The Lincoln Lounge was one of those sad dips in the dunes of the rural-industrial Midwest: wood paneling reflecting dim bulbs and LIGHT/LITE beer signage. A few tables scattered around a dusky green pool table, and a TV playing West Coast baseball. Battered old men huddled over beers at the bar while a few younger ones clacked pool balls around half-heartedly. She’d gone to high school with the bartender, she was sure, but couldn’t summon her name.
“Did you have a guy in here tonight,” she asked the bartender. “Tall, black hair, cocky looking?”
“Have to do better’n that.” She had a sharp nose that had looked prettier in her teenage days. Large breasts threatened to burst from the U-cut black shirt she wore, the cleavage vibrating in a gelatinous way as she poured whiskey and snagged the hose that dispensed soda.
“He was probably with Jonah Hansen?” Stacey tried.
“Oh. And Beaufort and all them?” She pointed her eyes at the door where he’d just departed and shook her head distractedly. “There was a fight, and they left a while ago now.”
“Any idea which direction?”
She shrugged to indicate she didn’t know. “You go to New Canaan?” she asked.
Stacey hesitated. “No, just trying to catch one of them.” Outside, she felt a momentary chill and looked up and down the street before venturing farther. For some reason, she was sure the blue sedan would have circled the block, and the driver would be waiting for her, the passenger seat now empty. Like a hearse, all of this car’s passengers only took one-way trips, and now the driver would be waiting to pick up another lost traveler.
She tried to remember if in that year between 2003 and 2004—in Lisa’s bed beneath the covers or in her own basement, the blanket of rocket ships drawn around their legs and tucked beneath her bottom—if Lisa talked about leaving. Once, she expressed the thought to Stacey, but she dismissed it the way you dismiss such talk from a seventeen-year-old: as an idle fantasy, a wishful what-if scenario.
“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” A dumb high school girl question like that.
Lisa traced her fingers along Stacey’s belly, the tips grazing from her navel up between her breasts and then drawing cylindrical patterns.
“Springfield, Ohio,” said Stacey.
“Seriously.”
Lisa had felt far away all night. They’d eaten dinner with Stacey’s parents and then retreated to the basement to “watch a movie,” which meant jacking up the volume while they took care of each other and muffled noises in pillows. Even during this she could sense something troubling Lisa.
When Stacey didn’t respond, not out of cruelty but because she was afraid of where this conversation was going, she felt Lisa’s cheek rise from the nook in her shoulder.
“Hey, wake up. I’m like trying to…” She propped herself up on her elbow. It was hard to find her eyes in the dark.
“You’re trying to what?” she demanded. “Ask me if I want to run away with you? We both know that’s not happening. Why talk about it.”
They were whispering even though her parents’ room was on the other end of the house.
“When we started this, I thought it was funny,” Lisa said. “I thought, ‘Well, this’ll be a good story for college.’ ”
“Glad I could be a good story.”
“Stacey, shut up.” Lisa blew a frustrated breath of mint toothpaste into her face. “Fucking fuck, I’m trying to tell you something.”
She was quiet for a while, and Stacey waited.
“So. Okay. When I dated Ashcraft, we used to tell each other, ‘I love you,’ right? Which was obviously ridiculous—I didn’t love Bill Ashcraft. I mean, yes, I cared about him. But I was not in love with him. The way I feel about you has been—I don’t know—unexpected. And it’s been different—and not because you’ve got a beautiful little pussy. Part of that difference is, you know, I love you. I’m in love with you. Whatever that means. Or whatever it is. Jesus Christ, I’m awkward.”
This was February, the darkest month in the Midwest. There was thick, week-old snow outside and ice coating every surface. It caught all the light of the stars and glittered in shifting, restless arrays. It captured the errant glow of a streetlamp and reflected it, silver and blue, through the blinds. It had been about six months since Casablanca. Two months since they went shopping at a thrift store in Columbus and Lisa spotted a dress, white with blue flowers, and judged it Stacey’s size, her style, her “swag.” It was four months before Lisa would leave.
She continued. “Before all this started, all I wanted to do was get out of this town and get away from my mom and Bob and Alex, but now I’m thinking about leaving and what that actually means. Since we’ve been hanging out, I just find myself…” A pause. “Unable to stop thinking about you. Like totally incompetent about anything except wondering when I’m going to see you next. And I know”—she gestured to Stacey’s naked torso to indicate the activities that went beyond friendship—“sometimes I treat it like a joke. But I don’t think it’s just screwing around. At least for me—like…” She kept getting lost, and Stacey could feel her face growing hot. “You’re a crazy-gorgeous, dreamboat bitch, you know? If I was ever going to have a partner to travel the world with and help me raise Darkheart McStabababy it would be you.”
Stacey laughed less at what Lisa said than at her inability to say anything sincere without injecting her particular brand of absurdity. And then on the next word Lisa’s voice cracked.
“But really.” She sucked on her cheek, which made a squelching noise. “It’s because you lift my heart. You make me insanely happy to be alive. So I don’t know what happens after this, and I know you still think we’re both going straight to hell, but that’s why you need to know. I’m fucking out-of-my-mind crazy about you.”
There was a period of her life after she graduated from Wittenberg and started traveling in which Stacey tried to render this moment inert with both reason and irony. They were just children, she told herself, imitating emotions they didn’t yet know anything about. That’s why teenagers are in love with pop idols and think it would be fun to shoot bows and arrows in futuristic dystopias. She’d look at pictures of herself in high school—her button-nosed face and bob of blond hair, the way she slouched, perhaps because she subconsciously wanted to be shorter—and think, Look at this awkward teenage baby! She can’t feel anything real yet! If she now heard a woman stammer on like Lisa had, she’d be embarrassed for her. So much Hollywood rom-com drippy bathetic nonsense. Yet the feeling she had back then always returned to her like a ghost; her face would go iron-hot and that pebble in her throat would exert its pressure. Because irony, distance, perspective would all eventually fail her—because that’s the kind of shit you lived a lifetime to hear. And something only a seventeen-year-old actually has the courage to say.
She snatched Lisa’s face out of the dark and kissed her. When their cheeks glanced off each other’s, they were both slick. All dreams of the soul ending in a beautiful woman’s body.
On the walk back to her car, she passed an older black man in shorts and sandals as he came around the corner. She recognized him as her high school music teacher. After the surprises of Jonah and Todd she was out of bewilderment to find Mr. Clifton snatching open the door of the Lincoln. It was clear to her why New Canaan wasn’t the magical realist space she’d imagined, the same reason it always took her mother two hours to shop for groceries: in a small town you just ran into a hell of a lot of people you knew.
He didn’t look Stacey’s way even though she was the only person out on this bare rock of street. She called to him using the honorific in front of his last name, a habit difficult to break with old teachers.