Alex Behm: MAIN LINE • Cleaver Magazine

Alex Behm
MAIN LINE

His voice is scratchy with sleep and a virus. I ask how he’s feeling.

What’s wrong, my father interrupts through the phone.

I’m just thinking, I say. Again. My father is in another state, trying to sleep, whereas I am in a dorm room with high ceilings and all of the lightbulbs blaring, even the desk lamp. I like to let the light in; my family lives in a river valley where I have never seen the sun set beyond those mountains that press us inward, nearer to the heart of what land is left.

My father walks down a flight of carpeted stairs, and they crack under his weight. He doesn’t want to wake up my mother, my sister, my brother. I hear him flick the light switches in his office. It is full of filing cabinets and antique toys that he has collected, whiteboards with dates and numbers and things, he tells me, I am not to be concerned with. Photos of our family.

There is a picture of my sister and me Scotch-taped to exposed drywall taken after a recital, standing with our grandmother. She wears a pink seersucker shirt with buttons and looks at yellow roses wrapped in cellophane. My sister and I smile into disposable flash.

I sang, I remember, something in Latin, and my sister played a novice composition of “River Flows in You” on the piano. I was maybe nine and she seven, whereas my grandmother appeared the same way I have always remembered, grinning with white curls locked in a perm, until the end of things when she looked younger, and so small. I had that feeling like air was catching in my throat. There was a ladybug in the curtains. In moments like this, it becomes hard to let go of my own breath.

You think with your heart, my father says to me over the phone, and I picture it inside of my rib cage, beating and blaring and blue. It is a visceral thing, something real and full. This is where you get stuck. This is where we lapse.

My father tells me, Do not live in the valley. He practices proverbs from a scuffed office chair. Live on the tops of the mountains.

Oh, my father. The valley is where we come from.

◊

When it is the time of afternoon between four and seven and we do not know what to do with ourselves, my friends and I drive through neighborhoods filled with houses where we could only ever dream of living. On a Saturday evening, we pack our things into book bags and walk outside wearing hooded jackets and sunglasses even though we cannot see the sun. All three of us.

Sometimes people let me down, but these two do not. They are both a year younger than I am in school but were my first friends after transferring colleges. We met convening at the T of three sidewalks and laughed forcedly at first, feeling like bad actors in a film where everyone grows up in the end. In the end, maybe that is what college is, just a long entertainment where they set you free with every burden in the world. Butterflies from the net. Though I do not know who they are, and often, I feel as though the world is on fire.

But now, it is raining. Cruel April. Behind tinted glass, the built world becomes fragile, as though if I tapped my nails and heard the ping, the window would shatter and with it, the film of a fabricated world beyond the other side.

Our campus is flowering. It is the kind of place sewn together with trees and enclosed in a stone wall, but outside of this sphere, there is a compounding space of syncopation, of ritual, of monotony: the Philadelphia suburbs. In these suburbs there are not streets but avenues. We slow to see the in-between where trees are like fences. Driveways wrap around to pillars and fountains. Yards have checkerboard grass. There are stone houses, brick houses, houses with glass roofs, glass walls, glass skylights, ceilings. We see gates made of metal, black and guild. Carports and pavement. Shutters painted red against white siding. Flags that are sometimes American and sometimes crests or seals. Ivy scaling walls, wrapping tight and firm. Flower boxes. Flower arrangements in concise rows that, as we drive, are smothered in a concoction of rainwater and fertilizer flowing so heavy, it could not all swirl into the drain pipes. The flooded flowerbeds. Peonies—how they bloomed, how they have faltered.

We play no music, but there is a consistent metronome’s chime, a click and tick. I have not buckled my seatbelt and listen for disregarded cacophonies; I love the way that word sounds.

We hit another red light. Stop.

◊

We coo to one another about beauty in its tangible state: the houses, the homes. We talk, as we often do, about where we might live one day. We decide, first, we are going to grow up.

Yes, we would graduate and move to East Coast cities where there are well-paying jobs. Our kitchens would be made of marble and hold latte makers and oat milk in the refrigerator. We’d go to galas where we’d carry little designer handbags and eat things like caviar even though two out of the three of us are vegetarian. We would get our nails done in salons with wallpaper and chandeliers. Our engagement rings would be the size of the knuckle on our manicured ring fingers. Our weddings would be white. We would have high-class weddings, timeless weddings, weddings with dusty pink flowers lining the runway to our life partner, and candles, and all of this would take place in front of a backdrop of some notable body of water.

And then, we would move to the suburbs. We would move to houses like these and we’d become parents and our children would throw out their arms and run through the grass that is cut like checkerboard; they’d be singing.

Our children would be happy, our children would be so happy. They’d have everything we’ve ever had and more. We would understand them. We would listen to them. We would love them. Of course, we tell ourselves, they would be all ours to love and someday, someday way off into the future, they would grow up the same way we are growing up now.

Our faces fall fast and we grow quiet, staring back out to those houses where everything is suspended in space as we hold our collective breath. So tight, so tight are our lungs. Maybe we will shout for air.

How guilty one feels in dreaming. This is our conclusion.

◊

My dorm room is a sacrosanct space. The concrete walls are painted a shade of manila and the floor is laid in commercial carpet, covered with a white rug. Moving in, I put square mirrors all over like glass wallpaper and, sometimes, I stare at myself until my pupils dilate and reflex; I think I am vain. At the end of the semester, my friends will help me cover them in duct tape and together, we will bust them into shards. We will have bad luck for the rest of our lives, but at least will not pay for damages, for messes that could not be cleaned.

Soon, my books will be packed into plastic containers and stored in my parent’s basement where it will flood while I am in another country and powerless to control the water. Fiction and memoirs and Bibles. Rust-colored water and a red algal bloom.

But before the floods, my father will drive to pick me up. I will walk him around my campus, and I will wear the only shirt I have not packed, with flowers and French text that goes down to my knees. I do not speak French, but for practice tell my friends á tes souhaits when they sneeze. Bless you. We laugh.

We will see the gym and the bookstore and he will buy us matching windbreakers that say the name of the college in a lofty print. He will see the library with cathedral ceilings, the cottage for the English Department, and “Hall” Hall where I took Latin despite having told myself I was through with it after graduating high school; I will show him the spaces where I have learned.

Together, we will carry plastic tubs and heavy boxes down two flights of stairs and into our SUV. They will fill up the back and I will worry because he can’t see out of the rearview on the turnpike.

I’ll ask him, when he is looking at the road, how he is feeling. About my grandmother. Three months will have passed and oh, he will tell me that he will be alright, he’s doing alright.

The rest of the car ride will be silent until he asks me, again, about law school. I tell him that’s where I will probably end up, knowing fully that law school is not where I am going to end up. The second part, I do not tell him.

Good, he’ll say, and he will be so proud of me. If nothing else, I can always write wills. Everybody’s gotta have a will. He will be so glad I am finally happy. That’s all he’s ever wanted. And we will go home.

But for now, I will rest.

Though it is nighttime, I look out my dorm room window toward the duck pond, the forest, the city. I feel like a debtor of morality, and so much like a kid. Outside is a light pollution wonderland, and the wishing stars are smothered.

Tonight, I do not lock the door. I am young and feel, paradoxically, powerless and formidable because of all the philosophy I’ve been made to read as of late. I shut off the overhead lights and the desk lamp.

To sleep, I imagine myself in one of those houses, one of the ones from the suburbs. Only here, it is on the top of a mountain. Yes, I imagine my face in an upstairs window, peering out. There’s a valley below me, and a river. How lucky I might be, how steady.

Alex Behm is a writer from West Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Allegheny Review, Milkweed, Zeniada, and elsewhere. Currently a student at Haverford College, she is the founder and leader of the Haverford Poetry Club as well as The Haverford Coterie, an undergraduate poetry magazine. When not reading or writing, she enjoys traveling and performing improv comedy. Visit her bio page here.