Untitled: Chapter 2

New Age

Even through the dark lenses of Josie’s sunglasses, the world was just a little too bright.  She adjusted the frames, pushing them further up the slope of her nose just incase that might help dim the late afternoon sun any.  It didn’t.  Josie sighed.  The little woman beside her looked up from arranging the rows of fruits and vegetables.  She asked Josie if she needed any help, but she just shook her head in response.  She offered the lady a smile and walked away from the stands into the store, a small bag of oranges clutched in her free hand.

            The store would have been blessedly dark if it hadn’t been for the brightly colored decorations.  Never the less, Josie removed her sunglasses, leaving them in a nest of messy hair atop her head.  She walked slowly down the short rows of shelves.  Packages and cans stared up at her, strange pictures under the labels in other languages.   She could pick out a few of the words here and there, but she didn’t need to know how to say “black beans” in Spanish to know that the can with the picture of them would be one she would never pick up.

            Josie hated shopping for food.  She couldn’t remember the last time she had visited a grocery store.  When she finally decided that she needed something more than coffee and vodka she ventured to the small store that always seemed to be on the way back to her apartment no matter which part of the city she was coming from.  It was small and easy, and even the new owners had started to recognize her.

            She picked up a few things from the shelves that could survive easily in the fridge or cupboards.  Most importantly they required no culinary skills.  She’d have been quite happy to survive on takeout leftovers and maybe bread.  Leftovers never lasted as long as she thought they should and her bread had molded over a week ago.

            The small armful of items was spilled out on the counter as the owner greeted her.  She gave the owner the benefit of a half twitch of a smile as she dug through her pockets for the bills she’d stuffed in them.  The man was trying to make conversation with her, but she wasn’t listening.  He put everything in a bag for her and she handed him enough to cover the number that glowed at her from the cash register.  It’d have been a small number if what she had wasn’t already one.

            “See you next week,” he said, his words heavily accented and thick as he handed the few coins back to her in change.  Josie paused, looking up at him.  She smiled.  He was probably right and she thanked him.

            The bag spilled over on the passenger seat as she drove to her apartment.  The bag of bright oranges rolled around the dingy grey fabric.  She ignored them even as they landed with a thud on the floor.  Her attention had been absorbed by the song blaring through the speakers.  The Velvet Underground, New Age.  She could remember when the album came out.  Her brother had played it on repeat for hours, stealing the small record player their mother had kept in their parent’s bedroom.  He would lay in the middle of the room he shared with the two younger boys smoking, the music so loud you could hear it two doors down.  She was barely 11 then.

            You’re gonna get in trouble, Josie would always say.  Not because their mother would have hated the heathen music The Velvet Underground made, but because Tate had touched something of their mother’s.  He dared to disturb a relic left behind by her.

            He did, of course.  The first time Tate had been caught with the record player their father broke his arm.  Back then Josie had been thankful that Tate had gotten off as easy as he did.

            The car heaved itself into the parking space just under a palm tree on the opposite side of the building as her apartment.  She turned the car off, but kept the stereo on.  The song wasn’t over yet.  She fished the small silver lighter out of her pocket and lit one of the almost-stale cigarettes she kept in the glove box.  She exhaled the deep drag and relaxed against the upholstery.

            Josie couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought of Tate.  He was a memory long lost.  He was the first one to leave the house.  It was the middle night when he left, just after his 18^th birthday.  He had snuck into her room to kiss her goodbye.  That was more than she’d given to her younger brothers.  She never felt guilty.  They hated her before she left just as much as they had hated Tate after he had.

            Something’s got a hold on me Lou Reed sang in his slow drawl.  Josie couldn’t help but want to sway to the slow melody of the song.  Instead she turned the sound up.  The speakers popped and crackled a little, but it didn’t bother her.  She closed her eyes and tried to remember Tate.  He had the golden tanned skin like hers, the dangerous dark brown eyes of their father.  He spent enough time outside that his hair was a lighter brown than hers.  It looked like their mother’s.

            The first year after he’d left, he wrote to them, telling them about where he’d gone and all the shit he’d been doing.  After that they stopped suddenly.  Josie never knew if it was because he’d forgotten or something worse.  She wanted so badly to blame it on their father.  Maybe he’d come across a letter and kept getting them before Josie could.

            She turned the car off when the song drifted into the more aggressive beat of Head Held High.  The oranges were picked up off the floor and stuffed back into the bag.  The smile she had worn for the grocer had long since faded.

            Josie wanted desperately to believe he was alright somewhere.  Maybe married with a family, even.  She couldn’t even pretend to be that stupid.  She’d have rather been forgotten about than the alternative.

            Mrs. Spencer was waiting at the mailboxes.  By the look she gave Josie, she thought that, for a moment, Mrs. Spencer might have been waiting for her.  The old woman didn’t say anything to her.  Nor would she get out of Josie’s way to check her mail.  She waited patently for a moment, trying her hardest to offer the woman a sweet smile.  It did no good.  She had been convinced the day Josie moved in that she was absolutely no good.  Not that she was particularly wrong about Josie, but the building hadn’t caught fire, nor did Frankie or Shane or Jason terrorize anybody in the building.  Though she pretended to see how Frankie’s fire-engine red hair and Shane’s tattoos could mean that they were vagabonds.

            After a few moments Josie asked her to move.  Mrs. Spencer’s eyes narrowed at Josie.  It looked ridiculous rather than scary.  She was a short woman and had to almost crane her neck to look up at Josie.  When the lady refused to move, Josie shifted the bag of food to her other hip and shoved past Mrs. Spencer to her mailbox.  There was nothing in it.  Josie cursed silently to herself before pushing all the way past the old woman to the stairs.  Even the electric bill would have made the entire ordeal worth while.

            The keys were set on the kitchen counter along with the bag of groceries as she kicked the door closed with the heel of her boot.  The bag fell over against the cheap linoleum countertop and the contents spilled across it.  Josie left it alone for a moment in favor of taking her boots off.  They were thrown in the closet and the cold hardwood floors felt good against her sore feet.  The oranges were picked up and shoved into the empty refrigerator.  She kept one out for herself.  The cans and boxes of various other foods were put in the cupboards and the old, and moldy on certain occasions, were thrown in the small trashcan under the sink.

            Even as she tried to focus on her task, the image of Tate lingered in the back of her head.  She had tried to find him once, just after she moved to L.A.  After almost four years, the task seemed pretty fucking hopeless.  She’d borrowed Frankie’s truck and driven out to the desert once.  She could remember the address scrawled messily on the envelope.  It had burned itself into her memory as she addressed the return letters to him.  They never came back to her, so she could only assume he’d gotten them.

            When she got to the apartment, there was a woman living there.  She couldn’t have been much older than Josie, plump and ammonia blonde.  She’d even tried asking if she had known Tate.  No dice there.  The woman couldn’t even remember the name of the landlord.  He was a drunk who could barely stand up straight.  So much like their father.  It was a wonder he had lived there at all.

            She sat down at the messy kitchen table.  It only had two chairs, but most of the time that was more than she needed.  Across the surface of the table a mess of newspapers, coffee cups, and scribbled half-finished poems covered the dark grain of the wood.  She sat the orange down on a small pile of lined paper, just staring down at the messy handwriting.  She read the words on the paper, and it is I who rises at dawn.  They stared up at her, but meant nothing.  She couldn’t remember what had been so significant about that.  It had been once.  She pulled it closer, reading the lines before it, but she set it back down before standing from the table.

            The apartment was too silent and Lou’s voice echoed through her head.  She wished desperately for someone to talk to at that moment.  She had always hated living alone, but living with someone else was worse.  When she had first moved to the city she’d lived in a house with who knows how many others.  She had counted the number close to seven once.  There weren’t that many rooms, but the ones that were fucking didn’t seem to mind sharing.  She’d only stayed there for a few months.  It was all her sanity could take.

            She picked up the paper with the words without meaning and turned it over.  She rummaged through the remains to find a pen.  There were three there, but only one of them worked.  Josie had never been able to draw.  She have liked nothing more than to sketch his image out on the white with pale blue lines, to have something she didn’t have to trust to her mind.  Rather than lines, rather than the harsh outlines of the blue ink and the unsteady shading, she wrote out his portrait.  A broken smile and high cheekbones, his eyes the mirror all he never longed to be.

            People had said that he and Josie looked alike.  She could never see it.  He was bright, the popular one.  She was the one who locked herself in her apartment with a bottle of vodka, an empty notebook.  How could that be anything alike?  His cheeks were always a dark gold and had freckles, she never did.  His hair was auburn and warm; hers was the color of charcoal.  She could never see similarities, only differences.  His shoulders were wider and her collarbones stuck out further.  Her nose had the Italian slope of her mother, his had a bump.  His hands were big and her fingers were long and narrow.  Was she as tall as he was, or did he still tower over her like he did when they were little?  She found that hard to believe.  He was stronger than she was and wore a silver ring on his thumb.  She had found a ring just like it once at a farmer’s market.  She bought it right then but couldn’t bring herself to wear it on her thumb like he did.  Instead it was in a small box at the back of her underwear drawer where women kept anything of sentimental value. 

            Josie jumped as the phone rang.  She had filled nearly the entire page with the description of her brother.  They were just words.  She closed her eyes as her heart slowed, but it was gone.  The image she had of Tate, so crystal and beautiful was gone.  She was left with nothing more than the words on the paper and the noisy, rattling ringing of the phone.  Her fingers traced over the scribbled handwriting.  The ink smudged lightly near the end of the paper.  The g’s melted into the e’s.  She frowned, setting her pen down on the paper.

            For a moment she felt hollow and empty, the memory of him lost, like he’d left once more.

            She stood from the table, leaving the paper where it was.  It was a mistake to write something so valuable on a piece of paper that already held meaningless words.   Her memory was too important to trust to that.  She crossed the small box to take one of the journals from the top of her dresser.  The piece of paper was tucked safely amongst the soft white paper in the journal that had cost her far too much to buy.  It was the first one she bought for herself.  It was the oldest one she had, and the emptiest.  She couldn’t bring herself to fill the pages with anything but something precious.  Tate was one of those things.  Maybe if the page spent time with something so valuable, the meaningless words wouldn’t seem like such a tragedy.

            The journal was replaced on the dresser before she cracked the windows open.  The winds had started up again, but she didn’t care.  The air in the apartment was too thick and stale for her lungs.

            I’ll come running to you, honey when you want me echoed through her mind.  Nobody ever meant what was sung in a song.  She’d accepted that fact long ago.  Songs were what people wanted life to be like.  Nobody came when they were needed and nobody loved anybody forever.  That was impossible.  It was a nice thought, though.

            What did Blue sing about, she wondered.  Her breath caught in her chest.  She could remember the soft drift of his guitar music across the beach, over the crashing of the ocean.  He hadn’t been singing that night.  Someone else had-- what was his name?  She could never remember.  It never seemed to matter how many times she went to those beach parties, she always received more introductions than hellos.

            Did he sing about love too?  Cheesy words that made people smile and fall in love with him from across the bar?  She found it hard to believe.  Maybe not hard, but she didn’t want to.  She didn’t like the thought that he could feed people lines about how beautiful they were and kissing women forever, and make those drunken girls in the corner fall in love with him.  Would they fantasize a wedding day with him, or just fucking?  She wagered it was the latter.  She exhaled the breath that caught in her chest.  She tried to ignore the thoughts of Blue and the helpless women. 

            She sang The Velvet Revolver’s song to herself as she stretched out on her bed.  Thoughts of Tate and their childhood were more comfortable to her than thoughts of the man on the beach.  At least she knew where memories ended.  They didn’t end with hUer fantasizing about a man she didn’t know.  They didn’t end with her becoming one of those helpless women, those Blind Sues.  They ended with her feeling safe in her small hovel.

            They ended with her feeling like she had escaped.  She was able to breathe then.