by Jameson Draper
I
Alice and Sam got married quickly. In a world speeding beyond the shackles of matrimony, in a generation that has less sex than ever, their courthouse wedding at the age of twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively, was a sight to behold. The Instagram post announcing their nuptials with a kiss in front of the presiding deputy clerk was celebrated in the comment section but gossiped about in the kitchen of Alice’s waitressing gig at a coney island, a Detroit-specific Greek-style diner, and the halls of Sam’s sterile workplace. Whether it was out of jealousy or genuine worry is unknown, but the quick elopement occupied their social circles for quite some time.
It was a whirlwind romance, one that, in the stretch of nine months, shorter than a pregnancy, went from a chance meeting at the coney to moving in together to ring shopping to a quiet honeymoon in the UP. The romance felt real to them, no matter what anyone else thought, but it came about differently depending on which of them you asked. Sam didn’t overthink it. “If it seems easy, it is easy,” he’d say. “There’s no such thing as a soulmate. Find someone you can stand and then call it a day.”
Alice pored over all her choices, though, so much so that she was often crippled by indecision. Her parents—Russian immigrants, her father a small construction firm owner with cosmically bad luck—believed this quick, passionate trial was a rebellious decision to escape the exasperation of their overbearing household. Her friends thought Alice was swept up in an unreal honeymoon period—or worse, coerced into a life-altering decision by a younger, more resolute man.
There were no prenuptials or contracts drawn out regarding the marriage. Sam came from a middle class family of marketing professionals and social workers. Alice came from nearly nothing; her parents, smarter than most, arrived from the Soviet Union with nothing and with nothing they remained. Their daughter was their lifeblood whose success in life could wipe away their own suffering and toil to make it all worthwhile. They knew better than to expect their own success, but were just naive enough to levy it all upon her.
But years later, Alice was still a waitress at the coney where she and Sam met. She took night classes at the community college, enough to get her associate’s, but nothing came of it. The economy had been steadily crumbling since she could remember; with cash tips from neighborhood lifers and flirtatious old curmudgeons alike, serving tables was a pretty good living. By the time they were wed, Alice was making several thousand dollars a year more than Sam, who was using his communications degree and some slight nepotism to leverage various temp jobs in the advertising world. There wasn’t much to motivate Alice to go back to school and, quote-unquote, find a career. She fantasized about opening an animal sanctuary,but always knew it would be a money pit. And she knew her and Sam couldn’t afford any money pit, not spiritually or physically.
II
Despite what they said aloud to each other, Sam was quicker to real love than Alice. In fact, for him it was nearly immediate. When he met her that afternoon at the coney, he sat on the bartop, ate half of his chicken gyro, tipped her fifty percent, and on the way out of the door looked at the friend he’d come with and said, “That’s the girl I’m gonna marry.”
For Alice, the true feelings came after the fact of commitment. At first, Sam’s hyperfixations seemed to her like an act or facade, tendencies and hobbies that would fall away with time, familiarization, and maturation. But they didn’t; they only grew stronger the more comfortable he became. Before she knew it, she was in love, too. She would say it happened during the honeymoon, when he made them drive the car up to the tip of the U.P. to visit the hotel where they filmed Anatomy of a Murder, even though it was two hours from their B&B. Up there, it felt like the edge of the world.
Alice laughed when they walked in the door of the Thunder Bay Inn. “That movie’s like 500 years old.”
“Look around,” said Sam, arms spread wide, the hair on his chest poking through his ruffled camp shirt, weighed down by sunglasses in his breast pocket. “It’s like you can feel the history here.”
Alice’s fondness surpassed Sam’s soon after, who seemed to only be able to be in love so much. His was an elementary love. His affection came quickly, but he never mined it much for meaning. He used his earnest love as a shield for his sensitivity and cowardice—being soft isn’t manly, but tenderness borne from adoration is the most noble thing a man can feel, he thought back then. Alice’s love grew every day with each small up or down experienced together. It felt like their life was converging into one path; they’d entered the woods on separate trails but would exit together at the same clearing. She cherished his wins and loved him all the more because of his flaws, not merely in spite of them.
By the time their first anniversary rolled around, Alice could see the rest of her life ahead. She’d wake up Sam in the morning and regale him with dreams about wrap-around patios and countryside homes built in the 19th century with dozens of (friendly) stray cats milling about. Sam would laugh and make her promise if they got that many cats, they’d all be polydactyls.
Sam was a dreamer too, but his dreams were more abstract, more selfish. He wanted to be a writer. At first, their relationship thrived on Alice’s interest in his writing. He wasn’t very good, but was passable. He had studied English as a minor in college before dropping it to pursue journalism. He eventually gave up journalism as well, settling for a meaningless communications degree after the failed and fruitless endeavor. He’d spend hours in the back room of their two-bedroom flat on the second story of an A-frame home in Detroit’s northwest corner—he converted the back bedroom into an office—brainstorming and writing and erasing and editing and staring at the wall, not coming out until he’d decided to be finished.
Alice would supply him with microwaved pizza rolls and beer. He’d forget to eat if she didn’t. She always asked him if he wanted her to oven bake the pizza rolls, and he didn’t, he always said he preferred them microwaved. Alice would smile to herself as she watched the processed meat pockets rotate on the turntable. Now and forever she could remember these quiet nights in the A-frame, listening to Sam’s clacking of the keyboard and elongated sighs, and smile at how far they’d come together. She felt a perverse pride at the idea that she was appreciating the Good Times while they were happening, like she was getting one over on God.
When Sam would finish a story, he’d bring his computer out to the main room and proudly read it aloud to Alice. She found his flawed, immature writings endearing and quickly learned how to gratify him. He wasn’t ever looking for real feedback; he just needed someone to tell him he was good. His father was a beacon of the local advertising world, and it seemed he wanted to be as good a writer as his dad was an ad man. Alice knew, deep down, Sam would never amount to anything as a writer, but she smiled at him with a genuine maternal love when she’d see him writing, or when she’d watch him read to her (not necessarily listening so closely).
In that disintegrating A-frame house, she realized they really were in the Good Times. She’d open up the bay window in the living room on warm nights and watch the orange blaze of the sun streak across the midwestern sky as it set over the hundreds of Tudor homes scattered across the city grid.
III
Things kept moving and eventually the topic of children came up. Although both parties wanted kids, they viewed parenthood differently, Sam as the natural progression of human existence and a familial duty and Alice yearning for the warmth of a small human with half of her own DNA that she could watch blossom into something greater than her. She remembered her parents telling her they would die for her, that they knew she’d be better than them. She wanted to put the same love on one of her own. It didn’t hurt that she also felt a little bit of insecurity about herself and her relationship–so yes, having a baby would tie Sam to her forever, in one way or another. After all, she considered herself a pragmatist more than anything else.
They discussed the logistics of it all like the idea of a baby was a unit in an Excel spreadsheet, cold and emotionless to the point where an outside party might call it unhealthy. The idea of Sam quitting his young career in marketing was out of the question. Alice leaving the coney felt ill-advised, too, she was still making more money than Sam since most of it was coming in under the table.
They came to a conclusion: the only way they’d be able to minimize daycare and babysitting costs is if Sam quit writing. It was taking up too much time, Alice said she couldn’t have a baby if Sam was working nine-to-five only to come home and hole up in his office for however long. It pained him to think about temporarily hanging up his dream, but something deep inside him thought that the window for having a child was closing on him quicker than any potential writing career was–eventhough he was only twenty-four, he felt in a rush. Besides, he could always come back to writing once his child grew up. And he would. He really would.
“You really sure you want to give up the writing? You love it, you’re so good at it,” said Alice, smiling through her teeth. She knew how to cut right into him.
“Children are more important,” said Sam, placing his hands over hers at her side and wrapping them around his waist. “And so are you.”
“Whatever you say, baby.”. Her heart was full. “Just want to make sure it’s something you want to do. You can always go back to the writing once she’s old enough.”
“I will, I will.” He sounded like he was pleading. Then he realized what Alice had said. “Wait a second—you said ‘she.’”
“My mom knew I was going to be a girl and I know our first-born will be, too.”
IV
Sam’s wonder for life–what originally drew Alice to him–was muted when he drank. Nobody who knew Sam would go as far as to say it was a drinking problem, but it was an undeniable truth that the man liked to get a little bit loose. So it’s no surprise that once he gave up writing, the drinking increased. To make sure he’d be able to support the little one, three months now in Alice’s womb, he picked up copywriting jobs for search engine companies and local businesses on the side. He was burnt out and sad, worse each passing day. As far as he knew, the only way to get better at writing was to keep at it;he’d stopped cold turkey.Alice didn’t like it when he drank so much, either. For the first time in, tension hung between them in the air.
“I don’t care if you do it,” she said. “But just don’t do it around me. Go out with your friends and get wasted or something.”
“Well, that would mean I’m lying to you,” he said, head down on the table. Alice had come home from her parents’ house in the suburbs to him drunk alone in the kitchen, sitting over a plate of half-eaten pizza rolls.
“Omissions aren’t lies,” she said, and walked into the bathroom, where she wet down a warm towel and brought it back out to him. “You know why I hate it when you drink?”
“Because both your parents are alcoholics,” he murmured.
“That’s only part of it and you know it.” Alice barely ever raised her voice at Sam but tonight she did. “I think about the baby,” she said. “What would she think if she could see you right now? You look pathetic.”
“You don’t even know it’s a girl.”
“Yes, I do. Now take this compress. I’m going to put a pot on.”
He finally picked his head up. The unfinished hardwood of the table struck lines against the side of his face. His face was red and his eyes were puffy. Dried spit gathered at the corners of his mouth. He hadn’t cared to wipe it off. It was clear he’d been there for some time. He took the compress and just wrung his hands with it.
“You know what I think about the baby? What if she could see what was going on in the world? Did you see that there’s, like, fucking protests and shit going on in Minnesota? They burned down a Target. The cops tear gassed the protestors and the rioters without permission. It’s only getting worse. Did you ever think bringing a kid into this world was a choice? My mom always used to call me selfish and I think she was right.”
Alice straightened her back, walked over, and took the compress back out of Sam’s hands. Her voice tightened. “Life is all there is.” She pulled down her maternity sweater and grabbed Sam’s chin with her right hand, pulling it up toward her face. Her powder blue eyes beamed straight into the brown of his.
V
Before the end of the first trimester, Alice got an abortion. Although she’d never admit it, Sam’s drunken words that night had hit her hard. She couldn’t sleep that whole week.
The following Monday she woke up, put makeup on (something she didn’t usually do), and drove herself to the clinic after Sam went to work. She never consulted him. Since he spoke about his fear, he never mentioned it again. In fact, over the next few days, he’d started to talk about the child again, ignoring his bombshell concerns, making an effort to use the word “her” in their conversations, as if he was now as more excited about the baby than Alice was. She thought that if she talked to him about it, he would confuse her, that she’d careen into a bout of her classic indecision. She decided to wait and tell him after it was done. When he came home from work that evening, she sat on the couch, barely more than a shadow in the deep violet light of the fading autumn twilight.
“Hi,” he said. He took his shoes off and put his laptop bag down before he noticed the odd look on her face. He walked over to the table lamp and switched it on. “Dark’s bad for your eyesight. Everything OK?”
“The baby’s gone.”
“What?”
“I killed it.”
Those three words seemed to rattle around Sam and Alice’s mind and reverberate off the living room walls that suddenly seemed so cavernous. Words forever seared in the back of their minds. Sam’s pupils dilated and then contracted again in an instant. Alice’s eyes were closed tight. Sam opened his mouth but could only let out a bated breath. He stared at Alice. He felt a burning sensation in his ears and suddenly felt sweaty. A rancid mixture of shock and betrayal overcame him. Somehow Alice’s stillness struck him as some sort of perverse tranquility; he could’ve killed her in that instant. The longer he looked, the quieter she seemed to get. After an eternity, he asked:
“Why?”
“I want to finish school. I don’t want to be a waitress anymore.”
VI
The next morning, Sam threw what was left of his bottle of scotch away. He didn’t touch the stuff for the next six months, at least.
VII
As promised, Alice enrolled at Wayne State that next week. She couldn’t admit to Sam that his worries about the world at large influenced her decision. But the enrollment wasn’t just a cover; she really did want to go.
Alice had spotted an inkling of deep sadness in her parents’ eyes behind the masquerade of proud, over-the-top joy when she’d told them she was pregnant. In their eyes, it was all over—their daughter wasn’t going to amount to what they thought she was. But look at her now: she was going to get a bachelor’s degree. She was going to be something. She’d enrolled in the business college; she figured since she still didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, she’d enter a field where big money was possible. She also took a minor in Russian.
Even though he stopped drinking, Sam fell deeper into despair. He’d lost his child and his calling. What happened to the family they were building? Soon Alice encouraged him to take up writing again but this time, for some reason, he saw right through her. The way she brought it up was so flimsy, so patronizing, like a parent asking their first grader if they wanted to pin their poem to the refrigerator. In a clairvoyant moment, he saw now that she hated his writing and wanted to scream at her. He held back. But he'd never felt hatred for Alice before and was uncomfortable and ashamed about the feeling, so he hid it and didn’t say anything.
Sam missed drinking all the more once he saw Alice pick it up. For the first two-and-a-half years they’d been together, she didn’t drink once. She’d regale Sam with stories of drunken escapades from high school littered with unsavory anecdotes that made him laugh, mostly because they felt like he was learning about a totally different person. This, she would say, is why she knew she couldn’t drink.
The change worried Sam, but at first he convinced himself it was harmless. She was making friends in her graduate program; it was only natural. She’d go out to craft cocktail lounges with her Russian professors and give her take on Lukashenko's deteriorating relationship with Putin, or brunch with other girls in her program for bottomless mimosas. \Of course, when she’d come home from these brunches, she’d give him the best sex he’d ever had.
Before she took up the drinking—but after they lost the baby—they weren’t making love often. Then the alcohol kicked it back into high gear.But Sam felt something vague and unsettling disperse throughout him during the act, a sort of soullessness. When she was drunk, he’d smile at her silently, thinking about his own grandmother, the worst alcoholic he’d known, how she’d wasted away the prime of her life in untidy rooms enshrouded by blackout curtains, how she couldn't leave the house without a tumbler full of Mountain Dew Code Red and cheap vodka.
He saw himself as an obedient and generous husband, though, despite his emotional unsupportiveness and avoidant depression. So Sam suffered in silence—at least, silence toward Alice. He filled a lot of his time with sleep. He briefly took up photography, but didn’t find much in it. He felt that it was, as an art form, rather cheap , that it belonged in the realm of informational media, was too perfect, too real. He felt it had nothing to say. He existed only on the precipice of dissipation.
VIII
Soon enough, Alice got her degree–passed with flying colors, even got commendations from the department during her graduation ceremony because she’d organized a class trip to Ukraine just months before the Russian invasion.
Her drinking had gotten worse. She wasn’t a bad drunk until she got wasted, but she’d rarely stop at one or two or three drinks. It was easy for her to not pick a drink up—that was her idea of self-control—but once the bitter spirits touched her lips, the rest of her day was shot. A glaze came over Alice’s eyes after she’d crossed a certain threshold of drunkenness, and her logic-driven, nurturing, ambitious nature devolved into something that terrified Sam: her eyes would go black,she’d become cruel, resentful, antagonistic, and impulsive. He didn’t know how to talk to her when she was this way.He took drinking back up, too.
On the nights when she drank and he didn’t, they avoided conflict. And on the nights where he’d drink and she’d abstain, she’d retire to her room as Sam wallowed in some vaguely theatric sorrow with all the lights off in the living room. He’d feel even worse if Alice didn’t notice he was suffering. Those days in the A-frame, they finished their nights drunk more often than not, sleeping in separate rooms.
But Sam was willing to accept these ominous portents because of the prospect of what might be. Alice would get a well-paying job and he could cut back on the freelancing, leaving time to write. They replaced the idea of a child with a cat, who they both loved dearly but he still wasn’t a human. The sun peeked through the clouds. Plus, Sam was the one whose drinking caused their first cracks.How could he resent Alice? Wouldn’t that be hypocritical? And he was no hypocrite.
Except Alice wouldn’t get a job. At least, not a well-paying office job which. The economy was shit and entry-level would’ve paid less than her serving job—if she could even land one. So, she lingered at the coney.
“Why don’t you keep applying?” Sam asked, one slightly drunken late summer evening. It had been a hot day and they’d spent the previous three hours drinking beer and eating pizza on a friend’s patio. The bay window in the living room was cracked and the faraway scent of grilled meats from a neighborhood block party drifted into the house.
“I applied for all of them,” said Alice, holding a hard seltzer can in one hand and pushing a Swiffer in the other.
“There’s no way that’s true.”
“Yep, all of them. Wanna look on job posting sites for me, or are you gonna believe me?”
“No, I believe you think you applied for all of them, but I mean, like, shit pops up every day.”
“I look every day.”
“What about jobs outside Detroit?”
“You love it here.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never explored the world.” He put his lowball glass of gin and soda down and walked into the kitchen. “I don’t want to be one of those guys who stays in Detroit his whole life. And we gotta do all this stuff together.”
“You’re going to get your socks wet stepping in the solution. I’m literally mopping,” she said, and didn’t look up at him. “Plus, I’m not leaving.”
“Why?”
“My parents are here,they’re poor and they’re drunks. What am I going to do? Just leave them to die?”
“Well,” Sam said, stepping cautiously, “to be honest, you need to do what’s right for you. I don’t think you should let other people dictate your life. Your parents shouldn’t hold you back.”
Evidently, this was the wrong thing to say. Alice threw the Swiffer down forcefully by the handle and finished the last of her drink, then tossed the can in the recycling bin behind her. That dark glaze was there in her eyes and now she looked right at Sam. He took a step back, barely noticeable. But Alice stepped forward.
“Be careful what you wish for. You seem to want me to get a job so damn bad. Do you want me out of the house? I don’t think you realize what that means. If you got your way, nobody’d clean this shithole. Nobody’d make you get off your ass and do anything. You’d have to microwave your own pizza rolls.When was the last time you wrote something?”
Sam cast his eyes downward, kicked the wooden coffee table—knocking off and shattering his lowball glass—put on his sneakers, and walked out of the house. As he went down the stairs and out into sweltering dusk, he was contented suddenly by a light breeze. He thought about Alice and her complacency. He couldn’t say anything to her. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. Her life had always been harder than his.
Whenever he’d bring up her career prospects, she scoffed at him—even sober—because she at least “had it better than most.” He kept wonderingwhat really made Alice this way: was her short-sightedness only a cover, a defense for something deeper? Was it because she didn’t know what she wanted to do at all? Did she really want to be a waitress forever? Was she afraid of whatever came next?
But she wasn’t truly happy, Sam knew that. Maybe it was simply the broken pleasures of malaise and inaction; he’d felt them, too. It was getting cold out, and time for Sam to head back inside. When he came to the door he stopped and took a deep breath, filling his lungs one last time with summer air. He opened the door. The lights were off. Alice had gone to bed. Sam made his blanket in silence and promptly fell asleep on the couch. The only sound he heard outside was the buzz of dog-day cicadas and the occasional clunking and huffing of beaters speeding down Wyoming Avenue in the distance.
IX
For Alice, the disguise was disappearing. She would wonder if she’d ever amount to something. He felt like she was making no progress. She dreamt about her tombstone. A child of immigrants, who left earth worse off than her forefathers. Ides of disappointment crept in her brain.
Her drinking took up most of her nights;then it started taking up most of her days. Even Sam had even noticed she began to bring a thermos everywhere: the zoo, family gatherings, sometimes even the grocery store. He knew it wasn’t coffee, but was too scared to check. The less he said on the matter, the better. Besides, Alice would remind herself, things could always be worse.
Sam grew more sedentary than ever, but the days flew by for Alice, despite the emptiness, so focused was she on her drinking and cleaning the house and waiting tables. She remembered her Mom’s favorite idiom: “An idle mind is the devil’s playground.” She wasn’t even sure what Sam did with most of his time. He hadn’t written a lick—she didn’t mind not having to read his work, but still she missed the smile it brought to his face when she’d extoll his nonexistent talents. He didn’t cook. He no longer had many or any friends, either, as far as she knew. He was more withdrawn than ever. They hadn’t made love since summer, even when they both were wasted. When he wasn’t out late for work or his freelance gigs, he’d sit on the couch, scrolling his phone or sleeping. He did a lot of sleeping.
X
A Saturday afternoon, the following spring: one of those early spring days when you could open the windows and let the smell of wet soil float through the house and forget there’d still be a few more weeks of winter-like weather. Alice had been drinking since mid-morning when she got off her early shift at the coney. Sam noticed her glassy eyes and pleasant attitude when she walked inside. It always went like this. Had she been drinking during her shift? As the sun tipped past its apex and began its slow motion freefall into the western horizon, her joy died out, replaced with tender bitterness; her glassy eyes once again grew into thick black darts. He was never sure exactly when it would happen, but if she started drinking early enough in the day, it was inevitable.
Sam had baseball on the TV. Spring training. The games didn't matter, but the crack of the bat, the undulations of the ambient southern crowds and the clap of worn leather soothed him. It reminded him that he wasn't alone, that generations of American kids perhaps changed their attitudes, but never their spirits. Not really. The world and country had changed so much over a century and a half but the sweet background baseball noise remained. Summer would always come back, by God. In the house, there was a tension in their silence. The only noise was the baseball on the TV and the dishes clanking in the sink. Alice was washing plates and glasses that had piled up and starting to smell. She searched for something to say. “How was your day?” She yelled over the running water.
“We’ve been together for it. What do you mean?” Sam said flatly. He didn’t take his eyes off the TV. He didn’t care to look into her eyes.
“Forgive me for asking.”
Sam didn’t peel his eyes off the TV. There was a static in his ears, vibrating and washing over the cracks and claps on the screen.
“You know, I think it’s funny,” Alice said. But she didn’t find anything funny. “That I work all morning just to come home and do chores.”
“Nobody asked you to do the dishes.”
“So you just want to live in a house that stinks? Is that what it is?” Her voice hit a higher pitch than Sam typically liked.
“It’s not even bad.” He was trying to avoid continuing the discussion. He preferred silence right now.
“You’re not in college anymore, Sam. You can’t just smoke weed in the house and let bugs crawl all over your dirty dishes and depend on Mommy for all the cleaning. We’re getting older every day. Why do you refuse to engage with me?”
“Not in college anymore?” He sat up, took his eyes off the television, and looked right into her black-dart eyes. “I couldn’t tell. Judging by all those empty White Claws on the counter, I don’t think you figured that out, either.”
“Fuck you.” She threw her sponge and a plate back into the sink. Sam could hear the plate crack. “I’m so glad we didn’t have kids together.”
Sucking the air out of the room. A burning rage appeared in Sam’s face, one Alice had never seen. He looked at her for the longest moment. Then he stood up for a second, put his hands in his pockets, and sat right back down. His breathing grew heavy. “Remember when you’d get mad at me for drinking? What if I sent a picture of all the empty cans to your parents? What would they think? What would they do? This is a two-way fucking street.”
Alice gathered herself for a moment. “Two-way street. You should tell that to yourself.”
She clenched her jaw and pursed her lips. As she thought about it all, pacing around the kitchen island, she riled herself back up. What she was about to say she’d rudimentarily rehearsed, yelled at herself in a mirror inside her mind for months before now. She looked up at the ceiling, exhaled and cried, spit flying out of her mouth, as she inched closer to Sam:
“You cannot treat me like a child. Not that you would know what that means, anyway. I drink because I have problems, true. You use your problems to try and make everyone feel bad for you. ‘Oh, everyone, look at how bad I’m suffering.’ News flash, buddy: nobody gives a fuck. Everybody’s life is hard and you grew up with everything. Daddy’s money, Mommy’s love. Red-blooded American horseshit. Nobody wants to hear you whine, especially not me. You want to complain about my drinking? OK, send that shit to my parents. They’ve seen worse. What would you even do if I wasn’t around? Nothing. You’d let this place go to shit, you’d get even fatter than you’re already getting. I drink to shield my pain, sure, it’s a cliche but it’s fucking true, and you sit on the couch and jack off during work hours and scroll on Twitter in silence, but it’s loud. It’s so damn loud. I hear it and so does everyone else. Your self-appointed victimhood is that fucking loud. My parents used to like you, you know? But they see what you’ve become. They tell me you’re a bad influence on me. It doesn’t matter that you don’t approve of my drinking. You’re a scar on my life. I was going somewhere until I met you. You hold me back because you depress me. I’m fucked, but so are you. And you know what’s funny? You know what’s fucking funny? Is that even I, an alcoholic child of alcoholic foreigners, with a degree that turned out to be fucking useless, am way better than you will ever be. You think you’re special but you’re fucking not. I could find another you tomorrow. I really could. I could find a million more yous in a million lifetimes. But you’ll never find another me. I am one of one. I am smart and I am beautiful and I will mean something to this world. You’re another white dude with a martyr-complex, but I’m fucking pure at heart, I will fucking triumph over my problems sooner or later. But you won’t. I’m so much better than you, it’s not even funny. It would be funny if it wasn’t true, but it is. And I can see it in your sullen eyes: you know. You know I’m better than you and it fucking kills you. And you sulk around, sleeping all day, telling me about all my flaws. Well, guess what? I don’t give a fuck. Sticks and stones, baby boy. You killed your own dreams and the onus is on me to keep the spirit of our relationship alive. You blame me for killing the baby, but it was you who did it, complaining about all the bullshit going on in this world. I still feel guilty about it, but guess what? I shouldn’t. And I don’t feel like carrying that weight anymore.”
Sam blinked. Nobody had ever talked to him like this before, and nobody ever would again. The worst part: Alice was right. Her problems were fixable. She was a few steps away from figuring her shit out. But what would he amount to? He hadn’t written a damn thing in years. He didn’t know what to say or what to do with his hands. He stood back up and put on the ratty wool sweater he’d been wearing for a week straight already. He walked over to the door mat and slipped on his New Balance sneakers. They were stained and littered with holes.
He opened the door, but before he walked out he turned back to her.“You’re drunk.”
XI
After Sam left that afternoon, Alice had two more drinks, finished cleaning the dishes, then turned on the TV. She watched two episodes of King of the Hill. Then she touched herself for an hour, thinking of the 43-year old man who’d call her “darling” and order takeout only during her shifts. She fell asleep at nine o’clock and woke up two hours later thirsty. She went back to the clean kitchen and drank a glass of water. She opened a package of Pop-Tarts and ate them both. She went back to bed and slept straight through the night. She awoke at seven in the morning on Sunday to sparrows chirping in the trees which lined the driveway below and decided to meet her mom at church. She heard the Orthodox service and only understood the English verses. But she felt cleansed.
After the service, Alice and her mom walked down the street and got coffee.
“That was nice,” said Alice, hoping her mother would engage. “I needed that.”
“Alisa, that goddamned priest still owes your father money from back when they built his deck. Stasia told me he gambled it all away.”
XII
When Alice returned to the house, Sam was still gone. She hadn’t heard from him. At first she assumed he’d gone to his parents’.She went over their blowout from Saturday, at least what she could remember of it, and tried to figure out what struck him the most. For the first time in a long time, she was overthinking their relationship instead of avoiding it completely. She thought she missed him. She called him. He didn’t answer.
At one o’clock in the morning, Sam returned to the house. He was loud, stomping his boots as he shook them off, slamming the closet door after hanging up his coat. It wasn’t an angry commotion, necessarily, more like a wordless proclamation: I am back.
Alice laid in bed pretending to sleep. Even though they’d been sleeping separately for a week straight, Sam removed all his clothes and got under the covers with her. He felt her stomach for breathing and said:
“You’re not asleep. I know your breathing when you’re asleep. You’re awake.”
She turned to him without opening her eyes, wrapped her arms around his neck, got closer and let him inside her. They fell asleep in each other’s arms. When Alice woke in the morning for work, Sam was already up. She put on her old robe and walked through the house, finding him in his back office.
“Good morning,” she said. “Not working today?”
“I’m working,.”. He didn’t look back from his screens. “Just working from home.”
“I’m sorry about the other day.I probably could have handled it better.”
Sam said nothing. He clicked his mouse and the wind beat against the weathervane outside.
XIII
Over the course of the next few weeks, Sam was around less. Whether he was working late or doing something else entirely, Alice didn’t know. He never told her, she never asked.
It got to the point where she didn’t know what to say about him to her parents or friends. How is Sam? How should she know? She didn’t even know where he was. She felt the same emptiness in the rooms of their flat whether he was there or not, anyway. She knew that, in his current condition, Sam wasn’t putting in any extra time at work. It had to be something else.
Alice wondered aloud to Sam about him cheating on her. It was a half-hearted effort and she never got behind it. She felt like he knew she didn’t really believe it, but she had no other way of getting to the core of their problems, this abrasion was the only way she knew.
“Sam,” she said one night over bowls of instant ramen. It was the summer again, a whole year had passed, and the windows were open on either side of the kitchen to let the cross breeze in. The smell of a burning woodpile floated in from down the street. “Am I not enough for you?” she asked him.
He didn’t look up from his noodles. He leaned over the bowl, slurped, eyes down, letting the broth dribble down his chin back into the ramen. He’d already figured somewhere in the back of his mind that a conversation like this was coming, but he never truly braced himself for it. “Wha are you saying?”
“You said I was the girl you were going to marry.” Alice picked up her bowl, walked to the sink, and dumped the soup down the drain.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Is there someone else?”
Sam looked up from his ramen. He was taken aback. He wanted to laugh. “Someone else?”
“You don’t touch me anymore and you’re always gone.” Alice opened the fridge and pulled out the hard seltzer. She cracked it open. There was a soft fizzing noise. She took a drink, set the can down on the counter, and took Sam’s bowl away from him.
“I was going to drink the rest,” he said. “Do you want to go out?”
“Go out? You hate going out.”
“It’s been such a long time. Let’s go to Menjos and take over the jukebox.”
“I have to do the dishes. And I have an early shift tomorrow.” She sat down at the table and clasped her hands in her lap.
“If you have to get up so early, why are you drinking?”
“OK,” she said and stood back up. She reached her hand out and placed it on Sam’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
XIV
Menjos was their favorite bar, a gay bar on 6 Mile, the only late-night spot in their neighborhood; they’d spent countless nights there drinking whiskey gingers at the stainless steel bartop, making small talk with the manager, and watching bald middle-aged men ride the mechanical penis. Last summer was the last time they’d gone, though; Sam walked in on an older man overdosed in the bathroom. He was keeled over, vomit splayed across his striped oxford shirt. All Sam could remember was the man’s wrinkled hand on his stomach. He saw a wedding band on his ring finger hanging off the side of the stretcher as the paramedics loaded him into the ambulance.
“Big boss man!” The bartender smiled and wiped down the end cap of the bar where he knew Sam and Alice liked to sit. “I thought you forgot about us.”
They sat down. It was nearly empty in the bar, just a group of four young women at one table. They were all dressed in nurse’s scrubs, winding down after an evening shift at the hospital down the street. One of them, Julie, was Alice’s old coworker at the coney before she got her nursing degree and took a job at the hospital. She hadn’t seen Alice since her last day. She walked up to the couple and smiled at them.
“You two look different,” she said. Her words were slurred. She was drunk. “Sam, how much money would it take you to ride the big dick?”
Sam laughed and returned her thousand-yard stare with an open-mouth smile. “I’d do it for free. Maybe a kiss on the cheek.”
Julie smirked and put her hand on Alice’s back. “How about a rain check?”
“Your loss,” said Sam.
“I’ll settle for buying you two a drink,” said Julie, turning to the bartender. “Hey guy, can we get three lemon drops over here? We got some tourists.”
The bartender laughed. “It’s on the house,” he said, and poured from a plastic bottle of premade concoction into three shot glasses and slid them down the bar. Some of the sticky, translucent, yellow liquid spilled on the way over.
“Thank you, my friend,” Julie said, then turned back to Sam. “Talk to Jack lately?”
Sam tried not to show a reaction but Alice noticed the right corner of his lip twitch before he twisted it into a strained smile. He straightened out his spine and stiffened his posture. He forced another laugh. “No, I haven’t. Thanks for asking, Julie. If I do, do you want me to tell him you miss him?”
Julie’s eyes beamed knowingly before turning back to her table. She downed her lemon drop and slammed it on the bartop. “You two have a nice night.”
There was a conniving air in her statement Alice didn’t totally understand. “Why did she mention Jack?” she asked Sam.
Jack was the editor of a third-rate literary magazine, once a classmate of Alice, and then Sam’s pal, as well.
One night at Menjos, some years back, Alice had introduced him to Julie. The two began dating, but had a particularly nasty falling out. She “blew up” (Jack’s words), and the next week Jack packed his bags and left for New York, leaving the medical industry to pursue his literary dreams. As much as they tried to stay out of the middle there, the nature of Jack and Julie’s relationship was inherently tied to Sam and Alice’s; they were all friends together, as couple-units. The relationship would never have existed without Alice’s introduction. Alice naturally sided with Julie in the name of friendship, and Sam was sort of ambivalent to it all. Naturally, once Jack left for New York, they stopped hearing from him. They seldom talked about Jack and Julie and their dissolution, but when they did, they could agree on one thing: Jack was far cooler than Julie.
“You know, Julie,” said Sam, looking through Alice, “she likes to stir the pot. She probably goes home and lays in her bed alone on dark nights wishing he’d asked her to come to New York City with him or something. Cheers.”
Sam and Alice toasted and downed their shots and then each ordered a draft beer. They didn’t say a word to each other the rest of their time at Menjos. The jukebox was broken, so they couldn’t commandeer the room that way. Halfway through his glass, an ache began to settle in Sam’s stomach. He didn’t want to drink anymore. He looked at Alice but she didn’t look back. She kept glancing between the table of nurses and the baseball game on the TV. The Tigers were losing.
The air had gone out of the room and was replaced by an oppressive heat from outside that smelled like worms. Rain. Sam thought about how Menjos was their unlikely watering hole; it’d crept up on them, they’d never chosen Menjos, it was more like Menjos chose them. He looked around the bar and saw the few sad faces. Nobody seemed happy. The only other patrons served simply as a reminder to Alice of her failures. The mechanical penis was desolate, Sam could hear metal pieces inside it scraping against each other. The lemon drops tasted like corn syrup; the older Sam got, the worse artificial sugar made him feel. He felt like something was gone, but couldn’t put his finger on what. He turned to Alice and looked at her until she could no longer ignore him
“My stomach’s hurting, Alice. Can we go home?”
XV
Alice woke up early, about a quarter to seven. The rain from the night before had stopped, but the smell of worms lingered in the air like the last, pre-hangover rushes of a good buzz. She felt the lack of sleep on her skin, in her head, in her crusted tear ducts. She mindlessly groped the bed beside her. Sam was gone, his side was empty and neat, pillows puffed up and sheets tucked in.Alice ripped the comforter back;there was no imprint of his body. She got up and walked into the living room, expecting to find him back on the couch. But no. Where did he go? she thought. She shuffled through the house in her worn-out robe, looking in crevices too small to fit any human body. I’m overthinking things, she thought. He loves the smell of rain, maybe he’s out for a walk. Maybe he had to go to work early and forgot to tell me. Maybe he went to urgent care for his stomach.
She decided not to worry. She took a shower, did her hair, got dressed, and went to the coney. She had an early shift herself.
It was a busy day at her job. Before she could take a moment to think, it was already noon. She noticed that a sunny morning after a rainy night always brought more dine-in customers. She accepted this as natural law and didn’t wonder why. As her shift wound down, one of her coworkers, a server named Anna, struck up a conversation.
“I heard you saw Julie last night,” said Anna, feigning nonchalance.
Alice felt herself seize up. She knew Anna was still Julie’s friend.
“Sam and I saw her at Menjos,” she Alice wearily as she bussed the counter above the register. “It was nice to see her. Been awhile.”
“I’m sorry in advance for asking, Alice, but are you OK?”
“What do you mean?” She was filling carry-out cups with ranch now, focusing on this harder than necessary, a typical coping mechanism for her.
“She said that you two didn’t talk to each other the whole time you were there,” said Anna. “Like you were two strangers who just happened to be sitting next to each other.”
“She was drunk,” Alice replied. “She was hitting on Sam, anyway, so I’m not sure she’s the one to give out relationship advice.”Alice clenched her jaw and it took everything in her to keep her eyes down on the condiments now. She badly wanted to put the jug of homemade ranch down and hit Anna’s beautifully symmetrical, olive-toned, pockless, Albanian face with a close-fisted right hook. As Anna doddered away shyly at her own unnecessary task, Alice wondered: how could she? She doesn’t know me. And more specifically, how could Julie? If she thought that things were bad between Sam and Alice, why didn’t she bring it to Alice herself? She started cooling down as she finished filling the ranch cups. While she stacked the cups in the cooler, Anna ambled back, doe-eyes glistening. The only sound she made was the sticking noise of her sneakers on the tiled floor.
Alice put her hand on Anna’s lumbar and said, softly, into her ear: “Sorry if I seem mad. Relationships are all about the ups and downs. You’ll understand someday. But that doesn’t mean my husband’s not a good man. I guess I just don’t like assumptions. That's all.”
“I was just passing along the way Julie thought about it, anyway,” said Anna. “I even told her that Sam’s probably just disappointed that Jack rejected him like that.”
“Wait, what?” She took her hands off Anna’s back. She felt hot; her feet suddenly throbbed.
“What do you mean? That thing he said about Sam’s short story.”
“Short story?”
“Oh, man. Sam sent him this short story he’s been working on for the past six months. And Jack said he’d never be a real writer. Do you not know about this?”
“Of course I do. Of course I know,” Alice snapped. “I guess when you said, ‘rejected’ I thought you meant, like, actually rejected. That’s not, like, really a rejection, you know? He was just asking him for feedback, really.”
“Are you sure?” Anna looked puzzled and a little suspicious.
“Positive.”
“Well, sure, maybe. Anyway, Jack’s just probably jealous of Sam, so I wouldn’t take it hard. I’d be willing to bet Sam’s a better writer. You can just look at him and tell. He’s a dreamer. Jack’s a climber. That’s gotta count for something, yeah? Jack doesn’t have anything to say. And he never stays around for the bad times. If you only have good times, I can’t imagine you’d have much to write about.”
“Well, Sam’s really putting in the work… Like you said, he worked on that story for six months. I was there. I saw it. And I think he should submit it to better journals, anyway. Who cares about Jack’s?”
Alice turned away and walked straight for the bathroom. Six months. Six months. He’d been working on a short story for six months? And all these people knew about it? Oh, God. How many people knew? She barely made it into the bathroom in time before she vomited into the toilet and all over its seat.
XVI
Alice bawled, loud and guttural, as she drove home. Her boss at work let her leave two hours early. He’d heard her in the bathroom and was worried. Alice told him it was just cramps. Six months? Six months? Alice tried to picture six months ago but saw nothing. She didn’t remember a thing.
Why didn’t he tell me he was writing again? she thought.It was hard to see the road. Did he really feel like he couldn’t tell her about writing again? She felt like it was her fault. She never liked Sam’s writing—could he tell after all? Was he too embarrassed to show her? No, he wore his heart on his sleeve when it came to this stuff. She would have known if he was hurt.
Did he feel like it was unimportant to tell her about this? Was he checking out?
Next came rage and jealousy. They overtook her as she waited at the final stoplight at the corner three blocks from their street. The light was red forever. Maybe if that idiot would have run his work by me, Alice thought, I could’ve helped him before he sent something embarrassing to Jack. She had a horrifying realization: this felt worse to her than any infidelity would. When they’d met, nothing was more important to Sam than making art, except for maybe Alice herself. Even if the writing sucked, she was crushed.
Her hands were shaking and she felt her insides balloon. She gripped the steering wheel so hard she could feel the faux-leather finish peeling. She blinked profusely to stay conscious as she pulled into the driveway. Grief overtook her now. pity, rage and grief coagulated inside her. Sam was a weak man, she could see, weaker than she could imagine herself ever becoming. He went through nothing, she went through it all. But how was he supposed to know?. It wasn’t too late, she kept thinking. I will fix it.
But once again, he was gone, nowhere to be found inside the houseAlice sifted through her purse, hands shaking, and found her phone. She called him and it went straight to voicemail. She stood up and walked through the house, noticing now articles gone in every room: the night stand in the bedroom, the men’s deodorant and fragrances on the bathroom counter, the desk and computer in the back office. She called him again and again until her phone died. Each call went straight to voicemail. She pulled out a half-empty handle of Tito’s from below the bed and chugged as much as she could before the burn was too strong. It was so empty in the house, she could hear every breath and every bubble of the bottle as she gulped. She could hear herself swallow. It was excruciatingly loud.
XVII
Alice drank until she passed out.
When she woke up the next morning, she couldn’t remember what day it was, or if she had work. There were teenagers doing contract lawn work next door; she could hear the weed wackers and the riding mower. Her head throbbed. She couldn’t stand the thought of thinking any more. She drove to the store and spent all her previous shift’s tip money on four handles of Tito’s. She started drinking the first one on her drive back home. By the time she was back there from the liquor store, not even fifteen minutes later, she was already blackout drunk. She kept drinking.
For the next few days, Alice drank until she passed out: she’d wake back up, vomit, take an Excedrin, then do it again. She tried to get each session of vomiting done as quickly as she could and kept the pills by her bedside; every lucid moment she was brimming with terror.
Several days later, she woke up in a strange room. It was the bedroom of a man, one she’d never seen. A Pulp Fiction poster on the wall and clothes overflowing in the hamper in the corner. There was the faint smell of Paco Rabane cologne. She remembered giving the fragrance to her first boyfriend, she'd always associated it with excessive hair gel use, with high school locker rooms. She heard the water running in the bathroom. Her head was pounding. She groped around the end table for her phone and knocked over a nicotine vape, a THC oil pen, and a room-temperature plastic cup of water, presumably, before she found her phone.
There was a missed call from Sam, and a voicemail.
“I’m gone. Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye. I turned off my phone for three days. I saw you called about a million times. I’m in Maryland with Spencer. I think I’m going to stay here, or at least see what happens.”
Alice stood up and closed one eye. The sun coming in through the room’s bent window shades made her head quake even worse. She was in panties and no shirt and had to sift through a plethora of black denim and vintage band tees to find her jeans and spaghetti strap-top. She found her purse next to the bed and ambled out of the place as quickly as she could.
The parking lot outside was more vast than she knew any Wayne County apartment complex was allowed to have. It looked like the endless acreage of used car dealerships in the furthest reaches of the suburbs. She walked up and down the rows and didn’t see her car. Then she turned out the front gate, past the security guard at the parking booth. She walked down the main road. The heat was blistering even this early on. She could feel the sweat beading in her armpits, her top sticking to her moist skin. Eventually, she flagged down a taxi,, surprised at its existence against all odds, and rode home in silence, hoping by some stroke of magic that if she kept her composure none of this would turn out to be real.
XVIII
Sam really left. Not just her, but the whole state, the state he considered so dear. Nobody liked Michigan as much as Sam. And he still left.
Half-blinded by tears, she pulled out her phone and called him once more, sitting cross-legged on the floor, expecting it to go straight to voicemail again. He didn’t answer, but this time, at least it rang. She let it ring through and after the beep, left him a message, the only one she could muster:
“We could’ve worked it out. You could’ve talked to me. All I can think about is your writing. What did you write about? Why didn’t you tell me? You could’ve talked to me. Who’s going to make you pizza rolls, you psychopath?”
XIX
Three months on, Alice moved back in with her parents. She found they got along better than before, but there was something weird between them: didn’t talk about her job, her degree, or even the dissolution of her relationship. Living with your parents wasn’t frowned upon in the old country, but this wasn't the old country. There was, of course, a sliver of happiness, all of them together again. Now that she was back in her childhood bedroom, she had to hide her drinking; it was mostly back to a nighttime thing now.
One day, she got a text from Julie. There were no words, just a link to a poem entitled “Love” on a small online literary journal she’d never heard of. The text was nearly impossible to read—a dark red serif font, size eleven, over a lighter red background. She could just barely make out the byline: Samuel Chapman. The poem was short; it read, in a painfully cringeworthy and antiquated rhyme scheme:
Born beneath foreign skies, winter solstice of yore
An unassuming dawn, blankets cover your skin
Shortest day of the year, God’s not here anymore
Halls full of heretics, life ends where it begins
It seems now that love doesn’t live here anymore
So soon, it died on the vine like that child of mine
Fall into strange breasts of older women and whores
who let me forget those years I wasted my time
I pray I see the light through the damp, rotten slats
Creeping in with envy to bring news of nothing
Moss grows on my shoulders, beans and sweet corn in vats
Here, I’ll sit in stone, and spend my time adjusting
To the blazing sun’s rays of vague and evil red
Alice texted Julie back: “Lol.” She locked her phone screen and sat on her bed for a moment, staring at the rotted out wood panel walls, years beyond needing replacement. An ear-to-ear grin shot onto her face without warning,she started laughing uncontrollably until she almost ran out of breath, but she stood up before she did,and grabbed her keys, purse, and her waist apron with her loose change, pens, and order pad.
She was running late for her shift.
______
Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has been published in Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books and the Detroit Free Press, among others. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened, and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma. Follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.
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