Once it gets dark I go out. Sometimes to Target or to an all-night grocery, if that’s what we need, but mostly I go to bars.
First I tuck the baby in. I sing her three or four songs I used to sing at karaoke or walking around a restaurant waiting tables when I was young: The Cranberries, Sarah McLachlan, “Me and Bobby McGee.” I drag them out into lullabies. I worry about singing to her about heartbreak and adultery and drug overdoses, but that’s all the good songs are about, and they’re gentler still than the songs I grew up on. The subject of each is the same at its core: unfettered longing. She is the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen. Every mother is supposed to think that, but I can tell you, I’ve talked to them, they don’t. They think mine is. She is three and she knows a shocking number of words, yet she is too small to understand the heartbreak or the longing or any of it. She will, later.
I sing to her until she falls asleep in my arms, her beautiful hand on my cheek, her breaths elongating until I can no longer hear them, can only sense them in the air around me. She is an excellent sleeper.
When she was eight weeks old, already in her crib, already spending full nights there, a room away from me, I would wake up next to her sleeping father in terror, the sound of her
breath cascading in my ears. It wasn’t a dream or hallucination: I could hear her from a distance of twenty feet, breathing her sleep breath. I would synchronize my own breath to hers, slow down my pounding heart, drift off. Or if I couldn’t, I would gather my slippers and robe and float to the side of her crib, her breath sounds entering my body the whole time, my senses tethered to hers. I would lay a hand on her chest and she would stay asleep. I would sit in the chair where I fed her from bottles her father and I measured so carefully, warmed so carefully, and I would fall asleep, lightly, for a little while, under the water of her breath.
That stopped after a while, my hearing her body working. Nine months in, maybe, I went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up until morning. I never heard her breathing across such a distance again.
Now, when her breath fades from my hearing, I leave her room and go to the bathroom I shared with her father and put on makeup. I brush my hair. I listen for my mother, who settles herself into a chair with a book and turns on the TV. She won’t watch the TV, but she likes the way it obliterates the silence. She turns the baby monitor up loud enough to be heard over the TV. She turns it loud enough to hear my daughter breathe, but the transmitter won’t pick up the continuous, rhythmic sound. She turns it loud enough that a cough or a cry will ring through. The whole house, amplified. When a car passes on a wet road she hears the sound in stereo, once from the road itself and once through the baby monitor. She keeps it plugged in because turning the volume so high burns through batteries. She keeps close to the outlet and the tethered monitor so she can always hear.
It is easier to let my daughter sleep her peaceful sleep if I leave the house. When I was a young woman, I lived near a plaza where the desire lines had been paved, smooth concrete cutting the grass into a mosaic or a shattered window or a collection of razor-thin, raised scars on an arm or a thigh. Longing, codified.
Desire lines form when we walk where we want to. If there’s a sidewalk in the right location, that’s fine. If not, we plow straight across the grass. One of us, you’d never know. But if enough people desire a path, the path will make itself, the grass thinning then disappearing altogether.
Later, there might be mud, or packed dirt cracking in the sun. When we’re young we want straight paths, the shortest route, and we want it together, in packs or single-file, headphones in, gazes down. Cities, college campuses, places where young people move quickly you see them, the desire lines. We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.
I liked to wander. I would cross the plaza in one direction then another, making what sense I could of the haphazard lines, trying to pin down each path’s source and destination, what might go on behind each door at each sidewalk’s end.
The spring weather is mostly dreary and wet, and the roads reflect my headlights back at me, useless. Tiredness sits around my eyes like swelling, tightening my skin, ugly in the rearview mirror. I look like I might’ve been crying, which, depending on the day, could be true. But not this day. On a given night I might go dancing, or sit at a bar for a while, to see what finds me. It’s unclear even to me what I’m out looking for. Love? Unlikely, and too much work besides. Sex is more plausible and also more manageable. Maybe just the jolt of a moment of attraction. Maybe
even a friend. When I imagine introducing a man to my mother I shudder. My daughter? Impossible.
The driving wears me thin, but once I select a destination and park my CRV, with its child seat in the back, in a bar’s parking lot and go inside, the ambient light suits me. It’s the high shine of headlights in the dark that breaks me down, the tension between the lights and the dark all around.
Some nights I go to an out-of-the-way dive with live music. The men who frequent it are muscular, bearded, tattooed, their long, loose hair still damp from their after-work showers. They remind me of the boys I knew when I lived near the plaza—boys who would sit on the grass smoking and talking about the seven-inch by whatever hardcore band they were into that their friend’s friend had left at their apartment. I didn’t care about the hardcore bands, and I didn’t have a record player in my little studio, but I liked the energy buzzing just beneath the boys' skin. I wanted to get under that skin, too. To feel that minor lightning, to root around inside of them. My husband could’ve been one of them, but he wasn’t. We wouldn’t meet for years after that, though I found out later he was there, living in that place, at the same time.
If I don’t feel like the noise of the bands, the next best thing is the taproom of a local brewery, which is as close to a culture as we’ve got in the Midwestern city where I live, breweries in every neighborhood, cider houses, even, churning out products with clever names that wink at our distance—three hours minimum in a fast car—from the nearest major city. The taprooms play Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog and maybe, if you stay late enough, Rancid or Bad Religion, and everyone in them knows all the songs. The men who never recovered from the boys they used to be, smoking and talking about hardcore records, started the breweries with their Boomer dads’ money, or else they work in them. I’ve never really recovered from those boys, either; in their presence the longing builds to an almost audible buzz beneath my skin, a lingering at a frequency just below the threshold of tolerability. I like it, the way I think I might explode but know I won’t.
My daughter was tired early tonight from the rain and the changing weather so I am out before the taproom fills up. Bar seating looks too desperate, so I find a small table, order a pint of cider, settle in. It won’t be busy for a while yet. It’s a bad plan to fuck the waitstaff if you ever want to come back, which is one way these bars are different from the ones we frequented when I lived by the plaza, but they’re good eye candy while I wait. The men are lean and angular, and the women look so much like the girl I was with their boots and short skirts and profane t-shirts.
While the taproom slowly fills up, I think about the night when I lived near the plaza and I fucked Nicole’s ex-boyfriend. Nicole waited tables at the same place I did, and was more or less a mean girl. She liked to sit in a booth with a friend while her coworkers cleaned her tables, or flip through bridal magazines while they rolled silverware. She sucked up sufficiently to management to get by with it. The bridal magazines were before she dumped Jeff then kept him on a string. He was free but hung up, all of them friends of friends, drinking by the pool at his apartment complex one night, and she didn’t show. Me singing a schlocky Jewel song well, my voice rebounding off the flat water while my friends, drunk, closed their eyes and swayed and somehow that turned into too many drinks too late at night. I could’ve driven the few blocks home, or even walked, but it was uphill, dark, I was tired. Jeff promised nothing would happen, he’d let me wear a shirt and some sweats and I could get some rest. That sounded good: rest. The sex hadn’t been my idea, or a good idea, but it had been good sex, his cock somehow excellent and well used, his mouth persistent and lovely. It was neither the first nor the last time I felt coerced—that’s the word we would use now, coerced—but it turned out fine. He was tan and hairless and somehow his skin felt like velvet. Most of my sex was that way in those days, and I had long before adjusted my expectations to allow for it. Another time a friend I adored slid my shorts and underwear down my legs, whispering, “I promise I won’t hurt you,” before going down on me for nearly half an hour. I hadn’t wanted to keep myself from him like I had with Nicole’s ex-boyfriend. I’d been afraid his tongue might catapult me into orbit. Maybe in the bars I am trying to get back there, only for a minute, my hair grinding into the carpet while my back arches and I feel everything. Everything. Desire lines in my memory, desire lines on my heart. Paths I’ve worn so many times in fantasy or imagination or fear. Longing, primarly, of course.
The path from girl to something else—first a tongue in my ear while I sat on a boy’s bedroom floor looking at paintings he made. Later, a tongue slid across my clitoris for the first time, nearly exploding, the boy’s parents two rooms away, all the doors between us open, the boy shushing my gasps. Doors in me opening. I would’ve done anything he asked. I did, later, his cock bigger than I could have imagined if I’d been inclined to imagine cocks at seventeen. I wasn’t. But there had been his tongue and then his fingers, and I’d been helpless, wanting only more. Even the pain—so big—was all I wanted. The pain was the most real thing I had ever felt. The other boys had been so stupid, thinking they could guide my hand to their erections, and I’d want them. Their sad claustrophobic penises raged against the confines of their Levi’s like trapped animals, as though their wanting me was all they needed me to know, as though their wanting me was the point, would make me want them back. They should teach cunnilingus in health class, tell them that they have to work for it.
Finally, close to eleven, somebody promising buys me a drink. He’s medium-tall with ropey arms, a single tattoo slinking delicately out from the sleeve of his black t-shirt. His dark hair falls just past his eyebrow. His smile is full of light. When he brings back my cider he asks politely if he’s welcome to sit down, as though he hasn’t just paid $8.75 to rent the space. We make the usual start.
Then he says, “You’re not from here, are you?”
“I am,” I say. “I left for a while, but I came back.”
“What for?”
I came back when my husband got a job here. “Love, I guess.”
“It seems like everybody here is leaving or coming home,” he says.
“Which are you?”
“Neither, so far. Depends what happens next.” He tips his pint glass in my direction, drains it, grins.
By this time, my mother is nodding off in the chair, her book open in her lap. She likes to wait up for me, to make me a cup of peppermint tea and tuck me in like she did when I was heartbroken in high school. Some nights I make it home in time, others not. Before long, she will take the baby monitor to the guest room, which has been her room for seven months and nine days now, since she showed up without a single word to help. I keep my phone out at the bars in case she needs to text me but she never does.
By midnight, “promising” has turned more specific and the man and I are pawing at each other against the brick wall behind the taproom. Kissing deep. I lick the ridge of his teeth and his upper lip, and he lets loose a guttural sound and grabs my arm, pulling toward the parking lot. In the glinting light I think about the lines on my face and my body—wrinkles and also creek beds etched by months of tears—and the tan line on my finger. I wonder if he can see them, if anyone can, or if they are only for me, a cartography of desires long left behind. The line of my c-section scar, too, and the fading stretch marks, maps of an unimaginable expansion of the shape of the rest of my life.
“Your car or mine?” he says.
“Yours.” Because there is a baby seat in mine. Because my daughter, sleeping, her father’s face and mine together in repose, survived the accident entirely unharmed while I waited for them both to bring carving pumpkins home.
When you’re young you get derailed. Desire breaks and breaks and the recoil knocks you off your path. Maybe you fuck a boy just because you want to, because you like the look of him, like tasting a bit of cake with pretty frosting, and then something unknowable happens and suddenly you’re attached. Maybe you don’t even fuck him. Maybe you just touch him gently on the arm. You have time for this—you think there will always be more time. You think this because you are so young. They are never any big deal, the boys, just detours, until one of them stays. You see over time that it isn’t the ones who leave who break you into pieces. It’s the ones who stay.
After we’d been married for nine years, the panic set in. I’m told this is standard issue, that it happens. My parents only made it eight, including three years of affairs, fighting, and vicious emotional plunder in both directions, so I had no one to show me. Suddenly every flaw in my marriage seemed fatal. You did this to yourself, I thought. Just because he stayed, that didn’t
mean you had to. Our fights were more callous than brutal, and more one-sided. Fear dismantled me. But fear of what? I couldn’t name it.
Soon, the ideations came thick and unbidden, like memories of bad dreams arriving early in the day. Graphic images of my skin peeled off my arms, my body thrown into traffic on the highway. They were not wishes for death but for escape, escape from everything that pinned me down. When they came, I would find ways to feed the demons, just a little bit. I might starve myself all day, or have enough caffeine to lift the top of my scalp an inch off my head. I might stay up half the night, knowing the next day would be hell.
Then one day I broke open and named all of it out loud and something shifted. We were fine. Better than fine. It was then, after so many years, that we decided: baby. And like a wish fulfilled, she arrived. We brought her home. We gave her our love. We were fine.
In the back seat of his car I open his Levi’s and climb on top of him. His hands are beautifully manicured. He pushes them slowly up my thighs, rubs my clit with his thumb. He lifts me up by my legs and slides himself down beneath my body, positions his mouth in just the right spot, gets to work. Me, first.
The trouble is that I’ve never once come when I wasn’t all the way in love. This cuts both ways. There was the friend when I was young who I loved so much I was afraid the orgasm
would kill me, right there on the rug on the dorm room floor. But now that my husband is dead it’s not clear that I will ever be all the way in love again.
Still, the whole thing feels fine, and when I pull him back up onto the seat and drop down onto him we both gasp at the shock of the connection. I used to tell my husband that the point of fucking was so that our bodies could try to be as close as our hearts. They never were.
At home, I slip silently into the guest room to retrieve the monitor. My mother’s breathing is steady but much louder than it was when she was young, when I was seven and she finally took me and left my father. The first few months she slept a lot. I would stand, just like this, at the foot of her bed and listen. We were alone, and I needed to know for sure that she was alive. Eventually she slept less, became herself again, took care of me again. “You saved me,” she told me, “but you shouldn’t have had to.”
In the morning, she’ll get up first, scramble eggs, fry bacon, butter toast. She will hold my daughter while they watch out the window for new birds returning from winter’s migration. When I come into the kitchen, she will have a mug of strong coffee waiting for me, just as much cream and sugar as I like, even though she only drinks tea. The guy from the taproom promised to call this morning to take me to brunch, but the number I gave him was someone else’s. I will lift my daughter from my mother’s arms and hold her close close close.
Victoria Barrett's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Colorado Review, Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, MonkeyBicycle, and Gay Magazine. She is the founder, editor, and publisher of Engine Books.
Photo by: Johannes Plenio