By Jaquira Díaz
It is the end of summer and we are sweaty and breathless and dancing. We have been herded onto the dance floor, released here and expected to abandon our inhibitions. And we do. We are overcome with too much Johnny Cash and Marvin Gaye, too much “I Want Your Sex” and “Rub You the Right Way,” songs we haven’t danced to since our college days or our high school reunions or our weddings. We do not think about the real world—it exists outside this ocean of pulsating bodies. We are not concerned about how they might see us, all of us with our hips gyrating, our limbs entangled, our hands exploring, discovering, conquering.
I am swaying, singing along with every song, and I am graceful, glorious — cheeks flushed, moist curls sticking to my forehead, the back of my neck, my shoulders, beads of sweat collecting there. I feel the music vibrate through me, fingers to toes, the beats hammering on my chest, filling me. I am breath and rhythm and sex.
And you. You are an awkward woman — off-beat, feet not cooperating, missing every step, arms flailing, your shirt’s underarms stained with half-moons of perspiration. But you are beaming, enjoying every second of it, hopping around on the balls of your feet, moonwalking. You are perfect and don’t even know it.
When you step on my toes, you smile, shrug. I shake my head, return the smile. You lean over, whisper an apology, and although you tower over me, I feel your breath against my neck. You are a tall woman, and I am an average girl. I will turn twenty-six next month. It will be my birthday and you will not know it. I will cry in the shower, silently, desperately, cradling myself while my husband of four years irons his pants in our bedroom.
But this summer, this night in Sewanee, we dance. We keep dancing, another song, and another, and another, until the night is almost ending and some of us retire to our separate rooms, some of us are off in small groups, headed to the after-party or the 2 a.m. poker game.
We are friends now, most of us, friends for life. But a week ago we were strangers, shaking hands and offering small talk, smiling awkwardly at each other’s name tags, pretending to be surprised by what we found there. JENNIFER MEAD, Sewanee, TN, photographer. NENUSKA SANTIAGO, Madison, WI, fiction writer. We were artists, some of us, professionals. But that was a week ago, a lifetime ago, and those were other people, a different you and a different me. Tonight, right now, we are music, we are summer, and though some of us are decades past middle age, we are alive with the thrum of this heat, and we are all, every one of us, young.
* * *
At lunch we sit among a group of fiction writers. It is the morning after we meet, but it is like you and I have always known each other. Even Ahrend, my very sexy and very gay conference boyfriend, wants to know if you and I met before Sewanee.
“Yes,” I say in a British accent, “we know each other quite well really.”
The writers seem interested, and someone asks how we know each other exactly.
“She was my high school poetry teacher.”
You look down at your iced tea, trying not to meet my eyes and give anything away.
I push food around on my plate, skewering two cherry tomatoes with my fork. “She was also my lover,” I say. “And not necessarily in that order.”
You look up at me with wide eyes, shake your head. You are a Southern lady, and would never think to say such things. Everyone laughs. Truth is we met last night while having drinks at the French House. We were introduced by another writer, a beautiful woman I have a crush on, and I suspect, so do you.
You lean back in your chair. “You know, I have a feeling that you are very dangerous.” You smile, tilt your head. “You’re bad, aren’t you?”
“You need a B.S. filter around her,” Ahrend says. “You never know when she’s joking, or when she’s actually telling the truth.”
“They’re all lies,” I say. “You know that.”
“So you were never a porn star?” Ahrend asks.
“Only on the weekends.”
You’re still smiling at me. “I don’t know,” you say. “You look like you could do some damage.”
I want to tell you that you’re right, that I’m capable of terrible damage. But months from now, weeks really, when you no longer take my phone calls or reply to my emails, you will know this without my having said it.
“I make shit up,” I say. “You can’t believe anything I say.”
“Honey,” Ahrend says, “we all do that.”
I look directly at you across the table. “This is not the real me, just the conference me.”
You sip your iced tea. “Is that right?”
“Trust me,” I say. I point my fork at the crowd, the poets and writers sitting at their tables, name tags dangling from their necks. “All of these people, they have to be actors. Nobody can be this fucking nice all the time. When they get back to the real world they won’t know what to do with themselves.”
“And you?”
I don’t blink. I don’t think about the other writers at the table, like spectators. I think about my husband, caring for our two-year old son back home. The two of them will pick me up from the airport in Madison when I get back, and we’ll go for ice cream at Ella’s Deli on the way home. We will sit at a table by the window, and they will share a banana split. I will watch a little girl in puffy brown pigtails riding the carrousel outside, her parents nowhere around. My son will reach aimlessly for the motorized mobiles hanging from the ceiling — Spider Man and Popeye the Sailor Man and Superman. I will think of you, and how you will never know him. He will keep reaching for these mobiles, these cartoon men, even though he will never be able to touch them. It will not break my heart, because I will be watching that little girl with no parents, her figure on the carrousel like a life-sized doll.
And then I’m back with you in the dining room. A photographer surrounded by writers, outside of your world of filters and color and light. I stick out my tongue at you, and you lean forward, your elbows on the table, waiting for me to respond. You want to know if I will be lost when I get back home, like every other writer in Sewanee, if I will miss the poetry readings, the free-flowing bourbon at every reception, the warm nights spent sitting in the rocking chairs listening to live folk music at the French House. I want to say, “I can’t wait to go home.” I want to tell you a story about how much I long to hold my son, to make love to my husband, but instead I tell you the truth.
Part Two
We walk the trails among the woodlands, headed toward the Memorial Cross. You bring your camera, like always, taking so many photographs I can’t tell what you’re shooting anymore. I am fascinated by everything we find along the trail—wildflowers and mushrooms and butterflies. The birdsongs of the mourning doves, the sound of running water, which I imagine are the Bridal Veil Falls. We spot a fox watching us from behind the trees, and you take several shots. We cross paths with a family of deer that looks like they’re just out for a stroll.
“Isn’t that pretty?” you ask, in your Southern Drawl. You tell me about your favorite places to photograph, Morgan’s Steep, the boulders, the overlook. “These spots on the mountain,” you say, “have so much history.”
“And ghosts,” I say, which makes you laugh. But I insist, these old places are always haunted, everyone knows that.
I ask why you keep coming back to the same spots, taking the same pictures again and again, but you swear that they are not the same. There is always something new. You tell me about the light, and shadows. You tell me why you prefer color photographs instead of black and white. I’m excited to hear about your work. This morning, before breakfast, we’d already spent hours talking about me, about my unpublished manuscript. I told you about my grandparents in Puerto Rico, about growing up in Miami, how I moved to Madison for college a few years ago and never went back. You told me about your ex, how she’d been married to a man before you met, how she’d played games, how it was especially difficult living in a small town where everybody knew everybody else’s business. But this is the first I hear about your work.
When we come around a bend, you take my hand, pull me back, press a finger to my lips to keep me quiet. On the trail ahead, a skunk. Slowly, you hold the camera up, and then, as if in slow motion, you’re putting your eye up to the viewfinder, you’re pressing the shutter button.
Years later, long after I have forgotten your face, I will remember this moment. I will remember your stance, the slight lean forward, the arch of your back, the bend in your elbow. I will remember the sunlight falling through the canopy of trees, the shadows all around us like phantasms, and it will be frozen in my memory, recorded like one of your photographs. And I will remember this as the moment when it happens, when I realize that I am preserving this image of you, that it is fragile, fleeting, temporary.
And just like that the moment is over, we’re on the trail, and I want to tell you that I’ve never seen a real life skunk, not up close, and that maybe instead of taking pictures of the thing, we should be running for our lives, the other way. But you are at home among the trees and the wilderness, this is your mountain, and I am left back, standing just outside of your world.
* * *
In a few weeks, on the day of my twenty-sixth birthday, my husband will announce that he has a surprise for me. He will call his sister in Fitchburg to babysit for the night, and he will take me out to the new place on Broom Street, the only Puerto Rican restaurant in Madison. We will both have the arroz con gandules and pernil, and even though he will love it, it will only make me hungry for my abuela’s kitchen. I will become nostalgic for Puerto Rico, and I will miss my grandparents, and I will wonder about you in Sewanee and about your grandparents and how if only we’d had more time you might have told me about them. And I will be back in that spot on the mountain, on the overlook, where the sky opens up and the world looks infinite, vast. I will imagine myself standing next to you, and you with your camera, taking panoramic shots that look different every time. I will remember how you let me hold your camera, showed me how to look through the viewfinder, but no matter how hard I tried, the world below was always out of focus.
Before dinner is over I will drink four beers, even though I hate the taste of beer, and my husband will ask if I’m alright. I will nod, and I will feel guilty but will not lie to him. Instead, I will remain silent. He will not notice.
He will talk about work. He will tell me about the customers who brought their cars into the shop this week, about how all the dealers overcharge them and they don’t even realize it. He will not ask about me. I will sit in silence, and it will seem strange that he is a mechanic and I have no idea what that entails. I will not remember the last time I thought about my husband at work. I will not remember being twenty and in love, or twenty-two and in love, and it will be like a weight that has been dropped on me, like a final thing. There will be no birthday cake, no candles to blow out, and I will not know that before next summer, the restaurant on Broom Street will shut its doors, a sign will be hung on the picture window: FOR SALE by owner.
Part Three
A week into the conference, at a book signing at the university bookstore, writers hover over food tables, piling mountains of cheese and hummus onto tiny plates, popping strawberries and Kalamata olives into their mouths. Some of them wait in line to get their books signed, others browse the shelves. I’m standing by the bar, a glass of pinot in hand, when I catch a glimpse of you at the top of the spiral staircase, standing in that familiar way, your lens aimed directly at me. Candid shots are the most honest, I remember you saying the night we met, your camera pointed at a group of unsuspecting poets. People are their truest selves when they think no one is watching.
I am tempted to smile, or to set my glass down and pose, but don’t. Instead I step back behind the Local Authors section and hide, finish my wine in a single gulp. I breathe. I recall the last five minutes, the last ten, wonder how many pictures you took before I noticed you watching me. I try to make out my reflection in the empty glass, check out the crowd. People are refilling their vodka tonics, or absorbed in conversation, or snapping up the last remaining copies of This Is Not Your City on the front tables. No one notices me hiding from you. No one watches you at the top of the stairs. It is like we are invisible, you and I, surrounded by dozens of people who don’t see us. When I step out into the aisle again, you are gone. I turn for the bar, to get a refill and pretend that it was not me hiding from you a second ago, like a teenage girl. But you are on the other side, taking pictures again. Without thinking, I turn back toward Local Authors, and you follow me, but this time I know you are following me, and I burst into fits of laughter. And then you’re laughing too, your camera hanging from a strap around your neck.
“What are you doing?” you ask. But I don’t know, and I can’t stop laughing long enough to respond, and then, somehow, you are hugging me, your camera filling the space between us. We are two girls, hiding in plain sight in the middle of a crowded room, laughing and laughing in each other’s arms. We forget about everyone else, like they have disappeared, like they never existed.
When we finally stop, catch our breaths, I think about what will happen in a few days when everyone goes back to their real lives. We are still embracing, my chin resting awkwardly on your shoulder, when I say, “I’ll be gone soon.” And although I can’t know for sure, I imagine your eyes are closed when you say, in your Southern way, “I know.”
You caress my shoulder briefly then pull away like you did something wrong, pretend to adjust the strap on your camera, and I feel our age difference for the first time since the night we met. You are in your late forties, already graying, and here I am putting on fake British accents and telling raunchy sex jokes. I want to ask you if this matters, if this is the way you see me, a schoolgirl with a crush. But I don’t say any of this, and I don’t tell you that I want to run my fingers through your hair, feel the brush of your eyelashes against my face. That I’m still burning where you touched me.
* * *
When I am back in Madison, after my birthday, after months of not hearing from you, I will still feel your presence all around me. I will be walking the trails in Caretaker’s Woods and wish I had a camera. I will be riding my bike around Lake Monona and think I spot your truck driving by. I will know it is impossible, that you are seven hundred miles away. But still.
I will be kneeling in the garden, pulling weeds, picking tomatoes and peppers, and the pungent earth will remind me of mornings in Sewanee. I will be sure I smell you, and I will kneel there breathing, breathing. I will be distracted, and not notice my son descending the steps on the back porch, not notice when he takes a fall, face first onto the concrete slab, until the screaming pierces the silence like a spear. My husband will come running, lift him up into his arms, and my son’s blood will cover them both. I will think that there is so much blood, too much, and try to remember how many pints of blood the human body carries, and if it is the same for a toddler. I will be frozen there thinking about the blood, and my husband will give me a look that says, What the hell is wrong with you? We will rush him to the emergency room, where he will get four stitches above his left eyebrow. I will apologize over and over, insist that I could not have known, but my husband will not absolve me. My son will be fine, and even when he is a grown man with boys of his own, I will touch the scar on his brow and feel ashamed.
My husband will not trust me with our son for a very long time. He will hover over us. He will watch me while I bathe him, triple-check the car seat, monitor his breathing while he sleeps to make sure I haven’t smothered him. For days after the accident we will not speak. For days we will eat dinner silently, and I will stare down at my plate, and I will be certain that he knows everything, that it is written on my face.
On a rainy afternoon I will slip down the same steps on the back porch. I will land on my backside, pain piercing my tailbone, shooting through my ribs. I will be down for a long time, grinding my teeth, unable to breathe. I will think I deserve this, that I am an awful person, a terrible wife and mother. When I finally get up, I will grab hold of the railing and look up, and be surprised to find my husband standing on the back porch, a beer in his hand, a lit cigarette pinched between his lips. He will say nothing, and it will feel like all the air has left my body, and that will be much worse than the fall.
I will want to tell him that I am sorry for not loving him enough. I will want to remember what it was like to feel safe in his arms, or happy in our home, but in a couple of years it won’t matter. Neither one of us will remember, and neither one of us will care to.
Part Four
My last night at the French House, you bring me a bouquet of Charms Blow Pops. I told you about my sweet tooth on that first night, a confession I made only after you professed your love for Sonic’s soft peppermints. We sit in the rocking chairs on the porch, sucking on lollipops and listening to a group of playwrights singing a not-so-bad cover of “The Weight,” complete with an acoustic guitar accompaniment. There is an air of sadness in their singing, maybe because tonight is the last night, maybe because we are all certain that we will never have a summer quite like this again.
Ahrend pulls up a rocking chair, and so does the beautiful woman who introduced us, and they begin a conversation about going home, and getting back to our lives and our projects and our jobs and our loved ones. I try changing the subject, suggest we take a walk down to the swimming hole, since we never made it down there, but no one feels like walking or swimming or changing the subject.
And then, the beautiful woman picks a lollipop from my bouquet, begins to unwrap it. In the years that follow, I will return to this moment again and again, hundreds of times, thousands. I will try to forget but it will be impossible to unremember her smile as she asks if I’m excited to see my husband again, or Ahrend’s eyes widening as he sees my expression, and then yours.
Your face.
The look you give me.
When I am forty, fifty, when I can no longer remember the blue of your eyes or the curve of your lips, I will remember this look. I will return to each moment we spent together, recall every single chance I had to tell you, ask myself why I didn’t, but will be unable to conjure an honest answer. I will remember the slump of your shoulders as you rise to your feet without a word, camera in one hand, keys in the other. I will remember your footsteps on the porch, the slow walk to your truck, the playwrights crooning in the background.
* * *
When my son is twenty-six, long after I have left his father, he will marry a girl he is madly in love with in La Plaza de Humacao, in Puerto Rico. My grandparents will be gone more than ten years, having died one month apart the spring my son turned fifteen. The sun will shine brightly in most of the outdoor wedding pictures, and I will stand next to my son in half of them, watching the photographer, a middle-aged woman. There will be a moment when I think I recognize her stance, and I will imagine that it is you behind the camera. I will know that it is irrational to think so. But I will do the math anyway, and picture you in your sixties or early seventies, gray and wrinkled and sagging — a different woman, yes, but the same bend in your elbow, the same Southern accent, the same light.
After the photographs it will start to rain. We will hustle inside the ballroom, all of us drenched, and I will regret paying three hundred sixty-five dollars for hair and makeup. My son will dance with his new bride. They will be wet, but happy. Then the lights will go down, and the dance floor will be full, and they will be surrounded by people who love them.
I will dance with his father for the first time in over twenty years. He will be divorced for the third time. I will be alone, again. We will dance without thinking, like we never did in the six years we were married, and with both our families watching, with our new daughter-in-law’s family watching, he will hold me. That’s our son, he will say. He will kiss me on the lips, and it will feel familiar. I will kiss him back and it will taste like wine. And then he will ask me what happened all those years ago. I will shrug. I will smile. I will keep dancing. I will think of friends I haven’t seen or thought about in years, about my abandoned manuscript. I will think of you.
What I will remember: how you returned for me that last night. How you found me walking back from the French House alone. How you pulled over along the side of the road and offered me a ride. How I got in your car and tried to explain why I didn’t tell you before, how I didn’t think I needed to at first, how everything changed when I met you. But you didn’t let me finish. You put your hands on me, and I tangled my fingers in your hair, climbed onto your lap, pulled my skirt up right there in your truck like we were both teenagers. And afterward, with my face in your hands, you looked into my eyes and asked me to stay.
I studied your face for a while and then said, “You’re crazy.”
But you were serious. “Get your things and come back,” you said, like you knew exactly what you were asking. “Do what you have to do. Take care of whatever you have to take care of, and then come back.”
And right there, by the side of the road and under the moonlight, I promised I would leave him. I promised I would come back. You kissed my forehead, turned the ignition, and put your truck in gear. We held hands all the way back to Humphrey’s Hall. You parked out front, and before I got off, you kissed me again.
“Come back to me,” you said. And then you let me go.
So many years later, I will be back on that dance floor. I will be swaying and the music will fill me and I will be a girl again. You will be there, and you will be forty or sixty or seventy or sixteen. We will dance all night, one song after another, and we will be laughing and laughing in each other’s arms. I will be twenty-six again, breath and rhythm and sex, and you will be awkward and perfect. We will be young, we will be alive, and I will know that I could have loved you. We will be sweaty and breathless, and it will be the end of summer.