Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

Bernice was pale, small, pointy. She had an army jacket that she wore for intimidation purposes, but it was too clean to have much of the desired effect. She was not a candle burner or a picture hanger, but she did keep cards in her file of pictures she might have hung or people she might have thought about dangling over a candle flame. She was a keeper of mementos, and a little bit furtive.

She was closed, to Sally’s open. Dark to Sally’s light. Lingering resentment to Sally’s effusive forgiveness. Bitter truth to Sally’s grand statement. Smirk to Sally’s horse laugh. Fuck to Sally’s kiss. Love to Sally’s love.

Had they found love? Can anyone ever find it? You may say that it’s worse now, but in 1984, it was already pretty bad. Religion had crashed, science was on fire, and the ideologies of governments around the world wore thin and tattered, turned old in one day. No monolithic monologues, no true truths, no classic classics. And the hardest of these to fall, the towering construct that cratered out bigger than god, democracy, and penicillin, was true love.

What an idiotic notion.

All the love stories had their clothes yanked off. Penelope: a trollop, feverishly quilting her chaste little heart out, waiting for her man. Wouldn’t that be just the thing you’d want in an absent wife. Abelard lost his balls; they were hacked off right before his lover joined a convent. Is this what you meant by beautiful? Tristan and Isolt died before even making it into the sack, poor fools, and Guinevere was an old hag before Lancelot ever got up the sack to bed her. Is it really even a pity? Alexandra ate her young while Nicholas watched, aghast. Think of any story people bring up to illustrate great love through the ages. Invented stories, morality plays, or subversive texts, scribed by manipulators to trap you into this or that tenet or belief. Every author was just trying to make a point. What is your love story? Is it so epic?

Romantic love in its heavenly attire and all the light and beauty around the concept—a creation of the government and the church, to stop young people from falling into bed with whomever they pleased. Love in a teddy, in a titty bar, in a G-string, passionate love—a symbol of sexual defiance against the church and government, “amor” and “Roma” being orthographically and theoretically opposite. Which proved it! There were wheels within wheels. Nothing was as it seemed. You think you’re going to run into that special someone just by chance, walking around in the same space you are, looking for a special someone, too? What exactly are you smoking?

Imagine Sally and Bernice sitting under a tree in the yard in the night, with the tattered remains of love falling around them like leaves. They don’t want to be duped. They don’t want to be stupid. If falling in love is something ridiculous that only morons do because they don’t know any better, then it isn’t for them.

At the same time, who can truly despair of love? Who can look at herself and deny she is a creature made for it? It is hard, like growing up a born-again Christian, threatened by the fires of hell and promised the golden streets of heaven, and then reading Karl Marx. Your brain says, “I no longer believe.” But you still look at every cloud break like it is the rapture, and you still find yourself wondering, “Will I go to hell?” Prayer is almost a guilty pleasure. So it was with thoughts of romance for Sally and Bernice.

They knew what they were supposed to think. And they knew what they wanted to believe. So the scheme to make their babies fall in love was born of this compromise: Make love from science. Plan for happenstance. And ultimately, believe. Faith has to be taken on faith. You have to have it before you can take it. Likewise love. It seems stupid unless you’re in it. But do you really want to be so cool and mature that you turn your back on love, when you might have found it just next week, perfect, beautiful love like you’d never even imagined could exist? What would have happened if Sally and Bernice had had a love story of their own?

Toledo comes alive at night. It really does. While the city sleeps and dreams and dies a thousand deaths, the young and intelligent people come out to play, like constellations bursting out in the darkness of the black sky.

Irene remembered being a teenager, sneaking out of her house, and meeting up with kids from her school in the city. Toledo was like a university town on steroids, where tourists had animated conversations about quasars and tall hotels filled up with guests hoping to hear a lecture from an aging astronomy superstar or visiting mathematician. Tourists flocked the marina at Summit Street to do a night cruise of the Maumee River and Lake Erie. Restaurants overflowed with stargazers smoking long cigarettes and eating dumplings. Toledo isn’t big, but it can hold everyone interesting in the world of astronomy at the same time. It is a gathering place for people who want to know what’s out there. It’s a home for rocket scientists and numerologists. For people who see a face on Mars and people who want to analyze Martian soil with an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. All those people, together, make Toledo great.

The river cruise was popular because at certain points on the map there were nighttime blackout laws in effect to protect the institute’s stargazers from the distractions of ambient light. The boats would head south through the lights and sounds of the city and the harbor, and then suddenly the banks and the boats would both go dark, sending travelers slipping up the river to loop around the Audubon Islands State Nature Preserve and loop back. Irene could remember sliding by the murmuring darkness outside town and then stepping back out of the yacht at the Summit Street Marina, back into the lights and noise of the city. The feeling of urgency from the tourists, the excitement of being downtown with honking car horns and radios leaking out of buildings, the chance of spotting a higher-up at NASA or one of the program directors from the launch facility in Dayton. The endless SETI@home frequency-time-power graph on an LED billboard on Madison and Superior. She hadn’t realized she missed it, but being there brought back memories that weren’t entirely terrible.

Teenage Irene would sneak out just to sneak out, not to drink or party or rebel, but just to be away. And did it really even count as sneaking, if her mother was passed out in her bed with her arm crooked over her eyes, saying she had a sinus headache, falling asleep in the middle of the sentence?

“I have a sinus.” And that was the end.

Irene could sneak out the front door, clomping along in her roughshod boots, hitching a backpack full of booze on her shoulder for everyone else to drink. Bernice’s supply would intoxicate the world, and Irene knew all the hiding places, all the secrets of the stash. If a few were missing, would Bernice even care? And what would she say, if she figured it out? “I’m sorry, but have you seen several pints of gin that I don’t drink and wasn’t hiding in the brick cavity behind the laundry room garbage bin?”

No, they never talked about the drinking. And they never talked about the fire. Everything else in the world was OK to talk about but never seemed as interesting as those two things, or as deadly. If something’s not likely to kill you, why mention it at all?

By the time Irene and George arrived at the nightclub, it was two o’clock in the morning.

“It’s here? Where should we park?” she asked him. “On the street?”

“Valet, baby,” said George.

Irene pulled up to the curb in front of the door, and a man in a black jumpsuit vaulted over the car’s hood and opened the door for her. She put the keys into his hand. The valet gave her a hand out, and she stood up into the street. Looking down at herself, she realized she was wearing her black jeans and a button-down shirt, work boots. The man in the black jumpsuit drove away with her car after handing her a plastic ticket, which she stuck into her backpack.