New Love

by Meagan Cass

Kara has a new love, we’re sure of it. We catch her texting at her own dinner party, not touching the creamy moussaka it took her hours to make. A glowing red nymph, somewhere between a lightening bug and a bed bug, crawls over her forearm.

“Who is he? Please not another musician,” we say, brushing the insect away.

She only blushes, excuses herself to the bathroom, phone tucked in her pocket.

After what feels like a long time, she returns smiling, a glazed look in her eyes.

“Seriously,” we say. “At least tell us his name.”

“Eh, it’s probably nothing. Just some guy I met online. An environmental studies professor. He lives three hours away.”

“Well, be careful with your heart,” we tell Kara.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says, digs into her gone-cold food.

What we want to say: how she always does this, falls hard for some distant artist or academic, with his witty text messages, his long emails, an imagined, galleried future. How as these communications progress, leading up to a meeting, she will stay in more and more, stop working on her book project—she’s a women’s historian—stop going to her competitive Sunday softball league—she played all the way through undergrad—stop answering our texts, stop inviting us over to her apartment with the good wood floors and built-ins she found by herself, when she moved here for her teaching job. 

How at rushed happy hour drinks she will explain why they haven’t had a date yet, how he is too busy, has an important paper/studio session/concert coming up. How we will pull the shining red specks from her hair, pink winged now, swat them from the air, smash them crawling across the table.

How she will flinch each time, will say, “They must be coming from where else,” and then “Things are going really well. We have these incredible, wandering conversations,” and “He’s so creative, I never know what he’s going to say next. I’ve never met anyone like him,” and “Look, he even makes his own bread himself: he texted me a picture.”

We will look quickly, concede “he’s cute,” then scrutinize Kara’s gone-pale face, her thinned body in a new butter yellow wrap dress. When it starts, she always thrifts a new wardrobe, all her dresses in the colors she senses her new man prefers: once sea greens, then goldenrod and tomato red, now pastels which make her look younger, which she is acting like, too, in our opinion. 

“It’s starting again. We’re concerned for you. Who even is this guy?” we tell her, and she gives us a cold look, explains how we couldn’t understand, we’ve been coupled so long, since we were twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven. We don’t understand how online makes it different, how the men have a hundred Guess Who? boards of women to choose from, how for women there are only a few who don’t hold dead animals in their arms. How everyone in this region married at twenty-two. How if he cancels at the last minute, twice, or only wants to text and not talk on the phone, it is because he has a full life, it’s a good sign, they’re both busy.

When we do not respond, Kara leaves the table, won’t talk to us for weeks, won’t answer even when we call in the middle of the night from our back porches, gin drunk again, our boyfriends and husbands disappeared into comic book movie marathons and RPGs and fourteen hour sleeps and other names for the depression they never do anything to treat, saying they just need space.

When we were girls, the stories were different and the same. To find love, you had to prick your finger, draw a single pearl of blood, fall asleep for years, or pretend to be dead inside a glass box, lay there, pristine, or endure a year of confinement while a monster became less of a monster. Now it’s these insects. Of course, in the stories they aren’t invasive or predatory or like insects at all. They are more like pomegranate seeds stitched into the woman’s once drab clothes, or like red-pink jewels woven through her hair, or like a shining red-pink fog in the trees as she walks home from her first date.

It did feel like that, in moments, once, we think. 

Sometimes, after our twelve hour work days at universities and non-profits and labs, on our way to the grocery store because our boyfriends and husbands forgot to buy eggs again, or to the electric company because our boyfriends and husbands forgot to pay the bill again and we must arrange the reconnection, or to the mall because our boyfriends and husbands need new clothes again and never buy them for themselves, we drive past her apartment, see her windows wine red and flickering. We want to throw rocks and also, on some level, to take her place, to not return to our own darkened rooms.

We have and have not been Kara putting down a barely cracked book to write him back quick, mind swarmed with flirty and serious text messages, Kara canceling on her softball team for the fourth time, then driving to see him again because he’s got more going on, he says.  Kara caulking her windows shut, purchasing black out curtains. Kara with red-pink bugs nested deep in her mattress, biting her arms and legs at night while she lies awake thinking of him, their abdomens filling with her blood, their mouth parts leaving itchy, heart shaped welts all over her skin until she can’t sleep much at all, becomes too exhausted to do anything she loves.

We had those welts too, a long time ago, for maybe three months. Back before our boyfriends and husbands moved in, before that part of our lives seemed settled. Sometimes we see them on other women around town, women behind reference desks and heading up private practices, women passing and cutting with us on pick-up soccer fields, women at the one bar in this city where you can get an adult cocktail. Or we see a woman’s hand reach to scratch beneath a blazer, a blouse, a carefully positioned scarf. When we stare, the women always smile hard, mumble something about the mosquitos this year, how it doesn’t get cold enough in winter anymore to kill them, or its their eczema, how it flares up constantly now that the air is so full of chemicals.

Or sometimes they just come out with it, say “New love, you know how it is in the beginning.” Their voices lilt up slightly at the end.

“Well, be careful with yourself,” we say, smiling back, trying to sound more worried than tired.

Sometimes we imagine an aerial view of our city at night. Certain teenage bedrooms, dorm rooms, vintage apartments, generic condos, and single-family houses with newly remodeled kitchens blink red-pink. Inside each, a woman both proud of and trying to hide her delirious infestation tells herself just a little bit longer, just a little bit more of this draining desire, just a little bit less of herself, just a little more sacrifice, and then she can relax into a man’s love, can open all her windows, call old friends, apply special balms, move somewhere fresh with him. Soon this in-between will end.

When things fall apart for Kara—the new man texts back less and then not at all or says the distance is too much or reveals that he’s married and wants someone poly, or, or—she will call us in the middle of the night. Our husbands and boyfriends will know to make us coffee, to grab our oldest jeans and gone-stiff combat boots while we pull out the Riot Grrl mix CDs, the whiskey, the special sprays they sell in drug stores next to the yeast infection creams, with names like Brave! and Heal-Your-Heart! and Asshole-Be-Gone! and Fuck Off! We’ll head over to Kara’s and go to work, two or three of us blasting the angry music, pouring shots, vacuuming the red-pink creatures, telling Kara she deserves better while we exterminate what would, if left unchecked, empty her of herself entirely. 

This time, though, we are too tired. Our partners have lost their jobs or their parents are sick or they are drinking too much again. They unravel in plumes of cigarette smoke while wings the color of wet newsprint open in our chests. We have our own infestations to deal with, grey moths that cloud our windows and lamp shades, leave us with a thin, dingy light by which to cook and paint and critique novels and fuck. We have our own sadness which, we can’t help thinking, is more grown-up, more real than Kara’s. We don’t let ourselves walk away. “At least you have someone who loves you, who’s always there for you,” Kara says when we try to explain. “Slow Sunday mornings listening to records. Rainy afternoons reading together. You’re so lucky.”

When our old friend calls, we let the phone ring and ring. Eventually, we turn it off, tell our husbands and boyfriends and ourselves to go back to sleep.

Or we meet her for a quick coffee—we are so busy this month, we are sorry— tell her to focus on her new book project. We tell her she is lucky for this free time. We tell her to learn how to make a Tom Collins. We tell her, hey, you don’t have to deal with in-laws at Christmas. Well tell her now is a the perfect time to create that new class. We say what about that fellowship she keeps meaning to apply for? What about softball? Surely throwing some pitches would help. Our words are bright and sure as registry cutlery, form a glinting fence between us. Before long, she closes her mouth.  

What we can’t yet imagine: that after eight more bad dates and three more break-ups, Kara will cry alone on the floor until midnight, then turn on all her lights. She will take full stock of her rooms, see the blood bugs that inhabit every drawer of her antique writing desk, the dark caves of her cleats, the binding of her last book, the bindings of our books in which her name is printed in the acknowledgments, the pockets of the weird, neon green wool coat she bought for the residency in Boston, the Dutch oven we gave her for her birthday so she could make proper Cassoulet, the spider patterned dress her sister made her from scratch, the pages of the article she was drafting before she gave all her attention to some man she barely knew. 

Before she visits her sister for the first time in years, before she calls the therapist again, before she allows herself any and all grief, before she gets back to writing, before she flies to the archive by the sea, before she tells us how we’ve hurt her and we tell her how she’s hurt us and we do and don’t understand each other, before she plans our first vacation together, no husbands or boyfriends, before she cries on her floor again, then again, before she moves to a new, bigger city, she opens all her own windows, stands still in the cold, red, buzzing air, listens only for what she wants next.

Meagan Cass’ first full-length collection, ActivAmerica, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction judged by Claire Vaye Watkins and was published by UNT Press in 2017. She is author of the chapbook Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press) and her stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, DIAGRAM, Joyland, Mississippi Review, and Puerto del Sol, among other places. She teaches creative writing and publishing at University of Illinois Springfield and serves as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications, where she is co-managing editor of Craft Chaps. She lives in St. Louis.