It’s Day 98 and Rosie wakes up to the sound of her phone buzzing on her nightstand. She rolls over, pulling at the covers, and buries her head beneath her pillow, trying to block out the noise. She shifts her hips and her shoulders at opposite angles so that her spine cracks, letting the popping of her stiff joints join in with the ceaseless vibration against the tabletop, and doesn’t move to shut off the alarm, letting it turn off by itself a minute later.
She stretches and dreads the inevitable moment where she will have to get up and shower, get up and eat breakfast, get up and drive to school. It’s a Friday: she has two classes in the morning and needs to buy groceries, she has to duck into work to pick up her schedule and at some point she needs to stop by the post office. Molly’s birthday thing is tonight and she’s meeting her for lunch around one. Sean is going to come by while she’s gone and pick up the rest of his stuff: the last of his books, the clothes he forgot to take with him, the stupid Bob Marley poster he insisted on hanging over the TV. Everything he left behind is packed and waiting for him in the living room, the last bits of his life with Rosie crammed up in cardboard boxes she got from the liquor store down the block.
Rosie takes a deep breath and emerges from her warm blanket cocoon like a dazed, blinking moth, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress. The bed feels so much bigger when she’s the only one in it.
…
Of her two classes today, Women in Literature is the worst. Applied Calculus was about as insufferable as usual, but her thoughts are wandering worse than normal as Dr. Fish gives a droning lecture about the themes present in The Handmaid’s Tale and nearly the whole class is dozing off by now, falling under the spell of the flat tone of her voice. She likes Atwood, she likes this book, but with twenty minutes left in class Rosie regrets even showing up at all.
“But what about the, y’know, all the Bible stuff?” someone says from the back row, and when Dr. Fish turns her back on the class to write something on the whiteboard Rosie folds her arms on top of her desk, gives up on trying to take notes. Her phone vibrates in her purse and she digs it out as surreptitiously as she can, trying to be sly. Dr. Fish doesn’t notice. There are three new messages waiting for her: one from Molly reminding her about their lunch plans and two from her older brother.
Max volunteered to watch Sean pick up his stuff and to take his key when he leaves, letting himself into her apartment after she left for school and probably eating all her Captain Crunch while he waits. He’s been texting her on and off all morning, sending her dumb jokes and pictures of dogs in silly costumes in an effort to make her feel better. There’s a corgi in a lobster costume in the first message, Seans an asshole in the second. Want me 2 beat him up 4 u? I’ve got nunchucks!
You’re 29, she sends back, What do you need nunchucks for?
He doesn’t even wait a minute before he replies: Stuff like this, baby sis. Stuff like this.
…
“…and it’s like, ick, you know? Hoes before bros, all that sisterhood shit. I still can’t believe you haven’t, like, smashed in his windshield with a crowbar by now, Ro.”
They’re sitting in their usual booth at May-Jen, Molly wrapping lo mein noodles around her chopsticks and Rosie picking at her vegetable rice with a fork. They’ve been friends since their sophomore year of college and Rosie sometimes feels like Molly is her own inverted mirror: tall where she’s short, blonde where she’s brown, open where she’s closed. Molly watches Rosie over the rim of her water glass as she takes a long, slow sip and Rosie scrapes her fork along her plate, tired of the conversation.
“That’s what I would’ve done. That or, like, mailed his mom a copy of his internet history. Now that would’ve been good payback, am I right?”
Rosie shrugs. She doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore; she’s had a hard time explaining what happened to people in her social circle, can barely even talk to her mom about it, really. She cried at the hairdresser’s on Wednesday when the girl washing her hair asked how she’d been: Jenna pushed gloved fingers through the soap-slick sections of her hair as she ran the water over it and Rosie couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t take being touched like that. She sat up and bent over at the waist in the low leather chair, crying into her hands like a little kid and not caring that her hair was dripping all down the back of her shirt. Jenna dabbed at her face with the damp towel and rubbed her back while she cried, and Rosie just wanted to sink straight into the floor, feeling embarrassed and miserable and hurting in places she couldn’t name because wasn’t the rawness of their breakup supposed to have passed already? Shouldn’t the suffocating feeling wrapping itself around her throat at least have started to disappear by now?
I was breathing before I met him, she thinks now, sitting across from Molly in their sticky corner booth, I was, I was, but that time is so far back in her memory she honestly can’t remember anymore what life was like before he came into it; it’s dark and distant, a foreign country she does not have a passport for. He’s been her best friend since they were nine years old and that’s fifteen years of her life she’s spent with Sean Callahan, fifteen years of stories and stupid inside jokes, fifteen years spent with someone who was supposed to love her and care about her no matter what.
“Anyway, you should wear that red thing to the bar tonight,” Molly continues, talking through a mouthful of noodle. “You know, the flouncy thing with the collar? The one you had at the one-act whatever you dragged me to last month. You look so good in red, Ro, it’ll be perfect for later. You can look super-hot and make a bunch of guys drool into their drinks, and if Suck-Ass Sean shows up, you can make that loser see exactly what he’s missing.”
Rosie shrugs again and tries to smile. “Whatever you want, Moll. It’s your party.”
…
The post office isn’t an imposing building – it’s red brick and white aluminum siding, it looks like a house, not a federal office. She’s sitting in her car and listening to Betty Who, contemplating the thick manila envelopes in her hands: grad school applications, stamped and sealed and ready to be sent off to Berkeley, to Miami, to York and UChicago and Pitt. The correct forms have been filled out, the admission fees all cleared and paid for, and all that’s left is for her to mail her transcripts. There’s a sixth envelope lying on the passenger seat beside her, just as thick as all the others and the address of UB’s admissions department neatly printed across the front, but she can’t bring herself to look at that one, not right away.
There was a moment about four months ago where she thought there was only one application she might need to fill out; she thought long and hard about just throwing caution to the wind and betting everything on blue and white, chucking all the other forms and paperwork into the trash because her family was in Buffalo, Sean was in Buffalo, her whole life was in Buffalo, not California or Canada or wherever else her program might take her.
She was happy with him, then, happy with skinny, green-eyed Sean, who stood half a foot taller than her and had the biggest hands of anyone she knew. He gave her his class ring when they graduated from high school and she wore it, sometimes, on days when she was feeling low or lonely; it hung huge over her thin ring finger, slipping off without even needing to be touched. Before they became a couple she would wear it while she drove to school or to work and she was surprised at how much she liked the weight of it there. She liked being able to look at her left hand and pretend that she belonged to someone, that the garnet set in heavy yellow gold meant something more than You’re my best friend, Ro-Ro.
She gets out of the car and marches up to the fat blue mailbox sitting outside of the post office, wrenching open the door and stuffing all six envelopes inside before she can change her mind. It shuts with a satisfying clang, the metal clicking together as it closes, and Rosie looks down at her bare left hand and remembers that the ring is still sitting in a jewelry box at her parents’ house.
Sean will not be getting it back.
…
She texted him a time late Thursday night that he could come by and pick up his belongings and did not receive a response. Here are the things Rosie Schulman has wanted to tell Sean Callahan in the two weeks since their last real conversation:
- There is a life-size sculpture of a pig sitting on the corner of Sweet Home Road, made entirely out of old scrap metal and perched on the curb in front of the new apartment complexes being put up, and it reminds her a lot of the porcelain pig statuettes his mom collected when they were in middle school.
- Some scholars are saying that the Venus of Willendorf might not be a fertility sculpture after all, but might, in fact, be a self portrait. That would explain why the proportions are so weird: there were obviously no mirrors, then, and nothing that could really give a consistent reflection, so the sculptor might have only been able to go by the view she had of herself while looking down.
- Bob Balaban circa Midnight Cowboy looks a lot like Mark Walker does today. Remember Mark Walker? That kid they went to high school with, the one he thought had a crush on her? He’s an actor, now, and he’s doing The Glass Menagerie downtown in a month – the posters are plastered all over Elmwood. She ran into him at Café Aroma recently and he looks good, she guesses, but seeing him and making the connection made the scene where Balaban blows Jon Voight in the porno theater a lot weirder than it already was.
- She saw some of the posts on Facebook from the party he and Cara went to last weekend out at Luke’s place in Wheatfield. She didn’t expect to be invited, she really didn’t, but come on. Just because they aren’t friends anymore doesn’t mean his life is completely invisible to her, and if she could be blunt for a moment, did he get dressed in the dark that day? The shirt he wore is fucking hideous, like, old-couch-in-a-nursing-home-hideous, and Cara must be blind if she let people take pictures of him in that raggedy paisley thing.
- A group of pugs is called a “grumble.” Isn’t that weird?
- She drove past their old elementary school the other day and they knocked down the playground – they built up a new one and flattened the old into an extension of the parking lot. Does he ever think about that time when they were fourteen, that day the summer before freshman year where they spent almost the whole afternoon screwing around on the swings, dangling from the monkey bars? Does he remember how they sat on the jungle gym and ate popsicles while the sun went down, how they sat so close their knees touched, how she almost kissed him right there on the playground but couldn’t get up the courage to move any closer? She does. Right now she can’t stop thinking about it.
…
It’s close to six by the time she gets home, lugging two full grocery bags and her laptop carryall up the stairs to her apartment. She struggles to get her keys into the lock, but is glad to see that Max was good about remembering to close up her place when he left.
She flips on the lights once she gets inside, dropping her bags on the kitchen table and looking around the apartment. Everything looks the same as it did when she left this morning, and she isn’t sure what she was expecting to change; the only difference is the space she’d cleared for Sean’s boxes, their disappearance painfully noticeable in the empty corner by the door.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she’s grateful for the sudden distraction. It’s another stupid picture from Max: a squashy, happy pug dressed up like a Bantha monster from Star Wars, complete with a tiny Tusken Raider action figure stuck in a little saddle on his back. I know you’re flying Han Solo right now, the message below it reads, But these are not the feelings you’re looking for. Patient, you must be. Use the Force and you’ll be fine – I promise.
She wants to roll her eyes, maybe write back a snarky reply, but all she can do is swallow down the lump in her throat. She doesn’t send anything back.
…
She doesn’t really feel like going out to Goodbar, but she doesn’t want to disappoint Molly tonight, especially not on her birthday. She dresses up like Molly asked and gets to the bar at ten, mingling as best she can in the mixed crowd that showed up, but she makes it barely five minutes past midnight before she starts making up excuses to leave: early workday, feeling ill, ran into that guy who used to follow her to the parking lot at her old job. By the time she reaches Molly in her chain of goodbyes she’s nearly ready to just give up and bolt.
“You can’t just go!” Molly protests, wobbling precariously in her five-inch heels. She waves her hands exasperatedly when she talks, nearly slapping Rosie in the face with the one holding her iPhone. “Ro, there’s a guy playing pool over there I want you to meet, and he is so cute, you two are really going to –”
“Moll, I’m tired,” Rosie starts, and Molly grabs her by the shoulders, trying to back her in the direction of the billiard table. Rosie brushes her off as carefully as she can in the crowded space, tells her, “Molly. I don’t want to hook up with some rando from Goodbar, okay? I just want to go home.”
Molly narrows her eyes and gives her an appraising look; Molly is stuck halfway between “slightly inebriated” and “completely plastered” and her expression shifts suddenly from mildly annoyed into something strangely serious, understanding. Without any warning she throws her arms completely around Rosie’s neck and kisses her quick on the cheek. “You’re better than him,” she shout-whispers in her ear, “He’s a fucking six at best, and you – you’re, like, an eleven, Rosie. You’re a fucking eleven thousand.”
Molly hugs her tighter and Rosie doesn’t even mind that she’s choking a little because Molly Jarvis, ardent anti-commitment advocate and unofficial Queen of the Drunk Text, is telling her one of the nicest things she’s heard all day, and even through the hazy tequila cloud Molly is radiating like perfume Rosie knows she means it.
It’s started snowing by the time Rosie shrugs her jacket back on and walks out of the bar, soft white flakes falling gently to the wet ground as she jangles her keys in her pocket. It’s a short walk to where her car is parked, passing under the orange glow of the streetlights to the half-lot near the gas station. When she unlocks the car from the curb the headlights flash twice, like it’s welcoming her back, and Rosie smiles to herself. The streets are weirdly empty tonight – strange on Elmwood, especially for a Friday night – and she’s made it nearly all the way to the end of Hertel Avenue when the song comes on the radio, pulling up to the empty stop at North Park right as it really starts: There’s a port on a western bay, and it serves a hundred ships a day – lonely sailors pass the time away, and talk about their homes…
It is the stupidest thing to ever make her heart stop, but Rosie can’t help it: she’s frozen at the stoplight, hands curled tight at the wheel, and as Looking Glass rounds through the first verse she feels like all the oxygen has been ripped right out of her lungs. It’s been almost four months – four months! – and she should be over this by now, she knows she should, but everything is hitting her all at once and she feels like she’s been caught in an undertow of emotion: smothering, overpowering, her lungs filling up with sentimentality like saltwater.
Their song was a stupid one-hit wonder about a woman loving a man who couldn’t love her back, and she wants to hit herself in the face, almost, at the belated realization of what that means. It followed them around when they first started putting labels on what they were doing, playing in this restaurant and that Starbucks and at the dumb corner bar by his old apartment until it became a running joke between them: Sean messing up the chorus on purpose, changing the words the sea to a horse and your mom and Bruce Lee, all because it made her laugh.
They were good for each other, everyone said so: friends for ages, turning into something more after a series of bad breakups on both sides of the equation. He knew her better than anyone; knew she was allergic to strawberries and hated the color orange and why Phil Collins songs make her want to cry. He used to play with her hair while she studied on the living room floor, her back to the leg of the couch he’d stretch out on, and she loved that: loved the simple intimacy of being comfortable with someone, of letting her guard down.
They were good for each other until he decided that they weren’t, until he decided picking up where he left off with his ex-girlfriend was more important than anything they had going on between them, and by the time Rosie realized what had happened it was already too late. There’s no way to fix this; Sean has been ticking away inside her since she was nine years old and she could run to all four corners of the Earth, but there’d still be no escaping the empty spaces in her life Sean left behind, no way to hide from the phantom-limb feeling of him next to her in bed.
Looking Glass keeps singing about Brandy’s stupid silver locket and Rosie presses her hands over her eyes hard enough that she sees stars, not even caring if she’s smudging her eyeliner. She used to really like this song, even before Sean gave it the official stamp of “theirs,” and she hates that he took even that from her, that he twisted all the little pieces of her life until she couldn’t even hear a song on the damn radio without it making her think of him. She slams her hand against the dashboard without thinking and starts pushing buttons at random, switching from Mariah Carey to U2 to Taylor Swift to Elvis and with every change in station comes all the songs about loving someone you shouldn’t, wanting someone you shouldn’t, impossibly fast and impossibly accurate and she feels like the universe is just making fun of her, now, like her heart is just pouring out of every station.
She jerks the dial hard to the left and doesn’t know where she lands, only that Carly Simon flows out of her speakers at exactly the right point – and that you would never leave, but you gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me – and Rosie takes a breath so deep and so sharp that it hurts, something halfway between angry tears and hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat. She turns the volume up as loud as it will go, so much so that the car shakes with it, bouncing slightly on its axles at the stoplight; turns the sound up so high she can feel every note vibrating inside of her, rattling all the way down to the marrow of her bones. The red lights at the intersection are warm and visible even through the darkness of her closed eyelids and she’s half-laughing, half-sobbing as she belts out the words, singing loudly, singing with enough force that she’s lightheaded from it, singing out until her throat hurts, singing until she can’t tell anymore if the painful ache filling up her chest is from sadness or from the song.
The numbers on the dashboard clock turn over, reading 12:39 in electric blue.
It’s Day 99. She keeps breathing.
Rach (Out Loud) 