LAID IN THAT WHITE RUSH
The house is silent when Doug drops her off. He keeps the car running. He doesn’t get out. He leans over to kiss Mara quickly and then turns the music up and bangs his hands along to it on the steering wheel while she collects her things from the back seat. The house is silent. Dani isn’t home, though her car is in the driveway, so Doug couldn’t pull in all the way. Doug is going to a concert at Red Rocks, a drum and bass thing they had planned to go to together. When he asked Mara in the car on the drive back from Denver if she minded if he still went, because tickets were like a hundred bucks and he didn’t want to waste his. Mara had spent the same amount of money on her ticket, and she wanted to say that, or at least make him think about that, but Mara was empty of herself and of the thing that had been growing in her for the last eight weeks so she said “Okay cool,” and that was all. Doug understood it in the way he wanted to understand it.
The silence of the house when she enters is a vast silence that wails through her cracked body like a plains wind through a ghost cabin. Empty bottles are scattered on every surface, like always. Wadded in the enormous empty fish tank in the living room is a football jersey, not one of the campus player’s genuine uniform but the imitation sold at the campus bookstore and at every t-shirt shop on the Hill, with the number of this year’s star left tackle. It occurs to Mara as she notices the jersey in the fish tank that this tackle is a junior. This tackle is twenty years old. Mara is older than twenty. She’s almost twenty-three. She’s still enrolled at the university, still a senior because of fucked up credits and unfulfilled prerequisites when she transferred into the business school. Her only work experience, other than her waitress job at a hyper-popular bistro on Pearl Street, is a single-semester internship at a financial firm in Denver where the interview process consisted mainly of the question, “Do you like making money?” posed to her from a guy in a pink oxford shirt who looked at her dress more than he ever looked at her face. She said she did, and then three days a week for sixteen weeks and for no pay she spent watching instructional videos on hedge funds and googling Carl Icahn.
The tackle is twenty. Mara is twenty-two. Doug is almost twenty-five and he has a concert tonight at Red Rocks that they had planned on going to together. The house is silent. Bottles are everywhere and the usual display of pipes and bongs and Doug’s or Dani’s dispensary license tossed on the gritty coffee table with various flyers, show papers mostly for Doug’s band or electronic music production company. Usually Mara would pick up some of the debris from the party the night before, and maybe sweep the floor so she could walk comfortably barefoot to the bathroom, but now she looks at it all with dissociation. She lives here but she is not here. Doug is not here either. Doug is going to a concert at Red Rocks. Mara doesn’t start crying until she closes the door to her room, even though the house is empty. She lies down on her bed and tucks herself into a corner under all the blankets though it is not very cold and she starts to cry and then she can’t stop.
Last summer came late and stayed long. It was a grotesque summer, an unpredictable summer, and they all moved uncertain through it over the earth. Their souls were precarious. Houses on the hill trembled late at night with careening young adults, too old to go wherever home was for a whole summer yet unburdened by the responsibility of providing for themselves and others. Kids often slept on futons on front porches, the soft Rocky Mountain air holding their bones together when too many hits and too many shots seemed to force them all apart. They all often left their front doors unlocked and there was no consideration of private property or of selves, until that sophomore was shot to death in a mugging on Arapahoe, twenty feet from her own open front door.
Most weekends Mara and Dani and everyone drove up to Coot Lake and the reservoir. The sun at that altitude in that clear air blistered skin and turned rocks to tinder for unsuspecting feet and hands. The girls lay out in bikinis on the lowered beds of their Outbacks, turning themselves now and then for premium caramelization. The boys threw rocks in the lake and strayed off the hiking path and stomped through the quiet cattails at the lake’s edge, startling all else living until that moment in learned harmony with human beings. Everyone had coolers in their car. Local brewing had exploded in recent years, upending the Coors dynasty in Colorado, and each of them had preferences of pilsners and lagers and IPAs and stouts and how “hoppy” something was, and the boys all pretended to know they liked bourbon better than scotch, because their fathers did.
Mara didn’t meet Doug at the lake, but they got to know each other there. Or, anyway, Mara got to know that Doug was from Santa Barbara and wanted to be a music producer, and was in the business school for entertainment marketing. Mara told him about her path through high school anorexia to nutritional studies, to restaurant management because of her job as a waitress. He looked at her soft hips and said he was glad she wasn’t skinny anymore. The compliment made Mara uncomfortable. It overturned in her the old panic of acknowledging her own body in space, the size and shape of it in relation to all other female bodies in the world, but she wanted Doug to like her so she didn’t say anything at all.
They moved in together in the fall. Well, they decided to live together in the fall. Mara and Dani’s roommate was graduating and moving to Denver, so the third bedroom was open, and Doug’s friend Alex lived next door, so Doug took the empty room. Mara liked having him in the house, she liked nights spent together stoned on the couch watching movies, even when she suggested a movie and Doug and Dani both rejected the option outright. Doug’s friends were loud, and one night someone broke the glass of the fish tank, but they always had weed and molly on them and Mara was in love with Doug.