Comfortable by Lauren Freeze

Whenever she has nights like this, dinners like this with Jake, Georgia thinks about something her friend Allison had said their junior year of college. She had gone out to dinner with Allison and a bunch of other girls, to a crappy Mexican place next to a gas station that served cheap margarita pitchers. The tacky sombreros and Mexican flag decorations that should have been pathetic were at the time vastly entertaining. They provoked a laughter in the group of glistening, tube-topped girls that echoed with their bold self assurance, covering a feeling of confidence, an excited ease in the guaranteed brightness of their futures. It was a laughter that had nothing to do with the actual state of the establishment or the furtive observant eyes of the various servers and family members who owned and worked the restaurant. That night they had laughed in a way Georgia hasn’t laughed in a while. Like most weekend nights Jake had been out drinking with his buddies from the football team. He was with his friends and she was with hers, and both of them were perfectly comfortable having each other resting at the familiar distance of speed dial #1 on their phones. As Georgia’s friends ordered pitcher after pitcher of margaritas the night had started to feel like somewhat of a blur. But she remembered when Allison, next to her in the red plastic booth, had nudged her and leaned into her ear.

“If I ever turn into one of those women,” here she had gestured with her head towards a middle aged couple sitting at a table not far from theirs, “shoot me.” She laughed and flipped her bangs towards Georgia before reaching for her cup and turning back to the discussion on whether visible thongs were actually a turn-on or turn-off. Georgia was still then. Her eyes had lingered on the couple across the room. They were somewhat non-descript, not attractive or unattractive, nothing extraordinary, not even a definitive age category. But they sat together at the small two-person table with the candle and fake rose in between them acting like they were on separate continents. Not a single word had been exchanged, and Georgia couldn’t say she’d even seen them make eye contact. Yet their wedding rings, and the way he had automatically, wordlessly taken his lemon wedge out of his water glass and put in hers at the beginning of the meal, spoke of a history and a familiarity she had understood all too well.

Two years later, sitting at a table across from Jake, she can’t remember if they’ve spoken a single word to each other since they got to the restaurant. But he has transferred the pickle from his plate to hers without asking. He has picked the tomato slices from the top of her salad and positioned them in between the meat and bun of his burger, knowing without thinking about it that was what she wanted him to do. She looks at her tomatoes on his burger and something tightens in her chest. She looks down at her cup as she stirs her water with her straw, watching tiny bubbles, watching ice cubes, not watching the man sitting in front of her because she knows what she’ll see but she doesn’t know how she’ll feel.

“What’s wrong?” Jake’s voice cuts into her thoughts and she blinks, her eyes shifting up and refocusing on the face across from her. Her eyes roam the features she could close her eyes and see. Hazel eyes under short, spiky lashes, slightly prominent brow with dark thick brows, long nose (elegant nose, her coworker had commented over Jake’s picture the other day, Georgia hadn’t thought it was particularly elegant, but hadn’t known how to say that without sounding negative), wide mouth with a slightly top heavy lip. She looks at that lip and remembers tenth grade, when they first started dating, how much time she had spent thinking about that mouth. Her stomach was always electric as she bent towards the mirror, seeing Jake instead of her own reflection as she leaned in and placed her lips against the cool glass. It feels like a million years ago to her. Now there is a small glob of mustard on the side of his lip and her stomach feels heavy and unresponsive.

“Wipe your mouth, Jake,” she says in a voice that feels too much like a mother’s. He wipes his napkin across his mouth and raises his eyebrow, asking silently if he got it. “You’re fine,” she says as she turns her eyes back to her plate and stabs a piece of lettuce.

“So are you going to tell me what’s bugging you or what?” He holds his napkin still crumpled in his hand, fisted on the table.

“Nothing’s bugging me.” She answers, raising her eyes to his. He knows this isn’t true, knows he doesn’t even need to ask, knows she is thinking she has a decision to make. She knows he knows this. She also knows that he thinks her decision is inevitable, that her doubt is a phase. It feels strange to her to feel like there’s a part of herself he can’t see.

“You know you might as well just move back down now” he holds her gaze.

“We’ve already talked about this, I’m not moving back to DesMoines”

“You’re not moving back yet, you said. But we both know you have no reason not to, you’ll have to find a new job and a new apartment in a month anyway – if nothing else it’ll be cheaper if you move in with me now instead of later.” He now has both fists on the table, not angry, just firm, sure of themselves. He is always so sure of himself.

“Jake, I don’t want to have the same discussion again. This is the only time in my life I may get to try something new, to be on my own. I’ve never really been on my own. I said after graduation that I wanted to do this for myself and you said okay. I said from the beginning it would just be a year.”

“I still don’t understand why it matters if it’s six months or a year – you’re not going to do anything different the next six months, you’ll still be the same person.”

“Do you think I didn’t hear this all the first six thousand times you said it?” she says with an edge while inside her head her voice says much more softly maybe I won’t. She pushes back into her chair and crosses her arms in front of her chest, crosses them against his stubbornness, crosses them to feel her own strength pressing against her ribs.

“Well you never seem to have anything new to say either, Georgia.” He is done talking. She can tell by the way his voice shifts down at the end when he says her name that this discussion is over for now.

“Fine. Let’s just go.” She picks up her bag and reaches around to the back of her chair for her sweater as he gets out his wallet to pay the bill.

In the car on the way home his mother calls. From the roller coaster trails of her voice coming from the phone against Jake’s ear, she guesses his father is drinking again. She watches the flat October pass by in a blur as she hears the sounds of next weekend unfolding. Jake will drive the hour and a half up from DesMoines to his parents’ house, to their hometown, and she will drive the couple hours down from Minneapolis. If she tries to get out of it she will be the villain twice over. Not only will she not want badly enough to see Jake but she will also be hurting his mother with her absence. His mother was the first one, junior year of high school when her own mother died, to hug her. She was the first one Georgia cried to. Her own father wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t touch her, went out early and came in late from work every day the rest of her time at home. His sad heavy silence turned their house into a cave. It was Betty who had cooked most of the dinners Georgia had eaten her last year and a half in Iowa. It was Betty who had taken up the hem of the dress Georgia wore to her senior prom. Jake was so like his mother at the core. The calm steady solidness of it had reined her in when she had felt like she was floating. But now she didn’t feel like she was floating. For the first time she felt like moving, like running, like going on her own and finding something new.

Georgia leans her head against the glass of the car window and closes her eyes. She has told Jake that it’s Iowa, that it’s never having left the state where she was born. He always asks her what’s wrong with the state where she was born. She’s not sure that anything is. She’s not lying when she says she loves Iowa. She tells Jake she loves him and she doesn’t think she’s lying then, either. But her insides are buzzing with some new something and she doesn’t know how to tell him, how to show him. She hears the phone conversation drawing to a close next to her. She hopes Betty doesn’t ask to talk to her. She’s not feeling up to it right now. Jake flips the phone shut and she exhales slowly, feeling the moisture her breath creates against the window seep into her cheek.

“How’s she doing?” Georgia asks automatically, head still leaning against the glass.

“The same. He’s drinking again.” Jake answers, voice clipped. It is at this moment, at these moments that happen too often, that Georgia feels pulled back towards him. His pain, his love for his parents, they tug at her. Her family always feels silent and hollow and even this dysfunctionally aching noise his family makes never really exhausts her the way it does him.

“I’m sorry.” She says, and means it.

“Yeah.” Jake answers, voice tight. Then, in an uncharacteristically reflective moment he adds quietly, “this would all be easier if he didn’t still love her so much. If she didn’t love him so much, you know?”

Georgia tenses, focused on this rare tone as he says this. She is still for a long moment after. She wants to laugh and she wants to cry but most of all she wants to grab his shoulders and ask him if he realizes how many different ways there are for relationships to be wrong, for people to love each other or not love each other, to not know and to hurt each other. She wants to ask him how he never wonders if there is someone else walking around somewhere that he could love, maybe better than her. But she doesn’t think he does wonder. He didn’t wonder, when he asked her out the first time, if she would say yes. He had just looked at her in that half-sideways way of his, smiling because he knew she’d say yes. He didn’t wonder, after her mom died, if she had wanted him to come up to her room where she was sitting alone on her floor, her back against the wall. He hadn’t wondered, he had just come upstairs and walked over to her and sat down next to her, pressed up against her side. He had taken her cold fingers and woven them into his own, never wondering if it was the right thing to do. Now she wonders if being so unsure made him more sure. If it still makes him more sure.

They are quiet the rest of the way back to her apartment. It’s Sunday afternoon and Jake needs to get on the road back to DesMoines. He pulls up in front of her building.

“You don’t need to come up,” she says, opening the door, “I don’t want you to get home too late.”

“Sure?” he asks.

“Sure,” she echoes, the word sitting heavy on her lips as she leans over and kisses him quickly on the mouth before getting out of the car. “Call me when you get home,” she says before closing the door and turning towards her building.

She walks up the stairs to her apartment. When she first signed the six month lease 5 months ago the place felt so new, so full of phantoms of a million different maybes and possiblies. This was before she knew about the jerky landlord and the clogging toilet. The accounting job at the “promising new firm” of Egbert& Ebel had seemed almost exciting too. Now she thinks of her toilet overflowing and the small office full of cranky 50-somethings that fill her days. One month of work is all she has left before her company’s “reorganization” takes effect. A small part of her just wants to quit now. The coffee shop down the street is hiring. One of the guys who worked there had asked her out a few weeks ago. She had laughed and told him she had a boyfriend. She hadn’t told Jake about it. Not that it would have mattered. He would have laughed too. That confidence used to please her. One time, when they were at the movies, he had been in the bathroom while she waited for popcorn. The guy behind her in line had started chatting her up, leaning in just a little further than was casual. She hadn’t been worried, just vaguely amused because she knew what would happen. And she had been right. Jake had walked out of the bathroom, strode unhurriedly over, and moved calmly to her side. He had grabbed her hand and winked at the guy behind them. At the time it had made her glow, had made her squeeze his hand and lean into his arm. Now that confidence felt unfair, it sparked something new and unstable in her. She goes into the coffee shop every morning before work and orders a latte and smiles at the guy behind the counter when he hands her the twelve cents of change. Sometimes when she smiles she feels guilty, sometimes she misses Jake when she walks out alone into the street, holding her cup. And sometimes when she smiles at the coffee guy she just feels pretty, and ready, and somehow free.

Georgia knows she could find another apartment, a cheaper apartment if she needed to. She also knows that she misses lying next to someone at night. She misses the feel of Jake’s body pressed against the entire length of hers, every inch of him sending the familiar, the steady, the solid into her pores. She misses someone being able to look at her face and just know, automatically, when she wants to talk and when she needs her space. But she can’t silence the new voice inside of her. This new voice that Jake doesn’t hear, that doesn’t even feel familiar to her most of the time. She looks around her apartment that is empty and full, and doesn’t know if she would stay here longer if she could. She doesn’t know if she wants to. She sits down on her couch, alone in her living room. Her body tingles and she feels like there is someone in the room with her.

“I. Don’t. Know.” Her voice is frighteningly loud in the empty room as she tries to cut through the silence that is pressing, constantly pressing, into her mind.