JANE LIDDLE / 3 FICTIONS
PALOMA’S
I sat in my late father’s bar, baseball bat leaning against the side of a table. It was five am and the bar was empty. I sipped a half-drunk Heineken, Ted’s drink. He considered it foreign (technically true). I thought of Ted and his affable pliability, his total lack of personal story.
Just a few days before I was in New Mexico, for a little vacation, my first time leaving the Northeast and its relentless seasons. I had gone to the Georgia O’Keefe museum to see the flowers and bones lushly rendered, to be jolted with an understanding of light that I could apply to mixing drinks and paying bills. To surround myself with woman-genius-made beauty, as a palate cleanser to my life thus far. But I stood in front of a bronze sculpture, a few feet tall and it was a slim cone, and I thought, why did she, she, have to go and do something like that. That’s what I was looking at when I learned my father died, via text. Once that tragic lure was cast out to retrieve me, I became blank with loss. Forgot my books. Forgot my journal.
So, after only four days, my longest time away from the bar since I was thirteen (called Teddy’s, after Roosevelt, or so I thought!) I came back, and the old men who knew me all my life said, this was what they said, “Whoa, you got a haircut,” and I hadn’t, I had just trimmed my bangs really short (result of an error). I wasn’t about to get into that with them. I went behind the bar and hugged Ted, who had started working here ten years ago, hired on account of his name, or so I thought! I looked out on the gray and navy blue crowd, and waited for a “Hey, how you been,” or “We were keeping the place warm for you,” or “I like your bangs.” I didn’t stand there stewing over the reception of my presence, or anything, because I felt that deep down they must have thought all these things. Maybe not about my bangs, but about seeing me, missing me, liking me, respecting me, loving me, admiring me, counting on me, impressed by me, hoping for me, seeing me. I don’t mean to make them sound incompetent and cold, ill-mannered brutes, heartless senile cable news watchers, hoarders and elderly degenerates, etc. I’m saying “they” but it was only Lou who said that thing about my bangs. And it was Lou who was the first of all of them to approach me and say how sorry he was about my father. And it was Lou who raised his glass to him and kicked off the myth-making.
I’ll spare you the stories that old men told about my particular old man. A lot centered his “loyalty.” I always thought that when someone called someone else loyal, what they were really saying was, “Hey, I know this guy is an asshole to the world and women but he lent me a twenty once, and he never asked for it back.”
I threw a rag over my shoulder, asked Lou what I could get him, and he laughed because he only ever drank Bushmills. But no, I was serious. I said how about something new, something with tequila, a memorial cocktail, and he said no, kind of rudely. I poured him his Bushmills. I opened cans of Schlitz, cases and cases of Schlitz, and I poured myself some tequila, squeezed a lime, a pinch of salt, grapefruit juice, soda, and Ted pointed at my drink, asked, “When did you become such a girl?”
I don’t know.
Everyone was drunk. I was drunk, which I hadn’t been around these men since I was twenty-two: a hard conscious effort I made as a New Year’s resolution and managed to keep and keep and keep. Johnny Cash was in heavy rotation. I slow-danced with Lou and absorbed his loneliness as he danced too close to me, his hand too low on my back, the grinding of his teeth in my ear. I squeezed his hand tight, rung out his entire body until he was so empty I could carry him to a cab waiting outside. Before I shut the car door, he said, “Maybe if you marry Ted, you’ll get the bar when he dies.”
I had been a girl, then a woman, who grew up in my father’s old-man bar, cleaned the bathrooms, laughed at jokes about wives and mothers-in-law, tirades about exes. I performed the act of good sport when the men purposely mispronounced the words on the spines of the books I was reading. My father died and left the bar to Ted. I got a baseball bat.
I sat in the bar, waiting for nerve. The smell was a hollow trash smell, with a hint of smoke and pine soap. The wood table I sat at was rough, and I could see decades-old crumbs and dirt in the grooves, so unlike the smooth reflective bar top. It would be impossible to clean. I took my arms off the table. No nerve came, just another idea. I raided both safes. I left just before the sunrise.
I eventually landed in the New Mexico sister-version of my own town, ridges and rock, but larger and redder. I bought a bar that had been legendary to the locals but closed a couple of years ago when the owner died. His sons were busy making money in San Francisco. After I opened the bar one of them visited, was impressed with the painted mint-green walls, the shininess of the mirrors, the designy sink in the bathroom. He had never spent much time in the place. Unpredictable adults made him nervous. I charged him double for a tequila cocktail, which he paid without blinking.
I WAS RIGHT
But before all this, I was seventeen. I was invited to a party by a woman I had met in an ice cave. Her name was Ivy. I drove over the ridge to get to her house. I had just gotten my driver’s license and this was my first time going over the mountain alone. The sharp turns and bends did not make me nauseous, and I did not shut my eyes when the drop-off was steep and the guardrail presented insufficient. The moon washed out the stars.
Ivy’s house was all white and confused angles, like her. I went up to what I assumed was the front door, though there were two other doors that were runners-up. Ivy opened the door before I could knock. She wore so much jewelry. I walked into the house and it was full of women, well, eight women, and one kid, who I later learned was nine years old, who I soon learned was named Dove. I learned all the women’s names, or rather, alleged names, because what are the chances their names would be Holly, Maple, Laurel, Olive, Hazel, Daisy, Flora.
I was seventeen, so I didn’t make sense of their names until years later when I was browsing the local bookstore for some field guides.
At the party I felt studied and a little awesome. I didn’t think my attendance (or even invitation) was strange. I had some bravado about being able to be anywhere because I had spent my life with all men at my father’s bar. I didn’t spend time with groups of women, ever.
Don’t be mad, but it was different.
No one made fun of me.
No one laughed at my jokes.
But there was a lot of smiling. So much smiling.
The women asked me questions about my mother, of whom I’m defensive and don’t feel like exploring why. I tried to deflect, to ask them about themselves, a skill I developed at a very young age. I jokingly wondered out loud if they were all ceramicists. Only one (Daisy?) said yes. They all told specific but similar anecdotes about my father, who I guess over a number of years helped each one out of jams after meeting them in emergency rooms and al-anon meetings.
I had never known my father to like the company of women. Sometimes when a regular brought a new girlfriend to the bar, my dad went from laconic to cold. So these women’s stories were so all news to me that I ended up giving away information that I never meant to give away: that my father wished I was a boy and I did too. That when I realized I was a girl, at maybe four or five, like really realized, I felt an existential sadness. “Like the Velveteen rabbit,” I think I said. They assured me I could become a boy, but I was like no, it’s not like that.
I took a pack of American Spirits out of my jacket pocket and pulled out a joint. I lit it and the women smiled while looking down.
Dove sat next to her mom (Maple?). Dove was not smiling. I inhaled, reached over (Laurel?) and (Holly?) and put the joint in Dove’s mouth. Dove put her lips around the joint and sucked. I don’t think she inhaled, but still she coughed. Finally (Maple?) said “Enough.” She was still smiling but like she had forgotten to stop. I handed (Maple?) the joint to put her in a dilemma. She hesitated, smoked, then passed it.
The thing with the ceramicists was that when they got stoned they liked to cook and eat. When I got stoned I didn’t talk. I wanted to go home, put on leggings, look at all my beautiful blank journals, choose one, write a couple thoughts on the second page, fall asleep. But I had to join all the ceramicists in the dining room around a circular table in order to eat the spaghetti and scrambled eggs and garlic bread and grapes. I don’t know what they talked about. I concentrated on eating and drinking water even though they offered me wine. That didn’t strike me as weird because I drank around adults in my father’s bar all the time. I got up to use the bathroom. I saw that Dove was still in the living room, by herself, twirling, comfortable in that short-lived childhood high. I left without letting anyone know.
I drove home, feeling like I was going too fast but when I looked at the speedometer I was going ten miles per hour, five around the bends, so slow that the windows were down but my hair did not move. All I could think on that drive was the moon revolved around me and I should have said goodbye to Dove.
I didn’t see the women again for ten years.
You know how sometimes you’re doing something unrelated to anything, like looking at field guides in the bookstore, and some weird moment from the past gets clarified that you didn’t even know needed it?
When I was twenty-seven, I drove past the cemetery where I had just buried my father. The sun was rising and the sky was hot pink. I saw a group of women in the distance, around the area where my father’s grave was, and I knew that they were my father’s mistresses.
A certain shame I had carried for a decade dissipated upon that vision. Until then, when my body wanted to feel anxious, or when I couldn’t fall asleep, or when I needed to explain why I hurt myself after I hurt myself, of before I hurt myself, I thought of me handing that joint to Dove. My baseless teenage cockiness. My dysfunctional boundary pushing.
I was right to give that child drugs.
AND NOW FOR SOME PLOT
Only two customers were drinking in my bar Paloma’s that day. They were in a deep conversation about couches. In walked Ted, who I hadn’t seen since the night of my father’s memorial, when I learned that my dad had left the bar to him, and that he was my half-brother, and then instead of processing that information I stole money from the bar’s safes and came out to the desert. Anyway, I hadn’t seen or talked to Ted since then so when he walked in I thought, uh-oh, I’m in trouble.
Ted said, “Hey, don’t I get a hug?” He looked so much the same.
I said, “I don’t hug family members. You hit on me once.”
The other customers stopped talking.
“I never hit on you.”
“I wrote about it in my journal!”
He turned around and walked out, got hit by a car, and was left in the hospital to rot like unused cilantro at the bottom of the crisper because his mother was weak with grief and hope.
So that never got resolved, even when he died a month later.
You could say Ted’s death was a metaphor for all the unfinished business I had left behind, and you’d be right. I sold Paloma’s to a San Francisco guy. Possibly he was having a similar moral crises, some sort of rootless discomfort that was causing him nausea. Or maybe making loads of money wasn’t cutting it anymore and he was like a skydiver on his 900th jump, making grocery lists in his head when he was supposed to be bursting with the thrill. I went home during a heatwave.
My father’s bar was locked. It had a sign on the door stating Ted’s vacation days. I still had a key so I went through the motions of opening. I did this for a week and not one my father’s many loyal patrons came in. I even saw Lou walk by, look through the window at me, keep walking.
I was lonely. My mom came in.
Said, “They know you stole money.”
“What do they care?”
“And they think you killed Ted.”
I laughed. My mom said, “They’re idiots. What are you gonna do.”
She wasn’t asking. I poured myself a drink.
She said, “I got to get out of here.” And she left.
I didn’t take it personal. She was an alcoholic. It took me a long time not to take that personally.
The men who used to live in my father’s bar started convening around the gas station, as if they were teenagers with no other cool place to go. They sat on green chairs outside, drank Miller.
My bar remained empty. I filled up my notebooks with cocktail recipes and fantasies of what the men were going to do to me. They stewed in methane. I didn’t consider approaching them.
But this summer was like none other in recorded history. I’m talking unprecedented relentless heat waves that no shade nor crescent moon could relieve.
And the men, weak from sun and fumes, started to faint, one every day, usually by noon. I saw it once, this new phenomenon that we all got used to within a week. I was pumping gas, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes when I sensed, then saw, a change in the atmosphere. It was Lou who swayed, gently, then peacefully succumbed to the ground, like a tinkerbell. The men sat Lou up, pressed their warm beers to his forehead, fanned him with pages from the local ten-page paper. One ran in to buy some water, an easy task that could have been done beforehand in light of this new inevitability, but nonetheless.
This went on for weeks! The men didn’t judge the situation untenable until they stopped dropping single file and instead en masse. Finally, on a record-breaking Columbus Day morning, all but one fell, Jeffrey, who assisted each man clockwise, got them all sitting and mumbling and passing the yet still single carton of water. They were slumpy and tragic and finished. Since Jeffrey was the last one standing he was the first to admit that he didn’t want to do this anymore. He walked over to my bar. I served him a beer and a shot, waved away his money, and waited for the others to follow, which they did. By nighttime they were giddy from the air conditioning and cushioned stools. We didn’t talk about anything, not my father nor Ted nor their belief in my guilt, nor the climate disaster that forced them to abandon their morals to be physically comfortable again. I was a cold respite and when the time came a warm one, a dry one, a silent one, a pretty one. It was nothing to make them stay home, an easy trick, of looking them in their eyes and asking them questions about themselves then gently teasing them for their answers. It was a relief to know that people abandoning their loyalties could sometimes work in my favor.
Jane Liddle lives in New Paltz, New York, where she is a bookseller, book reviewer, and book writer. Her short story collection Murder was published by 421 Atlanta in March 2016. You can find her and her writing at liddlejane.com.