Read The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Online

Authors: Marina Keegan

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BOOK: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
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“Sure,” I said, shifting up so Sam’s arm was merely around my shoulder.

“Cool,” he said, and sat down on the opposite couch. This kind of thing never happened at Sam’s because his parents were usually doing work or downstairs. We started episode three and our thoughts turned back to the weird things that glowed in the bottom of the ocean. But my dad fell asleep after ten minutes, snoring loud enough that I would have laughed if I were still in high school. Sam and I shut off the TV and I placed a blanket on my dad, throwing away his bowl of Jell-O when we walked upstairs. There was an awkwardness to the way he’d asked to join us that I couldn’t get out of my head. Some kind of cafeteria-table solitude that made me want to throw up. I thought then about how most things are not really anyone’s fault. I almost shared this with Sam but he was already in my room taking off his shoes. It was nearly two but I could see the glow of Kyle’s monitor as I passed by his door.

Sometimes we’d take a day off and I’d spend time alone or with my family. My mom and I went shopping a few times at the mall in Hammond Bay and I helped her make a cheesecake with lemon and ginger. On a cold Tuesday, my older brothers lumbered home in a carpool from Chicago and we all went out to buy a Christmas tree. Toby and Zach were older and immune to the islands they’d left floating in our house. So they laughed and teased and Kyle and I lurked behind them, refreshingly reduced to our attempts to impress. The holiday came and went like it seemed to every year since I was thirteen. We slept till a depressing 9:30 on Christmas morning, though I suspect my little brother woke up earlier to look at the stockings before creeping back upstairs until the rest of us woke up. Sam bought me a necklace with a tiny silver acorn that my mother held off my neck more than once that afternoon. I gave her a crème brûlée torch and a fleece jacket that felt both perfect and stupid the moment she gasped with gratitude.

My anxiety came back on the twenty-sixth and I started dreading the idea of phone calls every time I saw Sam. The vacation had seemed an eternity, but something about the other side of Christmas made college slip back into my consciousness. Once, when Sam was at school, he’d texted me that he couldn’t talk because his roommates were sleeping. Smiling to myself, I’d called him anyway—speaking one-way for a whole eight minutes. This is what happened today. This is how I’m feeling. This is why I love you.

Toby and Zach went back to the city and my house returned to its hidey-holes. I went to this horrible yoga class a few times with my mom, but we giggled about the instructor’s adjectives afterward, which made us feel like sisters. My dad would accidentally fall asleep on the couch a few times a week and I cringed to think what kind of clichés this spawned in Kyle’s head. Dad and I would talk sometimes after I’d driven home late in my smoky sedan. There wasn’t much to say but we could get at least ten minutes if I asked him to fill me in on the episode that was on. Once when one had ended and we’d finished a bowl of popcorn, he paused for a minute and looked down at our dog.

“So your mother seems to think you and this Sam kid are awfully happy.” She must have brought it up.

“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

“She said he bought you that necklace.” He gestured loosely at my neck.

“Yeah. For Christmas.”

He nodded, almost got up, but then stayed in his chair. “I thought that wind chime I got for her was good.” He looked up at me expectantly. It’s silver, my mom would have said. He bought her something silver.

“No, it was.” I cleared my throat. “That was a really cool gift.”

“I’m going to hang that up tomorrow.”

I
nodded this time. “Yeah, you totally should. That thing’s supposed to be cool.”

“I’ll do that tomorrow,” he repeated, walking over to the sink.

He didn’t. And by the time either of us woke up my mom’s banana bread was cold.

Sam’s uncle had an annual New Year’s party in Canada, and in a gesture of romantic formality Sam suggested we dress up and drive there instead of getting drunk in someone’s basement. He showed me pictures from the previous year while we waited for our instant cookies to bake. Everyone was wearing suits and had champagne and he said that people were maybe going to go skiing the next day. I decided to spend some of my campus job money on a dress and went back to a store I’d seen in the Hammond Bay Galleria. I stood alone in a three-way mirror, unable to choose between a green and two blacks. So I angled the panels and took pictures of each on my phone, sending them one by one in texts to my mom. I had to call her twice to explain how to open them, but she’d said the green made my legs look good so I went with that.

On the day Sam and I were supposed to leave, I found her again folding socks downstairs. I came in wearing the green dress to model it in person.

“What do you think?” I said, spinning around.

“You look beautiful,” she said. “He won’t be able to keep it on you.”

“Mom, come on!” I laughed, turning around. “Can you unzip me?”

She unzipped me and I went back upstairs to pack it away, returning in a pair of jeans and a gray sweater.

“So you’re driving up tonight?”

“This afternoon, yeah.” I reached my hand into the basket and started searching for a sock with two black stripes. “Don’t worry, I’m driving.”

“Okay.”

“Are you doing anything?”

“Probably not.” She smiled. “I don’t really like New Year’s, it’s sort of an excuse to drink.”

“Fair enough.” We didn’t say anything for a while, both absorbed in the sock pairings. “You know your father didn’t always drink like this, right?” She was looking right at me and I had to make eye contact.

“I know,” I said. “He hasn’t been that bad while I’ve been home, actually. I sort of see him sometimes when you’re already asleep.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” she said, this time not smiling. “I don’t know, Addie.” She let out a sigh. “I just don’t know.” I hated this kind of discussion and I hated myself for hating it. I wondered for a moment who else my mom might confide in but I wasn’t actually sure how close she was with any of her book-group friends. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” She was looking down again.

“Yeah.”

“Having you home, it made me think, and you seem so . . .”

“I didn’t mean . . .” But I trailed off too. I wasn’t sure whether this was different.

She paused. “Now that you guys are almost grown up, I’m not sure there’s a point.”

“I don’t know.” It was a stupid response and I wasn’t sure if I should comfort her.

There wasn’t sadness in her voice, just that same exhaustion I’d seen from my car. My phone vibrated and I flipped it open to a message from Sam.

“You can take that if you want,” my mom said, looking down.

“Oh, no, it’s fine, it’s not a call.”

“A text message?” She took pride in knowing the term.

“Yeah.”

She paused. “What’s it say?” I pressed Open and waited for a second. It was a heart, followed by a message that said “thinking of you.” I couldn’t show her.

“It’s from Sarah,” I said. “She wants to know what I’m doing tonight.” She looked at me again.

“It’s not from Sarah, Addie. It’s from Sam.”

“No, it’s from Sarah, I swear. It says: ‘Hey what are you up to later?’ ”

She smiled for a second but it didn’t reach her eyes. “When are you leaving?” Her tone was different. It was cheery, bright. I looked at my watch. It was 1:40 and Sam was picking me up at two.

“You know, Mom, I don’t have t
o
—” But she cut me off. “Addie, come on.” She pulled her hair back into a bun. “Three more pairs and I’ll let you free.” So I made three more pairs.

Sam and I smoked two joints on the drive, listening to airy playlists titled with combinations of our names. Three miles from Canada, we parked the car in a field and let the smoky air out just to be safe, sitting on the hood and holding hands. The air was crisp and the sky seemed determined to be bluest on this last day of the year. We could see mountains from where we were sitting and climbed back into our seats only when the sun started tilting west.

I made Sam leave our room while I put on the green dress so it would be a surprise when I came out. It did make my legs look good and I had to take it off and put it back on again before dinner. Sam smiled at me while we met aunts and old high school friends, our glances exchanging thousands of inside jokes. The night was a whirl of champagne and stupid hats and explaining why and where I went to school. At midnight, everyone gathered in a room with a fire, counting down in an iconic chant. Sam had one arm on the small of my back and I could smell the alcohol and perfume and fire that filled the room. I looked down at the fingers squeezing mine and something about the noise or his smile filled me with a kind of sick understanding of what our hand-holding had done. Of what she was trying to tell me before I got into his car. I tried to focus on the lights of the dying Christmas tree and the shrieking faces of guests I didn’t know. But in those final
seconds my mind wandered to my dad, who was probably
sitting alone in the kitchen, drunk and watching the ball drop on TV; my brother, shooting spells from the depths of his bedroom, his small face green with the glow of his computer; and my mother, crunching down the street with a flashlight and my cocker spaniel, moving through the snowy darkness as the clock hit zero.

Reading Aloud

O
n Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30
P.M.
, Anna takes off her clothes and reads to Sam. Reads him cable-box directions and instant-soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his textbooks. Each week she peels off her garments one by one, arranging them beside her chair with practiced stealth. Usually, Sam makes an exotic tea and they revel in descriptions from their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. Both can hear its soft percolation, but only Anna can see its cloudy mauve whirlpool. Only Anna can see her wilting breasts and her varicose veins. So she looks at him and he looks at nothing. And they let the words lift off the pages of the manuals and brochures and cereal-box backs and float fully formed from the sixty-something naked woman to the twenty-something blind man.

* * *

Her doctor suggested it. The reading, not her wardrobe choice. Said something about the benefits of purpose or the advantages of routine. Anna was sick and she knew it. Ever since her husband un-retired, she’d had an ache in her left knee joint and she sometimes felt nauseous. For four days last April, she was convinced unquestionably of her pulmonary tuberculosis; for three days in June of her endometrial cancer. She’d taken to leaving an old copy of
The Diagnostic Almanac
on her bedside table, flipping ardently through its pages. Naturally, she’d verify each hypothesis with recurrent appointments. Anna liked her doctor and his magazines, his lemon drops, and his pristine coats. Liked him enough to forgive his misidentification of her symptoms as “psychologically derivative.” Liked him enough to agree to volunteer at the city library’s Visually Impaired Assistance Program for “purpose and routine.”

* * *

On a Monday at 4:28
P.M.
, Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door. It was the same knock she knocked every week for twelve weeks—like she knew he knew she was already there. Her knee hurt and the building elevator was under renovation, so the two flights of stairs added a glisten to her forehead and a rhythm to her breathing. She hated herself for it. Back when her back could bend and her toes could point, Anna could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant without moistening her leotard—spinning and tucking on a single slipper. Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. The
was
haunted her from mirror to mirror in her Westchester high-rise. People used to stare at her, envy her, pay seven dollars to watch her grand jeté at the Metropolitan Opera House. But not Sam. Sam never watched her do anything. So twice a week, Anna didn’t watch herself. His place had no mirrors and even his fogged eyes were unreflective. So when he opened his door, she focused on his face.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam.

“Hi Sam,” said Anna. He reached forward, placing a hand on her elbow in his standard gesture of greeting.

“Your knee doing okay?”

“Well, not really.” She stepped forward, swinging the door shut behind her. “They just don’t know about these things these days. Might be pulmonary tuberculosis. They just don’t know.” She shook her head. “There’s a large brace on it right now, actually.”

There wasn’t a large brace on it, actually, but Anna liked the way it sounded. She also liked Sam.

Sam hadn’t always been blind; he’d managed a whole two
years before the fog came. His visual memory puzzled him, tricked him, disillusioned him. Trapped him with a visual
arsenal of table bottoms and grown-ups’ feet, forever restricting him from the bipedal perspective. He was a master’s student in a divinity school just outside the city, and at night, in the black,
he moved about his apartment, tracing his fingers across the
thousands of tiny dots of Jacob and Isaiah, Luke and Matthew.
Fingering the Psalms and stroking the Gospels. “Religious
Studies,” he would clarify to friends and uncles and the women
like Anna who read to him. “I study God, not worship Him.”

Sam’s apartment lived an immaculate life. Clutter was more than an inconvenience—it was a hazard. Anna walked by the Bibles and Torahs and Korans convened with books on Indian cooking and music theory in alphabetized rows of Ikea shelving. He’d built them himself. Felt every screw and every piece of artificial wood, sliding them together as Anna read him the instructions during one of her first visits. Everything had a location. Every utensil had its hook and every coat had its hanger. Tiny blue dotted labels speckled the apartment like some kind of laboratory. The microwave buttons, the light switches, the drawers, the cans: all had their names displayed in bright Braille blue. A Malaysian tapestry hung above the sofa and an Andy Warhol print hung opposite the door. “For company,” he shrugged when Anna asked. “My mother’s idea.”

“Well, sit down, sit down!” He gestured to the exact spot of her usual armchair, turned forty-five degrees to the left, and took six paces before stopping in front of the counter. “I’ve got a lot for you today.”

“I think I can handle it,” she said.

“Anna, Anna.” He mocked distress. “What would I possibly do without you?”

“You know perfectly well they’d just send someone else by.”

Sam smiled as he placed his pile on the table.

“I’m teasing you,” he said. “You know I love teasing you. Come on, sit down. I don’t want that knee of yours giving way. What was it? Pulmonary tuberculosis? Let’s not play around with pulmonary tuberculosis.”

Anna could see Sam’s grin, but she blushed anyway. She sat down and studied him. The way his skin held taut around his forearms, the way his pants creased in as he walked, the way his hands pulled and pushed and shifted and organized, steadily, confidently, free from a seer’s incessant second glances or double checks. He was young, and his hair was thick, and his body was still strong. Anna thought he had a dancer’s body and imagined his hands on her waist, lifting her up above his head before placing her down as he jumped. She imagined his fingers tracing her fingers in backstage shadows, the pulse of the crowd turning air to endorphin. High off the heat of their bowing bodies, all she could hear was the rhythm of their breath. The same breath she felt quicken when she sat in this armchair, when she slipped off her shoes and sat down to read.

“All right then.” Sam handed her the pile of mail and bills and misplaced receipts. “Let’s start with the boring stuff.” He sat down at his computer, ready to translate her voice into his language of dots.

She read him an advertisement for car insurance and unbuttoned her sweater.

She read him a credit card receipt and rolled down her stockings.

Sam sat at his desk, blind. Sat typing and sipping and small-talking between his chorus of Toss it. Toss it. Keep it. What? Toss it. What? Repeat that. Don’t throw that out! Anna knew she wasn’t the strongest reader; she’d spent her childhood staring at mirrored music boxes, not pages of books. But he never corrected her. Never smiled into his keyboard when she struggled with
entrepreneur
,
bureaucracy
,
Jesuit
,
psalms
. Not like Martin. Martin would have said something, would have laughed. Laughed at his wife, who—“Oh, did I mention, used to dance at the Met.” Excused her dinner-party mispronunciation of
bon appétit
to platefuls of partners at the firm’s annual dinner. She’d said it again once they’d served the dessert, deviously looking him in the eye and smiling her victorious smile: “Bone appetite, everyone! Bone appetite!”

But that was before Martin retired. Before he left work to stay home and question the amount of mayonnaise in the tuna salad and why she let that damn Chinese family overcharge her for the dry cleaning. Before he reconsidered and, at seventy-one, went back to the firm. Before she realized that she’d liked when he complained about the mayonnaise and didn’t really mind that he was home for lunch.

One morning, Martin made Anna scrambled eggs before she woke up. She didn’t say anything when they tasted oddly sweet, but once she found the empty cream carton in the trash, they nearly cramped up laughing. The next weekend, Martin took her golfing for the first time. And later that summer to the city for a show. But he must have missed his keyboard and his meetings and his legal briefings because the following fall he went back to his office, his job, his early mornings and late dinners. Anna’s career had peaked in her twenties, deteriorating with her body, not expanding with her mind. She retired at twenty-eight and worked in a dance studio for a while, but she eventually settled into her house and her hobbies. His decision puzzled her. And sooner or later her knee started hurting and her nausea began and she got
The Diagnostic Almanac
and Dr. Limestone prescribed her “purpose and routine.”

Sometimes, in the shower, or in the car, or loading the dishwasher, Anna would wonder what would have happened if she had offered to read to Martin. Offered her eyes to cable-box directions and instant-soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his law books.
I’ll be your glasses,
she would have said.
That doesn’t say milk, it says cream
.

* * *

On Wednesday at 4:22
P.M.
, Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam.

“Hi Sam,” said Anna. He placed his hand on her elbow.

“Your knee doing okay?”

“Not really, Sam. They think it might be a sign of hemolytic anemia.”

“That’s terrible, Anna. Come on, sit down, sit down.”

She sat.

“I’m just tired. I’m tired all the time. I wake up and I’m tired, I go to sleep and I’m tired.” She looked at him; he looked slightly to the left of her.

“You know I love having you here, but there are other volunteers in the program and if you’re too—”

“No, please,” she interrupted. “Really, I’m fine.” Anna brushed past Sam and settled on the sofa. “Did I ever tell you I could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant without breaking a sweat?”

Sam smiled.

“I’ll put on some tea.” The kettle needed washing and Anna was wearing a dress, so by the time he sat down at his desk, her clothes were already piled neatly beneath the armchair.

He looked at her. She loved when he looked at her. Loved imagining Martin imagining him looking at her. As he sat at his firm’s desk, too good to retire, staring at a case as his wife parted her bare legs in the apartment of a younger man.

Anna hadn’t made love since Martin un-retired. Or for that matter since her knee started hurting and the nausea began. But her pulse would quicken like it did in her twenties. Sometimes, when she’d finished a sentence, or a letter, she’d pause for a minute, letting Sam’s clicking fingers catch up, and close her eyes. Sam couldn’t see the way her breasts hung down in pockets of thinning skin. Or the way her pubic hairs had begun to thin near the bottom. So she imagined that they didn’t and they hadn’t. Anna just sipped her tea and let the years fall off her with her clothes. She was twenty-five. Her skin was taut and her hair strawberry yellow. Her joints were smooth and her voice was crisp.

That morning in her closet Anna sorted through options. Straps were preferable. Cottons and silks were quieter, skirts and dresses easier to remove. Buttons were practically essential. Her knuckles struggled with detail, mandating a patient delicacy in sliding the tiny polished plastic through their knitted holders. She started with a hand on her neck, lingering on the divot above her collarbone before sliding her fingertips under the strap and letting it fall off her shoulder like a leotard. Sentence by sentence, she fingered the circles, tossing them aside with the periods, semicolons, and dots from the
i
’s. Sometimes, though, the anticipation was too much. Sometimes Sam would turn toward her at the right moment and her lips would part, and her back would hurt, and she’d lose her place on the page—looking back at Sam like she’d looked at Brian from Conservatory or Lev from her summer in Moscow or Martin before he’d taken the bar. It was these times that she ached to rip off her straps and to let her buttons crack off like tiny moons.

* * *

“I miss dreaming forwards,” Anna said.

“What?”

“I dream backwards now. You won’t believe how backwards you’ll dream someday.” She cupped one of her breasts in her hand, sliding it up her body and closer to her neck.

“I didn’t think dreams had directions.” His broken eyes managed a smile.

“You’re teasing me.”

“Anna, I would never tease you,” he teased. She liked the way he said her name. It rolled off his tongue to say I’m talking to you, to say I’m listening to you.

“I dream of the past, of things that could have happened, or should have happened or never happened. You dream of
the future. You’re so young, Sam. You don’t realize it now, but you’re so young.”

“I dream in sounds and tastes and textures,” he said.

She paused for a moment, studying his half-lidded eyes.

“Future sounds.” She reopened the book. “Future tastes and textures.”

* * *

Sam wasn’t lonely. Not completely. His mother came up from Jersey every few weeks, and some of his college friends still lived in the city. They’d warned him about enrolling in a “normie” program. His college had been filled with dark classrooms and Braille keyboards, audio books and hallway railings. A college where students left their red-striped canes at the bottom of the staircase, feeling forearms and cupping faces. Pressing together to the vibrations of the speakers, dancing and slipping back to unmade beds based on the smell of someone’s hair or the curve of their wrist or the way their breath tasted. From time to time, Sam would sit awake in his living room, drink a Bordeaux, and blast these half-forgotten rap songs. He couldn’t stand to have a roommate, to subject some Westchester graduate student to the role of perpetual babysitter. After all, he already had nannies. Women who came and read to him like he was some charity case. But Anna was different. She never asked about his classes or his family or what it was like to be blind. It wasn’t about him. She just sat down and read. Read until her voice got dry or her eyes got tired and they would merely sit in silence for a while. She understood silence the way he understood darkness—running from neither as the sun set and the words ran out.

BOOK: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
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