Not Sally by Jen Gann

     Before we could begin the drive south to Dan’s mother’s funeral, before I mixed three homemade gin and tonics for myself, before I jutted my hips alone, in my dorm room, and packed, red-faced and frenzied, for a week of mourning with a family that wasn’t mine, Dan took his Greek exam.  He was studying Greek to translate the Bible.  He wanted to go to Divinity School after college.  He was, he said, interested in religion in an academic manner, one that made him talk about Christianity in a looming, abstract way—as though it was something distant and unfelt.  In his practicing life, he drank as much as any of us, lied when he had to, and did what he wanted.  We went to the same small, liberal arts college and we were friends, unexplainably, from nearly the start.  When his mother died, he didn’t mention God at all.

            I always get drunker alone.  My plan was to mix a light drink slow, maybe paint my nails, then fold my clothes carefully, and read a bit, while waiting for Dan to finish.  Instead, the first drink whooshed to my head.  I checked the halls then, for any sign of life, but everyone seemed to be working or pretending to work, so I ducked back inside and made myself another.  I wanted cigarettes.  I wanted music.  Then I realized I needed to pack, and fast.  By the time Dan’s careful knock came down on my door, his tentative, Jessica?, my ashtray was half-full with the smooshed half-carcasses of Camel Lights.  He took the first shift without asking and didn’t talk to me until we were midway through Delaware.  Usually we weren’t allowed cigarettes in Dan’s car but we smoked them then, sneaking the plumes and butts out an inch of cracked window.

            Dan and I switched places near Virginia Beach.  He pulled off the highway and down a darkened, curving road.  The gas station looked lonely and ominous; the lights inside the store were off.  Dan paid with a card at the pump.  Bugs I didn’t know and the lights over the station buzzed.  I didn’t know we had beer in the backseat, but Dan fished out a forty from somewhere.  He took a swig of it, and I caught the sallow, ghostly bulge of his pale neck as he stared off into nothingness.  The light veins over his skin were blue-green, unearthly. 

            “You don’t mind driving?” he said mildly. 

            I tugged at one of my braids and shook my head.  Dan studies in the library for eight hours a day.  He locks himself in one of the old typing rooms on the second floor, the kind where the white table bears the marks of the typewriter where it used to be bolted into place.  These rooms have no windows.  People put Post-it Notes on them labeled Do Not Disturb, and they mean it.  Sometimes, hours after dinner, after my room is too quiet for reading and the night looms long, I search the narrow hallway for Dan, knocking softly, hoping to find his exact hunch over the desk, his bent redhead and bony shoulders.  Dan likes cats.  He likes to stare at the ceiling.   From what I know, from the few I’ve spoken to, he is not so nice to the girls he invites into bed.  Dan and I met in a lecture on Romantic Poetry, one that met mid-afternoon in a fall that surged early on, head-on into winter, snow by October and ice by November.  The first thing he said to me was, Jessica, right?  I’ve never forgotten that.  Jessica, right?

            Dan settled into the passenger seat with the forty between his legs.  Any other time I would’ve said something chastising.  “Weather should be nice,” he said.  “You’ll see some flowers.  Camellias, forsythias, azaleas, and some other zaleas.  Pretty.” 

            “I remember, when we went to your house last year—”

            “Yeah,” Dan cut me off.  “That’s true.”

            There was no one on the highway.  Dan and I had hardly exchanged words from New York.  It was killing me, but I wanted him to be as silent or loud as he wanted. 

            “I didn’t bring anything to wear,” Dan said quietly.  “I just realized that.”

            “You don’t have anything at home?”

            Dan shook his head.  “My brother’s wedding—everything’s at school.”

            Dan’s brother Mark got married in Connecticut a few months ago to this beautiful, demure girl named Sally.  He made me go with him, because there’d be an open bar, he said, and I could shop for some man who made lots of money like his brother and be set for life.  He envied that about girls, he told me more than once.  If I wanted to, he said, I could go all-out pretty and escape from having to make something of myself.  I wore a dress and danced with his father in my stocking feet, shucking my heels off beneath a white linen tablecloth.  I kissed his mother goodnight for the first time; I’d known her for years then, and if asked, yes, I loved the woman.  Our parting was affectionate and loud, and she said, What a pity you’re not a Sally.  Her hand crept to her mouth afterwards, as though she wished she could stuff the words back in.  Dan and I went to the hotel room and fell asleep above the covers, the TV flashing silent when we woke, dry-mouthed and cramped in our dress clothes.  A month later, we found out his mother was sick. 

            We got lost on some back roads in North Carolina.  The roads got too skinny and blue for me to follow on the map.  Dan was horrible at reading a map; he didn’t know this part of the state well, he’d never driven between school and home without the counsel of someone wiser.  We pulled into a lit parking lot and cowered over the map.  Finally, we realized we needed to turn around.  Without speaking, Dan left the car.  He stood in front of a giant bear statue advertising a car wash.  It wasn’t until I rolled the window down that I heard the sound of his piss sizzle against the pavement.

            Dan had asked me to come along to his mother’s funeral quietly.  He knocked on my door early, just two hours after dinner, half a six-pack dangling from his thin, pale fingers.  We’d each finished a beer before he said it, peering into the mirror over my dresser and speaking at his reflection in earnest.  He said he needed someone to come along for the drive; his father didn’t want him to do it alone.  He wasn’t sure anyone else could sweet-talk professors into understanding the early bolt from the gate, just one week shy of spring break.  Besides, he said, better to have me bumbling along than one of our male friends, who would just get drunk, he said, and screw his cousins.  So would I come home with him, he said. 

            I kept expecting something to leap from North Carolina’s side roads.  Maybe in the daylight peaches would gleam friendly and some old woman would pour iced tea on a porch drenched in charm.  But at night, I felt ghosts, I felt death, I felt alone.  Dan’s forty, I saw, was swigged down to a couple of inches at the bottom.  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and squinted through his glasses into the darkness.

            He flung a hand wide, tapping the windows.  “This is where I’m from, and I can’t even navigate.”

            I shrugged, easing my skin inside the sweatshirt I always wore then—navy blue with yellow letters from some high school in Pennsylvania.  It’d belonged to some hook-up of Dan’s who’d left it in his room.  I wore it everywhere, too comfortable to wonder who hated me for it.  “You can’t read maps—so what?” 

            There was another reason Dan asked me to his mother’s funeral, besides what he wasn’t saying about us being so close, about me knowing his mother, about me being someone to count on.  There was something he wasn’t saying, and that something was my twin brother, Brady, who leapt off a bridge over Lake Washington the winter we were both seventeen.  Brady had always been afraid of water and never learned to swim, he cried in big, gulping gusts during the lessons and no on had the heart to force him from a single length of the pool.  The autopsy knew, somehow, that the impact off the bridge didn’t kill him but that drowning had.  He’d struggled, apparently, they can tell by measuring the height of water in the lungs and the idea is, my twin brother fought to stay afloat before he died.  The unsaid thing being that his suicidal ideas got undone in hang time between the bridge and the water’s surface and if he’d been able to swim, he wouldn’t have killed himself after all.  Dan would never tell me—and didn’t have to—that he thought I might know something about someone dying. 

            “I’d just like to get there,” Dan said, draining the last of his forty.  He rolled down the window and hurled the empty bottle into the thick night.  I like the South; it’s seems foreign, rich to me, soaked in legend and charm.  Dan doesn’t understand, and I tell him everything in the Northwest seems new, even the trees, the pines coming back green each winter, the mountains staying stoic against a backdrop of fresh gray.  Dan said, “My brother’s already there.”

            “I brought a skirt,” I said suddenly.  “A black skirt.  Not a dress.  I hope that’s fine for the funeral.”

            “My parents,” Dan said, “love you.  It won’t matter what you wear.”

            Dan hadn’t noticed his use of parents, but I had.  “Whatever,” I said. 

            “They think we should get married,” Dan said, letting that dangle.  He rearranged his knees then, and a laugh choked out.  I laughed too, grappling in the center console for a cigarette. 

            We smoked furiously, in silence.  I sped along, retracing our steps, eking out Dan’s home. 

            The car’s lights roved softly over the dirt roads leading to Dan’s house.  He lives tucked away in the wooded area outside of town, on a road past an endless amount of car dealerships.  We sat in the car a few long moments before Dan made any sign of going in.  Even then, he stood with his backpack hitched over his shoulder, looked up at the large house he’d grown up in, and sighed.  It was after four.  Dan led us through the garage and into the kitchen, where we helped ourselves to big bowls of cereal in the kitchen’s watery light.

            In Dan’s high school bedroom, we drank a beer each, then Dan flopped onto a mattress he’d dragged from the closet and nodded me toward the bed.  The shadows cast over the things Dan’s parents stored there: a drum set, a sewing machine, boxes of cable knit sweaters and plaid shirts, a purple medicine ball.  It wasn’t long before Dan’s snores rose and fell with regularity and ease.

            The funeral for Dan’s mother was at a church.  I sat by Dan, just as Sally, Mark’s wife, sat by Mark.  Dan’s father sat rigid and alone at one end of the pew, his family granting him the berth of, I suppose, the most bereaved.  I’d woken up to Dan’s empty mattress and the heavy quiet of a large house.  From the kitchen, Dan’s red hair looked messy, peaceful almost, in his sprawl on the sun porch couch.  It wasn’t until I slid open the door and stared along with him, at the grass bounding over the hills toward the trees, that I saw the open bottle of vodka he was sipping from.  He looked at me sideways, his morning eyes darker and small, and brought the bottle to his lips.

             Brady’s funeral was like his death: quick, brutal, bewildering.  His sloppy friends played rock music on the stereo.  I felt older by disapproving, somehow, of the songs’ fleetingness, how I knew we’d forget the lyrics just a few years later.  People cried.  I cried. They brought the food.  My parents and I sat- stunned- before the TV after it was over and the channel remained unchanged for hours.

            At Dan’s mother’s funeral, the Southern accents rose around me, then cracked, like cookies from the oven.  Their pain unfurled from them like steam.  People patted Dan on the shoulder, as if to encourage him to buck up, rise to the occasion tragedy presented.  How terrible, I thought.  When my brother died, everyone invited me to be a little girl again.

            At the reception, people set out warm rolls, baskets of crackling fried chicken, platters of asparagus, potatoes, regimented squares of corn bread.  Dan and I mixed big drinks of mostly gin, a little tonic, and gulped them, staggering out the sun porch to smoke cigarettes.  I kept catching glimpses of his father, who wandered the crowd, looking horrified and brittle.  No one noticed when we went upstairs to nap.

            We woke, surprised, late-evening.  The TV was on when we went downstairs, but no one was home.  The food was cleared away, just a lone stack of napkins left in its wake, standing guard near the edge of a long, wooden table.  Numbly, we ravaged the leftovers—ripping off hunks of rolls and plunging them into tupperwares of macaroni and cheese or casserole.  Sally wandered in at one point, her lipstick still in place, smelling of lavender, and fixed herself an iced tea.  She rubbed Dan’s shoulders and murmured her sorrow into him.  Then she touched my hip and told me, Jessica, how nice it is to see you again.  You too, I said.  Yes.  Then Sally walked up the stairs, her black, knee-length dress swaying calmly as she did.

            Dan looked up at the ceiling, holding a wing of fried chicken in front of his face like a ghost.  He looked to me.  “I guess my Dad’s sleeping.”  Dan ripped a hunk from the chicken.  “I guess he might need some alone time.”

            I opened two beers and handed Dan one.  Our fingers brushed over the bottleneck and there, that, was my way of giving his shoulder a squeeze.  “Sure,” I said.    

            Dan’s face still bore marks of his blanket, a crosshatch over one cheek.  His adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped the beer.  After he finished half of it, he asked me what we should do.

            “Watch a movie.”  I shrugged.  “A really dumb movie.”

            There was a TV in the hallway outside of Dan’s bedroom, a little nook adorned with built-in shelves and a wide, L-shaped couch.  Dan pulled a DVD from the shelf and ripped the cellophane from it; no one had watched it yet, even.  We watched a simple movie about guns, car chases, and instant, clear, bloody death.  Dan nudged me awake sometime later, motioning toward his bedroom door.  The frame of his body startled me; he looked like such a man, bent over me, there in the semi-dark, lit by the glow of the TV.

            I was eating olives from a bowl balanced between my thighs when Dan’s brother, Mark, came downstairs.  I’d woken up in Dan’s room still-dressed and suddenly hungry, so I crept through the house toward the kitchen.  I sat on the counter, my stockinged-legs swinging, feet drumming the wooden cabinets.  I ate in the light cast by the fridge’s waterspout.  I looked up, bringing my teeth down over the mouth of an olive, and saw Mark standing across from me: tall, thicker than Dan, eyes clearer, blanker, without the glasses that made Dan’s loom. 

            Mark reached between my thighs and brought an olive to his mouth.  He looked at me and the olive slipped between his lips.  He was lucky it wasn’t pitted; the moment would have grown legs and run out the open window and into the night.  Instead, he reached over, natural as the spring coming, and put his hand behind my neck.  He brought the rest of his body closer, as if I’d drawn him in.  He reached down and took the bowl of olives from between my legs.  He kept his eyes open when he kissed me.  I knew because I did too.

             “I’ve wanted to do this for awhile,” Mark said into my neck.  His hands traveled the length of my back.  “God.  I even noticed you at the wedding.  I love Sally, I do, but—Jesus.”

            As if it were a grimace, I wrapped my legs around his torso.  Mark’s tall; we were almost at eye-level, me perched on the counter.

            “I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Mark said.  Then he said it again, “Jesus.”    

            I unwrapped my legs, slid down the counter, and tugged my tights back into place.  I straightened the collar of my shirt, smoothed the edges of my skirt.  I said, “I can’t.  I just can’t.”

            Mark shook his head and went on as though he hadn’t heard me.  “I mean, look at you,” he said.

            Dan did not speak to me until I lay down on his bed.  It was so long, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw his outline lift himself up and onto his elbows.  “Where’d you go?” he said, his voice heavy.

            “Nowhere,” I told him, pulling the covers of his childhood bed over me.

            He sounded like a little boy, asking questions into the darkness of a room. 

            “I miss my brother every day,” I told him.  “Every day.”

            “Oh,” Dan said.  Then, “Yeah.  You know, in the Bible—”

            “Don’t intellectualize this.  It’s different,” I kept on, meanness stampeding through me.  “He killed himself.  He did something on purpose.”

            “It’s not your fault.”  Dan paused.  “There’s nothing you could have done.”

            “Shut up,” I said.  Dan didn’t sound like a little boy anymore.  He didn’t sound bewildered.  He sounded tired.  “Don’t say all those things.  You know it’s not true.”

            I knew Dan wanted help navigating through his sorrow.  I knew he thought my tragedy would help light the way across his.  But how, I wondered, could he have ever thought any two landscapes of such sadness could be similar?

            “I’m not Sally,” I said, remembering his mother.

            “What?” Dan said.

            “I’m not like Sally.”  I turned over in his bed. 

            Dan’s voice came up from below, aged with fatigue.  “No one ever said you were.”      

            In the spring, Dan’s studying lessened and he found a girlfriend named Callie.  She was short with a ring through her nose, and her name, the way her laugh echoed down a hallway, made me crazy.  Alone, in my room, mourning what I’d never given the chance to become mine, I felt like my brother.  He’d sat alone, those last few months, ignored by all of us, wailing along with the awful strums of his guitar.  I saw Dan’s family again at graduation, where everyone touched and smiled, inviting me into pictures.  His father bent to embrace me, and I saw a little life breathed back into his cheeks and was glad.  Even Dan’s glasses wobbled when he pressed them into my shoulder, arms wrapping with a fierceness.  I felt about him like a scab, as though all were contained for now.  Our families mingled, as if they were people who had known each other once.  Mark though, brushed past me like an apparition, Sally at his side like a ghost.