My Last Innocent Year

by Daisy Alpert Florin

When I was older, I would learn that there were other men like him, men who would bandage your wounds and make you dinner and hold your injured hands across the table. But at twenty-two, I thought he was the only one, and I wondered how I would live the rest of my life without him.

a Russian nesting doll of lies.

“For a smart girl, you can sure be dumb sometimes.”

Despite everything, I wanted him.

“Who?”

Men will really sit there and dig deeper in their lies even when you shove the evidence in their face.

I saw him look at the photo, measuring what a lie would cost him and what he might still get away with.

His eyes were crazed. He smelled like sweat and something I didn’t recognize.

I’d seen every inch of this man, and yet I didn’t know him at all.

What was a promise anyway? Just a string of words. I knew as well as anyone they didn’t always mean something.

It always happened this way; just when I thought I’d run through every memory I had of my mother, a new one would rise to the surface like sea-foam.

you can always start over in knitting, something you can never do in life. There is no such thing as a clean slate. We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.

“Well,” he said, “here’s what I do when I think I’ve made a mistake. First, I ask myself if it’s something I can fix. And if it’s not, I ask if it’s something I can live with.” “And what if it isn’t something you can live with?” “Then I go back and ask myself the first question again.”

Abe had never been allowed to have dreams of his own and so he focused on mine. It was the one thing he could give me that no one could take away.

I miss college, I miss my dad, I miss when things were easy. I miss the time before adulthood came crashing down.

A scarf was a project with no clear end, a way to outrun my mother’s words, and so I’d kept knitting until I’d run out of yarn. The whole time, I’d thought I was making it for Connelly, but it turned out it had always been for Abe.

After he passed, I gathered Alice in my arms, buried my face in her hair, and remembered I wasn’t that girl anymore. I had outrun her.

When I was young, I thought the sacrifices Roxanne had made for her marriage were unique and terrible, but now I knew the kinds of compromises you had to make as a wife, things you couldn’t ask about and things you didn’t want to know. I didn’t ask about the fire in her house the same way I never asked about the fire in my own.

Nothing had changed really, it was just time, which had run out on us at last, the escalator flattened to a line of metal teeth and there was nothing left to do now but step off.

“‘We were girls in the bodies of women. We bought condoms with our father’s credit cards, drank sloe gin fizzes, and slept with stuffed animals on our beds. We didn’t know how to fold a fitted sheet.’”

What made a girl a woman? Through what mechanism did we pass from one state to another? Had I become a woman the day my mother got sick or the day she died? When I came to Wilder or when I met Connelly? Did it happen that night in Zev’s room or was it happening right now, in front of Fayerweather Hall as the sun rose higher in the sky? In just a few moments, it would begin its imperceptible descent. I always thought there would be boundaries or milestones, something to mark the transition, but I was beginning to think the process wasn’t binary, that, like consent, it existed somewhere along a vast continuum. The lines were there only until you crossed them.

pressed on the bruise of it, coaxing out the ancient ache.