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“Dude, you can’t bring a kid into a bar! No offense, hon,” Turner said to Tara.
Tara pointed at Turner’s belly and said, “You’ve got one.”
Turner cracked up.
“Wait, even if she’s clearly not drinking? Is that a law?”
Turner shook her head at me. “Did you think the people sitting there checking IDs just had nothing better to do every night?”
“No, but sure, if there’s a chance an underage person might drink, then I get it. But she’s a child! And she’s with me!”
Tara and Turner exchanged an eye roll that confirmed my suspicion they’d get along.
“Just buy me a damn milkshake instead,” Tara said, pointing across the street.
“Watch your damn mouth,” I said, “or your mother will have me killed.”
Tara waved at Turner and pulled me outside.
Tara and I settled into a booth, and were immediately bent over her phone, watching the internet and feeling satisfied with ourselves as we ate chunks of Oreo cookie out of our milkshakes. A group of women from New Zealand who ran ultramarathons and had tattooed Xs on their ankles for every hundred miles they’d run together. Sisters with matching tattoos of vines along the scars from their mastectomies, that bloomed into roses on their shoulders. Tattoos marking the loss of mothers and friends. Two women dressed to the nines, flashing tattoos that said Femme Power on their forearms, surrounded by a scattering of diamonds and fangs.
Tattooed reminders of strength, resilience, autonomy, togetherness. Of hope. It was everything I could’ve imagined, and as the posts and shares kept rolling in I felt the kind of satisfaction that comes from figuring out a tricky tattoo problem—finding the right angle to show depth in a curve of the body, envisioning precisely the lines needed for the perfect cover-up. I could see the evidence of my efforts, and it filled me with relief.
“So this guy, Eddie. Kind of a slimeball, huh?” Tara said once we’d high-fived over the campaign.
I nodded, not sure if I should tell her about how he sexually harassed women too. I thought maybe she was too young? Who the hell knew. “Yup, total slimeball,” was all I said.
“It happens at school too, you know? The, like, pressure to be better than other girls?”
I felt the familiar combination of rage and heartbreak wash over me as I imagined Tara—spunky, smart, confident Tara—subjected to the pressures of that shit at school, at thirteen. And then in the world, for the rest of her life. “Yeah, I remember. Do you…is it hard for you?”
She shrugged. “It’s like…I didn’t notice it was that, you know? But if a girl dresses weird—or even just another girl thinks she doesn’t look good—then they’re super down on her. But then, if a girl is really pretty or dresses great, they’re down on her too. Like you lose either way, I guess? I don’t know, it’s not my friends, cuz I don’t hang out with losers. But…”
She bit her lip and I forced myself to let her finish.
“I guess it does kinda happen cuz there’s this one guy, Francis. And I’m really good friends with him but then my friend Angela’s friends with him too. And it’s totally fine. But then at lunch sometimes people will say like, ‘Oh, Angela, are you gonna fight for Francis’ or whatever. Like Francis can only be friends with one of us or something. It’s stupid.”
“It is,” I confirmed.
“I get…” She started biting her thumbnail. “Like, super angry about it sometimes. Well, about lots of stuff, I guess.”
“I hear that,” I said. “I’ve always gotten really angry too.”
And oh, man, was that an understatement. I used to feel so furious I couldn’t control it. It used to be that when I got that furious—which used to be about five times a day—I’d hit things. Punch the wall, punch a desk, slam my hand into the doorframe. Anything to act as a kind of pressure valve to let it out. Thing was, as someone whose livelihood depended on my hands being in good working order, punching hadn’t really been a good option for me.
I’d tried pinching myself, which worked for a year or so, though I was covered in deep violet bruises all the time. I’d tried squeezing my eyes and teeth shut and ended up with a cracked molar and probably a few wrinkles I’d see any year now. I’d tried furious gum chewing, but it’d just given me gas. I’d even tried a razor blade, but nothing about the clean, controlled drag of the blade and the line of hot pain it left behind matched the roiling fury I had inside. I’d tried rubber band snapping, doing multiplication in my head, reciting calming words, humming. I’d tried exercise to tire myself out but it wasn’t immediate enough. I’d tried meditation. Yeah, fuck that.
Fortunately, my anger had eased off a few years ago to bearable levels. Now I could mostly breathe through it. And when I couldn’t, screaming into a nearby piece of furniture usually worked pretty well. Sometimes I screamed so loud it left my throat raw and metallic-tasting for days and my voice rough. But it didn’t hurt my hands, so it was a-ok.
I said, “It’s hard, right? Because we’re kind of taught that boys get mad, and fight and stuff, but people think it’s not okay for girls.”
She nodded. “Does it go away when you’re a grown-up?”
I wished with all my heart that I could say yes. That I could assure Tara she only had to feel it for a few more years. But all I could do was hope she would find her own way to deal with it.
“No,” I said. “Not really. But you learn how to manage it, ya know? You learn how to turn the anger, or the self-consciousness, or the fear into something you can use. You take it all, and you put it into your art, or your sports, or your family and friends, or into trying to change things for the better. You have to, or you drown in it.”
⌃ ⌃ ⌃
Bro,
I’m pretty worried. Mom says you won’t eat? Or can you still not stomach her cooking? Hey, do you still like those brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts? I can bring you a couple boxes and you can just keep them in your room. I mean, you should probably eat something more because I don’t think you need scurvy along with everything else, but it’s better than nothing. I just texted you that too, so if you want you can just respond Y/N.
So, I…I want to do something good with Melt. When I first opened it I really wanted it to be this place where people could gather in the neighborhood. Someplace that would feel friendly and homey. And I still want that. But Ginger just started this thing online—she got dragged into this tattoo world social media war, and it’s in response to that. It’s a thing to highlight the ways that women use tattoos to support each other, and get through really hard times, or reclaim troubling experiences, or celebrate victories. I’m making it sound all cheeseball, but it’s actually amazing. Like, all these people are bonding over the way tattoos helped them, helped other women.
Anyway, it’s got me thinking about ways that I feel like food can also do that for people. Like, maybe in smaller ways, but when I was in culinary school there were a lot of people there who had used food to change their lives. This guy who was graduating the semester I started had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, and he was opening a farm-to-table restaurant in rural Nebraska that was going to take recipe inspiration from local, seasonal ingredients and hire local people to train them. My friend Carla had sometimes eaten at soup kitchens when she was growing up and money was tight for her family, and she wanted to open her own restaurant in her neighborhood in North Philly and do one dinner a week that was free for anyone who couldn’t afford to eat there.
I just… I guess I just haven’t thought that much about ways that I could be doing more. Making shit better via the business I started. I feel kind of stupid that I’m just now realizing it, honestly, but now that I am, I want to…I dunno, figure something out. Let me know if you have any ideas, okay?
Speaking of the shop, did I tell you Ginger’s been doing my Specials board? I don’t think I have. She even redid my labels in the bakery case. Dude, it’s amazing. She can do all these fonts because o
f tattooing, so she’ll pick a font to suit the different foods. So she did a curly cursive for the croissants, bubbly all-caps for muffins, this jagged lightning kind of font for the coffee drinks, etc. Then on the Specials board she’ll do, like, a fifties diner font for Tuesday’s Tuna Melt special, and a New York art deco font for the Reuben. You should come check it out sometime, bro.
I made up this sandwich called The Ginger, and Ginger drew a little picture of it—it’s this weird combo of all the stuff she likes, and it was mostly a joke because I didn’t think anyone else would ever order it. But then, the other day Ginger was in the shop getting a coffee, and this old lady came in. She looked kind of like Patti Smith, but older, with this wild gray hair and really dark eyes and eyebrows. And she looked over the whole menu, then she saw the description board of The Ginger, and she said, “Holy shit, that’s the greatest sandwich I’ve ever heard of.” Ginger’s eyes got huge because that’s exactly what she said about the sandwich. The lady got it to go, and I told Ginger that was totally her in fifty years. I swear, if that lady ever comes back in and she actually did like the sandwich, I’m going to send her over to Small Change to be Ginger’s new best friend.
You know, I bet I could totally make you brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts from scratch…
C
Chapter 16
Christopher hung up his coat, brushed snow out of his hair, and dropped the familiar white bag from Melt on the coffee table, but didn’t sit down. He walked over to my easel. With only two weeks until the show, I’d begun painting whenever I had a few minutes, not bothering to put things away.
“Jesus,” he murmured, reaching fingers toward the canvas. Usually I had a momentary lurch of fear when people did that, but I knew he wouldn’t touch it.
I stood behind him. It was coming together but it definitely needed work. There was something about the folds of the shirt that was off, making them look strangely flat.
He shook his head. “That’s amazing. I don’t know how you do that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
When he turned to face me, his expression was intent and unreadable. “Can I confess something?” he asked, and my blood ran cold.
“Um. Yes?”
“I was really fucking jealous of Daniel.”
“Uhhhh.”
“Because you were so happy to see him and you made time for him, and you have all these nicknames for him. And I had this whole speech planned that I was gonna hit you with once he’d left.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “It was gonna be about how I get that you and Daniel have your whole psychic best friends thing going on and that I wasn’t trying to intrude on it or mess it up. That I’d kill to have that good of a friend. That, um, if I’m really honest, I guess I was hoping that I could have something like that with you. But that it felt like there was only one space for someone close to you in your life and Daniel was already filling it.”
He shifted uncomfortably and I stuck my thumbs through the holes they’d worn in the seam of my cuff over the years.
“And it sucks to feel like I’m yapping at the edge of the picnic blanket for scraps or something, if you don’t want me to have them.”
He was looking at the ground, and the image of him as an enthusiastic, unwanted puppy ended me. “You were going to give me that speech?”
He nodded and looked up, and his eyes were liquid gold. “When you texted me to come hang out with you guys, though, I…” He shook his head self-consciously. “Dude, I was so stoked. I felt like maybe we were really doing this? Maybe you really did have space for me. Maybe you really did want to let me in more. And then it felt so easy, hanging out with you guys. Like maybe we could have that even when Daniel wasn’t around. Possibly.”
The sheer number of maybes and possiblies from a man who was usually so confident told me how hard it was for him to say this stuff, even though he was making it look easy. I admired his bravery. I admired it so damn much.
If he was saying that he wanted with me the kind of intimacy I had with Daniel, only more, then I wanted that too. A partner in crime who was also…a partner.
The way he’d phrased it also made me think. He’d said maybe I did have space for him, as if there was only so much of me to go around. And, as I’d just spent innumerable hours insisting with United Ink, maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe there was plenty of space, if I just changed the way I’d been thinking about things. If I stopped thinking that being with Christopher was taking time away from other things, and started thinking about all the ways that it was giving something to me.
And the second the idea registered, my whole viewpoint shifted, like the rotation of the camera that reveals the floor is really the ceiling.
How long had I felt like I had to pour every ounce of me into the shop and the business? Because I loved the work, of course. But also because I wanted it to succeed and I’d told myself I knew what being successful looked like. It looked like buying the business as fast as possible; having as many clients as possible; getting as much visibility as possible. Those measures of success, though… I’d thought they proved everyone wrong about my abilities. But really, hadn’t I just taken the metric my parents used to measure success and applied them to my own business?
What if I didn’t have to do it the fastest, the most? What if the true measure of success was being in charge of my own view of what success meant, of how I wanted to run my business, of what else I wanted in my life?
“Ginger?”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m having a fucking epiphany is all, one sec.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I…I’ve been doing things in a certain way for so long. And I just realized as you were talking that I haven’t been choosing them as intentionally as I thought. I—fuck, I’ve been…I’ve been thinking in a damn box and I didn’t get it until just now.”
Christopher sat on the couch, like he was ready to listen, but he didn’t press me. I sat beside him and reached for his hand. My thoughts were swirling madly, ideas and reevaluations tripping over one another too quickly to express them.
“I think I just let something go that’s been fucking with me for a long time,” I said, half in a daze. “I need to think about it some more.”
I needed to sit down and put paid to what I really wanted. What I really wanted. Not what I was doing out of twenty-five-year-old spite for my parents, or in order to have a come-back to fuckheads who dismissed me, or to hold up to myself in the mirror in moments when I felt insecure. But what I actually valued.
I was about to be thirty-five goddamned years old. It was time to let go of everything in my life that was reaction. It was time for action instead.
And the first action I had to take was clarifying things with the man in front of me. The man who was sitting, holding my hand, and patiently watching me, because he was invested in anything I had to say.
“I’ve been really scared,” I said. “Of this. I know you know that.”
Christopher nodded. “I wish I knew what I could do to make it easier for you,” he said.
“It’s not you. Or, it is you. It’s how much I fucking like you that makes it so scary. How much I let myself feel how deep under my skin you’ve gotten. How much it would hurt now if I lost you. And then I get all messed up, and—”
Christopher used the hand he held to pull me onto his lap, his other hand in my hair, his eyes intent on my face. “You’re not going to lose me,” he said fiercely. “I’m so in this, sweetheart, I don’t even want to say because I feel like I’ll scare you off. I—I’m so fucking gone over you.”
He traced my mouth with his fingertip, then my cheekbone. His eyes were hot and he never looked away. I felt like a feather drifting over the rooftops, kept aloft by the breeze and a kind of happiness I’d never known, and I grabbed onto him, suddenly afraid I might float away.
I nodded, trying to turn my happiness into words, and failing.
“It will take some time for you to trust me,” he went on. “For
us to trust each other. To feel comfortable with each other.” I nodded again. “I’m pretty patient.”
Then his eyes shadowed.
“I’m patient, but…only if I know there’s actually a chance. I’ve been thinking a lot about how it was when me and Jude were kids. Since he’s been back, you know? When we were in high school, he’d hole up in his room for days. My parents would bring him food because he wouldn’t come out to eat. They’d talk to him and he’d just kinda stare through them. But I’d, uh, I’d sit outside his door and tell him about my day sometimes, or about getting the winning goal in my soccer game. Stupid shit, just…”
He trailed off, and when he looked at me his gaze cut straight through me.
“It felt like it was okay for me to be there, to talk to him, as long as I didn’t need him to answer. As long as I didn’t need anything in return.”
It was the same memory that Jude had mentioned at the Christmas party, though the interpretation was different. The image of Christopher sitting outside his brother’s closed door and talking to it like it was a gravestone that never answered back sucker-punched me. That’s what he did. He was always still there, offering himself out of a sense of hope that maybe he could get through.
Then my stomach twisted, because I understood what he was saying.
“I can’t feel that way with you,” he said fiercely. “I can’t feel like that again. So I guess I’m saying…I know stuff with us will take time. And I’m here for that. But I need to know you’re here for it too.”
I’d joked that it’d never work out with Christopher because he was so normal and well-adjusted. But the truth was that thank fucking god he was, because it was precisely his steadiness that made it possible for me to keep being myself, with all my moodiness and variation, like he was a fixed house in the swirling blizzard.
Part of what Daniel and I depended on each other for were the ways we were similar. And at first I’d thought the fact that Christopher and I weren’t was an impediment. But now I realized its advantage: that I could throw all the shit I felt at Christopher and he had the capacity to catch it. That’s what he’d been trying to tell me. That he wanted to know me. He wanted the differences between us as well as the similarities.