The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Read online

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m coming home in the morning.”

  “Nice.” I waited. He killed something that looked like a fanged bull. “So how’re Mom and Dad? Bothering you enough?”

  “I guess.” I was annoying him at this point. “Mom’s obsessed with my homework.”

  I laughed. “What about Dad?”

  He waited for a minute until he started clicking again. “Um, the same. He’s kind of drinking a lot.” I hadn’t expected this. But I knew he was smart and it was stupid to think he didn’t know what was going on. I waited by his computer for a few seconds until I punched him in the shoulder and walked toward the door.

  “Keep the lights on in here,” I said, pausing in the doorway to hit the switch. “It’s creepy if you hang out in the dark.”

  “Okay.” He stayed looking at the screen as I went into my room to change into sexier underwear before I left for Sam’s. Then I was gone.

  That night we went to the lake and walked out to its center, where we passed a spliff and talked about the fate of humanity. Sam had a lot of opinions about the universe shrinking back up and banging again but I didn’t really have a view one way or another. I liked listening to him, though. The ice was thick enough to hold the fishermen’s trucks but there was still something sexy about lying down where we used to canoe. I went to college in Ohio, but Sam’s school was just down the street. The weed urged me to ask him if he ever came here with anyone else, but it started to snow a little so I leaned backward instead. He did too, and our noses touched.

  “This is good,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I wish it was just us.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We waited there for a while until our heads cleared and our butts froze. He didn’t need to explain what he meant because he knew I knew he was talking about everything.

  When we got back to his house we took a shower and fell dizzily asleep before our hormones could even take over.

  The next day I dragged him with me when I went back to my house. He wanted to stay at his place for the day because he had a bigger TV and his parents weren’t home. But I told him that I’d left at lunch and gotten in late and besides, we’re always at your house and you know it. When we pulled into my driveway my dad was shoveling the steps, which was surprising. He had on a giant windbreaker and we could see the spots where it darkened under his arms. I felt the familiar twist of sympathetic embarrassment and then embarrassment that I’d felt that in the first place.

  My mom came out from the computer room and we all talked in the kitchen for a while. She lingered even after my dad went back out to shovel, rearranging papers and mentioning cool articles she’d read online. She was watching us, and I knew she was soaking in our every expression.

  “What do your parents do, Sam?”

  “They work at the school.”

  “Addie tells me you’re studying science.”

  “Yes, ma’am, at least for now.” He looked teasingly at me and I reached a hand at his stomach, pulling his shirt so he moved closer and put his arms around my sides. I meant it as a gesture of trust, to show my mother we were comfortable around her. But she looked at us for a second, lost, and then went to check something on her phone.

  “I need to make a call anyway, so you two can go upstairs.” She was moving now, looking in the pantry and opening some drawers. “But thanks for talking to your old mother.” It was an honest joke and she stopped her motion to smile.

  “I love you,” I cooed, laughing as we moved out of the kitchen.

  “You don’t.”

  “I do! I do!”

  Winter break passed us with trips up the stairs. We slept in wearing woolen socks and woke up sweaty. Most of the time I slept at Sam’s because his feet poked out the end of my twin-size bed. My mom was usually asleep by the time I drove over there, but I could tell it bothered her anyway. I knew because she’d mention breakfast foods I might like around nine. I think my dad found the whole thing vaguely inappropriate; he was uncertain how to respond to his daughter wrapped up in something serious. But he liked Sam okay and whenever he came by I made sure they had at least ten minutes to talk about hockey. One night when Sam was staying over, my dad walked in while we were watching Planet Earth. It was episode two and our interests were shifting from vampire squids to my bed, but my dad asked if it was okay if he joined us. He was drinking and had a bowl of sugar-free Jell-O.

  “Sure,” I said, shifting up so Sam’s arm was merely around my shoulder.

  “Cool,” he said, and sat down on the opposite couch. This kind of thing never happened at Sam’s because his parents were usually doing work or downstairs. We started episode three and our thoughts turned back to the weird things that glowed in the bottom of the ocean. But my dad fell asleep after ten minutes, snoring loud enough that I would have laughed if I were still in high school. Sam and I shut off the TV and I placed a blanket on my dad, throwing away his bowl of Jell-O when we walked upstairs. There was an awkwardness to the way he’d asked to join us that I couldn’t get out of my head. Some kind of cafeteria-table solitude that made me want to throw up. I thought then about how most things are not really anyone’s fault. I almost shared this with Sam but he was already in my room taking off his shoes. It was nearly two but I could see the glow of Kyle’s monitor as I passed by his door.

  Sometimes we’d take a day off and I’d spend time alone or with my family. My mom and I went shopping a few times at the mall in Hammond Bay and I helped her make a cheesecake with lemon and ginger. On a cold Tuesday, my older brothers lumbered home in a carpool from Chicago and we all went out to buy a Christmas tree. Toby and Zach were older and immune to the islands they’d left floating in our house. So they laughed and teased and Kyle and I lurked behind them, refreshingly reduced to our attempts to impress. The holiday came and went like it seemed to every year since I was thirteen. We slept till a depressing 9:30 on Christmas morning, though I suspect my little brother woke up earlier to look at the stockings before creeping back upstairs until the rest of us woke up. Sam bought me a necklace with a tiny silver acorn that my mother held off my neck more than once that afternoon. I gave her a crème brûlée torch and a fleece jacket that felt both perfect and stupid the moment she gasped with gratitude.

  My anxiety came back on the twenty-sixth and I started dreading the idea of phone calls every time I saw Sam. The vacation had seemed an eternity, but something about the other side of Christmas made college slip back into my consciousness. Once, when Sam was at school, he’d texted me that he couldn’t talk because his roommates were sleeping. Smiling to myself, I’d called him anyway—speaking one-way for a whole eight minutes. This is what happened today. This is how I’m feeling. This is why I love you.

  Toby and Zach went back to the city and my house returned to its hidey-holes. I went to this horrible yoga class a few times with my mom, but we giggled about the instructor’s adjectives afterward, which made us feel like sisters. My dad would accidentally fall asleep on the couch a few times a week and I cringed to think what kind of clichés this spawned in Kyle’s head. Dad and I would talk sometimes after I’d driven home late in my smoky sedan. There wasn’t much to say but we could get at least ten minutes if I asked him to fill me in on the episode that was on. Once when one had ended and we’d finished a bowl of popcorn, he paused for a minute and looked down at our dog.

  “So your mother seems to think you and this Sam kid are awfully happy.” She must have brought it up.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

  “She said he bought you that necklace.” He gestured loosely at my neck.

  “Yeah. For Christmas.”

  He nodded, almost got up, but then stayed in his chair. “I thought that wind chime I got for her was good.” He looked up at me expectantly. It’s silver, my mom would have said. He bought her something silver.

>   “No, it was.” I cleared my throat. “That was a really cool gift.”

  “I’m going to hang that up tomorrow.”

  I nodded this time. “Yeah, you totally should. That thing’s supposed to be cool.”

  “I’ll do that tomorrow,” he repeated, walking over to the sink.

  He didn’t. And by the time either of us woke up my mom’s banana bread was cold.

  Sam’s uncle had an annual New Year’s party in Canada, and in a gesture of romantic formality Sam suggested we dress up and drive there instead of getting drunk in someone’s basement. He showed me pictures from the previous year while we waited for our instant cookies to bake. Everyone was wearing suits and had champagne and he said that people were maybe going to go skiing the next day. I decided to spend some of my campus job money on a dress and went back to a store I’d seen in the Hammond Bay Galleria. I stood alone in a three-way mirror, unable to choose between a green and two blacks. So I angled the panels and took pictures of each on my phone, sending them one by one in texts to my mom. I had to call her twice to explain how to open them, but she’d said the green made my legs look good so I went with that.

  On the day Sam and I were supposed to leave, I found her again folding socks downstairs. I came in wearing the green dress to model it in person.

  “What do you think?” I said, spinning around.

  “You look beautiful,” she said. “He won’t be able to keep it on you.”

  “Mom, come on!” I laughed, turning around. “Can you unzip me?”

  She unzipped me and I went back upstairs to pack it away, returning in a pair of jeans and a gray sweater.

  “So you’re driving up tonight?”

  “This afternoon, yeah.” I reached my hand into the basket and started searching for a sock with two black stripes. “Don’t worry, I’m driving.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you doing anything?”

  “Probably not.” She smiled. “I don’t really like New Year’s, it’s sort of an excuse to drink.”

  “Fair enough.” We didn’t say anything for a while, both absorbed in the sock pairings. “You know your father didn’t always drink like this, right?” She was looking right at me and I had to make eye contact.

  “I know,” I said. “He hasn’t been that bad while I’ve been home, actually. I sort of see him sometimes when you’re already asleep.”

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she said, this time not smiling. “I don’t know, Addie.” She let out a sigh. “I just don’t know.” I hated this kind of discussion and I hated myself for hating it. I wondered for a moment who else my mom might confide in but I wasn’t actually sure how close she was with any of her book-group friends. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” She was looking down again.

  “Yeah.”

  “Having you home, it made me think, and you seem so . . .”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” But I trailed off too. I wasn’t sure whether this was different.

  She paused. “Now that you guys are almost grown up, I’m not sure there’s a point.”

  “I don’t know.” It was a stupid response and I wasn’t sure if I should comfort her.

  There wasn’t sadness in her voice, just that same exhaustion I’d seen from my car. My phone vibrated and I flipped it open to a message from Sam.

  “You can take that if you want,” my mom said, looking down.

  “Oh, no, it’s fine, it’s not a call.”

  “A text message?” She took pride in knowing the term.

  “Yeah.”

  She paused. “What’s it say?” I pressed Open and waited for a second. It was a heart, followed by a message that said “thinking of you.” I couldn’t show her.

  “It’s from Sarah,” I said. “She wants to know what I’m doing tonight.” She looked at me again.

  “It’s not from Sarah, Addie. It’s from Sam.”

  “No, it’s from Sarah, I swear. It says: ‘Hey what are you up to later?’ ”

  She smiled for a second but it didn’t reach her eyes. “When are you leaving?” Her tone was different. It was cheery, bright. I looked at my watch. It was 1:40 and Sam was picking me up at two.

  “You know, Mom, I don’t have to—” But she cut me off. “Addie, come on.” She pulled her hair back into a bun. “Three more pairs and I’ll let you free.” So I made three more pairs.

  Sam and I smoked two joints on the drive, listening to airy playlists titled with combinations of our names. Three miles from Canada, we parked the car in a field and let the smoky air out just to be safe, sitting on the hood and holding hands. The air was crisp and the sky seemed determined to be bluest on this last day of the year. We could see mountains from where we were sitting and climbed back into our seats only when the sun started tilting west.

  I made Sam leave our room while I put on the green dress so it would be a surprise when I came out. It did make my legs look good and I had to take it off and put it back on again before dinner. Sam smiled at me while we met aunts and old high school friends, our glances exchanging thousands of inside jokes. The night was a whirl of champagne and stupid hats and explaining why and where I went to school. At midnight, everyone gathered in a room with a fire, counting down in an iconic chant. Sam had one arm on the small of my back and I could smell the alcohol and perfume and fire that filled the room. I looked down at the fingers squeezing mine and something about the noise or his smile filled me with a kind of sick understanding of what our hand-holding had done. Of what she was trying to tell me before I got into his car. I tried to focus on the lights of the dying Christmas tree and the shrieking faces of guests I didn’t know. But in those final seconds my mind wandered to my dad, who was probably sitting alone in the kitchen, drunk and watching the ball drop on TV; my brother, shooting spells from the depths of his bedroom, his small face green with the glow of his computer; and my mother, crunching down the street with a flashlight and my cocker spaniel, moving through the snowy darkness as the clock hit zero.

  Reading Aloud

  On Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30 P.M., Anna takes off her clothes and reads to Sam. Reads him cable-box directions and instant-soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his textbooks. Each week she peels off her garments one by one, arranging them beside her chair with practiced stealth. Usually, Sam makes an exotic tea and they revel in descriptions from their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. Both can hear its soft percolation, but only Anna can see its cloudy mauve whirlpool. Only Anna can see her wilting breasts and her varicose veins. So she looks at him and he looks at nothing. And they let the words lift off the pages of the manuals and brochures and cereal-box backs and float fully formed from the sixty-something naked woman to the twenty-something blind man.

  * * *

  Her doctor suggested it. The reading, not her wardrobe choice. Said something about the benefits of purpose or the advantages of routine. Anna was sick and she knew it. Ever since her husband un-retired, she’d had an ache in her left knee joint and she sometimes felt nauseous. For four days last April, she was convinced unquestionably of her pulmonary tuberculosis; for three days in June of her endometrial cancer. She’d taken to leaving an old copy of The Diagnostic Almanac on her bedside table, flipping ardently through its pages. Naturally, she’d verify each hypothesis with recurrent appointments. Anna liked her doctor and his magazines, his lemon drops, and his pristine coats. Liked him enough to forgive his misidentification of her symptoms as “psychologically derivative.” Liked him enough to agree to volunteer at the city library’s Visually Impaired Assistance Program for “purpose and routine.”

  * * *

  On a Monday at 4:28 P.M., Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door. It was the same knock she knocked every week for twelve weeks—like she knew he knew she was already there. Her knee h
urt and the building elevator was under renovation, so the two flights of stairs added a glisten to her forehead and a rhythm to her breathing. She hated herself for it. Back when her back could bend and her toes could point, Anna could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant without moistening her leotard—spinning and tucking on a single slipper. Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. The was haunted her from mirror to mirror in her Westchester high-rise. People used to stare at her, envy her, pay seven dollars to watch her grand jeté at the Metropolitan Opera House. But not Sam. Sam never watched her do anything. So twice a week, Anna didn’t watch herself. His place had no mirrors and even his fogged eyes were unreflective. So when he opened his door, she focused on his face.

  “Hi Anna,” said Sam.

  “Hi Sam,” said Anna. He reached forward, placing a hand on her elbow in his standard gesture of greeting.

  “Your knee doing okay?”

  “Well, not really.” She stepped forward, swinging the door shut behind her. “They just don’t know about these things these days. Might be pulmonary tuberculosis. They just don’t know.” She shook her head. “There’s a large brace on it right now, actually.”

  There wasn’t a large brace on it, actually, but Anna liked the way it sounded. She also liked Sam.

  Sam hadn’t always been blind; he’d managed a whole two years before the fog came. His visual memory puzzled him, tricked him, disillusioned him. Trapped him with a visual arsenal of table bottoms and grown-ups’ feet, forever restricting him from the bipedal perspective. He was a master’s student in a divinity school just outside the city, and at night, in the black, he moved about his apartment, tracing his fingers across the thousands of tiny dots of Jacob and Isaiah, Luke and Matthew. Fingering the Psalms and stroking the Gospels. “Religious Studies,” he would clarify to friends and uncles and the women like Anna who read to him. “I study God, not worship Him.”

  Sam’s apartment lived an immaculate life. Clutter was more than an inconvenience—it was a hazard. Anna walked by the Bibles and Torahs and Korans convened with books on Indian cooking and music theory in alphabetized rows of Ikea shelving. He’d built them himself. Felt every screw and every piece of artificial wood, sliding them together as Anna read him the instructions during one of her first visits. Everything had a location. Every utensil had its hook and every coat had its hanger. Tiny blue dotted labels speckled the apartment like some kind of laboratory. The microwave buttons, the light switches, the drawers, the cans: all had their names displayed in bright Braille blue. A Malaysian tapestry hung above the sofa and an Andy Warhol print hung opposite the door. “For company,” he shrugged when Anna asked. “My mother’s idea.”