Losing It. Emma Rathbone

compartments that needed to be pushed down in the trash. I sorted through credit card offers and bills and junk mail with the meticulousness of someone with too much free time. The complex had a game room with a pool table and a flat-screen television and sofas, and now and then I’d take a book and go sit and spy on the other tenants, the few who ventured in to watch sports. Or I’d idly sketch the fake holly branches coming out of a vase in an alcove in the wall, and then my hand would pause on the page and I’d look up and see myself from the outside and wonder just how I got slung into this padded room on the damp East Coast, and I couldn’t tell if every decision I’d made up to this point, every link that had led me here, had mattered a lot, or hadn’t mattered at all.

      Back up in my apartment I’d lie in the middle of my living room and toss a small pillow up and down, and think about my virginity, and wonder if it subtly shaped everything I did. Was it possible that people could tell on some frequency, like that pitch or tone that only dogs can hear? Were the un-lubed, un-sexed wheels and gears in me making my movements jerky? And would that quality itself ward men off? I could already feel that happening. Out at a bar, when a guy started talking to me (not that this happened very often), all I could think about was where it was going to go. I wouldn’t be able to get into the flow of conversation because I’d imagine the inevitable moment when I’d have to tell him, and how fraught it would then become, and how strange he’d think it was that I’d picked him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to tell him, but was it possible to just play it off? But then my hesitation would read as disinterest and the whole thing would derail from there. I could see what was happening—that the more I obsessed, the more I veered off track. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t relax. And so here I was, twenty-six and bottlenecked in adolescence, having somehow screwed up what came so easily to everyone else, and I couldn’t put my finger on when this had started happening.

      Eleanor Pierce: We’re at another sleepover. We’re sitting in a circle and talking about sex and who’s done it and who hasn’t. It’s about half and half at that point. Blissfully confident in my youth, I tell the truth, which is that I haven’t. “Me neither,” said Eleanor. “But I’ll kill myself if I’m still a virgin when I’m twenty.”

      “There’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you,” said my father over the phone. I was standing in my kitchen, staring out the window at suburban Arlington. Silvery, overcast light came in. In the distance, I watched a man in a blue polo shirt push a dolly of boxes along a path through the storage complex next door. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky. “Climate Control! U Store U Save First Two Months Free!” it read on the side of one of the units.

      After I’d put in my two weeks at Quartz, I’d decided: I was going to move home. I was going to go back to Texas and live with my parents for a little while. I would start over, reassess. At least I knew people there, people who could help me meet other people. I pictured the bright plaza at San Antonio Tech where I used to wait for my mom while she worked on her business degree, the hot benches and spindly trees. Maybe I could take some classes. I thought of the dry, bright air, our sunny kitchen and backyard and the prickly grass, and the smooth, warm stones that lined the walkway up to the shaded porch in the back.

      “Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We’re going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”

      “What?” I said.

      “We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”

      “I don’t understand,” I said.

      “What don’t you understand?”

      “Any of it.”

      My dad was silent.

      “You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”

      “We found a guy, he’s a carpenter.”

      “You said that.”

      “People rent things all the time,” he said. “You’re renting an apartment, are you not?”

      This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad’s calling card.

      “This is different,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

      “No I don’t. If you’re so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”

      “What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”

      “What? I don’t know, Julia, but we’ve signed an agreement and it’s happening.”

      “What the hell?”

      My dad was silent again.

      “There’s no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She’s a psycho.”

      “I didn’t mean Helen.”

      “Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”

      “I wasn’t talking about Helen.”

      “Or Miriam. What, does she have like five dog-walking businesses now?”

      “I was talking about my sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”

      I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead; Vivienne’s head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.

      “Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”

      “She’s fine. She’s still in North Carolina.”

      “Really?”

      My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn’t often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We’d only ever spent holidays with my mother’s side of the family—all the cousins and aunts were hers.

      He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

      “Where in North Carolina?”

      “Where I grew up, outside Durham.”

      “And, I mean, what is she doing?”

      “She’s fine. She works. She’s got a business painting scenes on plates.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She’s actually pretty good.”

      “She paints plates?”

      My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”

      I wasn’t sure where this came from. He’d never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.

      “Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”

      “Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.

      “Hi, Mom.”

      “How are things?”

      “Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”

      She cleared her throat. “Yes!”

      “Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”

      “Yes, well, no, this isn’t … We’re fine.”

      My parents had been married for a long time. They’d started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they’d managed to corner, and that drew on my mom’s know-how from her riding days when she’d been Collin County’s