by
Martin Riker
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Why did she like me? Not an irrelevant question, because the certainty that she liked me, and that other cool people I’ve known have liked me, has been my only reliable evidence, through the years, that I must be an interesting person. When my feelings about myself take a bad turn, this is the one proof that even my deepest insecurities can’t controvert. Cool people aren’t idiots, after all. You can’t fool them into liking you. If they like you, then something about you must be at least a little bit likable.
It was senior year, those exciting few days before the semester gets going, when everyone’s back but nothing’s started. I was supposed to meet her at a party that night, but she took the bus and came over to my place early. I’d moved off campus, to the old house with the big back porch next to the gas station. You could sit on the porch and watch, over the wall, the round sign rotating on its pole. She simply showed up. She’d been in Brazil all summer, staying with family. She’d wanted to take an ethnomusicology class but it hadn’t worked out, so instead she’d gone around on her own, meeting musicians, having adventures, every bit of which she was ready to recount for me. We talked in the kitchen for a while before she took out a bag of shriveled-up psychedelic mushrooms, which she wanted us to eat. It was the first time anyone ever offered me any drug other than pot, and I think I was a little bit flattered, just as I’d felt flattered freshmen year when someone first offered me pot. That I, Abby, could be mistaken for a person you simply offer pot to.
lol
I’ve always hated feeling that I have power. I like responsibility, but I hate the power that comes with it.
What the hell is wrong with me?
At some point Jason came out with beers and sat next to me. He drank beer now, which was disappointing. Then again, so did I. It was disappointing that both of us now drank beer. In high school, not drinking had felt special, like you were making a statement about the clichéd expectations of American youth. In college, beer was just beer. There were different statements to make. After some chitchat, I asked about his engineering classes, a topic we’d somehow avoided over the previous days, perhaps intuiting that it would lead to nothing good. I brought up the story about his dad.
“Aren’t you worried your life will end up being just sort of normal and boring?” I said. I could hear how presumptuous this sounded, but at the time it seemed important to say.
Jason looked surprised. “As opposed to what?”
Maybe something you actually care about? I wanted to say. Maybe something you ever once expressed interest in the entire time we were friends?
“I always thought you’d pursue music,” I said.
There are ways I could improve myself, but I am also capable. I am not powerless. I am not my past.
I am not the product of other people, not Maggie, or Evelyn, or Ed. I made myself and, if I choose to, I can change. I can imagine myself differently. I can make the imagination real. Who said that? Maybe I did. Not every phrase in my brain belongs to someone else.
Having a child doesn’t make you better than other people, but it did make me better than myself. It made me less self-absorbed, if only because I was suddenly absorbed with Ali. Being absorbed with someone other than yourself must be better than being absorbed with only yourself, but it’s still just one other person, and what needs to happen, what I think is supposed to happen in the progress to becoming a better human is that being a wife to Ed and a mom to Ali is not an end but part of a process, to train me for greater things. Finding yourself no longer alone at the center of your moral universe is only admirable if it helps you imagine committing yourself in other ways, to other things, other than yourself. That seems right. That is the person I want to be. God, I hope I remember this in the morning.
He’d been working at the Half Moon for twenty-four years when he bought the place, knew it better than even his childhood home. He knew the smell of it, the way the light looked at different times of year, in different weather. It was at the Half Moon that he learned how to fix a running toilet, how to solder a pipe. He got strong at the bar, bringing case after case of Bud Light and Ultra up from the basement because Hugh wouldn’t add a light beer to the draft options. He learned about cash there, how to accept it, how to turn it away. He learned how to handle the sales reps, which ones would fork over free branded glasses and napkins and throw a few packs of cocktail straws on top, just because they liked shooting the shit for ten minutes. He learned that though he could drink for free at any bar in town, he’d drop more in tips in those places than he’d ever have paid had he come in as a regular customer. He learned how to talk to anyone, how to find common ground. He learned how to be a vessel for people’s worries, their complaints, and he learned that he’d better not have any worries or complaints of his own. He learned how to be friendly to women without crossing a line, he knew how to make them feel beautiful without being a sleaze, and he learned how to walk those same women back when they crossed the line, without insulting them, without embarrassing them. He learned to hide his shock at some of the things they said to him, these perfectly normal-seeming women, these women in their nearly identical faux leather jackets and their wedges, their hair in banana curls like they were all heading to some pageant for middle-aged women, the things that came out of their mouths when they had too much to drink or if they’d been wronged by their boyfriends or husbands. He learned it was possible to appear to the world as an average, ho-hum person but to actually harbor thoughts that human strangers didn’t normally share with one another, until they sat at a bar for too long on a Friday night and encountered a bartender they considered attractive.
fair
Roddy was wiping down the bar. What a night it had been. If Malcolm could capture lightning in a bottle every time, he’d be okay. But if he couldn’t, what then? He couldn’t operate a place that was only half-full three nights a week. He was forty-five years old and he’d never had any other job. And he was good at this one. But middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.
:(
He thought, at first, they’d go right back to the way they were before. He thought she’d start stopping by the bar again, to surprise him. He thought she’d start grinning at him again, looking at him like she knew a juicy secret. It’ll take a while, he told himself, have patience. But then she was gone.
sad
[...] The guys came in for extra security on big nights, and Jess had a memory of the one called the Grog hitting on her even though she was newly married to Malcolm, who was twenty feet away. Pleasantly buzzed, she was waiting for the bathroom, leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, he was standing in front of her. He put one hand on her hip as if to ask her a question, and she put her hand over his and gave it back to him like she was apologizing, like it was awfully tempting but she was a good girl.
clever
A memory skittered through him, how he’d been brushing his teeth with the bathroom door open one morning and in the mirror he’d seen Jess lift his work shirt out of the hamper and press it to her face. He was about to ask what she was doing, when it hit him. He tried to never mention Emma at home, but maybe it was the omission of her name that pointed Jess to his interest. But interest wasn’t a crime. Nor was the way his belly tightened when he passed close to her in the narrow space behind the bar. When Emma asked him a question, she didn’t immediately doubt his answer, and that felt good. When she reported a problem, she looked at him with an expression of total faith that he would figure it out. One time, once, he stood so close to her as they were looking at an invoice that he could feel the light down on her arm brushing against him. She held perfectly still and so did he. Then Roddy came in and Malcolm shifted away.