After Bad News, Marian Crotty

MARIAN CROTTY

After Bad News

Keep pacing. Pour yourself a glass of water. Take your time. You are on the phone in a different time zone from Little Sister and you are allowed to pace back and forth in your underwear and not say anything. She will keep talking. She will give you the phone number for Northwestern Hospital’s ICU and tell you more about the man testing smoke alarms who found Big Sister unconscious in her apartment. You will not need to talk about how she got there. Big Sister does not talk to your parents these days and so you and Little Sister know her medical history, have spoken with her doctors, flown to Chicago for ECT treatments, listened to hours and hours of sobbing phone conversations. You know.

Look at the clock in your bedroom and calculate the very latest you can leave your house and still make it to school on time. Perhaps you do not need to enter those paper grades into the grade book this morning.

Dry your hair. Change your clothes. Notice the wide white space between your ribs.

Your students will not sense that you are frazzled and washed out, but you will stare at them for a minute, pacing back and forth in front of the chalk board in case there is a moment to say, “I’m having a bad morning.” These are sweet kids, half of them education majors who love school and teachers, kids who have long since forgiven your awkward pacing and wrinkled clothes, the gritty pens and papers heaping out of your book bag. They will lean forward and smile until you smile back and write a response question on the board.

Go back to your office and tell someone. You will not remember the details of this conversation later, but you will remember feeling better. You will remember feeling as if the inside of your head has swung back into the world with your body for a minute, and you will remember feeling surprised at how nice this person is, listening to this shit after knowing you for only two months.

It will seem as if you should do something, but you are hours and hours away. What you can do is limited to phone calls. You choose the order: ICU, Little Sister, Big Sister’s shrinks (you have the phone numbers from a few weeks before when Big Sister asked you to tell them she wasn’t crazy). Should you call your parents? The nurse will tell you that Big Sister’s lab results are inconclusive, that she probably swallowed a lot of pills, maybe several kinds of pills, enough pills to send her into prolonged unconsciousness and that she is very lucky that someone found her when he did. She will not say “fate” or “God,” but you will hear these words in the background and feel tempted to use them yourself regardless of how much such analysis reminds you of Chicken Soup For the Soul.

You teach class again, but it’s short—fifty minutes of creative writing—and you are just a teaching assistant for this class. You can sit in the back of the classroom and doodle on a legal pad while the professor talks and this will be enough. Do not worry about chewing a hole in your pen or about staring at the soggy rust stain on the ceiling tile for ten minutes. You are supposed to be eccentric. You are supposed to be a writer.

At work—the Mexican restaurant within biking distance of your house—you will do fine. It is Tuesday and Tuesday nights are almost always slow—no more than four or five tables at once, customers who want to sit still for a long meal after work, who don’t mind too much if their food takes longer than twelve minutes. In general, you are not a great waitress. You do not smile or make small talk, and unless the manager’s listening you do not introduce yourself by name. But you know the routine by heart—the questions to ask for each entrée, the lists of beers and Tequilas, borrowed lines about the most popular dishes—and it surprises you how well this goes.

Your friend Allison is not working, but she will stop by to pick up a paycheck and she will sit down with you in section six by the window. Her hair is wet and pulled back into a ponytail. You can smell shampoo.

“What are you doing tonight?”

She takes a bite of your chicken enchiladas, now half eaten and discarded, a napkin on top. You no longer think this is unusual. Allison is tough—she plays rugby and works security at a club on the weekends, won two national kick-boxing championships in high school. She can handle other people’s picked over food.

You shrug.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” she says. “We’re going clubbing.”

This will not be real clubbing. This will be dancing at a third tier night club on a college street the night before it closes, but this is the club where Allison works security and so it is free.

Wear something moderately indecent and embarrassing. A miniskirt. Pink high-heeled sandals. Glitter. Drink of a glass of cranberry juice mixed with vodka and listen to Tupac. When your head fuzzes, Allison will show up in leather and leopard skin, her breasts tied up in one of those lace-up halter tops, looking like a video game warrior princess. Decide that you are one hot pair.

A former student will check I.D.s at the door. When he sees you he will turn red and fumble with his fingers. Say hello. Wish for a sweater or a pair of pants, shoes that are not pink. Remember that you gave this person a C in Freshman Comp.

Drink. Follow Allison around the bar and talk to her friends who will congregate on the back steps, smoking. They will have tattoos and tongue rings and girlfriends with sheets of long blonde hair. When Allison introduces you as an English teacher, they will find this hysterical. They wish they’d had English teachers who drank too much and who wore inappropriate clothing. Their English teachers were all boring bitches. Tell them their English teachers did drink too much and that you are also boring bitch. Tell them you gave their friend at the front door a C. Or, smile. Slink against the cement wall. Crunch ice cubes between your molars and wait for Allison to tell them her story about rugby practice.

Wander. Stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Walk down the hall as slowly as you can. Watch two girls by the DJ booth whisper and giggle, the strobe lights flashing across their faces. Order another drink.

At some point you will go downstairs with Allison to meet another group of friends. You will be drunk now—heady and spinning, flushed—and you will be glad to stand in the cool air on the sidewalk. Your former student will still be sitting on a barstool with his hands on his knees, but you will no longer find the situation particularly awkward or embarrassing. One of the friends will be Allison’s roommate who plays football at a community college and greets girls by grabbing their asses. Another friend you do not know will pull up on a red motorcycle, wearing a silk shirt and lots of hair gel. He will smell like a guy you dated in college and this will seem like a good smell even though it is the smell of cheap cologne.

Talk. Lean against the brick wall. When Allison suggests that you go on a motorcycle ride with this friend, tell her no thanks. The roommate will side with Allison. The former student will side with Allison. The friend with the motorcycle will side with Allison. You’ve never ridden a motorcycle, they will say. Never?

Allison will walk towards your brick wall, stand with her face just above yours, her back to the street and the friends. She will raise her eyebrows slightly and grin, and you will know this means she is trying to set you up. She is always trying to set you up. You are too shy. You do not have enough sex.

Say you are too drunk. Say you are scared of burning your leg on the motorcycle’s tailpipe. Then relent. Smile. Tell yourself you do not have to be a boring bitch every day.

The friend will help you onto the motorcycle and you will wish again that you’d worn jeans. Or better underwear. He will say: Hold on. Don’t try to steer. Lean into the curve.

He will loop around a square of streets and your eyes will water in the wind. The motorcycle will swing down low towards the pavement, and your heart will wiggle against your ribs like a fish. When you pass the club again he will ask if you want to stop. Tell him no. You like shooting through the wind with your tear ducts streaking salt water down your face and you like having your arms around this person’s ribs. You can feel the skin underneath his shirt, muscle and tissue clinging to his back bones. Hold tighter than you need to. Slide your chin across his shoulder.

He will take you over a bridge with lights swooping along the top like strands of popcorn. You will fly up a road with strip clubs lit and buzzing. Hot Nude Girls. You know this road but it will look different at nighttime on a motorcycle, the cars lined up at stop lights, you and this person zipping between them.

Decide this is a metaphor about destroying one’s own body, flying around without a helmet. How it would be easy to crash. How it would be easy to move the wrong way on purpose.

Thank the motorcycle friend and follow him back into the club. Have a drink. Listen to him tell you about his job at a weight room and his job at this club as a DJ. Listen to a story about a recent ex-girlfriend who threw a box of his CDs out their apartment window. Think, unreliable narrator.

Look for Allison. She will have found a guy. Someone big and muscular, shaped like a linebacker. She will ask what you think. You think he looks like a dozen other guys she’s liked or dated or taken home with her, but say, “He looks strong,” and watch her mouth curl up in a giddy smile.

She will want to know about her motorcycle friend. “He’s a good guy,” she will say. “He’s nice.”

Switch to water. Dance with the motorcycle friend. He will dance with his legs wide, arms snaking in figure eights. Ask if he’s from California. He will shake his head. He is from Wisconsin.

Allison will want to leave with the guy she’s found and she will ask if the motorcycle friend can take you home. “He won’t try anything unless you want,” she’ll say. “He’s a good guy.”

On the way home, the guy will tell you he is having fun. He likes English teachers. He likes books. He likes girls who dance badly and wear short skirts and pink shoes on Tuesday nights. Say, “It is nice of you to take me home.”

When he walks you to your door, you have choices. You can stand close, decide that this too is a metaphor about destruction and rash decisions. Pull this person inside your house and your bedroom. You can kiss this person and leave it at that. You can answer the phone tomorrow when he calls.

Or, you can do nothing. You can stand awkwardly with your hands across your chest, watching a pink gecko crawl along a stucco ledge by your door until the motorcycle friend stops talking and goes home.

You can lie down on your bed and listen to music, but you will wish you were not alone. You will consider this nothingness the metaphor after all—the world in one place and you right here by yourself. Calculate the time in North Carolina and the time in Chicago. Drink a glass of water. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Set an alarm. Lie back down in your bed with the room dark and your eyes swirling, your head thick. Close your eyes. (You are okay). Sleep.