Raymond Road

[vc_row][vc_column][title type="subtitle-h6"]Zoe Townsend[/title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]I never go down Raymond Road anymore, not since my mother moved to a smaller apartment across the city. I have no reason to, really. My sister moved to Cleveland and my mom moved to the east side and I don’t know where you live anymore. I took the bus home from a job interview and when it stopped at Raymond and Carlisle, right in front of the Safeway, I got off because I had to pee and it was another forty-five minutes on the bus until I got home.I wondered if he still worked there, your boyfriend-turned-husband, but when I asked the cashier she didn’t recognize his name. It makes sense, of course. I wouldn’t want to work at Safeway for seven years, either. I left the store with a ninety-five cent donut, up from sixty-seven cents when we were in middle school. It seemed rude to use the bathroom without buying anything. It was a nice day for March and a horrible day for June but I decided to walk down Raymond Road while I waited for the next bus to come by. Supposedly they ran on the half hour but when you get as far out as Raymond Road, time seems less relevant and the busses come whenever they please. You always used to be late to school because you didn’t want to wake up in time for the 7:14 a.m. bus, the one I always took. For a while I called you every morning at six hoping you would ride it with me, but usually you just rolled over and went back to sleep after I hung up.We used to walk down Raymond Road on our way back from the Seven Eleven, lips blue from slushies. We used to hold the sweating cups to the back of each other’s necks, tilting them horizontal but not far enough that we’d spill melting slush down our backs. It didn’t always work out that way, did it? More than once, we ran up the stairs to your apartment, shrieking about a tank top accidentally dyed blue, while your mother clucked at us from the kitchen.“Girls,” she’d say. “So messy.”I walked past the squat four unit apartment buildings and faded duplexes that lined Raymond Road, and thought about how we dodged broken bottles with flip-flopped feet on our way home from the park. You know, those foam and plastic two-for-five flip flops that came in every color known to man? They sold them at Old Navy, but we got ours from wire bins in the back left corner of Safeway, near the frozen pizza. I never wear flip-flops anymore, you know. I remember how the first week of summer, without fail, those plastic straps would rub between my toes and on the sides of my foot, causing blisters. That is what walking down Raymond Road made me think of. Passing those apartment buildings and our neighbors who lived in them, I kept thinking about those blisters. There never was any air conditioning, and it drove us all outside, desperate to catch a breeze. I loved it, the days so hot all you could do was lie out on a towel in the strip of grass between apartment and sidewalk and sweat under the oppressive heat. You used to stand over me as a way of saying hello, blocking the sun and insisting we go to the two-dollar movie theater, where the air conditioning was turned just a little too high and the popcorn was stale but bottomless. One day, the August before our first year of middle school, you dragged me down Raymond Road while I complained about those flip-flops and how the sweat mixed with those plastic straps were chafing my feet to bits. I took off those infernal flip-flops and walked nearly two blocks barefoot before I stepped on broken glass and sliced open my foot. No one walks barefoot on Raymond Road, no one but a dumb kid in cheap plastic sandals.I had to get stitches, and you held my hand the whole time. I was still limping a little, used to favoring my right foot, when school started. Everyone called me “Gimpy” for a month and you did too. That was all right, because I was the Gimpy to your Gappy. Braces could’ve fixed those teeth of yours, but who had the time for those on Raymond Road? Your mother convinced you not to get them, against the dentist’s advice. They hurt, and you couldn’t chew gum or eat popcorn, and your apples would always have to be cut up. You agreed. After all, how could you get your first kiss when you had a braces-face?I passed that Seven-Eleven and I thought about how we used to steal Juicy Fruit and Slim Jims, telling ourselves that we were diverting their attention by buying those blue slushies. I don’t eat meat anymore, and I like chewing cinnamon gum instead, now. With how tight we wore our clothes, you would’ve thought the cashiers would see the outlines of the Slim Jims we stuck in our waistbands. Remember how we used to stay up until four a.m. just because we could? Remember when your mother caught us sneaking back into the apartment a bit past midnight, arms full of as much Mountain Dew and gummy candy as my babysitting money would get us? She laughed and let us off the hook because, she said, she was just glad we came home with junk food instead of hickeys. Of course you remember, even if you don’t eat gummy candy anymore. I saw a picture of you online a couple months ago, where you had adult braces and I texted you about it, but you never replied.Last year, when I was helping my mom pack for the move, I found my old dress from our first dance freshman year. Hot pink and poofy with sparkles that could only be called excessive. It was an absolute disaster of a dress, and I felt like a princess in it. Yours was lime green, and my mother said we looked like two gumdrops she could pluck up and eat. In retrospect, that wasn’t a compliment. We ran flat irons through our hair until every strand was stick straight and heat-frazzled, though my hair hardly needed it. I don’t even own one, now. Our eye makeup was so dark we looked like raccoons with two black eyes, a fact both our mothers were eager to point out. When we got to the dance, you and I stood in the door of the gym, paper streamers fluttering around us, and I thought that life couldn’t possibly get better than this.“Why do the other girls have flowers on their wrists?” you asked me. I watched your eyes dart around the gym as you nervously smoother the layers of glittery tulle on your dress.  I shrugged, figuring it was some fashion trend we’d missed. Our dresses were so stylishly puffy and sparkly, I hardly thought anyone would notice we were missing some silly flower. It turns out they were corsages, and by the mid-winter formal you were obsessed with finding a boy to be your date, and more importantly, bring you a corsage.As we walked the two blocks down Raymond Road from the bus stop after the dance, I wished that I could wear this dress again someday and feel so beautiful and you wished you had a boyfriend. We had left a trail of glitter on the blue metro bus seats, and that Monday morning on our way back to school I could have sworn some of it was still there. As we walked you detailed every boy who could ask you to Midwinter that January and which one would be best at picking out a corsage. I think you decided on a set of twins from the cross country team who would take us both. They didn’t. I desperately wanted to take off my heels, but the puckered scar on my left foot told me it was safest to keep them on. That night was only the second time in my life I had worn heels; I hated them at fourteen and I still hate them now.I was wearing heels as I walked back from that job interview, and I wanted to take them off as well. Modest one-and-three-quarter inch pumps, and I know you would have called them boring.Our junior prom we both went with seniors and you were already well versed in dating boys. I was well versed in bringing you Twizzlers and tissues after those boys broke your heart. You were so patient curling my hair before that dance and you didn’t even comment on how much of your hairspray I used trying to make the fine strands hold a curl.  I was so impatient, burning the side of your neck and a hank of hair while you screeched and I couldn’t figure out how to release the curling iron. I cried because you were going to look so pretty and I had messed it up, and you hugged me, laughing, while you held a bag of frozen peas to your neck.“It’s fine, it’s fine,” you told me. “I’ll just pin it to one side.”I knew that was a lie because you had been fretting over every aspect of your outfit since February; you had spray tanned your ankles, afraid someone would see how pale they were if you lifted the hem of your dress. I still feel bad about that, sometimes, even though your hair has grown back and we haven’t talked in at least a year.For our senior prom you had a date and I didn’t, but it wasn’t supposed to be like that. He asked me first and I told him that you and I were planning on going together without dates, which was true. After that last boy, who broke up with you on New Year’s Eve, you’d declared yourself single for the year and I was proud of you for making it until May. In first period Calculus — you always told me I’d never find a boy worth dating in Calculus — he asked me to the dance and I said yes because everyone was watching me and maybe a bit of me liked that smart boy with neat hair in a button down shirt and khakis that looked handsome rather than nerdy, preppy in a way people from Raymond Road never are. Fifty minutes later, leaving class, I told him, “No, no, I take it back.” I said you would be mad at me because we were already planning on making it a girls’ night. He walked off in a huff and that evening on the bus home from track practice, another activity in which I would never find a boy worth dating, I saw I had eleven text messages, three missed calls, and a voicemail from you. I started to text you back but you called again first.“You’ll never believe what happened to me today!” you said in the voice you saved especially for describing your next boyfriend. Before I could guess, you told me the answer. “I have a date. To the dance. On Saturday. Do you think he’ll have time to get a tie to match my dress?”“I thought we were going without dates,” I said, cautiously, wondering if that boy with the clean hair and khakis would let me say yes again. “Someone asked me today and I said no.”“Who? Who?” you asked, so excited you sounded like an owl. “Wait, guess who asked me.” And again before I could guess you told me it was the boy with the preppy clothes and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take back my no.“But who asked you?” you continued.“Nobody, just some guy from track,” I told you. “I would’ve said yes if I knew you had a date, but it’s not a big deal.”“Take it back,” you said. “Tell him you changed your mind. Any one of those track guys would love to have you as a date.”“It’s really not an issue. I didn’t like him at all.”“Who was it?” you pressed, and I told you he was a junior. “Younger guys are so immature,” you told me. “It’s probably best you said no.”Of course it was a big deal, but I had learned from years and years spent with you that arguing only ended in tears on your end and frustration on mine.I never got a picture alone with you at our high school graduation. You’d been seeing him for just a month, and after the ceremony and all through our graduation party you clung to his arm and he clung to your curves. I was mad at him because I barely got to talk to you. I went up to ask you for a picture and he flicked the white honor roll cord I was still wearing, still wearing over my dress even after taking off my robe, and I remember how he laughed and said he couldn’t believe that even with that cord I was still just going to community college. It was the same thing I told myself, you know. That white cord wouldn’t get me anywhere; it was the yellow high honor roll cord that would have gotten me a scholarship somewhere better. I was mad because he didn’t seem care that you’d graduated, only that he had, even though you were the best writer in our grade, even though you read a poem at graduation, even though only half the girls from Raymond Road ever graduated and we were lucky to be two of them. It never occurred to me to point out that he wasn’t going to school at all.You were going to community college, too, for cosmetology and I was going for the dental hygienist program, and we would eat lunch together every Tuesday and Thursday at one p.m. when our schedules allowed. We were going to rent an apartment together, a studio on Jennings Avenue, which we would divide in half with curtains when we needed space to ourselves. It seems ridiculous to me, now, that we thought we could share two hundred square feet. I would have hated you by the end.“That was rude of him to say,” I told you, cornering you as you left the bathroom. “About community college.”“It was just a joke,” you replied. “You’re so uptight sometimes.”“I’m uptight because I don’t like people insulting me? You’re going to community college, too.”“He was joking. If you mellowed out a bit, maybe more guys would like you.”“Plenty of guys like me,” I said with more hurt in my voice than I like to admit. “But I’d rather have no one like me than date all these...you know.”“No, I don’t know,” you replied, lips pursed, shoulders scrunched, and sandaled foot tapping against the faded carpet. “Are you saying I date too many men?”“I’m saying I’d rather just wait for the right one than date around—”“Date around?” you asked. “You mean sleep around? Are you calling me a loose woman?”I would argue that at the point you met him, he was more of a boy and we were far from women. But that day, I threw my hands in the air and stormed across the street, from your building to mine. You were insufferable sometimes, you know. I wonder if you still are.I made you box mix brownies the next day and they were still cooling in the pan when you pressed the buzzer, standing on the stoop with two slushies and a box of Kraft Mac ’n Cheese.“I got you cherry,” you said. “They were all out of blue raspberry.”“What’s the mac ’n cheese for?” I asked.“I thought you’d like it.”I did. I did like it and I remembered how we used to eat that same mac ’n cheese, planted in front of the television. I remembered how neither of us had cable but I had a tape of SpongeBob episodes, and how we watched all eleven in a row one Saturday while my mom was at work and my sister was out. I bet I still have that tape somewhere, but I know the VCR is gone. My mother was the last on our block to switch over to a DVD player, finally giving in when my sister stuck a piece of peanut butter toast in the VCR.That Independence Day, a month before we were slated to move into that studio on Jennings Avenue, you pulled me aside while fireworks ripped through the sky.“He asked me to move in with him!” you said.“What about me?” I asked, thinking of the lease we’d signed back in April, the day after I turned eighteen.“I mean, you know it wouldn’t have lasted long, I would have moved in with him eventually. We’ll still see each other at school,” you added.“Eventually didn’t have to be now,” I said, the closest to hysterical I’ve been yet. “It could have been next year. We’ve already signed the lease. Who will live with me? What if no one will?”“Calm down,” you said. “It will work out.”“It will not work out. Tell him no.”“He said he loves me,” you said, and I thought but didn’t say that he only loved himself.“That doesn’t mean you should move in with him. You’ve been dating for two months.”You took a deep breath and even in the dark I knew your hands were balled into fists at your side, your shoulders scrunched.“Look,” you said. “You’ve never been in a relationship that lasts this long, so I don’t think you’d—”“Two months is not a long time.”“He’s different,” you told me. “I mean, I could be with him for the rest of my life.”I nodded, too hurt to be worried about what this would mean for you. You gave me a list of other girls from our grade who would be at the community college, who would probably just love to share an apartment with me. It was a prime location, after all, a twenty minute bus ride to the school instead of the hour and forty-five minute ride from Raymond Road. I did move in with one of them, and we couldn’t stand the sight of each other by Christmas. I never did dishes and she listened to music at all hours of the night. At the time I was convinced it was her, but thinking back I realize two hundred square feet is too small to share with anyone but a cat.We didn’t see each other at school that fall, though. I begged you to get dinner with me the night before class started, but you insisted you had plans with him. He was called into work, though, and I was headed out the door to the bus stop the moment I saw your name on my phone screen. It was nearly two hours to your apartment, in a part of town near where we’d grown up that I’d never had a reason to go to. Your apartment had air conditioning, and I was so used being without it that it made your otherwise cozy living room feel sterile and unwelcoming. We ordered pizza and once we were done you hid the box in the neighbor’s trash and never explained why. I remember asking you what time your classes started the next day and I remember your off-handed tone when you said you wouldn’t be going to school.“Why?” I asked. You had never been the best student but there had never been a question of whether or not you would go. You wanted to get a cosmetology license and the community college had a decent program.“I decided not to,” you said. “I don’t actually know if I’d like cosmetology. It doesn’t make sense to go if I might not like it.” I would later find out that when you told your mother you were moving in with him, she pulled all financial support.“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “That’s how you find out.”“School isn’t really my thing,” you insisted. “It’s a waste of money.”“You get a degree so you can support yourself. Do you want to work at Chili’s forever?”“I quit Chili’s,” you told me. “It was stressful.”“You should have quit months ago.”“Well, I quit last Thursday. I threw my apron in the manager’s face and walked out.”“Good.”“He makes enough so that I don’t even need to work,” you said. “He just got promoted.” I held my tongue and didn’t mention that being a manager at Safeway wasn’t the best way to spend forever either. I know now that he didn’t, but I can’t imagine he’s doing something much better.“I wish I had that much free time.” I said.  You didn’t work, you weren’t going to school, and you hadn’t answered more than a few of my texts in the past month. I wondered what it was you did all day.“It’s a bit boring,” you added. “I watch a lot of TV.”“Why not get another job?”You shrugged.“Does he not want you to work?” I asked. I was suspicious; I was always suspicious of that boy who asked you out because I said no. It was sleazy and I didn’t trust him.“I don’t need to,” you replied. “He doesn’t care if I do, I just don’t need to. Why would you ask that?”“I was wondering.”“Why were you wondering?”“It just seems like,” I paused, searching for words, “like maybe he makes a few more decisions in the relationship than you do.”“That’s not true. Take that back.”“It’s just what it looks like to me. It doesn’t mean it’s what’s actually happening.”“Take it back,” you demanded.I shook my head. “It’s what I see.”“You’re just jealous no one will date you,” you said, and I admit that it hurt.“I’d rather be single than date someone like him,” I retorted.“Sometimes I think you’d rather be single than date anyone,” you replied.“I haven’t found anyone I like yet,” I said, and a little bit of me wondered if I had said yes to him back in May if I would be sitting at home, watching TV, rather than splitting my time between waiting tables, studying, and being a woefully bad salesgirl at Gap Kids.You raised an eyebrow, and neither of us said anything else on the subject for the rest of the evening.That night was the first time I really worried about you.I went to my first day of classes with puffy eyes and a headache, the latter which would follow me through the next seven years as I struggled through school. Sometimes I even wondered if you had the right idea. I was never big on school when we were younger, I was always the one looking up movie times that were purposefully during class and taking lunch hours that lasted until the end of the school day. I almost skipped that first day of class, too. I sat in the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street from the community college and wondered why the girl who couldn’t sit through all six blocks in a day of high school thought she could go to college. I did go, though. I told myself I could have a second donut if I did. You always told me that was a ridiculous way of rewarding myself, and I should have however many donuts I wanted for any reason whatsoever.I still go to Dunkin’ Donuts at least once a week. There are so many in this city, it’s hard for me to resist.You called me a week later to apologize while I was looking over notes from Dental Health Safety and Oral Anatomy. You stayed on the phone just long enough for us to make dirty jokes about that second class, and then I heard him call to you from the other room.“I’ve got to go,” you said.“Because he’s telling you to?” I responded.“Let’s not fight again, please.”“We never talk. I never see you. It’s like we have completely different lives.”“We do,” you said. “You’re so busy with school. You don’t want to hear about me sitting around at home.”He called you again and I wondered what I had ever found appealing about that boy.“I’ve got to go, really,” you told me. “We have plans.”It took me an associate’s degree and six months on the job to realize prodding peoples’ gums and reminding them to floss was not for me, but I kept working at dentists’ offices while I went to the four-year college the next city over. I drove my mother’s car there every Tuesday and Thursday and it took me four and a half years to do two years’ worth of classes. For a while I worked at the dentist office two blocks from our old middle school, but the dentist had a reputation for wandering hands and I quit after less than a year. One day you and he came in, and it was almost sweet how you scheduled your teeth cleaning appointments at the same time. Almost. If you had said a word to me, one word at all, it would have been. You texted me after, a “sorry,” and a, “he would have been mad,” though you never explained why.That dentist’s office is gone now and in its place is a dirt lot.I told you, over and over, that he was no good. I told you so many times that you should have hated me. We fought but you always forgave me, and I think a bit of you knew he was trouble too.We didn’t talk much while I was in school, and we saw each other even less, but I still saw your pictures online. Our old friends would comment that you and him looked so happy, so perfect, what a wonderful couple; all I could see was how his arm was tensed around your shoulders, pulling you into his side. I could see half a smile on your lips, a normal smile for some but far too lackluster for you. I missed your gap-toothed smile more than ever when I saw those pictures, and I wondered how anyone who had seen you smile before could mistake you for happy.I think I remember a lunch date we had, back when he still let you talk to me. You picked the bacon and walnuts out of a salad, and I thought that the you I knew would have never passed up on a burger and fries, and even when you chose a salad it was doused in ranch dressing.“Do you think I’m fat?” you asked.Of course I said no, and you weren’t. We wore the same size shoes and shirts, though your bras were three cup sizes larger. My mother always told me this was why you got more dates than me.“Well, he usually likes his girls a bit smaller than me,” you said.I probably swore, but for politeness sake I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”You rattled off a list of his old girlfriends, and what size jeans they probably wore.“And he said girls my size shouldn’t wear tank tops,” you added, almost as an afterthought. “It makes us look slutty.” You always hated sleeves, hated anything touching your arms. I always thought that was weird, how you would peel off your coat as soon as we got inside to reveal spaghetti straps, even in the middle of January.I saw only one picture of your wedding. You and he stood on the courthouse steps, his smile charming and wide, yours tight-lipped and tiny. There were no bridesmaids, no best man. A friend of his had been the witness; he was the one who took the picture. Your shoulders bent in and you were thinner than ever. There were circles under your eyes so dark they made you look as much like a raccoon as we at that first dance, but you weren’t wearing any makeup. I hadn’t seen you without makeup, whether carefully applied or just flecks of mascara left on your eyelashes after washing your face since you turned thirteen and your mother let you start wearing it. You looked so unhappy, a gray cardigan over a plain, knee-length, white dress. Even our senior year of high school, when sleek was in and everyone wore tight black dresses to the dances, yours had sequins. I remember how we used to plan our weddings to modern-day Prince Charmings at our sleepovers all through middle and high school. It was all about the dresses, long and sleek, short and flirty, covered in feathers or glitter or lace, not the man.You called me about a year ago, at 1 p.m. on a Thursday when I was out shopping for a dress for graduation, rather than finishing the paper that determined whether I would or not. It was the first time in a long time that we’d talked, and the first in an even longer time that it didn’t end in an argument.“I was thinking about how you always listened to my boy troubles,” you said.“Well, they were always more interesting than mine.” I replied, and we laughed because it was the truth. I wasn’t in a relationship that lasted longer than two dates until my sophomore year of college.“You always gave me good advice,” you told me.“And you never listened.”“I did, once,” you argued. “When that boy I dated junior year would let his dog stay in the room while we—”“He broke up with you,” I interrupted, falling so easily into our old rhythm. “You didn’t listen to me.”“He broke up with me because I made him put the dog out.”“You never told me that.” I said.“Because at the time I thought it was horrible advice,” you replied. “He broke up with me, after all. I just wanted the dog out of his bedroom. Still,” you continued. “You always gave me good advice.”“It looks like I was wrong about him, though,” I said.“Yeah,” you said noncommittally, though at the time I didn’t pick up on your tone.“How’s the married life treating you?” I asked.“Oh, good,” you said, then paused. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you—”I interrupted you, told you to hold that thought until I checked out. I forgot to call you back, though, and at that point you were such a small part of my life, I didn’t think it would matter if I did. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold my tongue when the topic was him, and I knew no matter if you thought my advice in high school had been good, you wouldn’t listen now.Then again, maybe you would have.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]