Summer 2013
An aging truck driver and I wait for rides as the luggage carousel slithers in never-ending rounds. Dallas Fort Worth is the second largest airport in the United States. I wonder if that’s why there aren’t many people around: there’s so much room to spread out. I eat my bag of vending machine Cheetos and think the truck driver looks like Santa Claus. I text my boyfriend to make myself look busy, but Santa talks to me anyway. He’s going to drive a truck from Dallas to somewhere up north. He asks what I’m doing in Texas. I’ve come to be a teaching assistant for an academic summer camp, I say. I’ve never been here before. He says I look young and tells me about his affairs with his high school history and English teachers.
“And now,” he says, “I’m dating a taxi driver the same age as my son.”
That’s interesting not because of the age gap but because of their professions. Perhaps their relationship will survive because they both understand a life behind the wheel, and I wonder if all the loops back and forth across the country or to and from the airport make them feel they aren’t aging at all but twirling in place and time.
My boyfriend texts back that he misses me already. I am glad, but I do not miss him. I like him very much, but I love this adventure.
My shuttle arrives, and I say goodbye. Santa is unsure when his truck will show.
* * *
I’d heard there’d be tarantulas in Sherman, Texas, and not much else. Upon my arrival at Austin College, I realize this tarantula tale is more than just myth. Every now and then I see the thick, soft arachnid sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, declaring itself to me like a teenager at a debutant ball entering society: Here I am.
Two of the youngest teaching assistants find tarantula holes, fill the holes with water, and watch the tarantulas crawl out to be caught or killed. They do not recognize this as cruelty.
Every building on campus is made of sand-colored bricks, which match the wide cement pathways. On a sunny day, which is nearly every day, the sun reflecting off the ground is blinding. One afternoon, I spot a tarantula in the middle of a bright path and touch it with a stick. It doesn’t move. Its legs curve inward like a claw. Perhaps it was trying to dig up the ground as it died.
Tarantulas used to exist for me in scary stories and nightmares only, but now there’s one motionless beside my foot: an object from another realm washed up on this reality’s shore.
* * *
Henry is dancing by himself on the way to the dining hall. Pale arms stick out of a colorful tank. He turns around, sees me, takes his earbuds out, and shouts something. Both of us keep walking toward the dining hall, but he’s now walking backward. He shouts something again. I don’t understand. He waits for me to catch up, and I push through heat to reach him. He tells me that Kanye West is a genius.
His hair is white in the sun, and his beard is sparkling. He is as bright as this campus and only nineteen years old, four years my junior. This feels like a very large gap. When I was entering college, he was entering high school.
The second time I speak to him, I’m driving his five thirteen-year-old charges to the bowling alley. Henry doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. In the car, he tells me that his spirit animal is a goldfish. I tell him that my spirit animal is a seal, but I don’t tell him that I only know this because of a school assignment. I am already forming an inaccurate version of myself for him. He says, “I can already tell I’m going to miss you when we leave.” I think about how weightless he must feel after he says, instantly, what he’s thinking. I work my sentences like over-kneaded dough.
Days later, Henry yells my name in the dining hall, and we meet by the soda machines. “Can I hug you? Is that all right?”
We hug. Our students watch. He wears grey pajama-like pants printed with the repeated pattern of a circuit board. When we go out to eat later that week, he orders three different fancy drinks, no food. When we go to Target, he buys a giant, superfluous pillow. In the evenings, he dances around the lobby with his arms in the air. He follows his desires. He is a revelation. He is the free spirit my mother always wanted me to be.
He tells me about his dreams, which he details on his Tumblr. I listen feverishly, dreaming of him dreaming of me. Mid-dream narrative, he notices my protuberant spine, and I lean forward, ask if he wants to feel it. This me—this awkward spine, this asking him to touch—is the real me. I direct his hands to the peaks of highest elevation. “Wow,” he says. “I feel it,” like he’s talking of a change in air pressure.
* * *
One afternoon, I take my writing students on a walk. Everywhere, the ground is flat and beige. The pale sidewalks are wide. We approach a crater that’s tiered like the seats of an amphitheater. I realize that it will be filled with water and become a fountain. I tell my students to discard their pads of paper, run around the rim, and flap their wings. Be birds! They instantly beat the air with arms like water pumps, their decorated Converse shuffling against concrete, and I feel unreasonably happy. I am amazed that they followed my direction. I am amazed that I get to know them. I am also delighted that I get to live on the precipice of romance again, which I am always teetering into and out of, but often, as in this case, only in my mind. This is not cheating, I tell myself. It is the contentment of existing in unfulfilled dreams, and Texas is wide-open, wondrous, and packed with places to direct my yearnings.
In the second week of camp, I spend the days waiting for Henry to appear. Every day is like the nighttime, and he is the ghost in my house: every creak is blamed on him; every footstep, he is coming to get me. I am more present than I have been all year, living on constant alert. I remember the truck driver and his girlfriend, and I believe now that four years is not an age gap at all. Though he is young, he is already who I aspire to be when I am old.
But I have a boyfriend; he is kind and gentle, and I thought, recently, that I might marry him. He emails me a poem about the distance between us this summer. He is showing me that he can be interested in writing. The problem is not that it is a bad poem but that when I read it, I think more about the poetic craft than his sentiments.
* * *
The instructors and TAs go to downtown Sherman, which is a quaint square and two or three blocks of restaurants and businesses. We bring our own booze to an Italian restaurant and for two dollars, the waitress opens the bottles. I notice that no one is walking outside. After eating Italian, we go to the bowling alley for karaoke night, but I do not sing. Remember: I am not an uninhibited person. We pack into cars on the way home and roll down the windows.
I talk to my boyfriend every other evening. We Skype twice, but this makes him feel even further away from my current reality: He is a television show I am watching and can turn off at any time. This summer does not feel part of my other, distant life. This summer is a portion of time from another universe coughed up from my throat like a delicious lump of food.
* * *
Henry and I play Spades with a few coworkers. We are partnered together. How lucky. It turns out that we are good at Spades. On another evening, we have no coworkers to play with and so we each get on our computers and find a pair of people to play online. We stay up until 1:30am, facing each other across a small table, united against phantom competitors. On the final play, we lose.
We hug. We have tears in our eyes.
* * *
My students are oblivious. They think I should date the anatomy instructor. His name is Cain but they call him Vampire because he’s from eastern Europe. They call me Genie because I wear long skirts. Together, we are Genie and Vampire. We are fiction.
When I tell my students that Cain has a girlfriend and I have a boyfriend, they say, “But this isn’t real life. Whatever you do here doesn’t count when you get back to the real world.”
The scent of this lingers. It is terrible and tempting. “That’s not how it works,” I tell them. “We have a responsibility to the people who aren’t here.”
This does not dissuade them. During the last week, there is a dance, and they make Cain and I waltz. Henry is behind the DJ table. We have stayed up late together every night, computers in our laps, shielding our hands from one another. I wonder what he is thinking, and I wonder about my students’ theory. Perhaps, precisely here, my actions do not impact the real world. I also wonder if time travels slower across all this land, if the truck driver is still waiting for his ride at DFW, if a tarantula takes years to dry up in the sun.
After the dance, I change clothes in my dorm, and wait on a couch in the lobby. “Hi, Jilly,” Henry says, and lays his head in my lap. I think that I do not love him but that I am enchanted by him. We hold hands for forty minutes as staff walk quickly through the room chasing children, making photocopies, or trying to find missing keys. We hear the pitter-patter of feet above our heads, out of sight. I am leaving soon to TA a different summer course at Texas A&M, many hours south. Most staff will be staying here to teach a new set of students, but our employer needs me elsewhere. I will miss Henry’s hands and the feeling of waiting for him to arrive.
* * *
On our very last night, we sit beside each other in the back seat of a car, having chosen to leave the bowling alley/karaoke night early. The windows are down, of course, and his fingers travel over my hands like a band of pilgrims looking for somewhere to settle down, their heads testing the pillows of my palms.
* * *
In the morning, on the drive to my next assignment, I am struck by the empty space in Texas. I no longer see such space as a graveyard but an offering. There is so much land to give, so much air, so many fields and atmospheric spaces presented to us in open truck beds. Should I reciprocate with my own offering? Can this be it?
Compared to Sherman, the number of people and things to do in College Station is initially alarming. There are too many options. I walk the vast campus alone at night, thinking of Henry, thinking of my boyfriend. I see the tree that’s famous for cursing you into loneliness if you walk under its branches by yourself but grants love if you walk under with someone else. It’s enormous, and both sides tilt down in gentlemanly bows.
Two days after I break up with my boyfriend in North Carolina, I walk barefoot under the tree to prove the theory wrong.
I read my boyfriend a letter over the phone. It was a terrible hour. He tried to scratch himself out of the breakup with words and remembrances, and I felt I was watching a tarantula die right in front of me, and I cried, couldn’t do anything about it, and his legs turned into a claw. I tried to believe I was far, far away; it was easy to picture Texas rotating above the earth like an extra moon.
* * *
I still talk to Henry online in the early hours of most mornings. We play Spades. I think that our relationship is an early morning and nothing else, a beginning stuck in the first few hours of its cycle. The sunrise, the sunrise, the sunrise.
The weeks pass slowly. Daily, I push a student in a wheelchair six blocks from her dorm to our class. While we sweat in the heat, she talks endlessly of John Green novels. I field messages from my ex. I hear that he knocks on my parents’ doorstep and hands them the record player that I gave him for his birthday. I get drunker than I’ve ever been; I repeatedly ask for Irish Car Bombs at the bar because this seems to garner positive attention.
After the last dance at Texas A&M—at which I slow danced to Lana Del Rey with a dark, slim twenty-one-year-old—the teachers and TAs walk back to our dorm through a muddy field and a fountain. My dress is bright blue, sequined, and floor-length, so I hold the bottom away from the dirt and water, and it sheds glitter on my palms. We walk through an underpass and the lights blare gold, and the university marching band is practicing in the giant stadium beside us, loud brass slicing drama into the summer, and I think that everything is romantic—too romantic.
* * *
After changing into casual clothes, we go to Daisy Dukes where BOOTS AND BIKINIS THURSDAYS is never unadvertised. The words are stamped on a white marquee above the entrance. It’s a club inside a barn-like exterior, adorned with an enormous disco ball in the rafters you can almost touch from the walkway. We dance a little, but mostly watch.
Out of curiosity, he tells us, the neuroscience teacher went to Daisy Dukes on BOOTS AND BIKINIS THURSDAYS, but there were only old men on barstools inside, their fingers probing their drinks, their hopes not yet lost. The bikinis could still arrive. The bikinis could still arrive.
* * *
The bikinis would never arrive—but it was Texas, so the waiting didn’t seem so long. The sunrise, the sunrise, the sunrise. The slow agelessness of the summer filled the old men with hope. They could be young again, or perhaps they were never old. The largeness makes the churning slow.
Intermission
Outside of Texas, life accelerates with dizzying speed. I begin grad school on the coast of North Carolina. In the daytime, in lobbies and courtyards and in small, plastic chairs, I meet dozens of people who are all cooler than me. I buy my first car. I move into an apartment that is too close to campus and the three, male undergrads who live above me stash their tiny dog on the porch above mine and droplets of its urine ski down our sliding glass doors.
The earliest class that I have is at 11am, so I can afford to spend many evenings and early mornings on my computer with Henry. I roll into the understanding that Henry is a real, whole person, and that he has real interest in me. I have somehow extracted him from the unreality of summer. One night, he buys a plane ticket. I imagine that it is an impulse buy. I assume he won’t get on the plane.
But here he is, at the airport, in a thin grey sweater. He puts his duffel in my trunk. Though it’s midnight, he suggests buying milkshakes on our way back to my apartment. I happily follow his desires. After milkshakes, we kiss for the first time and then kiss many more times. His kisses are all different. He hardly repeats the same movements. I find my lips tracking the motion of his lips more than sinking into the pleasure of kissing. His hair is soft and receding.
We sit on the beach, walk the pier as light posts ignite. We eat at Chilis. We throw a frisbee. We do not speak of dating. He lives very far away. We face each other in my tiny twin bed. His eyes are far apart and as delicate as daisy petals.
Summer 2014
This time, I wait for my airport shuttle outside. A polite British man talks to me about his business travels as I vigorously fan myself with my used boarding pass. I’m wearing a solid white dress with spaghetti straps. When I get to the campus in Sherman, two hours later, I match the pavement. Everything is how I remembered—big and blonde, quiet and bright.
Except the enormous new science building has been finished; the fountain filled; I have been promoted from TA to instructor; and this year, instructors will not live in the dorms with the students and residential staff but in apartments across the road from campus.
I do not see a tarantula on my walk to the apartment, but I do feel the familiar flatness and vastness of space: the generous sidewalks, the short and sparsely planted trees that tiptoe into the horizon.
* * *
Henry is not returning. It was never his plan. In the spring, we both started dating students at our respective schools. Mine dissolved, but his is lasting. I think I am okay with this, but he is still a reason I have returned here. I need to test the truth of dreamscape Texas.
A friend from last summer is here, and I make plenty of new friends to spend my free time with. The other instructors and I congregate in apartments to help one another invent lesson plans. Most of us have or are acquiring master’s degrees in our chosen fields but have little teaching experience. We go to the bar together and to the grocery store to stock our fridge with snacks, and we order pizza while planning collaborations between our classes. As I return from teaching every evening, I stop in the parking lot of the apartment complex and take photos of the sky. Here, it is soft and wide. It is a king-sized bed made with pastel sheets. It is the dream that I remembered.
* * *
Then late one evening, long after the colors all bowed to darkness, Henry calls.
I am lounging on a sofa chair in my colleague’s apartment, eyeing the purple bruises blooming on my legs from unsuccessfully trying to pull myself into a boat earlier that day. Nine other teachers and I rented a two-story pontoon on our day off and drove it on a giant lake in Oklahoma. We poured beer down the holes of one-dollar pool noodles and into our mouths. I swing danced with a handsome TA on the second level while a bag of white wine sloshed around on the floor. I drove home because I was the only one sober enough to. There was nothing to see but cows, horses, and cornfields as flat as the ocean. We listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers while the wind dried our hair. I felt Texas’s slow breath.
“I have to take this call,” I say to my friends in the room, and I run barefoot into the parking lot. Henry has never called me before. We text. We type online while playing Spades. We do not call.
“How’s Texas?” Henry asks. His voice is light but filled with purpose like the feet of a dancer.
I tell him it’s great but exhausting. I tell him it’s different. He says that’s good. He says he’s not doing well. He calls me Jilly. He is the only person, aside from my younger brother, who calls me Jilly. He says that there was an accident last night. He says that his father was in an accident last night. He says that his father was riding his bike home and was hit by a car. He says his father is dead.
There is the distant rumble of a train. I am sitting under a streetlight as if I am the star of this show.
“Henry,” I say.
“I wanted to tell you.”
I do not know what to say next. I only feel capable of receiving. I ask him about the rest of his family, which is a stupid question. They are not doing well. I tell him that I want to hug him. This is always true. I ask if he wants to talk. He asks if I want to talk. He says everything is weird. He says we should play Spades online sometime soon. He says that he is sorry to tell me this. I tell him that I am sad to hear it but not sorry he told me. I think that he wants something from the dream version of myself, and I am unable to deliver. He says goodbye. I say goodbye. His voice blows out.
* * *
I pull the skin of my face backward toward my ears.
I stand still, and then I jog. I knock on my coworker’s door. It’s almost midnight. An empty pizza box is on the kitchen table. I return to the sofa chair as if the world were still the same, but nothing is the same. I was crazy to think that time had slowed the summer before. We are always moving. This chair, which I sat on minutes before, is introducing me to a new Earth. Every second the world whispers welcome. Before you can say thank you back, another welcome comes. My blooming bruises are rotting petals now, the grey earlobes of a corpse.
* * *
The next day, I research the death of Henry’s father, how he was knocked from his bike by a drag racer, how he was killed on impact, how the car didn’t stop. A headline calls his father a “safety conscious cyclist.” Henry and his father have the same exact name, so Henry suddenly exists all over the internet. He catches Texas—my moon—on a fishing line and reels it back to Earth.
* * *
More sadness falls. One of my writing students threatens the lives of other girls and is put on watch, and there is an incident of assault between two coworkers. Searching for lightness, I ride with a van of instructors to Lone Star Lanes, where we sang karaoke and Henry asked about my spirit animal, but the building has been burned down. It looks like a charred game of tic-tac-toe.
Days later, I look up the menu of the Italian restaurant that charges you to open your own alcohol, but it has closed. Thwarted by these defeats, we go to a Mexican spot with incredibly cheap beer and the biggest and fattest quesadilla I’ve ever had, but it’s boarded up and empty. I remember that on our last visit, my coworker had asked the waitress how she was doing, and she answered, “Not too good.”
* * *
I spend many nights sitting on the curb behind our apartment building with coworkers Kyle and Kushal, the psychology and web programming instructors, while they smoke cigarettes, and we stare into the cornfield across the street. Occasionally, they pass me a lit cigarette and I take a drag. I have never smoked before. It feels like both a form of communication and something to do with silence. Right in front of us, before the field, is an abandoned building, long and narrow like a train car. We talk about checking it out, but we never do.
One night, Kushal sits on the curb beside me to tell me about his female conquests at his old workplace. “One time a girl gave me a look, like this, right in the eyes, and asked if I wanted to do it, so I agreed, and we went into the office. I used to not have this belly, you know.”
I have learned that when Kushal is sad about his girlfriend breaking up with him, which she is currently doing in stages over the phone (between bouts of phone sex, he tells me), he exaggerates his love life or dreams about his future women. He reminds me of the truck driver I met at the luggage carousel. While Kushal is in his bedroom arguing with his girlfriend, Kyle and I sit in the living room and watch films with lots of dialogue.
Kyle is dark haired and broad chested. He loves to dribble a basketball by himself and often eats alone in his room to get away from the hundreds of people in the dining hall. He is my closest companion, but the movies remind me of Henry, whose father is dead. Nevertheless, every day I move closer on the couch to Kyle, perhaps just so I might have found something at the end of the long road of lost things.
* * *
The Sunday after Henry’s call, I watch his father’s memorial service. It’s live streamed on a tiny, pixelated video screen. The Presbyterian Church is large and filled; some people appear to be standing. I learn that he was a war veteran, a Harvard graduate, a business entrepreneur, and an ice cream and St. Louis Cardinals fanatic.
Henry walks to the podium near the end of the service. Although he is a small, blurry rectangle with arms, I can hear his voice. He speaks of his relationship with his father through their life playing games together. It is a clever narrative through which to tell their story. He speaks very quickly but clearly, and the images he gives of his father are so precise that when I cry, it is not only for Henry’s loss but for the world’s loss of Henry’s father.
Henry steps down from the podium and his sister steps up. His sister just got into Princeton University and wants to be a pastor. Henry can be anything (he’s majoring in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, has a job in design, and won a national chess championship as a middle schooler) but had expressed interest in being a librarian. I love this about him, and I love him for not being me, a twenty-four-year-old sitting in Sherman, Texas, poking the smoking logs of our strange affection while also igniting a second fire.
* * *
Last summer, Henry got a tattoo at a tiny parlor near the campus. This was after I had left, so he sent me a picture: a lantern on his outer arm. I touched it when we shared a bed in North Carolina.
A week after his father’s funeral, I go to the same tattoo parlor. I’ve had a tattoo in mind for years. As the needle is scarring my skin, I ask my tattoo artist if he tattooed a lantern on a young man’s upper arm last summer. He did, he says.
A thought settles: Texas, where time moves so slowly, has finally granted me an ending. Henry and I have been tattooed by the same man. We have been grounded to this earth by the reality of our kindred skin. We are both real, and we were not made for each other.
* * *
An evening of my last week, Kyle, Kushal and I lay down on the campus’s empty basketball court. Tonight, they feel like my family. The court is cool. The sky is full of stars.
I think about death, but mostly love, because I am always falling for people. Tomorrow night, I think that I will probably kiss Kyle. I think that I would like to kiss him for a long time and then say goodbye.
I think about how I inject fantasy into my perception of the world. This explains slow-motion Texas and the other planet-ness of Texas. This is not because I’m bored of my life’s offerings; I am sincerely and regularly amazed by the world. Like the tarantula, everything that I’ve never seen or experienced before has a magical quality when it first appears: Here I am!
A breeze passes, and I am a feather ready to be lifted. And I see the stars, so bright in Texas, so bright they are throbbing—just look at them—like giant wounds in the sky. They are brighter than I’ve seen anywhere else in the world. But is that true? I’m being too romantic again. I’m not seeing the reality of Sherman, Texas. There should be a consequence for this, just as there should be a consequence for breaking up with my boyfriend through the phone and holding another man’s hand. My actions matter. I understand now. You cannot stop time without consequences. Time must balance out. Perhaps I am the reason businesses are dying and people are sad. Time sped up to make up for last summer’s stillness! Perhaps Sherman has been forced, by me, to deteriorate at a faster rate!
A wisp of smoke from Kushal’s cigarette floats through the black night.
Do you see how my ridiculous mind bends? Always curving back to me. I am, like the truck driver, going in never-ending rounds.
Forgive me, Texas.
As the smoke drifts, the stars come back into focus. Surely, they are the brightest I’ve ever seen. Surely, they cannot be merely my invention.
Jillian Weiss is a writer and teacher based in North Carolina. Her essays have been published in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at RJ Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem where she lives with her librarian husband and three cats. Find her online at www.jillianweiss.com.