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 Fifty
Date: Late January as seen from February 15
From The Machine:“...The band Bleed Monkey manages to make earnest yet meaningless cock-rock that I’m sure will advance their cause in stealing the virginity from many more 12-year-olds. Any reasonable society would already have the members of Bleed Monkey, even the nicer members, in some sort of quarantine or incarceration. Sadly, ours does not... “
Jean pulls no punches.
The road was icy, but not nearly as bad as I’d expected, completely passable, but very gray. Snow lined the freeway in drifts taller than the car. It was like being in a long white tunnel. I could just make out the little gray blotches of the Twin Towers against the sky.
I was headed for Staten Island. Daniella’s boss’s ex-boyfriend needed a roommate. It was going to be cheap. He was going to help me unload the truck (or so I was told).
The last weeks in DC had been rough. DC had been hit by a blizzard so fierce that it shut the entire east coast down. Almost 4 super-deep feet of snow. Fire trucks were stuck on hills in among cars strewn like boulders from a landslide. The mayor had had to tour the city by helicopter. Mt. Pleasant had been cut off.
Meanwhile, what was outside was inside. Our heat couldn’t keep up with the cold. I was despairing and purposeless. Waiting for a call from Daniella where she said things that she just wasn’t going to say. Nell was grumpy and Brenna had disappeared, maybe to Gaff’s? The only two people who seemed OK were Jean and Kerran, best buddies in the wake of Jean publicly calling for Kerran’s incarceration.
As Kerran said, “Yeah, she’s tough to disagree with, you know? After I read her rant, I was thinking, “Wow, those guys should really be in jail.”
Klingle Road, our connection to Cleveland Park, had been transformed into a single deep furrow between walls of snow. Taller 4 wheel drive trucks could get through, but few others. I could walk down the middle of it, but then someone would come through in a jeep, looking so sporty, and there’d be no choice but to jump into the snow drift as the person in the jeep waved or ignored me. Decent people might offer a ride.
I didn’t get offered any rides.
Just to get to Cleveland Park, that one little oasis of city, had become a 25 minute walk. On the morning the blizzard started, I’d woken up to see snowflakes the size of human heads not so much floating downward as plopping to earth. Each tier of the backyard rapidly disappeared. All other color vanished as everything washed into white.
Jean and Kerran, intrepid hunters of the frozen north, had already braved the walk into Cleveland Park in order to bring the rest of us bagels.
The one thing that became obvious was that I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t move. Or drive. I couldn’t, as my bitter fantasies sometimes insisted I do, jump on a bus or train to NYC in order to convince Daniella that she was making a mistake. That this whole thing was a mistake. That we were meant to be together. Right?
Later, I went out to walk around in the snow, each step rising to my thigh or higher, then higher. At first it was wonderful, so strange and new, like walking out into an alien world, then what was there to do? None of the housemates wanted to snowball fight and the snow was too deep for any longer walks so I went back inside and upstairs and tried Daniella. All I got was her answering machine. But, I wanted to speak to someone. I had this big hollow empty feeling in my stomach, only speaking to a person would fill it up.
So, I called Bella, but there was no answer so, needing people, I went back downstairs. Everyone minus Brenna sat in the TV dinner room with the ruins of several bagels sitting on plates around them. They all looked seconds from falling asleep. I sat down with them. We had nowhere to be, no one to go meet. We just had to sit there and watch the snow descend. It was kind of liberating...really liberating...we could do anything...write a book...finish reading a difficult book...go through my books...catalog my books...
Instead we took a mass nap on the couch. Later, I went upstairs to get a book to read, but fell back asleep on my bed.
Blizzard Day 2 (or Blizzard+1 as we started privately referring to the days) was similar. Day 3, I don’t even remember. By day 4, I was desperate to be liberated from my liberation. I would have gone back to my job for the day and work unpaid if they’d let me. I was in some sort of snowbound purgatory.
I tried Daniella, but she said that she couldn't talk. That one little five minute conversation felt like the best thing that had happened to me since Kerran had donated a bottle of tequila to the household back on Blizzard +2.
On day Blizzard+5, I called and rented a U-Haul for Blizzard+6.
On Blizzard+6, it snowed again. Another foot.
On Blizzard+7, it was resolved through a flurry of phone calls and round the clock, intensive final status style negotiations that Livia would move into my room in one week-- on Blizzard+13. I would either be gone by then or sleeping in the TV Dinner Room.
On Blizzard+8, I walked to Cleveland Park and sat in a coffee shop and tried to catch up on my journal. The group of snow-geared people next to me was talking about why Starbucks is successful. They’d come to the conclusion that it was the half-naked mermaid logo. It leant Starbucks a mystery and sexiness that its normal wholesomeness just didn’t have. I trudged back to the house, dodging sporty 4-wheel drive vehicles and thinking about swimming mermaids.
On Blizzard+14, I moved onto the TV Dinner Room couch in an all-night packing and clearance session that lasted until dawn. By the end of it, I was so ragged that I’d stopped actually thinking.
On Blizzard+15, we held a going away party for me. Not many could come b/c of the snow, but the usual gang was there and Brenna surfaced in a chipper mood carrying bags of nacho chips.
We started the party with tequila shots and, at some point, I tried Daniella so that she could be at the party too.
“How dare you call me from a party when you know that I don’t know many people up here and can’t go to one,” she said.
Who expected that? I should have. When was the last time she was pleasant and easy to deal with?
Nell had picked up a married bartender at one of the two Cleveland Park dive bars. Both have names that would also be equally suitable for old age homes or cemeteries. I think that the bartender was from one called Shady Grove.
So, at the end of the night, while I was puking in the 3rd floor toilet, I could hear the bartender sitting with Nell on the dark stairway, taking turns between making out and complaining about his wife.
The following day I had a blinding headache and drank plenty of water. Jean had made granola and I had some and felt a little better.
Bella hadn’t come to the party so I called her to tell her that I was finally leaving.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Just to say ‘hi’ and ask why you didn’t come to the party.”
“So, we haven’t talked in weeks and then you just call to say ‘hi?’”
“I did leave you a message inviting you to the party. Isn’t that the way it works if you haven’t talked to someone in weeks? You either never speak to them again or you call and say, ‘hi,’ right? Do you prefer that I’d taken the other option?”
“No, I’m just not very happy right now. I haven’t heard from Imogen in days.”
“Days? Doesn’t she call you three times a day?”
“Yes, she NORMALLY calls me three times a day. That’s why it’s so weird when she doesn’t call at all.”
“Do you think she’s OK?”
“NATHAN, she hasn’t called me in days. I have NO idea. I’d say “no” to be honest, but how can I know if she hasn’t called? Do you see? Do you see how fucked up this is?”
Normally, Bella is such a good understated person--ladylike in some don’t-make-em-like-that-anymore sort of way who doesn’t really swear so the fact that she was freaking out and swearing was very disconcerting.
“Is there something we can do? Somewhere we can look? I’m just not sure what I can do? Where was the last place you knew her to be?
“With that congressman. The one her father told her that she had to hang out with, that fucking sleazeball congressman.”
“Do you have a number for him?”
“No, the jerk is married. He doesn’t take her to his house...They go out to dinner then to a hotel...or just to his office. I can’t believe she’s doing that either. She said when this first started that she’d go out to dinner with him to please her father, but that it wouldn’t go further, that she wouldn’t let her father turn her into some sort of whore...”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just let it hang there, that word, no flinching from that thing that is there. Big wide o. In English there might be as many words for prostitute as there are Hebrew words for God, but only that one has the benefits of onamonapoeia. The others are just cold and clinical; prostitute, call girl or courtesan all sound one step removed, technical even, but not a whore, that one is close to its meaning.
Imogen is easily dismissed, a vapid rich good time girl who has never had to make tough choices. Brenna, Nell and Jean hate her, too pretty, too happy, too unconcerned; she just floats through everything. They only put up with her when they did because of Bella.
But I always liked her. I liked her disconnection, that she wasn’t any more concerned with how much things cost than she was with who was the president or whether or not she was going to have lunch later or a roof over her head. She could spend $500 on drinks, then bail me out of jail and give a $100 bill to a homeless man.
---All of that, in the blink of a phone conversation.---
“Are you there?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
“Well, this isn’t helping. I’m not sure what we can do, but this can’t be it.”
“I wish there was somewhere we could look. Promise me that you’ll call as soon as you find anything out?”
“OK.
The next day was actually sunny and some of the snow melted off. I walked the two miles to the truck rental place to pick the truck up. Driving it back, it actually felt alright, the snow didn’t seem to affect it that badly. I had a little trouble on the biggest of the hills near the house--the truck actually seemed to be sliding back down the hill at one point-- but it was fine once the truck was in a low gear.
I was able to park it in front of the house and--after much cajoling--everyone who was in the TV dinner room got off the couch to help me carry things to the truck. With 7 people it didn’t take very long to get it full.
Afterwards, we sat in the TV dinner room and we drank the leftover beer from the party. I’m moving in the morning, I said to myself. I’m moving in the morning.
That night, of course, there was more snow. Just an inch, but the news was saying that there’d be more. It didn’t matter. I’m moving in the morning.
I called Bella. Imogen still hadn’t called her. The congressman wouldn’t return calls to Bella or to Imogen’s father, who was now--apparently--scheduling time to be worried about his daughter. (10:00am-10:15am, I’m sure.) Bella was going to the police tomorrow.
The consensus in the TV Dinner Room was that she’d run off with either a Brazilian sugar magnate or a Tongan prince. However, there wasn’t the usual cattiness about Imogen, that was just in case something terrible really had had happened to her.
Date: Blizzard+17 (MD Day)The next morning dawned grey and overcast. The clouds looked heavy and pink. There’d be more snow.
Everyone was asleep, mostly on sleeping bags in the TV dinner room. The rest of the house was too cold to sleep in.
I threaded my way through the bags and got ready. Goodbyes were short. Brenna had reappeared a few minutes before I was to leave. She suggested we have a big goodbye breakfast, but there was going to be more snow. I’m moving today. I’m moving now.
And that was it. Goodbye to DC.
The road was icy, but not nearly as bad as I’d expected, completely passable, but very gray. Snow lined the freeway in drifts taller than the car. It was like being in a long white tunnel. The buildings were now dark gray against the sky.
I already felt their absences. I only knew Daniella in NYC. I was going to have to make all new friends. I was going to have to sit alone in my apartment and in bars. I was going to have to walk down the street and not know where I was going.
And as I thought about what I was leaving, all the long nights and empty glasses and this weird interconnection of friends where there was always someone around to hang out with. We were all friends and friends of friends and girlfriends and boyfriends and ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends and crushers or crushees of each other; and even when we hadn’t always liked everyone that our friends liked we were friends of the people we didn’t like who were friends with the people we were friends with. We were just like that.
Friendship, becoming close, making common cause, or having a common bond, that root-down feeling that you’re connected to someone, that you share some sort of siblinghood with someone, a siblinghood of intention, of hope and compassion. Those things I think I shared and share with Brenna and Bella, Nell and Imogen, Daniella and Livia and Coby and Kerran and Teddy and Frank too. That each of us is more when counted with each other.
And of course, our group was mostly women. Mostly sisters. Mostly mermaids. Mostly chasing sugar magnates in Brazil. And mostly I thought of myself as looking on from the shore, but I wasn’t. I was right here, in deep, trying to navigate the waters and not get spun in the eddies or broken on the shoals.
The road was icy, but not nearly as bad as I’d expected, completely passable, but very gray. Snow lined the freeway in drifts taller than the car. It was like being in a long white tunnel. The buildings now touched the sky.
Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2007 Me Three
