You Between the Lines

Chapter Eighteen

M Y PARENTS’ COUPLES THERAPY ISN’T going well. How do I know this? Good question! My mom must’ve hired a transcriber, because the second I get home for winter break, she offers me play-by-play scripts that sound more like soap operas than the anxious meanderings of two people on the cusp of sixty.

“And then he said, Well, if you wanted it that badly, you could have moved to Minnesota, who was stopping you? Can you imagine? Who was stopping me? Your father cares so much about what his boss and his colleagues think, but when it comes to his own wife, I’m an afterthought. I’m just supposed to let go of any forward progress because ultimately, Jeff’s comfort is worth more? I’ve let his anxiety dictate the trajectory of our lives, and he’s totally taken that for granted.”

My mom turns into the grocery store parking lot, her eyes wild even in profile.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I offer.

She turns off the ignition, eyes still fixed on the windshield. “He expected me, at the drop of a hat, to turn down one of the biggest opportunities I’ve ever been given. All because he was scared he’d never find a job or a boss he liked again. And you know what? I did it. Do you think Mayo is going to try again? Knowing I said no once? I never should have let him make this decision for us. I should’ve just taken the job.”

Except he didn’t expect her to turn it down. He didn’t make her. She’s a grown adult who made a choice to put family first, then regretted it.

But there are some arguments I know I’ll never win.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this.”

She quickly puts on her sunglasses. “I don’t have anyone else.”

“Don’t you still go on walks with Sheila? What about the people from your running group?”

We both get out of the car, and she stares at me over the hood. With her glasses I can’t see her eyes, just shields of impenetrable black.

“We don’t talk about our marriages.”

Down the aisles, cart in hand, she continues. In the dairy section, she tells me how my dad, or rather my father , has neglected his health over the last ten months, blaming it on his anxiety. While inspecting berry cartons, she wonders if all of this could’ve been avoided if he’d just gone to therapy like she’d asked. In the frozen food aisle, she buys three pints of ice cream—Buckeye for her, mint chip for me, butter pecan for my dad. I raise an eyebrow.

“It’s his new favorite.”

“But you don’t live together right now,” I say quietly, as if saying it out loud makes it more real than it already is.

She shrugs. “We’re trying to see each other a few times a week. Date night is on Wednesdays. That’s what the therapist suggested.”

In tiny moments like this one, I feel like it could all turn around. That the drama my parents are putting each other through is just a storm cloud on the precipice of a downpour. Something that will eventually pass.

Over the break, I relocate constantly to accommodate them. I spend the first three days with my mom, the next with my dad. My dad and his family get me for Christmas, my mom and hers for New Year’s.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I join my dad in preparing dinner before his relatives arrive. When I enter the kitchen, I’m assaulted by the smell of basil.

“Altering the stuffing recipe this year?” I ask Dad, who weaves in and out behind me with a giant pot. I skipped breakfast in preparation for our usual spread—turkey, stuffing, gravy.

“Seafood pasta. No stuffing. I know it’s a change, but the turkey was really on your mom’s side. I grew up with this. Here, taste. It’s Grandma’s recipe.”

He hands me a spoon dripping with red sauce. If I close my eyes, I can still taste the salty richness of gravy on my tongue.

“Nice.”

He places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I know this is weird. We should talk about it.”

I stiffen, leaning away slowly because I don’t want to aggressively shrug him off when he’s looking like that—all too-kind eyes and understanding. “I’d rather not.”

“Honey, this is our first Christmas not celebrating with the three of us. I want to talk about it and hear how you’re dealing with everything. Maybe you can even come to one of our counseling sessions. Pat mentioned that was a possibility—”

“Dad, Jesus, I appreciate the concern but it’s too much. It’s… suffocating. I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t think it’s healthy. All this drama.”

He raises an eyebrow and shakes his head with a small, sad smile. “You really are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you? I guess you’ll have to just learn for yourself, but trust me, all that bottling up… eventually it has no place to go, and you’ll explode.”

Your mother’s daughter. There’s no doubt in my mind that he resents her, resents how her inflexibility and lack of empathy blew up what had been a good thing for decades.

“The sauce is good, Dad.” I pick up the spoon, turn my back, and stare at the simmering pan, wishing it were something else entirely.

When Grandma comes a few hours later, I tell her it’s the best-tasting thing I’ve ever had.

On New Year’s Day, I wake up early, after a very non-eventful midnight, in my mom’s new rental condo in Cleveland Heights, which looks like an interior designer came in and gave up. Everything is half done and all of it is new and smells too clean.

And what I noticed first when I saw it a few months ago was that I’m nowhere. At my childhood house, you can find boxes of Christmas cards from 2002, old marketing textbooks from my dad’s college years, and half-empty ten-year-old condiments stuffed in the back of the fridge. Here, there’s just pictures, moments in time without any of the tchotchkes that came with our shared lives together. I pause at faded Polaroids of us on vacation, sun-sleepy and burnt on colorful beach towels. I don’t recognize the people in the photos at all. When was the last time my mom looked at my dad like he was everything in the world to her? Maybe an overpriced tourist gift from Florida could convince me it had happened, that I was actually there.

“Did you want to go on a hike in the Metroparks?” I ask my mom, still in her bathrobe, nursing a coffee on the couch.

“Isn’t it cold? I was thinking we’d grab lunch with Grandma and Grandpa downtown.”

I curl into a tighter pretzel on the couch next to her. “I thought you loved our New Year’s morning hike.” It’s something we’ve done as a family as long as I can remember, bringing coffee and fresh donuts in a backpack as we slowly jaunt around the Rocky River Reservation, watching our breath make shapes in the cold.

“That was something your father liked to do.” Her eyes stay on the TV.

“But aren’t you guys doing date nights? Can’t it be a date morning? With me?”

“It wouldn’t be the same as before.” She turns up the volume on the TV.

Three days later, I’m taking a virtual session with Bridget over FaceTime, in the parking lot of a home improvement store near my mom’s condo.

“Was there any part of spending the holidays with them separately that you liked?”

“I liked that they both seemed miserable.” I say it out loud and immediately feel like an evil daughter. But I also get a sense of relief from saying the words.

“What did you like about that?”

“There’s a small piece of me that wonders if they could still get back together. Maybe this was a separation they needed for a while to test it out. Since neither of them seems that happy, maybe they’ll reconsider.”

Bridget nods, as if everything I’m saying makes complete sense. “And what would it mean, to you, if they were to get back together?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. That they were wrong. That my childhood wasn’t all a lie.”

Something about those words doesn’t feel truthful, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. It’s not like I think my childhood was a lie . I was there during the good times. The family vacations. The cozy nights in watching Nickelodeon, just the three of us. I know my mom and dad weren’t acting. It wasn’t a facade.

But when Bridget asks, I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling, and I pivot before it gets too uncomfortable.

“I’d like to talk about Will now, instead.”

Bridget nods. “Let’s do that, then. When we spoke before Christmas, you told me about how he texted you at Thanksgiving. He said he saw your relationship as too distracting. Have you guys spoken since?”

“Hardly.” The word provokes an empty, aching feeling in my legs. “He doesn’t go out of his way to avoid me anymore, but it’s all just sort of tense and polite.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“No, it’s fine,” I blurt out. “I think it’s probably a good thing. Every time we let our guards down, we just end up hooking up, and I get more and more confused.”

Bridget’s lips quirk up into a smile, but she quickly neutralizes her face. “What if, for the sake of a thought experiment, you were to just keep hooking up? Keep letting your guards down. How would that feel?”

I laugh. “It doesn’t even matter. Will isn’t interested. I told you, he very clearly said he doesn’t have time for confusing or distracting. He wants to be there to write. Which is his prerogative.”

“Didn’t you also tell him you didn’t want distractions? Right after you first kissed?”

“No, I told him this wasn’t sustainable.” Bridget waits for me to continue, and her silence feels like a push. “And it’s not, long-term. Maybe, sometimes, it could be nice just to hook up. But I know myself. I can’t really do that, and I honestly don’t think it’s his thing, either.”

“What about after the MFA? Or after the fellowship application is due? Do you think he’d still consider your relationship a distraction?”

“Maybe not, but then we’re back to how I don’t see this working long-term.”

“Isn’t that coming from you, not from him?”

Something snaps taut inside me, and my voice comes out high and pinched. “He makes zero effort to convince me otherwise.”

Bridget must sense that she’s hit a nerve, because she backs off. I feel bad that I might have come off as harsh, but our session is up before I can convince myself to say something like an apology.

Back at my Perrin apartment in January, I’m in my usual spot at the window, racking my brain for something to write about.

I have a poem due for Thursday’s workshop and a fellowship application due a few days after that. One last shot to strategize the work that’ll jump-start my new-and-improved writing career, far from the creativity-crushing briefs and subpar coffee at Coleman + Derry.

I take stock of what I have for the fellowship first. Parsing through the poems I’ve written for workshop, I read them in the eyes of Daniel or Paul or Erica, sifting through the ones that feel fit for their consumption.

“The Only Good Straight Men Are in One Direction” is a meditation on the sanitized appeal of the Boy Band Man, how the speaker would kill to be in the middle of their onstage huddle, high on musk and salt-dripped skin, pressed safe into eight-pack abs and long eyelashes.

“Taylor Swift Sleeps with Someone New for the First Time” is told in the voice of Taylor herself; drenched in red, white, and blond imagery, it’s about her grappling with making art about someone she has feelings for.

Then there’s a poem that takes the form of a Love Island audition tape, take three. Another two poems in my Young Ingenue series, told in the perspective of a made-up persona I’ve created, drunk on the performance of everyday life.

All of them feel well crafted. But do they carry the vulnerability other writers seem to be teasing out of themselves, like Kacey writing about her former eating disorder, Jerry about his alcoholic mother, Will about his dad’s death?

Page by page, line by line, I scour the stanzas, looking for signs of life. In a way, I’m everywhere. A whiff between line breaks. A ghost in the nuance of a verb. It’s like I’ve tried to be vulnerable but haven’t figured out how.

I heat my kettle and light a cedar candle. Then I take the One Direction poem packet, a thick, paper-clipped stack of all my classmates’ comments. I’ve gotten to know everyone so well at this point that I know the writer purely by their handwriting. Which is good, because August never leaves his name.

Consider pushing this stanza to reach an even higher peak , Jerry scribbles in red, loopy letters.

Think these lines can be cut , Hazel writes, minuscule enough that I have to squint to read.

Heighten this ending :) Kacey circles.

I look at the last sheet in the bunch, and I know whose writing it is by the exacting, sharp cursive. While most of the comments I receive want me to push what I’ve written—asking for more tension, more drama, just more —Will’s comments sound like this:

Linger here.

Can you explore this moment?

Gorgeous.

While everyone else asks for a performance, some heightened version of what I’m offering, Will just asks me to be more myself. The comments are so soft, tentative even, but also firm and confident, a reminder of what he’s like when he touches me.

Stop , I tell myself. I blow out the candle and shake my head, watching the smoke fade.

My fingers tap-tap-tap across my keyboard, but nothing comes out. So I get up. Walk to my mirror and sit on the floor in front of it, cross-legged, close enough to catch every pore in the dim evening light. I fluff up my bangs. I run the pad of my ring finger under my eye, smoothing out patchy concealer. I try to write a poem in my head but still, nothing.

I change tactics. I run a cotton pad soaked with makeup remover over my face. There’s something satisfying in seeing all the colors of me—beige, raspberry, charcoal. I step into the shower and let the heat shock my skin; when I get out, I’m dripping in front of my mirror. Normally, I avoid looking at myself naked if I can help it. But now, I linger.

When I dry off, I get into bed, my computer on my lap, and start typing. I take every emotion of winter break—every knife-sharp glance between my parents in their handoffs of me, every gut-drop my body’s tried to carry—and spill them on the page. The Word doc fills before my eyes. I don’t edit a single word.

When I wake up, the laptop is sitting, closed, on my chest. I open it, last night’s poem stark and unruly in the morning light. I scan it once more, its words cascading into a whine, garden-variety neuroticism. The idea of seeing it next to one of Will’s poems about his dad makes me cringe. For Erica, I’ll stick with One Direction, Taylor, Love Island .

I save the document, close it for later. That’s when I realize I’m still naked beneath my sheets. Cold and strange and exposed.