WINTER

The Edge of the World

Lisa Kapland

Rebecca found herself in a fog. Suddenly somewhere along this vacillating border changed at the whim of people who could say "let’s push the Sudetenland back" just as easily as they could say "let’s escape to the China room," she found herself in a fog so dense that breaking through it was like tearing away layers of clothes. There could be a man in front of her car and she’d kill him, blind from the fog. It enveloped her small red, rented Audi; it hugged her and granted her, for once, anonymity. As she could but barely see, she pulled over on the side of the road, turned the car off, and lit a cigarette. The trees were dead, scared hair on a bald landscape.

She had let it happen or maybe she had forced it to happen, asked for it, argued for it, not realizing the mantra "careful what you wish for" really did have consequence. Strategically organizing her defense of why she ought to be free, she had begged for freedom. She had tried to be everything, to be fully present to everyone, to give one hundred percent everywhere, and in doing so, she had spread herself thick. And now she was to blame for the disconnect.

Jeffrey was a man who she was supposed to love, a word itself which had a random value anyway, she was not sure what its value was. Could anyone be sure? You could only be sure, understand what the word meant when you were so truly absolutely swept up by it. But when you were not? It was like all those words that meant some version of scorn on the SAT. You knew they meant something that emitted a growl, just as you knew love meant something that was to emit a smile, but you couldn’t remember exactly its definition. If asked to compare and contrast, to make analogy anywhere else? You could not. Such was with love. You knew the emotional essence behind it, what was supposed to be there, but could she really say love is to love as Rebecca is to Jeffrey? Was that its closest definition? Jeffrey talked of the future, of children, of households, of dogs, but the truth was she didn’t want to think of those things because as beautiful as they would be to have with Jeffrey, as much as if she were going to have those things she’d want to share them with him, she wasn’t sure she wanted them period. Because the beginning of children and dogs and futures and apartments and houses meant the end of life to her, meant that she had already decided, it had been signed and notarized and she could never turn back. She could never go back to the short days before and the long nights and the sideways glances and the dark corners and the beating heart and endless self loathing and the sickness and the flying. She could never be unstable, she would not be allowed to be unstable. She would always have to be happy because she had chosen, and this, this was the edge of the world. She could say yes and die, or she could say no and die alone.

Rebecca had packed her bags, taken two Ambien and a twelve hour flight across an ocean. All this only to drive through Eastern Europe in the heart of February which looked nothing like a heart. She had rented her Audi and the man at Hertz in Berlin had looked at her funny, amused by the girl, or woman, rather, who did not know where her drop off point would be. He gave her a map of Europe dotted with yellow H’s and she assured him somewhere it would be returned. So she had driven through Germany, stopping only at pensiones as a respite from the bitter cold, a coffee in the morning, and a glass of wine at night. She had politely declined "native cuisine" and men who spoke in guttural languages as they offered to buy the next glass. She did not want meat, she did not want conversation; she only wanted to look outside the window at grey snow and blinking lights and drive further out of her life the following day.

When Jeffrey had asked her to marry him she had not thrown up but she had cried. She lay in a man’s arms she knew she was supposed to love, she knew she was supposed to need, and she only felt alone. She knew that he loved her, that he felt connected to her, so why did she feel not that way? Why was she always screwing things up? Feeling disconnected. Why couldn’t she press a button somewhere like turning on a computer connecting to the internet, connect. Instead she was like one long dial tone, a phone off the hook. But she didn’t hate him, she had not yet reached hate. She felt when they were making love that there was love there, there was comfort, communication. And she knew this because she had reached hate before. Sitting on a dingy bed facing a dingy wall crying, a different him in tears.

"Is this gonna be the last way we see each other?" Bennett said in between sobs "all runny and crying?"

"No," she said with tears down her face because she didn’t know what to say and because she wanted to believe that maybe she could piece herself together and feel what she had felt before. But she was pieced together. In truth, she had never fallen apart. She didn’t want him to touch her even, he who had touched her without question for awhile now and she knew she wouldn’t feel. Worst of all, she knew "no" meant "good bye". And Bennett had sat on that bed in a shit hole of an apartment with baskets of flannel shirts and torn jeans and CD cases piled in towers around the room which may have been all he would ever amount to, but she wouldn’t ever know now, and she only cared fleetingly. From then on, she would only care in the rare moments, driving down side streets in Hollywood, passing restaurants that served pad Thai (Jeffrey hated pad Thai), remembering when she had first felt it, whoever that girl had been, walking down a street in Los Feliz, his arm around her. It was October, when the sky was starting to darken early, the five o’clock hour that made it feel like life was closing in on her, and he said "This is what life is, holding someone you love in the fall". And she thought perhaps Bennett could keep her from falling, but he had known. He had known all along because just earlier, they had sat across from each other at a window seat at a diner while she picked at a salad and he ate a hamburger and fries, and Bennett grabbed her hand and said, "You looked so sad for a moment I thought I was going to cry." She had ravaged someone, maybe for the first time, and cried for what she had lost, as though a part of her had been given away, and she would never get it back.

Rebecca wiped her nose on the back of her hand. The cold made it run, and she was too tired to rummage for mini Kleenex. Here she was, in a place, formerly, she couldn’t have been. A place too "East", the weight of such a word she would never herself be able to understand fully, but which still seemed to her a great sense of progress, of moving forward, always moving, even if in blundering steps, even if in the fog. She was driving somewhere along the German-Czech border and it was daytime, but everything looked like night. She had purposely chosen the bleakest time and the bleakest languages. She wanted a reason to feel as wholly alienated as she did. She wanted her surroundings to match the matter of her body. She pictured its cloudy blood, its lightless inside. What everyone lacked was hope, some intangibly positive sense that it would all be okay, and you could cross from East to West and back again safely.

What she had lost that first time, that first love, flannelled, ripped and torn, was not a part that would grow. No, rather, it was round and whole like a year, like a number, like an age. It was not something she could reclaim. And it wasn’t fair because she wanted to reclaim all the ages! She wanted to live it over again, not do anything differently, she didn’t have regrets, she just wanted to live it over, have the hope, the road in front of her! It wasn’t fair that after a certain point the realm of possibility shrunk so small to choke you, and what was less fair was knowing that. Was seeing the end without the hope it could be completely different. She wanted that outlook without end. She wanted to have no understanding, no vision, no sight of the finish line. She wanted to remember when there was no end, when there was no cut off, when she wasn’t being constantly reminded that half her life was over, giving her only half left to live. She didn’t count old age; she failed to see anything lovely in that. She never wanted to look in the mirror at lines and wrinkles and a sunken face and say, "I was so beautiful then." She had drunk the Kool-Aid and believed in youth, and there was only one way to preserve that.

She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked out at the unending fog that wasn’t so much ominous as it was unconnected; a foreign land, a foreign language, a foreign fog. She put her cigarette out in the Audi cup holder that had now become a harbor for ash and aluminum gum wrappers. It was interesting to think what it must have been like to live only for survival, to be stuck in a place in between two ski towns, old wooden A-frames and unmarked trails, goulash at the bottom of the hill, and be scared for your very existence, your very being. She looked into the dense woods, the tree after tree after tree, long and tall. She felt no connection to these woods, just as she’d known she wouldn’t. She knew she had never been here, in this life, or any other one. She felt no connection to thick beer, thick ankles, charcuterie plates, living in fear. And yet there were people who had never seen anything else.

She had a choice. She could turn around, go back to Jeffrey, have beautiful children, a life that could be just as full as anybody else’s. A life with so much life in it, bills, tuition, raises, broken faucets, dusty windowsills, broke down cars, paperwork, work, medical insurance, first steps, first words, diaper rashes, little league, carpool, that she could risk failing to see whatever glimmered between those moments, she could become an unhappy person, a difficult woman, someone who no longer suffered the bipolarity of being twenty something and instead just became permanently disenchanted with life. How could she know she wouldn’t become that? How could she be sure? That’s what her mother was, and her mother’s mother. A long line of unhappy brow lines and forehead creases and burnt toast. And she wasn’t like that, she’d never been like that. She’d always been a positive person, a hopeful person, but lately, she had seen life seep into her pores like a wash of negativity, and she began having feelings, conversations, words that scared her, that made her think perhaps we all become somewhat hateful, angry people.

If life is a series of moments is every moment the edge of the world? She stared at the road in front of her, wishing that it was summer. Wishing she could be that little girl with a check card when nothing mattered and consequence was just another challenge to argue your way out of. She wished that she could go back to nineteen in a grey mini-dress and pink heels on the steps in front of a building somewhere downtown, the financial district. And he had called her to meet her. Not Jeffrey, but the "he" of all "he’s", the "he" to measure all other "he’s" by. He had said "Come down! I’m in New York for a wedding, we’re at some dive bar, I’m not sure you’re gonna like it." But Proctor could’ve been anywhere and she would’ve come. And they sat on the steps, in the dark, in a deserted place, outside, and Proctor stuck his tongue in her mouth and put his hand on her bare thigh, and she thought that right then the world could end and she would be happy.

"Hey," he said and that "hey" became the "hey" to measure all "heys" by. That deep, soft voice, almost like a whisper and that face that looked at her and understood, hazel eyes, and it was like laying in linen sheets or making love on the ping pong table, the only fantasy she’d ever had. And they went back and she slept at his hotel! And had breakfast in the morning! Lox and bagels ("You had fish and then kissed him?" her best friend said) and the waitress thought they were married, and she rode back to reality in a taxi and looked at him standing there smiling through the window, and thought she had done what she set out to accomplish years ago.

It wasn’t until they met again in Los Angeles, a small house in the depths of the still, silent part of the valley that may as well have been a motel, that the fantasy cracked. Before she could’ve hung on, before she conquered. But here, he sweat all over, a thick wet carpet of black chest hair, and nothing happened, but she had taken a shower (with his soap! And his towel!) to wash his smell off her because in heaving and hawing, he had fallen off his pedestal. In a small house in the valley where Proctor phoned her from the next day "It wouldn’t have mattered how long we fooled around, it was never gonna happen. I went to the doctor, I’m having problems. I just wanted to tell you." When she really didn’t care, she was better off not knowing anyway, all of this was not part of the fantasy. It was life, crumbling the only giant there had ever been. He was rotted and lived a pathetic life, and she never needed to see him again. But she still thought of him, wondered if he still loved her, even though, looking back, she knew, for him, it had probably never been love at all.

Then, maybe, she was lucky to have Jeffrey. Maybe someone you could connect with eighty or ninety percent of the time was better than some people were ever going to get. Maybe the times with Jeffrey when she knew what love was, the shape of the word, its weight, its feel, was enough to make up for the times when she didn’t know what anything meant and enough to make up for the times that she had sewn together, the patchwork of her youth. She could always have it, it would always be hers. No matter how far forward they could make her go, no matter how deep and far into her life, they could not steal the first half back, it could not be erased. And it didn’t mean she had to be a different person, she could be the same person, just older. She could be growing into more than just a wife, and more than just a mother. Let Jeffrey be the husband, and let her take his hand. Not because she needed it, but because she had had the choice. And if life were going to be so awful and anxious and scary sometimes, she wanted Jeffrey to laugh with and share the better times. And at the end of the day, he would take care of her, he would stroke her hair and kiss her forehead, and there would be love between them.

She looked around herself, so far from home, so far from any dream she had ever had. This was not the Romance she had suspected. This was not a lonely artist wandering far from home, cutting herself off from the world, and plunging into independence. The cold had made the windows fog and she was loosing feeling in her toes. Perhaps it was not supposed to be this complicated, but it was. She would pick herself up and go back home and say "Yes darling, yes." And hope that her life was wider than she suspected it was and equally as full.