Sara Jaffe - Dryland

I said, It’s my tea. I said, Do you want some coffee? If he said yes I hoped there was some left in the pot my parents had made earlier. Nobody had ever shown me how to make coffee.

Ben said he’d come in for some when he finished the row he was working on. What he was doing to the yard looked okay — some smaller shrubs and some taller ones, a cross between random and arranged. It looked, not perfect, but better than it had before. He said, I hope no other landscapers see me doing this. This is a really weird time of year to be planting.

I set up in the kitchen with my Rice Chex and the A&E. There were shows in the TV listings I knew about just from reading them. Ben might think it was funny, or cool in a way, that I knew something about MacGyver without ever having seen it. Ben knocked on the sliding back door. He slid it open. He kicked off his wet boots and put the raincoat over a chair. He said, My jeans are a little muddy, do you think they’ll care?

I said, I don’t care. It was my house, too. I got up and poured Ben a cup of coffee from the coffeepot and brought it over to him.

He said, Oh thanks, I like it black.

I said, I can get you some milk if you want.

He said, No, for real. It’s great. He reached in the inside pocket of his raincoat and handed me a tape. He said, For you. One side was My Bloody Valentine and the other was R.E.M.’s Murmur. He said, I put a few extra songs on the R.E.M. side.

The handwriting on the front of the case was scratchy ballpoint. It looked like a little kid’s writing. I said, You know Country Feedback?

He said, Fuckin’ A. Only good song on the album.

Somewhere in the house, in the attic, or basement, there could be a boxful of tapes that Ben had made for my brother and that my brother had left here. Or were tapes from Ben something he would have taken with him?

The coffee was steaming Ben’s cheeks. He still had the outside on him. I took a slug of my tea and it was the bitter, tannic end, the tea bag in too long, my favorite part. I said, Do you ever talk to my brother?

Ben rolled his bead. I was sure that my brother had given it to him. Ben said, Not for a while.

I said, How long?

He said, Jeez. When did he go to Berlin? Three years ago? He called me once right when he got there.

I said, What did he say?

Ben pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows. He said, I don’t really remember. He might have blushed, or it might have been the steam and the cold. He said, And what I remember, I don’t think he’d want me to repeat to you.

Something swarmed behind Ben’s answer. I thought I could hit it from a different angle. I said, What did you do last night? Did you have a late night again?

Ben laughed. He said, Oh my god, you’re priceless. Do you want to just ask me what you want to ask me?

I said, What do I want to ask you?

Ben said, First with the magazine, now this.

I said, What with the magazine? Do you have it?

Ben said, God, maybe somewhere. But how do you know about it? It’s not like he sent you one.

It was true, I didn’t know how we’d gotten it. I couldn’t imagine my parents going out and buying it any more than I could imagine my brother sealing an envelope, writing our address, licking stamps. I said, Maybe his coach sent it?

Ben said, That guy. Oh my god, he would. Then he stopped, like a cartoon of a guy running into an invisible wall. He said, Julie. Tell me what magazine you’re talking about.

I said, Swimmers’ World. I’m not sure of the exact issue.

Ben laughed and his laughter swarmed away from me. He laughed like there was a third person at the table who was telling the most insane joke. People could laugh however they wanted, but it was rude. It was annoying. I had never mentioned the magazine out loud to anyone before. I said, What is so fucking funny?

Ben was still laughing. He said, I’m sorry. I think I remember the article you’re talking about. But I don’t have it, I’m sorry.

I said, What magazine are you talking about?

He said, Did you try the library? They keep back issues of everything.

I said, Of course.

I hadn’t tried the library. I hadn’t thought they’d keep something as specific as Swimmers’ World. I thought they just had Newsweek and Time and Sports Illustrated. I said, What magazine are you talking about?

Ben touched the tips of his fingers together around his coffee cup, too carefully. I wasn’t interested in his carefulness. He said, I just wish I could get a better sense of how much you know about your brother before I, how should I say it, broach certain terrain.

He sounded like a professor. He sounded like a fake-British imbecile. Pledge started barking and a car drove up. I sat for a moment staring at him, my jaw set around a quarry of swear words. My mom opened the door and called, Julie, groceries! Everything was twisted. I was sitting across my kitchen table from a person who could tell me everything, and he wasn’t telling me anything. I said, You’re confused, and got up to help my mom.

ERIKA HAD ASKEDme on Friday if I wanted to do something on Saturday night and I’d hedged. I’d thought there was a chance that Alexis would call me and ask me to do something, or just call me to talk. On Thursday in Yearbook I had found a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in my backpack and when I’d taken it out to unwrap it she’d caught my eye and given me a smile that slivered me.

On Saturday afternoon Erika called me, hysterical. She was talking even faster than usual. She said, You have to tell me you’re free tonight.

It was almost five. I said, I’m free.

She said, Thank goodness. Can you meet me at eight? We’re going to the movies with PT and his friends.

I said, He called you?

She said, No no, I went in for Saturday darkroom and one of his friends was there, that girl Larissa from the party, and I made myself ask her if he had a girlfriend and she said they were all going to the movies tonight and did I want to come.

I said, Does he have a girlfriend?

She said, No, I don’t know. Larissa said he has some thing with some girl from St. Mary’s, she said it’s complicated, but you’re coming with me, right?

It wasn’t necessarily my idea of a good time to hang out with PT and those photography girls, or whatever kind of girls they were.

Erika said, There’ll be a bunch of guys there. I bet one of them will be your type.

My first urge was to say that I didn’t have a type. I said, I like tall guys. I pictured a guy that was my height or a little taller, and was skinny but strong. He didn’t look like Ben and he didn’t look like Alexis, who looked nothing like a guy. Alexis was somewhere outside of this conversation. The guy looked, so what, like a boy version of me. In my head I dared Erika to find me a guy like that, to see what would happen when he met me, how quickly we’d go at each other, how manically the sparks would fly.

As I was getting ready to go out I had some second thoughts. There was still a chance Alexis would call, and I wouldn’t be home. But would that be the worst thing, for her to miss me? She might go out, instead, to the movies with her friends. There were often big packs of kids at the Galleria or the Tenplex on weekend nights. I couldn’t exactly see our two groups mixing, but I could feel what it would feel like when Alexis saw me from across the huge theater lobby. I put on my teal heathered henley. I took my hair down.

The movie, it turned out, was at a tiny old theater in Northwest. We met the girls from the other night and PT and two other boys, a short one with green hair and a tall one in a striped shirt. Erika whispered to me that the striped shirt was tall. His shirt was nice. These people were all clearly friends, and it made no sense that we were there with them. The theater was minuscule and mostly a dump. It had an elaborately painted ceiling for people who bothered to look up. Larissa kept smiling at Erika and giving her the thumbs-up behind PT’s back. She was being too obvious, but Erika thumbs-upped her back every time. Larissa maneuvered it so Erika entered the row just after PT, which meant that she sat next to him and that every five minutes she grabbed my arm and squeezed it in spastic excitement. She should have been grabbing PT’s arm. She should have been doing something to him or with him if she knew what she wanted. The movie was a collection or festival of animation for adults, and mostly so boring, and pointless, cartoons were for kids and once you took out the kid part there wasn’t much left. There was one that was funny, though it was hard to say why. A guy kept taking out a saw and sawing at a table and the woman, his wife, kept saying, Stop sawing, and he said, I’m not sawing, and kept sawing. Then there was a nuclear meltdown. The cartoons went on and on. Some didn’t have words. I tried to tune out and imagine that Alexis was sitting next to me, but Erika kept squeezing my arm and leaning over and whispering, and Alexis would never be at this dumpy theater, where the chairs were from some time, the 1920s, before people realized movie chairs needed to be comfortable.