The main thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter if you can sing. Karaoke isn’t a talent show. The trick is having confidence.
That said, do yourself a favor and start with something easy. Everyone can sing Billy Joel, say, or Huey Lewis and the News. REM’s not too tough. I once worked at a bar that held karaoke night on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I looked forward to it, if only to escape the monotony of the manager’s Bonnie Raitt tape played on a loop. (“Something to Talk About” still triggers in me an olfactory memory of fajita grease and spilled beer.) There were some regulars who did rousing versions of “Friends in Low Places” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” However, it was the summer of “Love Shack,” a little old song that young, drunk women believed could transform them into Kate Pierson. It was painful. For now, you should probably leave The B-52s alone.
Singing louder makes it easier, weirdly. Also, you can’t sing karaoke ironically. You can use a silly voice all you want, but you’ve chosen your song because something about it speaks to you. A stray lyric, the particular beat, a memory you associate with the song. When it’s just you and the microphone, you can be anything—younger, older, freer, tragic, more bad-ass, more soulful, more successful, unspeakably sexy—for the length of the song. When I sing, I feel something akin to joy.
•••
Even if the n-word is in a song you choose, you still may not use the n-word. Substitute “ninja.”
•••
I have a karaoke machine at home, and that’s normally how I sing karaoke. We’ve amassed a pretty nice selection of karaoke CDs that has nearly overgrown the drawer where we store them. If our collection were a radio station, it might have the tagline, “The best of the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, and today!” A little something for everyone.
Public karaoke can be hit or miss. The best public karaoke experience I had was seven years ago in Ocracoke, North Carolina. My friend Sundae is a local, and she took my husband and me out to a karaoke bar one night. The place was a huge, windowless building on a two-lane road leading out of town, away from the tourist traffic. We got there early; a small crowd gathered in the back, drinking. By the time the karaoke DJ got set up, I was one of the first to sing. I chose “The Deadbeat Club” by The B-52s, ignoring my own advice. I pulled it off okay, although I sensed that the crowd didn’t know the song and didn’t care about my rendition. An hour and a half later into the night, it was time for my second turn. At this point, the place was packed. Smoky, wiggle-your-way-to-the-bar, wait-in-line-to-pee packed. The DJ called my name, and I took the mic.
Ba-ba-ba-bada-dun-dun.
That’s right. Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby.” The crowd went insane. I was loaning the rock star experience, listening to scores of people singing along with me, watching the room bounce to my voice. For the first time, I understood the allure of public performance, the high that you get from knowing you created this mass of energy.
The next day, a woman stopped me as I was leaving a restaurant restroom. She congratulated me on my performance.
The worst public karaoke experience I had happened in San Francisco at a small Mexican restaurant located on one of those steep streets on which it’s impossible to maintain any sort dignity while walking down. Brandon and I had already been out with some writers I knew, had already eaten dinner and had cocktails, but by the time we got near the hotel, we weren’t ready to end the night. The place had one raucous group when we got there, and it seemed like good times. I chose a song; Brandon chose a song.
But by the time our turns came around, the fun group had left. I had chosen an Alanis Morissette song. I will just say this: There is nothing more humbling than scream-singing about oral sex at the movies, in a room populated by only your husband and the stooped older man running the establishment’s karaoke equipment.
•••
Don’t try to put your own stamp on it by changing the phrasing or some such.
•••
Lyrics can throw you, even if you think you know the song. One holiday, at a family gathering, my mom requested that my nephew sing Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Brit did, and we watched Mom’s face slowly register the meaning of the song’s lyrics. We refer to it now as “Grandma’s Favorite Methamphetamine Addiction Song.”
At one of our neighborhood parties, a friend volunteered to kick off the night with the first song. We were two drinks in—FYI, three is kind of the optimum place to be—and I suggested he try “Tainted Love,” a song on the not-challenging level. We were all having a good time, until he started in with the “touch me” part and happened to look around the room. Most of the adults were in the kitchen, noshing. In the room where the karaoke was, we were surrounded by children, all eager to get a turn at amplifying their own small voices.
It could have been worse. He could have been singing “My Sharona,” with its surprisingly creepy lyrics. Ick! Ick! Ick! Ick! Run, Sharona!
•••
I sprung for the nice microphones from Radio Shack, so don’t swing them from their cords, like you’re some sort of David Lee Roth.
•••
I grew up Presbyterian. Although as an adult, I consider myself a superstitious agnostic, I sometimes miss the ritual of a community gathering in song.
Brandon and I used to host an annual karaoke party on New Year’s Eve in our neighborhood before some of our friends moved and the new neighbors didn’t seem as interested in singing. It was one of the highlights of my year. We’d lay out some snacks and drinks, and we’d catch up. Eventually someone would start the singing.
We’d been hosting this long enough that I knew what people would gravitate toward. Ed and Lucy would do a Rocky Horror Picture Show song. Steve would sing Def Leppard’s “Photograph” with touching earnestness. Because Trisha is Canadian, she got first dibs on Alanis Morissette and the Barenaked Ladies. She also got “Me and Bobby McGee,” slapping her own thigh to keep time. Brandon and Dan would duet on some ’90s songs, and Sara would sing “Son of a Preacher Man” because she’s the daughter of a preacher woman. I’d go heavy on the hip-hop, the kids Top 40 songs, and then at some point Melissa would bust out the Grease soundtrack, and we’d all gather round and shout it out together.
At midnight, those of us left at the party would gather on the back porch with our glasses of champagne or sparkling cider to watch the city’s fireworks. Sometimes there would be a straggler, and in the first moments of the new year, we’d hear melody from inside the house.
I really need you tonight!
Forever’s gonna start tonight.
Forever’s gonna start tonight.
And then, year after year, it would.
•••
JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the founder and editor of Full Grown People. Her website is jenniferniesslein.com.
By far, Full Grown People was the best thing that happened to me in 2013. Obviously, it just didn’t “happen”—I put in some serious hours—but it does feel magical to me, from these fabulous essays from writers I admire that appear in my in-box, to perfectly fulfilled requests for photos and art to Gina Kelly and Beth Hannon Fuller, to—most of all—you, the lovelies who read this.
Almost five months in now, I recognize some of your names in the comments on the site and on social media. FGP seems to be taking on a life of its own—growing into an honest-to-Betsy community—because of you. I’m not particularly good at predicting which essays you’ll respond to the most strongly, but one of the most rewarding aspects of being an editor is knowing that somewhere, someone is reading an essay here and is thinking, “This is just what I needed.”
Oh. New Year’s post. Maybe you’d like a list of the most-read essays of 2013?
I don’t make resolutions, but I do have some goals for Full Grown People in the coming year.
The main ones involve bringing you more of this writing, both at FGP and in the form of FGP anthologies that combine work from the site with brand-spanking-new essays. I’m very excited about this. There’s a song I like that goes, “You don’t need a thing from me/ But I need something big from you.”
This is the thing I need from you: If you like Full Grown People and haven’t signed up for the notifications, please do it. (I just installed a new notification system because the old one was nearly maxed out, which sounds impressive but kind of isn’t.) And to paraphrase someone wise: if you like something, say something, to someone who shares your taste.
Also? Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope this year brings more sweet than bitter to all of us.
Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it! Merry Meal at Your Favorite Chinese Restaurant, if you don’t!
Full Grown People will be back on Friday with a new essay (one I can barely wait for you all to read!), but to tide you over in the meanwhile, here’s a handy list of what some of the massively talented FGP contributors have had published elsewhere. (Clicking on the writer’s name will lead you to all the essays that FGP has published.) A little re-gifting in a good way, if you will.
This is my sister Erin: As a child, she befriended the kids who were the outcasts so that they’d have at least one friend. In high school, we heard of a house fire; I donated some cast-off clothing, but Erin gathered up things that were still in rotation in her wardrobe. As an adult, she kept her door unlocked in case any of her friends dropped by and needed her. In the past couple of years, she has played host to a friend whose marriage needed some space, another friend going through detox, and another who was turned away from the psych ward although she was clearly in need some of mental health services. She stayed at Erin’s home, manic and wild, until her parents came to pick her up the next day.
Erin and I were born twenty-three months apart, summer babies, the children of school teachers. I’m older—I’m the oldest of the four of us sisters—but we each affected who the other became. As an adult, I’m expansive and generous and open to vulnerability; Erin taught me that. When I’m around her, though, I revert back to the same counter-balance that I’ve been all our lives: protective, suspicious of people who might take advantage of her giving nature, willing to fight her battles. I had a reputation, once, of someone not to fuck with, someone slightly crazy, aloof and unpredictable. I used to like that: it kept my sisters safe.
•••
Krissy, the third of us, called me. “Jeff died,” she said.
She’d called Erin earlier. Erin was gulping against her tears, more upset than Krissy had ever heard her. Erin’s husband, Jeff, had stopped breathing. Jill, our youngest sister, was on her way to Erin’s house where paramedics were working on him. In the next hour, there was confusion on Krissy’s and my part whether Jeff was actually dead. Maybe Erin meant that he died … but then someone had revived him!
She called Mom at work. “I think Jeff died,” she said.
“Krissy,” Mom said. “Did he die or not?”
“I don’t know.”
We were hopeful and inadvertently passed along that small hope to Mom, too, but no. They tried to save him. They didn’t.
(This is the part where I’m not going to write about Jeff, my handsome brother-in-law whom I’ve known since I was fourteen, the guy with whom I’ve laughed and bickered and grieved. This is the part where I’m going to keep up my denial that we’ve lost him. This is the part where my denial allows me to stay strong.)
The next day, Krissy drove up from Charlotte and picked me up in Charlottesville before continuing on. We stopped at a gas station for her to fuel up the car and for me to buy beer because I would need something to numb me. We’d been slap-happy on the drive up, too many hours in the car, and I stepped away to smoke a cigarette. The November sky in late afternoon was brilliant, cirrus clouds lit up pinky-orange by the setting sun. I don’t know why the sky is always important after a death, but it is. I can remember every sky after a death. When I came back to the car, Krissy was sobbing.
•••
We know how to get shit done.
Krissy and I got there too late to help make arrangements at the funeral home with Erin and their son Brit, but Mom and Andrew, Erin’s and Jeff’s friend, went; our Aunt Kathy met them up there. I was charged with writing Jeff’s obituary with heavy input from Erin and Brit. Jill took on making a playlist of songs to be played at the service. Krissy created a slide show that showed Jeff through the years, a slide show to which my eyes would wander the entire time at the funeral home.
Secretly, I had another mission: to determine who was a person there to surround Erin and Brit with support and love and who was a just a grief glommer.
The muscles of suspicion came back easily. After all, Erin was at the most vulnerable I’d ever seen her, lounging on the couch where Jeff slept, her big hazel eyes wet, veering wildly between intense grief and moments of okay. It was a testament to how open and welcoming Erin and Jeff were that so many people felt so close to them. Now, I eyed each one carefully.
In the aftermath of this tragedy—and this was a tragedy, Jeff only forty-two—our girl gang found the gamut. People are kind; people are misguided; people are completely inappropriate.
The first group was obvious. We found support in Erin and Jeff’s friends and our extended family, as well as in our own friends: food was brought, pictures were enlarged and framed, funeral deposits were made, alcohol was delivered.
I looked at the second group with some distance: the grief groupies. “I’m there for you,” although neither Erin for Jeff knew them, only knew of them. “If you need anything, call me—I’m not far away.” Yes, I thought at the time: Erin is going to call on near strangers to talk or maybe ask for help with the mortgage payment. Later, I could be more generous. I could see that these people were looking for a way to be important, looking for a way to make a difference. They were clumsy and maybe motivated by a hope that this was their chance to make a big impact on somebody’s world, but their impulses were benevolent. (Later still, some of these people would seem vaguely creepy to me, giving not only Erin but the rest of us too much personal attention.)
The last group, though, I still have nothing but disdain for. The grief looky-loos. They friend us on Facebook in the day or two Jeff’s death after not contacting us for twenty-some years without so much as an “I’m sorry for your loss,” and I have no idea why. You want to see what a family looks like when someone dies young? You want to see the face of raw mourning? You want to lick the salt of our tears? You want to see what Thanksgiving’s like this year? You want to hold my shuddering body as the baby-faced Army men fold a flag and present it to my sister? It’s not on Facebook. It’s here. Look close. You can call it schadenfreude, but it can happen to you.
•••
There was another category, though, and I’ll call her Liz. Liz was the friend who Erin and Jeff took in when she was turned away from the psychiatric ward. She claims to be bi-polar, but I suspect she’s schizophrenic; she abuses her medication so her condition isn’t controlled. I have loads of empathy for her in normal circumstances. She absolutely cannot help that she’s been dealt this illness, as debilitating as invasive cancer. But these were not normal circumstances.
Erin gets a text from Liz. She’s on her way up, she writes. She’s going to stay with Erin—permanently, if Erin would like! Erin, obviously, can’t take care of anyone at this point. Krissy offers to text back from Erin’s phone, to take one more thing off Erin’s plate, and we confer on the wording. Erin has a full house, Krissy texts, but we’re looking forward to seeing her at the funeral. At the last minute, Krissy asks me if she can change “Hi Liz, this is Krissy” to “Hi Liz, this is Jenny,” and I agree because this is what this is what the oldest is, the spokesperson and executive branch of The Family, charged with approving and enforcing the laws.
This is the place where I come home as a grieving sister-in-law and leave as the most hated alumna of my high school.
We’re plagued with other people posing the question: what happened? They come in droves, over the phone, on Facebook, in person. That evening, Jill and I drive the five minutes back to the home she shares with Mom and her daughter, and Jill tells me that everyone—all the sisters—are getting worn down. “What the fuck are they thinking?” she asks. “It’s not like we owe them anything.”
That night, I post on Facebook, “I know this is a hard time for everyone, but it’s especially hard for Jeff’s family. Please, please stop asking us what happened. What we know is that Jeff took a nap and died in his sleep. It’s maddening for us not to have more answers, too.” I tag my sisters, and, like that, the questions stop.
I tell my friend Tracy about this later, and she tells me that she thinks that there’s some part of people that looks for reassurance that death can’t happen to them. I agree, I agree, I agree, but can’t these people talk amongst themselves?
•••
The next day, I’m doing the day shift at Erin’s house. Our mom, Uncle Jimmy, and Grandma came by, but Erin fell asleep. Eventually, everyone leaves but Erin, Brit, and me, and, in the quiet, dim room, I watch her sleep while I read (not really, but it gives my eyes something to do) in the armchair.
The front door flies open. It seems unnaturally loud in the hush of the house. “Hello!”
A woman in sunglasses and a long, embroidered coat sweeps in the foyer. I get up from the armchair, and when she takes off her sunglasses, I see that it’s Liz.
“Liz!” I whisper. “So good to see you! Erin’s sleeping.”
“Oh, okay,” she says.
Brit comes in the room from upstairs, and she moves purposefully toward him, throws her arms around him, and cries, clinging to him, as if seeking comfort. Brit and I make eye contact.
No.
She releases Brit, asks me a few questions. She plays with the dogs for a little while. Serendipitously, another friend of Erin’s comes by. In the same whisper, I explain that Erin is sleeping, something that doesn’t come easily to my sister now. Liz asks me if she can hang out for a while. Brit interjects that Erin just fell asleep. “I’ll tell her that you came by,” I say. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. We’ll see you on Saturday.”
The two leave together.
But Liz comes back later that day, not on the day of Jeff’s funeral. She surprises us, showing up during the changing of the guard, when I’m going back to Mom’s, and Krissy and Jill are on their way over to spend the night with Erin.
In that time, Liz goes to the basement where Erin sits when she needs time to herself. I hear later that Erin talks to Liz, telling her how everyone has been so supportive: her family, Frank, Andrew… Liz starts arguing that she’s never heard of Andrew.
Really, she’s arguing for her own primacy in Erin’s life, which she cannot see simply doesn’t exist, although it’s no one’s fault.
Then Liz starts in on Erin’s decision to have an open casket. Erin tells her that she’s not going to argue about it, but Liz continues her rant. It finally falls on Brit—a man, but a young man, one who just lost his father—to stop her. “My aunts aren’t even here,” he says. “You need to leave.”
•••
We drive to the funeral home mostly in silence. I’m in the backseat with Jill and my niece. At every turn, I slide on the leather seat against their hips. The last time I spent any time squished in the backseat with family, we were going from our grandfather’s viewing to get something to eat. Then, Jeff drove us in his big truck. Now, my niece’s dad is driving.
I stare out the window at this part of Virginia to which I haven’t been since I was a teenager. There’s the strip mall where my best friend served frozen yogurt. There’s where The Black-Eyed Pea used to be, back when it was a restaurant and not a band. “Here,” Jill says. “Mike, turn here.”
“Jill,” he says quietly. “This used to be my playground.”
A grand old house with a broad porch has been converted to the funeral home. We help carry in what will be displayed: Jeff’s bass guitar, photos of him, trophies. The home is quiet and the wide wooden boards of the floor creak as we enter.
The funeral director’s name is Chad. Chad! Like a guy you know who maybe was a lifeguard in his youth and likes to party. But this Chad is soft-spoken and radiates kindness. He leads Erin and Brit into the chapel, where they spend some time together, alone, the three of them, the two of them.
When the private family time is over, people start arriving. In droves. Chad tells us later that since Jeff’s death, the phone at the funeral home had been ringing near-constantly with people trying to make sure they had the right time and place and day.
•••
The Niesslein sisters switch into full-on support mode.
Our parents’ divorce was a messy one, and although it’s been twenty-five years, some learned instinct—a prayer to no one: please keep it pleasant—kicks in for me when the two sides of the families come together—until now, just for graduations, marriages, and the births of grandchildren.
They’ve almost always kept it civil and sometimes downright pleasant, and they rise to the occasion again. I stand with my Dixie cup of water, wishing it were something stronger (a joke I’ll make a million times over the course of the day) and listen to chitchat between the two sides. Our cousin and his wife are wrangling their six-month-old son, a blue-eyed beauty whose heart belongs to anyone with a necklace to fiddle with. Our grandmother from the other side of the family notices him. “Bring me the baby,” she says from a wingback chair. She’s a little Godfather-like in her delivery, but this newest Niesslein brings both sides together in admiration of the little guy.
Family: check.
For the most part, Erin and Brit stay in the chapel, now crowded with people filling the pews, waiting in line to see Jeff’s body, wishing Erin and Brit their best. I look at Erin across the room, and I can’t even imagine how she’s still standing. I suppose that it’s a combination of denial and medication and the default mode of who she is: warm and loving.
As for the rest of us, we’re running around the place like the A.V. Club, asking Chad and his colleagues to turn off the music, turn up the mic, resume the music as people—Brit, Jeff’s friends, his musical buddies—give their tributes. People are spilling out of the rooms onto the porch, the driveway, the waiting room of the home’s office. Jeff and I graduated together, so his funeral is, in addition to being one of the most wrenching things we’ve ever gone through, an impromptu class reunion.
It’s crowded enough that we can quietly shun people who we know make Erin or Brit uncomfortable or who Jeff didn’t like. There is Liz, touching inside the coffin. There are a few other people who, when they look as if they might approach us, we busy ourselves, mostly by checking on one another. Occasionally, I sit down. I’m doing this when Jeff’s old bass teacher plays a lovely song as a tribute, and as I lean into the furniture, forgetting, I think, You know who’d like this? Jeff.
Like my other sisters, I usher Erin through the crowd to have a cigarette, take a break, abandon her smiling façade for a moment. I notice a crowd of our high school alumni gathered out front, talking and laughing. I can’t hold it against them—I’d done the same throughout the day. But looking at them, I realize that this is their final goodbye; they’d file Jeff away in their memories soon, a guy that they’d known and liked who died too soon. We were different. We—the people who loved and supported Erin and Brit—would be the Sherpas across their long chasm of grief, descending into it with them and climbing up, step by steep step.
•••
After the funeral, we head back to Mom’s and Jill’s house. Our extended family is already there, quietly providing a spread of food and drink. Erin and Brit had invited close friends and family to join us in the celebration of Jeff’s life, and soon the house is crowded.
I let down my guard and crack open a beer. I take off my boots and put on slippers. I hug—long, lingering hugs, inhaling nosefuls of scent—my husband and our son for whom I was so homesick the night before. I survey the group. This is the love and support that Erin and Brit deserve right now.
I use the bathroom off of Mom’s room, and when I come out, Grandma and our cousin Jordy are searching for Gram’s purse that she ferreted away somewhere deep in Mom’s closet. Jordy’s using his cell phone as a flashlight, and I’m clicking through the hangars when Jill bursts in.
“Liz is here,” she says.
I pause. Am I the person who’s going to bounce a deeply sick woman from the house? Yes, it turns out. Yes, I am.
In the living room, Liz is standing in bare feet, looking at the baby. “Liz,” I say. “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”
Although the day had been warm, it’s freezing outside now, and I lead her to a place down the sidewalk, away from the people lingering with their cigarettes.
“I heard you weren’t very supportive of Erin last night,” I say. “I think you need to leave.”
“I respect that,” she says. She stares into my eyes for a long time without blinking. I’ve been drinking, but even I can see that she’s trying to intimidate me; we’re down to our most animal selves here. I stare back.
“I can’t believe after such a good friend I’ve been to Erin and Brit and Jeff that you’re asking me to leave—”
“I appreciate that, Liz.” No, I don’t—they’ve been good, amazing friends to her, but it hasn’t been, couldn’t be, completely reciprocal. “But that’s not my job here. My role is to make sure that they’re surrounded with love and support.”
She stares at me for another long time, and I don’t break her gaze. “Let’s go,” I say.
I head toward the front door as Grandma’s leaving. I make way for her and her walker. Liz, not seeing, tries to push past. I put my hand on her shoulder. “You need to wait. Our grandma’s leaving.” My tone is sharper than I intend, but maybe that comes with the territory of being a bouncer.
Eventually she locates the guy she came with, and they leave. I crack open another beer. The five of us—four sisters and our mom—find ourselves in the foyer sometime later, hugging each other in a circle, like a coven. Our cousin Mike snaps a picture, and that’s how I like to remember that night, each of us supported by the collective strength.
•••
It’s three weeks after Jeff’s death. I’ve been calling Erin every other day, Brit once in a while. Today, I’d gotten Erin’s voice mail, and she calls me back. She’s crying. “I just miss him so much,” she says. “It’s only been three weeks, and I have a lifetime of this.”
“Just an hour at a time, baby,” I say.
For the first time in my life, it hits me: I really can’t protect her. I can write this stupid, fucking, whiny essay in which I paint myself as some kind of hero, but it’s a distraction from what’s really going on. Jeff’s gone, and as much as I want to snatch the pain away from Erin and Brit, I can’t. I can steer away people who aren’t helpful, but I can’t alleviate this ache, this loss, one tiny bit. I don’t know what to do with this impotence.
When we were little, I’d ride my bike with my sisters, Erin in the banana seat in front of me, Krissy on the handlebars with her feet in the basket. There was a family down the street who kept a pack of dogs, half-crazy mutts, and when I saw the pack coming, I’d tell my sisters to get off the bike and get behind me. I’d walk the bike to our house, its shiny pink aluminum the shield between us and the Big, Terrible Thing.
I was wrong to say that we’re Sherpas. All of us will have to descend into that chasm of grief, alone, together, and climb out, alone, together. When the Big, Terrible Thing happens, it doesn’t matter that you’re the big sister. The shield is flimsy, and you are, despite your best hopes, simply a familiar body to cling to. You have to start believing that that is enough.
•••
JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the founder and editor of Full Grown People. Her website is jenniferniesslein.com.
Full Grown People will be back next Monday with a brand-spanking-new essay, but in the meantime (while I’m cooking and drinking and guarding the good stuffing) maybe you’d like to catch up on some essays you might have missed? You can poke around in the archives or search by category.
Or, here’s a little list. Every year, editors of small magazines get to nominate six pieces of work for the Pushcart Prize, a huge honor in the lit world. The deadline is December 1, so now at the end of November, here I am, with much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. I want to nominate all of them—I love each essay on this website for different reasons. Alas, this was my long list of possible Pushcart nominees before I narrowed it down to six:
See what I mean about the gnashing and the pulling? Even now, I’m thinking, but what about…?
•••
I also want to thank you all. Thank you for reading, for commenting, for sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you for signing up for the notifications and writing about FGP on your websites and for donating to the tip jar. A publication is nothing without its readers, and I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for your warming up this corner of the internet.
There’s been a death in my family, and I need to be with my people. FGP will be back next week, although I’m not certain which day. Check your notifications and/or your Facebook or Twitter to get back in the swing.
We met in the dim basement of a fraternity. The fraternity—we can’t remember which now, any one of those old columned houses lining Rugby Road—pumped music loud and we had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. We were refilling our red Solo cups from the keg of cheap beer when we first yelled to each other. We were dressed alike, in tee-shirts and denim shorts. We joked later that we found each other because we were the two people who looked as if they shouldn’t be there, vaguely alternative kids in a sea of khakis and L.L. Bean.
We were nineteen years old. It’s funny to think that we danced that night—Hey, show this person your least impressive skill! We went outside to talk and stood close to each other. We didn’t want the night to end so we piled in with the others in Kathy’s little Honda; we slept in the same room that night, one of us in the bed, the other on the futon. From that night on, we were inseparable.
We both lost weight that first year. We woke each morning giddy that something good would happen that day: we would see each other. Of course, in the first few weeks, we were both a little cautious, consumed with a heady mix of romance and doubt. Was it completely reciprocal? Would we run out of things to talk about? Would some terrible, deal-breaking flaw reveal itself?
There was a certain kiss that tamped the doubts down. We were walking from a party, holding hands during the few blocks it would take us to get to the convenience store. We were going to buy a pack of cigarettes. We stopped and turned toward each other, savoring those seconds when our mouths were near but hadn’t yet made contact, the salty scent of our faces, the delicious nerves. We kissed. After that, we threw out caution. We took a sort of ownership of each other’s bodies, a jumble of legs and arms and mouths and love.
•••
On the university grounds, there was another couple that looked like us, her tall and with a sheet of long hair, him taller with a mop of curls. They broke up before graduation, but we wondered if they got the same sort of comments we did. A mentally ill woman—the one who did somersaults on the pedestrian mall—told us that we were going to make beautiful children; strangers we’d just met would remark on how well matched we were. Our chemistry seemed like a force field.
We twined our lives together. We stood together outside the hospital room door and heard the first cries of our oldest nephew after his birth. We took cheap vacations to places like off-season Chincoteague, using our last ten in cash to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. We stayed up late waiting for the other to get off shift waiting tables or tending bar. One summer day, we skipped work to go hiking at Sugar Hollow. It was a ways out of town and we drove with the windows open and the music pouring from the speakers. We found an easy sun-dappled trail that led through some streams, and we walked the gentle incline, bumping into each other just as an excuse to touch skin. We took pictures of each other posing on a rock that lay just beneath the surface of the water, an optical illusion of levitation.
That’s how we felt about each other: we walked on water.
•••
We grew up to be the people we are now, shape-shifting together, holding hands like the Wonder Twins. We were the engineering major and the English major, morphing into the trumpet player and the local journalist, turning into the chemical engineer and the aspiring short-story writer. We became husband and wife, father and mother, good cop and bad cop, fly fisherman and Scrabble addict, quality assurance engineer and business owner.
We can see our flaws now, both in ourselves and each other. On the eve of our thirteenth wedding anniversary, a strong thunderstorm blew into town. A huge limb fell off our maple, hitting the yard with such force that it stuck into the earth at a forty-five degree angle. Worse, the city sewage line backed up into our basement.
We spent most of the night on the phone, calling the city and the sort of companies that clean up murder scenes. It was certainly grisly down there, the pipe in the recesses near the hot water heater spewing whole neighborhoods’ worth of filth. We rolled a dampened towel and placed it under the basement door so the smell wouldn’t permeate the rest of the house.
The next day, the city came to clear the wreckage and the cleaning company came back to scour. We lost nearly everything in the basement. We were tired and both missing work to deal with this minor catastrophe. After everyone left, we sighed, assessing our lost belongings—the antique chest that held sports equipment, a basket of laundry, the bright ceramic flowerpots bought on a long-ago Mother’s Day. Our Christmas tree and ornaments, including every one that our son had ever made and the Lenox china one of two doves, bearing in gold script “First Christmas Together 1991.”
“Did you at least save the ornament—our ornament?” one asked the other.
“No—the whole box was disgusting.”
Exhausted, we snapped then, reverting to type: one of us irritated and pragmatic, the other seething and sentimental. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, not so much as a punishment but to avoid saying something that we couldn’t unsay. We took a nap; we came to our senses by dinnertime. It was our anniversary, for God’s sake. We had each other, even if our keepsakes, as we’d later put it, went down with the shit.
•••
It’s been so many years, we might be the kind of people that some refer to as “smug marrieds.” We don’t know. Every partnership, it seems to us, is a locked box, knowable only to the people in it. We don’t feel smug. We feel grateful for the constant accrual of all these minutes together—the winks across a crowded room, the ass grab in the kitchen, the phone call from home, the car sex on a (whoops, not quite) deserted road, the arm to cling to at the funeral, the mispronunciations of words that our son made when he was little.
Last year, we turned forty. It sounds odd to say, but we don’t know what the other looks like anymore. We have too many associations—love, passion, comfort—to see one another with any degree of objectivity.
For people like us, forty is when you start to realize that you’re out of big beginnings. Unless something unexpected happens (or you force it to happen), there will be no new romances, no new weddings, no more of your own babies to nuzzle. You know very well that you’re not going to relocate.
Couples around us have started to break apart, tender bands of skin on their ring fingers, new apartment keys in their key chains. Even in the very best of circumstances—amicable, mutually decided, no kids—we find it sad for them, something with such a hopeful beginning coming to a close. No matter how much better off our friends wind up being—and they are, they always are, at least emotionally—there is pain.
On a more self-involved level, though, these break-ups remind us of something every couple loses sight of: that it only takes one of you to develop an itch for something new, and there is nothing at all that the other can do about it. It’s the lesson we learn from our newly single friends, over and over. We try hard to lose sight of the lesson for the sake of ourselves. As someone wise once said, “You gotta have faith, faith, faith.”
•••
We got married on the grounds of a sprawling bed and breakfast, just beyond the koi pond. It had sprinkled earlier in the day, but by the time the pianist struck up “Here Comes the Bride,” the sky was clear and warm. We were twenty-four and wrote our own vows. The ceremony itself lasted all of five minutes.
It was a lovely beginning, but essentially it was just a party in celebration of us.
In novels and in jazz, the big squishy middle is where all of the interesting stuff happens. In our story, this is where we are now.
We don’t know which events will seem important years down the road, but we’re living the details right now. In 2013, in our big, messy house, our son practices his clarinet. Our Boston terrier mix is still alive, goofy as ever. We haven’t used a babysitter in a long while, and we usually go out to eat on Saturdays, just the two of us; weirdly, our son despises eating out. We laugh ourselves silly over a random lyric we hear on the radio. We eat lunch together most days in the TV room and finish off with a piece of chocolate. One day in February, you come home from work with Chinese food for us, and I ask you, my valentine, to read this, and you do.
This essay originally appeared on The Nervous Breakdown, which is an excellent site you should check out.
•••
JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the founder and editor of Full Grown People. Her website is jenniferniesslein.com.
I’m so glad you’re visiting the site. If you’re picking up what we’re putting down here, here are some handy tips to remind you to check us out more often.
• Sign up for notifications, conveniently located on your right. Thanks to the FGP peeps on Facebook, I’ve streamlined the email that comes to you when I post new essays. They don’t have images and they’re posted before anything else. (I did this because I didn’t realize how many people read the internet on their phones! Not me, man. I recently sent a text to my mother in which I called her something in Spanish. I’m not sure what.) I write an introduction (no spoilers!) to each essay; they’re just a couple paragraphs and I work pretty hard on them. You have to confirm that you’ve signed up—it might be in your spam box or, if you use gmail, it might be in your promotions box. The emails come in the wee hours, so insomniacs? Got you covered.
• You can also join the Full Group People Facebook page. The updates happen whenever I wake up—I’m not a morning person, so you’ll have to wait until I have my first cup of tea. There’s a small intro there (not the same as the one you get with the notifications). It’s a good way to share stuff.
• FGP has a Twitter page. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great Twitter citizen, but I do update when we have a new post.
•••
I can’t even thank the people who contributed to the tip jar enough. We’re getting closer to recouping the expenses I put out to start this. I tear up every time we get one. I know that there’s a great TED talk on not making people pay for things but letting them, but if you grew up without a lot of money, it’s tough, emotionally. Thank you. Really.
Finally, I’m hoping that you’ll tell the people in your lives about Full Grown People. There’s an insane amount of talent here in FGP’s writers and artists, and I’d love for them to get an insane amount of recognition.
Thanks so much for checking us out! On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, FGP publishes essays that tackle those moments in life when you wonder, what’s next?
Maybe you’d like to know more.
A couple of years ago, I interviewed Nicholas Christakis. Christakis studies how people—even people who don’t know each other—influence one another’s choices in life, from weight gain (or loss) to divorce to mood. One thing he said stuck with me: people are open to change when they’re in a “liminal state.” Which is fawncy talk for being in transition.
“In transition” pretty much describes where I am. Last year, my beloved friend and business partner, Stephanie Wilkinson, and I sold our magazine. For me, that meant I pretty much sold my identity. (Read all about it here.) I looked around at my friends, and they were all going through different, but no less earth shaking, transitions. We were all done with the celebrated firsts: first kiss, first sex, first long-term relationship, and in many cases, first child. We were left with the sometimes glorious, sometimes messy, stuff that comes with adulthood.
From way back, I’ve looked to writing to help me figure out the difficult stuff in life. Before I discovered reading for wisdom, I read for information. I learned about sexual intercourse from the World Book Encyclopedia that my mom ordered one book at a time. (In case you’re wondering, it happens by a man inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina. In practice, this is not an especially helpful description.) I founded Full Grown People because I find comfort, empathy, and intellectual stimulation in reading other people’s stories.
The topics here run the whole gamut: romance, family, health, career, dealing with aging loved ones, and more. But what draws everything together is the sense that we’re all feeling our way along. There are a gazillion how-to books on all of these subjects, but I’ve always been interested in the how-come.
I hope you’ll find here what I’ve been wanting to read: well-told true stories of how different people have figured it out as they’re going along. I think every age has the potential to be an awkward age, and as my teeth migrate steadily back to where they were pre-braces, I’m revisiting those feelings of let’s pretend again. Let’s we pretend we know how to dance. Let’s pretend we know how to kiss. Let’s pretend we know how to dress for work. Let’s pretend we know how to date after many years. Let’s pretend this new career move isn’t scary and thrilling as all get-out. Let’s pretend we know how to deal with our father’s dementia. Let’s pretend we know how to say a final goodbye to our mother.
Thanks for pretending with us.
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