Olivia Wachtel
Ambassadors
As far as Clarissa was concerned, all Lydia had to do was sneak a peek at the outside of the toilet bowl. The base of a toilet spoke volumes—not everything, but certainly enough to judge the character of a boy living in a three-bedroom apartment with five people who had invited an intelligent, naive, horribly disorganized girl to eat spaghetti (probably the only dish he had learned to cook) at his place.
Nonetheless, Lydia only smirked at the suggestion. Clarissa held back a cutting remark. What was she supposed to do when someone couldn’t appreciate sound advice?
“Lydia,” Clarissa explained, slowly and without revealing the many, many misgivings fighting to raise her eyebrows at her niece. “The corners of a person’s home are an unfiltered glimpse of their character. Everyone knows that. If you see mold on the bathroom grout, or hair all over a duct grate, or—dear Lord—crumbs in the little silverware organizer trays, then you have your answer: he who cleans halfheartedly also lives, works, and loves halfheartedly.” It was honestly surprising Lydia had survived this long.
“Okay, Auntie C,” Lydia said, warmly pressing the smile out of her lips. “I appreciate it. Really. I’ll let you know how it goes tonight.”
Clarissa doubted that Lydia would take her advice, but there wasn’t much she could do. Which was exasperating, given how desperately Lydia needed it. she would plunge into anything, never taking a moment to assess the risks—risks which inevitably became plot points in Lydia’s long list of preventable mishaps. And while Clarissa would be the last person in the world to tell someone they were about to run their life into the ground, she would gently hint at it over coffee. It would’ve been cruel not to.
“How’s Simba?” Lydia asked.
Across the small cast-iron table, Lydia absently fidgeted with her necklace, spinning the kitschy wooden beads between her thumb and index finger.
“That cat and I are not on speaking terms,” said Clarissa, “and it’s really not worth discussing. He’s an old fart who refuses to see that I have other things to do with my life than opening another window for him at 3:00 am because he wants a different view. It’s really getting to be a problem.”
Again, Lydia smirked and nodded her head sympathetically. Clarissa could tell that Lydia had found a punchline in her crisis-of-cat and was trying not to laugh at her aunt’s misfortune. And yet again, Clarissa found herself wondering how a quick-witted girl like Lydia had such poor judgement in people. She had never learned that some people were incapable of changing—much less improving— even in her own intelligent, naïve, horribly disorganized hands. In middle school, Lydia had made cookies for the cruelest girl in class because the girl’s parents had clearly forgotten that there were three people involved in the divorce. Never mind the fact that the girl had mocked Lydia’s puppy folders in front of everyone. Lydia had gotten up at 4:00 so that she could bake the cookies before school and make sure they were warm for the girl. Then, there was the boy in high school who’d never had the forethought to shower or revise his remarks before they left his head. Every moment with him around had been a headache filled with a how-come-you-don’t-eat-pineapple-pizza, or your-aunt’s-cat-always-looks-mad-and-so-does-your-aunt-actually, or she-obviously-likes-you-do-you-like-her-back-or-what. When Clarissa had given the boy some tough but necessary pieces of advice, Lydia had cried. She’d said that his awkwardness was the product of sincerity, not malice. After that one, Lydia’s mother, Krystal, had told her that Lydia hadn’t slept the entire night afterwards. Of course, Clarissa had retorted that, if not for her intervention, Lydia would’ve been up all night anyway, nodding along to boy’s the unwanted and unending commentary. If all Krystal would do about the kid was chuckle, the responsibility to keep Lydia from being walked all over fell to Clarissa. And then, of course, there had been Rita. Clarissa really hadn’t had any qualms about Rita, other than the fact that she was allowed to kiss her niece, which, of course, was not prejudiced, only protective. From what she understood, the lesbians were a shifty bunch, which, of course, was not discriminatory if she used the information to keep Lydia safe. And hadn’t Rita left after Lydia had found that anonymous pair of underpants too big for either one of them, peeking out from beneath their bed? As far as Clarissa was concerned, that was shifty behavior. But, in the face of all that, here Lydia was, about to eat dinner with someone she barely knew, having no intentions to check the bathroom for red flags. It just made no sense.
The check came, and the two left the restaurant and strolled around the neighborhood, which was remarkably quiet for 7:30 on a Saturday morning. Didn’t these historic houses have people anxious to water their lawns or jog around the neighborhood in garish spandex with their hypo-allergenic dogs? Maybe that wasn’t fair, Clarissa thought. Maybe they had already left before dawn to go boating.
They walked in easy silence, Lydia humming softly to herself, then suddenly asking, “You know what I dreamt last night?”
“Sweetie, people look stupid asking questions they know the answers to. And, of course, you’re not stupid, so you really should keep that in mind.”
Lydia didn’t reply to this. She just launched into her story.
“Well, I was on this mountain. I think I was camping or something, but I forgot my bug spray, so all these bugs kept falling on me from the trees. At one point, a huge spider started running around on my leg, trying to suck my blood. I don’t know how I knew that, because I don’t think spiders actually suck blood—don’t they just bite?—but I was just freaking out that he would stick to me like a leach and never come off. Anyhow, then I was suddenly in France, but the spider was still on my leg, so I was just standing in this really fancy café, screaming and slapping my shin trying to kill this spider. And a waiter had to come out and tell me I needed to leave, which was so much worse than the spider, so I walked down the street, but by that time, the spider had found an opening in my sleeve or my shorts or something and I could feel if crawling around on my back, and I started screaming and ripping my clothes off, trying to find the spider. Do you think when you feel things in dreams, they link to something actually happening? Like, was that spider really just my hair or the corner of my sheets tickling my neck? I wonder if they have any studies on that. Anyway, by the end, I got it, but I suddenly realized I was in in the middle of the Louvre, with nothing on, and no idea where the bathroom was so I could hide! I tried to run away, but I got that thing, you know, where your feet won’t let you move fast enough in dreams? And then this person in a bear costume started laughing at me! And all I could think was, how did they let someone in a six-foot bear suit into this place, and how am I the one being laughed at right now?” Here, Lydia snickered again, “Isn’t that wild?”
“Were you... scared?” Clarissa asked. She wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was when someone finishes telling you a fragmented dream about spiders and accidentally stripping in France. As usual when Lydia told a story, Clarissa’s energy was reserved for pursing her lips and trying to keep up.
“Oh, terrified!” Lydia chirped, “I woke up sweating, thinking I was going to be arrested for streaking in a country where I couldn’t even speak the language!”
Clarissa wasn’t sure why such a ridiculous dream would be frightening. She thought back to her own dreams. In one, she had forgotten to refill Simba’s food and clean the litter for one morning, and he died of hunger and asphyxiation while she was at work. Everyone at the funeral whispered to each other that it’d been her fault. In another, she forgotten the name of one of the other substitute teachers, and the rest of them shunned her with silence in the lounge. Two nights ago, she’d dreamt that she was too exhausted to get up and set her alarms, so she’d slept through her entire breakfast with Lydia. She hadn’t been able to sleep at all after that one. People could say what they would, but as far as Clarissa was concerned, nightmares about the mundane were the most unsettling. With nightmares about crazed spiders and misplaced clothes, you knew none of it would happen (or, at least, not if you took the right precautions). But if you lost sense of what was real? No. Nobody had any business fiddling around with Clarissa’s grip on reality—not even her dreams.
She was broken from her thoughts by the sound of something scraping against dry skin. She looked over to see Lydia picking ferociously at the corner of one of her thumbs, all the while swinging her arms in time with her legs. It was a scabbed callous, and when Lydia scraped further with her fingernail, the skin cracked open along the side and a little sticky cranberry started bubbling out of the wound.
“Lydia! What are you doing?”
It went without saying that Clarissa was appalled. She wanted to say it anyway. Lydia looked down at her hand and raised her eyebrows on seeing the gob of blood now trickling under the nail and onto the other side of her finger.
“Oh, whoops!” she said, as she reached down and wiped the gore on her leggings. Apparently unable to sit still, her fingers curled around one another, releasing a volley of pops and cracks. Clarissa held back the strong urge to vomit.
“I know, I know,” Lydia smirked, “hygiene is the ambassador of first impressions. But isn’t this more hygienic than the nail biting? Think of how much bacteria I used to get in my mouth! Not to mention whatever chemicals and crud my nails had picked up throughout the day.”
Clarissa shuddered. Expectations were at an all-time low if they were setting nail biting as a legitimate standard.
“And think how much more hygienic it would be to stop scalping all of your fingers.” In fact, after a few sidelong glances, Clarissa was alarmed to see that all of Lydia’s fingers were missing varying degrees of skin, some with tips red from burgeoning sores, some with jagged troughs where hangnails had been. Twenty years old and still skinning her fingers. Good God.
“What time is the boy picking you up?” Clarissa circled back to avoid any discussion of the skin peeling. It was a hopeless cause.
“Oh, no, I’m just going over there. It doesn’t really make sense for him to drive to my place and back.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Clarissa lilted. It was hard to sound sincere through a clenched jaw.
She knew that Lydia was very attached to the idea of an “even playing field” between all genders—or haphazard justification of male ineptitude, as Clarissa said—but good Lord, making a girl drive herself to a date where she could only expect some noodles and canned marinara? There’s a statement for you. But Lydia was all about statements. When she had been in high school, she’d tried for three months straight to get Clarissa to read Sylvia Plath’s journals, talking for hours about how the writer wasn’t afraid to go there in terms of personal vulnerability and sexual preferences. Clarissa had no problem with bold statements, much less any fear about going there, so she humored Lydia. But after about 100 pages journal entries going there, Clarissa did not understand why she wasn’t allowed to just stay at a rest stop along the way while the rest of the world went there if they wanted. There had to be some nice B&B past the patriarchal, Eurocentric canon Lydia so hated but before the place where an author gets to fetishize rape. No, she was not afraid to go there; she just wouldn’t go there to prove a point. This whole business with Lydia driving herself was just more of the same.
Obviously, Clarissa was all for women’s rights—for God’s sake, she had lived on her own for forty-one of her fifty-eight years. She had never owed anything to anyone, except Simba, who really just got whatever he wanted because that was easier than suffering the consequences of upsetting him. Obviously, Clarissa would be the last to resist women being financially independent. But at this rate, what was stopping girls from having to pay for dinner? Sure, Lydia’s date tonight didn’t involve food anyone would pay for, but it was the principle of the thing. The more Lydia talked to Clarissa about “even playing fields,” the more everything sounded like “split the gas money.”
Regardless, Lydia didn’t seem to share any of Clarissa’s reservations about the date. Apparently, Lydia had made less progress than Clarissa thought earlier this morning. Lydia had said was that she “wasn’t sure how she felt about him” yet—which to any reasonable person meant she didn’t trust him. But there was also a chance Lydia had only been referring to their “emotional compatibility”—the ability to feign interest in the same things—and not skepticism over his well-timed awkwardness that always had a charming conclusion. Clarissa gave the relationship six months.
They continued their usual route around the town, the scent of the gnarled oak trees cutting through the sporadic October wind.
“Mm, don’t you love fall?” Lydia asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet as they walked.
“If I didn’t, they would’ve burned me at the stake by now.”
She wasn’t entirely kidding. The pumpkin worshipers were really starting to worry her.
“My poetry professor wants us to focus on change and transition this month. You know, leaves turning and all that stuff. She’s having us free-write in a notebook, starting at the back, so the binding is on the right and you have to write on the right page before the left! It’s supposed to get you out of your comfort zone, which it totally does! Isn’t that a great concept? You just have to write everything that comes to mind, as soon as you open it. Ooh, you know what, you should do it with me! We can do stream of conscience for the first ten minutes of breakfasts, and then compare notes!”
With a start, Clarissa realized that she was dangerously close to one of Lydia’s “it’ll be fun” ideas—which were really “it’ll raise Clarissa’s blood pressure” conspiracies. Not that any of Lydia’s propositions were too much for Clarissa to handle. Clarissa just preferred not to run up the wrong escalator, or decide in the middle of the store to buy cupcake decorating materials even though they weren’t on the list, or set up an unlicensed lemonade business soliciting customers on a Sunday morning, in full view of the authorities. And Clarissa had said as much to her doctor. Clarissa did not panic. Her heart might beat the spots below her ears with projectile red-blood cells, and she might find herself back home with no memory of the drive, and she might have the nagging feeling that she would vomit up her lungs, piece by piece, if she didn’t figure out how to breathe in enough air to push them back into place, but all of these were symptomatic of organ malfunction, not an overreaction to some non-threat. She had done her research. She had also found a new doctor.
“Lydia, don’t be ridiculous. Just because your instructor is running out of ways to stay interesting does not mean I want to humor her.”
Lydia sighed spasmodically through her nose, trying and failing to conceal her amusement.
“And just because you’re too chicken doesn’t mean you have to pawn off the blame on my professor,” Lydia said.
Clarissa knew Lydia was baiting her. She also knew it usually worked. But that didn’t change the fact that she was right about the professor. Writing in a notebook backwards? Who is desperate enough to think of it and cruel enough to require it?
“Auntie C, have you ever done anything without thinking about it for at least three days?”
Good God, what kind of question was that?
“No. People who live like that don’t own their houses, or have the funds to go out to breakfast every weekend, or grow their own catnip.”
The wind had abated for a bit and Clarissa heard her own breath, syncopated unharmoniously with Lydia’s, like two car blinkers at a red light that are so close to being in perfect rhythm. As they continued, Clarissa spotted an empty plastic tub—she supposed it was supposed to be a bottle, but given the size, it qualified as either—of vodka discarded onto the sidewalk. She picked it up with one of the tissues in her purse. It was between touching something with someone else’s saliva and bacteria on it and leaving it there to eventually blow off into the street and remaining in some park until it decomposed in 15,000 years.
“Auntie C, can I ask you something?” Lydia’s voice had suddenly become serious, with that quaver at the end of the sentence that she always had when she was afraid to say the wrong thing or make the right thing sound wrong. Clarissa heard her shoe crunch a stray leaf, and she winced. She knew leaves didn’t have feelings, but she was also not thrilled at the prospect of leaf crumbs following her onto the floor mats in her car.
“Hon, what did we say about asking questions with self-evident answers?”
Clarissa could not imagine what had caused Lydia’s sudden shift in tone, but she prayed to any powers that be hanging around the chilly morning sidewalk that Lydia wasn’t about to launch into one of her disarming, embarrassing slew of questions. When Lydia was little, she had asked Clarissa why she didn’t have any grandparents. Clarissa hadn’t been able to answer for a whole thirty seconds. How had Krystal not told her? Sure, Lydia was only seven then, but if it had started when Krys was three and a half, how had she not educated Lydia, if not about the details, at least about the dangers of life? Clarissa had told Lydia, “Don’t be silly. Of course you have grandparents. Everyone has them, unless they’re dead, I suppose. Yours just don’t visit. They’re not nice people.”
Not nice people. Such an understatement, it seemed laughable, and Clarissa had the rising urge to burst into breathy giggles. How did you convey to a seven-year-old the image of walking into your bedroom for a forgotten stuffed animal to find your little sister, face streaked and contorted in silence, the adhesive straps of her pull-ups straining to contain his veiny hand? How did you describe the mix of nausea and numbness you had when trying to reconcile that scene with the twinkling eyes that made him so charming to the other families, to the teachers, and, somehow, to yourself? When Krystal had dropped off Lydia before work, Clarissa had had not been prepared to tell a seven-year-old with heart and eyes as large as Lydia’s that, when an adult says “Because I wasn’t fucking doing anything,” you have to take the other child’s hand and claw and kick and run for as long as it takes, until the distance makes it seem like he’s not still saying it.
“But,” Lydia had persisted, “then how come Miss Allison says grandmas and grandpas always buy hot fudge sundaes every Sunday at McDonalds, just because they think it sounds funny? Do they not like me? Miss Allison says her grandma doesn’t get any sundaes for her Dad because she doesn’t think he’s good enough for Miss Allison’s Mom. Do Grandma and Grandpa think I’m not good enough for Mom? I was real good last week when Mom had a vertigo all day. . . I made her tea and a cheese sandwich and took her temperature and tried not to talk too loud or too long. She even said we could go get milkshakes this weekend because I was such a good doctor!”
Clarissa had made a note to speak to Lydia’s babysitter about appropriate boundaries and not assuming everyone lived life the way Miss Allison did. Really, didn’t she realize after three years that Lydia’s grandparents were scrubbed from portraits, family holidays, and conversation? Caught thus off guard, Clarissa had not felt up to the task of explaining further—and anyhow, this could not possibly have been the responsibility of the sister who had very pointedly and determinedly had no kids. So she had merely distracted: “Well, do you want a hot fudge sundae?” despite the fact that it was bordering on obscene to give a child ice cream at eleven on a Friday morning. Lydia had been chipper the rest of the afternoon. She had told Clarissa all about the “little dears” in her class—Clarissa made a note to get that girl some books besides Anne of Green Gables—children whose contentment, even at that terribly young age, Lydia had made her responsibility. And the remainder of the day had been filled with so many pirates and volcanos and witches that there was no room left for grandparents or questions. Now, though, Lydia’s voice, suspended on the crisp afternoon air, dragged Clarissa unceremoniously back into reality.
“You know that you’re allowed to ask for things, right? Like, you know, I love that you keep me safe and always know what do, and you’re really good at all of that, but, I guess I just want to make sure you know, like, you don’t have to live in some kind of vacuum. Like, people can help you and protect you too. I mean, it’s not weak. Not that you think it is weak. But if you do, it’s not, and you, God, do you know what I’m trying to say?”
Clarissa felt her lungs begin the process of climbing up her esophagus even though they knew full well they’d get stuck again. She thought about commenting on Lydia’s ungodly amount of filler words. Or the fact that she knew very well what people were and were not capable of, and that for all of Lydia’s well-meaning nosiness, she was still thirty-nine years short of experiences in this conversation.
Instead, she just said, “I think so. Thank you, hon.”
Lydia nodded again and out of the corner of her eye Clarissa saw her hands fiddling with the beads on her necklace again.
“Okay, how about this? I’ll do the existential writing in my notebook, and you can make your lists in yours. But you have to fill it back to front. Period.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay, that’s fine! Also, I forgot to mention, I’m busy every Saturday for the next three weeks, so we’re going to have to reschedule breakfast.”
Lydia was becoming entirely too much like her mother. What kind of niece gives her aunt an ultimatum? It was ridiculous. Clarissa wouldn’t stand for it. They would finish their walk in silence, and that was that.
“Fine. But the notebook will be very small and only used for a very limited number of grocery lists.”
Lydia clapped her hands, just like she used to when she was little and she got Simba to brave her over-zealous petting or when she got Clarissa to spin around with her arms out to see how heavy and tingly her fingertips got.
“Would you look at that? My schedule just opened up!”
As they continued to walk, Clarissa could feel Lydia beaming at the fall air around them. It was really quite aggravating. The girl had won, and gloating was simply untasteful. They walked on in easy silence, Lydia occasionally mentioning how she had found a silver dollar on the sidewalk the other day, or noting how funny a squirrel looked when it realized they were watching him burry an acorn and then scurried away, having difficulty getting across the street with the sizeable acorn dragging from his small mouth. Clarissa nodded, silent save for the occasional comment, until they arrived back at the diner parking lot. Lydia paused to give the usual goodbye-wave, when Clarissa briskly bent her arms around Lydia’s slight shoulders, patted her back three times, like she’d seen Lydia do with Krystal when they’d finished moving Lydia into her dorm the first time, and quickly stepped back. The wind was picking up and it made her nose threaten to run and her eyes sting at the corners.
“Well, then, I’ll see you next week,” she said with a short nod.
Lydia’s eyes were entirely too wide and glistening and crinkled from her smile for Clarissa to feel anything but uncomfortable. She turned and opened her car door, blinking the crisp air from her eyes but failing to keep the ridiculous, bubbly sensation from tickling the corners of her mouth as she scraped the leaf bits off the bottoms of her shoes and thought about the best route to the stationary store.
In the Beginning
The problem is that I want to write about the lightness.
The problem is that I get so weightless, I come-to, head split against the moon.
The problem is that I see a prism and lines about shaved ice and resurrection quickly turn to sea monsters.
Throw all that out.
Baby, bathwater, everything.
The beginning is the smell of cinnamon.
The beginning is Mom singing Nora Jones and making cocoa after saucer sledding.
The beginning is lying still on the floor, listening to the shadows of the oak leaves on the wall.
About Olivia
Olivia Wachtel is a senior English major at Kent State University with minors in creative writing and psychology. Her work has previously been published in Brainchild magazine and Luna Online, and she is thrilled to be featured in this issue of Folio. In addition to writing, she enjoys long drives, early mornings, and meeting new people. Upon graduation, she hopes to attend graduate school for speech-language pathology. To keep up with her work, follow her on Instagram @owachtel or on Twitter @olliewachtel3.