by Rachel Thompson
Jazz held my breath that night.
Four months earlier, I was alone in my apartment, making a cup of tea. When the microwave beeped, I took the cup out by its handle and let the steam touch my face to warm my nose. I poured some honey in and tried to be delicate—avoiding the tea bag. I lifted the string up and down, up and down, though I knew better. It makes the tea taste bitter, but I wanted to throw the bag away before I left the kitchen. I hate when the tea bag touches my lips. I hate having to put it on a napkin or magazine and watching the moisture make spots on my round, antique table. I did the unpardonable and squeezed the bag to hurry up the process. It was tossed into the trash on the way into my damp- smelling, under-decorated, wallpapered-in-the-80’s living room.
While I sipped my tea and watched the television on mute, a conversation replayed in my head. I’d talked to Lydia that morning, the woman who owned the hair salon on 6th Street. She spent the majority of my haircut passing on gossip about people I didn’t know. She also told me about her Louis. She said they’d had their rough spots, but she’d never loved a man so much. In the end, they couldn’t live without each other. The sentiments were scattered throughout a lot of talk about his bad habits. But what I could not stop thinking about was what she said about tea—or rather, about her Louis. She told me, when his job would take him away every other weekend, sometimes she’d set out a cup of tea for him, to feel like he was there. And she’d call him up and ask if he wanted any sugar in it or not. “I know, it’s silly,” she had apologized to an imaginary crowd of un-romantics. I was that obvious, I guess. The image of Louis’s tea sitting there growing cold was so vivid that I didn’t even see what was playing on the television. I felt myself growing cold, sitting there on our old loose-pillow, gray couch.
I woke up to fuzz radio. Jon said it was the only sound irritating enough to wake him up. But associated with the irritating sound was the miserable feeling of having to force oneself out from underneath warm covers and into cold morning air. Consequently, fuzz radio was probably my least favorite sound. That morning while I let the conditioner soak into my hair, I read the bottles on my shower rack. Right under the shampoo label Silk Threads, it said, “Enrich your hair and you’ll enrich your life.” I had come up with that. I remember it was a Tuesday, and the company threw it at me last minute. I had tried to pick the best adjective I could think of between luscious and healthy. Those two had been done before, effectively so. Enrich was the end result of my not-so-rigorous brainstorming. To be honest, I hadn’t tried at all. At work, I scooped whatever natural brilliance lay on the surface of my brain and tried to get all the mileage I could out of it. I’d written a thousand other slogans that could make a person cringe. I turned the Silk Threads bottle toward the shower wall and began to rinse the conditioner from my coarse brown hair. It had grown coarser every day since we bought the apartment.
Ever since we moved into the apartment, I had stopped running outside when it rained. A few times I didn’t even know it had rained until I had to walk out to my car to drive to work. Now I realize why, but at the time I didn’t understand reasons, just results. Now I realize it was because Jon had started working one week on, one week off. His off-weeks were spent catching up on sleep and fixing up our place. It was because I had become a businesswoman. It was because we had replaced holding hands with brushing our teeth together. Life had butted heads with whatever we had when we were young.
I remember meeting him when I was just 18. We met in a bookstore. He was buying a children’s book for his sister who taught kindergarten. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the fiction section, discovering the genius of Kurt Vonnegut. Jon walked up and talked to me like he knew me. So I let him get to know me. After that, I guess we fell in love. I know we did.
I picked up a copy of that day’s newspaper on my walk from the car to the office. My eyes scanned the fluff section, and I located my birth date just for the heck of it. My horoscope read, “Today will be a good hair day.” I giggled for the first time in a long time. Someone’s step quickened behind me, and I saw my co-worker Jim catching up next to me. He was a natural type of guy—always friendly, always honest.
“Wow, Suzie.” I hated that nickname. I really hated it.
I lifted my eyebrows, bidding him to go on.
“Bad hair day?”
My hand rose to the top of my head as I smoothed down two lumps. I’d…nope. I hadn’t brushed my hair. How could I have forgotten to brush my hair? The newspaper in my hand was shrieking with laugher as I crumpled it up into a tight ball and threw it into a nearby trashcan.
Work was lifeless. Maybe it was more listless. But I am not as sure about the definition of the word “listless” as I am about the feeling it conveys. I know exactly what the word “lifeless” means, however. And although it’s dramatic, I will use it. I believe I know personally, and to a greater extent than most, what “lifeless” feels like. You ought to be asking yourself a question at this point. Maybe, “How can a person be lifeless and alive at the same time?”
There is nothing redeeming about typing up descriptions for teeny-bopper hygiene products. Everything must be exaggerated and made to sound life-changing. I knew I was making false promises to 14-year-olds when I wrote, “Make him love you” on their perfume bottles. But oh—the pay and the benefits…the pay and the benefits.
I called Jon. His voicemail was always the same. “It’s Jon. Leave me a message.” The tone of his voice made it sound like you’d interrupted him. I didn’t leave a message.
After work, I drove to Antelope Valley High School to pick up my brother Shane. He was 12 years younger than me. In her old age, my mother found it difficult to take on normal parental duties. She told me it was because she felt young. She needed to take some time for herself “finally.” Besides, playing chauffer was the least I could do. She had paid for me to go to college. She had spent the better part of her life driving me around. I wished her arguments made sense.
Shane wasn’t alone. He and Casey were waiting, playing with some kid’s skateboard. Casey kept falling, but she’d just laugh and dust off her hands. Once they got into the car, I turned down the talk radio. Five minutes into the ride, they found a permanent black marker on the floor in the back seat. No restraints now. Casey started laughing before anything even happened. She knew exactly what she was going do with it. She took the cap off and drew on Shane’s face. It was a messy job, but it resembled a mustache, mostly because of the placement. “Guys, I hope you know that’s permanent,” I warned from my seat of authority. They didn’t hear me. It was Shane’s turn, and he held Casey’s chin in his hand and drew right above her lip and below her nose. They titled hers a “Hitler mustache,” and she let him make more art on her cheeks, her chin, even the tip of her nose.
I shouldn’t have spied, but I noticed something. And once you see past a person—I suppose you could call it “seeing their insides”—there is no looking away. It’s one of those “finish what you start” kind of things. I noticed how gently Shane held her face. He’d draw something and then let himself stare into her eyes. He’d stare and then look down quickly. Not quick enough for me. I knew he loved her. They laughed and took pictures of themselves. When we dropped Casey off at her house, Shane yelled out the window, “You look good with facial hair, Case!” and she disappeared. On the way home, I thought about the worth of adjectives and whether I ate too much yogurt. Shane thought about Casey’s soft face.
Most people would call Jon and my marriage a young marriage. A spark should still be easily lit. The truth is, in spirit, we were an old couple, maybe about 65. We’d stopped getting to know each other after the first year. I knew his hygiene habits and his snore like they were my own…but I couldn’t remember for the life of me what his favorite book was anymore. And maybe he had a new favorite by now. I just didn’t know.
It was obvious by our looks and tired smiles. Our uneventful evening would be ending shortly. The blood that flowed through my hands felt like ice water, and I remember struggling to fit the key into the car door. Jon rubbed his arms rigorously and looked sideways at me. That look had so many different meanings. Tonight it meant, “I’m cold, baby.” I heard the words though he never said them. The key finally clicked in, but I stopped in the process of opening the door. I heard music. Like someone had pressed play in the middle of a song. A couple walked out of the small jazz club down the street, and as the door shut, the music stopped as abruptly as it had started. The parking lot was gray. Everything about it: the ground, the cars, the night lights, the cold. I took the key out of the door, and it slid through my fingers to the asphalt.
“What’s up, Suze? I’m freezing here,” Jon said.
I put my cold hands over my face (this was a shock, yes, but I was too stubborn to take them away) and started to cry.
“I…what’s…” Jon was a wonderful handler of female emotions. I was so comforted by his words that I kept crying.
“I’m sorry…I just…can’t take it anymore. Honestly. I can’t.”
“Take what? Susan…I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jon sighed. But there was no reason for him to be frustrated with me. I rarely acted irrational. About a year after our wedding, my random bursts of tears had dwindled and finally disappeared almost entirely. And so had Jon’s understanding of me. I stood there with tears making everything colder, everything worse. But then Jon stopped. That is, he stopped being the husband I knew too well and yet not at all. His eyes seemed to flash compassion, guilt, maybe even understanding. I think he was even surprising himself. He was making a face I hadn’t seen since…I don’t know. Had I ever seen it? “Come on…let’s not go home just yet. We can go inside for a while.”
And he didn’t even wait for me to respond or to walk toward him. He came to me, put his arm around my waist and led us both back out of the parking lot and down the street. The music played again for three seconds and stopped. I didn’t remember that I was cold anymore, when I saw that Jon was leading us toward that little jazz place.
We walked in like shy guests. “It’s warmer in here, hmm?” Jon whispered in my ear. I whispered something back—not for the sake of communication, but more for the chance to whisper in his ear. A doorman led us to seats up close to the band. He seemed to think we were serious music connoisseurs. I was still wiping the wetness off my cheeks, by now feeling more awkward about the whole crying thing. But Jon kept his hand on my waist, even after we’d sat down. I just felt different…felt like I was with someone different. Jon was behaving as if he wasn’t busy and tired, though I knew he was both. I had hardly slept the night before, but those thoughts didn’t consume me. The flute player’s fingers did.
The air was smoky, but it only contributed to my alertness. I would say happiness, but it’s such a strong word. The piano player had handwritten sheet music in front of him, and when he began to play, all the other musicians stopped and watched. They nodded their heads and smiled with eyes closed. The trumpet player was the leader, you could tell. His presence was large and silencing. He hardly moved, but he shut his eyes, and sometimes he’d mouth words. I felt distinctly that he was the best musician there.
Glasses clinked. An old man sat at the table next to Jon and me. He had come for the music. His withered face made me picture him young…a young soldier. And his gray hat made me picture him dancing to the same song 20 years earlier. The drummer played the rim as the song reached its climax. I glanced at the old man again as he sat there with his eyes closed, his hands tight around a glass of liquor. Jon told me later he noticed the man, too. And he told me that the guitar player had caused him to think about improvisation for 10 minutes. I was happy in those moments.
There was a table full of women, probably from out of town, packed elbow to elbow. They’d stolen chairs from other tables around them. They drank assorted martinis, laughed and talked, and didn’t know there was music playing. At least not in the same way that old man did. I leaned over to Jon and asked him to grab me a lemon slice. There was a platter of them going by. He laughed and shook his head at me. I remembered just then. Fitzgerald. That was his favorite author. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I wished I were wearing high heels and sweet perfume for him. I’m sure if I’d analyzed my feelings, I would have been shocked, maybe even worried. But listen, I wasn’t analyzing. I was listening to jazz music and holding my husband’s hand. I was smiling. The trumpet player lifted up his instrument and played what he felt. What I felt. All the nights of my life had led up to black and white keys that kept and matched the pace of my heart.
The drive home was rainy. And having settled back into my normal self a bit, I started thinking organized thoughts, though not questioning the night just yet. I decided I ought to put Jon and me inside a metaphor. I decided that we were like a drop of rain running across a car window. Glistening, traveling, breaking up and coming back together again as a bigger drop—with all the more speed. Our car was approaching a tunnel. Jon said with sincerity, “Ok, now hold your breath.” He gulped in and kept the air all in his cheeks like a chipmunk. I didn’t start until halfway through the tunnel because I was staring at Jon’s childlike enthusiasm. I gulped, and we both held our breath until the car made it out of the gray tunnel and into the lit up street.
Four months earlier, I was alone in my apartment, making a cup of tea. When the microwave beeped, I took the cup out by its handle and let the steam touch my face to warm my nose. I poured some honey in and tried to be delicate—avoiding the tea bag. I lifted the string up and down, up and down, though I knew better. It makes the tea taste bitter, but I wanted to throw the bag away before I left the kitchen. I hate when the tea bag touches my lips. I hate having to put it on a napkin or magazine and watching the moisture make spots on my round, antique table. I did the unpardonable and squeezed the bag to hurry up the process. It was tossed into the trash on the way into my damp- smelling, under-decorated, wallpapered-in-the-80’s living room.
While I sipped my tea and watched the television on mute, a conversation replayed in my head. I’d talked to Lydia that morning, the woman who owned the hair salon on 6th Street. She spent the majority of my haircut passing on gossip about people I didn’t know. She also told me about her Louis. She said they’d had their rough spots, but she’d never loved a man so much. In the end, they couldn’t live without each other. The sentiments were scattered throughout a lot of talk about his bad habits. But what I could not stop thinking about was what she said about tea—or rather, about her Louis. She told me, when his job would take him away every other weekend, sometimes she’d set out a cup of tea for him, to feel like he was there. And she’d call him up and ask if he wanted any sugar in it or not. “I know, it’s silly,” she had apologized to an imaginary crowd of un-romantics. I was that obvious, I guess. The image of Louis’s tea sitting there growing cold was so vivid that I didn’t even see what was playing on the television. I felt myself growing cold, sitting there on our old loose-pillow, gray couch.
I woke up to fuzz radio. Jon said it was the only sound irritating enough to wake him up. But associated with the irritating sound was the miserable feeling of having to force oneself out from underneath warm covers and into cold morning air. Consequently, fuzz radio was probably my least favorite sound. That morning while I let the conditioner soak into my hair, I read the bottles on my shower rack. Right under the shampoo label Silk Threads, it said, “Enrich your hair and you’ll enrich your life.” I had come up with that. I remember it was a Tuesday, and the company threw it at me last minute. I had tried to pick the best adjective I could think of between luscious and healthy. Those two had been done before, effectively so. Enrich was the end result of my not-so-rigorous brainstorming. To be honest, I hadn’t tried at all. At work, I scooped whatever natural brilliance lay on the surface of my brain and tried to get all the mileage I could out of it. I’d written a thousand other slogans that could make a person cringe. I turned the Silk Threads bottle toward the shower wall and began to rinse the conditioner from my coarse brown hair. It had grown coarser every day since we bought the apartment.
Ever since we moved into the apartment, I had stopped running outside when it rained. A few times I didn’t even know it had rained until I had to walk out to my car to drive to work. Now I realize why, but at the time I didn’t understand reasons, just results. Now I realize it was because Jon had started working one week on, one week off. His off-weeks were spent catching up on sleep and fixing up our place. It was because I had become a businesswoman. It was because we had replaced holding hands with brushing our teeth together. Life had butted heads with whatever we had when we were young.
I remember meeting him when I was just 18. We met in a bookstore. He was buying a children’s book for his sister who taught kindergarten. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the fiction section, discovering the genius of Kurt Vonnegut. Jon walked up and talked to me like he knew me. So I let him get to know me. After that, I guess we fell in love. I know we did.
I picked up a copy of that day’s newspaper on my walk from the car to the office. My eyes scanned the fluff section, and I located my birth date just for the heck of it. My horoscope read, “Today will be a good hair day.” I giggled for the first time in a long time. Someone’s step quickened behind me, and I saw my co-worker Jim catching up next to me. He was a natural type of guy—always friendly, always honest.
“Wow, Suzie.” I hated that nickname. I really hated it.
I lifted my eyebrows, bidding him to go on.
“Bad hair day?”
My hand rose to the top of my head as I smoothed down two lumps. I’d…nope. I hadn’t brushed my hair. How could I have forgotten to brush my hair? The newspaper in my hand was shrieking with laugher as I crumpled it up into a tight ball and threw it into a nearby trashcan.
Work was lifeless. Maybe it was more listless. But I am not as sure about the definition of the word “listless” as I am about the feeling it conveys. I know exactly what the word “lifeless” means, however. And although it’s dramatic, I will use it. I believe I know personally, and to a greater extent than most, what “lifeless” feels like. You ought to be asking yourself a question at this point. Maybe, “How can a person be lifeless and alive at the same time?”
There is nothing redeeming about typing up descriptions for teeny-bopper hygiene products. Everything must be exaggerated and made to sound life-changing. I knew I was making false promises to 14-year-olds when I wrote, “Make him love you” on their perfume bottles. But oh—the pay and the benefits…the pay and the benefits.
I called Jon. His voicemail was always the same. “It’s Jon. Leave me a message.” The tone of his voice made it sound like you’d interrupted him. I didn’t leave a message.
After work, I drove to Antelope Valley High School to pick up my brother Shane. He was 12 years younger than me. In her old age, my mother found it difficult to take on normal parental duties. She told me it was because she felt young. She needed to take some time for herself “finally.” Besides, playing chauffer was the least I could do. She had paid for me to go to college. She had spent the better part of her life driving me around. I wished her arguments made sense.
Shane wasn’t alone. He and Casey were waiting, playing with some kid’s skateboard. Casey kept falling, but she’d just laugh and dust off her hands. Once they got into the car, I turned down the talk radio. Five minutes into the ride, they found a permanent black marker on the floor in the back seat. No restraints now. Casey started laughing before anything even happened. She knew exactly what she was going do with it. She took the cap off and drew on Shane’s face. It was a messy job, but it resembled a mustache, mostly because of the placement. “Guys, I hope you know that’s permanent,” I warned from my seat of authority. They didn’t hear me. It was Shane’s turn, and he held Casey’s chin in his hand and drew right above her lip and below her nose. They titled hers a “Hitler mustache,” and she let him make more art on her cheeks, her chin, even the tip of her nose.
I shouldn’t have spied, but I noticed something. And once you see past a person—I suppose you could call it “seeing their insides”—there is no looking away. It’s one of those “finish what you start” kind of things. I noticed how gently Shane held her face. He’d draw something and then let himself stare into her eyes. He’d stare and then look down quickly. Not quick enough for me. I knew he loved her. They laughed and took pictures of themselves. When we dropped Casey off at her house, Shane yelled out the window, “You look good with facial hair, Case!” and she disappeared. On the way home, I thought about the worth of adjectives and whether I ate too much yogurt. Shane thought about Casey’s soft face.
Most people would call Jon and my marriage a young marriage. A spark should still be easily lit. The truth is, in spirit, we were an old couple, maybe about 65. We’d stopped getting to know each other after the first year. I knew his hygiene habits and his snore like they were my own…but I couldn’t remember for the life of me what his favorite book was anymore. And maybe he had a new favorite by now. I just didn’t know.
It was obvious by our looks and tired smiles. Our uneventful evening would be ending shortly. The blood that flowed through my hands felt like ice water, and I remember struggling to fit the key into the car door. Jon rubbed his arms rigorously and looked sideways at me. That look had so many different meanings. Tonight it meant, “I’m cold, baby.” I heard the words though he never said them. The key finally clicked in, but I stopped in the process of opening the door. I heard music. Like someone had pressed play in the middle of a song. A couple walked out of the small jazz club down the street, and as the door shut, the music stopped as abruptly as it had started. The parking lot was gray. Everything about it: the ground, the cars, the night lights, the cold. I took the key out of the door, and it slid through my fingers to the asphalt.
“What’s up, Suze? I’m freezing here,” Jon said.
I put my cold hands over my face (this was a shock, yes, but I was too stubborn to take them away) and started to cry.
“I…what’s…” Jon was a wonderful handler of female emotions. I was so comforted by his words that I kept crying.
“I’m sorry…I just…can’t take it anymore. Honestly. I can’t.”
“Take what? Susan…I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jon sighed. But there was no reason for him to be frustrated with me. I rarely acted irrational. About a year after our wedding, my random bursts of tears had dwindled and finally disappeared almost entirely. And so had Jon’s understanding of me. I stood there with tears making everything colder, everything worse. But then Jon stopped. That is, he stopped being the husband I knew too well and yet not at all. His eyes seemed to flash compassion, guilt, maybe even understanding. I think he was even surprising himself. He was making a face I hadn’t seen since…I don’t know. Had I ever seen it? “Come on…let’s not go home just yet. We can go inside for a while.”
And he didn’t even wait for me to respond or to walk toward him. He came to me, put his arm around my waist and led us both back out of the parking lot and down the street. The music played again for three seconds and stopped. I didn’t remember that I was cold anymore, when I saw that Jon was leading us toward that little jazz place.
We walked in like shy guests. “It’s warmer in here, hmm?” Jon whispered in my ear. I whispered something back—not for the sake of communication, but more for the chance to whisper in his ear. A doorman led us to seats up close to the band. He seemed to think we were serious music connoisseurs. I was still wiping the wetness off my cheeks, by now feeling more awkward about the whole crying thing. But Jon kept his hand on my waist, even after we’d sat down. I just felt different…felt like I was with someone different. Jon was behaving as if he wasn’t busy and tired, though I knew he was both. I had hardly slept the night before, but those thoughts didn’t consume me. The flute player’s fingers did.
The air was smoky, but it only contributed to my alertness. I would say happiness, but it’s such a strong word. The piano player had handwritten sheet music in front of him, and when he began to play, all the other musicians stopped and watched. They nodded their heads and smiled with eyes closed. The trumpet player was the leader, you could tell. His presence was large and silencing. He hardly moved, but he shut his eyes, and sometimes he’d mouth words. I felt distinctly that he was the best musician there.
Glasses clinked. An old man sat at the table next to Jon and me. He had come for the music. His withered face made me picture him young…a young soldier. And his gray hat made me picture him dancing to the same song 20 years earlier. The drummer played the rim as the song reached its climax. I glanced at the old man again as he sat there with his eyes closed, his hands tight around a glass of liquor. Jon told me later he noticed the man, too. And he told me that the guitar player had caused him to think about improvisation for 10 minutes. I was happy in those moments.
There was a table full of women, probably from out of town, packed elbow to elbow. They’d stolen chairs from other tables around them. They drank assorted martinis, laughed and talked, and didn’t know there was music playing. At least not in the same way that old man did. I leaned over to Jon and asked him to grab me a lemon slice. There was a platter of them going by. He laughed and shook his head at me. I remembered just then. Fitzgerald. That was his favorite author. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I wished I were wearing high heels and sweet perfume for him. I’m sure if I’d analyzed my feelings, I would have been shocked, maybe even worried. But listen, I wasn’t analyzing. I was listening to jazz music and holding my husband’s hand. I was smiling. The trumpet player lifted up his instrument and played what he felt. What I felt. All the nights of my life had led up to black and white keys that kept and matched the pace of my heart.
The drive home was rainy. And having settled back into my normal self a bit, I started thinking organized thoughts, though not questioning the night just yet. I decided I ought to put Jon and me inside a metaphor. I decided that we were like a drop of rain running across a car window. Glistening, traveling, breaking up and coming back together again as a bigger drop—with all the more speed. Our car was approaching a tunnel. Jon said with sincerity, “Ok, now hold your breath.” He gulped in and kept the air all in his cheeks like a chipmunk. I didn’t start until halfway through the tunnel because I was staring at Jon’s childlike enthusiasm. I gulped, and we both held our breath until the car made it out of the gray tunnel and into the lit up street.
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