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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Twenty-Five
July 7
It’s easy to get caught trying to figure people out. Dani does it all the time. We’ll be sitting together and I’ll be starting to read something for work or she’ll be starting to read something for the class she’s now taking as a prereq for sociology grad school (which confuses her parents; they like the idea of grad school, but are completely stumped as to what sort of profession it leads to: Dear Dani’s parents, Don’t be stumped. THERE IS NO PROFESSION IT LEADS TO) and she'll start talking about someone, Kerran for instance.
Suddenly, reading time is over...before either of us has really gotten anything done...and we’ll spend an hour where everything is all about what Kerran’s parents must be like, “...Inattentive?...Preoccupied?...Was he a latchkey kid?...Of course he was a latchkey kid. Were his parent’s socialites? Must have been...He’s the very definition of someone whose mother is on too much Valium...Kerran, a womanizing, easy-going, over-entitled party boy would happen in no other way, right?”
She talks about Kerran so much that I can’t help but wonder if she’d like to be sleeping next door instead of in my room. And I start to wonder if that might not be a better thing for me, too. I often get lost in these conversations and start to wonder things like, Will Neil Gaiman ever let Dream and Delirium find Destruction, or will we’ll ever find out how Delight became Delirium? Lord knows that no comic book fan can let a potential origin myth get away.
Later, after she’s gone and I’m sitting on her bed alone, I start wondering where all this is going, where she and I are going. What will happen after she moves? None of this stuff has felt like my real life, like whatever we’re doing is part of it. Instead it feels like a nice aside, something unusual like a vacation. It’s now a six-month vacation. Maybe she’s right about me? How can I be a person who’s serious about her if I think of her as a vacation?
Maybe Brenna is the most difficult person in the house to figure out? Maybe she’s the one who is more of a mystery, has the most contradictions, most likes to keep secrets or least likes to draw bright lines around where her life is and isn’t. But maybe that’s not true. She’ll give an answer to every question, but I always feel like she’s holding something back no matter what she says.
Last night we sat and she talked about her day and her night. She was slurring her words a bit and I asked her where she’d been and she only said, “Out,” but then she’d gradually told me, bit by bit, until I’d gotten the whole story.
I pay the rent and other bills and -- when we first moved in -- she’d deliver her portion wearing only a towel. Her hair was usually wet. Showering was a good reason to wear a towel, but I knew when I was being taunted. Taunting me about what? To do what? To ask her for the towel instead of the rent check? To ask her to show me what was underneath?
Once she only gave me $80 when she owed me $100. I didn’t argue with it because I couldn’t argue with her when she was in the towel. That’s why she wore it.
This week, I went into her room to find her in the middle of a pile of her clothes snipping at her hair with nail scissors. When I asked her what she was doing it was like I’d snapped her from a trance and she looked around and then up at me and her big deep brown eyes reflected the light in half-moon shapes like fish bowls do. It was as if she didn’t even know she was cutting her hair.
Rick slept over twice this week and Gaff once and I don’t think she’s gaming them.
She’s been working at a bead store since she quit a data processing job. She said the boss was hitting on her. “Maybe he’s just friendly,” I had said, but Jean, Nell and Brenna, who were all sitting around me at the time, all stopped and turned their heads towards me and gave me a look that’s known as the “Hey Crazy Man.”
But I decided that I wasn’t going to back down. “How are men supposed to work with women if they’re always going to be interpreted as coming onto them?”
“I know it’s a problem,” Jean said.
“Men and women just have different ways of working to start with,” Nell said. “Women do their work and are efficient. Men need to play around more. It makes it tough for women. If they’re goofing off too, then it looks worse than when a guy is goofing off. When the guy is goofing off, he’s fun and charming. When it’s the woman, she’s a troublemaker.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“It's true. You don’t want it to be true. It’s just very hard for women to adapt to men’s workplaces.”
“So men and women can’t be friends in the workplace?”
“I didn’t say that. I just think it’s tough.”
“I just don’t want to believe that we can’t transcend all that.”
That argument went in circles for a while before petering out in non-resolution. I think that Nell left the room very frustrated. I thought that what she wanted was for me to agree that there’s an unbridgeable gulf between men and women that’s so deep and so wide that people on the two sides can barely see each other waving, even while watching with binoculars.
So...The bead store had been especially boring and Brenna had to help some diplomat’s wife who was trying to find herself a hobby. She was hopeless and all her jewelry was in terrible knots.
Brenna had piece by piece, knot by knot, untied it for her, but besides the knots, the woman had put big gold beads next to big pearl-like beads next to big angel shaped beads and small bee shaped beads all at intervals that were virtually random.
“She should just have an affair or become a spy for a competing government,” Brenna said.
After work, she’d called Nell to meet her for a drink, but Nell was working late so Brenna had walked through Dupont Circle to the liquor store down on Connecticut, the one that has the sign with the big rabbit holding a gigantic bottle of champagne. She bought a pint of vodka and sat on a bench in the circle to drink it.
A bum came up to her and asked for a swallow and, despite him stinking and not having shaven or washed in she didn’t know how long, she’d given him the bottle and he’d taken a long swig and passed it back to her; then he’d pulled out a bottle of Thunderbird or some other of the cheap super-alcoholic wines and offered her a swig and it hadn’t been bad mixed with the vodka. The alcohol would have killed any germs anyway, she said.
Another bum -- in equally bad condition -- had come up and had another bottle. You couldn’t even tell the color of the clothes he was wearing, she said. The three of them had sat and passed the bottles around so that it hadn’t mattered whose was whose.
They barely said a word to each other. The two drunks had acted like it was the most perfectly reasonable thing in the world for her to be drinking with them.
Instead, the whole time she’d watched a dog chase pigeons through the fountain. Once the dog had almost gotten one. It made him friskier the next time, she said; his tail was wagging faster, but all that enthusiasm meant that he kept overdoing it. He’d pounce too fast and fall short of the pigeon. As he got tired and realized that there would be no pigeon for him, he’d stopped making such an effort and the pigeons knew it and stopped really even bothering to get away from him. They knew he wasn’t a threat.
Once it was dark, she’d walked down P street. "You know how there are always those clumps of people on P," she’d said to me. "They’re always headed to the 17th street bars...most of them to gay bars...and they’re always so loud and enthusiastic?"
“Yeah,” I’d said.
Well there were none of them. P street was dark and empty. It had weirded her out. It was so silent that it was like one of those movies where suddenly a murderer pops up out of the bushes to attack the helpless woman. She’d virtually run to 17th where there are always people.
She’d gone to the Fox and Hound and sat at the bar and ordered a vodka tonic and a shot of whiskey. “Any particular brand?” the bartender had asked.
"House," she’d answered.
“Owner’s a greedy shit...house brand is barely done fermenting,” the bartender said.
"So?"
“Your funeral,” he answered, pouring.
The lead singer of Dead Eddie was there and making the rounds like he was the host or something. He’d gone up to her and tried to start conversations, mostly about himself. “Did you see my show last week?” he said. “We were really rockin’,” he’d said and bobbed his head so that his shoulder-length curly hair had fallen just so on his vintage tweed blazer.
After a second, he’d looked around stunned. “What’s that smell?” he’d asked and she didn’t know what he was talking about until she thought that maybe she’d picked up the stink of the bums which made her nearly fall from her seat laughing. (Actually, when she’d told me, she used the word “chuckling,” but so few people use that word that I think it wouldn’t be believed if I did.) After that, he’d gone away.
“So what happened to you?” the bartender had asked her. Boys, she’d told him.
A guy had come in and was standing next to her and was wearing a nice suit with the tie undone. He was one of those Handsome-with-a-capital-H men, the type who was definitely a banker or a lawyer or a congressional aide.
“Boy problems, girl problems...it’s all a problem,” he said to her and was already slurring his words.
"Don’t tell me," she’d said to him. "You’re engaged to a woman you aren’t in love with, but it’s a good family match and your parents are very happy about it?"
“Ouch,” he’d said. “Is that what the suit says?”
"The suit...and, you know, you’re obviously slumming. Guys in suits like yours in this bar are trying to find somewhere to drink where no one they know will see them."
“As a matter of fact, my friends used to come here when we were in college.”
“Are you still friends with them?”
“Well, truthfully, no, but I used to love this place. I think that one of the puke stains over by that booth is mine,” he said pointing towards a booth near the window.
He’d ordered tequila shots for them and another round and he hadn’t said a thing about the smell. It had turned out that he was actually engaged, but that she was in med school and he saw her once a week. “The sex is pretty mechanical,” he told Brenna. “She tells me about her cadaver at dinner and I think about her cadaver while I’m having sex with her...I go completely limp.”
He was nearly falling over drunk when he said it. They were both hanging onto the bar for dear life and he finally did fall over. Do you know what song was playing when he fell over? Brenna asked me and actually waited like I would know the answer.
Tom Waits’s "I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You."
“Did you go home with him? I asked her.
She nodded.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
