WHEN THE BEE STINGS

By Lisa Romeo


         I had towering crushes on all of my sister’s boyfriends, who were all correspondingly smitten with me too. Brad always hugged me tightly, Patrick kissed the top of my head and fingered my hair, Mark winked at me, and Allan often told me I was pretty. A few even took me along on their dates, sitting beside me to whisper secrets at the movies or ice cream shop. Those kinds of things can happen when your sister is 12 years older than you are, when your sister is more or less your mother too.
        Our newly affluent Italian American family included our real mother, of course. But much of the nurturing, the nuance, fell to Cathy, either because of our mother’s early menopausal vexations, or because of the way eldest daughters in the 1960s buoyantly accepted the mother-helper role. This was fine with me, terrific in fact, since I knew nothing else and loved my sister in a fierce way that sometimes scared me.  
        The summer before I started kindergarten, Cathy and I plopped down on the lumbering green and white slider swing in our suburban New Jersey backyard, sucking on root beer ice pops. 
        “Why do you have to live at college?” I asked.   
        “To have lots of time to study and to learn. I want to learn everything there is to know about math.” She told me how her college was in the prettiest part of Massachusetts and how much fun we would have on the drive up in the fall.

        Cathy was a contemplative and pious teenager who intermittently avowed that she wanted to be a nun. My parents insisted she attend a coed Catholic college for at least two years before binding herself to a novitiate. I worried whether nuns – or college girls – visited their little sisters. Held their hands? Shared peanut butter and jelly on crackers? Or sat on the front steps chanting “he loves me, he loves me not” and plucking daisy petals, as we did that summer.
        “Who loves you? Billy?” I asked her. The boy across the street once came to our door three times in one afternoon selling Boy Scout popcorn.
        "And who do you like? Paul?” she teased.
        “He’s the cutest Beatle, right?”
        Cathy did not shrug me off or push me away. She never said, “She’s so annoying” or “Leave me alone!” the way it was with my cousin Emma and her older sister Patty. Cathy did not shush at me when she was on the phone with a girlfriend, or jilt me when she and her friends walked to Bond’s for ice cream.
        So why did she want to abandon me now? My older brother was already away at New York Military Academy. My father worked six days a week at his polyester manufacturing company and spent many evenings and weekends reading The Wall Street Journal or visiting his parents. I trailed along with my mother to the beauty shop, the seamstress, upscale department stores, and her bowling league. But at home, without Cathy, I wondered what I would do, who would play jacks with me.
        “Why do you want to learn about math?” I asked her.
        “I think numbers are really neat, and I want to be a teacher,” she said. “What do you want to be?”
        “I want to be a writer,” I declared. “I want to write newspaper stories and books and poems and everything. On a typewriter, like a real writer.” 
        One afternoon that August, Cathy returned from her part time job as a sales clerk at E.J. Korvette carrying a big blue and white box. “It’s for you, so you can write me lots of letters.” Inside was a manual Junior Secretary Smith Corona typewriter. She had already taught me, when I was four, how to read and print words.

         I stood beside Cathy when she packed a low green trunk with white socks, hair rollers, and two new pairs of penny loafers. I idly fingered the dusting powder and jewelry box and other items remaining on her side of the bureau in our shared bedroom.  
        “Are you taking your slippers and robe too?” I asked.
        “Of course, silly. What would I wear in the morning and at night?” Cathy ruffled my pixie haircut.
        “You’re taking the pictures, too?”
        She considered the formal 8 x 10 high school graduation portrait, and the smaller framed and slightly blurry snapshot beside it. A statue of Mary stands over the two of us on the church lawn, Cathy still in her graduation robe. My arms are clutched around her waist, crushing and pulling up her robe so that an inch of white dress shows at the hem. She leaves the large one, lays the small one in the trunk atop a pale blue sweater, her hand emerging with her favorite bottle of Christian Dior perfume, setting it gently back on the dresser. “Can you keep this for me till I come home?” she asked. “You can wear a drop sometimes.” I burrowed my face in her long chestnut hair, breathed in the Dior, and squeezed my eyes tight.

        Every afternoon after getting home from kindergarten that fall, I typed a letter to my sister on plain white paper. Real writers did not use the kind of flowery stationery my mother had bought me. I reported the day’s news – how Mrs. Bartosh’s dog Sir Bum got loose and pooped in Mr. Hufnagel’s driveway, that we had veal cutlets for dinner and Mommy didn’t burn them, who was on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were one or two-page, single-spaced missives, long for a six year old, but good training I figured for a future world famous writer, and lengthy enough I thought so that Cathy would not forget me.
        About once a week, I got a thick envelope back, neatly printed on several pages of daffodil stationery, stories about her roommates Kay (Katherine), Pat (Margaret), and Liz (Elizabeth), and about which boys were cute (many). The cafeteria food was good and she had two favorite teachers, including Professor Peterson. “He has hair like John Lennon and he never combs it and it’s always in his eyes and we wonder how he can see what he’s writing on the board!”
        I missed Cathy in every corner of the house – in the bathroom when I brushed my teeth and used to perch on the narrow sink ledge so I could watch her in the mirror doing the same. I missed her in the kitchen where we filled bowls with milk and dropped in ripped doughy chunks from yesterday’s loaf of Italian bread. In the backyard where she always turned on the sprinkler for me on stifling summer days, and did not care if I splashed her.
         Mostly I yearned for my sister in the big double bed we had shared since I was two. My mother said I could stretch out now, but that was where Cathy used to lie with me almost every night, singing songs from movie musicals or Broadway plays. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things….
         I missed all the things we used to talk about. So what happened on I Love Lucy today? I bet you would love to work in a chocolate factory! Are horses still your favorite animal? Were there any good games at Margie’s birthday party? Now my mother brushed a kiss on my forehead, clicked off the white lamp with pink flowers, and closed my door, jobs that once belonged to Cathy.
         In one letter, Cathy asked about the boys in my class, but I only pined for My Three Sons, Beaver, and even Mr. Ed, all of whom I had heaps of time for now. The television was always switched on in our house, but Cathy had always been there, inviting me to play board games or go on the swings, suggesting we draw hopscotch grids in the driveway, or read new books. Now, I spent a lot of time meandering around.
         “Moping again?” my mother asked and offered me some chocolate chip cookies.
         In church on Sundays, I silently prayed my sister would decide she hated college and come home.  When she did come home for a weekend in October, and it was time for bed, Cathy lay down on top of the covers. I wanted to tell her how Miss Hauxwell was teaching me to write in script when the other kids were coloring, and that Laurie and Cindy, the new girls who moved in next door, were nice after all. But before I said any of it, she kissed my hair, said goodnight, and left.
        That Sunday morning, I put a fresh piece of paper in my typewriter, banged the keys: Reasons Why I Miss You So Much. 1.) You love me more than anyone. I folded it neatly and slipped it into her suitcase, near her underpants so she would be sure to find it that very night back in her dorm room.

       The afternoon Cathy was due home for Christmas break, I ran full speed from the bus stop. I knew that when I opened the front door, there she would be, arms open. I wanted to know why she was not writing back every week anymore and when I could stay overnight in her dorm room, as she had promised.
        My mother and her mother, my Noni who was staying with us now that she had had her right leg amputated, were at the kitchen table rolling out dough for Italian Knot cookies. “She’s not here,” my mother said. As I walked slowly up the stairs to my room, I heard her say to Noni, “Did you see how fast she went back out with her college friends? I guess we’re too dumb for her now.”
        When Cathy arrived, laughing and waving to the friend who dropped her off, she came up the front steps slowly, her hair reflecting the winter sun. I wondered why she was not running to find me. When she finally came through the door I bolted at her, hugging and hopping on stocking feet, wet from the snow she had tracked in.
       “Guess what, I asked Santa for goldfish, a whole tank of them,” I blurted. “And a Creepy Crawler set to make icky bugs,” I added, giggling and scrunching up my fingers at her neck.
         “You still write to Santa?” she said.
        “Sure. So when I see him at Aunt Doris’s house every year, he already knows what I want.”
        “That’s Uncle Frankie in a costume.”
        “Liar! Cathy’s a liar.” I ran to the kitchen where my mother was stirring tomato sauce. “Make her stop lying.”
         Cathy followed, hands on hips.  “Mom, you shouldn’t allow her to believe in man-made icons.” Then she went up to our room and closed the door. My mother slammed down the wooden spoon and pressed me to her. She told me my sister was confused by the new things she was learning at college and that of course it was the real Santa Claus at Aunt Doris’s house and why didn’t I run along now and color.
        I found the glittered paper angel I made at school that week and brought it up to show my sister, who said, “It’s truly lovely,” and hung it from the lamp switch. Later, Cathy went out, I got into bed alone, and tried to sing.
        “Summonchanted evening…” But I gave up and cried, and before I fell asleep I thought I knew just how my Noni must have felt about her missing right leg.

        After that, I wrote only weekly news reports that omitted the curlicues, hearts, and x’s, and when an occasional letter arrived from Cathy, I placed it on the dresser next to the Dior bottle until bedtime. That winter, Noni moved into my brother’s empty bedroom. In the afternoons she played Go Fish with me, let me watch The Edge of Night with her, and unwittingly taught me swear words in an Italian dialect my father didn’t understand.
        One Thursday morning in March, I spotted Cathy’s eyeglasses in their usual spot on our double dresser. I rushed downstairs, shouting, “Mom! Is Cathy home?”
        The living room coffee table was in the dining room, the piano bench crammed beneath the baby grand. My sister and her roommates were on the floor, blankets overlapping, hair askew, their flannel-draped, flower-flecked arms this way and that. Small suitcases rimmed the scene, four pairs of loafers were lined up on the Italian tile in the foyer.
         They had driven four hours the night before in my sister’s green LeMans, unannounced, with plans to drive the 15 miles into Manhattan for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch at the kitchen table while Cathy told my mother, “Don't worry, we’re only missing one class. It’s an adventure.”
        Before my father left for work, my mother wondered aloud if she should allow them to go, to drive on their own into New York, these naïve girls whose parents probably did not even know where they were. “They’re over 18. Let them do what they want,” he said. Noni stirred her tea and shrugged. My mother asked Cathy if the girls wanted Pop Tarts or English muffins.
        “Neither, we’re going to eat green bagels in New York,” Cathy said, dropping a quick kiss on the top of my head. She waved for the girls to grab their suitcases and follow her upstairs, where she pointed out the bathroom, and led them into our bedroom, closing the door.
        My mother seemed to have forgotten about my getting ready for school, so I laid down on the crumpled blankets in the living room and turned on the TV. As the girls drifted back downstairs, Kay asked what grade I was in and Pat tried to guess my favorite TV program. Liz said I was cute and showed me a photo of her little sister back in Rhode Island. Then Cathy grabbed my foot and shook it. “Get dressed kiddo. Mom says you can come too.”
        Whether it was permission my mother gave or a mandate, I didn't know. I only knew I was going to New York City, without my parents, like a real college girl. I scrambled to my room and pulled on green knee socks, green corduroy pants, and a green and white sweater. In New York, the five of us gobbled green bagels and hopped up and down on the cold sidewalk to keep warm. When I needed a bathroom, Cathy found a coffee shop and ordered a hot chocolate to go so we would be customers. When I couldn’t see over the crowds, she picked me up, and even talked to me almost as much as she talked to her girlfriends, who took turns holding my hand. Before she drove back to college, Cathy wrote on our kitchen calendar, “Lisa visits Cathy” over a weekend in April.
        My mother helped me to pack, unpack, and repack my little plaid suitcase several times in preparation for my big trip. My mother said to bring sweaters, but Cathy had promised me a real college sweatshirt. I thought about bringing the Dior perfume, but it was a glass bottle and I was worried I would drop it on the floor in her dorm room, which Cathy said was not even carpeted. I resisted my mother’s advice to bring something to do if I got bored, to pack a toy or some crayons and coloring books. I was going to college.
        My parents drove me two hours to Hartford, halfway, where my sister and her roommate Pat met us in the parking lot of the Silver Dollar restaurant. “Make sure she eats properly and brushes her teeth,” my mother told Cathy. My father slipped a folded twenty-dollar bill into my sister’s purse and patted my head. “Knock ‘em dead, kid.”
         Cathy set my too-short hair with hot rollers and let me watch TV in the student lounge with her until ten. I got to sleep on the top bunk since Kay was home for the weekend. “This is my little sister,” Cathy said in the cafeteria the next morning, introducing me to the dorm matron (this was a small Catholic college in 1966), to a few other girls, and even some boys who, I noticed, noticed her. With her shiny hair curled into a flip, smooth skin, shapely figure showing through the cashmere sweater set and high-waisted tapered capris, and her smile of straight sheet-white teeth, my sister looked just like Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
        One boy in particular, a big guy with a brush of spidery red hair, freckles, and an easy smile, moved awfully close to her, and put his hand lightly on her back. I thought he was going to kiss her, and wondered if he had already kissed her in secret.
        “Lisa, this is Patrick,” Cathy said. I liked him. He told me jokes I could understand, tickled me but not too much, and watched I Love Lucy with me that afternoon when Cathy had to study. I saw the campus from atop his shoulders when the three of us walked to church on Sunday morning and heard about his four little sisters back home, an hour away.
        “Are you going to marry Patrick?” I asked my sister the next morning, expecting her to say, No, silly.
        “He already asked me, because he graduates next year. I think I’m in love with him, and I know he loves me. But I would have to quit school and I don’t know about that,” she said.
        “Will you have a baby? Can I babysit?”
        She mussed my hair. “Shush, silly. And don’t tell Mommy or Dad.”  So I shushed, but I did tell my parents, near the end of the ride back to New Jersey. The next weekend, we drove right back to Massachusetts and I played checkers with Kay while my parents and Cathy took a little walk. Later the four of us, and Patrick, went out to dinner at a restaurant near his house, and then instead of ordering dessert, we drove to Patrick’s house. I played with his sisters in the front yard, while the grown-ups had coffee inside and Cathy and Patrick sat on the porch.
        Back at the dorm later, Cathy took me to the vending machines to get a snack for my ride home. “Why did you tell Mommy and Dad that I was getting engaged?” she asked.
        “I don’t want you to not come home anymore. You love me best.”
        “God loves you best,” she said.
        “I mean in our house.”
        “Mommy loves you best. Anyway, we will always be sisters. Even when I do get married, even when I have a baby,” Cathy said, and stroked my hair.
        “OK.”
        “Even when you get married and have a baby.”
        Cathy graduated and moved to Boston where, unbeknownst to our parents, she was sleeping on a foldaway cot in a dingy cramped apartment with five other girls, where they ate rice and beans, stayed out a little too late, and sometimes smoked cigarettes. I knew, because about every six weeks or so my parents let me take the Eastern shuttle to Logan where Cathy was always waiting, arms open. Back home, I didn't tell.

         A few years later, when I was 12, she got married, but not to Patrick. (He married Cathy's good friend Brenda, who then had an affair with her father-in-law.) As we got dressed for her wedding back in our old shared bedroom, Cathy gently stroked pink lipstick on my quivering lips, and just as she finished, I started to cry and hugged her tight. She hugged back, tightly as well, too tight. When I lifted my head, a sticky pink stain was spreading on the bright white fabric over the left shoulder of what I understood to be an extravagantly expensive custom wedding gown. Panicked, shamed, I cried harder.
        "Shh. We don't want Mommy to hear," she said, grabbing tissues and the container of Johnson's Baby Powder, and concocting a tincture of talc and spit. With the veil pulled just so, my big sister, whom I loved more than anyone, once again looked as pure and good as I knew she was. She smiled at me in the way that had always held me safe.
        Sixteen years later, on the day of my own wedding, I waited under a windy hotel portico for the limousine that was late to take me to church. As I turned my head from side to side, I rubbed my pink lips against one of the oversized puffy sleeves of my own expensive designer gown and felt a prick of panic rise. Then I remembered, and motioned for my sister, and this time we laughed through my panic, and of course she knew just what to do.
        Cathy and I both got to be mothers ourselves, and godmothers to each other’s first sons. Most of the time we stayed close, as close as two sisters born more or less a generation apart and living 250 miles from one another can be. Sometimes, we pulled apart:  I'd get tired of her earnest strive for goodness, and I'm sure she was sometimes frustrated by my single-minded career ambitions.
        We write to each other about once a week now, poorly punctuated e-mails with six-month-old subject lines. They are often serious missives: She's worried about her grown daughter, a missionary living in Peru. I'm anxious about one son's new school, the other's Wii addiction, and a client insisting I learn HTML. We exchange ideas about new books we've read and how to best deal with our widowed mother's health. We never discuss the men in our lives – her ex-husband with whom she endured a decade of verbal abuse, or her new sometime-fiancé; or my husband of 20 years whom I deeply love, and often cannot tolerate.
        Occasionally there is the oddball inquiry, like the one I sent this morning: “What did we call that concoction with the Italian bread and milk?”
        “Soggy soup,” she wrote back.
        These days, it's Cathy who visits me, often to watch one of my sons mark some milestone, playing drums in a school concert, receiving his first Holy Communion. Perhaps like me she notices, though they are only four years apart instead of 12, my sons' developing relationship, the way the younger one looks at his big brother, how the older one absorbs the sticky adulation, shirks it off, and settles a look on his little brother equal parts acceptance and acquiescence. They are establishing the dance, patterns that might sustain them, challenge them, fortify them, for decades, though of course they don't know that yet.
        When she's visiting, Cathy and I sometimes sit together on my patio, three blocks from the street where we grew up. Billy, the boy who had a crush on her so long ago, is my next-door neighbor, recently retired from his plumbing business. Cathy's retired from teaching math now too, and I'm starting a new kind of writing in midlife. So we talk, as it seems we have been doing all our lives, about what's next, what's changing, the things we love, hate, and fear about what's ahead. We give each other advice, and we often think the other is silly or wrong. But we usually always ask.
        For a while, Cathy talked about moving back to New Jersey when she retired, a state she never really loved. I am the only one from our family who still lives here and for a time I wondered and worried how we'd do, living close to one another again. Then she met a new man in Massachusetts. She might or might not marry him, or teach a college class, or visit her son in Illinois next month. As for me, a 12-years-younger married woman with two school-age kids, I'm slightly jealous of what look to me like her wide-open options, until I remember about her divorce, the retirement savings based on a teacher's pay, and her tricky lower back. Last time she was here, we talked about all of it and nothing, and about what will happen to us, flung across states, time zones, and life stages, when our aged mother is inevitably, one day, gone.
        Following such a visit, after Cathy leaves, I occasionally find a note tucked into my date book on which she has written, “God loves you more than anyone.”

THE ARCHIVISTS

By Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

 
         The book first appears on page sixty-one of the document that is us. It is in one of my e-mails to him. “Please go read The Archivist,” I write. And though he has never met me, he listens.
         He tells me later, on page seventy-five, that he stopped by a bookstore to read the first few pages and bought it immediately. He writes, “I started mentally composing what I was going to write to you and decided in the end that it was best summarized by, ‘Damn.’” This is how we spent our days, mentally composing e-mails to each other. I am twenty-seven and living in Boston, where I will graduate law school in one month. Then I will move to New Jersey to live in my parents’ house and be cared for as I undergo jaw surgery. He is twenty-seven also and one month from graduating medical school in St. Louis. When he finishes, he will move to Boston to begin his residency.
          So we are both on the edge of a transition, and this is how we come to each other: teetering, a little unsure what the future will hold. I place a note on an online bulletin board seeking a pen pal, a bit of distraction in the mind of another. He sees it. He writes, “You will leave Boston before I get there, but I had to write.” I write back, and then he does, and then I do again. When it is time for me to leave, I ask my landlord to let me stay another two weeks. I am curious.


        The book that makes its appearance so early in our history is a novel, average-sized in the edition I own, a little over three hundred pages and bound in burgundy with the author’s name, Martha Cooley, shrunk small to fit horizontally across its spine. Its front cover depicts a stack of books, their titles teasingly out of view, only their volume of pages visible. A stack of pages, printed atop pages. The cover was what I saw first, one day years ago. It was its profusion that drew me in, the suggestion of words upon words upon words.
        The novel is about an archivist: a collector of something that does not belong to him, a curator, a professional tender-to. His name is Matthias, and he looks after the letters exchanged between the poet T.S. Eliot and his lifelong correspondent Emily Hale. He is the keeper of their words and through those words, their relationship.


        My correspondent and I meet on a blue-black May night under torrential rain. We have exchanged photographs – mine carefully culled from those with flattering angles, depictions kind but not untrue – and I already know from his that he will be large. In pictures, he dwarfs in stance and stature whoever stands with him, sometimes crowding them right out of the frame. Still, I am unprepared for the size of the body before me. Lined up with shoppers and students, all of them crowded under the shop’s awning with their heads bowed, seeking shelter from the rain, he looks as though he has wandered into a world cut on the wrong scale. It is a little like meeting the Hulk. His body seems on the verge of exploding with excess: his face just holds at bay the coarse hair that engulfs his head, stubble breaks through his cheeks so high only his eyes are free of it. His calves bulge and strain against his pants. In construction, he stretches the limits of nature. His voice, too, is unexpected, high for such a large man. I don’t like it, or the way his arms swing in the air as we walk. Strangers duck out of his way and shoot glances at us, but he doesn’t notice. When we reach the bar we are seated at an intimate table for two and just by sitting he reduces it to kindergarten furniture, something ridiculous.
        Still, though, there are his words, the words that are all I have known of him, and as long as I don’t look at him they are all I have again. We have been waiting for the gift of sound, waiting to be freed from the tedious peck of our fingers at the keyboard. Now our words pour out in torrents as free flowing and engulfing as the rain outside. I sip my wine and force myself, slowly, to look at him. I remind myself that his is the brain I have been writing to, that his is the body it comes in.
        And so we talk, and drink, and loosen. I slip in remarks, some sly and sharp, feeling witty and alive and liking it and the wine. He keeps score on an imaginary chalkboard located on the wall above his side of the table, tallying our conversational points with a flourish the shape of a checkmark. If I make him laugh, I get a point. If I tell him something new or delight him, I get a point. If he makes me laugh, he gets ten – he is making these rules, after all. I want to be annoyed, I want to protest that this is unfair and anyway how can the evening already be a contest, but mostly I want points. So I trot out the best thing I can think of: a bookstore not two hours from Boston, tucked deep into the woods in an old mill that lies alongside a river.
       “Books and water!” he says. “A million points. We’ll go in the morning. On the drive we can talk about The Archivist.” Just like that, it begins.


       We never do talk about the book. Instead he pulls his iPod out of his backpack and uses a radio transmitter to send Old Crow Medicine Show over my convertible’s stereo system and out into the open air, a bunch of twenty-something Nashville boys singing modern day come-ons set to old-time bluegrass music, rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama any way you feel, hey mama rock me. I laugh and tell him that I know the band, that I’ve seen them live while lying on my back in the grass at folk festivals, and I counter with Radiohead covering an old Wilco song. But it’s too easy, he’s heard it, and again that’s it and we’re off, each with four or five songs on cue before it is our turn. When we get to the Bookmill, we are the same way, running impatiently through its aisles. From the start, the five hours we have until closing already feel too few. We pull books from the shelves and show each other passages, reading aloud the words that have wormed their way into our hearts. We tell stories of ourselves as children and the heartbreak and wonder of realizing how many books there were in the world, how many more than we could ever read, and that there were people writing even as we were reading, that we would never catch up, never read it all. Neither of us has ever gotten over the vastness of the unknown.
        Then the pain in my jaw comes, as careless and complete as if someone had flicked a switch. I can’t hold anything in my head when it’s like this, all the stories and worlds and even this one just fade to black. I can’t talk either. I move my hands like a wheel, hoping he will understand. He’ll have to drive home. “That’s okay,” he says, “but what about the pain?” I mime downing a shot from a glass and when he doesn’t understand, I write it on a napkin. I need a drink.
        At this he takes his hands, rough from the sun and straw of his Nebraskan boyhood, and lays them gently on the sides of my face, cradling me. I brace myself, expecting pain, but do not pull away. His hands are warm; there is no pain. Then he sweeps his arms wide open, as though beckoning the world in to come join me. “Tonight,” he says, “you shall drink in four states.”
        He drives, I drink. We find a college bar with dark wood and the table carvings of lovers and drunkards past before we even leave Massachusetts. The gold flakes in my shot of Goldschläger are the brightest things in the bar, and with a single gulp I finish off the first state. Rhode Island provides a decent martini. The sky has gone black by the time we reach Vermont, but I notice the words Ricky’s Roadhouse by the side of the road. Inside the bar is dark and thrillingly true to type, with men in biker’s chaps and bandanas talking in low voices, their biceps carrying the possibility, at least, of a brawl. A lone, wrinkled old woman in an oversized Assumption College sweatshirt plays pool by herself. I sip a vodka-soda and he whispers threats to break a pool cue over the woman’s head, to start a fight not with the men but with her, until I have to tell him to stop making me laugh, it hurts too much. The only lights we see when we reach New Hampshire are the neon signs on a place that looks like a diner but has a Mexican name, and it is there that we stop. The craggy-faced, chain-smoking waitress is already sweeping up and glares at us, but we are too close to our goal to stop now. I do a tequila shot and load quarters into the jukebox. I choose Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” He opts for John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.” We are living our own movie. We dance, and for a moment I think we might kiss.
        As the car speeds along the blackened highway and he charts our course for home, I put my seat all the way back and stare up at the night sky. The car dips and careens like our words and my head, everything earthbound moving so quickly but the sky above so still. At four o’clock in the morning we stand in front of my apartment, ready to say goodnight, and he hoists me into the air. I stare down at his face, drunk and teetering and heady as the stars above. I tell him we can’t date. I tell him that I’m sorry, but I’m not attracted to him. I tell him I already know I won’t fall. What do you mean, he says, of course you won’t fall. I’ve got you. He dips me then, to prove his strength, the surety of his grasp. No, I say, I mean I won’t fall. For you. As the words leave my mouth their cold and calm cruelty cuts through even my drunkenness. I am shocking myself, but he doesn’t even flinch.
       In the morning I give up my apartment. Later, he will joke that I broke up with him and then moved in. Not true, I will say. We never dated. “Spoken like a lawyer,” he says, and I can’t disagree.
        We are not together. We share a bed. We share a house. We share meals we cook together and eat them on his balcony with shared coffee in the morning and shared wine at night. When we read, we call each other over and share passages, thoughts that tumble together until they are the product of us two and not the product of one mind working alone, and still I refuse to say that we are together. Nowhere in the document that is us, all 284 pages he gave me when I finally left, 284 pages in which he’d collected every e-mail we’d ever written and transcribed every text message we’d ever sent, do I admit to what he wants, to what another might see. These pages are our story, but also the battle for it. In the text experiences are reshaped within days, sometimes within seconds, by our retelling, by the battle of words and minds and meanings that has been going on since before we met. We are volatile this way, but also steady, consistent.
        On my favorite page of the document, he texts me to say that he has just left death class, he asks me how my death work is going, and he reminds me to leave an article on dying from The New York Times on his pillow so it’s there when he gets home. It is absurd, this focus, this redundancy under the hopeful June sunlight. Ours is the summer of death. He has patients dying and at the hospital they are teaching him how to deliver this news gently, how to be the conduit to help sever the connections between his patients and their loved ones. In his world death is something that stalks, a darkness that lingers in the corners of overly bright white hallways sterilized against it. At times he despairs that so many patients die that death seems almost inevitable – and then he recalls, as though coming newly upon the human, that yes, it is. I am spending my days parsing execution transcripts, continuing a project I began in law school. In my world death is the known outcome, not fended off but imposed. We make each other so high with life and all that mental energy, for both of us, is going into understanding death. It is our work but also our obsession.
        One morning we wake in his – our – his – bed and lay side by side, listening to the hymn coming from a neighbor’s radio. It is Sunday. When the song finishes, its exultation ending at last on one long, drawn-out note, he rolls himself onto an elbow so that he is above me, and stares down into my face. He is unshaven, and his eyebrows are thick and dark and unruly, as brash as the rest of him. He touches my forehead and says, “I want to be there when you die.” I understand, I do not think his words strange, but I fight against them with words of my own, words I do not say: No, I want to be there when he dies. I want to be the one who gets to have the intensity of that experience. This, too, is a race. We are greedy for experience, always wanting more, always aware that life is finite and scared we won’t get it all in. We sleep little and talk much. Sometimes I try to wrap my arms around him. It is impossible, I know – my arms will not reach, even as his fingers can encircle my wrist once around and then half again – but I try anyway. In these moments I bring my lips to his ear. “Please let’s live forever,” I whisper. I know it isn’t up to him. I say it anyway.
       He doesn’t forget about the book. It is near the top of his list of the things we have not done, the promises he thinks we have left unfulfilled. At the very top of the list is my refusal to say that I am in love with him, my failure to be sufficiently won over by his mind to overcome my aversion to his body. “You should,” he accuses me often, “want to kiss my brain.” I want to mine his brain. I want to scramble through it like a playground of best childhood dreams, I want to pick up every idea he’s ever had and examine it, turn it over, a shiny bauble to delight in and turn up to the light. I want to get high off his brain, but no, I do not want to kiss it and I do not want to kiss him. Sometimes when we make love I catch him staring at me. His eyes linger over my skin, trying to find a way in. I look at the wall. For this I make no apology. He has been warned, I think. I harden.
        On one of his rare days off we go for a hike. For four hours we climb up a mountain, finding foot holes in the ungiving rock. He is nimble, and quicker than I am. The sun over his head should be casting shadows but it’s not, it’s just blinding me, and I have to shield my eyes with my hand and squint just to see his blurry form. At the top we stop. There’s nothing there, really, and the view isn’t all that different than it was on the way up. He takes red wine and cheese from his backpack, the cheese made pungent and runny by the summer sun. I take a blanket, a corkscrew, and a knife from mine. I have forgotten the crackers and the sun has turned the wine too hot to drink, but we spread the runny insides of the cheese on the rind and eat it that way, licking it off our own fingers and not each other’s. We will talk about The Archivist now, we say, but we don’t. Instead we talk about why we both love a Mason Jennings song and what it would be to live in California and how I have failed him.
         By the end of the summer we talk about this last thing so much that we don’t talk about anything else.


        In the novel, the letters between Hale and Elliot are not yet public. The rules of the bequest dictate that they may not be read yet, it is not yet their time, and it is Matthias the archivist’s task to keep the curious at bay. Roberta, a graduate student, wants access to the letters. She wants to read them, to analyze them. She wants to know if Hale and Elliot were lovers. In the dried ink scrawled across the pages, she thinks, she will find the ineffable, what emotion spun the expanse between the two. Even if nothing is explicitly stated it will still somehow be there, its meaning emanating from the spaces between the words for all to see. In the collected document, she thinks, she will find both what the two were, and what they were not.
       That is the thing about archives: in their haste to relay all that was realized, in their urgent love of the litany of fact, they are a summing up not only of what we are, but of what we are not. Whatever riches their depths may hold, whatever truths may be mined by the curious and the observant, those depths are finite. Eventually limits are reached. Eventually the archive runs out. And it is there, in the inevitable final blank, that the archive holds its full meaning. It is as much a list of what never will be, as what was.

       
         Six months before I met him I’d been dating a woman, an opera singer whose laugh, deep red lips, and long, grand name were all scaled for the stage. I loved to twist my tongue around its syllables, their round mouth-feel as seductive as the waxy twist of her hair around my fingers. She smelled like apples, words that mean nothing until you meet a woman who actually does.
        We were the exact same height and weight, yet different. Naked before me, her body seemed an alternate possibility, cells and skin and bones and muscle that had arranged itself into another configuration, as though the same material had, by chance, given rise to another object entirely. I am small on top with hips. Her hips were as slender as a boy’s, but her breasts were large and round. The scent of skin was what we were, sex always and everywhere, talking little but kissing much. She was addictive to kiss, sugar-sweet with her whole warm body rising into it, nothing held back. She was like this about everything: all emotion pushed forth, cultivated for display and intended for the record. Nothing held in reserve.
         Once I asked her how she’d known to pursue me when we’d met, when, shy and uncertain of my sexuality, I’d tried so hard to cover up my attraction to her. Was it my body language? Had that given me away? No, she said. It was my words that had betrayed me. “No gender pronouns,” she said, and smirked. “It was always they this, and they that. I knew something had to be up.” When she said this I thought of legal terms: to expunge from the record, to strike. It’s a common litigator’s trick to say something inadmissible in front of the jury. The judge can instruct the jury to obey the strict rules of evidence and not consider what they’ve just heard, but memories aren’t wiped as easily as chalk from slate, and the instruction only serves to highlight the offending, revealing comment in the jurors’ minds. The judge will tell the court reporter to erase it, too, but a mark always remains on the transcript, the blacking out of words that were once there that is, in its own way, proof of their existence.
        The last time I saw her was a Sunday morning in late August. The summer heat hadn’t yet begun to yield to autumn’s encroach, and the defiant sun blazed bright enough to burn. I’d called her, ready to leave Boston and wanting to say goodbye, and she’d come. We arranged to meet in the center of Harvard Square, but I saw her from across the quadrangle’s leafy shield and almost turned away. She’d worn the top from the first night I went to bed with her, the top I knew she’d made her best friend go shopping with her to buy just three hours before our date, after she’d tried on and discarded everything else in her closet. The top that pushed her breasts almost up to her chin and dipped them in liquid hi-beam silver, so that on a sunny Sunday morning in August she looked a little like a gilded statue and a little like a bedraggled club kid the morning after, one still wearing the crusted hopes and smeared mascara of the night before. On her feet were sparkly gold heels she’d bought for another date with me. Her first girl shoes, she’d called them at the time, and I noticed she still couldn’t walk in them. Around her waist she’d tied a pink and green striped men’s necktie I’d used to pull her into me for a kiss, for many kisses, when it was still properly loped around a crisp shirt collar. Nothing matched. It looked like it had been pulled from one of those Goodwill bags marked Please use for discards, an outfit culled from other people’s lives. But it hadn’t been; instead it was culled from ours. Her body was a catalogue of the physical experiences of us, our short history compressed and organized and pressed against flesh, the same flesh I’d pressed and breathed in and kissed and lingered over. She’d gained weight since the last time I’d seen her. The cloth memories no longer fit. She smiled at me, nervous. She tugged at the silver sequined shirt where it had ridden up over the new, white fat of her belly. I left quickly.


        But that, bodily, was hers, and this is his: a stack of white paper thick as a book, thick as a story, something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The day I finally leave he hands it to me. I am standing in his living room, surrounded by the books that line his walls, their straight, colorful spines overflowing the floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases. Each room in his apartment is clothed in this way, draped in the stories of others. I have spent the summer surrounded by these stories, these voices, every one a world unto itself. Standing here now, with the sun streaming in through the windows, the room seems bathed in a dusty, achy glow, and I know I will leave. I regret every book left unread.
        Then he walks up behind me, places a hand on my shoulder, and presses a stack of papers into my hand.
        I don’t understand what it is at first, only that he holds my wrist a beat too long and I want to pull away but can’t. But then my eyes fix on the top page of the stack, and I recognize, slowly, the words printed on it. They are ours, they are his and mine, our exchange. I understand what it is, then. I understand what he’s done. And now I do try to jerk my hand away, but he is so much stronger than I am and holds me fast. I think, now, of Helen Keller, and of the stories I read as a child in which her teacher took her hand and formed words on her palm, concepts on her flesh, forcing her to see the world by painstakingly pressing it into her skin. He bends my fingers through the pages, making me feel their heft and volume. Here we are. Here is us.
        When he releases me I walk out, leaving the document behind. At the end of the book Matthias burns the letters. I’ve ruined it for you now, done the one thing you never should and given away a story’s ending, but stay with me and listen. Though he is an archivist, though it is his life’s work, his identity, and his obsession to catalogue and to remember, he burns the letters before Roberta ever gets to see them. He destroys the only physical record of their words so that the question of definition – what the relationship was and what it was not – can never be answered.  
        One week after I leave Boston I get a final e-mail. It contains no text, no warning, just the little paper clip symbol that signifies an attachment. It might be a picture, it might be a forwarded cartoon, it might be a mournful Elliot Smith song or a note telling me to go to hell, but it isn’t any of those things. Instead it is the 284 pages of us. I sit at my desk and stare at it for a moment, unmoored. It is there and I know only that I want it not to be. But what can I do? I consider deleting it, but stop short with my hand still on the mouse. I could, it would be easy enough, but then what? It would still be here, in its way. It would still have been here, and there is no undoing of that.
        So I don’t delete it. I don’t even try. Instead I start at the very beginning, with the first words he ever was to me and the first words I ever was to him, and I read. I read the story of us. I see the shapes the words make as they fall across the screen. I see the white space between them grow larger, longer, as the summer wanes. I am reading us, then, and I think I see his hands and mine, separate, each of us typing, each of us spinning our stories out of what was and what never would be.