There was an oak tree just outside the back window. Brown leaves clung to it through the winter, unwilling to sever their ties until they were forced out by new growth. Some nights, when I was tired of waiting and had a little too much to drink, I would slip out in the dark and throw my empties at it. My mother did the same thing – tossed cheap wine glasses against rustic mantles, flung half-full bottles of Sangre de Toro against cracked linoleum. Broken glass every time. Me? I lobbed 7-ounce Budweiser bottles here, old jelly-jars-turned-cocktail glasses there. Every single one landed with an unsatisfying thud in the frosted grass or clinked against mildewed siding.

One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.



It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.

From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.

Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.

Tags: The Little House, alcohol, anger, writing prompt, NaNoWriMo

The story was that he and Willard were drunk when they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.

Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.

Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the next weekend, excited to start building the cottage, Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned. It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out that they had to start all over again.

Image: The house at Hollywood Beach, August 1957.

Tags: faction, family, alcohol, family stories, flash fiction

This installment is less about Maureen, more about the time and place (and D.). I'm not sure what the next installment will bring, or when I will post it. These are hard to write and take time to do properly, with the pull between the macro approach, overviews of the time, and the micro approach, focusing on those pivotal moments. For example, next time I might want to overlap with this post and write about the night a neighbor saw D. and Rudy leaving the Little House. What are you interested in reading more about?

And -- this is written a year after I posted this -- rereading this makes me feel uncomfortable, like I've presented a story that isn't fully processed or finished. But it is mine and there is a truth to it.

Click here for Part 1.

As I pulled the wheel of the John Deere tractor to the right, the mower, wide and low to the ground, hit rock and screeched as it scraped the edge of the flower bed. Palms damp, grip tightened, I put the tractor briefly into reverse, then hit the gas and forged forward. Shit! The magnolia! I quickly swung around the tree, barely missing the azalea by the front door. Suddenly there was a clear path ahead of me, a gleaming expanse of green. The mower shot across the lawn, cutting another inadvertently serpentine swath.

"Jenny! Got a minute?"

My grandfather was gesturing at me from the kitchen window, summoning me in the usual way: by screaming out a nickname I hated and asking me a question for which yes was only answer.

I cut the engine and surveyed the mower's wobbly wake. Three uneven rows occasionally interrupted by jagged patches of ragged grass; a mangled forsythia; two scraped river rocks; several crushed marigolds. Not the cleanest job. The air smelled green and bitter with freshly cut grass. In the maple outside of the kitchen, a blue jay and her mate traded a series of rusty squeaks, rustling the leaves as they hopped from branch to branch. Some other unfortunate up the street was wasting a perfectly brilliant Saturday on yard work. Their mower sounded wonky, chugging in fits and starts.

Here’s where the moment slows down, where we cue in Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy on a bike whizzing down our street in the direction of the river. College aged, tanned and blonde, wearing a black t-shirt and ragged cut-offs, he glances at me. His long muscular legs propel the bike forward and I can just make out the checkerboard Vans on his feet. The moment passes, the bike and passenger become a blur and disappear.


Documented: D.'s Vans, Little House, 1986ish.

In a place where I know almost everyone, a place I’ve been a part of since before I was born, this person is totally unfamiliar. Cut the music.

Who was that guy?

"Jenny!!"

I hop off the tractor and go into the house.

It is June 1984, the beginning of a summer of new love for my mother and Kevin, the beginning of my time in the Little House. Back in Wilmington, I have a part-time job at a daycare center, but most weekends I end up at my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach. It will be a year before my mother buys a cottage down the street, less than that before I become pregnant (in the Little House. Sorry, parents. That wasn't my story then, but it's the truth). Come spring my friendship with Maureen will end here, too. "Everything happens in the Little House," Maureen and I used to say, and that was before I gave birth there.

So this warm mid-June weekend kicks it off. Maureen's mother drops her off to spend the night and we immediately douse ourselves with baby oil and lie out in the sun, with no worries about wrinkles or skin cancer. Dinner is simple, pepperoni and mozzarella on Italian rolls. When night comes we get restless and decide to take a walk, to kill some time before Saturday Night Live.


Recent picture of Hollywood Beach. Looks like the old benches are gone.

Maureen and I walk about a half mile to the Elk River, down the shoulder of a barely two lane street, past little shacks and cottages built in the 40s and 50s, some expanded in later decades. The beach has trucked-in sand (the actual river bottom is mucky), with a small swimming area marked off by buoys and lines. Several benches face the water. The old folks hang out here at sunset, smoking their cigarettes and admiring the view. Behind the benches are sycamores and a grassy fenced-in area with swing sets, a merry-go-round, and shuffleboard courts, all dating back to the early 60s. The small parking lot has a single street light and a soda machine.

The soda machine stands against a small white clapboard building, the clubhouse, used for community events, the Men's Pancake Breakfast, the Association Potluck. Before the accident in 1966, my grandfather called Bingo here on Saturday nights. Back then he was handsome and charming, unfaithful and dissolute. I played the same game in the 70s, would come down to the clubhouse on a Saturday night with my grandmother. Skeeter Haines, a tall man with a shiny bald head, would call and I'd concentrate on my board. Sitting next to Mom-mom, I would kick my legs underneath the table, rest a hand on her solid muumuu-ed leg. I haven't been in the building since her death in 1979.

Tonight there are a couple of cars parked by the street light. A small crowd of guys are hanging out, leaning against the fence and talking. Someone is playing Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker, and the not-yet-familiar smell of burning marijuana wafts our way. We walk up and greet the crowd. Rudy, the nineteen year old brother of a school friend introduces us to the boy on the bike, D. Nieubaur.


Interior of a '67 Chrysler Newport Custom.

Before we go on, I need a delusional interlude, a nostalgic montage of the future past that comes with its own soundtrack. It’s a hot summer night two years later and I am sliding across the wide seat of D.’s 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom, admiring my legs in the dashboard light. The sinuous strains of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold are coming from the eight-track and I know that a Budweiser is waiting for me outside. Or we’re tearing down Town Point Road in that same former family car aka “The Beast.” D. has just restored it to its Motor City glory and wants to see how fast it can go on the straight pass between cornfields, before the road twists and turns through the woods. He steps off the gas at 100 mph, slows it down right before that first curve, ZZ Top’s Manic Mechanic blasting from the new tape deck. That’s us, kissing in the Little House to the White Album. He's thrown over his other girlfriend for good and the moment is sweet and warm, comforting.

OK. The former teenager in love hidden away within me is satisfied now.

Here’s the darker version, the pre-bliss. Two nights later, alone, I go down to the beach to join the crowd. D. walks me home, holding my hand, pushes his bike alongside us. Did we kiss down at the beach, did he offer his mouth to mine? Did I breathe in the memory of pot smoke and too many Budweisers on his breath? These are the moments that are supposed to be marked in our minds forever, first love and all that. But there were so many similar nights, nights when he traveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol, when his breath was smoky and beer sweet, that this one no longer stands out.

"Everything happens in the Little House." I let him in, into the house, into me. It was my first time. I thought that casual sex was the way of twenty-year olds. They just did it (though perhaps not with fourteen-year olds, even particularly mature ones). I went along with without joy or desire, let the boundary be crossed without note. Before this moment, I had joked with my friends about the possibility of nuclear war, the potential Armageddon to come. Could you imagine dying, I'd ask, could you imagine some The Day After scenario in which some of us have been obliterated or are radiation-sick and dying, having never had sex? It turned out that sex was much more complicated than I knew, even in its apparent simplicity, the basic equation of one plus one. I wasn't ready.

After that night, D. and I became a strange sort of late-night item (in part because he is also dating Rudy's sister, Anne). He shows up at 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m.. I fall asleep watching late night broadcast television, awaken to his knock on the door. Maureen begins seeing Rudy. We start to drink the beers that are offered. I bring jars of gin, siphoned from Mom and Kevin's endless supply, with me to my grandfather's house, hide them in my massive pocketbook. Sometimes a jar springs a leak and I wonder if anyone else on the bus to Newark can smell it too. But nobody says a thing and my grandfather doesn't seem to notice when he picks me up at the bus stop.

When a neighbor friend reports to my mother that he saw two men leaving that Little House at 1:30 in the morning, saw Maureen in Rudy's arms and me giving D. a final kiss, I get a lecture, maybe even a cooling off period of one weekend away from the beach. But nothing changes. More importantly, my mother doesn't say a thing to Maureen's parents, though in retrospect I am not sure why. There is nothing to stop us from picking things up where we left off after my brief time away.

At the end of the summer, D. goes back to college. Mom and Kevin continue their relationship, with the threat of catastrophic storms to come. And I start tenth grade. Everything is different, from the music (cue in the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, the Dead Milkmen) to the make-up (from none to fluorescent stripes on my eyelids) to the cloves I've started to smoke. And it isn't going to get better any time soon.

To be continued.

Tags: alcohol, The Little House, friendship, Music

Tammy glanced over at Julie’s hair, wrinkled her face in disgust: was that a louse crawling around? Yes! Using thumb and forefinger, she plucked the imaginary bug and tossed it into the tiny invisible skillet in her opposite hand. Sizzzzzzle. Sizzzzzzle. Flip. Sizzzzzzzle. Tammy hurled the fresh-cooked louse into her mouth with lip-smacking relish. Maureen and I, however, preferred to let our fantasy lice live in peace. We wanted them to intermingle. So we built a bridge, connected her lank hair to a frizzy extension of mine with rubber bands. Sixth grade was an unironic time. I’m not sure if anyone knew we were joking.

Maureen, hanging from a tree, 1982

We stayed after school that day, dismantled the lice bridge and went to the playground, squished our Docksiders against spring-rain damp turf. The middling March air was cool against our faces as we ran to the swingset. In warmer weather the game was to fling off our shoes to see who could kick them the farthest. Today we passed a hairbrush back and forth, hurtling through the air on wooden seats, trying to make the other person drop it or chicken out.

“Want to play Space Invaders? Let’s go down to the Hole in the Wall.”

Maureen’s grandfather owned a bar by the canal, a basement space in a building from the late 1700s. In the afternoons it was quiet and we were allowed to play pool or a video game while her father got the bar ready for business. The walk from Chesapeake City Elementary School to the bar took us past the funeral home, white and windowless, past boarded up storefronts and ramshackle houses tumbled against the sidewalk. The Eastern Shore town was not yet thriving, was a decade away from becoming a boutique village. We decided against stopping at Pyle’s, a small convenience store that sold things like Push Pops and sticky Bubble Yum and Dixie cup ice cream that came with a wooden spoon. There was plenty of non-nutritious crap awaiting at the Hole in the Wall, cheese curls and barbecue-flavored potato chips and candy bars. I’d get to mix the drinks, sugary combinations of Coke, 7-Up, and orange soda over ice. We called them “Suicides.”

The tendency – or my tendency, at least – in writing about childhood is to make it sound either impossibly idyllic or like a living hell. So here is a list of the good stuff: Hanging out on Maureen’s porch swing after Canal Day, holding a 20-inch sparkler in full glimmer as we watched a line of cars heading for Route 213. Playing Atari games – Asteroids, Adventure – while eating junk food. Dancing around to “Flying Purple People Eater.” Eating an entire meal without using our hands, “like cats.” Annoying her sister by making Three Stoogesesque snoring noises as she was trying to get to sleep. Organizing slumber parties with shrieking and séances and morning-after pancakes a la James Beard.

Behind the idyll? Turmoil. Children are the unwitting passengers in the lives of others. Best friends only offer so much protection. I felt like a freak, too smart and too quiet and odd, living in an increasingly uncomfortable situation with my mother, grandfather, and soon-to-be stepfather. This was the year I actively threatened suicide, when I kept track of my thyroid and asthma medications in preparation for an overdose. The year I carried around an Ouija board, desperate to get in contact with my dead grandmother, the year when the girl wars were beginning and teasing about one’s physical development or lack thereof was common (“We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” was the recess refrain.)

Anyone who thinks that childhood is all carefree is delusional. Or an amnesiac.

But I didn’t kill myself and our friendship survived my seventh grade move back to Wilmington. Outside of the machiavellian middle school environment , Maureen and I became closer, with frequent overnight visits and some very funny correspondence. She wrote me weekly. I was so proud of her letters, of her sense of humor, that I would bring them into school, my address carefully blacked out so that no one would discover that I lived outside of the school district.

The weekend my mother told my stepfather to pack up his things and leave, I had plans to visit Maureen. I still went, though I was not in the mood. Yes, Tim was an asshole (since reformed, apparently), but he had been a part of our lives for eight years. We spent holidays with his family. We needed his income. And I hadn't seen the break coming. What was going to happen to us?

DEATH at moment of reading! Envelope from February 1983 letter.

I sludged through that October 1983 weekend, trapped in a quicksand of worry. On Sunday, I was surprised to see Tim waiting for me at the usual rendezvous point, the Newark Howard Johnson's. Maureen and I hugged, I waved at her mother, and slipped into the Cutlass. Tim and I were unaccustomed to making small talk and there wasn't much to say. He was staying with his parents, had hopes of repairing the marriage, though I doubt we talked about that. He didn't linger in front of our inner city rowhouse and I didn't look back as I unlocked the door.

Inside, Mom was sitting in the living room reading with Frank the cat on her lap. She looked up when I came in, glanced around the room and asked "Notice anything different?"

"Sunlight."

One of the first things she had done upon Tim's departure was to open the living room shutters. They had been closed since our move to the house, a bizarre cost-saving measure. The room seemed unnaturally bright. Light bounced off of the white walls, pooled in the corners. Our other cat, Liz, was basking in a patch of it. She held our a paw and trilled. Could you get more symbolic than this, darkness transformed by light, a closed off room now open? A little foreshadowing, a portent of good things to come?

House in Wilmington during the Tim era.

Don't be so gullible, so easily blinded by the sun. Sometimes a patch of sunlight is just that and nothing more. An open shutter can be closed again.

The end of the Tim era did turn out to be free and glorious, five months of mother-daughter bonding. We enjoyed the sunlight. Bought 100% orange juice and name-brand yogurt. Mom acquired a moped and zipped around town picking up freelance writing work and groceries. I arranged rides to and from games, kept up with my studying, memorized lists of German words, puzzled over teutonic grammar. Maureen and I continued as best friends. For Mom's 34th birthday I got her a card with a guy in drag made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor: "Birthdays are like husbands – after a while you stop counting!" Ha Ha.

Adolescence, the process of pulling yourself into burgeoning adulthood, shakes the seemingly solid foundations of identity. The sweet boy, lover of plaid shirts and belted khakis, suddenly starts dressing in black, from hair dye to nail polish to skirt and shoes. The athlete takes up drugs and loses motivation. Best friends drift apart. I started ninth grade in pastels, a nondrinker, a German-studying, Duran Duran-listening cheerleader. I finished the year close to that, too, though internal changes were taking place in preparation for my metamorphosis.

The shift may have happened anyway, it might have been destiny, but I can't deny that there was a catalyst. He moved in down the street that spring. Kevin the poet-carpenter. Kevin with his plumb lines and his radial saws, with his collie and his poetry books. My mother met him and dropped everything.

By May I was essentially on my own.

Next installments: The Little House, demon rum, Dirk, and a friendship that doesn't survive.

Tags: family, friendship, sixth grade, step-father, suicide, ouija boards, alcohol, Dirk

(Let's call this faction.)

The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.

Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends:  we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.

Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.

He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.

The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.

By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.

Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)

The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.

You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)

Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?

Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.

I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.

Tags: writing prompt, College, roommates, alcohol, smells, faction, date rape, Joy Division, guilt, lies, secrets

By the time the lease ran out, I was barely speaking to Joan and Alistair. I owed Alistair money – someone in a group of kids I brought home from d.c. space had landed on the coffee table in a dramatic drunken loss of consciousness, permanently bending the metal frame. Post-fall, the table sat with one leg propped up on a thick paperback, its glass top tilting slightly to the left, a reminder of my dissolute ways. I started hiding out in my room, emerging only to eat and use the bathroom. Then Joan didn’t invite me to their spring engagement party, bluntly telling me that I had to find someplace to be when Alistair's wealthy Westchester County, New York family met her working class Baltimore clan. When it was time to move, I looked only at studio apartments, determined to live alone this time.

Capitol Plaza Apartments

The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.

To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.

Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.

Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.

Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.

A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.

I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.

In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.

In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).

The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.

“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.

Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.

It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?

Tags: College, friendship, coincidence, DC, roommates, alcohol, Columbus, loneliness, isolation

Obviously, Victoria wasn’t planning on falling down the stairs, tumbling like one of her son’s Lego creations, a gymnast gone wrong, cracking and popping along the way. She landed on her back, squinted her eyes at the upside-down view of the chandelier hanging in the stairwell, noticed two burnt-out faux candle flame bulbs. The stairs were in need of a good vacuuming. Two weeks’ worth of animal and human hair had been forming into angry mobs along the corners. They were threatening to rise up and cover the entire surface of the steps. The left wall had a series of equally-spaced gray marks made by her toddler son’s hands as he supported himself while climbing up and down. This vantage was a good reminder to vacuum more often, much like retching into a toilet bowl rimmed with stray hairs and old drops of urine was a push to get out the scrubbing brush.

Photo from apartment therapy.

“If only I was drunk,” she thought, remembering those tales of drivers fueled by alcohol miraculously surviving car-totaling accidents, their floppy limbs and carefree attitudes rescuing them from death. Extricated from smashed tin-can cars, they get up and walk away with a sprained wrist or broken toe while their sober counterparts are Medivaced and rushed to emergency surgery. Then she remembered: she was drunk.

This wasn’t normal. “Really, this is an outlying event,” she pictured telling the paramedics. “This is not my standard Tuesday afternoon.” Her stressful weekend had bled into the week and she couldn’t stand the muscle tension, her shoulders pulled tight, the way her tendons held her limbs at awkward angles. Victoria couldn’t even hug her husband properly. Unconvinced by his warmth, by his beating heart so close and welcoming, her body maintained its stiffness. She felt like an impassive observer as her hands thumped him on the back, a prelude to withdrawal.

When Laura suggested sharing a bottle of wine with lunch, Victoria thought: why not? It beats valium. The crisp Sauvignon blanc complemented her crab salad. They each had a tiny glass of Port at the end of the meal over a shared piece of chocolate cake. She felt marvelous.

No. Not drunk. Just a little tipsy, a little loose. Maybe she wasn’t hurt after all. Victoria slowly raised her right arm, then her left. She moved her head from side to side, bent a leg. Sore. Bruised but not broken. Her tailbone ached, and her left hip was probably turning purple, the broken blood vessels leaking into her muscle fibers. She turned around, pushed herself up. How would she explain this one to Barry? Oh, it was easy enough. Chris was in the habit of leaving his toys right by the stairs and both she and her husband had almost tripped multiple times. Maybe this would convince her son to be more careful. Even though he had nothing to do with it.

Once she was off the floor, Victoria inched her way up the stairs, favoring her left leg. To better assess the damage, she went into the bedroom, stripped down to her underwear and stared at her battered image in the mirror. Years before she had fantasized about taking up boxing as a way to get out built-up anger. Intrigued by the idea of sanctioned violence, she wanted the thrill of knocking her fist into another human being, but had never worked up the nerve to sign up for lessons. Victoria balled her freckled hands and took jabs at the mirror as she danced and swayed. Her hip was as dark and soft as a ripe plum. One of her cheeks was yellowing and there was a thin line of clotted blood coming from her nose. Her back ached. But the tension was totally gone.

Tags: writing prompt, falls, stairs, cleaning, boxing, violence, alcohol, wine