This is a chapter from Beyond Category, 2024’s novel. It is a rough draft from a manuscript in progress.
Melysian Fields
Amy Hempel wrote gruesome stories without ever spilling a drop of blood. There were no guns or knives or werewolves or even regular wolves in her stories, but by the time I’ve reached the end of one, I feel like I should have long scratches on me. Her stories are simple, almost childlike, and often seem to be about next to nothing at all. But it’s that “next to” that’s important, because her stories are just about humans going about their day next to each other. Stripped, distilled action and just as spartan dialog, but she can make you feel how savage people are to one another, even when they’re just having drinks at a dinner party.
But her cruelty wasn’t cruelty for its own sake. She just had no patience for the BS of everyday life, the masks we put on and take off and change. Or maybe, actually, she had all the patience in the world for them, because she was fascinated by the dents in the social facade. Not the ones we all know, the ones we hide or simply never mention. She poked into those folds, the joints in the wad of aluminum foil that we all take to be our social sphere, and in the midst of an innocent looking conversation, would come up with an observation that she and only she could have come up with. One sentence, sometimes a jewel masquerading as a clump of dirt, sometimes a gold plated dog turd, and you felt like someone had just whispered a secret in your ear.
Sometimes that secret sounded like a lover stroking your earlobe with her tongue and then whispering, “Strawberries make me horny,” while you’re on the freeway driving back to her place from the farmer’s market. So you press your foot a little harder on the gas and the speedometer grows from the legal seventy all the way up to a swollen ninety as she’s slowly making her way around your neck with her kisses and her tongue and once her lips reach your other ear, she whispers, “I cut the brake lines.”
And you don’t check, because somehow you realize you knew the whole time.
No wonder most of her stories were short. She’s not the kind of reading I would usually have done, but I did it to impress Melissa, the last girl I was ever together with in high school, and the first one I’d ever gone into with eyes wide open, knowing before it started that it would end, because not only was I going to be the hell out of Anna the first day I was eighteen, I was going to be out of there the first second.
And I did and I was, and neither of us had any regrets. What we had had, we had had. I still have part of her odd juxtaposition within me in the form of an appreciation for both Hempel and Jimmy Buffet. I still have my memory of how her lips were so eager to part that they’d already be open before my mouth got there, so I learned how to deal with that. And every time I’m in a liquor store, I still take a walk by the cheap section looking for the strawberry schnapps she loved and I pretended to like, because I hate alcohol that tastes like fruit. Maybe she did, too, but it was the easiest thing for her to “borrow” from her parents’ liquor cabinet.
Maybe I wanted everything to end then. I didn’t particularly want us to end, and I certainly didn’t actively wish for it. It just wasn’t going to happen, not with me going to the other side of the country and her having too much corn dust inside her to ever want to leave. But under happier circumstances, an alternate timeline where my mother stayed on her meds or her genes were tweaked just enough so she never would have needed them in the first place, or one where my father remarried with someone with an actual job or one without one but who could be perfectly happy with the furniture we had and didn’t want new carpet and a car that had to be replaced every even year or simply understood that loving a stepchild doesn’t mean you can’t love your own just as well, I could have seen myself married to her. Happily, with two or three kids. I could have taken that scholarship to Ohio State and talked her into coming with me because she’d still not be all that far from her parents. I could have gotten a degree in whatever and a job doing something and we could have bought that farm that was for sale and was vacant so it was a perfect place to park the car on a warm, moonlit night. We could have raised those little mes and hers and sat on the porch and watched the big oak tree get a little bigger every year. Lived happily and anonymously ever after, like normal people.
But in this timeline, Eileen exists, and I exist sitting in the office of her dance studio, the door closed as I type. I can hear her playing the piano for her students, the occasional giggles from her gaggle of ten year olds. I’m here because the next class is a special group of children. Tonight is the night a small group of them go en pointe for the first time, and their parents are invited for the ceremony.
After all the hard lessons and preparation and anticipation and choosing the pointe shoes that they think are the prettiest but that also fit their unique feet the best, they’re going to get three inches taller tonight on those little satin platforms, and they’re taking one giant leap for themselves. Those delicate, shiny shoes are going to be the tools that take them places both inside themselves and out, so this is a big day for them. I hope the magic of that moment will stay with them forever the way I remember the day I took the training wheels off my bike.
They’re the closest thing I’ll ever be to being a father to anyone, and I’m just here to stand in the back and witness not only their accomplishment, but to see the love in Eileen’s eyes as she watches them. She won’t be proud of herself for getting them there because she’ll be too busy being proud of them. That’s why I’m here: to be the one who’s proud of her.
There isn’t an oak tree or a field of Melissa in the world big enough for me to want to be anywhere but where I am, right here, right now. I’ve traveled all over the planet, six continents and six dozen countries, hundreds of thousands of miles, to come to rest in this exact spot, where I could, if I wanted, walk twenty feet and touch her hand and remind myself I still exist… and why.
Hempel once said that need for new love is faithfulness to the old. Twenty years later, I finally understand what that was supposed to mean, and I don’t think it means what she thinks it means. Because with every dawn, my love for Eileen becomes new, and the old day gets stacked on top of the love I had for her the day before like tiers in an eternally-growing wedding cake, and my faith in her grows. I never would have been interested in ballet if it hadn’t been for her, so I never would have had the privilege to share in a moment like what I’m about to see in a few short minutes. And tonight when it’s over and the pictures have been taken and the hugs given and the roses handed out and the tears of happiness have dried and we’re home and she’s in my arms as I drift off to sleep, I’ll know that I can’t love her more than I do at that moment. But by sunrise, she’ll make me do it anyway, because she is every day’s sunrise.
Read a recap of 2024’s NaNoWriMo, from which this excerpt comes, here.
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