The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

but the countertop is still cold under my elbows, the way cotton bedsheets are when you first climb in.

I am a writer who listens to public radio. Of course I’ll be eliminated.

She’s got a trustworthy haircut, what an insurance salesman might get in a midwestern barbershop. It’s a lesbian haircut, I think.

I could loop my fingers around her wrist and make the tips touch.

Here’s a liability for the owner of a restaurant: I cannot tell when someone is drunk.

Then I want to cry for a different reason, and I cannot tell anyone why. I think about her wrists and her white teeth. I wonder what she thinks about me.

I wonder what her friends call her. I wonder what she would look like next to me in a photo.

But I don’t have to tell anyone. Brandon doesn’t have to know, remember? The woman in the men’s suit doesn’t either. She has no idea that a single glance in my direction, her eyes on my skin, would keep me awake all night, fantasizing.

It’s my secret. I’ll keep it here, with me. I can visit my secret whenever I want. Knowing this feels luxurious. That’s the word for it. Luxurious.

I’m sweating in only a tank top. She steps toward me, and the sun explodes off the paving tiles. I raise my hand to shield my eyes.

I am a stage actor in a play about a bus stop.

In another iteration, I could have lived it differently. In some other life, I could have stood next to her in a photo.

Her smile was disorienting, like being blindfolded and spun around.

I could use it as fuel, something to bring home and burn, let both of us feel its heat. But this isn’t that, I say. That’s what scares me. I don’t want to share this with Brandon.

I liked the way its warmth was different from the sun’s warmth. It was my mother’s heat.

I didn’t answer. I had thought I was straight. Straight enough to not think about whether I was straight.

No, I said. I rolled onto my back again, let my fist find the blanket between us. I said, I’m afraid if I do, I’ll burn down our marriage. He made a noise, and then I knew he was crying. It sounded like he was breathing underwater.

In his place, I would not have been kind. But he was. Now I’d made him cry, and I knew he was crying not only for himself but also for me. He was crying with me. We were both afraid, of the same thing and of very different things.

We both cried. I wasn’t alone with it anymore: he was with me. We had a shared secret. We would carry it, we would interrogate it, we would outlast it. We.

The smooth skin inside my elbow found the smooth skin of his waist. His skin was like June’s.

The first time we kissed was in the kitchen of my apartment, against the closed door of the dishwasher in mid-cycle. Everything whirred.

I felt like I could split open at any moment and it would all spill out, the jelly of my insides, like the alien in a sci-fi movie who looks like a woman but in the act of love is revealed to be a glowing column of light.

But what could, and should, I compromise on? How does anyone know?

Do you know you could have done that? Do you think your story would be different?

‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’”2

I remember exactly how it felt to slide myself under his arm, fit the front of me to the side of him. We stood that way for years, until at some point, we stopped.

Of course it wasn’t like that, and of course it was.

We hit the ground like thoroughbreds, pacing each other.

Anyway, even if he had the idea to open a restaurant, I never imagined he’d do it. This was a man who had, after all, also considered robbing banks.

When I finally came to, when my book was at the printer, I saw that the lease was signed and our basement was impassable for all the scavenged pots and table bases, chairs, and professional kitchen equipment. I understood that I had been terribly wrong. He was going to open a restaurant.

A friend of mine used to have a phrase taped to the wall of her office: Accept it as if you’d chosen it.

Accepting it, this thing I had not chosen—this was not defeat but evolution. This was what I’d heard called “resilience.” This was sanity.

Once I’d recovered from the shock and terror that we were, in fact, opening a restaurant, and once Brandon had recovered from his shock and terror at my shock and terror, we began to sort out a plan.

It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable.

A person’s got to be on good terms with adrenaline to make it as a professional cook: you’ve got to like the rush, rise to meet it and ride it through to the end of the night.

I found a place I could accept in the thing I hadn’t chosen.

I’ve never minded cooking only for myself, never needed to be feeding another person in order to justify doing the work.

I wanted to find him in our bed, curl around him like a vine. To miss him felt good and right, because I’d lost something real, our particular way of love.

Every couple fights the same fights over and over, and we too had choruses we’d return to.

He’d dismiss me as “irrational” or “crazy,” which had the logical effect of making me crazy.

I must be punished, and I will do it myself.

We were good at good intentions.

I saw in myself the power to burn us down, and I hoped he could stop me, pull me out.

It’s normal to burn sometimes, he said, and he was right. He could soothe me if I let him, and this would pass. I had the power to raze us and the power to choose not to.

Here was something we both wanted. Our secret kept us warm. In the dark, I pressed the length of my body to his. I had missed him, and here he was.

She was my invention, a pencil sketch from a fever dream that I now pored over for hours, days, weeks. I colored her in with fantasies and fabrications. I made her up.

the instructor asked us to write for ten minutes about a fantasy meal.

When I sat down across from her, our knees knocked softly like gloved knuckles.

They wore loose, boxy jeans that frayed at the pockets, what clothing companies like to call “boyfriend jeans.” There was evidently no boyfriend.

I wanted them to take me in like a stray.