Always Happy Hour: Stories(10)

As we stand awkwardly around my bedroom, I tell them things happen in the house that I can’t explain. There are noises. Lights come on. Garage doors open by themselves and books are moved. It’s an old house and there are rational explanations for all of these things, or at least most of them. The country is noisy as shit and nails don’t hold and wiring is faulty and I drink a lot so I can’t say whether or not I closed a door or moved a book, at least not for certain.

The women ask about an alarm system—nonexistent. I tell them that my dog would happily lick the feet of an intruder, though I don’t know if this is true, and that dozens if not hundreds of people know the gate code: the year the university began. I say this with pride: I am okay here; I’m tough. But on my worst nights, I don’t sleep. I lock my bedroom door and lie awake planning escape routes. I imagine myself climbing out of the bathroom window, shimmying and jumping my way down without a scratch. I am unbelievably limber in these imaginings and there is a part of me that wants to be tested. But the facts show that I am bad in an emergency, that I will stand in one spot and scream until rescued, which is why my father refuses to give me a gun.

And then we gather in the living room where they take turns reading their stories. I have given them guidelines: the stories must be under 750 words; they must be in first person and they must have been written this semester. They don’t follow them. As graduate students, they know they don’t have to.

The boy reads a highly sexualized piece that isn’t shocking so much as it is awkward and I wonder if he’s chosen this particular piece for me. I look at the carpet as if I’m concentrating very hard and think about my own early writing, how I wrote things that shouldn’t have been written and how it had taken me years to figure out the difference between writing the truth and writing something explicit and ugly that only looked like the truth. But these things are so hard to explain. Often, in class, I find myself talking about the mystery of writing. I find myself relying on rules, which I never thought I’d have to rely on. Write and read: these are the only rules, but they are unhappy when you tell them this; it’s too difficult and they don’t really like reading all that much. And half the class writes about mermaids and aliens and strange apocalyptic worlds, which are all so similar, and I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. How I could possibly teach anyone anything.

It goes on and on. Deirdre and the emaciated girl and the Chinese guy and my TSA friend and their stories must be seven, eight pages long. Every time someone begins to read I try to determine how many pages they’re working with, the thickness of the stack.

When it’s finally over, I’ve had nothing to eat and five or six beers.

I send the students home with leftover pizza. I even bag up the nuts and pretzels. While I say goodbye to everyone, the boy stays in the bathroom and then emerges, the light behind him, smiling triumphantly. His skin perfectly normal.

“I thought you carpooled.”

“I drove myself,” he says.

There are only a couple of beers left so I make him drive me to the gas station where it is embarrassing how well they know me. They know what I eat and drink and give me coupons, their cards, because it’s a college town and they are trying to improve themselves. I wonder if they think of me when men come into the store late at night to buy condoms, though I haven’t sent anyone over in a month, at least.

“It’s gotten weirdly foggy out,” I say to the girl, and she says she’s glad she’s inside because it’s spooky as hell out, and then she goes into a story about how she saw an owl for the first time in her life, how it turned its whole neck around to look at her.

“Owls are predators. They could take off with a small dog, easy.” I glance at her name tag, tell myself to remember it this time.

“You be careful out there,” she says.

Back at the house, the boy and I sit on the porch. It’s the end of October but it’s still warm and bullfroggy. My dog licks my leg and I want to pick her up and carry her upstairs to my bedroom where she’d be uncomfortable but I’d shut her in and make her stay with me anyway. She doesn’t like stairs. Occasionally, I carry her up them, though she’s thirty pounds and acts like I’m torturing her the whole time.

“What’s wrong with her eye?” the boy asks.

“Nothing. She’s an Australian shepherd mix.”

“Is she blind?”

“No—she can see just fine.”

The bottom half of her left eye is blue-gray and craggy; it looks like a mountain range. This is what I tell him. He doesn’t say anything. “Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the mountain in her eye?” I want to touch his leg, most of all, which is so thick with muscle it is nearly fat. I want to grab his arm, so near me I could rub my own against it. I’ve heard he’s in love with another of my students, a talented girl from Georgia with very short hair. She told me she writes at least 1,500 words a day, every day, which depressed me. I hate to hear how hard people are working.

“Why are you still here?” I ask, but this only makes him ask if he should leave and that’s not what I was getting at; it’s also the only response to my question. Soon he will be with this other girl, this young girl he loves, and they’ll get engaged and live in a small apartment where they’ll write their stories and drink their Starbucks, dream their big dreams. They will do things in the proper order and they’ll be happy. I can see it all so clearly. Don’t mess it up, I want to tell him. Don’t fuck things up because once you start fucking up it’s so hard to stop and there comes a point at which you simply don’t know how to do anything else anymore.