Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

She heard it before she saw anything — loud music, the kind of music that played in the background of dream sequences in bad television shows, with layers of sitar over something more contemporary. It was dance music, what they used to call techno, electronic and repetitive. It was loud enough that she could hear it from the porch. Surely the neighbors were going to complain, once it got late. Ditmas Park was nothing if not swift with a noise complaint.

People were dancing. They all looked like sweaty versions of Ruby, twirling themselves around with their eyes closed. Elizabeth nudged herself closer to one of the large windows. There were shades down, but the shades were gauze and it was lighter inside than out — she could make out everything. The main room was crowded with bodies, all of them smiling and jumping. She saw hands on asses, hands on faces, lips on lips. “My God,” she said, out loud. “It’s a fucking rave.” Elizabeth was just about to turn away and walk toward Hyacinth, so sure now that she would find her husband there, tucking into some beautifully prepared dish, and then she saw him.

Andrew was drenched in sweat. His T-shirt clung to his thin chest. His head was thrown back, lolling a little bit from side to side. He hadn’t danced that way in years. She felt like her very own Ghost of Husbands Past, like she was watching herself and Andrew when they were nineteen and on Ecstasy and licking each other’s faces all night long just because their tongues felt so funny. Only Elizabeth wasn’t in the room, she was standing outside it, and she wasn’t licking her husband’s face. To his credit, no one else was either, but Andrew looked as if any number of the young men and women pressing past him and against him could easily have slipped their little bodies into his mouth and he wouldn’t have objected. This was not the face of propriety. This was not the face of marriage. This was one man, midlife, losing his shit.

Ruby couldn’t believe it — the SAT class was ten minutes under way, and she was sitting in the back row alone. Harry had ditched the class, and she hadn’t, and faking another stomach flu would have made the Queen Dork call her mothers for sure. She sat with her bag on the seat to her left and her jean jacket on the seat to her right, just in case anyone got any ideas about sitting too close. Rebecca smiled and waved, and Eliza and Thayer made a couple of stinkfaces her direction, and Ruby ignored them all. She flipped over the first handout—“Turn Similes into Smiles!”—and started drawing Bingo with a superhero cape and a cigarette.

The class was interminable. Three hours of practice tests and tricks for how to answer multiple-choice questions when you didn’t know the answer. Ruby had bombed the SAT so efficiently the first time that she thought she could teach the class better than Rebecca, a simple Do the Opposite of Whatever I Say methodology, where you got extra points just for not skipping every third question. Tomorrow it would be July, and the class would be half over. She tried to think of it as meditation. Her body had to be in this room, but her mind did not. She tried astral projecting but found Thayer’s gum chewing too distracting. Ruby filled in bubbles in the shapes of fish eating smaller fish.

It wasn’t that she was against college, per se. Ruby just felt that the world held too many unique experiences for her to be pinned down to doing one thing for so many years, especially when she’d spent her entire life up until this point doing that exact thing. When was her boxcar-jumping period? Her life as a carny? Reality TV and PETA newsletters had spoiled many things, but they couldn’t kill her dreams about being a loose woman in the United States of America. What if she wanted to work as a stripper someday? She didn’t, but what if? What if she wanted to get ill-conceived tattoos with brand-new friends? Ruby had two tattoos already. Her mothers knew and didn’t even pretend to care. One was a small star in the space between her right armpit and her boob, and the other was a B for Bingo on her left big toe. Her mum was so jealous of the B that she got one, too, but only because Ruby made her promise that they would never bare their toes at the same time in front of anyone Ruby knew.

The kids in the row ahead of her stood up, shoving handouts into their bags. “Fabulous,” Ruby said, at full volume, and followed suit. She waved to Rebecca, gave the finger to Eliza and Thayer, and was the first person out the door.

Harry was standing outside, wearing sunglasses. He had a very full tote bag slung on his left shoulder and a beach umbrella leaning against his right. “Ready, mademoiselle?” he said. “Dirty hipster beach in the Rockaways. I found it on the Internet. Taxi’s waiting. And by taxi, I mean the subway. It’s going to take us a hundred years to get there, but I swear to God, it’ll be worth it.”

“For fuck’s sake, yes,” Ruby said. She raised her arms in victory.

Yoga Evolves on Stratford

EVOLVEment owner David Goldsmith hadn’t spent much time in Ditmas Park before opening his brand-new yoga and health center on Stratford Road. “I’d been looking around Brooklyn — mostly in Williamsburg and Bushwick — when a friend tipped me off about this place,” he told us. “Like a lot of people, my first thought was, whoa!” EVOLVEment offers yoga classes, massage services, and serves juice and other beverages. Goldsmith says that he’s interested in getting involved in the neighborhood, so stop by and check them out! Drop-in classes are $11, cheaper with a class card. We tried a ginger-kale-apple juice, and it was delicious!

It was more fun than he’d had in years, though “fun” wasn’t precisely the right word. Salome called the dance parties “cosmic trances,” and they were fucking cosmic, absolutely. Andrew had never been a dancer — in high school he had occasionally pogoed into his friends in the pit at shows, and at Oberlin he had grinded his body against beautiful girls with short hair and nose rings when he was fall-down drunk, but he had never really liked to dance. He was far too self-conscious. Zoe was in the dance department, always flinging her body against the wooden floor and calling it choreography. That was how she got all the girls. Elizabeth was more like him, happier to stand against a wall and bob her head, preferably holding a red plastic cup in front of her face so that she could whisper things to whoever was standing next to her. Andrew hadn’t realized he was so tired of whispering.

At first, when Salome had started playing music, they were all sitting down or giving each other little back massages. Andrew closed his eyes and sat on a pillow in the corner of the room. He wanted to let go of his body, to let go of his mind. He’d tried talk therapy, but it wasn’t for him. You couldn’t change anything by sitting in a room with a stranger and telling him your side of the story. Andrew liked interaction, and healing from the outside in. The music was interesting, rhythmic and wobbly. He couldn’t tell if he was listening to guitars or synths or nothing at all, just some computer-generated tracks made by a kid in his basement. Probably the latter. Did anyone even learn how to play an instrument anymore? No, he wasn’t going to think about that, he wasn’t going to be Clint Eastwood telling kids to get off his lawn. And so Andrew relaxed, and waited.

It was three a.m. when he finally walked out the door. He was soaked with sweat — his own and everyone else’s. EVOLVEment had turned into a greenhouse, all of them their own individual hothouse flower. The air on Stratford Road felt cool and refreshing, just like the glasses of cucumber water that the EVOLVErs had been passing around and then pouring over one another’s heads.