Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
NOSTALGIA TAX
LOUISA
The clock on my dashboard is six minutes fast, a temporal hallucination I refuse to correct because some days those six minutes are the only thing keeping the rest of my life from totally going off the rails. (And it doesn’t always work.)
I'm thirty-five miles from home on a pilgrimage for the chocolate digestive biscuits. (The local grocery import aisle doesn’t stock them anymore.) The justification I've built for this trip is airtight, the specialty shop is the only place within a reasonable (kind of) driving distance that carries the version of a smokey Earl Grey, and the clotted cream that when I put on the scone I make later, will make my—erm, our apartment smell like a kitchen I only half remember from my childhood. I don’t cling to a lot of my childhood, definitely even less before we came to the states, but there’s something about the nostalgia of baked goods.
That’s the justification. The other reason (that I will admit to myself in this car alone) is that the last few months have involved so much newness that sometimes I need the smell of something old just to confirm I still exist as myself, separate from everything I’ve agreed to.
The drive is long enough that I've played Roma's voice note, twice. (And the new Noah Kahan album.) She left it this morning while I was recording. Eleven minutes, which means she had too much to say for a text and too much tact for a phone call she knew I’d have to fake my way through without lying directly to her face. (She knows my face, even when she can’t see it, she would know.)
‘Okay so I've been sitting on this because I wanted to be sure before I said it out loud,’ Roma begins, giving me a grace period to prepare.
‘But I've listened to the last files back to back and Lou, I don't know how you did it, I genuinely don’t, and I'm choosing not to ask, but whatever it is— it's back.
Not just back. It's different. It's so much more. You’re not narrating two people anymore, you're making us all live it.’ She goes on, tells me about a new series, a protective author who wants a call, and the three non-fiction auditions she gently (not so gently) brushes aside.
She's not wrong. I submitted them as a backup plan, not a real one.
‘Romance is your home, babe. You can visit anywhere else you want. But this is where you live.’
I laugh to myself (okay, maybe I cry a single tear) because it wasn’t long ago I didn’t live in the books I was reading, and I wasn’t going to be able to live in my home. It’s just taken a few months, and my once-grumpy-neighbor-turned-husband.
When I pull into the parking lot, there’s more commotion than I would expect for a mini mall with nothing more than a British grocery store, a laundromat, and a bookstore with a ‘Going Out of Business’ sign that looks like it’s been in the window a lot longer than it would if it were actually going out of business.
A police SUV has their lights pulsing between red and blue, flashing and reflecting against the windows of the laundromat.
They’ve blocked in a sedan and the officers are aggressively leaning toward the driver’s side window, with posture suggesting a question that has no good answer.
I feel a brief, sympathetic beat in my chest, remembering the cold sweat of my own traffic stop last month.
I still maintain that I wasn’t actually speeding, but none of the classic damsel-in-distress maneuvers had worked for me.
I didn’t cry, I didn’t flirt, I just sat there, gripped by a profound sense of annoyance that my day was being hijacked and I would then have to show up to some government building for traffic court.
(Don’t ask me what happened next, but it’s in a folder in Hudson’s desk drawer.)
But today, the annoyance isn't mine to carry. Today, I am a woman on a mission for digestive biscuits, and I can just hope that they also have a lawyer fake-husband to take care of their ticket.
I ignore the siren-light disco and pull open the heavy glass door of the specialty shop. When I walk in, the bell above the door gives a pathetic, tinny chime, and the woman in the back matches it with a “Be right there, dear.”
I’m here on a mission, in and out. I tell myself.
Even though it wouldn’t be the worst thing to pop into the Going-Out-Of-Business-Bookstore before I head home, ya know, perhaps to keep them in business a touch longer.
I grab the Union-Jack-painted basket, and head to the corner to grab the goods. Got it!
“Back again so soon, are we?” Mrs. Clarkson coos.
She’s hovering near a display of prawn cocktail crisps, flavors that feel like a fever dream to the uninitiated.
She can’t be more than sixty. She’s mentioned that she and her husband moved here to be nearer to their son.
And they just couldn’t live without the tastes of home.
Lucky for me. We’ve ‘hobnobbed’ before, a terrible pun I only allow myself because it’s also a top-tier biscuit, but today, she decides to break the cardinal British rule of Mind Your Own Business.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, dear,” she says, squinting at me over her glasses.
The ones that can’t escape her neck if they tried, strung around her with a simple chain that dangles by the sides of her face.
“Where exactly are you from? You’ve got that nowhere-in-particular lilt, but every now and then, a vowel escapes and I just can’t place it.
” I offer her the very practiced, easy smile and answer I’ve perfected for every date I’ve ever been on. Which, honestly, few and far between.
“I’ve been here since I was a child,” I say, reaching for a tin of smokey Earl Grey.
Didn’t need it, but not going to leave it behind.
“The original accent got buried under a decade of trying to fit in, I suppose.” Explaining that there’s nothing more than small nostalgia back in the UK, and thanks to her, I can buy nostalgia, sometimes it’s just at a premium price.
The accent has been long since demoted to more of a tool.
And in my line of work, the British inflection is my superpower.
I can turn it on like a faucet, sharpening it so it sounds like I've ‘received pronunciation.’ Elongating the vowels until I sound like I should be narrating a documentary about the Tudors. (If there’s smut that is.
Because I don’t know if you heard, but I’m back, baabyyy!) But here, standing in front of the Hobnobs and the Ribena, I keep the accent tucked away.
I see the stacks of British candy and grab bags of Percy Pigs and Flying Saucers.
I add them to the pile of stuff that amounted to much more than the biscuits I came for.
I can just hear him now. ‘Percy Pig is a ridiculous name for a candy, Lou-i-sa.’ Because he always says my name, he wouldn’t dare waste a syllable.
And then I’ll tell him that it's ‘no worse than Nerds,’ which are like his holy grail of sweet-treat. (He wouldn’t call it that.)
“Actually, these too.” I toss the Wine Gums in with the rest. I don't particularly like Wine Gums. They’re not sour enough to be interesting and they’re not sweet enough to be worth it.
They exist in a middle ground I have never found compelling, but I know someone who will.
(Even if his preference is for Nerds.) ‘It’s nothing,’ I tell myself.
(Out loud and under my breath.) People pick up things for people they live with; if we were roommates, it would be totally normal.
(Whatever you have you tell yourself, Lou.)
I think I’ve been telling myself I'm still on solid earth, that the terror I feel is just the anxiety of everything we’re doing this for.
I pretend the way I listen for the sound of his key in the lock has everything to do with the performance of cohabitation and nothing to do with me.
That when I picked up his brand of sparkling water at the grocery store last Tuesday without thinking, I was just being practical.
But I'm standing here with bags of candy on top of my favorite things, and the honest version of what's happening is that I know him now. Not in what he’s listed, but in a way I’ve figured out.
And the thing I know most about him is that letting anyone know him, honestly not just truly, is not in the cards. (Not by accident and not ever.)
So I look at the Wine Gums, a candy I only picked up because I can picture exactly the face he’d make trying one.
(And I want to see it.) The way he'll pop it in his mouth and spend three seconds deciding if he likes it before saying something dry and conclusive (maybe insulting), like it's a verdict. The way he won’t concede, not immediately, but he will finish off the bag. Then he’ll ask where I got them, so he can add them to his grocery list. The grocery list he always asks me if I want to add anything to.
‘Romance is your home,’ Roma had said. (Yeah, okay.) I’ve narrated enough people who want things they can't have.
I know how those stories go, I know exactly how they go.
I've voiced them in countless accents and numerous different sub-genres.
(Hello, alien smut.) But those are fiction.
And this? This is faker than fiction and somehow doing more damage.
This is proximity poisoning my ability to see him without caring.
Because here’s what happened: it was supposed to be simple, because we didn’t even like each other (right?), let alone have any real affection for one another.
But we’ve lived together now, my apartment is only there serving as an office.
And we went from enemies, to husband and wife, to roommates, and in the cracks of all those might be a friendship that scares me more than I want to admit.
We became something that exists in the inbetweens, like the doorways we’d face off in.
I don't have a clean word for it. What I do have? Clean laundry. He just did it, with his own. (Separating items that he thought should be dry cleaned, of course.) But he didn’t separate our laundry before putting it in the wash.
Just, combined it, like that’s a thing we do now, like there’s a we that does laundry together.
Like the idea of sorting my clothes from his was a step that simply didn't occur to him because the category of mine versus yours has started to blur at the edges.
We might have separate bedrooms, but the separation of our lives is blending together dangerously. And for everything he sees, I don’t know that he sees this. (While I am pretending not to.)
Hudson is someone who pretty much up until we said I do, had a rotating door of guests.
Now, he washes my socks. I think about that sometimes, and then I think about him, across the apartment, in the middle of a big bed, in a bigger room.
He’s probably reading something dense and useful and not thinking about me at all.
But I lie awake in the room he furnished for my comfort, staring at the ceiling, slipping my hand under the covers and between my legs, and I think about him.
Who has made it extremely clear, in the most honest and unapologetic terms, this is not real.
Despite what he said. (Trust me, I think about it more than I should.) It’s not about being single, but if it becomes too much, I should come (word choice, Lou!) to him about it.
What a thing to say on your wedding night.
His feelings for me? Would be a ‘risk.’ Well guess what, I’d risk it.
But that's the thing, he can control that.
(Must be nice.) My feelings? Those would be ‘too great a liability.’ (Like the rest of me.) He said it with such truth, without apology, which is somehow the most devastating delivery method available.
And I am terrified. Not of the feelings, exactly.
I've had feelings before, I'm a person who feels things at full volume with no volume control and I've survived all of them. (Up till now.) What terrifies me this time, when the paperwork clears and the interviews are done and we file the dissolution and go back to being the people who share a wall and nothing else (if I even can), Roma is going to call me and play back my recordings and say ‘what happened, you’ve lost it again, where did it go?’
And I know, I’ll have left it with him.
I’m standing at the counter as Mrs. Clarkson touches my hand gently, I don’t know how long I’ve dissociated into this spiraled state. I pay what I call the ‘nostalgia surcharge’ on a few of my favorite items, Hudson would call it an import tariff, and push through the tinny chime of the door.
When I step outside, the SUV is gone, though the sedan is still there. The driver likely having gone back inside the laundromat, taking whatever ticket they were written, and going about the rest of their day just slightly more annoyed.
I just clutch my bag and get into my car six minutes in the future.
Time to return to my fake life. With very real feelings.