one breaks my body, and the other breaks my soul

six

The bar that had once been home was tucked away by the river in the Warehouse District.  Alice parked her car around the corner, cut off the engine, and rested her forehead against the steering wheel.  She’d decided to give herself two minutes, two full minutes there in the car to collect herself, to make up her mind to take this step away from Jess and into the future. 

It was the first time she’d ever passed up an opportunity like that.  In fact, she’d spent the last five years mastering the art of making something out of almost nothing, going so far with so very little to go on.  But now she just felt tired and homesick and thirsty.  She lifted her head with a sigh, and felt for the keys, still dangling from the ignition.  It would be so easy; just a twist of her wrist, and she could take it all back.  Fight for her old life, for Jess, one more time.  But the two minutes were up, and her car still sat parked on Constance Street, the decision made for her.

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five

It was shocking how much of that last encounter she was still able to remember, given the amount of alcohol permeating her blood cells at the time.  Catherine had only just left, which wasn’t saying much, considering she had never really moved all the way in, and already Alice was pinned against a wall, sweating gin and pulling Jess toward her by her belt loops.  Her hand had unceremoniously slipped beneath the waistband of Jess’s jeans, and she’d delighted in the way Jess was laughing, panting, moaning into her ear. 

And it was all happening so fast that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from gasping, “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

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four

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three

The note was waiting for her on the kitchen table when she got home from work:

                        Al-

Don’t sit home all night listening to Joni Mitchell or some other sad girl crap.  Don’t get drunk and go looking through those photo albums in the hall closet.  And definitely don’t clean the apartment.  I’ll be home in time for breakfast tomorrow, and I WILL KNOW if you’ve broken any of these rules.

                                                                                    Love,

                                                                                    Sam

            She smiled for a moment, in spite of herself, before going over to the stereo and flipping it on.  Joni Mitchell’s voice flooded out into the living room—

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68, and he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday

—as she returned to the kitchen to fix herself a glass of gin.  Taking a deep gulp of the stuff, she glanced at the clock over the stove.  In just a few minutes, she would turn twenty-three.

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preview of part two:

There must have been a first moment, a first time he’d laid eyes on Alice Martin in all her indifferent, teenaged glory, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it.  Instead, it seemed to him that she had just always been there—hovering on the periphery of his life with her guitar and her rumpled notebooks—until one day, the light changed, and suddenly she was all he could see.

That day, he remembered.  

let the wild rumpus (of rewriting) start

“Now, Samuel,” Uncle Lenny said soberly, taking another bite of coffee cake, “when are you and Alice going to get married?”

Sam just sighed.  He’d been having this conversation—in some form or another—his entire adult life, and it was starting to become exhausting.  “Well,” he began, before being cut off by a shout from his mother in the kitchen.

“Alice is a lesbian, Leonard!  I already told you!”

Sam had to repress a laugh at his mother’s newly-discovered frankness on the subject.  For a long time, it had been something they talked in circles around, when they talked about it at all.  It wasn’t that his mother didn’t love Alice; he knew she did.  There were still pictures of him and Alice all over his mother’s house: the two of them with knowing smiles, dressed in their best for their senior prom, or slouching coolly on stage together at one of their gigs.  And he’d seen how his mother had taken Alice into her arms on that summer night just after graduation, when Alice had turned up on their porch, shattered from what had happened with her parents.  It had been the end of Mrs. Cohen’s dreams, too, that night.  But she’d held in her disappointment in favor of comforting Alice, who was still the daughter she’d never had, even if she’d never be her daughter-in-law.

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