Spring 2024

I once got so sad at a party that I left, feigning a headache, and drove around the corner to sob in my car.

I wasn’t a teenager suffering some adolescent cruelty, but a professional woman with a successful career and a happy marriage. And I was lonely. For years, I had suffered from an acute sense of isolation, causing me so much pain that even a party for a colleague was too much to bear. That afternoon, as friends hugged, shared news, and reminisced, conversations I wasn’t a part of, I experienced a familiar ache. The people around me formed circles of connection and rapport, while I floated on the periphery, alone.

I’d lived in the green and spacious Midwestern city I called home for twenty years. I came for a job, in a year when nearly everything in my life changed for the better. After an exhausting job search, I had finally landed a coveted tenure-track university teaching position. I went from barely putting food on my table to paying debts and starting a 401(k). The urban area I moved to was blessed with shimmering lakes, leafy parks, and cultural amenities which regularly placed it on lists of the best cities in the US to live. To make things nearly perfect, I soon met a kindhearted, intelligent man and fell in love. But my new life came at a cost. It meant leaving a host of cherished friendships.

“What are you doing to my dog?”

I shouted to the shouter when I crest the hill to see Buzzy holding a tall, thin man hostage, his back pressed against a rough pine tree, his shiny mountain bike in front of him like a shield, yelling, “get away,” “get,” “get away” to our black and white Blue Heeler cross, who, all hackles and teeth, looks like a mishmash of porcupine and werewolf, the glint of the bike a red blanket in a bullfight and I flash back to proudly choosing Buzzy from a litter of nine because when the cranky guy chucked frozen fish at them, Buzzy appropriated one for himself, leaving his siblings to fight for the other and I had that shimmer of doubt (again) that I hadn’t chosen well but the man in the crisp mountaineering clothes took one look at my face, leapt onto his bike to speed away

Eleven months after my husband died, on a sunless, empty Saturday in January, I sat in our now hollow, silent bungalow. A thought struck so intensely that I spoke out loud. “I need something alive in this house besides me.”

We had planned to add a dog to our household. Whiled away hospital hours, turning the pages of A Complete Book of Dogs, debating the merits of Collies and German Shepherds. Whatever kind or sex it was, we would name it “Crystal,” in honor of my husband’s family dog, a Collie.
I adopted a two-year old, fifty-pound shepherd/terrier male in need of a haircut. I call him Crys. He answers to Crystal, too.
On our first night together, I settled Crys on a thick bed of blankets in my bedroom. I figured he would be used to sleeping on the floor.
Not so.
When I woke the next morning, he was curled tightly in the southwest corner of my bed as far from me as possible. That he’d waited until I was asleep before sneaking onto the bed was proof he understood he was in forbidden territory.

We aren’t from that kind of stock. We’re too poor for that. We use the bone for flavor. Get what little meat and fat can be pried from it and we don’t complain. I suppose it never occurred to me. Never knew what we were lacking.

Ingredients
• 1 pound pinto beans
They should be sorted and rinsed but I doubt he ever bothered with that.
• 12 cups water
He’d just fill the pot. Eyeball it. Turn on the faucet. Position the pot beneath the stream. Let the tide rise and rise until it catches up with the beans. Let the lines meet. Once the beans begin to boil, you’ll have to hover over the pot, keep adding water, fighting the steam, that dissipation of water, like the evaporation of memories over time. The gradual loss.
• 1 ham hock
Some people use a chunk of ham. Cut it into cubes. We aren’t from that kind of stock. We’re too poor for that. We use the bone for flavor. Get what little meat and fat can be pried from it and we don’t complain. I suppose it never occurred to me. Never knew what we were lacking.

In high school, my friends and I spent weekends playing roleplaying games, rolling oddly shaped dice and creating characters, second selves we inhabited for as many consecutive hours as we could steal away from the real world.

Depending on the game, these alter egos were jet-setting super spies or starship captains, Marvel super-heroes or half-elven wizards. But those characters, and the games we played them in never lasted.
Star Wars lasted.
Star Wars, my senior year of high school, was epic. Roleplaying games were usually just me, my friend Jonah, and his older brother Bruce. But for The Star Wars Roleplaying Game (Second Edition), we assembled a bigger group: me, Jonah, Bruce, our friends Marcus and Fred, and Molly, who was that rarest of things to find in a high school gaming session—a woman. I don’t know exactly why Molly or the boys liked playing Star Wars so much. But me? I was seventeen, closeted, dating a girl, and living with Republican parents in North Florida. I desperately wanted to be someone else, to face a different set of problems.

A woman on a motorcycle sped past, a blur of blue. She vanished around a bend. I walked along a high, winding road in Phuket, on my way to pick up laundry. Below the cliff, waves unrolled in lacy layers. The motorcyclist reappeared and skidded to a stop.

“Want a ride?” With her apple cheeks and thick black curls, she reminded me of my best friend’s sister in high school.
“Yeah,” I yelled, and raced across the street.
She turned her bike around. I straddled it and wrapped my arms around her waist, hugging her tight, all but burying my face in her wall of curls.
“Back up,” she said gently, pointing down. Her bike was a two-seater, the second seat slightly raised behind the first. I’d squeezed myself crotch-first into the driver’s seat behind her. Blushing, I scooted back.
She gunned the engine, and we tore off, blazing down the road. I squinted against the warm, salty wind. Her curls whipped my face. Neither of us wore helmets. If I died in a wreck with the ocean below me and this woman’s hair in my mouth, I was cool with it. There were worse ways to go.