An indefinite stay in Texas.
by Laura Beckner
My parents met in Texas.
My father had a job covering the metro beat at The Houston Chronicle and my mother was an undergrad at UT Austin. These years are forever preserved in beautiful black and white photographs of the two of them wearing hippie shirts, sprawled under shady trees with romantic items like a lyre or a tabby cat in the background. My mother braided strips of leather into her long hair. There is a shot of her topless somewhere perched on the rocks with a kind of feigned serious look that only a very young woman knows how to make.
When my Dad tells stories about his days at The Chronicle they usually involve guns in paper bags and fathers accidentally shooting their daughters through doors and whatnot. Once, at the Washington DC equivalent of high tea, he got so wrapped up in one of these grim tales he failed to notice our elderly, deaf guest trembling on the sofa; she was reading my father’s lips and processing the horror of what he was saying at a truly comedic delay. My mother said she didn’t think it was appropriate conversation material and I haven’t heard much about the old days at the paper since.
The week I spent in Austin does not fit neatly into a medium-sized tupperware. I pulled up to my friend’s apartment after a brief altercation at a peach stand in Fredericksburg. Kaylie and I had been friends since 6th grade when I had a sleepover at her house. Sleepovers are an odd social custom when you think about it. There you are, hormonal and insecure, your freshly shaved leg hairs inches away from a girl who you barely know, while you trash talk other girls and wonder why the pillows feel different. It’s basically just as uncomfortable as sleeping with guys in college, except there were less body parts that required immediate attention. I didn’t sleep soundly next to another human being until my first boyfriend, when he told me he thought he loved me and gave me a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the Tower of Babel, not necessarily in that order.
Kaylie tackled her 20’s in her characteristically plucky and fearless way. She worked in a lab in Mexico, studied art in Italy, dated a fancy New York furniture designer, biked across the country twice, and finally married a bearded entrepreneur who seemed to be just perfect for her. Our visits over the years revealed that she was progressing into adulthood properly while I was still scouring her cabinets for sugar cookies and weeping about how my sister was prettier than me. It’s a miracle that we have remained friends.
With Kaylie’s husband out of town, we passed the hot summer weekend like characters from “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” except we were younger and whiter. We went dancing with two studly Irish military guys who had us doing endless shots of Jameson. In between kissing, whiskey, and The Cure I saw Kaylie telling her Irishman loudly with hand motions that she was happy to dance with him, but she was married. He nodded but grabbed her ass about five minutes later anyway.
We declined a 3AM offer to drink gin in their hotel room and wandered home laughing. The next day was spent sunning by the pool, making popcorn, and watching a romantic comedy that stars someone I actually know.
I was hanging around Austin waiting for a job interview that never came. Instead I bought a pair of jean cutoffs, swam in a dark cold lake, and tried on the pace and texture of Kaylie and Sam’s daily life. I woke up every morning to high rise views of a much more modest city below and meditated next to a knife holder on the counter shaped like a Keith Haring cartoon man with utensils slotted through his plastic body. Google search “stabbed man knife rack” and you’ll get it. My walks somehow always deposited me in front of Whole Foods or a food truck with 20 different kinds of funnel cake or something. I would sigh and return to the perennial knifing victim back in the kitchen with a wheatberry salad or powdered sugar still on my lips.
We went to a famous old dive bar where there was country dancing and I watched my friends two-step around the floor to a live band. I finally partnered up with a few old men, one of whom stopped and took a good hard look at me before saying, “You’re strange.” I took it as a compliment and went back to quick, quick, slow.
Somewhere back in LA, I had thought maybe I would move to Austin. Kaylie and Sam certainly loved it there, and they were radiant and happy. But the beauty that spoke to me the most was hidden behind fences and crumbling walls, cellulite and wrinkles, an old power factory, an orange tinted woman with fake breasts who really knew how to twirl, a lake with weeds that rose to the surface and teenage hips with red grass marks branded next to silly scrolling tattoos.
I should have remembered that when my father proposed to my mother in those balmy young days she answered him by saying, “Yes, as long as you take me out of Texas.”