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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-Four
Date XX
It could have been much, much worse. I/We woke up at three...predictably...with a slight spinning feeling and a burning stomach. Every little movement caused a disproportionate increase in the spinning so I stayed very still and occasionally groaned because it made me feel better.
“You’re not going to just lie there, are you? We’ve already wasted the whole day. C’mon...get up...” Dani said from next to me.
“Aren’t you hung over?” I asked her hoping that she shared in my misery.
“No. I want to go get food,” she said and she got up and almost fell over pulling on her shorts and socks and a t-shirt. Serves her right for wanting to get up when it was so clear that we shouldn’t ever get up again.
I lay there, hoping to fall back asleep before she reappeared because I knew that once she reappeared...
“It’s really bad down there,” she said. “There are puddles of beer everywhere, thousands of cups and one of Kerran’s friends...I think it’s one of Kerran’s...sleeping on the sofa. He has his shoes on. That’s going to piss Nell off. Hope she doesn’t see that.”
“I hope not, too,” I said and even talking was enough movement to restart the spinning. I held on and wished for it (and everything) to stop or at least for the talking to stop, but then, not unexpectedly, Dani kept talking so I had to keep talking...and spinning...and it eventually the force of it centrifugally spinning me towards null and void. Mostly void. A swirling, post-earthquake, nausea-inducing void.
I only just managed to get my boxer shorts on, run to the bathroom and throw up.
After that was out of the way, I could move freely without fear of dizziness, but still wanted the bed and went back to it gratefully and I think that Dani brought me a cold, wet towel and pressed it to my head, which annoyed me because I felt like a child, though I knew that she was just trying to help. Why do people (why do I?) resent people for trying to help?
“I’m thinking of going back to grad school,” Dani said.
“What in?” I asked.
“I’m not sure...journalism maybe? Or psychology? I just can’t keep not knowing what I’m doing.”
“You know that can take time.”
“I look around and it seems like most people have an easier time than I do. They have some plan...I just go from idea to idea to idea.”
“Maybe you’re just cocooning?”
“That sounds nice, but what I’m doing is taking money from my parents who ask me everyday if I’ve found a job yet and then pester me with a continual stream of suggestions on what I should be doing. Or they tell me which children of which of their friends got what remarkably high paying job and/or scholarship. Or is going to what graduate school? Or making such and such enormous sum of money...”
“Isn’t it rude to talk about those sorts of things? Who tells their neighbors how much money their kids make? That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Seems pretty normal to me.”
“Might be normal, but it shouldn’t be normal.”
“Why don’t you tell them that it makes you feel bad?”
“Because I don’t want them to know I’m that weak.”
“It’s not weak, it’s just human. Of course it makes you feel bad. It’s manipulative and cruel.”
“My mother told me the other day that if I couldn’t manage to find a better job that I should just go back and live with them.”
“So that they can make you feel bad all the time instead of only when you’re on the phone?”
“She also said that if I couldn’t make more money that I should at least marry someone who could. She said that I’m wasting my time dating guys that aren’t going to marry me.”
“No one gets married at 22 these days. And how do you know I wouldn’t marry you?”
“Because you’re not the marrying type.”
“You mean that I don’t have a way of making money.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I just mean that you’re not settled on things yet and you’re not settled on me.”
“Doesn’t that take a while?”
“I won’t move back in with them, but I am going to move back to New York.”
“To the city or near your parents?”
“The city.”
“When?”
“End of August I think.”
“You know I’ve been talking about moving there too.”
“I know.”
“I can’t move in August, but I could move in the late fall I think? Or maybe the winter? I think I’d have enough money then.”
“You’ll visit though, right?”
“Sure, we’ll figure things out...I mean I won’t have the money to visit all the time, but I’ll visit.”
There was a knock at my door. I pulled the sheet up over us and said, “Come in.”
It was Brenna. She had dark circles under her eyes and was slumping a bit. I could tell she was trying not to put pressure on her stomach.
“Do you guys want to drive to Denny’s?” She asked.
I looked at Dani and she didn’t signal anything so I said, “Sure.”
The car was a mistake. I was dizzy again and all the grand temples on the Mall blurred into white smudges as I tried and failed to focus on them.
Kerran and Nell were with us. Jean wasn’t. Her hangover was too bad. She’d said that she thought she’d “bruised her brain” and said she was going to rest it and we should check in with her in “4 to 6 months.”
I hadn’t been able to see her expression as she said that since she was leaning face first into a wall, but Brenna assured me that she was joking.
We got off the interstate and were on one of those highways that’s four and sometimes six lanes and lined on either side with so much wire running on the telephone poles that I could barely see the strip malls and fast food restaurants or the empty cleared lots, deep red like a bloody gash where every tree or bit of grass has been scraped away to await the building of probably another strip mall or fast food restaurant.
But the fast food restaurants themselves were strangely beautiful, perfectly geometric little buildings on perfect little green squares. The whole thing was not unlike the monuments on the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial almost the exact shape of a McDonalds and the Mall was just a bigger rectangle of grass. McDonalds being set there for a different reason: so that hamburgers by the people and for the people don’t perish from this earth?
At breakfast, we had greasy things drowning in syrup and Nell got bacon grease all over her mouth and a spot of syrup on her nose and we all made fun of her. I had to wonder what all the people who so looked to her as an example would think of the shiny smudges of bacon grease.
On the way to Denny’s, Brenna had said, “In the entire car, there aren’t enough brain cells to…” and we had all waited for what seemed like many minutes for her to finish the statement before we got the joke, that she had finished the statement.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
