Emma Rathbone: Losing It

—

Eleanor Pierce: We’re at another sleepover. We’re sitting in a circle and talking about sex and who’s done it and who hasn’t. It’s about half and half at that point. Blissfully confident in my youth, I tell the truth, which is that I haven’t. “Me neither,” said Eleanor. “But I’ll kill myself if I’m still a virgin when I’m twenty.”

“There’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you,” said my father over the phone. I was standing in my kitchen, staring out the window at suburban Arlington. Silvery, overcast light came in. In the distance, I watched a man in a blue polo shirt push a dolly of boxes along a path through the storage complex next door. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky. “Climate Control! U Store U Save First Two Months Free!” it read on the side of one of the units.

After I’d put in my two weeks at Quartz, I’d decided: I was going to move home. I was going to go back to Texas and live with my parents for a little while. I would start over, reassess. At least I knew people there, people who could help me meet other people. I pictured the bright plaza at San Antonio Tech where I used to wait for my mom while she worked on her business degree, the hot benches and spindly trees. Maybe I could take some classes. I thought of the dry, bright air, our sunny kitchen and backyard and the prickly grass, and the smooth, warm stones that lined the walkway up to the shaded porch in the back.

“Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We’re going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”

“What?” I said.

“We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What don’t you understand?”

“Any of it.”

My dad was silent.

“You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”

“We found a guy, he’s a carpenter.”

“You said that.”

“People rent things all the time,” he said. “You’re renting an apartment, are you not?”

This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad’s calling card.

“This is different,” I said. “You know what I mean. ”

“No I don’t. If you’re so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”

“What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”

“What? I don’t know, Julia, but we’ve signed an agreement and it’s happening.”

“What the hell?”

My dad was silent again.

“There’s no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She’s a psycho.”

“I didn’t mean Helen.”

“Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”

“I wasn’t talking about Helen.”

“Or Miriam. What, does she have like five dog-walking businesses now?”

“I was talking about my sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”

I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead; Vivienne’s head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s still in North Carolina.”

“Really?”

My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn’t often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We’d only ever spent holidays with my mother’s side of the family — all the cousins and aunts were hers.

He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

“Where in North Carolina?”

“Where I grew up, outside Durham.”

“And, I mean, what is she doing?”

“She’s fine. She works. She’s got a business painting scenes on plates.”

“Excuse me?”

“A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She’s actually pretty good.”

“She paints plates?”

My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”

I wasn’t sure where this came from. He’d never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.

“Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”

“Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How are things?”

“Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes!”

“Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”

“Yes, well, no, this isn’t… We’re fine .”

My parents had been married for a long time. They’d started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they’d managed to corner, and that drew on my mom’s know-how from her riding days when she’d been Collin County’s regional gold medal eventing champion. They’d always been dismissive of each other in a way I’d taken for granted and sort of admired. I thought that’s the way it was with married adults; you ignored each other all the time in a brassy, warm way. It occurred to me now that maybe it hadn’t been so warm.

“I overheard,” my mom said. “You’re thinking of spending the summer with your aunt?”

“That was just something Dad said.”

“Well, it might be nice.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Have you seen her plates?”

“No,” I said. “When would I have done that? Why would I have? I don’t even understand what they are.”

“She’s pretty good at it.”

“Yeah, well. No. Nope. I’m not going there. There’s no way I’m doing that.”

—

One month later I drove down a thin driveway, gravel popping beneath the tires, toward a house with white columns in the distance. All around stretched raggedy green fields, shiny in the late-day heat. I looked at the piece of paper on which I’d written Vivienne’s address: 2705 Three Notched Lane. I had no idea if I was going toward the right place. It had been a while since I’d seen a turnoff, much less a mailbox with an address on it. I passed a large twisted weeping willow. I passed a slumping wire fence. The house, bright in the sun, was on a gentle swell, and behind it was a dark line of trees.

It was only after I’d gotten off the phone with my dad and adjusted to the idea of not being able to go home that the idea of Durham began to take shape. I looked it up and saw that it was a midsize city with a lively downtown area and a historic-district repaving project, and that’s when the idea began to take shape. Scrolling through the stock pictures on the tourism part of the website, I saw one of a man and woman laughing at a candlelit dinner. Another showed a couple wearing bright T-shirts and lounging in each other’s arms and staring at a hot-air balloon in the sky.

I thought, This is where I’m going to lose my virginity. It would be like going to another country; I would be completely anonymous. I could do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn’t be attached to the chain of small failures I’d managed to accrue in Arlington, where I might run into Jessica and Kidman, or in Arizona. I could go to a bar, meet someone off the Internet, join some kind of singles-outing group, whatever. I could be one of these people, walking hand in hand in the sun next to a glass building in a revitalized business district with refurbished cobblestones. I didn’t even care that the graceless plan formulating in my head — of just getting it over with, in some anonymous encounter — was so far from how I’d always thought it was going to be, because I was so desperate to get rid of the albatross around my neck. The new plan also had the added incentive of basically being my only option.