# 04-24-2012



## Badly Drawn Girl (May 3, 2015)

Our friend Libby stayed over for dinner Friday night...Libby from Woodstock, the girl who was dating Luke's old friend Damian, who had the house on the mountain last summer.

Turns out Damian is not exactly the most stellar human being ever...he and Luke had a falling-out last August and they haven't spoken since, and with everything else going on between then and now I hadn't seen or heard from Libby since the solstice: that last good evening last June when we all drank rosé and sat by the stream and drove through the hills in her purloined BMW, feeling slick and sexy and dangerous in the warm dark night.

It's not easy for me to make female friends, let alone ones I'm actually attracted to in some sense, so for a girl to appeal to me in both respects is rare...I guess because we were both in the same situation, refugees stranded by our significant others in a strange small town in the mountains - we sort of bonded, I felt less threatened by her...which, aside from finding some of them aesthetically pleasing, is how I normally perceive most girls: as some kind of threat.

So her black car with her Colorado plates was sitting in the drive when I got back from work...the two of them were sitting out on the deck with a Becks and a bottle of white wine. She was wearing an oversized off-white tunic and black leggings and boots, same as always. She smiled and said hi. I smiled back.

It was warm and humid, there were thunderclouds building on the horizon, far out across the marsh and the hills...it was the kind of baited-breath weather that makes your hair stand on end...they smoked and Libby poured me a glass of wine and every once in a while would interrupt him to ask things like "Sarah is this true? What do you think?" as if I were the arbiter of everything...I'd pull back into myself, consider how strange things seem from the outside, how I've become a character in someone else's book...always called on to verify - _yes, it's real and you're here - welcome_...the stormclouds swelled, the peepers in the marsh grew loud in the still air...I was happy to be where I was...

After a while we were functionally inebriated, and then Luke proposed the idea of fish for dinner, and we both said that sounded fine, and I told him to go to the A&P in Patterson since it was getting late and the Asian market in Hopewell Junction where we normally get our freshest seafood would be closing...no, he said, it was only just past seven, Hopewell would be open for at least another hour...Libby shoots me a sympathetic eyeroll as he marches confidently towards the car, then tells "us two girls to behave" with sly, undisguised delight. I eyeroll back, she laughs and lights a cigarette, the Audi disappears in a cloud of dust down the drive.

Then just me and her, we sit by the open doors leading out to the deck, CNN with the volume on low in the background (the second Boston bombing suspect is being flashbanged out of his hiding spot), and drink tequila and lime and talk quietly as a violent sunset advances across the western treeline. Every once in a while there will be a low mutter of thunder, subliminal; we smile and singsong "It's coming" and watch the thin curtains move in the wind.

She's nice to me, which to me is unusual, since pretty girls rarely are. I feel a sense of ease around her - maybe because she was closest in a way to the whole thing, as close as anyone could get up there anyway. I remember meeting her for the first time last March while I cooked for everyone barefoot in the little cabin. I remember wishing in hindsight that I'd worn shoes. She's pale and dark-haired with the clean uncomplicated lines of the naturally and effortlessly goodlooking. Her sunglasses make her look like a frail celebrity. I notice her scars and wonder if mine are as immediately obvious. I hope not.

The wind picks up and whistles through the gaps in the windows. She makes me another drink, turns the volume up on CNN - the suspect is now in custody, floodlights hovering in infrared above a suburban backyard. Maybe it's the voyeurism inherent in the spectacle, the sense of dissociation...or maybe not, maybe it's just the weather, the wildly vacillating barometric pressure that's making everything feel slightly unreal, makes it feel like I'm moving through a kind of pleasant, narcotic fog.

My phone rings - Luke (gone for almost an hour now) is shouting on speakerphone that he's been to four different supermarkets looking for salmon. Trying to keep the schadenfreude to a minimum, I ask him if he tried the A&P.

"That's where I ended up," he says irritably, then graces us with one of his trademark through-clenched-teeth sighs, "after _forty five minutes of driving_. I'm just _letting you know_." Libby is laughing silently to my left as I tell him that I'm sorry to hear that and that I'll get the vegetables started. "Thanks for letting us know!" she cackles as he hangs up.

In the kitchen, I smile apologetically as I wash and quarter a collander of redskinned potatoes. "He doesn't cope well with...life."

She shrugs, a breezy gesture that says simultaneously _...Artists_ and _...Men_. "When did you guys get back together?"

I wouldn't say we're back together, I say - then, catching her looking around, at my stuff piled haphazardly on the couch, my hairdryer on the steps, her cute _Sure, sure_ smirk, I qualify: "Things are better now that we don't live together."

"I guess that's the difference with Damian." She pulls her feet up beneath her, folds herself like origami into a tiny corner of the overstuffed armchair. "Do you know what he said to me earlier, when I told him I thought I might be pregnant? He texted me saying _'This is really the worst time for you to be telling me this. You don't understand the stress I am under right now.'_"

"Good lord."

"Like, at least Luke, he has your best interests at heart."

I smile, unmoved. "What leads you to draw that conclusion?"

She lights another cigarette. I notice for the first time the three or four thin silver bracelets encircling her left wrist. There is another gust of cool air, another premonition of rain, a grumble of thunder outside. "Well, he loves you anyway."

"I don't know if that's the case."

"He told me he does."

There is a resistance inside me; the wagons circle the campfire. "I think he wants to think he does."


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## Jaguwar (May 4, 2015)

I love your writing style very much, and hope to read more. You have a knack for description.


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## Travelerkid93 (May 20, 2019)

Great story


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