Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for.

the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that.

My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell ...

wonder if that’s part of the reason I don’t miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I’m starting to forget.

Maybe the thrill of the relationship was the languages, that everything was heightened for me because of it, more of a challenge, as I tried to maintain his belief in my facility with languages, my ability to absorb, mimic, morph. It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.

Every conversation was a chance to excel, to frolic, to amuse myself...

look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

I nod. If I’d had some warning I might be able to handle it better, but this is a surprise attack. I nod

You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet.

We lay damp on his bed laughing, our chests pumping at the same time, knocking together, making us laugh even harder. When I looked at him I hid nothing.

His wife, Jen, came out first, and she and Luke bear hugged, swaying with exaggeration and affection.

There’s a dead spider on the blanket whose legs look woven into the wool. He would like that. It would probably end up in a poem. I take pleasure in not showing it to him.

I wheel it around to his window and ring my bell out of habit. It is the sound of me coming to his cabin at the end of the day. I want to take that sound and stuff it into a bag with rocks and throw it in the river.

‘I’m usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing.’ ‘From heartbreak?’ ‘Yeah.’ My throat is closing. ‘I can usually get out of the way before it hits me straight on.’ ‘That’s not really heartbreak then, is it?’

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

We hug goodbye outside her apartment building, talk for another half hour, and hug goodbye again.

They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.

can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

when I came back my father told me to sit down. I said I didn’t want to sit down. I heard it all in his voice. I already knew. For so long I was so mad he made me sit down. Something like that rips you out of your life and you feel for a long time like you’re just hovering above it watching people scurry around and none of it makes sense and you’re just holding this box of sneakers—’

could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn’t love them anymore.’

Then she sat up, said she had to make a phone call, lay back down again, and was dead. It was very peaceful, Janet told me. Such a pretty day.

But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

Marriage is the polar opposite of a fairy tale, my mother said.

Best friend? She’s a good friend. She’s an old friend. Just the smell of her parents’ living room would bring back three years of my life, but that was many lives ago.

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

They’re arguing about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, and the woman says he was a Howdy Doody manqué, which I think is a good line, but the two men don’t hear it.

when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you’ve coaxed it out of her, it’s hard not to always believe it.

Lynn didn’t know my mother, but she’s the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

I have a problem with that sometimes, getting attached. Other people’s families are a weakness of mine.

Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.

But alcohol doesn’t have that effect on me. It makes me tired then sad then puking.

Oscar is studying me. He’s making decisions already. I can feel this. Between our call and today he talked himself out of me, and now he is coming back around.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

I ask how she died. He says cancer and tells me that afterward he was angry for three years. He says there was nothing else. No love, no sadness. Just the anger like a big red alarm going off all day for three years.

I smile while we’re kissing, thinking about telling Muriel later that we both tasted sour because of the lemon in the frosting, and he feels me smile and smiles wider.

There isn’t that feeling you get with some guys, like they’re barreling toward one place and one place only and seeing how fast they can get there without complication or too much conversation.

‘Man, Casey. That’s an accomplishment.’ He seems genuinely happy for me. You can’t always count on a guy for that.

‘I wish I could remember what we said to each other.’

‘I like coming here. It stirs me up and calms me down in all the right ways.’

He’s more comfortable with silence than most people.

I put my key in the lock. I’m in the mood to call my mother, that happy, shift in the wind mood. I calculate the time in Phoenix. Nearly noon. Perfect. The bolt retracts, and I remember she died.

I’ve never been more aware of not touching someone in my life.

We talk and tear the labels off our bottles.

It’s impossible not to feel that I could write better with just a little more space and light.

Third date, I want to say, but I can’t with Silas. Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don’t acknowledge that they’re happening or say what they mean. It all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.

Paco and I used to play gin rummy in bed. I forgot that. Sometimes we’d find cards between the sheets in the morning.

It’s like not being able to catch my breath except that I can’t catch any part of me.

pray hard and yet I’m aware that I have no sense of what or whom I am praying to. I went to church until my mother went to Phoenix, but I never believed the stories in church any more or less than I believed in Pinocchio or the Three Little Pigs.