the babitz diaries: 1.3

 

Outlaw

 

Written 11/15 about 11/16

 

    I don't usually go out on Tuesdays. My city girl life is reserved for weekends: nap, then coffee, then snack, then eyeliner, then train, then club. But I am young. I am very young. When my friends invite me to go out, I must. I will only be here for a few more months. I can sleep when I'm older, I tell myself, closing the hooks-and-eyes of my new top. I can sleep when I'm dead.

    Tonight is line-dancing at Loretta's. Before driving to the train station, I stuff a mass-market paperback into my bag. Predictable. I have a deep fear of being stranded somewhere without reading material: I cram books into tiny purses, into back pockets of jeans. Lovers have teased this habit of mine, but at least I am consistent in my quirks. 

    On the train, I skim Wallace Stevens poems, reaching out from the hush of my sleep-haze to catch stray lines and stanzas. It's a used edition. The previous owner's cursive, penned in blue-ink, clashes with the black gel of my Pilot.

Complacencies of the pegnoir, and late 

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, 

And the green freedom of a cockatoo 

Upon a rug...

    I'm wearing my brown leather jacket: the one I thrifted for $20 at Salvation Army, the one with the plethora of inside pockets probably once used for cigarettes. Now, they're stuffed with MAC lipsticks (Film Noir, Paramount, Devoted to Chili, Fresh Moroccan) and mints. My breath smells of Wint-O-Green and coffee, which I chugged while touching up my baby bat wings. Line-dancing is a perfect excuse to wear my cowboy boots (genuine Mexican leather, purchased from Bill's Wild West). I clomp through North Station with the high-heeled swagger of a Buckle Bunny, making a beeline for the bathroom. 

    The North Station bathroom is a rite of passage. A ritual. A Meghan Night Out Requirement. One must walk off of the train to a good song (something like, let's say, "Black Cat" by Red Rum Club, or an equivalent; you want music that makes you feel morose, edgy), book it to the bathroom, and stare at one's reflection in the bathroom before ordering an Uber. I think the reason why I love the North Station bathroom so much is because it feels like a liminal space: the lights always flicker, the stall doors always refuse to lock. The mirrors are gunky. The floors are cracked, stalls slick with pats of smushed toilet paper. The soap dispensers only work if approached by a single slanted, pleading hand.

    I order the Uber, snapping selfies in the big stall. Gabriel is on his way. The archangel? I think, staring at his photo. 

    The last time I went line dancing, I watched a thrum of bodies kick and stomp in Loretta's stuffy barroom. Pressed against the jukebox, I'd counted scuffmarks on wood. I had tried a few dances, watching denim limbs twist into unfamiliar shapes. Between songs, I sipped water from a plastic cup, surveying the wash of Ariat, the few cowboy hats bobbing in a sea of halter tops and ponytails. I was reminded, as ever, of the Southern states my extended family calls home. 

    It's hard not to think of them: the extended family. I'd written about them in my personal statements, my Fulbright essays, in choppy poems too confessional to publish. They cropped up during the holidays: like clockwork, the group chats would burst with requests and question marks. My sister and I were the oldest on my father's side: the first to attend college, the first to have jobs. The first, now, to leave our parents' houses. Schedules will never align as they did when we were in high school, when we could rely on predictable calendars. Spring break, Christmas break, Veteran's Day. Unwilling to venture beyond the comfortable humidity of the Bible belt, our family relied on us to make the drive to Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Florida. They felt unknowable, like mythological gods, forever shrouded in swaths of drugstore perfumes and church hymns, untouchable in their many acres of land.

    I clamber into the Uber, greeting Gabriel and his AirPods. The black interior of his car lights up red and white as we hurtle beneath tunnels and through traffic. Any attempt to read Stevens is futile, so I stare out the window. Across the Charles, spindled trees are wrapped in Christmas lights; on the Esplanade, runners pant, shaking gloved wrists in rhythm with their strides. Gabriel changes lanes without signaling. The toe of my cowboy boot presses into the back of the passenger seat - my wilted attempt at backseat driving. Gabriel chatters to his friend.

    I'd bought my cowboy boots back in January 2020. We'd gone down for Christmas and had spent an unusually cold week freezing in t-shirts and jeans. It wasn't supposed to be that chilly: not in Mississippi, and not that time of year, but it was. My girl-cousins and I huddled for warmth, tipping our New Years' Eve-crowned heads together beneath blankets as the boy-cousins lit fireworks. The dry grass, tanned as summer skin, was briefly illuminated by the flurry of temporary sparks, before being shrouded again by January pitch. We blew warm air into our hands as we traipsed to Bill's Wild West Emporium, and we'd relished the heat as we pulled on pairs of stippled red and black and brown boots.

    Gabriel lets me out right in front of Loco's. They don't always drop me so close to my destination. My last Uber plopped me a block from Loretta's, and I'd had to make the perilous journey past House of Blues. As I'd walked past, I'd scoured the line for anyone I knew. It was pointless. No one I really wanted to see appeared, and I felt stupid for looking. 

    Z, J and I get tacos and queso, discussing recent dates. In a stroke of girly coincidence, Z and I have both opted for lace tops; hers black, mine cream and brown. We're both in cowboy boots. J, fresh from the MIT lab, is clad in a cardigan and turtleneck. On the walk to Loretta's from Loco's, Z borrows my lip balm, and I reapply Paramount, watching clots of Hot Mulligan fans migrate to House of Blues. Riffs of whiny, Midwest-emo pours out from the doors. I'd lamented over the ticket price, wishing I could afford to go. My friends, bless them, were not into that genre of music. I am not ready to go alone. I am not ready for that kind of solitude. 

  I often wonder if my extended family thinks of me, of the things I create. It is a silly thing to wonder: Of course they do, right? On both sides, I am the only writer, solitudinous in my snobbery (literary criticism, Plath, Poe, Faulkner). This, too, I have included in personal statements and essays. For a brief period of time, we were connected by Pentacostalism's thread; then, I cut it. Unmoored, the cousins and aunts and uncles and paternal grandmother floated over the tide of obligation; untethered, we all knew we were swimming in our dissimilarities.

    Somehow, the bouncer remembers me from last time. He lets me in - no need to flash my ID, with its forlorn photo (I didn't have bangs when I took the picture, but I did wear an egregious amount of lipstick; my mouth shiny-wet and dark with gloss). The guy I was crushing on last time is not at Loretta's tonight. A shame. I had mustered the courage to ask him to teach me to swing dance, had secretly wanted to be spun and tucked, dipped and guided. Now, drunk strangers shove through grapevines and Do-See-Dos, their laughs punctuated by our periodic claps and chants. My mouth tastes like aspartame, tongue still saturated by the Diet Coke I drank at dinner. 

    J and I have a lot of fun. I remember some of the dances from last time, kicking with lipsticked vigor. Drunk strangers jostle through the crowd, their cups half-empty of liquor. J rolls her eyes. Occasionally, cowgirls sneak out the back door, puffing clouds of vape smoke in front of the windows. One girl wears a white tank top proudly emblazoned with "COWBOY PILLOWS". 

    I remember that I am wearing my maternal grandmother's jewelry, her gold Avon chain rubbing into my collarbone.

    No one asks me to dance.

    It reminds me of Irish step dancing. Turned feet, aggressive stomping. I often pull myself off to the side, watching regulars swing dance with trusted partners. I envy their cool confidence, watch strands of hair whip with dips, arms linking up to twist and catch. At one point in the evening, I go nonverbal: in the bathroom, I swipe at my eyelids, adjust the bows on my top. J and I leave early, lingering near the bouncer to wait for my Uber (Seoul is on his way). A girl, fresh from the Hot Mulligan concert, compliments my makeup - I thank her, ask how the show was. Her face breaks into a smile, eyebrows shooting up beneath her beanie.

    "They were even better live than on Spotify!" she exclaims, and I express my jealousy. 

    In the Uber back to North Station, I check my notifications. Students are emailing, asking if I can update their grades. Tomorrow, I'll read their assignments, leave comments in the margins of their Google documents. I struggle to be young. I struggle to come of age in this world, to teach others how to navigate a place I do not even know myself. My students ask where I'll teach next year; I say I'm not sure. Wherever I go, will I dance the way I did tonight? 

    The sky will be much friendlier then than now, 

    A part of labor and a part of pain, 

    And next in glory to enduring love, 

    Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

   Outside, college students from the Fenway Five drift listlessly through the streets. They meander over broken sidewalks, in search of parties. So many leather jackets. My gaze drifts, falling back into my lap. I put on my seatbelt, hips swaying to follow the motion of the car. 

    When I was a few months old, my parents decided to drive down to Tennessee. The extended family was so excited to meet me, so my parents piled me into their black Saturn - the car they shared, the car that would burn out a few years later. It was a 25-hour ride. My mother loves to brag about how well-behaved I was. Bundled in the plastic nest of my car-seat, I did not wail. I slept, stared out of the window, cooed with patient softness. As I grew up, I remained a quiet traveler; I was good at being bored. The drive to Pennsylvania takes about nine hours; from Texas to Mississippi, nine. I loved to trace over the AARP map books, following their roads and rivers with my index finger, fabricating journeys much longer than the ones we used to make. I'd watch trees change shape and color, staring out of the window, searching for differences in leaf shape as we crossed borders and tolls. 

    My Uber ride only takes ten minutes, but my mind roams, wild and silent. Will my family visit before I have children of my own? Will they read this? Will they read any book I write? Will they understand, as my lovers did, that because they knew me, they will be written in the pages of my notebook?

    What little I have of my family - their hunting gear, their windy backroads, their small cities, their living rooms, their transplant accents - is mine. I suppose this is some small comfort. But they have nothing of me: they do not journey to find who I am. Over landline calls and FaceTimes crackled with static, they asked about the weather. When our faces, skimmed with traces of one another, were turned toward that same New Year sky, they did not ask what I thought of anything. Was it enough, I wonder, to spend my childhood and adolescence having exchanged only silence with them, these cousins and aunts, these uncles, this singular grandmother? 

    If my extended family were a town, I would be an outlaw. Cowboy boots and all. Jack and Coke. Cross necklace. Instead of a holster, a book of Stevens poems. Instead of a Bible, a diary. Push through the double-doors. Count tumbleweeds (or publications).

    My Uber driver is silent, and I am grateful. TD Garden looms in front of us, as if carved from a single block of concrete. I wait for the 10:50. Too tired to read, I leave Stevens on my lap. The spine of the book is wilted; the pages more yellowed than they were before I brought them into this city. I call my mom, promise I'll be home soon. 

    On the drive home from the Salem station, I am silent. No music. No sound. I hit every red light. 

    I realize I have not cried in three days.

    Italicized text is from Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning".