the babitz diaries: 1.2

 A Beautiful Little Fool

Written 10/28 about 10/27

I explain it like this: I see my future life as a series of photographs. I can see the grain of hardwood floors, stiletto-scuffed. I can see a coffee-table littered with notebooks and magazine pages wrinkled, like fingers held underwater. I can see a fire escape, two tattered pillows marking perpetually saved seats, ideal perches for people-watching and stargazing; a black cat, an orange cat; a rumpled bed; a glass-top record player; too many books to count; art taped to walls; water cups on nightstands; peeled oranges, their rinds curled into bracelets of pulp. In the photographs, there are people. I care for them. I make them toast. They sleep on the couch. They light tapered candles and we sit around the coffee-table and we all bat moon-eyes at each other, laughing. Sometimes, I am holding someone’s hand. Sometimes, there is an arm around my shoulder. The only face that isn’t blurry is mine.

I have always dreamed. I was born dreaming. I grew up dreaming. In this way, I have lived in many places, despite having never moved. S and I grew up in the same town. My house is seven minutes from hers. Our memories weave through similar landmarks, our conversations perpetually returning to the same names. Here is the map of our lives: twenty minutes from Salem; an hour from Boston. Predominantly-white town. Upper-middle-class. Friendly in middle school; friends in high school. As juniors, we dissected pigs in anatomy, wiping Vicks beneath each other’s nostrils before trying to determine the sex of our animals. S was the one to gag as we squinted at formaldehyde-wrinkled genitalia. For Halloween, we dressed as characters from The Office. S stood on a chair in the school library during study hall to re-enact “Prison Mike” while I wrung my hands in the fiction section: a true Pam. We were both smart; we were both, in our own way, suffering. We never spoke about it - not then. There are few people in this world with whom you can communicate your despair soundlessly. For me, S was one of them. 

In college, we went our separate ways. She left, I stayed: business management, English and education. Before what is arguably now my “biggest mental breakdown” to-date, I reached out to her; she had moved back, and was planning to live at home for a while. In a few months, the roles will reverse. I will go. She will stay. 

October crawls to its slow death. One weekend, we get brunch at our favorite French cafe, drinking lukewarm water from juice glasses. Over crepes and lemon squares, we decide, with blase resignation, that we owe it to ourselves to do one (first and last) Salem Halloween. The costume is determined almost immediately. Gatsby and the Green Light: me in an oversized black blazer, bowtie choker, black tights and Docs. S in a lime-green tutu, matching top and fishnets. 

Halloweekend: Night One. In S’s kitchen, we scarf slices of white bread, taking Polaroids on her parents’ 80s couch. Between camera flashes, we debrief the week: coworkers, students. 

“Did you hear who got engaged?”

“Did you see who’s having a baby?”

We line up the photographs, wait for them to develop. The rim of my martini glass is printed with MAC’s “Fresh Moroccan”, the ridges of my lip visible against just-rinsed crystal. S unzips her silver booties, placing her hand against the wall to steady herself. I scruff my bangs, watching my own face bloom through the film. At the end of the night, we’ll decide who keeps which pictures. My features sharpen, settle. I bite the inside of my cheek.

Uber and Lyft are fruitless endeavors; none of the drivers promise to get us to the station on time, and we’re antsy to leave. S offers to drive. Her father makes an awkward comment about our costumes. We force laughter that rings hollow and false, bouncing tinnily off of the kitchen counters, the stove. She hands me the aux, but it’s pointless, our conversation already covering the music. Outside, the trees are still; night is beginning to settle in. It’s warm. Too warm, I think, for October. Cool air streams through the vents of her car - though, maybe “streams” is too strong a verb. It’s as if the machinery itself is unsure of this change, this sudden and unseasonal heat. We drive past the reservoir where S met up with a boy in high school, and he refused to pay for her food. Her car hugs choppy white road lines; one hand on the wheel.

“I just can’t get over it.” 

We approach the farmstand where everyone comes for pumpkin-picking and scary corn mazes. Pedestrians dart in front of S’s car, and she rolls her eyes. They’re bold: the farmstand’s fog machine has blanketed the road with haze, and their figures emerge as if from mist. Like Heathcliff, I think. Like the moors. 

It’s me who can’t get over it. It’s me who can’t get over anything. This time, it’s a date: dinner, with one of those guys who’s nice and put-together. Friendly to waiters. Seemingly sober. Communicative. Eager. New.

Dreamers ask everyone about their dreams. We cannot help it. When I meet new people, I like to ask what it is they want to do with their lives. Often, this question comes out as, Where do you see yourself in five years? Are you happy with your job? Do you think you’ll stay here? If you could go anywhere, where would you go? When I meet new men, I try to see if our visions take similar shapes, are sketched in similar colors. My questions are forever leading toward the second pillow on the fire escape, my hand is forever holding a spare key. Will you leave with me? Will you pack up your things? Will you swear not to come back, not for anything in the world?

On the date, I find out this man has lived here his whole life, too. S and I’s map grows, if only for an hour, to accommodate his narrative. My landmarks shift, retreating into a cool mist. Salt-tongued from edamame (the date had been at a sushi joint), I’d asked question after question, fist closing around the key. He is happy here. He wants to stay. 

“I want to do the starving-artist thing,” I tell S on the drive to the train station. I am envious. “I want a bohemian-artist life. I want more.”

S turns on her blinker, nodding along to its crisp beat.

“And I wish,” I continue, twisting the stem of my martini-glass-prop. “That I could be content with staying. How much easier would it be to teach at DHS, to stay put, to buy one of those new condos downtown, to let everything happen to me without resistance?”

“There is so much of the world,” S agrees. “You want stability in a partner. Not stability in a life. I don’t blame you. There is a difference between choosing and staying.” 

“I guess, when I dream, I don’t see my future children. I don’t see my future partner. I can’t. They’re ideas, not real people.”

“See, I don’t have that problem. Kids aren’t even an idea for me,” S replies. “Though I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t adopt kids at all. Like, isn’t that just a savior mentality?”

We return, always, to the question of our bodies. What to do with them. The narratives we’ve inherited and are trying to rewrite. I have to remember that we are so young. Perhaps the wide swaths of time I devote to dreaming would be better served living, trying to act in ways that bring me closer to the photographs, the tapered candles, the peeled oranges. Do I really know what I want? I am sipping beer that I bought because I wanted to act like I knew what I was saying. I am dressed in a costume that is barely a costume. I am sitting across from a girl in green, and we are waiting for a train to come take us into a city we’ve avoided for years.

“Do you think you really want children?” she asks, after a beat. “Or do you think you’ve just been conditioned to want them?”

In other words: is that really a part of your dream? There is no room in the apartment for a crib. Pregnancy remains a scare or a joke, but I keep lists of baby names in my Notes app. Boys: James (Joyce), Henry (James)/Henri (Cole), Edwin, Valentine (Romeo and Juliet), Oliver, Bronte, Jonah (the doubter), Timothee (Chalamet). Girls: Lucille (Clifton), Margot, Jane (Eyre), Cordelia (King Lear), Anna (Akhmatova; Karenina), Anais (Nin), Mary (Magdalene), Joan (of Arc).

In my dreams, no voice calls me “mother”.

We take selfies, and the phone camera tilts in my hand, our faces out of focus. We board the train, taking more pictures on the tracks. I stick out my hips, hold out the martini glass. The car we choose is almost empty: Hugh Hefner and a PlayBoy bunny, plus a few ragtag Halloweekend crashers in last-minute costumes. It is five minutes to Salem. It costs us $3.50. 

On the date, the guy did not ask about my dreams. I would have shared them. I wonder how he would have reacted. He owns a home; I dream of an apartment. He wants to stay; I dream of different citizenship. He adores his lawn; I dream of rooftops, uneven streets. He wants children, a wife; I want two cats. An orange one named Ponyboy. A black one named Beauvoir, its neck clasped by a red collar. Not everyone dreams of leaving. 

Salem is lackluster. There aren’t as many people as we’d thought. Men cut eyes at S’s chest, my legs. At a crosswalk, we find ourselves standing next to a pair of women dressed as Barbie. One woman’s blonde ponytail swings in rhythm with her steps; the other, “Weird Barbie”, tightens her grip on her dog’s leash. A chorus of “Hi, Barbie!”s follows them, and they offer the same bright response. Their smiles are wide. Gingham Barbie’s heels click against the uneven pavement. Weird Barbie’s backpack flashes the hot-pink logo.

Having gone to college in Salem, I know downtown enough to know which houses are allegedly haunted, which have been painted-over with the intention of becoming a “spooky” tourist-trap, and which ones are just regular condos and apartments. I have friends who live here, posting Instagram stories from their street-level living rooms. I am envious, peering into the curtainless windows that separate me from my dreams. I almost step on a still-lit cigarette, and mournfully stomp out the flaring ash. 

We’re down by the Wharf now, and we’re speaking to each other in accents. French, British, Southern. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Our consonants shorten and length, our s’s becoming z’s, our intonations becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. I am having one of those moments where I Know I Am Going to Write About This Later, my brain trying to gather details: my mouth tastes like apples. S’s French accent becomes German. There is nowhere to go, and there is nothing to do but walk, following each other in the crowd. Before crossing the street, I grab her arm, throat catching on her name. 

We decide to take the next train home. We’ve only spent an hour here: milling uselessly around the Common, skulking for something to do. There is no music, there are no visible parties. There is no one to flirt with. Children abound, stopping at sewer grates to look for ghosts. Haunted houses shutter their doors; Village Tavern saturated with tourists and uncoordinated frat boys. 

S drives us home. She offers aux, but I’m too tired to DJ. She shuffles between stations, landing on Lorde. 

Living in ruins, in the palace within my dreams

And you know, we’re on each other’s team

We’re on each other’s team

“Eh, we’ll leave it on that one,” she says, waving her hand at the speaker. The belly of the steering wheel grazes her green tutu’d lap. My martini glass rolls around the floor of her car, unattended. I pinch out the soft middle of the bread slices we’ve brought from her place, my stomach bloated with carbs. The bowtie is too tight around my neck. Beneath my blazer, I’m sweaty: my body smelling like stale perfume.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Italicized text is from the final page of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Title is from page 22 of that same text.