Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

“Loneliness. Longing. The sadness that leaks through all that enforced sunny cheer. It’s heartbreaking.”

Berry shrugged. “This is a cool song.”

“It’s in the sound, not the words. It’s the way you feel, or rather the feeling you get. Like slightly off, rancid America, you know?”

Berry turned to her and smiled. Her blond braids glittered in the sun. “When you move somewhere new, it’s good to have someone or something from your past there with you, reminding you of who you are, don’t you think?” she said.

I don’t know where but she sends me there

“Listen to the harmonies. Why is it that harmonies can give you chills? Why do they please so deeply?”

“Like it is so easy to lose track of yourself, in a way, if you go somewhere new,” Berry said, her voice choking a little bit. She laughed at the sound.

“Are you feeling nostalgic?”

“Emotional, maybe. What do you expect with all the free-floating estrogen around here, right?”

Caroline tied the long braids with leather laces. She got up and brushed tiny pebbles from the backs of her bare thighs. It was cold already. As soon as the sun went down it got cold in these old mountains. Berry got up, and the two of them walked slowly down the path. As they approached the community from the north, Caroline glimpsed the common house through the trees. For the first time she thought Mother G’s house looked beautiful, particularly with the gentle diffusion of the dusk light making the purple paint a nearly unnoticeable natural brown. Usually the flush clapboard and lack of adornment seemed too plain to her. No flourishes in the returns at the edges, no fluid, fanciful lines, nothing for its own sake at all. No embellishments to discover in a lintel or in a dormer. Not a hint of whimsy in a molding or a cornice. But now, when she glimpsed it through the trees, she noticed its symmetry. Its economy and its balance. The harmony of the lines of the perfectly straight clapboards and the mullion lines between windowpanes. Repetition and order. The sturdiness of it. And the beauty of it, quiet, modest. Even, perhaps, despite itself. But there was a slight pretense in all this simplicity, though, wasn’t there? It was just as deliberate, just as constructed as the most ornate Victorian house; just as contrived as the elaborate and distinctive Greek Revival houses that dotted the surrounding countryside. Its absence of style was never that, was it? Just as contrived as the simple, reduced culture of the commune. Nature had nothing to do with any of it. Artifacts, all of us, no matter how deep in the woods.

“The tech-nos will be gone in another month. They spend their winter in the Southwest,” Berry said.

“No kidding,” Caroline said. “That’s funny. I’ll bet this whole place gets halved in the winter. They get stacks of snow up here.”

Caroline reached the end of the path first. Berry ran to catch up to her and swung an arm around her shoulders.

“What are you thinking?” Berry said.

“What am I thinking at this moment? I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind a beer and some men.”

“Really? ’Cause that is completely what I am thinking.”

“No kidding. You?”

“Shut up. Look, I mean today. Let’s go take a break. We can hitch down to Little Falls and stay in a motel overnight,” Berry said, clapping her hands together.

“And eat some hamburgers and smoke and go to a bar.”

“Candy bars.”

“Men.”

“TV and newspapers and—”

“Men.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of them had been farther than the tiny town of New Harmon since they arrived. Caroline thought of it: men. Young and dumb. Old and mysterious. Unshaved faces. Whiskers, what it feels like to kiss a man with whiskers. The prickle of it. Handsome, square-jawed men with short haircuts. Beer bellies. Large hands. Some men had gnarled veins that poked out from the muscles of their arms. An arm that fit around her waist. Some men, Bobby for instance, could reach an arm around her when she lay beneath him, lifting her gently to him by her midsection. They were all like him, and yet none of them could compare at all. But still, having not seen any men for so long did make her giddy and almost delirious with anticipation. Surely that wasn’t the intended effect of a women’s community?

Clothes changed, money in pockets, the two women walked the long trail to the road and hitchhiked to New Harmon. They waited and hitched a few more miles. They waited and hitched some more until they reached Little Falls. The Big Town. They ate dinner in a small Italian cafe on Main Street. Berry was thinner and tanner than when they’d first arrived in New York. Caroline could see that now. She hadn’t sat across from Berry and really looked at her the way other people might. Berry ate and spoke and drank all at the same time and in the same way — fast. They were receiving what seemed to Caroline an excessive amount of attention. Both of them felt a little overexcited, and this feeling radiated from them. As they left the restaurant, the people at the other tables stared at them. They both wore dirty jeans and gauze blouses with angel sleeves and tiny embroidered designs. Berry had sewn them out of scarves. The bottoms of the blouses came to points in the front and the back, but the sides were cut high, so if you reached an arm up, a flash of waist peeked out. Caroline’s red hair dye was fading and starting to grow out. She wrapped a scarf around the roots and tied it by the nape of her neck, the ties hanging down, gypsy-style. She wore large hoop earrings that, along with the dangling scarf tips, brushed her neck and tickled her whenever she turned her head. When they got outside, Berry undid her braid and pulled her curls loose.

“Do I look okay?”

Caroline nodded. “That choker looks good with your hair down. You look like a fallen Gibson girl. You look really great.”

Berry rolled her eyes.

“Like a former lady who has been shipwrecked and still clings to a few scraps of her past gentility.”

“All right already.”

They shared a hand-rolled cigarette, herbal in taste and sweet in scent. Caroline felt suddenly very happy.

An older man slowly walked by, staring at Berry from her legs to her neck.

They walked to the edge of the Mohawk River. Several bars were situated on a sort of barge between the river and the canal. All of them were dives, but one called the Waterfront had loud music and some traffic in and out. They went in, and Caroline immediately noticed two men drinking at a table. Their long hair reached well below their shoulders and looked incongruous with their tan work boots and mashed-up carpenter hands. Since she had arrived in New York, she’d noticed more and more of the shit-kicking truck-driver types let their hair grow long. It was no longer a sign of grooviness. Good old boys, rednecks and freaks became hard to tell apart. They all even smoked pot. The bar was full of similar men, but these two were the best prospects. For the first time Caroline had no problem thinking of sex as something abstract that she could want, independent of someone, and then find a man to fulfill her want, instead of the other way around. Sex floated around her. It seemed mystical, magical. The last person she was with was Bobby. She knew that this would have nothing to do with that.

Berry went to the bar to get drinks. Caroline watched the two men sitting by themselves. They talked and sipped beer. Occasionally they would look up at the room but not with the focused determination of men on the prowl. She watched them for only a minute, then she turned away. She looked back again and caught the men staring at her. She examined her hands and smiled to herself.

Berry returned with two schooners of dark beer. “Let’s stick together tonight. Maybe find two guys already hanging out, if we can.”