Next Year, for Sure Page 6

  Sitcoms, it turns out, have a lot of people going on first dates. These dates are usually disastrous, ha-ha. Kathryn let these episodes slosh around her and tried not to imagine things. Occasionally, though, a sitcom-date goes well, spectacularly well, and you know that this new character is going to be around for a while. Maybe a few episodes, maybe whole seasons. These good dates, Kathryn watched more closely. Were they genuinely good? Were the characters being true to themselves? Were they following the rules? If Chris and Emily were on that same date right now, would that be okay? Would Kathryn be okay?

  —

  She turns the TV off. The mockery and canned laughter hang in the room. She puts some pasta on to boil. She paces around the apartment. It feels small. She wants to move. She wants to sprint across the alley and have her friend still live there and still be that friend.

  She calls Sharon on the phone.

  Chris is on a date, Kathryn says.

  A what?

  With Emily.

  There is a deadness on the line.

  That fucking asshole, Sharon says.

  No, I told him to.

  Right, says Sharon. Told him how?

  I told him to ask her out.

  Jesus, Kathryn. Why the hell?

  Kathryn doesn’t answer. She is wondering if she might vomit. The smell of the pasta is filling the kitchen. She listens to the open line.

  Do you want me to come over? Sharon says at last.

  I’m fine, Kathryn says.

  I’m coming over.

  Don’t.

  Twenty minutes.

  Bring wine, Kathryn says.

  —

  When she hangs up, Kathryn feels a slap of clarity. Why shouldn’t she let Chris go on a date? They’re adults. And it’s their fucking relationship, not Sharon’s. There are lots of ways to be in a relationship, Sharon, ways they don’t put on TV. People are capable of amazing things. Kathryn could be capable of amazing things. She and Chris are smart, caring people who love each other. They can try things out, and if those things don’t work, they can try something else, or go back to how they were before. Kathryn could call Chris right now and tell him to come home, and he would, if he had a cell phone. Kathryn could say, I need you to not see Emily ever again, and Chris would do it. He would erase Emily from his very thoughts. But Kathryn’s not going to ask that, because that’s not what love is, Sharon. Love isn’t I love you so much that I need to possess you and control you and be the source of all your happiness. Love is I love you so much that I want you to have everything you need, even when it’s hard for me. And besides, what would Kathryn and Chris be doing if he wasn’t on a date right now? It’s eight o’clock at night. They’d be in bed, reading. Kathryn doesn’t even like the book she’s in the middle of. And most of all, it’s her goddamned relationship. So what gives Sharon—with her new bed and oatmeal sex—the right to tell Chris and Kathryn what they should or should not be doing on a Friday night?

  Kathryn would like to yell at Sharon. Kathryn has never yelled at Sharon, not yet. But Kathryn also likes the idea of Sharon being here when Chris gets home, sitting with her at the kitchen table, relaxed and drinking and laughing and saying to Chris, How was your date? Was it disastrous-ha-ha? Was it cliffhanger good? Kathryn likes the idea of hearing the succinct version that Chris would tell with Sharon in the room, hearing that version first, before he tells Kathryn every little thing.

  —

  At 8:37, Sharon texts:

  Stuck here.

  Can’t come.

  Tomorrow?

  You know what? No. Not tomorrow. She’s not waiting around anymore. Kathryn is not going to sit here for two hours eating buttered pasta and waiting for her boyfriend to come home and tell her he still loves her. She is going to do something.

  She is going to put on her jacket—the old one that Geoffrey said made her look like a man. She is going to open her front door and charge toward something.

  —

  This is good, Kathryn thinks. She is walking hard down Broadway. It’s barely nine, but it feels like the middle of the night. The sun has been down for hours.

  She used to stomp around this city all night. Before Chris, before Geoffrey. She was seventeen and emancipated. During the day, she plowed through correspondence courses from her old school district back home and at night she put on her thrift-store boots and this thick black jacket and would go out and watch people make choices, to see how people lived when they weren’t afraid of God. Kathryn would take up a whole booth at late-night diners and eat plates of hash browns. She would let drunk men give her advice. She would wander down by the Cut where the graffiti artists would nod to her gravely and go about their work. She would put herself in the middle of things and see what would happen. Mostly nothing happened. Mostly people left her alone. By the time she started university, she’d been in the city for ten months and knew no one. She felt impervious.

  This jacket, though, was never great in the rain. It’s soaking through now.

  There’s an all-night place in the bus station where the old Kathryn used to go to drink cup after cup and let her clothes dry out. That’s where the sidewalk is taking her now.

  —

  Kathryn takes a booth no one wants, back by the bathroom. She orders pie. There is an almost whole cherry pie under a plastic dome on the counter. It is exactly what the ritual requires. She holds each bite in her mouth, letting the filling run and pool under her tongue, and she thinks about food shortages. She thinks about people driven from their land by famine. She thinks about wheat left to rot in warehouses while people starve. She thinks about the man outside the bus station picking through garbage cans. So who is Kathryn to be unhappy? Who is she to sit here with pie in her mouth and say life is miserable? She has everything. She has more than anyone needs. And yet she is jealous? Greedy and grudging and unwilling to share? No, that must stop.

  Kathryn is mapping that part of herself—honing in on that grasping, malignant part. She will find exactly where it is. Then she will cut it out by the roots. She knows how.

  —

  When Kathryn was little, she had wanted a kitten. There was a poster of a kitten at her dentist’s. It said, Wake me when it’s Friday. Kathryn didn’t care about Fridays, but she loved the kitten, and thought about it all year, between checkups. She asked her mother if they could get a kitten. Kathryn’s mother said kittens kill cats—Kathryn’s mother had ideas about things—but that maybe, if Kathryn was good, they might get an old cat that no one else wanted. Kathryn had argued and pleaded because she wanted a kitten that would fit in a teacup like the one on the poster, until her mom said, That’s it, and put her in the pastor’s car and drove her to the town humane society and showed her all the animals in cages. Most of these cats, her mother said, will never have a home because nobody wants a grown cat, everybody wants a cute little kitten like you do. Her mother told her that if nobody adopted these cats this week, they’d be taken into a small metal room and killed. Her mother pointed to a windowless door that led somewhere. Kathryn had cried—broken down there, right on the linoleum—and her mother took her home and gave her vegetable broth and told her that crying didn’t fix anything. Kathryn was seven.

  The next day, Kathryn’s mother was waiting for her after school and took her back to the humane society to show her the poor cats again and point out the ones that were missing. Kathryn begged to take home one of these poor cats—an old calico with a dent in his face—but her mother said no. I believe in your heart you still want a kitten, she said and dragged Kathryn home. For a week or more, they went back every day and came home empty-handed until one day there was a litter of kittens at the shelter and Kathryn couldn’t stand to look at them. She was repelled by their cuteness.

  That’s how you cut something out by the roots. You figure out the right thing to feel, and you make yourself feel it.

  —

  Kathryn orders another piece of pie, coconut cream, just to enjoy this time. It’s even b
etter than the cherry. She didn’t eat dinner. She feels a calm coming on. The world comes into focus around her. She admires the people in the diner with their own worries and joys. She peers right into their faces. Some look back, confused. She smiles.

  Somewhere Chris and Emily are enjoying their time together. Kathryn can afford to be happy for them. That feeling exists inside her, like a seedling poking through the dirt. Kathryn can sit in this bus terminal all night and eat pie with these people and be happy because the person she loves is happy.

  Condensation creeps up the windows.

  —

  Her placemat is a map from the bus company. A continent of lines and dots.

  Anywhere in the country for $89, it says.

  That can’t be right. Kathryn looks for the fine print. $89 is nothing—an afternoon’s work to go thousands of miles. She could get on the next bus—the 11:50—and wake up in one of those unlabelled dots between the other dots. Buy a toothbrush from a vending machine. Watch the towns go by until one feels right. Some town with two supermarkets and one high school where you can rent an apartment for $200. What’s the smallest apartment there is? Is there something smaller than a bachelor? Kathryn would be willing to pay more for smaller. She’ll get a job doing something in an office. Maybe the high school. And her co-workers will be people who grew up in the town, who’ve known each other since kindergarten, who rib each other and gossip, and Kathryn will listen and smile and let it nourish her, and on Fridays they will ask does she want to come out with them after work and she’ll say, No, no, go without me, until someday they don’t ask anymore, but she could still come if she wanted. How long would it take to run out the rest of her life? Thirty years? Surely no more than fifty. She’ll shop at Safeway like everyone else and that’ll be fine.

  —

  $89 is the advance purchase price, says Daniel at the ticket counter. Two weeks for those. To get on a bus tonight would be $389. Kathryn could do that. She has almost $1800 in her bank account. But $89 felt better.

  Let me think about it, she says.

  The 11:50 leaves in twenty minutes. Chris would be home by now. Kathryn can see him coming in, full of things to tell her, and finding the apartment empty.

  She knows he would never recover. If the last thing known of Kathryn Louise Matzen was a bowl of uneaten noodles on the kitchen table, Chris would never let himself be happy again. He would be destroyed. And he truly is the best person she has ever known. Kathryn would have to get word to him somehow. And then she wouldn’t really be disappearing at all.

  —

  Kathryn sits on a metal bench by Bay 8. It’s too cold to rain now. She can see her breath. She enjoys feeling like one of the smokers, topping up before the trip, waiting until the last moment to climb those three steep steps.

  Some of the young women look like they are wearing pyjamas. They carry large bed pillows and seem strangely proud.

  Kathryn admires the empty-handed most of all. No luggage for them, no paperbacks. Just a ticket pointing some direction.

  The 11:50 is half full. Kathryn has already picked out her seat, judging through the windows which ones are least desirable. Middle left, right over the wheel, directly under the ceiling-mounted TV.

  The 11:50 leaves. The 12:20 arrives and departs. Buses come and go in flurries, followed by quiet intervals when the loading area is empty.

  Kathryn doesn’t want to go home. She is on the other side of tired now, which she hasn’t felt since undergrad, keyed up and sharpened. She wants to stalk the city and watch people take chances, win or lose. She wants consequences.

  But the old fearlessness she used to feel has leached out of her bones. How did she ever do it? How did she bomb around these streets and alleys and not sense the danger? Even the thought of walking home feels perilous tonight. So Kathryn stays put on the empty platform. She wonders if someone in a reflective vest will come out of the terminal and tell her to go home. Otherwise, she might sit here all night becoming her new self.

  There is a scurrying movement, fast and close to the ground. Kathryn starts despite herself. How pathetic she is. Why be scared of a rat? She isn’t scared of squirrels. And it’s way over there, not close, not interested in her. Just a rat doing its thing. Kathryn forces herself to look right at the animal, to breathe calmly, to be with it, here in this big open space. It is shadow-coloured and drags its tail.

  Then she sees the one near the garbage, the one by the drain, the one under the vending machine, the one on the ledge, the one by the puddle.

  CHAPTER 7

  Consequences

  Chris has told Kathryn about everything. About holding hands on West Fourth; about the funny jokes they made; about maybe, possibly celebrating Halloween this year; about the moment they didn’t kiss; about how Emily wants to do it again.

  Kathryn is in the bathtub, submerged to her ears. She’d come home shivering, unable to get warm, and Chris, who’d had hours to imagine the worst, put her in a hot bath and sat on the bath-mat offering to bring her tea or soup or anything. She’d laughed off his concern. She’d gone for a walk, she said. Tell me about your date, she said. And so he has told her everything.

  Well, that sounds pretty wonderful, Kathryn says now. I’m happy for you. And she turns and gazes into his face and smiles serenely. Then she looks back at the tile. She twists the hot water faucet with her toes and lets the water run for a while. It is three in the morning. She seems unusually contented.

  She is paving over her feelings, Chris can tell. He has seen her do it before, like with Geoffrey in the end. She never talked about Geoffrey those days at the hotel. She didn’t cry or rage. She played cards and stared at the TV and made passable conversation, and then it was like Geoffrey had never happened.

  Are you upset with me? Chris says.

  Of course not, she says. Again that smile.

  Is there anything I can do?

  I need sleep, she says.

  She pulls the plug with her foot and the water starts to groan out.

  —

  They lie beside each other in postures of sleep.

  Kathryn will never ask it, but Chris is forbidding himself to ever see Emily again. It is unforgivable to make Kathryn suffer like this. He can feel it coming off her like heat radiating from an infection. Chris will phone Emily in the morning and tell her that it’s impossible. He will say that he is sorry, that it is all his fault, that if it was only his own happiness at stake, he could be brave and daring and unshrinking, but that he can’t live with hurting the people he loves, he can’t. And Emily will listen open-heartedly and will accept it with a compassion and kindness that will make Chris love her still more. Oh crap, he loves her.

  Chris can already feel his connection with Emily starting to evaporate. He’ll have nothing to prove that this thing between them was ever there. No photo-booth strip of them in the clothes they wore. No carnival coin with their names stamped into the soft metal. He should have kissed her when he had the chance. He’d had permission.

  —

  In the stillness, Chris can hear each second scraping by. He wonders how long it will feel like this, in human years.

  Day to day, not seeing Emily won’t be that hard to accomplish. Chris can avoid the places Emily goes in the world, find another laundromat. He can stop his fingers from dialing her number. It’s easy to control his hands and feet. But what does he do with the feelings? Pave over them, like Kathryn does? Or just pretend, as they are pretending now to be asleep? You can’t live like that, Chris thinks. It’s inhuman.

  He is up and out of bed. There is no sleep in this room.

  Do you want breakfast? he says.

  Yes, says Kathryn. She kicks off the covers.

  —

  Chris scrambles the last of the eggs and gives most of them to Kathryn. He settles in with toast.

  We need groceries today, Kathryn says.

  They’re out of everything. They usually go grocery shopping on Friday nights, when everyone else is
at the discotheque. That’s what Kathryn likes to say: when everyone else is at the discotheque.

  They talk about the things they need—lemons, greens, dish soap—the things they always need.

  I’d like to hang out with Emily again, Chris says.

  You already said you would.

  I mean, I’d like to keep hanging out with her.

  Well, do.

  Kathryn carries her plate to the sink and starts scrubbing it. Chris follows her.

  You’re saying it doesn’t bother you?

  I’m the one who told you to do it.

  But does it bother you?

  Kathryn sighs. I’m fine, she says, though Chris can see she is not. She’s hardening where she stands. He wants to enfold her. He wants to comfort her and carry her to safety. But he also wants to get at something, now, before the concrete sets.

  And what if I want more? Chris says.

  More how?

  What if I want to see her twice a week? Three times a week?

  Then that’s what we’ll do.

  How about every day? Is there anything that would upset you?

  Chris, you should do whatever you have to do.

  Great, he says.

  There is a heaviness in the room. The refrigerator is making its sound.

  So what do we do now? Chris says.

  We get groceries.

  It’s five in the morning, K.

  We’ll go to Safeway.

  —

  Safeway, it turns out, doesn’t open until seven on Saturdays. They sit on a dry patch of pavement by the entrance and lean against the wall, delirious with exhaustion.

  They talk about the holidays looming up. Chris’s mother has been threatening to come spend Christmas with them for a change, which has everyone nervous. Mom doesn’t travel. And besides, she has the Christmas stuff; Chris and Kathryn have nothing. Not an ornament, not a cookie cutter.

  I guess we’ll get some, Kathryn says. Kathryn likes Christmas.

  Oh wait, says Chris. He has just remembered Villette, stowed away in his backpack. He hands it to Kathryn, wrapped as it is in a paper bag.