Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

Your roommate exits laughing; you weren’t meaning to be funny. You honestly do not know what matters to you. Being drunk and stoned at the moment doesn’t help, but stone-cold sober the question would be no less existential. You climb up to your bed, the top bunk, with your notebook and a pen. You open the notebook to a blank page, write “What Matters to Me” across the top, with a number one below it on the left-hand side of the page. Nothing comes to mind, so you write a two below the one, then a three below that. You could just put the stupid pen down on the paper and scribble, maybe it would come to you that way, but it seems too important to just write any old thing down, “peace on earth” or whatever. Stuff like that matters to everyone, doesn’t it? What matters to you ? Right now you can’t even remember what interests you. You write down “Matter,” next to the first number. Now you’re on to something. Next to number two you write “What is matter?” Then you cross that out. “What is the matter?” That’s not right either. What the fuck does matter to you? You care about things. You want the people in your life to be well and happy. You’ve always liked writing, but does that matter ? Could that be a thing that matters? You know that whatever matters to your mom, you don’t want to matter to you — heaven forbid. That made sense when you thought it a second ago. Oh yeah, right, because you’d be engaged right now if that were the case; forget that there are no viable candidates just yet, at least you have the good sense to know that if you can’t even figure out what matters to you, even the best candidate would end in disaster. Then again, you don’t want to do the opposite of what your mom did either, because she always told you she did the opposite of what her parents did. If you do the opposite of the opposite, is that the same as doing the same? You could just relax, maybe experiment a little. But that’s not really your thing, not the experimenting, definitely not the relaxing. You want a boyfriend; you sometimes think a boyfriend would be not so much what mattered to you most, but the thing that would cease your cosmic loneliness long enough for you to figure out what mattered to you most — because the truth is, boys do take up a lot of space in your head, even if it is usually just one at a time.

Another beer will probably help. You climb down off the bunk; your foot gets stuck between the bars toward the bottom. You fall backward — no big — you get up, grab a beer, but suddenly popping open a beer is physically demanding, your right hand doesn’t have the strength to pop the tab and your left hand is made of mush, and the beer drops to the floor and spills all over the shaggy throw rug. You try to pick up the can to salvage some of it, but it falls right out of your mush hand as soon as you lift it, which is a bummer, because when you go to the fridge to get another, you discover that that was the last one, and you don’t have it in you to go get money from the bank, which isn’t open anyway. You go pee, come back with the crusty rinse cup from the sink, try to push the spilled beer out of the rug into the cup with the side of your hand; this results in nothing more than some slightly wet fuzz on the lip of the cup, and you wonder how one would wring out the rug while it’s still on the floor. You put the cup upside down on top of the rug, pinch at the rug fibers with your fingers in the hopes of flipping the cup quickly with the liquid still in it, this method also unsuccessful. Somehow you climb back up to the top bunk (tomorrow you won’t remember this part), look at what you wrote, scribble something on it, pass out, wake up with the notebook in front of you, not realizing you’d even passed out, scribble a few more words, pass out again, scribble some more.

You want to matter in the world. It matters to you to matter. Yes. You’ll figure out how later, maybe. Sadly, though, in the morning, you won’t remember this; just as well since it’s not a suitable paper topic anyway.

Climbing down from the bunk the next morning, you find that your left wrist has swollen to the size of your face, and you are certain you can see it throbbing like something’s in there trying to get out. At student health they ask a bunch of questions for which you don’t have answers. Nothing new. They X-ray your hand; there’s a small fracture. For about two seconds you think that this could be a consequence of having been drunk and stoned, before blaming it on getting the short straw on the top bunk.

— That is really interesting, Mom.

— I always thought I could have been a writer.

—. .

— What?

— That’s not exactly what I meant.

— What did you mean, then?

— It’s just. . plausible.

— You should give me more credit.

— You should give me what I already have.

— I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

— Let’s just move on.

— You move on.

You graduate from GW in December, a semester late, because of the drinking and not going to class sometimes. It’s almost remarkable that it’s only one semester, but you pulled it together when you were on the verge of flunking out — drank only on weekends after that, which helped improve your grades, anyway. Junior year you switched your major from English to broadcasting, when you realized it was the only major that would get you out of school before 1992. Not that you have any big ideas about what to do with this degree. You don’t even have any small ones. You might like to be a newscaster, if it didn’t require hair spray and a suit. The truth is, all you really want right now is a job where you don’t have to wear a suit. I try to tell you that you have to at least have one suit for interviews. Why should I spend money I don’t have on a suit I’m never going to wear? It’s an investment. That’s not what an investment is, Mom. An investment is when you expect or hope to get more money back than you put in. Don’t be smart with me. Everyone needs a suit sometime, Betsy. I don’t want to need a suit. I’ll take you to Jersey to the outlet malls, my treat. You always want to treat me to things you think I need, never what I really need. You’re twenty-two years old. You don’t know what you need.

You move back into your old room at home with us even though this is not ideal for anyone. Our apartment hasn’t gotten any bigger in the last four years. After a few weeks you land an entry-level job at CBS News; unfortunately, they put you on the graveyard shift. One night, during your three a.m. lunch break, one of the local weathermen sits down next to you in the commissary, asks if you mind having some company. You tell him you don’t mind at all; the weatherman is super cute, even though it’s hard to tell with the suit and the combed hair and the moustache, which you are way not into. It’s 1984. Didn’t people stop having moustaches about five years ago? You’re not really up-to-date on weatherman style; maybe this is überhip on the weather scene. The commissary is a bleak landscape at three in the morning. The room has no windows, dropped ceilings, and fluorescent lights; it’s like a grade school cafeteria without the noise, which would be a welcome relief from the odd, steamy silence. The only other person here is a janitor eating some pudding on the other side of the room. Roger McMenamee , the weatherman says. You say Hi, Betsy Crane, yeah, you do the weather, right? I do, but at 3:25 a.m. I’m sort of the tree falling in the forest of weathermen. You smile. So. . if you talk about the weather, is that like, work? Exactly. Esoteric subjects are wide open, though. Oh good. I was hoping to talk Derrida tonight. He laughs and asks what you did to get yourself on the late shift. I guess I graduated from college with no previous work experience? He nods. Oh, that’s good. You have a chance of getting out then. You aren’t really sure what he’s talking about. I drank my way onto overnights . You smile, assume he’s joking. You are not yet at the point where you might talk about your own drinking mistakes. Everyone drinks in college. When you do talk about your drinking mistakes, it’s with a certain amount of pride. That time you and your friends got lost on the Beltway back to DC after a house party in Arlington and mistook the Peruvian embassy for your dorm is still hilarious to you, even though it was not hilarious at all to the Peruvian diplomats, who nearly had you taken away by the cops. Roger the weatherman has a curious smile on his face as you tell him this story, nods in a way that you can’t totally break apart, and you’re usually good at reading people. He asks what department you’re in; you tell him you’re sending facsimiles in the traffic department, ask if he knows what a facsimile is. He laughs, says he knows what the word means. You say Well, it’s like sending a letter over the telephone very slowly . He thanks you for educating him, you tell him you didn’t know until you got there that traffic wasn’t traffic, like car traffic; he laughs again, finds you charming. Would you like to dine together again, perhaps somewhere with fewer mayonnaise-based choices? You say Sure, I’d love to .