"Skin" by Megan Cummins

A theater company comes to Newark in midsummer to perform a production of Romeo and Juliet in Military Park. All day the sky looks thunderous. The dark bellies of the clouds sag toward the ground, and the air seems to skulk through the city, brooding. I check Military Park’s Twitter feed to make sure the performance is still happening, and whoever is tweeting reassures us that that, rain or shine, the show will go on. So at 7:00 p.m. I text my friend Aamina to see if she wants to meet me there, leave the apartment, and walk alone toward the expansive green lawn of the park.

I come upon a small set, just a backdrop of a medieval town and a few chairs pushed together to serve as Juliet’s balcony. There are rows of folding chairs set up for the audience, and they’re mostly empty. I sit in one on the end of a row and look around the park, which was revitalized last year and is now manicured, with gorgeous bushes of purple hydrangeas along the walkways. A Japanese maple burns red behind the set. Beyond, the Gutzon Borglum statue of American wars towers over the grass: Revolutionary War soldiers morph into Civil War soldiers who become the soldiers of the twentieth century. From above, the park takes the shape of a sword, and the statue is its hilt. The blade, once a reflecting pool, is now a vibrant bed for two thousand red pansies.

I read about the revitalization on the Military Park website, and I’ve spent my summer days reading here.

The park manager walks among the chairs with a clipboard, asking people to sign up for the mailing list. She has a big smile and beautiful blue braids twisted into a pile on her head. “I’m already on it,” I say, and then she recognizes me and says it’s good to see me again.

Aamina dashes across the park lawn late, just as the men are roaring through the streets of Verona in their billowy white shirts.

“What did I miss?” she says, laughing, as she slips breathless into the chair next to mine.

“Well, there are these two families,” I say. “Believe it or not they cut out the chorus in the beginning. How are we supposed to know what the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ will be?”

“Two hours?” Aamina checks her watch. “Really?”

“One,” I whisper. “They abridged it.”

Someone shushes us. Romeo sulks over Rosaline. Juliet ponders marriage. The actors are young, students at a musical theater school somewhere in New Jersey. Even though they’ve abridged the play, they seem to be hitting all the main points. They’re earnest, but a few of them hit the lines just right. I lean my chin on my fist, watching.

The weather in Newark builds a tension of its own. A quiet wind turns into a sharp one that blows dirt in our faces from a construction site across the street. They’re building a Whole Foods, and a little way down Broad Street they’re raising the new Prudential Tower. A woman sitting near me wraps a scarf around her head. When we get to the part where “parting is such sweet sorrow,” the backdrop falls forward, revealing the costume rack and the offstage actors behind it, and everyone laughs. The company takes five to reset the stage, and my eyes wander around the park. That’s when I see Patrick, my ex, walking nearby. His head is bowed against the wind and he’s wearing his red spring jacket.

I stand up. I almost go to him, but a fierce gust of wind blows dust in my eyes. The dust blinds me and forces me back into my seat. When I’ve wiped my eyes clear, Patrick is gone.

“What?” Aamina asks, looking over her shoulder.

“Nothing,” I say. “I thought I saw…”

“Oh no,” she says, taking my hand. “You’re staying here.”

Patrick and I made a mess of things at the end. He was too young for me, twenty-four. I shouldn’t have been with him in the first place.

The actors can’t get the backdrop to stay upright in this wind. We hear a ripping sound nearby. Atop the skeleton of the new Prudential Tower a construction tarp has torn free and spins above the skyline. An unoccupied chair topples. A low rumble of thunder takes the whole evening in its grasp and shakes it. The park manager hurries to talk to the director of the play, and as the first fat drops of rain are falling they call off the rest of the production.

The small audience scatters. Most of Military Park has emptied; a few people are huddled under the bus shelter on Broad Street. The rain is picking up, but Aamina and I walk slowly toward the fancy cocktail bar on Halsey Street, where we know I won’t run into Patrick.

“That was cute,” Aamina says. “The play.”

Two martinis appear before us. Dirty gin for me, dirty vodka for Aamina.

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“Cute is a compliment.”

“What if someone called your poetry cute?”

“My poetry isn’t cute.”

“See?”

We laugh. Aamina suggests another drink when we finish our first.

“You sure?” I ask. “One is good, two is too many, and three’s not enough.”

“Stop it,” Aamina says, signaling the waiter. “Tell me you wrote something down today.”

“You know, Aamina,” I say. “I think I’m going to write a book about a woman who drinks a magic martini and is bestowed with the superpower of never spilling a drop when she carries her drink from the bar to her table.”

“I’m not going to hang out with you anymore if you keep this up.”

“Come on, though, isn’t that a pretty good superpower? You’d take it if offered. You don’t have to trade anything for it. I would take it.”

“Of course you would,” Aamina says—and it makes me blush, makes me think I really shouldn’t order that third drink.

Later, we part ways, and the wind and rain force me homeward. I cut through Washington Park, the scraggly cousin to Military Park. I haven’t read yet if they’ll renovate it or not. Even though it’s July, the city hasn’t undecorated a squat pine tree strung with lights and ribbons for the winter holidays. The grass grows anemically, but the John Massey Rhind statue of George Washington and his horse still holds forth at the corner of Broad and Washington Place.

I pay attention to the history of places because my father loved history. As a child I always kept a close eye on my father. He was so quiet and removed, he made me curious, and I felt he needed protection. I would see him hide his canisters of pills around the house. Vicodin, Oxy, Xanax: those were his favorites. I’d turn the bottles over in my hands, examine the labels, and then return them to their hiding places. Because I loved him, and because I believed he had a reason for hiding these things, I didn’t tell my mother. Mostly I could forget that I’d seen him tucking pills behind books on the shelf or in garment bags in his closet, but I knew, too, that there was something to hide, and that if I told my mother then she would divorce him.

Across Washington Street, the symmetrical face of the Ballantine mansion is dark, stately. I wait for the light to change even though there are no cars coming. Once I grew into a teenager and could see more clearly the ways my dad was hurting our family, I shunned him. Shut him out. Didn’t help him through his illness. I didn’t even think of him as sick, just as someone who couldn’t help himself. When I was sixteen, and he left to go to rehab just as my mom was finally divorcing him, I told him I never wanted to see him again.

We did see each other again, but not many times. For my mother, his death was the closure to her grief. For me it was just the beginning.

I come up to my house and am happy to see my neighbor Per outside the brownstone where we live. I need someone to lift me from my memories. I accept eagerly when he invites me inside for a drink. When Patrick was living with me, I saw Per and Thora less frequently. Now that he’s gone I’m glad they’ve welcomed me back.

Their twin newborns are asleep in the front room of the downstairs apartment. I try not to stumble or trip on the toys scattered on the floor. There are no windows in the middle room, with the small kitchen and an open space for the table, but Thora has lit candles, and a soft yellow bulb glows in a lamp on a shelf stacked with books and houseplants. We need more oxygen in the house, Thora had said when she brought the plants home. The very first time I met her, she was on the stoop repotting a ZZ plant. 

There’s the lovely sound of wine splashing into the bottom of a glass. I look up to see Thora’s filled three. I love the feeling I get being in their kitchen with them at night. The only light is soft and artificial—we’re tucked in the middle of a row of brownstones, tucked in the middle of the house. We’re safe.

We clink glasses. I tell my neighbors about the show and how it was canceled, but next time the company performs—at the end of August—we should go together, I say. They can bring the babies.

Per and Thora exchange a glance. I take an uncomfortable sip of wine and comb over my words, worried I said something stupid or offensive.

“We have some news,” Thora says. “We’re going back to Denmark.”

It’s gotten too hard to live in America, they say. They’d like more space than what our brownstone offers, but instead of finding a new apartment they’ll return to Copenhagen, where they’re from, and where the quality of life is much higher. They’ll have free healthcare.

“We loved our New York party days,” Per says. “But they’re over.”

We laugh, and I agree with them about everything—if given the option of free health care, I would take it. “It’s cold there, right?” I ask. It’s the only negative thing I can think of.

“It is,” Thora says, but she tells me that in Denmark snow is cleared with large brushes, and she can’t believe Americans still tear up their roads with plows.

“What will you do in Denmark?” I ask. “Besides paint.”

Per shrugs. “There are a lot of unknowns, Marie.”

I smile, because he seems fine with the unknowns, and I’m impressed that Per isn’t catastrophizing. He sips calmly and puts his hand on Thora’s hand absently. Their daughters sleeping in the other room make the unknowns something to be conquered, not surrendered to.

“Well,” I say. “I’ll never find neighbors as good as you.”

“Oh, not true,” Thora says. “You’ll be happy not to have babes crying in the night.”

I insist that they’ve never once woken me. In fact, I love hearing them squeal in the mornings.

Their news has made it difficult to shift to a new topic; we find ourselves circling back to their preparations, their timeline, getting the EU passports for the babies at the embassy in New York. After a while the bottle of wine is gone, and as Thora takes her last sip, one of the babies starts to cry. “What timing,” she says, and she starts to clear away the glasses but I tell her I’ll do the dishes. She disappears into the babies’ bedroom while I wash the glasses and Per searches in the dish rack for the pacifiers. We hug, and though they’re not moving until later in the summer, it feels like we’re saying goodbye.

I visit Thora in the evenings, and, each of us holding a baby, we talk about the plans they’ve made. She tells me what belongings they’re leaving here and what they’re taking with them. Per’s an artist, and Thora gestures vaguely in the direction of a storage unit a few miles away, complaining that it’s full of Per’s unsold paintings. It would cost a fortune to ship them to Denmark.

I tell her I’ll be their US-based art dealer. Just bring them upstairs, I say.

She asks if I’m serious. “Of course,” I say. “No one uses the second bedroom. Patrick used it as an office, but I like to work at the kitchen table.”

Thora looks startled. I haven’t mentioned Patrick casually since he left. Then she shrugs. “I’ll talk to Per about it.”

Per shows up with a U-Haul and brings a dozen large canvases into my apartment. I choose one for him to hang on the wall. It’s a depressing scene of a cemetery next to a baseball diamond, but in the right corner is a patch of bright blue sky where the clouds have parted.

The next day, walking home from the train, I’m thinking about how the painting looks on my wall. Before I left that morning, I stood before it for several minutes just taking it in. Learning its specifics. When I reach my house, I come upon Patrick sitting on my stoop.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hi,” he says.

My hand twitches toward my keys in my pocket, I’m itching to let him in.

I sit down next to him instead of opening the door. I snake my arm through his and lean my head on his shoulder. I tell him the truth, which is that I miss him. There are no visible stars, the lights are too bright, but I search the hazy dark sky for something to focus on. Each minute that passes is another minute that I don’t let him into my apartment. I think of my mother, who worries that I’ve inherited her and my father’s addictive traits. I squeeze his arm harder.

“Maybe we need each other,” he says.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

The night gets old this way. When he throws up what he’s been drinking, I care too much for him not to let him inside. I bring him in and get him settled on the couch. I return to the stoop with a pitcher of water to clean the sidewalk, my beautiful brick sidewalk on my quiet, beloved street.

I measure the waning of summer by the movies that play in Military Park on Tuesday nights. Each week the movie begins when the sky is completely dark, earlier and earlier, until I’m no longer home from work in time to catch the beginning of the film.

I haven’t let Patrick back in since the night I found him on my stoop, though he texts me, and sometimes I text him back, and then I have to convince myself all over again that it’s best just to let things go.

August comes to an end, and it brings the departure of Per and Thora. I help them pack the last of their things and see them off the day they leave for the airport. I hold one of the babies as Per loads the cab. I watch the car turn the corner, and when it’s gone I go inside and look into the spare bedroom that’s so packed with Per’s paintings I can barely maneuver around them.

I pull out a few storage tubs that are filled with things I took from my father’s apartment after he died. I finally feel intrepid enough to sort through which things to keep and which to discard.

I find a case of burned DVDs, labeled with the names of songs. My laptop is old and has a DVD drive so I pop in the first disk. On the DVD my father recorded himself playing his guitar and singing, and since I haven’t seen him or heard his voice in almost four years, the tears come without warning. “Next,” he says, “Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Did She Mention My Name?’ ”

He looks at the camera before he starts playing. “A little bit of trivia—Marie, this is the first song you ever heard, in the hospital, the night you were born. I don’t know why your mom allowed it. She was probably in too much pain to care.”

I watch the video again and again because he’s talking to me. We’re talking. Or, at least, it’s as close as we’ll ever come again to talking. At the end of the video he recounts also having played the song to my mother on the second night of their honeymoon.

“A bad idea,” he says, shaking his head and looking away from the camera. “Bad, bad idea.”

I’m about to text Patrick to ask him to come over when the doorbell rings. It’s the mail carrier. She extends a package for Thora my way, and I’m about to tell her they’ve moved, but a letter from my insurance company distracts me. It’s thick and is stamped Urgent. I put the package on the hallway table, I’ll have to forward it later, and I tear open the letter.

The company is bankrupt, the letter says. I’ll have coverage through the end of September, but afterward the company will be liquidated.

“Oh, fuck,” I say, because I have a chronic illness, and this company had just approved an expensive infusion drug, the first drug I’ve tried that has helped my joint dysfunction and my fatigue.

I forget about Patrick. I look for a new plan on the internet, but most carriers seem to have left the New Jersey marketplace, and none of the remaining options covers the drug. I could buy a plan from a different carrier off the marketplace, but my search makes it clear I need the government subsidy. I don’t know what to search for next. Google stares back at me. I wish Thora were here. We could at least talk about universal health care in Denmark and agree that it makes much more sense.

 “Why don’t you move to Brooklyn?” my mother says on the phone. “You work in the city.” 

I always call her when I already know the answer to a question but don’t want to listen to myself. I look out my window. Pink evening light falls on the brick buildings across the street.

“It’s so expensive there,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “you’ll have to weigh the difference in cost. The difference between paying for the drug and paying more in rent.”

“I mean, it’s not a lifesaving drug,” I say. “It just improves my quality of life.”

My mom laughs.

“What’s funny?”

“Can I ask what you see is the difference?”

I don’t want to leave Newark, but I find a health insurance plan on the New York marketplace, which will start January 1. I look for an apartment. My mom has to cosign, which makes me feel ashamed, but once I have an address, I can lock in the plan. I’ll have a gap of three months between my old insurance ending and the new insurance beginning, so I refill my medications and see all my doctors and suck every last dime from the insurance company before they turn out the lights.

I could leave Newark without ever telling Patrick. I could block his number and when he next showed up at my apartment he’d find it empty. But since finding my dad’s DVDs I’ve become obsessed with closure, so I text him and ask to meet for a drink at the cocktail bar on Halsey Street, where Aamina and I like to go. It has a leafy patio strung with bare white light bulbs. It’s different from our old haunt, the dive bar, so maybe that will encourage us to behave. He’s standing outside when I get there, his thumb caressing his phone screen, and when he sees me approaching he gives me a thumbs up, which makes me laugh.

We get a table outside and wait a long time for our drinks, but I’m okay with the wait. There are wet leaves pressed to the brick patio and the air is cool, damp, and clean.

Patrick sighs and looks at me with a sad smile when I tell him I’m leaving. He picks up the coaster and taps it against the table.

“It’s only ten miles away,” I say.

“Ten miles, with eight million people in between.”

Then he says, with some love in his voice, that I’m going to become boring like all the other people our age moving to Brooklyn.

“You might not be wrong,” I say. “But I was boring here, too.”

“No, you weren’t.” He brandishes his pint glass. “Perish the thought.”

Our server comes to place a flickering tea light on the table and clear our empty glasses. Against my better judgment I agree to a second round. The light rain from earlier in the day returns, and Patrick raises the table umbrella so the droplets bead on the fabric. It gets dark, but we’re the only ones outside and no one from the restaurant has plugged in the string lights yet. I can barely see Patrick’s face across the table.

He says, “When you leave, there won’t be any chance of running into me again.”

“We were good at that. Running into each other. More often than not, though, I think we orchestrated it. Time to stop living a lie, Patrick.”

I mean to be funny, but his smile fades. 

“I get it,” he says. “I’m a fuckup.”

“You’re young enough that it’s okay to be a fuckup. I can’t keep living my life like this. I have things I should be doing.”

“And I don’t?” He looks offended. “I don’t have things I should be doing?”

“You do. You just have more time to do them.”

Patrick clears his throat and goes on. “You’re writing here. That’s something.”

“I’m not, really.”

Patrick suggests a third drink, but I decline.

We hug for a long time on the sidewalk. Cars swoosh through puddles in the road, shooting up soft ferns of water. The humidity lays a black velvet cloak over our shoulders. In a year or two, the Whole Foods across the street—we’re looking at it from the back now, and through the building is Military Park—will be finished, the gentrification of Halsey Street underway. This block used to be where you went to find methadone, my landlord Yuejin told me once. Now there’s scaffolding and Coming Soon signs.

“I’m going to miss it here,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes.

“You’ll get over it,” Patrick says. “It’s getting bougie here.”

Our hands meet without meaning to. They entwine. Maybe I’m already a few sips past making a mistake.

I’m leaving next week. What’s one more night?

During my last lunch with Yuejin, I tell him to let me know if he ever decides to sell the brownstone. If I could scrape together a down payment, I’d snap it up without hesitation.

Yuejin waves the thought away and tells me I don’t want anything to do with the property. “It’s a mess,” he says. “The heater is the original oil heater from the 1920s. There’s no one alive who fixes those types of heaters anymore, so it’s a pain when it breaks. Costs me eight hundred per month to heat that building.”

“Why didn’t you charge me for utilities?” I ask, incredulous.

Yuejin shrugs. “It was too much. You wouldn’t have stayed.”

“Still,” I say. “I’ll put in a new heater. Natural gas or something.”

“It’s not up to code, the wiring. It needs sprinklers installed if you want to rent it out. Every time I return home I’m surprised to see it hasn’t burned down.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me this before,” I say. “I was very at peace in that brownstone.”

 “You’ll like living in the thick of things,” Yuejin says, smiling.

And so I crossed state lines for health insurance. My new apartment in Brooklyn doesn’t have the quiet of Newark, a place I realize now I did know, I did love, but it has a garden where I spend the last nice days of fall, winter about to descend like a cold kiss on the city. There’s no spare bedroom, either, and I regret agreeing to store all of Per’s paintings—they’re crowding me out, stacked everywhere, and my cat tried to scratch the paint off one of them the other day. But at least, in a way, they remind me of home.

Though I’ve been there for more than a month, I haven’t finished unpacking yet, so once the pregnancy test delivers the news that a hunch I had was right, that I am in fact pregnant, I sit among the boxes of books, knees tucked to my chest, and worry I’ve already ruined this baby’s chances. For weeks I’ve been pregnant, and also taking blood thinners and an antirejection drug that can cause birth defects. I signed a form at the doctor’s office when I started taking the drug, agreeing to stay on two forms of birth control—except I was lying, I only ever used one. And drinking, too. Drinking less than when I was with Patrick, at dinner when water hits my tongue it’s not the taste I expect, but still, I’ve been drinking. And now I have to decide if I want the baby, if my body will allow it—a hard decision to make when you don’t feel at home.

—

Megan Cummins is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BA), UC Davis (MA), and Rutgers-Newark (MFA); and her work has appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Okey-Panky, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection IF THE BODY ALLOWS IT was awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. She is the managing editor of A Public Space and serves on the governing board of the Bare Life Review. Her next project is a YA novel called Aerosol.