Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Can you be quiet a little? My suitemate is probably trying to sleep,” Garret said. “Why are you so angry, anyway? You’re leaving me, so calm down.”

Kristy’s mouth began to bleed, a slow seeping at the edge, like an early sign of mutation. Her cheek had been swollen for too long. There was maybe something wrong with the stitches. “Fuck,” she said. “You didn’t even come with me for my wisdom teeth.” She wiped her mouth with one of Garret’s shirts. “You had to go to class? You skip all your fucking classes!”

“That’s my shirt,” Garret said. “That’s inconsiderate.” Against the bureau was a stack of photos that they had taken together. “Take your photos,” Garret said. Kristy kicked them across the floor. She threw her sandals against the wall. They lodged in the window blinds and dust went in the air.

“Why are you acting like this?” Garret said.

Kristy set her luggage upright, the wheels aimed at the door. “Why don’t you install soundproof walls for your suitemate?” she said. “If you care about him so much, why don’t you?”

“I will,” Garret said. “That’s considerate of you, finally.” They looked at each other. Blood oozed again out of Kristy’s mouth, and then out her nose, like a crushed thought. She went and grabbed her sandals from the blinds. She set her luggage outside the door, got in position to properly slam the door with both hands, and then slammed it. The door bounced off its frame without closing.

Kristy wheeled her luggage down the outside hall. It made squeaky noises, and train-track noises. Garret sat and listened. For a moment he felt sorry for her, for himself, for the whole wrecked and blighting world — it was hopeless, really — but then he felt okay, felt that things were not that bad; he felt friendly, and he felt that this moment of softness, of calm, though maybe it was just that he was tired, was good, was enough, that if there could be this feeling, then things would go on, month after month, one good and tiny feeling per; it was okay. And he wanted suddenly, badly, to share all this, and so he called out, “Have a good week.” He stood and shouted, “Wait; I hope you can be happy now; I hope we can be friends still, really,” and then Kristy was back, was looking, was saying, “You’re a real shithead,” was saying some other things, her face inflamed, and the door, then, slamming shut, making a loud noise.

Last week I received, via Priority Mail, a card inviting me to a wedding that I’d very much like to attend. After eighteen years of partnership, the card said, Ms. Leala Kroger, Esq. — my older sister — and Mr. Mattathias Williams, Esq. — my older sister’s boyfriend — were getting married on the island of Oahu. Two days after the card arrived, my sister called from her Colorado mountain home and said that she wanted to tell me herself that she and her partner-in-life, best friend, and the father of her six- and eight-year-old daughters were getting married in Hawaii in the second week of May 2014, and that in order to attend the wedding I would need to reserve a room this week using the code KROGERWILLIAMS2014, and I said, “Wonderful.”

The wedding, my sister said, would not be fancy. However, there would be a hair-metal band, a five-course local organic vegan dinner, and a life-size fair-trade chocolate baby elephant. I’m afraid that my sister went on explaining details about the wedding, and I stopped listening; this is because I caught Lyme disease five years ago and have neurological damage that makes it difficult for me to listen when people talk, especially when what they’re saying isn’t interesting.

It was an eighty-degree November evening in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and I was sitting at my oak desk in my attic apartment. I had a nice apartment. One room, true, and in an attic; but cozy. The window looked over the owner’s garden. I was fond of its wide orange floorboards and the mice that pattered out from beneath my futon whenever I ate buttered crackers. On my desk was the stack of student stories that I needed to read for the next day, and next to them was a letter from a collection agency.

“So you’ll come?” my sister said.

I considered what to say. I knew that even if you’re an unmarried forty-year-old woman who steals reams of paper from her workplace and collects unemployment compensation illegally, there are things that no one who’s decent does, and I knew that skipping your sister’s wedding was one of them.

Also, I wasn’t broke. There was room on my Platinum MasterCard, and on my Capital One card. But I owed $1,200 in rent, $820 in credit card bills, $1,275 in overdue student-loan payments, and $13,756.46 to the collection agency.

So when my sister said, “You’ll come?” I scratched my nose.

I figured a plane ticket to my sister’s wedding in Hawaii would cost $2,000.

I could not tell her I was broke. Last year, when I quit my job as a creative-writing teacher at an Ivy League university, my sister said, in a disapproving way, “Why are you giving up your job?” When I explained that I’d enrolled in a program to earn a degree as a health coach and planned to help people transform their lives by helping them eat healthful diets, avoid toxins, and exercise, my sister said, in her attorney’s voice, “You should keep your job.” My sister also said, “Sonya, you used to be a writer. You used to talk to me about your writing. Now all you talk about is fluoride.” She reminded me that it would take years to get enough clients to support myself as a health coach, and that once I did get clients, I’d be sued. She said my ideas about health were odd, and predicted that if I gave up my position at the university, before the year’s end I’d be broke. I told my sister not to worry and that no matter what, I wouldn’t ask her for a loan. But I’d failed, since graduating from the health-coach program, to get enough clients, even though I offered free consultations to all the fat, hormonally imbalanced women I met in local health-food stores and sent “You need a health coach” emails to all my former Ivy League colleagues. So now, after my sister announced her wedding and repeated in a sobby voice, “Please come,” I told her, “I’ll try.” Then I said the only thing that, given the circumstances, I could: I said I’d won a fellowship to a writing colony. I’d won a “special fellowship prize” to “Yaddo,” I told my sister, and I needed to “go there and write all next May.” I’d try to change my dates, but the “Yaddo people” would not let me, I said, because it was impossible. Yaddo was a rare opportunity, I said, and there was no way any writer could pass it up.

In reality I would never go to a colony to write, because in my apartment I have a desk, and I have a pen and paper. I wouldn’t go to Yaddo unless I wanted to have sex with some lousy-in-the-sack, fluoride-drinking writers. But I knew my sister would believe me if I said I was blowing off her wedding for a colony.

“I really want you at my wedding, but I know it’s important for you to get writing done,” she said, probably because I hadn’t written anything in five years.

“Thanks,” I said, and just as I was weighing health-coach-y things to say in return, like “I’m glad you’re getting married in Hawaii, it sounds like that’s an important thing for you to do,” my older sister’s voice got high like a girl’s and she said, “Maybe you could write something.”

And I said, “Eh,” because recently she’d told me that the book I published six years ago was “bad,” “needed more plot,” and made her sick. o

“No,” she said, “I don’t mean a story, I mean a note for Matty, something we could read at the rehearsal dinner so it’d be like you’re there. You know…,” she said, “a toast.”