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 Forty
September 1
It went wrong from the start. Predictably wrong. There was supposed to be an orderly line of people, ant-like, moving boxes towards the little Ryder truck. Predictably ant-like in anyone else’s movie, but not so in hers.
Instead, a little circle of people sat talking out front of Dani’s building. They’d carried out the 10 boxes she’d actually packed and were now waiting patiently to carry out any box she might get around to packing.
They’d asked if they could help, but Dani hadn’t said anything, just flung herself back and forth across her apartment picking up stray bits and tossing them in the general direction of an open box. I could feel the frustration seething off her. It seemed best to back away, slowly and immediately, the way that you would if you were in the African savannah walking through high grass that suddenly opened into a clearing where a cheetah was feeding on a recently killed gazelle.
I thought for a second that maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, that I was exaggerating it in my head in order to have an excuse not to do the work, but then she looked over at me and glared and I knew that I was the cheetah’s next meal. I backed away slowly and then, once out of the apartment’s open door, turned and walked quickly down the hall. I knew that look. I was going to be its victim either way. I might as well put it off until the last possible moment.
The goal had been to be on the road by noon and to her parents’ by 6pm. But, we didn’t leave until 5:30p and got stuck in rush hour traffic all the way to Baltimore.
Baltimore. Where did Baltimore come from? Who put it there? Does anyone ever really think about it other than Baltimoreans? Is there a reason to? It’s one of those places that, if you didn’t have to drive through it, if you’d decided to believe in it, you’d be doing so purely on faith. Like Lubbock or Topeka. I know they must exist, but they don’t exist for me.
But, in saying that, suddenly those sorts of places seem so much cooler than the ones that I’d lived in or wanted to live in. There were no expectations for them to live up to. And they weren’t like dear Washington that attracted every blowhard with delusions of importance (or competence).
Somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia, Dani and I had a fight. She’s been spoiling for it all day. I’d known that as soon as I’d seen that look in her eyes that morning.
It was like a storm that had been on the horizon with ever-darkening clouds. One of those ones that looks bad and you watch it wondering if it’ll be as bad as it looks when it finally hits.
This one wasn’t quite. When it started, I thought it was going to be terrible. She accused me of sabotaging her move, saying that I should have been there more, that I should have really insisted on helping to pack, that I should have taken charge of it.
I wasn’t even sure how to respond. I’d tried at various points to jump in and help. But every time I’d picked up anything...a dish, a cup, a book...and asked her where it went, she’d told me to put it down and let her sort it out. Now she was telling me that I wasn’t supposed to have listened to her? To have packed that stuff anyway while she glared at me for not doing what she said?
I didn’t know. But all this followed a very predictable pattern of our fighting. If I listened to her and did what she seemed to want, I was wrong for not perceiving her true needs or desires and acting according to what she really wanted. If I didn’t do what she’d asked, I was wasn’t listening to her. And the worst of it is that it was often both, in the same argument, so that I didn’t even know what to say or what to apologize for and, obviously, would have to keep silent for fear of treading over some line or another. By the end of it, she was usually berating me for my silence.
And that’s how this one ended, too. After she’d berated me for it, there was a long stretch where we were both silent and, during that silence, the sky got bluer and darker and Venus appeared with all the suddenness of a pinprick. And across to our left, the bright line of daylight made a firm horizontal magic marker line in reddish white that paralleled the darkening gray line of the highway. By the time we got near Philadelphia the traffic had dissipated and it was night and the two of us had been silent for so long that I’d almost forgotten the anger of the fight or the claustrophobia of wanting out of the truck’s small cab.
Somewhere around the New Jersey Turnpike, we started talking again. It was tentative at first, but then like we’d never fought. Of course I knew that the fight hadn’t been forgotten, that it was still there, on a secret scoreboard where I was quietly losing whatever this game was.
I was almost relieved to be losing and relieved that she was going to be so far away so that I’d have space and peace and not have to shape my life around her or shape her into my life. There’d be no nights when my friends wanted to make plans that I couldn’t participate in because she didn’t want to. There’d be nights when I could just choose to stay home and read. There’d be nights were I could write in my journal or look at my photos. And I could always see her on odd weekends, right? It wasn’t that far away.
The Turnpike ran through miles of wetlands before it got to New York City. Oil refineries, power plants and industrial sites sit in those wetlands or on those wetlands. Bizarre bird nests of endless metal and piping, some of them spouting fire, burning off gas or some other chemical, sitting almost delicately on the flat watery land around them. Gas distorted the air above and, through the flames emerging from one metal chimney, I could see, in the far off distance the Twin Towers rising up from the flatlands like mountains, not buildings.
We took a turnoff over Staten Island and all the time I was craning my head to see glimpses of the city that appeared tantalizingly above the surface whenever the the highway stretched through the flatter parts of the landscape. I kept asking Dani if there’d be a better view or whether this was it and she said, “Yes,” but I was impatient and started to doubt her.
Then the highway opened up and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stood up like a titan in front of us, so bright and huge that it was easy to think that it had been set there by Gods, not metalworkers.
And after it, the highway hugged the coast so that there was a constantly rotating view of the city as it shifted and got ever closer. Totally overwhelming, like a single grand masterpiece of sculpture. My eyes couldn’t take it in, couldn’t understand or accept it, but wanted all of it, to own it, to have the whole shining thing to be mine.
Out in the harbor, the Statue of Liberty swung into crisper, sharper view and looked so bright and so small next to the buildings of the city and it made me think that moments like this, that seem so dramatic and you’re seeing something so surprising to you and profound and the moment, even in a photo, can’t be captured and matters only to you. You can share it with someone. Dani was here, but she’d seen it all a before. It was part of the landscape to her.
“What’s to our right,” I asked Dani.
“Brooklyn,” she answered.
Where my grandfather grew up. I looked over at it and it seemed even more unfathomable, endless medium sized buildings, endless expanse with barely any greenery. Buildings mushrooming out of buildings. Endless row houses amid large brick monsters that were industrial or storage sites.
A person would get swallowed in all that, lost among all the other people. And in the treeless incoherent desolation how could you find your way? In my head, I revised...if it were me, when it’s me, how will I find my way?
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2006 Me Three
