Shoot Me If I Ever Look Like That

She was young when she said it but she was in a clear state of mind then. She knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want. Those things were solid in her early. She knew what she wanted to become and how to get there. Knew how to mess with men’s minds, change her oil, fastpitch a softball, roll a tight joint, charm her way out of tickets, fuck without getting called a slut, ride English, keep her stomach flat.

Three things she knew then:

She wanted to be a large animal vet.

She wanted to have her tubes tied.

She wanted to never get fat.

In supermarkets, at the mall, wherever we’d see women who were bulging and beaten down, hauling around a bunch of kids, gone to seed, she’d say:

“Shoot me if I ever look like that.”

         *                                         *                                *

It stuck with me. We were sure about things then. Hers were the highway taillights I followed home. I made a promise that became my guardrail.

She never gave a crap about getting married. She never wanted kids. Guys were always beside the point with us. They were ways to get things, sex, through. She talked about them like they were stuffed animals. The ones she liked had “nice eyes.” She went for stoner guys with long eyelashes who took their anger out on their transmissions.

They were just scenery.

College in different states. We’d see each other Thanksgivings and it was like fresh horses. We were still on the same team.

I went to her wedding. The guy was beneath her, like they always were. She met my eye and told me she knew it without me having to say so.

“He doesn’t want kids,” she said in the bathroom, hauling up her wedding dress and peeing with the stall door open. We clinked beer cans. He was just another chump.

Spun away to different towns after that, different states and coasts and addresses and numbers, never seeing each other in person after the wedding. Just a Christmas letter with a picture: Her and him in front of a fireplace with assorted rescue pets.

Her letters were careful. Monitored, almost. Her practice. The work they were doing on their house. Like all married friends, no mockery of the husband. No particular indication of dissatisfaction, or of happiness. Just a version of the truth.

Then a birth announcement. No warning. Inexplicable. She was the only one I’d ever known who’d said I’ll never. She took me to Planned Parenthood to ask them to tie her tubes. (They wouldn’t.)

Wasn’t I the keeper of what she really wanted? Hadn’t she asked me to be that? Why was she sending me this announcement? How was I supposed to respond?

These were things we promised each other when we were young and beliefs ran through us like power lines through hills. This fork she was taking: It made zero sense.

I was who I was because of who she refused to be. She’d smacked the rose-colored glasses off my face and I never could put them back. She’d cleared things up for me, got me through ordinary life by treating it like a blur to pass.

I’d kept up my end of who we were.

*                                *                        *

The baby, with a hopeful name, like they all have now, was ordinary. Metastasizing annually into a child impossible to imagine loving more than life itself, while the Girl I Idolized grew softer in the hips, wider in the arms, tired in the eyes, looking more and more Like That.

Her eyes looking straight to the camera as if to say, Help me.

*                                *                                *

The return address sticker led me to a town in Oregon.

The travel, the expense, the time, the motel life didn’t deter me. I cared about her once and it was good to be filled with care again. It lit a wick she’d threaded through me.

I came to enjoy my days in my room, reading our old notes and letters, making dead sure this was what she wanted. My camouflaged nights of target practice in the forest felt like a teenage throwback to when the sky and the stars were still a thing and my eyes were used to seeing by the moon.

They were friendly in the shop and asked only about the size of what I wanted to hunt, and told me how to take down something that was Boone & Crocket sized which, by now, she was. I asked for something silent that was good for close range. They sold me a dart gun. They said I’d have to aim for the heart.

Watching through her windows was weird. I felt like my old self again, being with her, but watching some future we were both supposed to dodge.

She did the cooking, the way she did for her dad when we were in high school. Still made the same sauce with sausages. Still saved it Tupperware.

She served the husband and the daughter their dinners. The ceiling light yellowed her thickened arms.

She was the one who put the girl to bed. Read her stories. Kissed the ordinary creature goodnight.

Then hours of teevee in the room with the fireplace, on the sofa under pets and afghans. Usually they were too tired to have sex.

I waited for times she was alone. The guy and the kid were her mistake. They were not going to be mine.

Waited till it was warm enough to keep the windows open to the night. I’d pierced the window screen. She was doing laundry. She carried it down to the basement where the windows were too small to get a good angle.

I followed along the side of the house to the kitchen window and watched her: emerging, microwaving some cold coffee, putting a piece of paper towel over it like she used to do. Sitting on a kitchen chair. Watching it rotate through the microwave door.

The dart gun at my lips was loaded.

It was like a photograph. Her, on a kitchen chair, lit by the light on the hood of the stove. Staring into the humming microwave with its own little light.

It was impossible, what had happened to her. It made me want to cry.

She didn’t look unhappy. Just tired. And older. Almost unrecognizable. All of her definition gone. Looking like someone she would never have believed she’d be.

I stepped on a branch and she turned to the window. I didn’t think she could see me. It was dark outside, the lights in her kitchen reflected her back.

She looked a little like her mother did, in the little while I knew her mother. She looked like the ladies in our mall and in our supermarket. The ones who took our spaces.

Something in me went soft as muffins.

Feeling the loss of her and all the girls I knew.

She looked like every other nobody. Like nothing special. Like a million other unfuckable Americans.

I was outside looking in to that diorama of total surrender. It was how I felt all my life.

I lowered my sights.

She didn’t need me to shoot her.

My friend was dead already.

                                  ##

________

Risa Mickenberg has been published in The American Bystander, The Baffler, Vice, Purple Magazine, Grl Squash, The Witness, Del Sol Review and republished in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and the Utne Reader. She wrote the feature film EGG (2018) and is the author of Taxi Driver Wisdom (Chronicle Books). She is singer & lyricist for the band Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse and editor of the rarely seen Hermette Magazine.