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Founders’ Day

Logan Lane

    I’m living in the era of S women: the Saras, Stephanies, Samanthas, Selenas, and Syndneys. Sometimes even Sierras or Stellas. We don’t get a lot of Sadies, Syklars, or Savannahs in Northeast Ohio, but when I find one, she’s always a ride.
    I met a Sage, once, too, in the alright part of Akron: a little strip of bars and muraled coffee shops. She had strawberry blonde hair and eyes so dark they swallowed the light. When we were drunk enough, I asked her to fuck me like a prophet. She did.
    It could be just a quirk, an oddball fetish—but I think it’s more than that. I like to believe it’s something in the rhythm and noise between people, something between the syllables of the names. The way the whole package rolls off the tongue. Something in the brain, in the heart and loins, recognizing a familiar spark. It could be romantic; sometimes it is.
    Just now, I hear Sabrina downstairs in the kitchen. The blender growling. A window opening. Warm air rolling indoors. Her sneakers on the linoleum. I roll over in bed and smell the hint of her perfume on the pillow beside mine. All of it holds a trace of the name, just a whisper of the person running around downstairs. Even the home noises, the creaks and cracks, that she makes underfoot carry a dash of Sabrina.
    I’d think about it more, but it’s Founders’ Day. That doesn’t mean much, but here in Akron it’s when the alcoholics and their sponsors and their families and their knobby little kids go bumbling around the city. They jaw around on street corners and in little diners between AA landmarks, talking about the wonderful thing Dr. Bob and Bill W. created some years ago. And always by midday they flock to Dr. Bob’s very own house, the little white two-story across from the apartment Sabrina and I share.
    So, right now, instead of thinking about Sabrina, tasting her name in my mouth, tasting her, I’m watching a herd of American suburbia and grimy bikers mingle on Dr. Bob’s lawn from our upstairs window. Soft, stooped men in high white socks, ball caps tugged over their grey heads, loose polos and t-shirts smacking around in the breeze. Others in black boots and jeans, their shirts unsleeved at the shoulder. They mill around Dr. Bob’s yard and on the sidewalk, aimlessly pointing, laughing, nodding, smoking.
    Sabrina calls from downstairs.
    I go down. She’s made lunch: two bowls of tabbouleh quinoa salad. I’m not surprised to find that she’s already eaten hers. I sit down and she stands, swings over to the sink to clean her bowl. In running shorts and tennis shoes, with her hair pulled back into a tail, she is a cord of muscle and tight tan. She’s listening to music in her earbuds. She sort of sways and bounces, kicking the rhythm around, and I hunt the beat springing down her thighs as she steps her weight from one foot to the other.
    “Hey,” I tell her.
    She hums hello.
    Watching her, I know she’s already taken her pre-workout. She eats the powder like my dad used to eat cocaine. She mixes it into her cereal, her salad, her smoothies. When it settles into her system, her eyes go quick and ardent. She gets a warm, sweet flush across her neck and chest. It makes me sweat. For a while, I watch her at the sink. She attacks the dry bits of quinoa in her bowl with a brush. She bobs her head, stamps her heels into the floor mat. Her body is a spring, and all I want to do is throw myself against it.
    Eventually, I stand and slip behind her. I push my hands across the curve of her waist, down past the navel, under the waistband of the running shorts. I reach the holy land and she pulses back into me—receptive, I think—until I start kissing her neck.
    “Jack,” she hums, shrugging me back.
    “Sabrina.” God, her name is candy.
    “I’m going for a run.”
    I cling to her, pleading with kisses and sighs. She whips around, snatches me by the shirt, kisses me. She dives down into my tongue. Her skin buzzes; her heart gallops against me. I could climb into her, make a throne out of her surging ventricles. Or not. I’d be happy to beg between her legs.
    “I’ll be back in a bit, alright?” she says finally.
    “Mhm.”
    I watch her leave. I consider, for a moment, going back upstairs to stand at my window and track her down the road—not to scratch some neurotic itch, but just to carry the flows and flutters of her body with me for a while longer. I know that a bit could mean two hours, three, or even longer. During summer weekends, when Sabrina works out three or four times a day, I see her in blurs and flashes, hear her in fits and creaks. The dark tail of hair bobbing behind her as she pushes open the door. A waft of her warm, working body as she goes up to bathe. The squeak of her sneakers. The gurgle of her blender in the kitchen. Our interactions, brief exchanges in the kitchen or in the bedroom, always leave me stirred.
    After I finish eating, Sabrina texts me gym and I can already see and feel the day and evening unraveling, their transition completely void of her. Often when she runs, she’ll decide to step inside the nearest gym. She comes home, hours later, flushed and ragged, panting like a horse, and passes out before I can even kiss her hello.
    It’s been happening more often lately, too. Our interactions seem like haphazard collisions, our conversations like static. Love babble. Crooning laughter. Updates on each other’s professional lives. The fate of mutual friends, of our local siblings and parents. We pick and prune our future plans, the vacations and getaways that are half-trimmed, unwatered. Maybe it’s all normal. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening. Maybe this is what happens when we grow accustomed to the rhythm of our partner’s routines. Your joined life just goes subsonic. A fall into white noise.
    I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t seem like our sex were not also just another nameless mutter in all of this low, cold noise. Momentary contact when it’s convenient. Brief and fanatic collisions before we succumb to sleep and, in the morning, Sabrina races off again.
    Six o’clock comes by and I decide—no, I realize—that I need to go out. I text Sabrina that I’m meeting a coworker for dinner. When I step outside, the city and all of its crowded heat and noise boils around me. Men in black tank tops roar by on motorcycles. The alcoholics and company, still milling around Dr. Bob’s house, wave at the passing bikers. I go out into the street and unlock my car.
    “Hey,” a man calls out as I’m fishing my keys out.
    “What?”
    “How’s it feel living next to Dr. Bob?”
    I shrug. “Like living next to any other dead doctor, I guess.”
    He laughs furiously. His gut sags and swells. All 210 pounds of his sweaty, good-natured gymnasium bulk goes ruddy. “Yeah right, buddy. You know what he did, right? Dr. Bob, I mean. The man’s a hero.”
    “Didn’t he spend seventeen years performing surgery while drunk out of his gourd?”
    Everything good and whole about this middle-aged, pink-cheeked man goes sour. He looks at me like I’m small and insignificant. “He founded AA,” he says. “You really should be more respectful.”
    “But he did that after, right? After all of his operations, I mean.”
    The man shakes his head and returns to his family across the street, a wife and child who give Dr. Bob’s home long, craning looks. I climb into my car and swing onto Main Street and find myself in a pack of motorcycles, engines ripping and growling. I drive to the strip of bars and cafés.
    I find a bar, some place out of the way, but it’s still early. I find a place and have one beer, two, and then start scoping out the place as the sun comes down. People start filling the bar, packing the walls with a warm, rowdy buzz. They bob to the pop music, laugh and babble. I look hard for an S. Eventually I spot some woman in jeans and a T-shirt drinking a beer a way down the bar. She’s not gorgeous, but her body’s got enough swerve to rope me in.
    I go up alongside her. We start talking, going through the rhythms. She’s an engineer somewhere, a dog-lover, an avid fan of Spanish culture. Celine, she tells me. Not an S, but it scratches the itch. I buy us another round, and we’re both getting tipsy, and then some, and we get closer, thigh-on-thigh, cooing amours in a raw, wanting whisper.
    I’m half-aware, this whole time, of a flock of women a few feet away. They chatter and laugh, but there’s one, a dark-haired thing in tight jeans, the queen of the flock, who keeps telling her friends how ironic it is that we’re all here, in a bar, on Dr. Bob’s very own day. Isn’t it just so ironic, she says? Isn’t it just the epitome of irony that there are still happy hours on this of all days?
    But even that melts into the background static as Celine and I start getting warmer. We bounce and roll to the wobbly throb of some pop song. We slop back the rest of our drinks and I lean in, give her the eyes, ask her if she’s got a place nearby. By now, we’re both hopelessly athirst, draped over one another, murmuring nonsense while our bodies do the work. This is my favorite part. Always. It’s like the tide starts to roll. It washes the place out, makes all its noise fuzzy and distant. We’re trapped in our own pocket of acoustics, caught up in our own buzz and babble. We’re elbowing people around us, catching eyes from the tenders and wallflowers. My hands are antsy around her waistline; hers are having a tantrum against my belt buckle. I start pushing toward the door when I hear the woman again, the queen, keening in my direction:
    “Jack? What the fuck are you doing?”
    Now, even a bit slurred I can hear my death knell in queenie’s voice. I consider shoving the catch, my Celine, forward, onward, out into the hot night. I consider bolting alone. But before I do anything, queenie catches up and sinks her claws into me.
    “Jack, who is this? What’re you doing here?”
    I turn around and get one look to confirm. It’s Sabrina’s sister. She comes at me with those eyes, pupils leaping up at me. I’m not completely shameless, so I mount a quick defense. I’m stupid, I tell her. Drunk, too. Stupid and drunk, out of my depth. I abandon poor Celine. She leaves scowling at me, swearing at me, as I stand packed in by queenie and company, hounded by promises of retribution.
    In the end, none of it matters much. I escape—wading through the tide of shoulders and arms—while queenie is calling Sabrina. I push open the doors and stream out into the hot, wooly night. I bum a cigarette off some guy outside just to spite my body, my brain, my lungs. I choke it down and go along the street, trying to unscramble my head. I’m usually careful, cautious, but I’m not much of a planner. It’s all starting to go loose, to unravel, and I think, shit, let’s just ride it out.
    So I head to the next bar. I’m walking along when I see this tall, filthy, yeti-limbed caveman come shambling down the sidewalk. Ragged, dirty, bearded, he’s almost Paleolithic. He hugs the curb, weaving in and out of the parking meters. I slow down to watch him. He stops alongside each one, hugs his hand against the meter head, and feeds a plastic card into the mouth of the machine. It’s late, so I know those meters aren’t ticking, but he works them like a meter maid—no, like a dancer, a lover. One step, two step. Card in, card out. One step, two step. He swivels, snatches the next head, feeds it the plastic. It’s marvelous. A heavy madman working his meters in two-time.
    But wait—he’s got a snag. The machine eats the card, spits it back out, but the yeti doesn’t move on. I expect him to freak, but instead he goes in close, starts murmuring to the machine. He smacks his words around in his mouth, slops them across his tongue. I can’t make it out. For a second, I really think someone’s pulled him out of a museum.
    Still slurry, I go in close. I can’t catch a look at the meter, so I go in real close. I’m lover-close now, and the yeti doesn’t smell as bad as I’d thought. No boiling rot here; just a sharp, musky zest lurking under dry mildew. A real complexity.
    “Hey, buddy,” I call out.
    He starts jamming the card in and out of the meter. When I crane a bit closer, I see the ERROR on the machine’s screen. It flashes this message and gives a digital whine each time the man rams the card back in.
    “I don’t think it’s working.”
    One, two, flash, whine.
    “It’s not working, man. Give it a rest. They don’t even run after eight anyway, so I’d save the charity until tomorrow—if that’s what you’re after.”
    I’m about ready to turn tail and leave the man, but I finally make out what he’s saying:
    “Nineteen-seventy minus eighteen cents, then another fifteen. We get—mm—we get—aahh—we get thirty-seven. Mhhh-yuh.” But it’s all low, garbled, dragged through the gutters of his poor mind. So I shove my palm over the error message, grab him by the wrist. I feel his sharp bones and tight little sinews twitch in panic.
    “Easy, easy. Just wait. It’s Founders’ Day, you know? It means you don’t gotta do this, buddy. Here. Don’t look, don’t listen. Just feed it one more time, yeah? This one’s on me, though. Don’t worry about the money.”
    The yeti doesn’t give me his eyes—they’re lost somewhere out in the dark—but he manages to jerk a nod and give the machine one more two-time. I even cover the sound grate so he can’t hear it whine. I think Dr. Bob would be proud.
    He turns away and shambles on down the sidewalk. I want to turn around and keep walking, but I’m stuck. I just stand there and stare at him, at this shaggy madman, and just before he disappears into the dark, I see him start lurching back toward the meters.
    I manage to swivel back around, but after a minute of walking I too start to lurch. I nearly run into the bouncers outside the first bar I come across, and they almost don’t let me in. But they do. I get inside. I have one drink, then another, and then some liquor. I get sloppy with booze and cigarettes. The noise here is bad, spoiled. I can’t tell an S from a T. Hell, I can barely give the barman my next order—but I’m set on seeing this thing through. By the time I roll out of there, I’m stumbling, pawing at my gut, slurring through names.
    Shelly, Shelia.
    I chamber each one, let it sit on my tongue, but they don’t feel right. What was her name again? The number in the jeans?
    The night and lights and cars swing past in streaks, the colors starting to run. I look up and find I’m no longer even on the sidewalk. My leg catches on a tangle of bush. I go tumbling. For a moment, I thash around in the growth, trying to free my limbs. Then I’m out. I get up and haul myself across the street—my street, I realize, as I kick leaves and twigs out of my jeans.
    Stephanie, Suzanne...
    Down the road, Dr. Bob’s porch light is on.
    Shelby, Sara...
    The bikers stand smoking on Dr. Bob’s lawn. They watch me, heads cocked. I cross the street, still spilling names, and climb my own porch. But I stop and hang there on the porch. I swing around and take a look at Dr. Bob’s, at the bikers there, and consider wandering over. I could just walk right over. I could shoot the shit with them. Let the night unwind. Ride this thing out. I bet they’d let me stay if I said something nice about Dr. Bob. I could tell them I helped a homeless man. They’d love that. They’d probably let me hunker down and sleep this off. Maybe afterward, I could remember the S from the bar. Her name is still buzzing around somewhere.
    I wrestle with this mess, try to force it into shape, until my own porch light whines on above my head. I blink the light out of my eyes and when I finally swivel around, Sabrina’s standing there in the doorway. She’s in her bouncy running shorts and her hair is pulled back into a bun. Her eyes are tight and red and misty. She doesn’t look at me, won’t look at me.
    “Sabrina,” I slur.
    She swerves around me, her sneakers squeaking on the sill, and dashes out into the night. And I really can’t bring myself to chase her.

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