Red Earth Review #6 July 2018

When they leave, and the small room with it’s couches and cushions and laps and microphone smells slightly stale, full of these people and her, Alexandra wants to cry because she wants to talk about her life in these way. She wants these lives to be her life, to appropriate these narratives, to understand how to make each story she hears her own.

Alexandra calls Peter because she keeps missing him. She wants to know that he is okay.

She says, “Maybe we should go to lunch.”

He says, “I guess. I think that would be okay.”

She doesn’t know what else to say or if, now that she is actually on the phone with him, if she wants to see him.

He says, “Alex, this lunch would just be lunch, right?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Peter clears his throat. “Well, I was talking to some friends of mine and they said you were probably calling to try to get back together with me.”

He says this and Alexandra knows that she does not want to see Peter. She feels angry, that heavy pressure in her stomach tightening as it moves up her esophagus. She tries to swallow.

“It’s just lunch, Peter. I don’t think it is a very good idea anymore.”

She does not say, “I wouldn’t have divorced you if I still wanted you” or “Don’t be stupid.” She says, “I guess we will talk again sometime.

Take care.”

She closes her phone. She realizes that she and Peter’s relationship is not over; it is just a prolonged series of goodbyes.

Alexandra thinks about her mother, the oldest of the girls in her family. She folded laundry and washed dishes and snuck out of her bedroom window after she should be in bed, dreaming about holy and sacred things. Her mother, so smart and witty, laughing easily but ready to escape the small house, the shared basement room with the younger sister, the four other siblings, their mother locked in her bedroom typing, and the father, too tired when he came home to give attention to anyone other than the mother, so needy, clinging to his arm, pulling him to her. Oldest daughter, dark-eyed and sad, but only sometimes, fast to take the plates off the table, even if the younger sisters were still eating. She scrubbed dishes furiously, wiped them dry, stacked them in the cupboards, eager to leave that place.

Alexandra wonders if her mother still feels like escaping, not that her mother has ever used the word escape. !207