The bay, the water, the seagulls.
“When you’re here, it’s always ‘Daddy Daddy,’ keeping them out of the basement so you can work, brokering that. When you’re not here, it’s quiet and I feed them early and put them to bed early, not at nine o’clock—”
“Hey, why don’t you take the night shift for the next four years?”
“Because I need drugs to sleep.” Beanie let out that piercing cat scream. I heard her whacking him on the back. “And when I take medication, I need more sleep. I’m not doing this for you next summer, so have fun.”
“I’m having a blast.”
“I don’t care what you do up there, but if you give me a disease I will cut it off. Got it?”
“Fine.”
“Or shoot you. Or chop off your balls.”
“Understood.”
Beanie remained quiet, and then we were all quiet.
“I wouldn’t mind going to some makeout festival if my body wasn’t broken.”
“Go ahead.”
“As long as you take care of them while I take care of me.”
“I should probably get back to it.”
“You didn’t say how your first class went.”
“My class?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“You say that every year. You worry about that class for weeks, slaving over your notes, ‘What do they want from me? I forgot how to teach!’ It hardly pays anything, and you’re up there having a blast and I’m here killing myself and for what?”
“At least it gets me thinking about comics again. I used to love making comics. I don’t know what happened. I have to get a break from the magazine. I have to start something I care about. I have to find a way back in.”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to write stories about your life anymore. Maybe you outgrew it. Maybe it bubbles up because you’re there and you should force it back down where it came from.”
“Thanks.”
“Or maybe being around those people, you’ll have an epiphany.”
“Sure.”
“Go on, shove it down. Next to your childhood. Next to your parents. Keep shoving.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know all about you. That’s what you’re trying to get away from. You think you’re worthless, so you make me feel worthless, and when you’re gone I don’t have that, nobody second-guessing me or giving me nasty looks or turning off my music or criticizing my soul. It’s more work, but there’s no time to be depressed or think, although I actually can think. Four producers are coming from L.A. on Monday, I’m meeting with the network, it’s the busiest time and budgets are insanely tight and Realscreen is right around the corner. I can keep fairly complicated ideas in my head without having any obligation from you to talk and listen. I’m myself. I get love from people at work, and Karen Crickstein wants to meet me for lunch, and Elizabeth comes over and we do the knitting tutorial, and have conversations that matter, and she doesn’t wish I would shut up and go away.”
The first time I saw her, standing in my foyer, she was holding a giant stick bug in a wooden frame. Robin Lister had moved to Baltimore for a job at the public television station, and knew somebody who knew the sister of this lunatic, Julie, who lived in our group house on Chestnut Ave. Robin took the room of the guy we called Lumpy, who was headed to law school in Denver, which meant we’d be sharing a bathroom.
I helped carry in boxes from her U-Haul. That night I heard her spitting into the bathroom sink, and the next morning I found her in the kitchen, in a thin yellow robe with tiny blue fishes, staring into the garbage, trying to figure out how many cups of coffee she’d already had by the look of the used filter. When I think back to whatever it was that brought us together, it probably happened in the kitchen. She’d been hired to write and edit bilingual scripts for a local children’s television program and had tape drives of old episodes to study, but she already had a few things to say about the show’s three main characters, a hyperactive skunk, a Hispanic beaver named Anselma, and a wise old chipmunk who protects the young explorers.
I found myself sitting across from her, lingering over breakfast, offering piercing analysis of our roommates’ psyches: Nedd, the ladies’ man; Rishi, an account exec at the ad agency where I worked; and Julie, the emotionally stunted MBA who talked like a baby. Robin had questions, and I projected a confiding warmth and a loud, Jewish, overcompensating wit.
She was seeing a guy named Jim, who deejayed on the weekends. He was followed by Digger, a cameraman from the Czech Republic who worked in war zones and had always just stepped off an airplane held together with duct tape. He’d been to the Congo, had ridden a horse across Afghanistan. Somehow, a year passed. I’d been dating Eileen Pribble, an elementary school art teacher who stuck refrigerator magnets to the outside of her car.
Robin and I were friends, although she was too good-looking for that. She needed company. I thought I might earn something, through my loyalty, that someday I would collect. At first I didn’t know what to make of her, but after a while I noticed how much I looked forward to her coming home at night. After dinner, the two of us would sometimes walk down the street for ice cream. She had hazel eyes, thin, wavy brown hair, and olive skin. The hair resting thinly on a delicate skull held an introspective, self-doubting, reasonable, forceful, somewhat dignified mind. She wanted to get out of kids’ programming and work in hard news, wanted to see the world. Digger had friends who could help. In the fall of that year, two Sudanese guys had blown a hole in the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen. The new trend in terrorism, Robin said, was asymmetrical, like a bottle of botulism in a New York City reservoir. She wanted intensity and danger. She was so pretty that guys would stare at us as we walked down the block. Sometimes I worried that one of them would try to kill me.