Always Happy Hour: Stories(9)
Other days I stand on the porch and think: I love it here. I love this house. I love the birds. I love the geese and the ponds and the hills and the tennis court and the woods and I love that this is “my land,” if only for a little while. I sing and run and my dog jumps up to lick my hand, offering me nothing more than a stick, and we pretend we’re in a musical. These are the best days, but still I do not write.
I observe one of my students going into the bathroom for the third time and stop myself from saying something. He once left his pipe on the floor of my office and I brought it to class and handed it to him in front of several other students. This man is writing a memoir about his time in the TSA and fears he’s on a government watchlist, which makes me like him best (besides the boy, but I don’t really like him, not really).
The boy tells me he has relatives in Savannah he sees on holidays. I look at the bowls of nuts and pretzels that I’ve positioned around the kitchen. “Savannah has the most amazing St. Paddy’s Day Parade,” he says, “one of the best in the world.” He has ties to the South, he wants me to know, having already learned that women down here don’t date men they can’t trace. Not me, but others.
“Maybe you could come with me?” he says, and I want to grab his arm. God, his arm. It’s like a thigh. “That might be inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
“You won’t be my student in a month.” And then, because I think the others might be picking up on something, I ask him loudly if he plays tennis. I say, “Y’all are welcome to use the court anytime. No one ever uses it.”
“I can learn,” he says.
I climb onto the island to screw in one of the lightbulbs; it comes back to life. I look down at my students eating pizza and drinking Coke—most of them don’t drink alcohol—and wish I could stay there, stretch my body across its length while they glance nervously at each other and giggle. I open another beer and excuse myself to the bathroom where I text my boyfriend, the doctor. All of my exes have been reduced to two words, three at most, and this one, though still current, still in play, I think of as The Doctor. The famous writer is also a doctor. My sister says this doctor only wants to sleep in the famous doctor’s bed—it must be his dream—but all of the mattresses are new, as is most of the furniture, and my boyfriend prefers for me to sleep at his house. The only person who really likes it here is my mother. She comes to get away from my father. She brings her little dog and we go on exploring missions in which the dogs peer into holes and run through fields of tall grass. Once I let them swim in the pond and laughed as they struggled to keep their heads above water. Another time the little dog fell into a hole and I had to climb in to get her out.
I’m watching Bob’s Burgers, he texts back. How are things going with your students? I don’t reply. I feel my lower body, swelled with blood, and hope my period starts soon.
Once, after he came inside me, I said, “Let’s have a baby.” I can’t explain these things to myself. Do I say them because I want him to break up with me or do I say them because it’s what I truly want, deep down in some unknowable part of myself? I have never wanted a child, but perhaps this is because I’ve never been with anyone who wanted a child with me. He was kind about it. He said that we should do things in the proper order. But since my divorce, eight years ago, there is no order, proper or otherwise. I think I love someone and they love me and then something comes along and ruins it. They let me believe that I am that something.
In the dining room, I find a few of my students flipping through some old university annuals—1904, 1906—beautifully bound in soft leather. The fraternities used to publish them, their clubs interspersed with poems and drawings of farm animals, profiles of women with pinned-up hair. I got an email recently from the secretary who was looking for a particular yearbook, and then someone from the foundation contacted me about it, and then someone else. I thought it might be rare, the only copy, but I saw the secretary at brunch and she told me they wanted to destroy that year because one of the fraternities had formed a KKK club, had dressed up in white robes with cutout eyes, and the university wanted it gone.
We walk the rooms. The house really is beautiful. There are windows everywhere and a table for twelve, high ceilings, chandeliers. When I first moved in, I imagined the house full of people and laughter, just like this, footsteps going up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing. But it hasn’t been like this; it hasn’t been anything like this. I am alone, far enough from town that it’s considered the country, though it’s not that far from town and is not the country.
The boy follows me around, asks questions. He wants to know what it’s like to live here. They all want to know what it’s like.
Nights, I climb out onto the roof with its not-too-steep incline to smoke a bowl; the window opens easily—all I have to do is throw a leg out. We stand in front of this window and I open it. This is what I want to show them: here is where I sit nights. When you think of me, imagine me here. But I don’t actually sit out here very often. Only after I’ve had too much to drink, when the potential for hurting myself is greatest.
They peer into my bedroom, admire the size of my bathtub, the separate shower and all of the closet space.
The boy comes up behind me and I ask how old he is, though I know how old he is. The only correct answer is that he is old enough and I am young enough. And I’m old enough to know better but not so old to take myself seriously when I talk about the young people today with their pretentions and noise music and carefully crafted carelessness. Their highly developed sensitivities to sexism (but not so much to racism or classism because it is still the Deep South). Stop policing my body, I once overhead a female student say to a male—not mine—and I smiled at her, thinking the comment ironic.