You Are Young and Radiant and Stupid

Calla flies in from Long Beach, where she tends bars intermittently. She sleeps on a blow-up mattress in the meditation room. She brings two carry-ons, one for clothes and the other for make-up. She’s very beautiful, and almost my age. I can see myself with her. I thought she’d be older, Jenny’s age. An indeterminate and cancer-ravaged sixty, like Jenny. Missing an eye and her sense of smell and her ability to chew and swallow properly, like Jenny. I live in Jenny’s attic in Akron, Ohio, and Calla lives in Jenny’s rental property in Long Beach, California. Calla is Jenny’s niece. I’m nobody. I live in the attic and eat in the attic, whatever I can easily cook on the single plug-in burner I bought at Walmart the first week I moved in, and the burner sits atop my mini-fridge in the corner I’ve designated as the kitchen. The corner has a nice low window, almost floor-level, looking out to the neighbor’s pitched roof. I keep a maple side-table for food prep space and a red milk carton for dirty dishes, and every week on Sunday I take the red milk carton down to Jenny’s kitchen on my hip so I can use her sink to clean the canned curry and peanut butter off my plates. I own four plates, two bowls, and four of each kind of silverware. I bet Calla has multiples of everything, and cupboards to keep it all in. She straightens her hair with an expensive flat-iron. She’s beautiful. The clothes in her carry-on bag are all neutral-toned and thrifted, wools and high-waisted trousers with pleats and turtlenecks. She’s maybe double my weight, healthy, cat-eyeliner, black bob, coffee-colored eyes, dark lipstick. I want to avoid her like weevils and be close as flies on glass, I want to stay in touch, I want to accidentally walk down the attic stairs with the milk carton on my hip at the same time she comes out of the meditation room with her make-up bag and straightener, oops, hey, how are you this morning, just fine thanks let me show you how to do this thing with mascara, oh sure why not! Make me empanadas, make me tostadas, make me your girl, implicate me in a crime. Okay, maybe not the last one. I’m just saying I’d go to prison for you is all. Like fucking Bonnie and Clyde in the fortunate absence of a cinematic cliffside.

I’m coming in from work. I teach preschool. I come in the side door because the front door’s never worked. It sticks and we don’t have the key for it. Jenny and Calla catch me sneaking up the stairs and say, “Hey, you!” and I lean into the kitchen innocently enough. I don’t intend to stay, I tell them. Got stuff to do. I look goofy in my khaki work pants and company polo. The kids have been eating the leather off the toes of my boots, and you can see the strips where they’ve torn the top smoothness off to reveal the uncured furry material underneath.

“We’re having a party,” says Jenny. “You—you wanna come? You’re invited.”

“I don’t wanna impose,” I say. “No. I don’t wanna be a bummer.”

“Impose? Bummer? Nah!” Jenny waves a slotted spoon at me. They’re making beans and fake meat and peppers in lush old skillets. The kitchen smells warm like iron. Calla plays music from playlists on her new phone, already dropped with a smashed-in face.

“You listen to Thundercat?” she asks.

“Yes,” I lie. I’ve only seen his latest album at the record store, the one where he’s peeping out from the surface of a lake looking like a sociopath.

“I like Thundercat. He’s groovy.” She swirls her midsection and jives her arms around. She’s a groovy dancer. She’s wearing a black turtleneck and brown plaid pants, black boots with a teeny heel on them.

“I think I’ll stay for the party,” I decide.

Calla shoves me with her shoulder. “What, yeah! Sorry if that was inappropriate. I guess I didn’t ask if I could push you.”

“It’s okay. I’m used to it.” I flash my daycare logo. “Kids.”

“Ah, coolness.”

“I have to change. This is embarrassing.”

“Or you could not change. Embrace the embarrassing.”

“Sure, yeah. Or I could not do that.”

“Fair enough.”

The outfit I choose for myself is a tragic testament to self-image. Over-the-waist jeans. Not quite over-the-waist—my weirdly long body stops them right above the hip bones. Target t-shirt with very thin stripes of color. Black leather belt. Oversized leather jacket with SAVE THE PLANET embroidered on the back. Doc Martens. Rolled pantlegs. I look like a bassist or lesbian or teenager or all three stirred for a very long time in a very hot cauldron.

There are seven-odd people in the house that normally aren’t in the house. Jenny’s band shows up first. Then an Austrian psychology professor and her preschool-aged kid, whom I spend most of the party impressing with my stuffed animal collection. There’s also an older man named Eric, whom I gather has a thing for Calla, and Calla is fine with this, even encourages it, and Jenny also is fine with this and encourages it. There’s also a woman with a rainbow guitar strap. I have no idea where these people materialize from. They all live within walking distance, and they all, like me, seem to own keys to Jenny’s house.

We eat tostadas and drink wine. Everyone brings at least one bottle of wine. Someone brings three boxes of Winking Owl. I eat two tostadas piled high with beans and quickly lose track of how many glasses I drain for myself from the Winking Owl spigots.

This is unfortunate. I embarrass Eric by flapping my full wine glass at him. I blink a lot. We move into Jenny’s dark front room, thick oriental curtains drawn shut against pristine Dodge Ave, the dull porcelain lamp standing as tall as the toddler with my stuffed animals in her lap, giving off spooky orange light, diffuse as a string of holiday bulbs. The rug is one of those spiral-woven deals. I made a potholder like it in fifth grade art class out of twisted fat quarters. Hand-painted portraits of Indian goddesses hang in golden frames up and down the wall, and Chinese fan the size of a bald eagle, and a Joan Boaz LP in a plastic sleeve.

Also, the instruments. I’m worried about bumping into and possibly destroying one of the twenty unique instruments sitting in unique instrument holders around the cramped front room, but I don’t have to worry long because soon every one of Jenny’s party guests has an instrument in their lap or around their shoulders and is playing it, or attempting to play it, in an improvised jam session. I sit on the floor to watch, placing my wine glass between the arches of my feet. Calla sits with me. She has an instrument shaped like a frog. She drags a mallet to and fro across its ridged back to produce a sound like this: krrrrrrrrrrk.

Eric stands next to us. He does not have a frog instrument. He has the toddler, attached to him at his ankles. He also has a pair of bongos.

Calla scrapes her frog and Eric pats his bongos and the toddler bites the ankle she’s wrapped around. I bow my head to slurp wine off the rim of my glass. The Hour of Music feels choreographed, tight, like an Austrian music box, but it’s not. It’s all in the familiarity with the ritual, and these peoples’ familiarity with one another. Which is why I have no instrument. I’m not familiar.

Halfway through the last song (something by the Beach Boys), Calla pulls up Tinder on her iPhone and starts tapping through her matches. She balances the frog instrument and the mallet on her left knee. The mallet, turns out, is made to fit perfectly in the frog’s open mouth when not in use.

“I met this guy the other night,” she says. “Don’t tell Jenny, because I told her we just made out a little bit.” She shows me his picture. He resembles a skinnier Ed Sheeran, like from the Game of Thrones episode where he sang on a log. I narrow my eyes against his paleness.

“Go wild, then,” I say disapprovingly. I’m not sober enough for nuance. She shoulders me, laughing.

“I like him. Nah, I don’t know. He’s weird, huh?”

“Weird-looking.”

“You’re right, you’re right.”

She moves her dark hair behind her shoulder, revealing the wooly collar of her black turtleneck. I want to snap it with my pointer finger. I manage to resist. She laughs again. “Wow,” she says. “You, my friend, are fucked.”

Then Jenny announces we’re moving to the wine bar.

Do people still drop in on gigs? Jenny does. She has me case her functioning accordion and one good banjo, one of four similar banjos in a line-up next to the fireplace, and load them into the trunk of her beat-up blue Toyota Yaris. Calla kicks around the driveway at my back. I slam the trunk.

“Hey, Wobbles. You need any help?” she asks.

“No-to-the-ope. Got it.”

Jenny’s house stands three stories tall above us. On our other side stands Marsha and Dan’s three-story beige four-square, a panel at the base of the porch still open where Dan recently had been crawling in to repair the cracked foundation with some sort of plastic foot or jack. He explained it to me once at the end of our joined driveways, but I forget already. Behind our rows of houses, the big Highland Tower sheets the stars. We are entrenched in a canyon of city darkness. Calla, all shadow in her dark clothes and dark skin and hair, self-evaluates for drunkenness on a fairly straight fracture in the gray concrete of the driveway. She holds out her arms and flaps a bit, but doesn’t fall.

“You should do it, too, kid,” she insists. She pressed on the small of my back. “You’re the one who drinks wine like it’s water.”

“Call me Christ,” I stammer.

“Give me a miracle first,” she says. We bend our necks to look up at the top windows of Highland Towers. The lights are on in some of them, and the attached balconies shimmer, vaguely gold. Calla rustles me alive again with her hand on my shoulder. “Weirdo,” she says. “I gotta grab my coat.”

I’ve been wearing my jacket through Jenny’s house party. I pat my pockets, checking for the thin folio of my wallet. In the left pocket, with my car keys, a pen, a tiny Moleskine notebook with bad poems scratched hard into the thin pages.

I pay Jenny $350 for use of her attic. It’s not much. It doesn’t cost much to stay alive, I’ve recently found out. I budget out $25 a week for groceries, usually stuff that keeps in cardboard boxes for several weeks until I get around to eating it. The rest goes unaccounted for. I figure with several months of thriftiness, I’ll have enough for a down-payment on my own house, but these ideas feel hazy and half-formed, unreal, without blood. I don’t know what I’d do with a house. Just like I don’t know what I’d do with Calla or the cute barista at the coffee shop or any girl if she liked me back. I’m frozen in the driveway under the hundreds of eyes of Highland Towers. I thumb the hole in Jenny’s siding where she ran into the house with her waterlogged RV. Eventually Jenny comes out in her pea-coat, and Calla in her wool trench, and they guide me into the Yaris, saving me.

Gig is a strong word for a fifty-year-old white guy playing blues on a stool in an empty wine bar. When Jenny swoops in with her holographic accordion, she’s playing the part of his one-eyed angel. She gathers the broken pieces of his failed guitar-picking, adds melody, adds actual fucking god damned notes to the barrage of smoker’s lung and silence.

Calla and I sit at a table against the wall, just watching. The waitress comes around insisting we look at the laminated menu she forces on us, one page with half a foot of fancy white space between each hors d'oeuvres option.

We decide to bail when they start tooling around in Willie Nelson’s discography. Calla texts Tinderdate that we need a ride. I stare at the print above our table. It’s an ad for red wine. I wonder what their marketing angle is.

Turns out Tinderdate can’t come pick us up. Jenny’s in the middle of an involved accordion break jammed into the final quarter of Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain, so Calla orders us an Uber. She touches the screen delicately, her fingers skipping across spiderwebs in the glass.

“Men are dick bags,” she says. “Never forget. I just want someone who will prioritize me for once.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s playing Destiny. What is that even?”

“It’s a video game. I think it’s an MMO? Nerd stuff.”

“He wants me to come to his house to play Legend of Zelda on his flatscreen.”

“Don’t do that.”

We move outside, where the waitress can’t return to ask us for the fifth time if we’ve finished deciding whether or not we want overpriced nachos and glasses of wine. In mid-October, it’s close to forty and dropping fast. Soon a cold front will descend from the Arctic. The snap will be unlike anything seen before in this region of Ohio, cold enough to freeze locks and eat away the brittle parts of old cars. I’ll break out of Jenny’s house one of those nights through a window, and slip and smack my head on a patch of black ice in the driveway by the indent near the gutter where Pudding, the neighbor’s cat, likes to sleep in the summertime. I’ll lay in the darkness for a moment that will feel as suspended and frozen as my body. I’ll wonder if I’ll die. I hear that sort of thing happens all the time to people living alone.

We lean against the black fence keeping the shrubs tame, pulling our coats closed against our chests.

“Will the car be here soon? When he comes, I call the backseat,” I say.

Calla shrugs. “Ten minutes. Better out here than in there. Also, you can’t sit shotgun in an Uber. It’s a legal thing.”

“Never been in one.”

“Jesus Christ! How old are you?”

I have to count back the years. “Uh, twenty-three.”

She bores holes in me with her melty chocolate eyes. “Dude,” she says.

“What?” I ask. Then the Uber pulls up to the little fence we’re leaning on, and we leave the question hanging on one of the posts like a homeless person’s winter hat.

Calla tells the Uber to dump us off in front of the West Market bars, and we cut across traffic on foot to edge into Square, this gay bar, no windows. The only fixtures are dim and give off as much light as college-dorm string lights. There’s a dance floor and a few pool tables and Calla asks if I know how to rack up a game. “I’ve never played,” I admit. I shrug. She flags us two chairs at the bar and asks me what I want. “Whatever you’re having,” I say, because I’ve never ordered a mixed drink at a bar before, and I want to know how to do it. She waves at the bartender.

“Two vodka pineapples. With lime.” She turns to me and admits like a secret, “It’s better with lime. Trust me.”

“Lime?”

“Yeah, like a lime slice.”

“I trust you.”

“Coolness.” We get our drinks. A quarter can of pineapple juice with well vodka and little slices of lime, paid for in cash. She shows me how to squeeze the rind into the disposable cup. I feel like a toddler, incredibly unworthy, but honored to have someone so cool they know how to squeeze lime juice into an already very tart drink want to hang out with me this late at night. When she could otherwise sleep or meet Tinderdate at his house for Final Fantasy VIII on the PS2.

“What do you wanna do?” she asks me. The overhead lights and the light coming off our drinks tint her cheek highlights pale green. I see faint green tones in the upward slicing of her fake eyelashes.

“I want to eventually go to this concert in Canton, I think,” I say, glancing at the clock. It’s not yet midnight. This night is trapped in a vacuum of time.

“I mean with your life, silly.”

“Oh. Uh, I don’t know. I want to write or something. I’ve published some things. I don’t have very much time for it anymore.”

“Are you gonna teach writing? Like a professor or something?”

“I don’t know. I’ll do something. How about you?”

“Well, I just got this job with a brewery. I basically go around and drink for pay. I also tend the bars. Bartender. It pays great. I’m very happy with it.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah, I just wish I could meet some cool guys. They’re all dicks.”

“Guys are dicks,” I say, trying to indicate, what, that I think guys are dicks? This is not a revelatory comment. This indicates nothing about me. Handfuls of straight women make this comment around other straight women. Does it align me with Calla? Does she feel that I stand out as a figure of empathy, even solidarity?

She says, “Hell yeah,” and we knock our plastic cups together. She takes a long sip through the little brown coffee straw the bartender placed in her drink, the kind with the thin white vein running down the center, bifurcating the opening. “I’ve been meaning to ask, anyway. Why are you living with Jenny?”

“Your aunt?” I shrug again. “It’s a long story. I used to live with a group of girls our age, but one of them converted to paganism and started sigilling our windows in paint marker. She’d tell me all these crazy stories about her sex life. Also, I was horribly depressed. And I sold all my stuff and was about to live out of my car, and I was stealing things from the grocery store all the time.”

“So, you came to live with her?”

“Yeah, none of that really answers your question. Sorry. Uh. I needed a place to keep me permanent. Like how moms eat yogurt to keep from shitting themselves.”

“I’ve seen your place up there. I couldn’t help myself. Auntie was talking it up, said you really did a good job turning it into an apartment or whatever. So I took a look. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, dude. The little kitchen in the nook is fucking genius.”

“Thanks. It still smells musty up there though, because of all the water damage and old carpet. I cleaned out the plug-in fan the other day and found a dehydrated mouse in there. I put it in a Tupperware container on my skull and fur shelf. I also find a lot of dead bumblebees on the porch. And butterflies. I have no idea if any of this means anything.”

Calla stirs her drink with the coffee straw. The ice cubes scrape together and slide around the grooves in the plastic cup. She sighs. “Well, we should get going. You want the rest of this?”

“Right,” I say. I guzzle mine and then I guzzle hers. She says nothing about being impressed. I realize suddenly that if she was ever impressed by alcohol retention, she would’ve voiced her admiration of me many hours ago.

She pays the bill and tips generously and we leave, crossing the neon-cold streets back to Dodge Ave, holding our coats tight around our necks. Music pours out from the propped doors of all seven bars we pass on the way home. Punk, ska, jazz, math rock, metal, whatever. Covers of 80’s pop songs. Thin karaoke instrumentals. From the coffee shop, since it’s time to close up, there’s Merzbow. I think I hear one of the apartments above the bars playing Animal Collective on a Bluetooth speaker. I assume it’s Bluetooth because there’s nothing in the sound to indicate to me they’re spooling it out from a turntable. It’s so clean, crisp like a cold glass of water over the ambulating sea of scratchy outdoor venue and bar speakers piping over the road. And I want this stranger to have the best in life, honestly. I hope their Bluetooth speakers are new and very expensive.

Jenny’s pulling on her wool coat in the stairwell when we get home. The house is warm and fragrant with mothballs, mouse traps, and hot lint.

“I was worried you’d miss the show,” she says, doing the snaps on her coat. She leaves the top two undone. Her tongue clicks against the loose bones in her skull. “Well. I’ll drive.”

I cede Calla shotgun. I’m ill from the alcohol and Jenny’s driving makes me spin regardless. She takes the turn from Dodge Ave to West Market Street with the speedometer needle clipping near 40 MPH. I lay across all three seats without a buckle on, releasing my body to the rolls and dimples of the road.

I gaze at the pilling felt on the ceiling.

I want a different life.

They’re talking up front in mumbled voices. Something about the distance between Akron and Canton, the distance between Canton and Long Beach, and the press and weave of tris all around as Jenny’s pale blue Yaris plunges out of the valley of lights, the city, the compact prism of bank towers and hospital wings, too fast, 60 MPH down a one-way 30 MPH road and then sharp, merging onto the highway outta here. The road glides under us. We’re powerful. We could be going anywhere. The music at this show could be any music, it could even be yours. I lay across the backseat. I’m drunk and gently swaying under the roof of the car to Calla’s Thundercat resting on the center console. Mumbled voices. Lights, then darkness. We shoot off into the black of night.

HC writes from Seattle, Washington. Their writing can be found with The Threepenny Review, Little Patuxent Review, Gordon Square Review, Eastern Iowa Review, and Delay Fiction, among other places, and has been nominated for awards such as Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. They are currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate on the prose track with University of Washington. Their first novella, No One Dies in Palmyra Ohio, is forthcoming with What Books Press.