Sarah McCarry - All Our Pretty Songs

Aurora and I have lived in this city all our lives. If you came here you would know that it is a young city, out on the edge of the world, just a few hours away from where the earth drops off into the grey ocean that reaches all the way to the far edge of the sky. It is a city of hills and water, ringed in mountains that are capped with white even in the dead of July. The summers are sweet and golden, bookended with long rainy seasons where the sky brushes the earth with a blanket of cloud.

Aurora and I used to spend our days roaming, picking out books at the huge old bookstore downtown with its creaking wooden floors and innumerable rooms, trying on Doc Martens and buying Manic Panic at the punk store under the viaduct, stuffing ourselves with fish and chips on the pier and drinking coffee until our speedy hands shook. We haunted the curio store down on the waterfront, visiting Sylvia and Sylvester, its glass-cased mummies (Aurora insists they are real; I say no way). Even now we still love putting quarters in the fortune-telling machine and watching the turban-swathed mannequin inside move its jerky mechanical hand and spit out fortunes printed on cardboard squares. Aurora always gets the good ones. On the curiosity-laden shelves a fetal pig bobs in a bath of formaldehyde next to a stuffed two-headed lamb. The store manager once let me take Aurora’s picture with the lamb.

We love best the coffee shop up on the hill, a veritable stable of goths and artists. Tall, many-paned windows let in the light, and the red-painted walls are lined with bookshelves. When we were kids Aurora and I would bum cigarettes off cute boys playing guitar at the outdoor tables. She’d pen tortured poetics in her journal while I surreptitiously tried to draw everyone around us. The baristas with their multicolored hair and deliberately ragged clothes, most of them stained with paint or some other indicator of artistic temperament. The strung-out rockers, blinking into their coffee. The street kids hitting us up for quarters and trying to get Aurora’s phone number.

It was easy to pretend I was an adult in those moments: the rain-dampened streets outside the window, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, the whir of the espresso machine, the low murmur of people talking around us. An adult with a bookstore job, maybe, and a musician boyfriend who would write songs about me. We would stay up all night smoking pot and having sex, and we would only allow our apartment to be illuminated by candlelight. Every room would be hung with glittering beaded curtains. Cass had no tolerance for my preadolescent passions; when I brought home a stack of Jane’s Addiction records she scoffed. “Smacked-out posers,” she said disdainfully. I couldn’t explain to her that there was something in that wash of noise that felt like home to me. Cass and Maia had lived for punk shows when they were our age, but Cass never even went out anymore. Never went with us to the dirty all-ages clubs we spent our weekends in, or the bars we started frequenting as soon as Aurora was old and charming enough to get us past the door. Cass still had all her old records, but I never heard her play them. Finally, one day a few years ago, I dragged them all into my room and kept them there.

When Aurora and I were kids Cass would take us hiking in the woods outside the city. We’d pick our way across the loamy forest floor, our noses flooded with the green dark smell of moss, of mushrooms coming up out of the damp earth, of fallen trees crumbling into soil and new trees springing up out of the old, their roots snaking through the dead, rain-slick trunks. We’d climb narrow rocky paths up out of the woods, clinging to the sides of mountains, picking our way through alpine meadows awash in monkshood, lupine, and scarlet paintbrush. I loved the immense, vivid silence up there, the way a single marmot cry would echo and echo through the far hills. Up there you felt like you were all alone on the roof of the world, nothing but razor-edged ridges and high peaks as far as you could see in all directions.

These days Aurora isn’t interested in wild places, and Cass rarely has time anymore. As soon as I learned how to drive I started borrowing Cass’s car and going out on my own. I spend the morning panting my way up switchbacks so steep I think sometimes I’ll tip over backward. Later, I’ll drive home through broken-down logging towns with trailer parks full of moldering doublewides, where men lean against the bar in the one restaurant in town even though it’s only three or four in the afternoon. I’ll order hamburgers, or milkshakes, fried eggs and sausage, the kinds of foods Cass never allows across the threshold of our house, and pick at the greasy mess on my plate, wondering how my life would be different if one of those men was my father. Sometimes I see kids my own age. They stare me down, mean-eyed, and I always look away first.

You learn a lot about yourself when you spend most of your time alone. If I’m not with Aurora, I’m never with anyone. Aurora is happiest as the sun at the center of a solar system, and I’m at peace as a quiet moon, no light coming from me but the light that was hers first.

It’s hard if you are a girl like Aurora, easier if you are a girl like me. I’m not the one old gods hanker after, not the one likely to be invited to immortals’ parties. The Fates don’t bother with small fry like me. I was never jealous of Aurora, not of her beauty or her money or her sad fairy-tale life. I loved her with every corner of my dark and crooked heart. People said our names together in a single breath, like we were two halves of the same body, like they could not imagine either one of us on our own.

I was never jealous, I should say, until him.

I’m smoking a cigarette and trying to draw the ocean when Aurora calls. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of the world are seeming. Right? Are you with me?” I make a noncommittal noise. “Exactly. I’m going to have a party. Come over.” I know better than to argue, promise I’ll be there in an hour. I grab my bag and unlock my bike from where it’s chained to a pipe in the alley behind our apartment building. The night feels dangerous and too warm. It’s the kind of dark that makes you reckless, sends an itch creeping under your skin. This summer is the hottest I can remember. The air smells like jasmine and, underneath, the sea. The moon is low and huge in the sky.

I’m tired by the time I’ve bicycled the long miles to Aurora’s house, and I stand for a while in the shadows of her garden, catching my breath. When Aurora was younger there was an assortment of gardeners and assistants to keep up the grounds and take care of the house, but one by one they’ve straggled away over the years. These days, the house is lurching into a kind of derelict glamour. The once velvet-soft green lawn has been overtaken by wildflowers and straggling vines. Thorny hedges of blackberry have swallowed the wrought-iron fence that marks the edge of their property. The house itself is overrun with jasmine and St. John’s wort; yellow and purple flowers wind up the columns of the front porch, obscuring most of the house, and battle for supremacy with the ivy that shrouds the chimneys and hangs in green tendrils across the windows. Aurora seems unconcerned about her house’s slide into disrepair. “I like it,” she says. “Maybe one day my mother will wake up and notice her entire life is falling apart around her, and then she can clean it up.”

The first floor of her house is open and angular, and I can see through the plate-glass windows to the vaulted ceilings and vast white expanses, the huge abstract canvases that hang here and there: a savage red square on a yellow background, a field of blue, another field of white. Behind a slab of marble, a tattooed bartender in an old-fashioned suit pours drinks. In the yard, Aurora has hung paper lanterns in the trees. The roses are blooming. Her house is full of people. Industry people, ostentatiously uncool, making sure you know how much they don’t care about anything except music. Stubble-cheeked boys in cutoff shorts over thermals, hair hanging to their shoulders, talking in big voices about their bands, their tours, their perennially breaking-down vans, telling the same old musician stories. Some of the women are in vacuumed-tight dresses, their mouths painted on in glossy red slashes. I have no idea who they’re trying to impress. Any of these dudes will sleep with you for clean sheets and a free breakfast. No reason to even bother with brushing your hair.