“How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.”

- Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth

From the front right corner table at the recently reopened Piccolo Italia, Mari could see beyond the register into the restaurant’s tight kitchen, where a pair of hands pulled flat loaves of focaccia out of an oven to cool. The hands—Mari could only see the hands, and part of one wrist—sliced two loaves at a time off the cooling rack. The fingers, with their clean square nails, struck Mari as extremely familiar in their movement and shape, erotic in the way they pressed against the tops of the pillowy strips. 

“Yoo-hoo Mar!” Katie waved one of her own hands in Mari’s face. Her engagement rock was fat and shining. “You asked to hear this!” 

Mari had just asked Katie and Gi, her girlfriends from high school, to detail the whole Manda Shorsky-bank-fraud saga, but had gotten bored halfway through, distracted by those hands.

“Sorry,” Mari said. She’d been transfixed. “I do want to hear the Manda drama but I swear to God that’s Anthony Pask back there on the bread.” Mari made two loose fists she tilted up and out and brought to her eyes like they were binoculars. “My first kiss!” she hissed.

“Are you crazy?” Gi contorted her body to catch a glimpse of the hands, placing her own on the chair, her rock too in Mari’s view. Hers was pavé and silver—the Paramus standard. The three of them had grown up with Anthony Pascarella:  Leo DiCaprio’s doppelgänger, all-state football. Mari was the only one who had ever kissed him; a very long time ago, like when they were twelve. 

Gi gave up first. “Can’t see a face,” she said, settling back into her seat to rub her neck, grimacing at the muscle she’d pulled while contorting herself.

“No way it’s Pask.” Katie didn’t need to look. Her eyebrows were raised a centimeter over where they naturally landed on her face, reminding Mari of a stern elementary school teacher. Which she was now. Fifth grade. “He stayed in South Jersey after Stockton, and he only ever worked at the Hawthorne spot. He’s also like, a dad?”

“Oh.” Mari sighed as she brought her index finger to her temple and scratched. Anytime Mari was back home time became less measurable: she saw ghosts of her past everywhere.  “I always do that.” She laughed at herself and her friends laughed too. “So weird!” Mari thought Katie, the blondest of them, was laughing too hard. 

The three of them, reunited for the first time all year, had finished one bottle of wine and were opening another when their server returned to their table with the check to let them know the restaurant was closed. “Ugh, I forgot this is Hoboken,” said Katie. 

Gi thanked the server but stuck her tongue at his back while screwing the cap back on the second bottle of rosé she’d brought. “They’re really kicking us out.”

“Remember when they first opened and had a wine list?” Mari said.

“That’s the bad thing about BYOB,” Katie said, rolling her eyes. “They don’t let you sit long.” 

Outside, Mari checked her phone for train times. Gi and Katie were taking a cab back to midtown, where they lived now. 

“Shit,” Mari said, the blue phone light straining her eyes. “My train leaves in five.” She made it a point to sound bummed, but she wasn’t really. She preferred these reunion dinners to be short and sweet. 

“If you run, you’ll make it,” Gi said. 

“Aww,” Katie said, frowning at the sudden goodbye. “Wait, take the wine.”

“Yes, take it!” Gi grabbed the loose strap of Mari’s tote bag and shoved the bottle of rosé inside. “We’ll tell you about Manda next time.”

Mari hugged her friends goodbye and lurched herself into a jog, pressing her now-heavy tote into her armpit to steady the bottle. Her peeling Chelsea boots had a slippery heel, so she needed to pay extra attention to her fast strides on the cobblestones.

Think of something you really can't be late for!

Like a train! 

No, like a big fat wedding.

Like your fat wedding.

After sprinting two blocks she crossed the avenue and slowed to a jog, but her brain kept repeating: Your wedding, you’re the bride, kind of in rhythm with her feet. 

Marriage was on Mari’s mind. Not just after seeing Katie and Gi, but also because her sister’s wedding was in two months and she had come home to find her parents in a party-planning tizzy. It was stressful to be home. She missed Carbondale, where everyone was broke and no one had weddings, eloping instead in the summer to courthouses in small towns bordering the Great Lakes. It did not matter that her GPA was so low and that she might never finish writing her dissertation, the only reason she was still in Illinois to begin with. Mari reached the Lackawanna train station with seconds to spare. The conductor closed the gate behind her as she hopped onto the double decker New Jersey Transit train stalled at track four, and this time, when she spotted someone she thought she might know, her eyes weren’t playing tricks. It was none other than Aaron Kerr, getting situated at the front of the car she’d boarded.  

“Oh my god,” Mari said, pointing to Aaron Freaking Kerr who stood there taking off his coat, one knee on a pink leather seat. What identified him to her was the red beanie on his head lit up by the overhead lights on the train, a sort of auspicious star. Mari was tipsy from dinner so she didn’t think twice before causing a scene, pushing herself past a few people in coats who were also trying to settle themselves among the seats, until her pointer finger touched Aaron's right shoulder. 

Aaron smiled. He had big teeth and big lips and god, he was still cute, in that boyish way that never leaves. 

“Mariana Drexler,” Aaron said. He looked her a little up and a little down. “What a weird surprise!”  

Mari laughed and wobbled toward him, her body still gummy from her dash. She leaned in for a hug and fell into Aaron as the train lurched and took off.

“You good?” Aaron asked, helping her steady herself. 

Your wedding, you’re the bride! Her breath was still heavy. “No! I ran here.” 

“Ah, you almost missed your flight,” Aaron said, then corrected himself. “Train.” 

Mari laughed and shook her head. She could sense how crazy she seemed. “Train, train. Uh huh. Can I sit?” 

“Of course,” Aaron said.

Mari sat down next to him. She took her little ticket out and placed it in the metal clasp above the booth in front of her. For now, the train car was empty and calm, and across the aisle she saw a woman take off her trapper hat. What a pleasant surprise, Aaron Kerr. It opened up her whole night. Now her future felt filled with possibility.

“So!” Mari said, swinging her feet out in front of her and pushing her hair out of her face with her fingertips. “Wow.”

“You’re the same,” Aaron said, smirking a little. Up close, or upon further thought, he really was not so boyish anymore — his hair was greying from the bottom up and his skin looked two-dimensional, like it couldn’t reflect light. He looked like youth had been worked out of him, leaving behind someone resembling a man. “You’re the same, like, you’re still jumpy.” 

“No you’re the same. The second I saw you I recognized the beanie.” Aaron had no doubt been wearing this same beanie since college. Mari recalled how she’d teased him with the nickname “Beanie Man” when they went to Maine—he wore it every single evening they were there, when the sun went down and the air got cool.

He reached up and placed a big beautiful hand over his hat and Mari’s heart took a two-centimeter fall when she saw his wedding band. “This is actually… believe it or not… a new beanie.” 

“No. It’s exact same as the old one!” 

“More expensive,” Aaron said. Mari thought she saw him sneak a look at her no-ring finger.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages,” he continued. “And I think I know why.”

“Because I deleted my Facebook.” 

“Yes. And your Instagram, and everything.”

“I can’t believe you noticed.” She was actually kind of embarrassed that he’d noticed. But yes, two years ago, when Jonah had broken up with her unexpectedly, she’d gone a little nutso and deleted everything. She’d never gone back on social media. For what? So people could stalk her to see how she stacked up, or how she didn’t?

“You’re totally not living here anymore,” Aaron said. “That I know. I never see you at things. And I see Gi and Katie all the time.” 

“Yeah, I’m in Chicago,” Mari lied. She was at SIU Carbondale which was five hours away from Chicago at the complete other end of the state, but better to just say Chicago.

“Carbondale, I thought.”

“Oh, you know.”

“It’s okay. Chicago is cooler. Doing what?” 

“I’m getting a PhD,” Mari said. 

“Damn, you’re a smarty after all.” Aaron smiled at her. It made Mari feel light. Such a dumb smile!

“No one expected it, but it’s whatever. I honestly might not finish. What about you? What’re you doing on the Bergen County line to Radburn right now?”

“Linny and I moved back,” Aaron said. He pointed backwards with his thumb, then forward with his pointer finger, remembering what direction the train was moving in. “We bought my grandpa’s house actually. Happened like, months ago.”  

Mari could not believe he’d married Linny after all. Linny was his friend from Fordham. Mari had always found Linny so plain and steady, so un-fun and rule-abiding.

“You married Linny-plain-and-steady?” Mari said.

Aaron laughed. “Yeah. I did. Last winter.”

“I am so happy for you,” Mari said, bending from her waist to her toes to stretch her back out, not unaware Aaron might be looking at the curve of her lower spine as her cropped jacket inched up. 

“Thank you,” Aaron said. “She’s gonna laugh when I tell her I saw you.”  

“Why laugh?” Mari asked, pulling herself back up. The conductor, a young lady who looked good in her uniform, took their tickets and pocked them with a hole puncher before moving on.

“Because she liked you,” Aaron said. “You always made her laugh.” 

Mari rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t make me feel, how you say, good.” 

“Why not?” Aaron asked.

Mari shrugged. “I dunno. I was kidding.”

Now Mari was sizzling with envy thinking about Aaron and Linny’s home life. Linny-plain-and-steady had probably decorated Grandpop’s brick colonial with old advertising posters in navy frames, maybe a map of Paris. Their wedding reception had probably been at that place in River Vale, no doubt.

“I can’t believe that’s what you’re doing,” Mari said. She hadn’t meant for it come out so mean and blatant, but too late now.

“What do you mean doing?” Aaron asked.

“Just like, your life,” Mari said. “What do you guys talk about?”

Aaron, more than anything, looked concerned. “When you live with someone,” he said, “you talk about everything. At least, we do.”

Mari put her hand over her mouth like a mime, then took it away. “Sorry. So work’s good?” 

“Yeah, work’s work,” Aaron said, not skipping a beat, but fixing his eyes out the window as their train pulled in low at Secaucus. Mari looked too—she liked to watch people’s feet amble around on the platform as the train slowed. “We almost quit to like, backpack Thailand. But we're sticking it out for a little longer. We got a fucking mortgage now.”  

“God, mortgages,” Mari said. “Pain in my ass.”

“You’re so lucky you’re back in school. What’s your thesis? Or dissertation, whatever?”

Commuters and day tourists tired from managing the city pitched forward into the train car, turning the car hotter and stuffier. 

 “Like the topic? Um,” Mari said, tipping her head to the side and considering if what she was studying would make any sense to Aaron. At dinner her girlfriends hadn’t asked her anything about school—they rarely did. They were afraid of misunderstanding her. “Basically, like, hysterics. As they pertain to female characters in 19th century literature. Like, emotions.” 

“Damn, okay.” 

“I also party a lot. And have adventures.” Mari wiggled her eyebrows at Aaron.

“Adventures?” Aaron checked his phone. “Duh. You’re the adventure queen. Remember when you made me come with you to Maine?” He put his cell back in his pocket. 

“How could I forget?” Mari reached over into Aaron’s personal space to tug on his beanie. “You’re lying, by the way. This is the same beanie.” 

“What a good summer,” Aaron said. “We were like, what, twenty-one?”

“It was for your twenty-second birthday,” Mari said. 

“That house was really nice, right on the lake.”   

“You passed out and messed your forehead on a rock.” 

“Whippets,” they said in unison.

“I loved whippets,” Aaron said wistfully. 

This conversation was beginning to irritate her. If all she and Aaron could exchange were memories of a summer they spent together years ago, well, that was sad. Where was the here and now? Mari wanted to ask Aaron what he was feeling, really feeling, but she was too shy to dig. Instead she fished a very abridged Clarissa by Samuel Richardson out of her bag. She’d be teaching it next semester, unabridged, in an undergraduate lit class. 

“Oh, so this convo is done,” Aaron said. “I didn’t realize.” 

Mari ignored him. She curled herself up against the window as the train rolled to a stop in Rutherford, wishing it wasn’t so dark out. She loved this route, how it snaked through the swampy Meadowlands and into these familiar industrial towns. She missed all of it, going to and from the city, from here to there, pinging herself back and forth, from home to college to home to work to home to unemployment until she’d finally decided it was time to leave. For years, New York and New Jersey were the only two places she knew. But now she knew about the Midwest, too — an entirely different part of the country, where people had actual blonde hair and were Christian, not Catholic; where Mexican food was better; where she could wear a scarf with an all-black outfit and be called a “fashion icon” twice in a night. She’d yet to visit Europe, had never been to South America, only to Florida and the Bahamas on trips as a child. Maine felt like the most exotic place she had ever traveled to, so lush and rolling, the air and lakes and ocean so clean, like none of the horrors of this country had risen up to touch it yet.   

“Actually, Mar, hope you don’t mind me saying, but I think about Maine a lot.” 

Mari squinted at him over her book. 

“Definitely more than I should,” he continued.  

“Flattered,” she said, “but not surprised.” 

Aaron didn’t say anything. He just sat there looking at her, a sheepish expression on his face. That look, its sincerity, sent Mari reeling with old emotion. She squeezed her book between both her hands, straightened her posture, and met his eye. “You’re not special, FYI,” she said. “Lots of people have done this to me before. Wow Mar, good times when we fooled around in the taxi. I miss the time we took the bus to Boston’s Chinatown and napped in a bar! You were always so crazy, remember driving on the shoulder down the Parkway just to make free admission at Paradise?”

“Is that what people say to you?” 

“If we had such a good time together,” Mari continued, “if everyone has such a good time with me, then why, why God, marry someone like Linny?” 

For effect, she threw her book into the aisle of the train. She heard the woman with the trapper hat go “Whoa, okay then!” She’d really said it, and could feel her cheeks flushing from the adrenaline. But she felt better.

“Well,” Aaron said, evenly, “If I remember correctly, when I tried to talk to you about like, us you kind of—” 

“I was there,” Mari cut him off fast. “I know what happened.” 

Actually, Mari did not remember much about what exactly had happened back then, when she and Aaron were twenty, after they’d driven the ten hours it took to get from Maine back to New York. She could recall a chunk of time where she’d gone around avoiding him, hanging out with crowds he didn’t associate with and leaving her cell phone home so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty if he reached out. It was on one of those no-phone nights she’d met Jonah at a trendy lounge downtown, through stylish friends she wasn’t friends with anymore, a wildcard person who drove a sportscar and had money and clout and was interesting, from Manhattan, not New Jersey, who built sound and light for fancy buildings, someone she barely understood but whom she really thought she’d marry at one point, just because things had gone on with him for so long and without conflict. She couldn’t remember when Aaron had eventually given up contacting her, only that when it happened she couldn’t even remember feeling relieved. 

In the silence, Mari shifted in her seat and her arm touched something cool through the canvas of her tote. It was the wine, still chilled, the bottle solid and smooth. Touching it felt like a rescue ship passing their lifeboat on a cold starry night.  

“Wait. Want some of this wine?” Mari asked Aaron. Her head was racing. She wished she could keep up with her own emotional range. 

“After that speech?” Aaron said. “Yeah, I’ll take some.”

Mari pulled two pieces of paper out of a journal in her bag and fashioned an origami cup in the shape of a cone. Aaron half-watched, looking distracted, as he texted with one finger. 

“You texting Linny?” Mari said. She hadn’t folded cups in years and wanted to make sure they were done right so they didn’t spill. 

Now it was Aaron’s turn to blush. Instead of putting the phone back in his pocket he put his phone in his backpack, which was sitting by his feet.

“Well, I’m sorry if I upset you,” Aaron said.

“It’s fine,” Mari said, handing Aaron the first origami cup. “This place makes me emo. Hold this.” 

She twisted off the cap of the cheap rosé and poured some for Aaron. Then she poured some into her own cup.

“This station stop is—Radburn,” the automated train voice sang. The train slowed to a stop as Aaron and Mari cheers-ed.  

“We better finish fast,” Mari said, chugging the wine. “We’re next.”

The train slowed and they both rose to walk towards the exit. The doors chucked open and Mari descended first, left hand swinging the bottle and right hand grasping her cup. Mari could hear him behind her crinkling the cup in his mouth, not unlike a cocker spaniel would a bone.  

“Happy new year to you,” the conductor said to them both from the platform once they’d debarked the train. 

“Thanks!” Mari said, and a firework went off inside her. That’s right, she thought. It’d be a new year soon. The smell of exhaust carried past by a chilly gust of wind made her nostalgic.

“How exciting,” Mari said aloud.

“What?” 

“Nothing. So what?” Mari said, walking towards her Corolla, which she’d parked at the station lot earlier in the evening. “Need a ride home?”

“Ya,” Aaron said. She was charmed to notice his earlobes still turned red when he drank. “That’d be great.”  

Mari pressed a button on her car key to unlock the doors.

“Let’s warm up, no?” Mari said once they were both inside. She turned on the ignition, unscrewed the bottle again, and poured them more wine. 

“Cheers,” they said. They toasted to the new year and drank quickly, since the handmade cups were beginning to leak.

Soon, on the Toyota’s creaky brake, Mari and Aaron pulled up in front of Grandpa Kerr’s house. The property had been re-landscaped, and two handsome Japanese weeping willows flanked the home’s original vestibule. Draped over their leaves were tiny white Christmas lights that transformed the trees into delicate winter webs. 

 “Okay, AK,” Mari said. “See you next at our high school reunion, or years from now in a grocery store, or whatever.” 

“Oh, jeez, dramatic,” Aaron said. 

“Yeah, well,” Mari said. She was exhausted, all out of ideas.

 “Hey,” Aaron said. Then surprisingly, really surprisingly, Aaron pulled Mari closer to him and kissed her on the mouth.

“Oh my god,” she said the second he pulled away.

“Sorry. I don’t know what that was. But I think you’re going through something right now and I’m sorry, I really hope you feel better. It was so great to run into you,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, so embarrassed for them both. “Happy new year.” 

He did a cornball move where he pretended to tip his beanie towards her. He got out of his car and left Mari’s world again as quickly as he had reappeared.

Aaron was such a good, sweet, dumb boy. If she had been just a little older, she thought, she might not have run away from him.

After the pity kiss Mari was reeling a little bit, so she couldn’t drive straight to her parents’ house, which was two minutes away and down the avenue. At the next red light going north, she folded the bottom tip of her cup up so nothing would spill and poured herself some more wine, taking a sip and securing it in the cup holder. The light turned green and she veered right onto 208. She drove for a mile and took the Saddle River Road exit, which would wind her back through town. When they were teenagers, she and Katie would take a route they used to call “the loop” to kill time. She drove it now. She turned down Sunnyside, which was always dripping in Christmas lights this time of year, past the Panera where she’d cried once, drunk at closing time, for an existential reason she could not remember; over the train tracks where the pretty senior girl died when they were freshmen; past the dead hedges of the women’s club, where she’d been an awkward, half-hearted Girl Scout. The loop was never long enough. Soon, she would be back at her parents’ house, where the two of them would be aging into their sleep, where the old dog would be on his bed surrounded by newspaper, where the living room would be littered with binders and fabric swatches, set for the wedding planner’s final prep session in the morning. 

Mari thought about something she’d read somewhere. Maybe it had been Lucille Clifton, though she couldn’t be positive, who’d said that nobody on earth gets to live their ideal life but that it is possible to live a small, compact, doll-sized version of this ideal life. Of course, you have to know what your ideal life looks like to really apply this statement to your existence, but the whole philosophy was a giant crumb lodged in Mari’s head. What was Mari’s ideal life? She didn’t know, but she thought maybe her compact version of it was marrying Aaron, living in his grandfather’s house in Radburn, the one she’d always admired when they were younger, with the new brick and the weeping willows and the map of the 8th arrondissement.

Mari took another gulp from her cup and placed it back down. Actually, in her ideal life, she would be able to live recklessly and not have people look down upon her for it. In her ideal life she’d be old and rich in a Hollywood movie, a dame who never left her bed, who had a poodle to refresh her martinis for her, or something. In her ideal life she might also be with Jonah, who would love her so much, who would give her real estate and luxury and all of the things that had eventually repulsed Mari about him would no longer repulse her. In her ideal life, actually, no one would repulse her. She would live in an apartment in Weehawken, be drunk and high and sexy in private while seeming on the outside as plain and steady as Linny-plain-and-steady. Aaron, with whom she’d be having an affair, would never bore her; she'd be too busy with her job at a firm to get bored. In fact, in an ideal world, she’d like Linny. They’d be friends. Her ideal life was not to be found in Carbondale, because she felt far too calm and anonymous there. It had to be here, with everyone who had wronged her, did not understand her, the place where her existence made so little sense to herself and to others that it drove her to feel so much, to feel evil, tragic, desperate, unique: right here, Mari thought, she could haunt it all.