This Is Not a Love Song Read online

  “You have got to try this,” Kirsten said, pushing a paper plate toward Edina. “You’ll love it.” Whatever smell of cinnamon or caramelized sugar had emanated from the pie when it was fresh from the oven had long since dissipated. Edina pictured the bakers combing the orchard for apples, finding a few that were barely ripe, then rounding out the recipe with whatever they could find on the ground. Kirsten drew a line through the center with a short plastic knife and began sawing at the scalloped crust.

  “Perhaps later.” Edina swallowed hard. She saw Kirsten steal a look at Vitas.

  “Come on,” she said, her voice the singsong lilt that adults used with reluctant children. “You’ll love it.”

  Edina extracted a pea-size morsel from the crust—more a biopsy than a bite. She examined it, noting the grit of the sugar, before popping it into her mouth. Kirsten’s eyes were wide, expectant.

  “It’s good,” Edina said. She knew that she was being too sour, too obviously displeased with the whole idea of sitting across from Kirsten eating a pie that made her stomach turn, so she pasted on a smile—more for Vitas’s benefit than Kirsten’s. She didn’t know which depressed her more: that she was a forty-eight-year-old woman competing for the attentions of a man or that she was doing so against an Olympic-caliber flirt like Kirsten.

  “Are sure is good?” Vitas said to Edina. “Look like is eating something poison.” There it was: sumzing. It was charming—Vitas’s brutal pronunciations, his tight-fisted grip on Slavic grammar—although Edina was disappointed in herself for thinking so. She took pride in her English, her fluent control of its ridiculous rules and inexplicable pronunciations, and before meeting Vitas had considered the headlong abuse of any language to be a failure of self-discipline or a sign of sloppiness.

  “Everybody eat up,” Kirsten said when each of them had a paper plate of mangled pie. Edina blew into her hands and rubbed them together, her pale fingers ashen, her nails purple.

  Vitas drew out the flask and held it poised over the table. “Edina,” he said, “this put feeling back in fingers, toes, ears, hair—everywhere.” He poured a splash into her cider, then topped off his cup and Kirsten’s.

  Kirsten bolted her drink in a single swallow. Vitas roared with laughter and refilled her cup while Edina pushed the fragments of pie around her plate and sipped the cocktail of cider and vodka. In the far corner of the room she spotted some kind of outdated farm machinery—a scooped metal seat perched above crabbed fingers of bent steel. Edina could only guess how the contraption worked: Pulled behind a tractor? Dragged by a mule or ox? Her father and grandfather were doctors; she was at home with stainless steel and sterile surfaces but not with the rust-furred implements of farming. These were causes of injury and infection. These were the reasons why people came to see doctors.

  Edina turned her head and sniffed at her shoulder. She could still smell the orchard, and she wanted to know if the scent hung in the air, or only in memory, or if it had penetrated the fabric of her coat.

  “Does something smell funny?” Kirsten said.

  “No, it’s nothing,” Edina said, quietly cursing Kirsten for noticing and cursing herself for giving Kirsten something to notice. Kirsten’s eyes were trained on her, as harsh as bare bulbs. “It’s just that smell in the orchard. It…lingers.”

  “You mean that sticky apple smell?” Kirsten’s face lit up. “I totally know what you mean. It’s so, I don’t know—memorable. I took this psych class in college, and we talked about how smell is the sense that’s most closely linked to memory, how certain smells can bring back these super-intense feelings in a way that hearing a voice or seeing a picture never can.” She sipped her vodka, her eyes darting from Vitas to Edina over the rim of the cup. Kirsten had eyes like a china doll’s: bright, almost luminous, and shot through with radiant splinters of brown glass. “This is going to sound crazy,” she said, leaning into the table, “but I swear that smell always makes me think of the first time I had sex.”

  Edina almost dropped her cup. It was just as she had told Vitas: She’s always looking for an excuse to talk. And the girl will say anything! While Edina stiffened in her seat, Vitas slapped the table and let loose another bark of laughter. At the next table, a man and a woman were parceling out doughnut halves to three red-cheeked boys. In the warmth of the café, snot ran freely from their noses. The children flinched, their hands frozen in mid-grasp at the sound of Vitas’s laugh. Unaware and undeterred, Vitas clapped his hands like cymbals. “First love!” he said.

  “I wouldn’t call it love,” Kirsten said. “I mean, at the time, sure—I was crazy about him. But I think I was just crazy, you know, the way you are when you’re seventeen.”

  “Seventeen.” Vitas rolled the word around in his mouth like hard candy, his eyes scanning the rafters high above. “Is crazy, crazy time.”

  Edina hoped that Kirsten’s story would end there, with each of them silently contemplating the conjunction of sex and seventeen. Edina raised her cup to her lips. At seventeen, she had just started university. She was finally away from home and eager for the life she had always imagined was awaiting her in Sarajevo. But as the vodka slid down Edina’s throat, Kirsten broke the silence.

  “It was around this time of year,” she said, “but up in Wisconsin. That’s where I’m from. It’s the state above Illinois. There’s a lot of trees and hills up there; it’s not flat like it is around here.” She sipped once from her cup, then finished it off with a gulp.

  “So anyway, there was this big Halloween party that my high school threw at one of the orchards outside Madison. There was music, hayrides, a big bonfire. Wait—” Kirsten swiveled her head from Vitas to Edina. “Do you guys know what Halloween is?”

  They nodded.

  “Just stop me if I say something that doesn’t make sense,” Kirsten said. Edina wanted to catch Vitas’s eye, but she saw that he was already looking straight at her, one eyebrow raised, warning her: Don’t be so mean. He twisted the top off the flask and poured a shot into Kirsten’s cup. “I’m never sure how much you know about American culture,” Kirsten said, “and I don’t want to presume that of course you know what Halloween is or where Wisconsin is. Okay?” Kirsten’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes glowing. She scanned their faces, ready for questions about local customs and Midwestern geography. Then she raised her cup, winked at Vitas, and downed the contents.

  “So there was this big Halloween party, and there must have been two or three hundred kids there. I was a junior—that means third year of high school—and I was hanging out with this guy Todd, who was a senior and on the football team. He wasn’t the quarterback or anything—”

  She looked again from Edina to Vitas. “The quarterback is the big star on the football team. He’s the one who throws the ball.” She cocked her arm as if about to throw a perfect spiral. “Todd wasn’t even that good, but he was cute and nice and whatever. It was high school.” Vitas sipped from his cup and nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation of her attraction to Todd.

  “He had swiped a bottle of peppermint schnapps from his parents’ liquor cabinet, and we were doing shots straight from the bottle. We’d hooked up a bunch of times, but we hadn’t done it. I could tell he wanted to, but I think he was a virgin too so he wasn’t too smooth.”

  “Poor Todd,” Vitas said, shaking his head. “Is all the time wondering, When, Kirsten? When?”

  “Hold your horses,” she said, “I’m getting to that part. So anyway, the party was supposed to end at eleven, and by ten o’clock couples were disappearing into the orchard. Todd said we should go for a walk, look at the stars, that sort of thing, and I was like, Sure. The moon was out and it was a pretty warm night for October—we call it Indian summer, I don’t know why. Anyway, it was hard to find a spot with a little privacy because every time you went to sit down under a tree there’d be two people totally going at it, and you’d be like, Whoops, sorry.”

  Kirsten was speaking more quickly, her words starting to slu
r. Edina had counted three shots from the vodka bottle since they sat down in the café, plus whatever Kirsten had had during the walk from the orchard—her lips where Edina’s had been, tasting the sharp metal before the rush of vodka. As if reading Edina’s mind, Kirsten nudged her cup closer to the flask, asking for a refill.

  “So Todd and I are making out and blah-blah-blah and when he unbuttons my jeans I just think, Why not? I mean, there was more going through my head than that, but I liked him a lot and I did want to do it. I don’t know. I’m sure the schnapps helped.

  “So anyway, that smell. Todd’s on top of me, and there’s nowhere I can go that I don’t have about a dozen apples poking me in the back. And that smell—rotten, but also kinda sweet—is everywhere. So I’m squirming around like crazy, which Todd probably thinks is because he’s such a superstud, but really I was just trying to find a spot that was halfway comfortable.” At the next table, the mother loudly gathered cups and shot acid-laced glances at Kirsten’s back while the father pulled mittens over his sons’ sugar-coated fingers.

  “Lucky for me things didn’t last very long. Like I said, Todd wasn’t exactly Mr. Lover Man. Then on the way back to the fire, Todd let me wear his letter jacket, which I thought was sweet of him, but for the rest of the night I was pulling these mashed-up pieces of apple out of my hair, and it took like three showers to get rid of that smell. All in all, I guess it was pretty gross.”

  “Poor Todd,” Vitas said. “So much to learn.”

  “Poor Todd!” Kirsten rapped Vitas on the arm, her face a full-lipped pout. “Todd turned out to be a jerk. Two weeks later he hooked up with a cheerleader.”

  Edina checked her watch. She was starting to think that it didn’t matter when they returned to Evanston, because she had a pretty clear idea of Vitas’s plans for the night. Maybe she had been missing the signs all along, and today was just another bead in a string of drinks and jokes and flirting and more. Was this something Kirsten would have eventually told Edina all about on one of those mornings when she slouched in her doorway? Was this the story that a single question would have unlocked? Kirsten and Vitas: hooking up, making out, doing it, blah-blah-blah.

  Edina gulped from her cup. What did she care if Kirsten and Vitas met every day for lovers’ trysts? As long as they didn’t interfere with her work, what did she care? Before today, she had barely thought of Vitas at all. He was that loud, crazy Lithuanian who was rarely in the office. He was always out “making interviews,” as he called it, or stampeding the others to a bar. Soon she would be back in Sarajevo, back in her apartment, back at her job, doing all of the little things that kept life moving: making sure the magazine got to the printer on time; writing updates on the “Bosnian situation” for a variety of well-meaning and largely ignored NGOs; organizing panels to discuss displaced persons, civil society, right of return. A friend of hers had once said that Edina didn’t have a career, she had an addiction—but it was an addiction that gave shape to her life.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Kirsten said, turning to Edina. With the way Kirsten could spin innocuous observations into questions, every word out of her mouth was a land mine. If Edina was quiet, then she must be thinking, and if something was worth thinking—Kirsten’s philosophy seemed to be—then it was worth saying. Out loud. And preferably to a group of near-total strangers.

  “So what’s on your mind?” Kirsten said.

  “Nothing really.” She couldn’t help looking for Vitas’s hands. One was on the table, cradling his cup, the other—the one closest to Kirsten—under the table. Unaccounted for.

  “Nothing at all?” Kirsten said, slurring nothing into nussing.

  “Nothing.” Edina sharpened her pronunciation. She tried to make the word sound flatly Midwestern, but it came out loud and hard. Another word from her dictionary loomed: brusque.

  “What about last night?” Kirsten said. She had invited Edina to join them for drinks after work, but Edina had said that she already had plans. “Did you do anything fun?”

  “Nothing special.” Edina’s fingernails inscribed half-moons into the soft flesh of her palms.

  “Did you go out?”

  “Outside? No, it was too damp.”

  “But did you go out-out—you know, to a restaurant or a bar or a club?”

  “Do you mean to discos?” She shook her head. “No, that’s not for me.”

  “You know, that’s really funny,” Kirsten said. “Nobody says disco anymore.”

  “I was not trying to make a joke,” Edina said.

  “I just think it’s a funny word: disco. You know, like in the seventies.”

  Edina looked up at Kirsten, expressionless. “It is just a word,” she said. “I have never thought of it as funny before.”

  “Edina,” Vitas chided her, “is not interrogation. Is two friends, talking.”

  “No, forget it,” Kirsten said, raising her cup to her lips. “I told you she was like this.” Edina was struck by how suddenly emotion rewrote the girl’s features—one second, eyes lolling drunkenly in her head; the next, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes brimmed with hot tears.

  “Like what?” Edina tried to sound innocent, even oblivious, but Kirsten’s words burned with their suggestion of intimacy—of inside jokes and shared opinions. I told you she was like this.

  “Like what?” Kirsten said, incredulous. “Like this!” She spit out the words. Her fingers were splayed, as if she were dumping two months of snubs, audible sighs, and indiscreetly rolled eyes back into Edina’s lap. “You never want to tell me anything about who you are, or what you do, or what you like.”

  Edina swallowed hard, clearing the burr from her throat. “There isn’t much to tell.”

  “There must be something.” Sump-thin; now the girl was really butchering her own language.

  “There’s nothing,” Edina said defensively, almost apologetically. “Just life.”

  “Just life is plenty!” Kirsten said. “But you won’t tell me anything. You won’t even be nice to me.”

  This was all a joke, wasn’t it? You silly girl, she wanted to say. She had seen this look before, on the face of her four-year-old niece, sulking because Auntie Edina wouldn’t read her one more bedtime story! But as her eyes darted from Vitas back to Kirsten, she saw that he agreed with the girl. Hadn’t he been saying the same thing in the orchard? And now Edina had to say something, sumzing, sump-thin to end the brutal silence—to show that she wasn’t the monster. She wished that she did have a secret double life; at least she’d have something to say. The truth was far more mundane.

  Since coming to Chicago, she’d spent a lot of time in her apartment.

  She walked by the lake, which some days was soft and gray as old flannel and others as green and whitecapped as a shattered windshield.

  She wrote her father long letters. She was his only daughter, and he complained that the apartment they shared in Sarajevo was too quiet and there were few distractions to help him pass the time—just the cat, his medical journals, and the bootleg CDs of Bartók and Prokofiev that Edina had bought from the street vendors.

  On weekends she rode the El south to Belmont and then bounced back north on the Brown Line to Lincoln Square, where stout matrons lined up at the butcher for cevapcici and where a man from Banja Luka made pizzas topped with spicy wedges of sudak.

  But this wasn’t what Kirsten had waited so long to hear: that Edina was homesick and spent far too much time moping—time she knew she’d regret when she was back home, besieged by office deadlines and her father’s questions about where she was, when she was coming home, and what she was making for dinner.

  “Kirsten, I do like you,” Edina said, dragging the words out of her throat. For a split second she thought about patting Kirsten’s hand, even giving it a firm squeeze.

  “No,” Kirsten said, her eyes hard and bright as mica. “You don’t. And you’ve had this black cloud hanging over you all day. If spending time with the rest of us makes you so miserable, the
n why did you even come?”

  Kirsten was pressing her advantage, and Edina felt her patience drying up. “If I had known about the change of plans, perhaps I would have stayed at home.”

  “So now you hate apple-picking too?” Vitas put a hand on Kirsten’s shoulder, the hand that had been beneath the table, and murmured into her ear. She swatted at him. “I don’t want to calm down! I want to know what her problem is.”

  “My problem?” Edina said. Blood burned in her face, scouring out the last traces of embarrassment and leaving behind a core of vivid anger. “You want to know what my problem is? You want to know what’s on my mind? I’ll tell you. That rotten-apple smell—the one that reminds you of Halloween parties and sex with the quarterback—”

  “Todd wasn’t the quarter—”

  Edina cut her short with a look she hoped was withering. She sat back abruptly, her fingers tented over her nose. She took a deep breath and told herself to be calm, to take it slowly, not to let it get away from her.

  “We had a war,” she said finally, looking directly at Kirsten, “before you were born. When the fighting started, everyone I knew said we would be safe. There was a garrison of the Yugoslav army in our town, and the new Bosnian president said that they would protect us from the militias. He believed that the soldiers would follow his orders. Of course that’s not what happened.

  “We had heard the rumors about the camps, but it didn’t seem possible. This was Europe; things like that didn’t happen anymore. Then one day we heard on the radio that the Serbs were coming. We had a day, maybe two to prepare. Most of the people were packing, preparing to go to Tuzla or one of the other safe areas, but a group of us refused to go. We just couldn’t believe this was happening. This was our home. We were building a new country.” Edina lifted her cup. The vodka was like a spark in her throat.

  “The Serbs came in the morning, ready to liberate the town from the Turks. That’s what they called us—what they called anyone who wasn’t one of them. When we saw that they were riding in Yugoslav army trucks, we realized that no one was going to protect us. There were so many of them, and what did we have? A few old guns, some hunting rifles—and we weren’t soldiers. All we were was young.” Kirsten was leaning forward, her eyes wide. “I was your age, Kirsten. I had just graduated from university. I wanted to be a poet.” Edina’s cup was empty, and she waited as Vitas refilled it. After he screwed the top back on the flask, he folded his hands heavily on the table.