NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Eastbound

Fiction by ​Alysandra Dutton

A drab of wax trembled on the edge of one of my wedding candles. They were lined up on a podium that rattled with the dull plink of piano keys, ten little flames like ten bridesmaids. I watched the wax instead of my husband’s face as I came down the aisle. A photo my maid of honor Nina took with her new/old polaroid camera and tucked in the guestbook revealed his smile: front two teeth overly white (fake, from an accident as a kid), dimples writing his happiness into his cheeks from eye crease to chin.

The camera caught a shine from his eyes. Wet, and so were Nina’s.

Right before I said “I do,” the wax coursed down an avenue of hardened drips and hit the hardwood floor of the church. Nina didn’t take a photo of this moment, so I don’t know what Daniel looked like while I was watching the wax from those cheap dollar store candles ruin the floor we’d paid two thousand dollars to stand on.    

The drip clung for a second, swelling, expectant like the moment before a C chord. Then it trembled, and my brain supplied my ears with a bare “smack.” I believed I heard it, anyway.

I believed I heard drips falling like raindrops to the floor in front of the piano. Now came my vows. Now came I do. Now came lips I’ve kissed eight hundred times. All during: drip, drip, drip, like rain tapping on tin, drowning out my head-noise.


The first thing we said: “Hi.”
    
I was the first one in the car, a red Toyota driven by a man named Julio and together we drove seven blocks off track from my destination to pick up Daniel, the man listed at the bottom of my Uber screen; you are pooling with Daniel, paying 12.35. He slid in next to me and said, “Hi.” First came me, then came Daniel, then later came a breathless, second, “Hi,” with sheets tangled in our ankles. He told me later that he got out of the car with me because he liked my bracelet.
    
“What about my bracelet?” I asked as he twisted it on my wrist, in his king-size bed, in his twelfth floor apartment in the West Loop. He held my wrist and twisted my bracelet like a man holds the wrist and touches the jewelry of a woman he is intimately familiar with. (First came me, then Daniel, then hi, then canceling my meeting, then the bar, then the bed, then came us. Well, him.)

“This ox charm. I’m Year of the Ox, too.”

“Actually.” But I swallowed. If he asked me on a second date, I would tell him that I was actually Year of the Rabbit--but I didn’t like rabbits, and years ago after a bad breakup I’d flown to Nepal and trekked the Annapurnas. Thirty two eternal days smelling like saffron and cold, blinding sunlight. The sun out there laid freckles across my arms that left me in the winter and never came back. Four of those days me and a friend of a friend, and a German named Kate, and our guide hiked with the yak herders, and once got to put our fingers in their matted fur. When I bought my Pandora bracelet they didn’t have a yak charm, and the Buddhas were sold out, and I thought the ox would be just as good.

He did call me for a second date, but I waited until the third to tell him. I whispered it in his ear when he asked me to tell him a secret; “I’m actually not an ox, I’m a rabbit.” He laughed and called me not a rabbit, but a devil. We were pretend-drunk off morning mimosas and walked close together at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

It turned out that Daniel was enthusiastic about astrology.

“I knew that something was wrong because people born in the Year of the Ox are contemplative before making decisions, but you seemed more hesitant, like when I asked which way you wanted to go when we got to the big cat cage? Rabbits are like that.”

He slung his arm around my neck and squeezed too hard, but I forgave him, because I knew the grip was meant to be friendly and flirtatious, and I giggled out of respect.

Daniel kept referencing how funny was it that we’d already slept together, none of his past girlfriends slept with him that quickly. Girlfriend? Was I his girlfriend? I told him we could still make the third date special, and I don’t remember hesitating. I don’t remember hesitating even when he was holding the door to his apartment open to me, all I felt was go, go, go, take your pants off, and my shirt too, please do this before it can’t be done.

At the zoo I pointed out the Himalayan monals and told him about chasing them from flowered rhododendron hedges when me and my friend of a friend visited Chitwan in the south of Nepal.

“How was it out there/how long ago did you go/that’s interesting,” he said. I clucked at the monal, which had sunk into itself, living every day to sun in Lincoln Park, fat happy zoo bird with nothing going on.

“It was great. It smelled different. I went rafting and I traveled everywhere on the local buses,” I answered.

What I didn’t tell him was that my thirty two days in Nepal had swallowed my whole year, and then, it seemed, my whole twenties, with its enormity. That once I was more like a patchy, bug-eyed bush bird than the fat monal in front of us. And that I had bought the Pandora charm bracelet and the little ox to go with it because all I had left from the girl I was no longer, was a crumpled five rupee bill, faded pink, with two yaks standing under Mount Everest. I kept it folded in my wallet, behind my insurance card. It was my reminder that once, a long time ago, I had managed to leave.


The first fifty times Daniel and I fucked all he needed were the lights to be dim and for me to squeeze his hips with my thighs and also for me to smile when he kissed my neck, and the next fifty times he needed to bruise my wrists a little, holding them against the pillow above the arc of my body, but I liked how Daniel did me. It took me out of my brain and it felt real, dutiful, and when I was dabbing my wrists with the cream concealer from my Sephora kit before work, I was given something to think about while inputting data.

I thought good sex was something that you had on vacation — not Mexico during spring break, but the kind of vacation where you quit your job and took your savings to Asia. Not that I did that when I went to Nepal, but I met those girls. They had dreads and mandala tattoos and I kept seeing them in every bar in Kathmandu, in Pokhara, again in Chitwan, in the teahouses, and I could hear them in the bunk below me or through thin painted walls having good sex. And then after they’d come out of the shower and have a drink and tell me about the good sex they had in Yangon and Bangkok and Seoul, they quit their marketing job, they had enough money for three more months, they bought this motorcycle in Delhi. And all of them were smudged with dirt and had overgrown eyebrows and glowed with magnetism, they were all the sun, they collected satellites, I was crushed by the pull of their gravity.

I told Daniel this and he laughed. “Let me show you what kind of sex those girls were having.” And he pulled my hair.

Somewhere in the first few months we were dating Daniel took me to the lake in Edgewater, near a school, and we sat on a bench while the sun set. Everything gold and glowing was in the west behind us, but over Lake Michigan were violet clouds and the foreboding encroachment of darkness.

“I feel like everyone my age is farther along than me. Pete got married last year.”

“I feel like that too,” I said, and I did, because I didn’t know where the time between breaking up with my ex and the too old for boyfriend-girlfriend now had gone.

“I think I would like to get married soon.” And Daniel looked at me, and I wished desperately for one of my old sorority sisters to get a picture of the silhouette we made, our chins tipping towards each other in sunset agony. I had twelve thousand pictures of my ex and none with Daniel, and I knew that I was too old to care that my niece Parker got hundreds of likes on Instagram and I only got twelve, but it would have been a nice backdrop, and my sorority sisters all would have messaged me asking who he was. I wanted that picture to look back on, before memory made the ink run.

He kissed me, and I felt the moment where the romance matched my daydreams, sliding into place with a gentle click.

That night he buried himself in me and buried his face in my neck, and I smiled and smiled, and I reminded myself that later, when it wasn’t so nice, I had to remind myself to smile again over the lake memory. So most of the time, that was what I did, smiling when I rubbed the concealer in with the perfume on my wrists, smiling during staff meetings, smiling when I didn’t meet my quotas. And the roughness of him against my inner walls was a pain I could tolerate.

The third fifty times we had sex he needed to squeeze my neck just a little and whisper/ask if I trusted him. I was never sure that I did.


At the reception, Daniel’s face grew brighter and wine-stained in his cheeks, and I worried about the fork trembling in his great-grandmother’s hands, splattering spaghetti sauce onto the table cloths, I wondered if it would come out of our deposit. A constellation of marinara drips staining our first shared paycheck.

My sorority sister, my maid of honor, Nina was talking with the best man, giggling in his ear. I watched her red nails trail over the cloth that had been finely tailored to his elbow. I had asked her to do her nails lilac, to match the flowers and her dress. She looked at me and winked.

“She’s getting it dirty,” I whispered.
 
"My pet?” and then he turned away as quickly as he turned to me, approached by a gaggle of brothers, his and mine.
    
The first dance came with our plates of salmon and lasagna only picked at, and Daniel gripped my waist too tight. I let myself breathe into a soft smile for the pictures, a sweet and natural smile to share on Instagram later or for a frame on an eggshell-white wall in our new home, which we would someday have, though neither Daniel nor I had money for a Chicago mortgage.
    
But then I heard a glass break behind me and started to shake.
    
“Darling, it’s alright. The deposit will take care of it.”
  
“We wanted to get the deposit back, that’s what they’re for.”
    
“Shhh.”
    
He moved his hand over my back with firm, comforting pressure.
    
When Daniel first moved in, he was amazed to realize that I’d been living alone for the last four years, amazed to observe the tops of hard to reach counters; I dusted them once a week. Amazed that my books were organized by color; I saw it on Pinterest. And for myself, I was amazed by the way he rattled and echoed around the place, and amazed by the way his boots scuffed the hardwood floors, and amazed by how much noise the shower made when I wasn’t in it. Daniel told me a few times that we could get a new place together, but I was terrified of bedbugs; I felt them itching on me whenever I saw couches near dumpsters or rugs sunning outside. I knew that my bed was safe, because I had the bedding professionally heat-cleaned every two weeks.
    
“Well, you could do that in the new place, too,” he said. I told him wasn’t Lincoln Park nice, though? So we stayed.
    
Later, when we had been living together a few months, Daniel asked why was it that I jumped off an Uber and into bed with him but I was so scared of bed bugs or a little dirt? He asked this while wiping his greasy, tar-covered hands onto a white rag. He’d bought a car in the time we’d lived together, it was a real fixer-upper, and he had brought its grease and its tar into my apartment.
    
“It was because I liked you more than I hate bugs,” I said. I thought of that day in Edgewater, by the lake, to make myself smile.
    
He wrapped his arm around my waist and whispered, “I like you, too,” and I counted 1, 2, 3 all the way to ten to keep from scream-asking if he’d washed the grease off of his hands before he touched me with them.
    
The truth was only part of what I’d told, that I liked him more than I hated bugs. The truth was that I was a warrior at beginnings; in the Uber pool when I looked at Daniel for the first time and he smiled at me, I thought, this man has no idea who I am, and then I thought, so I could be anybody. And since I was a warrior, I gave him blowjobs over breakfast, and I didn’t check for bed bugs until he was asleep, and I was chatty at the zoo about the monals, and it didn’t truly hit me how tired it all made me until I was wearing his ring, and my head ached all the time.
    
At the wedding, with us dancing, he asked, “Are you feeling alright?” I was still breathing softness into my own expression, and tipping my face towards the light so that the picture would be pretty, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “I know it’s messy.”
    
He said things like that a lot. “I know you don’t like things messy/I know you love to clean/I know bugs scare you,” and I could only think, when did you start to know these things? I’d think back to him sitting on the couch watching Manchester U play soccer and him correcting me, “Hon, it’s football,” and was that the moment that you knew about me that I loved to clean?
    
I hated cleaning. My knees ached as I scrubbed the kitchen of the rubber marks Daniel’s shoes made when he forgot to leave them at the door.
    
I ignored Daniel and looked over my shoulder to where I knew the photographer was waiting for us to turn. Wrinkled my nose with a cheeky grin. In a few years, I’d look back on this picture, and I would be able to forget the broken glass and the splattered spaghetti sauce; only us, only perfect us, looking like we weren’t.

    
What I liked most about Daniel was how normal he made me feel, when he slept through my nightmares and when he said things like, “I’m thinking Chinese food tonight,” as I dusted each piano key in turn, like it was something I was doing just for fun. I liked when I slipped past his vision while he ate or watched football/soccer like I wasn’t anything to notice, like there wasn’t a single thing remarkable about me; this was a calmer way to feel. I normally felt like I was the sun, blazing with extra-normal light and energy, I felt like I was being stared at on the street for the carefully ironed presses in my blouse, I felt like I was ten feet tall or blue or had eight arms, all juggling as I walked.
    
When his eyes slid over me, or when he called me “Hon,” for days at a time and I forgot what my name sounded like in his mouth, I breathed relief; these were clues that I was absolutely regular.
    
I stored the non-normal things in my closet. In there was: a poster I bought in Kathmandu, more than twenty plastic bracelets strung together by Tibetan refugees, pictures from those days, too, and piled on top of all that, cleaning supplies, and dry-cleaned rags to wipe the cleaning supplies up. Daniel was repelled by his disinterest in cleaning, so he never made it beneath the Windexes and Mr. Cleans, to the remembrances of my before life, but I pulled out the postcards every few months to trick him into thinking I was still brave enough to board a plane.
    
They were lying on our dresser when my sorority sister Nina came to look at the dress.
    
“You look beautiful/have you lost weight?/I’m going to cry,” she said, dry eyed, seeing me in my dress. And then she turned to the postcards. “Where is this?/Do you think you’ll go back?/I love this architecture.”
    
The postcards were of stupas in the mountains, of a Tibetan woman with missing teeth smiling on a sunny day, of Everest, of rhododendron bushes, and my favorite, one of a tea house at night, with a few hikers bundled into puffy jackets, sitting as barely discernible outlines in the calm observance of the mountains at night.
    
If Nina flipped the postcard over, she would see Kate written and scribbled out in the address line. In fact, they all said Kate on the back, and were all scribbled with the imprint of a ballpoint pen tip. When I ran my fingers over the frontside images, I could feel the indentation of imperfection.
    
In Nepal, I sat outside the tea houses most nights with Kate, a German girl I’d met on the Annapurnas, while the friend of a friend I was supposed to be with warmed her toes inside. Kate was a broker in Berlin, she had gotten the job because of her dad, and she was young and unbelievably blonde. Some nights in the tea houses I would arrive with my friend of a friend, and Kate would be there, her laughter echoing in the rafters hours after she had quieted, and some nights she would claim cold and share my blankets, curling into my side.
    
When we got off the trek, she bought me a milkshake in Pokhara, and she looked at me like I was the sun, blazing with extra-normal light and energy. I said, “I’m so dirty,” and she said, “I’ll make you clean,” and her hand covered mine.
    
That night I scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, to be clean without her help.
    
“I don’t think I’ll go back,” I told Nina.


After the wedding we went to the Palmer Hotel downtown, famous for being an art deco Sistine Chapel, for the bubbles in the brush strokes of thickly painted decadence fit into the ceiling between big wooden beams. It took four stars to find a hotel that was unmarred by the reports on BedbugRegistry.com.
    
Daniel rubbed my shoulder as we checked in; my train was pinned to my waist. A while ago one of my sorority sisters told me about her wedding night, how she and her husband had picked bobby pins out of her hair and then fallen asleep without even having sex.
    
I knew that Daniel would need to have sex with me like he needed air, I knew it by the way he rubbed my shoulder and my side and my lower back as I gave my ID to the clerk at the front desk. In the mirror of the honeymoon suite a married woman gave sidelong glances to me, she was wearing my face. I watched her as I pulled out my own bobby pins and as I zipped the sides of the white, lace bodice Daniel bought me for tonight.
    
And it seemed as though she kept staring at me, following me from the bathroom mirror to the one on the dresser that overlooked our four poster bed. She watched my legs as Daniel slid my stockings off, the arch of my back as his hands crawled over my sides. I was transfixed by her breathing and the flush of her cheeks, like the red in Kate’s cheeks as she followed behind me up a steep mountainside.

The married woman in the mirror gasped and her eyeliner smudged delicately in the corners of her eyes, and she did not mind that I stared at her as Daniel worked through me, until he bit my shoulder to bring me back to him. Even then I could see her moving, blurry in my peripherals, like a gust of wind and light, like powerful nature. She was the heave of the Earth, the pulsing in my pulse, and when I closed my eyes, I thought I could feel her move inside me.
    
When it was done, before my head had stopped spinning around me, I looked for her and she was gone. It was only me in the mirror, breathing hard, and with a rat’s nest forming in my curls.


Daniel slept, and I stared at the ceiling, the mirror, the lamp. Whenever I closed my eyes I could hear the dripping of wax falling to the floor, ruining the hardwood of our marital church.
    
I sat up, and Daniel stirred.
    
“Baby, stay asleep.”
    
“Shhh,” I answered.
    
He was used to me getting up and scrubbing. I almost thought that the sound of a Windex spray bottle, or the swish of my cleaning toothbrush swishing back and forth between the rivets of our bookshelf comforted him. He sank deeper into the bed as I cleaned, until looking over, I found him indistinct in the mess of covers and the dim of the night downtown.
    
I took the red line up to Roger’s Park, where we’d gotten married, clutching at the pole with my hand wrapped in antibacterial wipes. A homeless woman was curled into herself further down the train car, and every once in a while someone got on or off, slumped with sleeplessness and melancholy and never staying on board long. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Chicago is the city that closes its eyes only halfway.
    
Nina was waiting for me with the church keys. I’d called her on the way to ask her to come down. I could hear Daniel’s best man mumbling beside her on the other line, and my stomach twisted.
    
We weren’t close before I asked her to be my maid of honor. I think she was surprised, but I wasn’t that close to anyone, and I didn’t want to ask Daniel’s sister, her hair was too blonde.
    
“Are you okay/Does Daniel know you’re out/Do you want some of this scotch?”
    
“Yes,” I said, and she let us in.
    
The floor was as I left it, with mountainous piles of wax around the piano and podium. They rose in jagged peaks and smooth valleys, creating avenues and ravines between them. I knelt on the floor, the pajama pants I borrowed from Daniel’s suitcase slipping a little. I observed what had been created as I listened/didn’t really listen to my vows. I ran my finger over the tip of a peak, and remembered a picture my friend of a friend took of me and Kate, our fingers touching the tip of Annapurna in the distance.
    
When I took that picture with Kate, it had seemed so enormous. Even miles away, Annapurn consumed the sky; the sun set behind it at three PM, it towered, it made us balk and gasp around every turn. And now, under my finger, fragile.

I pushed the wax down and mini Annapurna sank and collapsed.

Nina passed me her flask of scotch, and we took turns drinking it, her sitting on the edge of the stage, me on my knees, scrubbing away the wax from the floor with my cleaning toothbrush. And after I was done, and the floor gleamed, I sat next to her and leaned my head on her shoulder.
    
“It’s hard to figure out what goes on through your head,” she said, the movement of her mouth jostling me from under her jaw. “Even back in college, you never talked that much.”
    
I closed my eyes, and though I didn’t hear the drip of wax in my head anymore, I still could not find rest; instead, my mind tugged me towards Chicago O’Hare, to the International Terminal. I imagined getting on a plane and flying east in a window seat, and squinting against the glare of the sun rising over the Atlantic. I had this crazy sense that I had been moving the wrong way for years, that I’d been in an unending night, racing away from the horizon and the light it bore. And now I wanted to stop and turn around and head the other way; I wanted to get there faster than Daniel or Nina or Kate, and bathe in sunlight while they slept. I had this thought that I couldn’t wait another second for the sun to come up.
    
“Nina,” I said.
    
Her hair was swimming in synthetic light from the street lamps that shined on us from outside. She was wearing Daniel’s best man’s pants, bunched at the drawstring with a firm knot.
    
“Will you get these bobby pins out for me?” I asked.
  
And while her fingers wound and unwound the knots in my hair, the tangles, pulling from them pin, after pin, I thought about the last night of the trek. Kate had been so cold she slipped into bed with me, and put her frozen fingertips on the skin of my back to prove how badly she needed my warmth. I wondered where she’d been in the five years I’d been breaking my promise to write to her; she talked about Myanmar and Tibet and volcanoes in Hawaii, and I wondered whether she’d seen those places, and if I would someday walk where her footsteps had been.
    
​I knew that someday, I would be on a beach in Thailand, and that I would let the water mouth my feet. I felt Nina’s fingers pull my hair from temple to tip, gently, searching for more pins, and I knew that I would be that brave again, someday. I knew that the sun would rise, someday. I also knew that I would never see Kate again, and that would be okay, someday. By the time Nina had found all the bobby pins, there was light coming from the eastward windows, warming my toes.

Alysandra Dutton
​
Alysandra Dutton graduated from Hiram College, moved to Cleveland Heights, and works the reference desk at the local library; Cleveland is her home away from home. Her work has been recognized by the AWP Intro Journals Project and Lit Cleveland's 5 Under 25 contest. Starting Fall 2018 she will be a member of the fiction cohort of the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing. This is her first publication.