As I crawled back into bed, Boots was still on his side. Here was a man so at peace with commitment, he became the physical manifestation of it. Each morning, he woke in the first position he’d settled in the night before.
“What am I going to do?” I whispered to the back of his head.
“Whatever you want,” he mumbled, half-dreaming. “You always look pretty.”
He reached his hand behind him and patted my hip, a gesture that meant both “good night” and “making sure you’re there.”
6
The next morning, we stood beneath one of the screens at Penn Station, straddling our bags. My eyes were glued to the track assignments. Boots was less competitive in these situations. He reasoned that we had tickets, which meant we had seats, and that was as much thought as boarding a train required. I informed him that this was the approach of a tall white man with no hindrances in his history and no oppression in his genes.
“Does Penn Station have to be about the patriarchy?”
“It was torn down by men and put back up by men,” I said. “You tell me.”
I primed my muscles to lean in one direction or the other, willing my synapses to transfer the numbers to my brain faster. On cue, I grabbed his hand and made him bolt with me.
“Peconic, first two cars,” instructed a conductor. “Only the first two cars will open for Peconic.”
He sounded exasperated that we were not born knowing this.
Boots and I sat in a center row, our fingers interlaced in a jigsaw puzzle of bones. I watched as the landscape shifted from apartment complexes to shallow bodies of water, birds bobbing in concert with the telephone wires. Maybe, after we got married, we could live somewhere out here. Find a town the real estate boom hadn’t touched. Somewhere safe from memory or coincidence. A place so tiny, none of the train cars open, there’s just a little chute that spits you out onto the town cushion. I thought of Clive’s mother’s story, of the lottery and the towns filled with ghosts who would do anything to go back in time. Anything.
I shook the thought out of my head.
“Are you okay?” asked Boots, squeezing my hand.
Adam’s brother picked us up at the train station, where we were trailed by a woman who’d been on the train with us, only in a different car. She swallowed her name when introduced so I didn’t catch it. She also kept a close watch on her garment bag as it was being loaded into the trunk, showing no compunction about treating the brother like a butler. Boots, in the front seat, turned and widened his eyes at me.
“Everybody in?” asked the brother, even though we had our seatbelts on already.
I always forgot how life outside the city had a completely different texture. The days were easier here, warmer or cooler upon command. Being picked up in a car with no screen or meter affixed to the dashboard reminded me of childhood. But for all the surface comforts, the materials that made up this world were much harsher. Everything was coins in the console, gravel in the shoe, ticks in the grass, ice in the pipes, splinters on the wood. We passed Jess’s high school, a stucco palace in beige. It looked like a prison. An electronic sign was having a conniption fit about an impending baseball game.
The woman and I made small talk in the backseat, which smelled of wet dog. She was in the midst of subletting her apartment, which meant she kept asking me questions but getting pulled into an ongoing text exchange about keys. Eventually, we fell into a silence. It was only in the lobby of the hotel, hours later, where guests had congregated in anticipation of a van, that I heard her introduce herself as Georgette. I wondered how I managed not to have heard a name like that. She had the same reaction upon hearing my name, launching into the Kinks song: “It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Loooow-la!”
“Yup, that’s it.”
“La-la-la-la Loooow-la!”
“It’s a good one.”
“Now that song’s gonna be stuck in my head the whole night,” Georgette said, accusatorily.
She sat with us in the van, Boots on one side of me and Georgette on the other. She wore orange lipstick and a silk jumpsuit with a deep V that she could get away with because she had no breasts to speak of. Her hair was up, revealing the parallel lines tattooed on her neck. Sobriety chic. She shook a sandaled foot in my direction. Her toenails were jagged, as if she’d been trimming them with her teeth.
“Do you remember the first wedding you ever went to?” she asked us, tucking a chunk of hair behind her ear that fell right back out. “I was like sixteen, which is disturbing because I remember going to plenty of funerals. I guess my family is better at dying than getting married. Anyway, I think it was in a roadside hotel in Reno, though that can’t be right, it was probably just like a hotel with bad carpeting but when you’re young you think all weddings should be in magical forests so a Radisson meeting room is a bummer. Have you ever been to Reno? The bad parts of town are also the sad parts of town, and how many places can you say that for?”