Leesfragment: I Meant It Once

De Amsterdams-Amerikaanse schrijfster Kate Doyle debuteerde onlangs met de verhalenbundel I Meant It Once. Ze beantwoordde enkele van onze vragen. Lees waarom ‘hondje’ zo’n fijn woord is, en Alexandra Changs Days of Distraction zo’n fijn boek, en hoe een aantekening in haar telefoon het begin van haar boek was. En lees een verhaal uit de bundel.

• ‘This “gorgeous, electric” collection of short stories is about the inner lives of young women during their transformative twenties, navigating relationships, nostalgia for the past, and the uncertainty of the future.’ — Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House).

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world. 

Written with crystalline prose and sly humor, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today’s world go down easy and pack a big punch.

You Are With Me

Here is how I came to my decision. One night Adam was making dinner, and I was making sketches in the small room that was my office. I found myself looking out the window at the snow plunging down, and thinking abstractly of warmer locales—I imagined for example a baby on a beach, scooping sand with little grasping hands.

I thought if we ever had children, Adam and I would raise them somewhere warmer. At the thought of this I reached for a cup of tea he had placed for me on the desk, and when my skin touched the ceramic I was scalded. It occurred to me I was not sufficiently paying attention. I put my hand on the cold window to soothe the pain.

Around me on the desk were different floorplans I was sketching. In the kitchen, Adam was cooking a whole chicken: our apartment was fragrant with butter and thyme, lemon and roasting skin. That Adam often cooked for me was a kindness I sometimes felt I could never repay. My pain was subsiding, but when I peeled my hand from the glass its print stayed behind like a ghost, and on my palm a red welt rose brightly. I felt a certain clarity then—my unswayable choice. Eventually I would have to tell Adam. For now it was a private certainty I turned over in my mind like a small and unusual stone.

I thought about it all winter, working alone at my desk, while Adam went to and from the law school where he studied. All day I made renderings of buildings I would never live in, and listened to the gentle hum of our fridge in the adjacent kitchen.

At the end of each work day I would stop drawing to take a long run. One day, though it had been my intention to do a five-mile loop, I didn’t turn back. I kept running, into the woods outside of town. I ran over sharp stones and through thorns. The earth was cold and hard, the brambles sheathed in ice. I ran along the lake, where muted light glittered on its blank surface, and at dusk I came upon a timber frame cabin whose warm glow invited me to dine. I went in, wiping cold sweat from my forehead.

Inside was a restaurant: small, cozy, empty. Sawn oak beams overhead, a pine floor, and a fireplace furnished with logs that had not been kindled. There appeared to be no waitstaff, only a grim, attractive maitre d’ whose eyes appraised me as I entered. The restaurant had seven tables, each crowned with a wavering candle, and for one ecstatic moment I thought I would go sit at each one. I wanted to experience which was the most comfortable—which the best distance from the kitchen—which ideally angled to take in the view over the lake. I wanted to experience everything, and then decide. Instead the maitre d’ gestured to a table, and I sat obediently. I ordered vegetables—braised carrots like slender fingers, the mollusk halves of brussels sprouts. I ate bread with cold butter and I drank a glass of wine, which dripped on the white tablecloth: small stains like drops of blood. When I had eaten everything the maitre d’ offered me the small key to a room upstairs, which I accepted. Having climbed the stairs, I fell asleep in a soft bed that seemed to subsume me entirely.

In the night I was awoken by the sound of seven men. They were knocking on every door up and down the hall, insisting I come out and fix them dinner in the restaurant. They broke into my room and thronged around me. Soon I was downstairs in the restaurant’s large industrial kitchen, brightly lit, disoriented. Where am I? I asked, and the maitre d’ kissed my hand. He said: You are with me. His eyes filled up with silver tears of joy. I felt I could see him imagining the children we would have together, counting up their sweet faces.

When I was again in my own apartment, I found the blankets were a nest around me, warm and creased. Adam was in our kitchen making breakfast. He never seemed to need as much sleep as I did—I needed whole hours more. If I wanted to, I could sleep till noon.

From our kitchen came the smell of bacon and buttered toast, and I felt some dim connection—as if the more Adam cooked, the more meals he set before me with his hopeful smile, the more sleep I would need. No domestic effort from me could equal one from him, I knew. He got special credit. I thought of my mother, in the kitchen of the house where I was raised: In the memory she was drinking her morning coffee, the windows still dark, her bathrobe knotted at her waist. The coffee machine hissed and gurgled. In the memory, neither of us said anything.

I got out of bed and went to our kitchen. Adam was laying strips of bacon on a plate. While we were eating what he'd made for us, I said to him abruptly: One thing I dread about becoming a mother, is never getting enough rest, walking around like this suggestion of who I used to be, wishing I was asleep. There was bacon grease on my hands. Adam looked at me with dawning apprehension, his hand poised over a piece of toast. We had never spoken about children before, and perhaps he had made some assumptions about what I hoped for. So then I had to tell him.

That was Sunday. We talked about my choice and then, as we were both upset, Adam suggested we take time to consider our respective positions. All week he emanated seriousness and alarm when he looked at me: No children! I could see he was working hard to continue being kind, and I could see he gave himself credit for that work.  One night we confronted each other in the bathroom mirror before bed. Adam said: If I’m being honest I do want to have a family someday, and it isn’t negotiable for me. He wore an old, soft t-shirt, and a pair of blue underwear. He wore the eyeglasses he only put on before bed, and his feet were bare on the bathroom tile.

I spat my toothpaste in the sink and saw there was blood mixed with the foam. I bared my teeth in the mirror like a bear and pushed back my gums, but I couldn’t locate where the blood originated. It was easier for men to idealize a family, of course. It isn’t fair, I wanted to say, but he wouldn’t understand. I only had the sense that having a baby would be one change too many, of all the changes I had made for Adam in my life.

In the mirror, our eyes met. Some impulse made me reach to turn the light off, so we were standing in shadow, silhouetted, the only sounds our breathing and, in the next room, the refrigerator humming. In the meat drawer, slipped in among the cold cuts, Adam was keeping a liver pâté in the brown paper, to eat tomorrow for our anniversary. He had bought it specially. I had watched him place it in the fridge with attentive, gentle care. And what did I owe him in return? In my mouth I could still taste the bright spearmint of toothpaste, the bitterness of blood. I said to him again, experimentally: It’s possible I don’t want to have a family at all.

He said: You would of course have the right to make that choice for yourself. It’s only fair. I wanted him to make some request of me, but of course he wouldn’t speak beyond the boundary of what each of us formally owed to the other. I could hardly make out his face in the dark as, with a sound like a small bell, he replaced his toothbrush in its cup. And then I missed him, with a keen sense of loss and absence.

I heard him go into the kitchen, I heard him throw something away. I looked into the dark mirror and I could see the possibility of a wedding in it, a small ceremony with each of our delighted families, a reception where I danced with abandon. I did not want to keep dancing but I found I could not stop: not even for a drink of water. Not even for a piece of cake. Sweat cascaded from my arms and face. As I spun, I felt sure I heard someone cry out, I thought maybe the sound was my name, I thought maybe the voice was my mother’s. Her blurry figure seemed to reach for me, approaching from across the room by a tall fireplace, holding out her arms urgently. Then I was certain I could hear her voice in my ear: Run through the woods, and don’t ever come back. But Adam was crossing the dance floor with a plated piece of wedding cake, pink-frosted sponge crowned with sugared fruit. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, his tie loose around his throat: a person who would never demand, a person who asked warmly and directly for the things he wanted most, trusting that someone would listen. His eyes were filling up with tears. He wasn’t crying for joy, he told me. He dearly wanted a family, he was just very sad. And it was specifically with me that he wanted a family—wasn’t that nice? Wouldn’t I consider changing my mind?

He held out a bit of cake to me, on the end of his fork.