July 2012 - Archives

Girls Like Us

The night Brandi tells me about Zachary, it’s near the end of April our senior year - that first warm day of spring when you finally know that the temperature isn’t some cruel joke, that winter is finally over and summer is coming to stay. Still, we are rushing things with short skirts and no pantyhose but it’s one of those nights when the empty cornfields and endless rolling hills feel full of something other than that standard aching desperation to be somewhere else, a night when I look out into the same old nothing but fancy the whole place as an infinite possibility, ready to ignite. We are bored, like always, and drive to the next town over, the anticipation of summer heat filling the streets of Indiana with young people looking for something to do. And for us, this night, it’s good enough just to be best friends, just to go somewhere and have boys look at us, not even talk to us, just look and maybe flirt a little before we run off, giggling into the night.
Too young to drink and too amped up for movies or the mall, we park our car just off the IUP campus and walk two blocks to a pizza shop for plain slices, Diet Coke and cigarettes that we would never dare smoke in the light of day or anywhere less than 10 miles from our parents.
In the greater world of teenage girls, we are good: drink a little but never been drunk and have the common sense and courtesy to only smoke where our parents’ friends won’t see. Tonight we wear tight shirts adorned with cats and puppies that we found in the girls’ section at Super Wal-Mart but in general we are modest, never showing too much cleavage and leg at the same time. We are four months shy of college: me to Penn State main and Brandi going right here, staying with her grandparents for a year and saving money until she can transfer with me.
At our Christian Missionary and Alliance church we are the bad girls, the kind with too many holes in their ears and too many rings on their fingers and toes, the kind who giggle too much about boys during services or youth group meetings. We hang out with older boys who we’d grown up with at church and whose parents we still see every Sunday morning, no matter how late at night or early in the morning we come home. They are older boys with their own apartments near campus, apartments with bongs on the used coffee tables and wine bottles covered in dripping candle wax and Reel Big Fish and Social Distortion posters on the wall. Sometimes at their apartments we sneak a swig of vodka or canned beer, pass around a joint without inhaling or let boys put a hand up our shirts. Having grown up with us, most of the boys, but especially Zachary, are like our older brothers, only letting us experiment as far as they can see.
“She’s not that kind of girl,” Zachary always says when an unfamiliar boy starts to get too fresh with me. He hates it when I smoke.
But tonight Zachary isn’t here to stop me. He’s with his girlfriend Emily at a wedding in Altoona and although I’m sad that we don’t have a place to hang tonight it’s nice to have Brandi to myself.
As we open the screen door to the pizza shop, we’re met with the whir of an oscillating fan and the comforting aroma of garlic and cheese. The place is non-descript, pale yellow walls and bright red booths. The college-age workers pause to look us over as we order plain slices and pop. All three of them sport the beginnings of a beard and white aprons over red t-shirts. One of them has blue eyes and another wears diamond studs in each ear.
While Brandi pays and asks for a lighter (every last one of them reaching into their pockets at once), I wipe a thin layer of parmesan cheese off our table. A sketch of Italy mounted to the wall reminds me of a screen print I’d argued with my mom about just last week: An American Girl in Italy - a young girl walking an Italian street as the men admire her. I wanted it for my room. She said no. I told her I’d get it when I moved to State College. She said I’d change my mind.
“They’re not admiring,” she said. “They’re leering. You’ll understand when you’re a little bit older.”
My real dad died on a motorcycle when I was too young to remember and my mom remarried the nicest most boring man she could find shortly thereafter. I love my stepdad and my little brother and sister too, but John was nothing to aspire to. He was the kind of safe, unattractive man full of money and religion that you run to after your good-looking but troubled first husband runs off the side of the road with a fifth of whiskey in his veins. My mom judges all men on the basis of my dad, a personality quirk I ignore like church sermons and yellow lights.
Brandi comes over with the pizza and we dab at them with paper towels, sopping up the thick orange grease. It’s the sort of thing that Brandi’s mom has taught us to do. She has bleached blonde hair and the tiniest waist and highest heels I’ve ever seen.
I glance towards the kitchen, accidentally making eye contact with the blue-eyed boy. He smiles. It is charming. I blush, turning to my pizza and pop.
Brandi eats a dainty bite and sets down her slice, dropping a cigarette onto the table. Menthols. Just like always.
“I’ve been having sex with Zachary,” she says, fumbling for her lighter.
I swallow. The truth is, I’ve imagined this scenario before, not with Zachary but with somebody else. Brandi is my best friend but there’s always been something about her that’s unknowable, a mountain of defenses that nobody, not even me, has ever been able to crest. And I’ve always been okay with that because growing up in a town where everybody knows everybody and who they’re related to and what they wore to the first day of first grade is boring. Brandi and her mom moved in with her grandparents halfway through freshman year, so when it comes to her there are at least 15 years worth of things that I have yet to learn.
Still, she could have made this moment more of an announcement, maybe added a brief prologue, like “I have something to tell you” or “There’s something I have to say.” She could have even said that they were sleeping together so that maybe there’d be a moment of confusion and I’d have to ask if she really meant sex.
I think of Zachary’s disapproving glare every time I reach for a cigarette. I think of his girlfriend Emily and her dimpled smile, how the remnants of her acne disappear when you really make her laugh. I think of how Zachary had once told me that I was like Emily, the kind of girl you marry not date. I think of Zachary’s mother, a prim woman with auburn hair in a permanent up-do who makes the most delicious lasagna I’ve ever tasted.
“Are you going to tell?”
Tell? I wouldn’t even know where to start.
“So,” I say, trying to sound cool, but wondering if she thinks it’s humiliating that the farthest I’ve gone is second base. “Are you guys like a couple or something?”
She shakes her head, her honey colored hair hiding her face. “It’s just something that happens sometimes.”
It’s just something that happens sometimes. It seems like a weak excuse. In all of the things that I can think of that just happens sometimes, taking off your clothes and having sex doesn’t seem like one of them. And if it’s just something that happens are they even being safe? I’m irritated that she’s so thoughtless, that she’d take this risk. We are so close to going away to college and getting degrees and moving somewhere better where there’s a beach or a big city or anything other than this. You just don’t up and start having sex with somebody’s boyfriend if you really plan to escape.
I look past her, watching a mosquito fly in through a small slit in the screen door. It’s immediately swept up by the fan and blown halfway across the room. My neck feels damp. A dollar store fan and an open door don’t do much good when it’s eighty-five degrees at night.
I think of the good girls at church: Cassie and Kimberly and Renee, who play woodwind instruments and sing in the choir and wear crisp white dresses and pastel hats on Easter Sunday. They are the kind of girls who will go away to college for a few years then marry hometown boys and settle down in houses near their parents to become the next generation of good local families. I think of those girls and I wonder what happened to me that I don’t want to be them, that most of the time I don’t even want to talk to them.
Brandi snaps her fingers. “Say something.”
I nod, squeezing my eyes shut and turning to her face now, those angular cheeks made hollow from too many salads and diet pills. I know that she is waiting for me to speak, waiting for me to approve.
“So,” she says, feeling me out. “Do you, like, hate me now?”
I shake my head. I’m not even sure what she means. She takes a careful drag on her cigarette and looks out into the night. Her black eyes squint, beady and serious and for the first time I can see that she’s honestly afraid. Watching the hard line of her profile, I know that there is something impenetrable about her and I see, for the first time, how easy it might be for her to just stay.
Outside, underneath the red neon glow of the pizza shop sign, a group of boys about our age stand talking, hacky sacks in hand. When I look at them one of them smiles and I look away, once again caught.
Brandi laughs, nervous at first, but then her expression softens, a rare crumbling of defense. A Spice Girls song comes on the radio and she laughs even harder, using her fist as a microphone and trying to make me laugh. I can worry about what’s going to happen next year when I’m away for school or I can go back in my mind and try to figure out what I really think about her and Zachary, if there’s some sign or clue that I should have picked up on and known what was going on or if I should tell Emily the truth.
I can think about all those things, maybe for the rest of my life, but instead I start laughing with my friend, those outside boys still watching through the window and wondering just exactly what kind of girls we are.
Laurie Koozer is a writer and works in research at the University of Pittsburgh. She enjoys brunch, fall festivals and flip-flops. Her short stories have appeared in The Fourth River, Storyglossia, Stymie Magazine and the Open Thread Regional Review. Her upcoming novel, What Happens on Sundays, follows the loves and lives of six Pittsburgh women during a Steelers football season. Excerpts are available at her website: www.yinzrreadin.com
                                                                                                                                                             

First Birthday

Unsteady but certain, she stumbles from one body to the next. Quiet, like a toy come to life without its own voice or history. Adults babble around her.
Silent, I take her in my arms only when she reaches for me. My father prods: Time for you to have one of those. I set her down.
They pass her from arm to arm until, dizzy, she finds the cake and the dazzle of candle and flame. Under the pavilion, their delight drowns out the drizzle of rain and the tear of shiny papers. Her eyes peek from under heavy lids at each new, strange object. Chubby fingers grip tighter at her mother’s shirt.
I stab a piece of fluff with a plastic fork, straining to hear the wind shake the leaves. Plastic lids snap closed, Styrofoam cups crumple in the trash. I ask if I can help, but they shake their heads. Another celebration fizzles out— just like the poems I haven’t been able to finish. Perhaps my father is right: I should focus on practical things.
But how could I bring someone else into this world when I barely know how to live in it?

Andrew Sydlik’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Taproot Literary Review, The Shine Journal, Bewildering Stories, and the anthology Come Together, Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press). He will be entering the English Literature PhD program at Ohio State in the fall of 2012.

                                                                                                                                                            

<h1> Brief Summary </h>
<p> I completed this painting in the summer of 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh. I was enrolled in The Foundation of Paintings class. The painting was done on a canvas and I used Winsor & Newton water mixable oil Colour paints.</p>
<h1> Bio </h>
<p> Natalie holds an Associates degree in Specialized Technology Le Cordon Bleu Pastry Arts. Natalie is currently working on getting her Bachelor’s Degree in Pre-Clinical Diatetics/Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh. </p>
<p> She has been working with different mediums since an early age. She always enjoyed watching her mother paint and now that Natalie is older she finds painting a way to bond with her mother.</p>
<p> If you are interested in more of Natalie's artwork, please feel free to contact us at the Holiday Cafe and we will get her in contact with you. </p>

 

<h1> Photo Description </h1>

<p> Carrie Furnace is a derelict former blast furnace, located along the Monogahela River in the Pittsburgh-area industrial town of Rankin, PA. Part of the Homestead Steel Works, the Carrie Furnaces were constructed in 1884, and operated through 1982. At its peak, the site produced approximately 1250 tons of iron per day. Today, the site is managed by the Steel Industry Heritage Council, and is included in several proposed plans for redevelopment – including the creation of a museum and park on-site. </p>

Taken by Andrew Weier