The doorbell rings. At the dreadful sound of her relatives storming the house, Jennie hides out in the bathroom as long as she can.
It’s Saturday night, when her parents’ dining table is usually crowded end to end with cousins, aunts and uncles, and other relatives whose names she still has trouble recalling. The air is ripe with the strong smell of peony perfume and tobacco.
Jennie had endured hundreds of family dinners, but ever since she’d moved back home, they’d become painstakingly awful. The conversation is on the same circular track, as it’d been for years. “So, what are you doing now?” Years have passed, yet her aunts ask as though she’s still a college freshman figuring out what to study.
“I’m a writer,” she says, immediately regretting saying the words out loud. She’d never hear the end of it. Writing was a hobby, a parlor trick for family reunions. “Another word for unemployed,” that’s Uncle Lou’s favorite joke.
When she graduated, her mother told everyone she was getting a degree in business, ashamed of the black mark of a liberal arts education. Like clockwork, here comes the famous life speech from Uncle Lou. “You kids,” he’d deliver on cue, “expect to have life handed to you on a silver platter.”
“More cake?” Her mom always senses the tension in the room, and smooths it over with chocolate.
She instinctively shakes her head, but when she’s alone, she cuts up the rest of the chocolate sheet cake to sneak back to her apartment. She’s gonna need it.
A night in with Facebook, cheap Merlot, and self-loathing.
Less than six months ago, it was the New Year’s Bash at Le Petit Paris, a new French bar in downtown Chicago. It was a night of bottomless champagne and tuna on toast melting like butter in her mouth. There were flashes of purple and red spotlights, blurred the lines, especially when mixed with gin. The bar was intimately crowded and warm, the champagne went straight to her cheeks. A guy she met at the bar, Christopher something, he was suddenly behind her with his arm wrapped around her.
The vibrating bass immersed her until she heard nothing else. Christopher’s trying to have a conversation over the loud music, he played guitar in a band. Without a thought, she forcefully grabbed him by the vest and kissed him mid-sentence. It was the champagne. When she awoke the next morning, she was curled up on the floor of a suite, topless, in the Trump Hotel, her friend Maggie was passed out in the Jacuzzi tub.
Anything could happen. It’s the beginning of a new year, and on the most perfect of nights under the Chicago sky, she lived in the right now.
And now she was stuck in the middle of nowhere in Midwest, missing out on the amazing life she had and was desperate to win back.
It’s just after nine. Jennie is in an old Mizzou t-shirt and hot pink yoga pants, covered in chocolate crumbs, with no place to go.
There’s half a bottle of Merlot left from the previous night. Facebook stalking her Chicago friends is the next natural step down into the abyss at this point. Their usual Sunday brunch at La Dolce Vita, a Coldplay concert in Millennium Park, and a road trip Hotlanta, she’d missed all of it.
What the hell happened to Maggie? They did everything together, 10 o’clock Chinese takeout, hitting every rooftop bar down Michigan. The times Jennie had held her friend’s hair back while she was hunched over the toilet. Spending her birthday with Maggie’s parents in Lincoln Park. Since she left, there’s no calls, no texts, no “miss you” posts on Facebook.
Jennie is already disappearing from her friends’ feed, and it won’t be long until there isn’t a trace left. It was the worst outcome she imagined, becoming the outsider. She could see them all sitting out on the high-rise balcony with a bottle of Prosecco, savoring the cooling night breeze coming in off the Chicago River. Someone asks amusingly, “your old roommate, what was her name again?” Cue the laughter.
1 out of 25 try to leave Redmonton every year. But they all end up right back where they started.
Now Jennie is a part of the club, the chosen few who have the appetite to move away, but then the town they’ve spent years trying to leave suddenly snatches them right back.
After two years, it’s no surprise that her hometown is unchanged, a perfectly preserved ninth wonder of the Midwestern world. The Dancing Cowboy, part rodeo and part dance club, looked dim from the highway but lit up the night sky. The filthy diner on Park Avenue, still serving the same cheddar crust pies since the Cold War. The Grab n’ Go gas stations, with their homemade beef jerky that smelled like old leather. For miles, the streets lined with strip malls and pawn shops, and the smoke rose up in the distance from the limestone factory.
And here they all stood firm to the ground, every detail exactly how she remembered, and there was something so comforting about it, when everything else was so undecided.
“There’s a party tonight. And you’re coming,” Lindsay told Jennie before she left for dinner at her parents.
Jennie was in a slump this week. 10 job interviews, most of them places she was already embarrassed of being spotted by people she used to know. In Chicago, she was a paid writer, on the 22nd floor overlooking the corner of Madison and Canal Streets, a block from the french marketplace.
In Redmonton, she was 18 again, an insecure mess eating Cheese Whiz from the can, asleep by the middle of the day. A degree was worthless here, where she wasn’t qualified to scoop ice cream in the mall, or fold shirts at the Gap.
Jennie hit a wall, afraid to leave their apartment. A trip to Price Cutter, she’d be running into her parents’ neighbors in the frozen aisle. If she stopped for Starbucks, she’d run into Sara, the most annoying girl from high school (she’s the biggest reason to not go out.)
And everyone now knew why she’d come back. Unemployed. Broke. A failure.
[aesop_gallery id="626"]Her phone is buzzing again, three more missed calls since midnight.
LISTEN: 6 New Voicemails from Lindsay
Jennie’s been ignoring her phone all night, certainly to avoid being dragged out into public. Give Lindsay a few drinks, and she’ll completely forget all about it.
