like whiskey and Maybe I’ll get a tattoo I’ll regret in the morning. If only I weren’t with my parents. If only I were the sort of person that could be attracted to a washed up scoundrel with pretty eyes even if he didn’t want to talk about books. I mean, how do you even flirt with someone if you can’t make dirty jokes about writers?

We shuffle through the crowds and the mall to the series of escalators and sidewalks the convey us over the ersatz forum in front of Caesar’s Palace and then onward to the crowded strip. It is neither sexy nor dangerous. There are many pairs of cargo shorts, overpriced cheeseburger joints, and oversized frozen cocktails in penis shaped to go cups, compounding the notion that, for most Americans, the pinnacle of transgression is Spring Break freshman year of college. I stand on the sidewalk watching the volcano go off in front of the Mirage, thinking that I’d prefer a sin city with a guilty conscience and dirt under its nails and maybe I should have moved to New Orleans after all?

We drink at a cocktail bar, draped off from the slot machines by translucent netting. I feel queasy halfway through dinner and my yellow shoes have rubbed blisters all over my feet. I hobble back to the hotel, too tired for adventures or night cap. My feet are bleeding by the time I get back to the room and my busted up face is clearly visible through the make-up. I go to bed sulking and wake up crying and shuffle out, still sulking, demanding space.

Liberated for the first time in days, the only place I can think to go is the bird sanctuary at the center of the Flamingo. I wander past a lot of unshaven middle aged men with open collars and gray skin and emerge in this center courtyard with blue-dyed water, actual flamingos, mandarin ducks and a mini-golf waterfall. It’s reasonably peaceful, humid, and as much green as I’ve seen in a week. I sit on a bench by a black swan and try to cry, but I’m all dried up, just puffy and woozy. I pass a couple of showgirls dressed in black and red feathers. One of them looks a little older than me and has one of those immensely kind faces. She catches me looking at her and asks if I need any help. I think about saying yes.

I walk home through Caesar’s Palace because I have a weakness for classical kitsch. My eighth grade Latin teacher—an ex-nun and inveterate gambler—rewarded good classwork with Caesar’s Palace souvenirs and library passes. I conjugate verbs through the casino and goggle at the Lisa Frank perma-twilight of the interior forum. I’m saddened by the lack of actual Latin souvenirs (seriously, not one single Vini, Vidi, Viva Las Vegas).

My mother and I go to the spa. My massage therapist is an Israeli grandma who clucks at my face and tells me she moved to the States to help her daughter out of a violent relationship. I try to explain what really happened—I dropped a phone in the dark in Utah—but she’s having none of it. She throws in a cooling face mask as a freebie and spends most of the massage giving me the ins and outs of the singles scene in Jerusalem where she thinks I will find a good husband without a dangerous temper. I think my love life is difficult enough without having to Tinder in a conflict zone. I give her a larger than average tip. She gives me a hug.

It is Halloween. I packed a black dress with a red crinoline and attached a congressional subpoena to my bodice with a small, enamel Lenin pin. “I’m blacklisted,” I tell the parents. “Don’t worry. Almost no one will get it.” Every now and then, I get a knowing glance and a thumbs up. I like those moments of recognition, the one of us nods that we congenital weirdos never stop looking for, even after we grow up and learn how to pass as normal.

Mom makes us bar and dinner reservations on the terrace overlooking the Bellagio fountains. She and my stepfather look very happy. Adults around me squeal in delight, like children to giant streams of water choreographed to the “Titanic” theme. It’s ridiculous, I think, as the lights die down and the surface stills. And the desert is all,  so is pretty much everything you humans get excited about. I’m weirdly relieved. Did you come back to tell me something insulting? Are we going to do more of “The Wasteland.” The desert sighs warm dry breath over my cheek. Your existential crisis will still be there in the morning. Why don’t you just chill out and enjoy the show? I snort. The desert says, Twenty bucks says the next one of these makes you cry.

Mom and turns her chair as the artificial fog rolls out by the lake. I listen to the first notes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” a sentimental, crowd-pleaser that does, in fact, always make me cry.

I face away at the rail, to obscure my busted-up, tear-stained face, as the strings swell.. I saw the Martha Graham dance company do this ballet when I was a kid. It was sublime. Better than this then? I roll my eyes.

Still, I think I’m going to miss the desert. Oh, I’’m not going anywhere. You should come back out and visit once you get your shit together. I worry I’ll never get my shit together. Isn’t that the whole thing? That I’m a disaster.  What is it you said? A failure. A loser. A coward.

 I’m a landscape, says the desert. You’re a rational human being. Who do think is doing the talking here?

I sniff.

You still might get your shit together.

I’m not holding my breath, but maybe.

I lean my head back against the chair rail, away from the water, to the hazy pinkish night sky. You know what’s a real light show? The stars tonight. They’re perfect. You can’t see them, of course. Light pollution. But trust me when I tell you they’re there and they’re gorgeous.

I smile. I know.

I endure.

My last semester in college, I took a creative non-fiction workshop on Wednesday nights in a class of all women, taught by a woman scarcely older than I was at the time. There was some odd symmetry to it. I started college at a Women’s College. I finished in a classroom without men.

I had a hard time taking the class seriously. I joked a lot, which was at odds with my earnest classmates, all of whom younger than I and most afflicted with a taste for what was then called emo. They wrote stories about beautiful angular boyfriends that cried and how veganism made them beautiful angular girlfriends and the perfect beauty of a butterfly wing beating in tempo with an Ani DiFranco on a summer morning during an internship at an organic farm. I wrote stories about shoplifting bodice rippers from Lord’s Drug Store when I was nine (true) and how when I was twelve, I got fired from cat-sitting for the famous child psychiatrist next door by inviting all the boys in the neighborhood over to play with his extremely cool vintage collectible pinball machine (also true). I felt like a drunken elephant harrumphing around a china shop full of  exquisitely damaged porcelain figurines. This was not uncommon. Conventional femininity is a lot about being delicate and whenever I tried to perform it, I usually just ended up tripping over myself, tumbling down a grand staircase and destroying something priceless.

I had not, as they say on TV, come to make friends. I’d arrived at the conclusion of an endless, contentious and frequently abysmal college career. The writing class was literally my very last class. When I got around to submitting for the last workshop, I decided to write, in particular, about how college had been, about the lowest moment of my horrific undergraduate career.

At the time of the class, I vastly preferred writing fiction. I’d written a mostly awful gothic novel about homeless punk rock kids, family pressures, and Gilded Age ruins in eastern Pennsylvania. I’d won a literary award in college for a stream-of-consciousness short story I wrote about doing crystal meth at boarding school, which was hilariously cliché, and everyone believed was autobiographical. It wasn’t. I considered Creative Non-Fiction a euphemism for literate “truth” that blanched at first sight of a fact-checker and a cynical marketing ploy to sell mediocre autobiographical novels. I’d received plenty of criticism in the class thus far for my failure to delve deep into the endlessly gentle, endlessly suffering thing that a girl at my former college had tattooed on her arm after misunderstanding TS Eliot’s “Preludes” (or perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats”). They wanted misery and they wanted it to be beautiful and sexy. They refused to believe that anything as banal and petty as I ran away from home because my dad wouldn’t pay for boarding school could possibly be true. Which was both deeply weird and weirdly flattering.

So, the story I turned in was about 70% fiction. It took place in my actual old apartment. It described a bar I did go to. It mentioned songs that existed in the world—songs I liked, even. And I had certainly felt the way I described myself in the story–empty, lonely, impossibly depressed, deploying a lot of gallows humor to create (ironic?) distance between myself and crushing despair. The plot line, however, followed an entirely invented evening of various self-destructive behaviors and a boozy, low-lit sexual encounter with a flatteringly scruffy amalgamation of several dudes I knew, all dialed up to a solid 11.5 on the Nan Goldin-style beautifully/seedy meter. It made a better story than the reality of chastely contemplating suicide over a Cook-Out Tray in the Piedmont Triad. And if I were truly  not vulnerable and tragic and real enough for my professor or classmates, I would happily serve them up a whole pile of horseshit in their preferred scent profile.

I had plenty of practice making things up. I’d spent much of my young life lying through  my teeth. Sometimes this would start with something simple. A polite white lie. A bit of gilt on the lily. The sort of fanciful exaggeration my family–a rogue’s gallery of writers, politicians, peddlers, socialites, and bullshit artists of the first degree–might call  a melon ball.  An offhand anecdote, spurred by an attempt to enliven a conversation. A false admission so I might better fit in or seem cool. You can make a lot of friends nodding along about a neglectful punk rock boyfriend in California ,even if you’ve never had a neglectful boyfriend in California, even if you’ve never had a boyfriend at all, even if you’ve never been to California, and 99.9% of the time, no one asks follow-up questions, because most people, especially young people, are mostly just waiting for their turn to talk about themselves. Sometimes the tales transformed with time into things that required complicated infrastructure and timelines and character sheets. They were cinematic, evocative with scenes so richly imagined I could describe the scent of the air, the way the ground felt under my feet.

Eventually, I grew out of the lies and tired of the care and maintenance they required. Sometime around the bottom of the abyss, on a night very much like the night I’d fictionalized for non-fiction class, I realized I’d reached the limits of invention. I no longer took any pleasure from the ersatz versions of my life and I couldn’t get any of the old razzle-dazzle to work on my actual lived circumstances. Human beings are, after all, annoyingly unreceptive to authorial intent. I could neither imagine my way out of unhappiness nor make art out of  the boring, irrational, endless days of sitting up until five am listening to the same five songs waiting for a different final verse.

I stopped lying when I was depressed  because  I had to stop telling people I was cool and fine if I were going to make it.The whole time I’d assumed, eventually, they’d call me on my shit. They didn’t. People have their own shit. They don’t want to work out your inconsistencies or analyze your word choices. They generally prefer a good tale to boring truth, as evidenced by the whole world over the past few years, as evidenced by my creative non-fiction class.

If I’d had the slightest concern at being called out for making up my assignment, I needn’t have. My fake evening having fake sex with fake guy were the only parts of the story that rang true to my classmates. They lauded me for the brutal truth of my descriptions of the sexual encounter, the heartbreaking honesty of my richly-imagined conversations, my precise recounting of the laundry list of self-destructive behaviors I never actually partook in. Very brave, my professor said, if only the parts where you describe your state of mind were so honest. And then she went on to describe the actual true parts as too remote, too dry, too full of ironic distance. This doesn’t feel like something written by a person who has been depressed. You write about pain like a vapid hipster.

I think I just rolled my eyes and said something pretty close to exactly oh well, whatever, nevermind. She gave me a B in the class, the lowest grade I’d ever received in a writing workshop. I didn’t care. I graduated.  I believed—and perhaps still do– the only way I could write really honestly about anything, was to do so through fiction.

Seventeen years after my non-fiction creative writing workshop, I find myself writing a lot more creative non-fiction than fiction. Not just stories, but statuses and posts and blogs and tweets. Social media wasn’t a thing when I was in creative non-fiction workshop. I couldn’t have foreseen a world in which I’d feel obliged to curate a multimedia memoir installation all the time and every day in order to maintain a professional reputation and register my presence as A Person in The World. Facebook and Instagram and the rest offer truth in the most soft-focus, Colbertian sense. There’s certainly risk of a call-out—the internet gives those inclined all the tools they need for fact-checking—but who has the inclination or the time to call out everybody. A fellow memoirist recently told me, on the sly, as I was hemming and hawing over my lack of material for a theme-based submission call, that a good non-fiction piece really only needs to be about 70% true.

 I wasn’t shocked about that. I even couldn’t be depressed about it. A 70% true story in 2018 looks pretty good, right?[1] I wanted to look at him and say, the reason I stopped writing non-fiction for so long is that best-received story I wrote when I was young was only about 30% true and no one called me out on it. I didn’t. I was sure it wouldn’t have surprised him.

Truth rarely makes for satisfying narrative. We forget our epiphanies when we have them (sometimes because they’re dumb). Our intuition fails. Our will rarely rallies against distraction, let alone catastrophe. Suffering does not necessarily make us stronger. We’re undone by small tragedies far more often than we triumph over the large ones. We resist change. We don’t get rid of things, and when we do, we tend to pick, if not the wrong things, then the easiest to throw away. For many of us, life is an excruciating re-watch of a movie in which the protagonist continually makes all the wrong choices. And even as we yell passionately from the other side don’t open that door, don’t have that drink, don’t text that guy, don’t stay at that job, don’t let people treat you like that, she, or rather we go on, doing the stupid thing over and over again.

People like a snappy ending, a triumphant conclusion, a real sense you’ve overcome, you’ve survived, that you’re stronger, better, wiser.  I’m not always good at those.  I try to cleave to what happened, to what I remember, even if what happened was unsatisfying, banal, and without the requisite uplift. The best thing I can offer is silly, irrelevant anecdotes that end only with the promise that I’m still alive and as long as I am there will certainly be more of the same sort  silly, irrelevant anecdotes. They’re usually true, even if they’re rarely dramatic or beautiful.

Sometimes, in flashes, they’re  even a little bit honest.

[1] I mean, have you looked at Politifact recently?

Tips, drinks, donations toward acquisition of Italian villa (you can totally come stay):

©2018 Alison Fields and TinyCommotions.com.

After college, my little sister planned events at a historic mansion in the state capitol. The house sat at the center of a lush city park in the center of a once-shabby, since-gentrified historic neighborhood blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, the capitol building itself, and the shiny, unmemorable skyscrapers familiar to any city with a banking presence and a hankering to call itself New South. Local preservation groups had, over the years, collected a village worth of historic buildings—an old chapel, a clapboard store front, a cottage that had been the birthplace of the second-worst American president named Andrew–and moved them onto the property

Sometimes I would drive out and meet my sister at event conclusion and walk around with her in the damp, green, while she turned off lights and checked the locks on centuries-old doors. My reward was usually a beer at a nearby pub, or an invite to a fundraising gala held on property, despite not having any funds or any way to raise them. I’d show up in a pink satin dress, drink out of a champagne fountain, and run around barefoot in the grass  when the event was upstaged by a thunderstorm, fetching umbrellas for rain-shy dowagers.

The house itself was a more modest version of what you imagine when I say southern mansion which is true of much aptly describes most of the antebellum architecture here in the Vale of Humility. It was also quite haunted, if you believed the stories. My sister ushered paranormalist video crews, of both huckster and credulous persuasions, around the mansion and listened as they recounted their otherworldly encounters.

The haunting came on an otherwise, innocent, sunny afternoon, at another white table-cloth and tiered pastry tray event. As my sister completed her last minute tasks in the parlor, she gave a look to the food the caterers had supplied. The brie room was temperature. The fruit plate, perfectly arranged. But then as she turned to walk away, a single melon ball rose from the plate and levitated across the room. My sister was gobsmacked, and fled the scene before the cursed fruit could find its final rest.

My sister’s best friend at the time was skeptical at the recounting. And after numerous queries, it emerged that the melon ball had perhaps not so much floated as rolled off the  tray, a likely victim of gravity and clumsy caterer handling. My sister’s friend gave her a hard time about it, and henceforth shorthanded that variety of good-story-serving hyperbole, common to our family as  A Melon Ball.