//creative//
Fall 2020
Fall 2020
Small Minds
Ava Ferry
The first time I laid eyes on Him was when we met up for our interview. I was writing a paper for class in which I had to interview someone about their job and write a profile on them. On paper, he had seemed pretty interesting, as far as the subject of a school assignment goes. His daughter was attending a birthday party in Griffith Park near my house, so he asked me if I wanted to meet him and do the interview there.
He was a journalist and had written for Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times, not that I read either of them, but I guess it was impressive. He shook my hand and shielded his eyes from the late afternoon sun and then led me to a picnic table just out of view of the party. He lent me the tape recorder he used for work, so I could record our conversation, and we talked about how he cut his teeth in journalism covering the Bush-Gore election and paddled through the streets of New Orleans in a plastic baby pool during Katrina. He was conversational and charming, which I guess is necessary for a journalist, and when I listened to the tape later I was struck again by this fact—and also filled with shame listening to my own stuttering, juvenile voice. I dissected an awkward silence at 30:56 in my mind until I fell asleep.
But he was old—forties maybe—and I was young. Too young to have any business feeling anything for anyone, much less my best friend’s dad, which is who he was. And he didn’t invite me to do the interview at the park, I was there for the party because it was for a girl in his daughter’s and my class, and he stayed until we were done with cake and then let me interview him for my language arts assignment.
To say His daughter was my friend is generous. Annabelle was her name. At the start of eighth grade, she was the new kid, and she sauntered into our classroom with the sort of scrubbed, unblemished look only an only child can have. As the oldest of four, I generally made it a rule not to make friends with her sort, as they were spoiled and had an air of innocence, like they didn’t know how brutal life could be. At thirteen, I felt I understood the brutality of life quite well.
I fell into my friendship with her unintentionally; I guess because I realized that she was soft and pliable and she would let me message random men on her Instagram and play ding-dong-ditch on her neighbors. And her parents spoiled her, and by extension me, so our afternoons were peppered with snacks made fresh by her nanny and rides to gymnastics.
I eventually got bored of her and stopped responding to her texts. It was two months before eighth-grade graduation, six months after we first met. Not to be rude about it, but she had a small, circular mind. When we would go and stand in a group to talk to other kids at dances, she was always tugging on my dress asking, “wait, what?” She was always just missing the point. And she was so optimistic about how much she mattered. So I let her texts go unanswered until she gave up on me and then turned (and ran, if needed) away from her whenever she’d try to catch my eye in the hall at school, which is how I’ve ended every friendship since.
My infatuation with Him was probably one of the only reasons I even stuck it out for those six months. When he would pick us up from school and take us to gymnastics, I would sit in the back seat and put my scintillating wit on display, my eyes trained on the rearview mirror, so when he looked back at me, I could catch his eye. He always looked and laughed a lot. His eyes were sparkling; I know they were. What did it mean? Maybe it didn’t mean anything, because his wife was blonde and meek (their daughter took after her, which is unfortunate), but that’s what every guy wants, right?
I don’t really believe that. There was no way his wife had anything to offer. His face broke open with light when he saw me. In front of His daughter, too, even. If only fucking Annabelle would just leave us alone for five minutes.
___________________
Every once in a while, I would sneak my mom’s journal off the shelf behind our old photo albums. I found it once, accidentally, when I was looking for her weed, and I couldn’t help myself. After that, every few months when I was home alone, I’d flip through it, gulping down the entries ravenously and defensively, like a child whose plate might be snatched from their grasp at any moment. I didn’t feel like a bad person for it. My mom was a mystery to me, and this was my way of trying to understand her. But, to be honest, it made me hate her. She sounded so selfish, but I already knew that she was. Way too selfish to have four kids.
In April of my eighth grade year--after I had just dumped Annabelle out of boredom but would stand behind the fence at the pickup line and peek through the slats, hoping to see him when he came to get her-- I went on another journal expedition that crushed me. I guess there’s no other way to put it, because in the first entry I flipped to, I saw His name.
I flipped back through the journal to find the first mention of Him in my mom’s notebook. Shockingly, it went as far back as January. I hadn’t even been under the impression that they’d even known each other, beyond maybe a wave from behind tinted windows at pickup or hellos at back to school night. My parents weren’t excessively involved in my life, as much as they wanted to pretend to be, so to them, I thought He was like a glorified nanny, someone who they were happy to hand me off to for rides and snacks.
Clearly, I was wrong, because in nearly every entry since January, my mom had written His name.
Here, from what I can gather, is a brief timeline of whatever they were.
January 10: The first meeting. She meets him while volunteering in the library after school. (Her notes: He’s a journalist, and I was so thrilled to be able to tell him I went to Medill. He won a Pulitzer for his reporting a few years back, maybe on Dick Cheney. Impressive. He’s tall and so hilarious!)
January 21: She can’t stop thinking about him, etc. She starts doing more of my pickups so they can have small talk while she waits for me. In hindsight, I had noticed that she started performing the mom role a little more diligently around this time. (He’s sexy, in a literary way!)
February 9: The first date. At a rock climbing gym. I was there, actually, I now realize. (We sat on a mat watching the kids scramble up the wall. I brought a picnic basket and a thermos of wine. I hoped it wouldn’t be weird, and it totally wasn't!) It was. (He let his leg fall against mine and it was electric. I’d forgotten what this feeling was like. Should I feel guilty for experiencing this while my daughter was in the same room? Probably, but I don’t right now). Not surprising.
February 28: My dad begins to catch on. (He’s suspicious. I think he can tell I need him less. And he found a receipt for two to-go coffees in my purse and asked me who the second one was for. I lied, I don’t remember the excuse. It doesn’t take much to pacify him. That’s kind of what I hate the most about him. He’s quiet and passive and angry but not angry enough or about the right things).
March 5: They have regular lunch dates, and she brings my brother along. Classy! (Is it bad that I keep handing Ben off on playdates so I can go downtown to meet him during his lunch hour?) Yes, it is. (Today I wasn’t able to, so I had to bring him. He’s two, it’s not like he knew what was going on. I got him a scone and he sat in the chair with his face barely peeking over the edge of the table, and drew stick figures in crayon. He rested his foot against my calf as he drank his iced coffee and I picked at my salad, too elated to eat).
Then, later that day, they had their first kiss. (And it really did feel like my first!) It happened at the park by the cafe while my brother was distracted by the swingset. (I love the freedom of anonymity downtown. I can be fully myself with him. I don’t have to answer to anyone else!) Not that she was very good at doing that, ever.
April 1: My dad knows, now. He saw a risky text, the contents of which I am lucky enough to not be privy to. My dad enters therapy (probably necessary, regardless of any infidelity). The email chainTM commences. This gloriously traumatic finding cracked the affair wide open for me, and my mom’s computer was added to my repertoire of snooping locales.
The emails took various forms. There was the master chain, with my mom, my dad, Him, and his wife, as they tried to sort through the shambles of their two marriages. The emails were surprisingly civil and bland, but no less interesting. It was odd to see adults interacting like confused children, forcing courteousness and admitting that they didn’t know what to do. (I didn’t yet know that adults never know what they’re doing, so this affected me). Most disappointing was an email from three months into the affair, from my dad to my mom with Him cc’d, telling her that she had permission to keep going on dates with Him until she figured out what she wanted to do.
(My fucking father. He had one job, which was to not give his wife his blessing to cheat on him, and he didn’t do it).
I stopped reading after this. It was too scary to think about what was going to happen, and besides, He was ruined for me. I can’t believe I ever found him special, it makes me sick.
My parents never broke up. They just continued to exist, quietly and casually unhappy. Or maybe not unhappy, just uninspired. I don’t care, as long as they stayed together. I didn’t want the trauma and effort of having to scare off potential stepparents, because there was no way in hell I was letting either of my parents bring that into my life. Especially not my mom, and especially not if she wanted to divorce my dad to keep dating Him. Which she probably could have, because he and his wife did get divorced. The wife moved across town, though, and Annabelle went to high school in the new neighborhood, so thankfully I didn’t have to devote effort into ignoring her past the end of middle school.
And then I forgot about him. That is, after sending ten anonymous hate letters to his house, scrawled in sharpie with cryptic messages of death, whispers of “man whore” (a term I’d just learned and was eager to put to use! And it was so fitting!). He didn’t know it was me, I don’t think. He never knew that I knew. My parents didn’t even know that I knew.
I forgot about him until eight years later, when I was waiting for a flight out of Newark, hungover and jittery with pre-flight panic. He approached me openly, and it was then that I realized how average he was. And short. Had he always been?
He walked up to me, and said, “Oh my god. What a coincidence.”
He was so mediocre, and he was staring at my tits. He really was a man whore, or maybe I just grew up to be exactly like my mother, I don’t know which is worse. I let out a pinched smile.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you—?” He pointed at the screen displaying my flight to Los Angeles.
“Yep.”
Unfortunately, he was on it too. It’s not that he was so odious, I thought, eyeing him as he lowered himself into the seat next to me. I just never needed to see him again. I’d already worked out whatever issues made me like him in the first place, by sleeping with the dad of some kids I used to babysit one night while his wife was out of town.
I turned to face slightly away from him, signaling that I’d had enough socializing. It was 7am.
“So what have you been up to?” He was ever the journalist, undeterred by my disinterest.
I mustered the energy to join the conversation. “College,” I said. “But now I’m going home for winter break.”
“How are your parents? I haven’t seen them in forever!” He gave me a goofy smile, which he dropped seconds later.
Yeah, I know, I thought.
“They’re fine,” I said.
He breezed past the niceties, clearly eager to start talking about himself.
“I’m coming back from Iraq,” he said proudly. “Layover in New York.”
I could tell he wanted me to ask him about it, and it seemed easier to oblige than to not.
“What were you doing there?” I asked, as flatly as possible.
“I was covering the situation in Mosul. I lived with my translator and some soldiers, and during the day they’d take me into parts of the city that had been liberated. I saw a car bomb go off, some gunfire, pretty heavy stuff.”
Heavy stuff. He sounded like a teenage boy trying to be deep, sensitive.
It actually was interesting, though, not that I’d tell him that. He was being insufferably braggy about it.
“Annabelle’s doing well,” he said, without preamble.
“That’s good,” I said.
“She’s in college too.” He told me, proudly. “USC.”
What did he want from me? My mom hadn’t even picked him, in the end. I’d friend-dumped his daughter. And it’s not like I was providing him with a scintillating conversational experience right now.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I looked him in the face and told him, “I know, you know. About you and my mom.” Then I got up and walked away.
Actually no, I didn’t do that, but a big part of me wishes I had. I just stayed quiet, and pretended I was getting a phone call, so I could avoid him until I could board the plane. Thankfully, we weren’t put near each other, and I saw him once more at the baggage claim in Los Angeles, and avoided his searching eye.
//AVA FERRY is a junior in Barnard College. She can be reached at [email protected].
He was a journalist and had written for Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times, not that I read either of them, but I guess it was impressive. He shook my hand and shielded his eyes from the late afternoon sun and then led me to a picnic table just out of view of the party. He lent me the tape recorder he used for work, so I could record our conversation, and we talked about how he cut his teeth in journalism covering the Bush-Gore election and paddled through the streets of New Orleans in a plastic baby pool during Katrina. He was conversational and charming, which I guess is necessary for a journalist, and when I listened to the tape later I was struck again by this fact—and also filled with shame listening to my own stuttering, juvenile voice. I dissected an awkward silence at 30:56 in my mind until I fell asleep.
But he was old—forties maybe—and I was young. Too young to have any business feeling anything for anyone, much less my best friend’s dad, which is who he was. And he didn’t invite me to do the interview at the park, I was there for the party because it was for a girl in his daughter’s and my class, and he stayed until we were done with cake and then let me interview him for my language arts assignment.
To say His daughter was my friend is generous. Annabelle was her name. At the start of eighth grade, she was the new kid, and she sauntered into our classroom with the sort of scrubbed, unblemished look only an only child can have. As the oldest of four, I generally made it a rule not to make friends with her sort, as they were spoiled and had an air of innocence, like they didn’t know how brutal life could be. At thirteen, I felt I understood the brutality of life quite well.
I fell into my friendship with her unintentionally; I guess because I realized that she was soft and pliable and she would let me message random men on her Instagram and play ding-dong-ditch on her neighbors. And her parents spoiled her, and by extension me, so our afternoons were peppered with snacks made fresh by her nanny and rides to gymnastics.
I eventually got bored of her and stopped responding to her texts. It was two months before eighth-grade graduation, six months after we first met. Not to be rude about it, but she had a small, circular mind. When we would go and stand in a group to talk to other kids at dances, she was always tugging on my dress asking, “wait, what?” She was always just missing the point. And she was so optimistic about how much she mattered. So I let her texts go unanswered until she gave up on me and then turned (and ran, if needed) away from her whenever she’d try to catch my eye in the hall at school, which is how I’ve ended every friendship since.
My infatuation with Him was probably one of the only reasons I even stuck it out for those six months. When he would pick us up from school and take us to gymnastics, I would sit in the back seat and put my scintillating wit on display, my eyes trained on the rearview mirror, so when he looked back at me, I could catch his eye. He always looked and laughed a lot. His eyes were sparkling; I know they were. What did it mean? Maybe it didn’t mean anything, because his wife was blonde and meek (their daughter took after her, which is unfortunate), but that’s what every guy wants, right?
I don’t really believe that. There was no way his wife had anything to offer. His face broke open with light when he saw me. In front of His daughter, too, even. If only fucking Annabelle would just leave us alone for five minutes.
___________________
Every once in a while, I would sneak my mom’s journal off the shelf behind our old photo albums. I found it once, accidentally, when I was looking for her weed, and I couldn’t help myself. After that, every few months when I was home alone, I’d flip through it, gulping down the entries ravenously and defensively, like a child whose plate might be snatched from their grasp at any moment. I didn’t feel like a bad person for it. My mom was a mystery to me, and this was my way of trying to understand her. But, to be honest, it made me hate her. She sounded so selfish, but I already knew that she was. Way too selfish to have four kids.
In April of my eighth grade year--after I had just dumped Annabelle out of boredom but would stand behind the fence at the pickup line and peek through the slats, hoping to see him when he came to get her-- I went on another journal expedition that crushed me. I guess there’s no other way to put it, because in the first entry I flipped to, I saw His name.
I flipped back through the journal to find the first mention of Him in my mom’s notebook. Shockingly, it went as far back as January. I hadn’t even been under the impression that they’d even known each other, beyond maybe a wave from behind tinted windows at pickup or hellos at back to school night. My parents weren’t excessively involved in my life, as much as they wanted to pretend to be, so to them, I thought He was like a glorified nanny, someone who they were happy to hand me off to for rides and snacks.
Clearly, I was wrong, because in nearly every entry since January, my mom had written His name.
Here, from what I can gather, is a brief timeline of whatever they were.
January 10: The first meeting. She meets him while volunteering in the library after school. (Her notes: He’s a journalist, and I was so thrilled to be able to tell him I went to Medill. He won a Pulitzer for his reporting a few years back, maybe on Dick Cheney. Impressive. He’s tall and so hilarious!)
January 21: She can’t stop thinking about him, etc. She starts doing more of my pickups so they can have small talk while she waits for me. In hindsight, I had noticed that she started performing the mom role a little more diligently around this time. (He’s sexy, in a literary way!)
February 9: The first date. At a rock climbing gym. I was there, actually, I now realize. (We sat on a mat watching the kids scramble up the wall. I brought a picnic basket and a thermos of wine. I hoped it wouldn’t be weird, and it totally wasn't!) It was. (He let his leg fall against mine and it was electric. I’d forgotten what this feeling was like. Should I feel guilty for experiencing this while my daughter was in the same room? Probably, but I don’t right now). Not surprising.
February 28: My dad begins to catch on. (He’s suspicious. I think he can tell I need him less. And he found a receipt for two to-go coffees in my purse and asked me who the second one was for. I lied, I don’t remember the excuse. It doesn’t take much to pacify him. That’s kind of what I hate the most about him. He’s quiet and passive and angry but not angry enough or about the right things).
March 5: They have regular lunch dates, and she brings my brother along. Classy! (Is it bad that I keep handing Ben off on playdates so I can go downtown to meet him during his lunch hour?) Yes, it is. (Today I wasn’t able to, so I had to bring him. He’s two, it’s not like he knew what was going on. I got him a scone and he sat in the chair with his face barely peeking over the edge of the table, and drew stick figures in crayon. He rested his foot against my calf as he drank his iced coffee and I picked at my salad, too elated to eat).
Then, later that day, they had their first kiss. (And it really did feel like my first!) It happened at the park by the cafe while my brother was distracted by the swingset. (I love the freedom of anonymity downtown. I can be fully myself with him. I don’t have to answer to anyone else!) Not that she was very good at doing that, ever.
April 1: My dad knows, now. He saw a risky text, the contents of which I am lucky enough to not be privy to. My dad enters therapy (probably necessary, regardless of any infidelity). The email chainTM commences. This gloriously traumatic finding cracked the affair wide open for me, and my mom’s computer was added to my repertoire of snooping locales.
The emails took various forms. There was the master chain, with my mom, my dad, Him, and his wife, as they tried to sort through the shambles of their two marriages. The emails were surprisingly civil and bland, but no less interesting. It was odd to see adults interacting like confused children, forcing courteousness and admitting that they didn’t know what to do. (I didn’t yet know that adults never know what they’re doing, so this affected me). Most disappointing was an email from three months into the affair, from my dad to my mom with Him cc’d, telling her that she had permission to keep going on dates with Him until she figured out what she wanted to do.
(My fucking father. He had one job, which was to not give his wife his blessing to cheat on him, and he didn’t do it).
I stopped reading after this. It was too scary to think about what was going to happen, and besides, He was ruined for me. I can’t believe I ever found him special, it makes me sick.
My parents never broke up. They just continued to exist, quietly and casually unhappy. Or maybe not unhappy, just uninspired. I don’t care, as long as they stayed together. I didn’t want the trauma and effort of having to scare off potential stepparents, because there was no way in hell I was letting either of my parents bring that into my life. Especially not my mom, and especially not if she wanted to divorce my dad to keep dating Him. Which she probably could have, because he and his wife did get divorced. The wife moved across town, though, and Annabelle went to high school in the new neighborhood, so thankfully I didn’t have to devote effort into ignoring her past the end of middle school.
And then I forgot about him. That is, after sending ten anonymous hate letters to his house, scrawled in sharpie with cryptic messages of death, whispers of “man whore” (a term I’d just learned and was eager to put to use! And it was so fitting!). He didn’t know it was me, I don’t think. He never knew that I knew. My parents didn’t even know that I knew.
I forgot about him until eight years later, when I was waiting for a flight out of Newark, hungover and jittery with pre-flight panic. He approached me openly, and it was then that I realized how average he was. And short. Had he always been?
He walked up to me, and said, “Oh my god. What a coincidence.”
He was so mediocre, and he was staring at my tits. He really was a man whore, or maybe I just grew up to be exactly like my mother, I don’t know which is worse. I let out a pinched smile.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you—?” He pointed at the screen displaying my flight to Los Angeles.
“Yep.”
Unfortunately, he was on it too. It’s not that he was so odious, I thought, eyeing him as he lowered himself into the seat next to me. I just never needed to see him again. I’d already worked out whatever issues made me like him in the first place, by sleeping with the dad of some kids I used to babysit one night while his wife was out of town.
I turned to face slightly away from him, signaling that I’d had enough socializing. It was 7am.
“So what have you been up to?” He was ever the journalist, undeterred by my disinterest.
I mustered the energy to join the conversation. “College,” I said. “But now I’m going home for winter break.”
“How are your parents? I haven’t seen them in forever!” He gave me a goofy smile, which he dropped seconds later.
Yeah, I know, I thought.
“They’re fine,” I said.
He breezed past the niceties, clearly eager to start talking about himself.
“I’m coming back from Iraq,” he said proudly. “Layover in New York.”
I could tell he wanted me to ask him about it, and it seemed easier to oblige than to not.
“What were you doing there?” I asked, as flatly as possible.
“I was covering the situation in Mosul. I lived with my translator and some soldiers, and during the day they’d take me into parts of the city that had been liberated. I saw a car bomb go off, some gunfire, pretty heavy stuff.”
Heavy stuff. He sounded like a teenage boy trying to be deep, sensitive.
It actually was interesting, though, not that I’d tell him that. He was being insufferably braggy about it.
“Annabelle’s doing well,” he said, without preamble.
“That’s good,” I said.
“She’s in college too.” He told me, proudly. “USC.”
What did he want from me? My mom hadn’t even picked him, in the end. I’d friend-dumped his daughter. And it’s not like I was providing him with a scintillating conversational experience right now.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I looked him in the face and told him, “I know, you know. About you and my mom.” Then I got up and walked away.
Actually no, I didn’t do that, but a big part of me wishes I had. I just stayed quiet, and pretended I was getting a phone call, so I could avoid him until I could board the plane. Thankfully, we weren’t put near each other, and I saw him once more at the baggage claim in Los Angeles, and avoided his searching eye.
//AVA FERRY is a junior in Barnard College. She can be reached at [email protected].