In Which We Attempt To Stop Ourselves From Weeping

Morning Star

by KATE NURSAS

She explained she had brought her boyfriend, Davidson Legrange, to see her family on some minor holiday.

He wore a handmade shirt with the letter 'P' on it. Her mother asked him what it meant. "It refers to Plato," he said, and she saw her mother almost imperceptibly grimace. Later her cousins, all decked out in Raiders jerseys, got wind of the fact that Davidson Legrange had written a poem for her.

She found him in her father's garage, tapping on a toy piano that no longer could produce any discernible noise other than a soft G. He had not yet begun to cry, holding his hands in his hands.

The poem began,

Night falls.
Stars manage to bow,
I see you in the light
or out of it.

You know
you should just let your
hair grow.

It went on like this, mostly about his feelings for her or himself, replete with so many broken metaphors it made her a little dizzy when she had read it the day before. She did not know if the purpose of the poem was praise or advice, but the more she thought it about, the nearer she was to the conclusion that this distinction eluded her fairly often.

While her family cut up cakes, he begged her to drive him to Home Depot. His broken Schwinn sat in the back of her truck. She watched him try to fix it outside a Dunkin' Donuts. Across from them, at a picnic table, an officiously dressed up family of four mildly ate bagel sandwiches. Their voices, low and steady, sounded like worship in the cool night.

When she pointed them out to Davidson Legrange, he shuddered, recalling her mother. It is one thing, she thought, to love the women who gave you life and another completely to be reminded of her when you really did not want to be. The faithful family joined hands around the table and let out a sigh. She reflexively put her hand on his boater.

Another part of the poem read

A lighthouse
tumbles into the ocean.

A man stands on his heels
or falls to his knees
in supplication. Your hand touches my face.

She had looked up from his notebook and told him she thought using the word 'tumbles' was inappropriate. "It's nothing wrong with the word itself." She went on: "It's the association it has with a popular website." She has suspected at first this would make Davidson Legrange angry or chagrined, but he had kind of grunted and put an index finger to his temple. Then his face softened and he nodded. She supposed that meant he felt he was the one wandering through the lighthouse, the person this was all happening to. At that thought she herself had made a face.

The moon bristled and ascended over the Dunkin' Donuts. It did not surprise her that he could fix his own bike. He had said to her more than once before that he did not understand the idea of starting something and not seeing it through to its completion. At the time had been clearly referring to a mentorship program with underprivileged youth he had joined as an undergraduate. In time she had begun to wonder if it applied to her as well.

When they returned to her parents' house, everyone was watching the game in a drunken fugue. At halftime Davidson Legrange read his poem when her cousins demanded it, brushing his bangs back from his face and periodically looking at the sky. He never met her eyes. It was not that the poem was unkind to him or to her. It was that it existed at all.

Back at their apartment in the city he kept opening and closing the refrigerator, or drawing circles on his mousepad. She knew saying something was probably going to lead to unkindness on her part, so she suppressed it. She did not think he had ever been willfully cruel, or she hoped she had not been.

The end of the poem read,

A maelstorm. A haunted, caloric cavern.
Where I stand thinking of you forever.
Your embrace.

She watched him at the desk from her sid of the bed, always about to say what she was going to have to say. His back was to her, and her mouth felt dry.

Once in a book by an author she used to admire, she read that a woman would tell you something on her own time, when she was ready for it, or not at all. This, she still believed, was not only sexist, but completely without even the slightest grain of truth that such generalizations usually possessed.

To her, both sexes seemed remarkably transparent. Even if someone she knew did not come out and explain their difficulties, it took no great insight to uncover the truth. As soon as this idea entered her mind, she knew that it was not about the world, held only as far from her as the top of the lighthouse might be from the ocean below in order to guide those who passed, but about Davidson Legrange.

Tears on a fucking mousepad. Jesus.

Kate Nursas is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Were Not Expecting That

At the Lodge

by KATE NURSAS

At the lodge it is something of a competition to act as playfully as we think we should feel.

"Do a cartwheel," Helga says. "But close your eyes first." Bob presses a napkin to his face and looks worried.

"It gives me vertigo," Jane's boyfriend says.

"You're only upside down for a second," Helga says.

"It feels a lot longer," he tells her. Everyone else is going down the mountain or up the mountain. The snow machines work overtime because it's unexpectly balmy for February.

"I'd like to see it," I say. Jane's boyfriend tosses his blonde hair back and resolutely takes a position. He pours the rest of his drink into a nearby plant and looks at each of us in turn. Before he does it, he says, "It's not just cartwheels. It's all gymnastics. But I'll try because you asked me."

He falls over, and I say, "Try to rest your eyes in the distance on something, an object not nearby."

Bob's "honestly not feeling well." I tell him I'm going to ski and he refuses to go back to his room. I ask him if he should be drinking. He shrugs and says, "I don't even know if it affects me anymore."

I get ready. He says, "I see Jane on the north slope. She's raising her arms."

"I want to get out there," I say. "Are you coming or not?" He steeples his fingers.

"No," he says, "you're right. I'm going to go upstairs and read The Silence of Lambs." He reclines back on the chaise and covers his eyes.

"Oh come on," I say. It's something about how his eyes are glancing over to the window.

"I don't want to hold you back," he says. I touch his knee and he gives a reaction halfway between a shudder and a convulsion. He sits up.

"Sorry," he says, "I wasn't expecting that."

Helga comes in with Jane, who wonders if we have seen her boyfriend. "No," I said, "and he's not much of a gymnast either." A solid woman in a bright smock serves us what I think is grenadine and vodka which we all sip out of straws. A person can hardly expect to ski in such conditions.

"How is it out there?" I ask Jane. "I saw you raising your arms."

"Sometimes I like the fake snow better," she says. "It makes me feel like my mind is generating the climate."

"Global warming is something we can all embrace," Helga says, taking off her jacket and doing an inspired rendition of the macarena.

Now that Jane's going back out, Bob can't feign illness any longer, if that's what he's doing. He's more competitive with her than anyone except her boyfriend. The blonde viking never joins her, and when we come in for dinner, he's nowhere to be found.

"Maybe he did have vertigo," Helga says. There's a nurse on duty with long brown hair and she tells us she gave a man fitting the description of Jane's boyfriend a tylenol and a ham sandwich. Under his breath Bob says, "That's service."

The next morning is our last at the lodge. We all want to go out together. In my jacket I find a little red rose and a note that says, "Come in before the others." I show it to Helga on the lift.

"It's not Bob," she says. "He told me he didn't want to hurt you again." I don't know why, but I laugh. Maybe it was because I was hearing something I already knew but had never consciously accepted.

"The rose is kind of crumpled."

Instead of going in first, I wait until everyone else is complaining that there is no drink service on the lifts. We start to lose the light, but it's something about me, probably. I find I never get cold. Jane is the second to last, and I admit I get great pleasure from watching her as well. She looks like a lion slipping through plain as she moves back and forth.

Helga's the first one to meet me. "Did you have fun?" she says.

"Yes," I told her.

"I figured out who it was," Helga says. "It was Jane's boyfriend. The rose wasn't fresh."

"So?"

"He must have put that in there yesterday. That's why he left. He felt rejected."

"When you write about this," I say, "Take pity on us all." She hands me a margarita.

Kate Nursas is a writer living in Chicago.

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