Past Times

I was born in July, but you wouldn’t know from the way it welts my neck. Over the phone, my mother’s voice comes through in splinters of sweat and stress. The job is going fine, I tell her. I am the goddess of search engine optimization. The tech speak scuttles her off to prune the hydrangea.
Goddess scrambled is dodges, plus an s. I was laid off two weeks ago.
Back in September, my roommate Danya and I toasted to our senior year at Wellesley, and to what we were sure would be a spangled future. The foam bubbling out of our pilfered champagne flutes felt frothy and right then. By spring it was sour and flat and we made ironic eyes as we clinked. At the office, Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” looped over and over, chafing against stale button-downs and filmy teeth until the shredded lips of my supervisor pushed out a version of those world-crashing words. Now, in the 95-degree heat of the studio I share with Danya, I have only Sarah Bernhardt and Greta Garbo, who pass out baleful stares through faux-vintage sepia.
My whole life was planned in sturdy blue. Danya says hers was red–molten. She would, but I think she’s right. Red has proven sturdier than blue –even community theatre is several steps above life-guarding.
***
Heat follows Danya as she clangs through the door.
“My mother is killing me. She simply refuses to accept that playing Viola is a job.”
“Because you’re not being paid.”
“Money comes with experience, Alison. And sometimes not even then. Do you think Meryl Streep was paid in the beginning of her career?”
“She supported herself by nannying for some Park Avenue princess.” Danya’s face slackens.
“How on earth do you know all these things?”
“I read a lot of People on the guard stand.” She bows to the glossy tabloids, insurance for her future fame.
“Ugh, nannying? How tragic. Perhaps that’s why she was so brilliant in Sophie’s Choice.’ “
“So true,” I murmur.
***
I come home to the smell of soy sauce. Danya has a new apron, white with cherries, but she is about to lose the bow. I retie it, choking the knot into plump symmetry.
“How was work, darling?”
“Ugh,” I sigh, and watch her nose suck in stir-fry vapors, shove them out.
“Oh Al, I love you dearly, but why don’t you go home? You don’t really want to spend your summer in subterranean vat of chlorine and old ladies. The varicose veins alone would slay me.” Except she wouldn’t be able to see them through her stupid bangs.
“Because. How many times do I have to tell you? Home equals defeat.”
“We just graduated, Al. Give it some time. I know there are countless magazines who would love to hire you.”
“Now’s not really the hiring time.”
“Well in the meantime, why don’t you get another web design job? They pay well, don’t they?”
“So it’s okay for me to lower my standards?”
“Well, I have no other talents. The stage is my world, my only world.” I roll my eyes at my cherry bow.

The pool is stultifying today, and Danya is right about the varicose veins. I need a vacation. Last summer I spent a week couchsurfing in Barcelona, taking pictures of Seusian drip castles and ordering glasses of rioja two at a time from sullen, caved-in bartenders. I’d like to go back, I think.

Tickets to Barcelona start at $1100 roundtrip. $950 for London. $1300 for Paris.
“We should roadtrip,” Danya says. She is wearing a patchwork dress. Her granny boots smell like a basement.
“What about your play?”
“Mini road-trips? We could go to Provincetown. Or Newport? Or maybe Kittybunkport? I always liked the sound of that.”
“You want to?”
We decide on Ipswich. Danya has never been to the North Shore, and I’ve been craving fat-bellied fried clams, sluicing oysters…

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