“…see under pathos. The quality that arouses pity. Pathetic. Affecting the emotions of pity, grief, or sorrow. Sadly inadequate. (Interesting: inadequate and sad.) Contemptible. Derisory.”
A return to Sarah, visiting home in Chagrin Falls. The first instance of Sarah here and second here...
It was not pity, exactly, that Sarah felt for her mother and her sister. She’d always said she would rather hate someone than pity them. To pity someone always felt so…deflated to her. It also required you to think you were better off than someone else and the older Sarah got, the less she was able to do that, the more she learned that you never really know anyone else’s whole life. It was more that she felt they were making the wrong choices. They were not pitiable because they were agents of their own plain lives. Just as Sarah had chosen her life, they had chosen theirs.
Maybe Sarah’s allergy to pity came from the feeling she had so often that so many people pitied her for things she’d chosen quite on purpose. Her apartment, her lifestyle, the commitment to her dream of being an actress. She’d spent a good chunk of her twenties and thirties being single and that, too, had put her into a pitiable state. Her coupled and then married friends forever cooing at her, I’m just so sorry you haven’t found someone yet. But you will, you will. Though she was sometimes very depressed to be alone, a lot of the time it was a deliberate choice. She had not wanted someone too close to her when she was younger and then she grew accustomed to the independence, the frequency of new lovers, the electric snap to the air of a first date or the first time sleeping with someone new. Sarah did not like how some types of pity were socially acceptable and spoken aloud—pity for the spinster—but others were more taboo—for example, telling your sister you thought having three children with her husband was going to be both overwhelming and utterly boring.
She and Leo had been texting over the past few days. She’d told him she was getting on an Amtrak train to Cleveland and he’d faked alarm. Back to the Midwest?! He’d written, Is everything ok?? Sarah told him about her sister and the pregnancy and made up some white lie about wanting to get some fresh air. The messages back and forth had been mildly flirtatious but nothing that would get Leo in trouble with his girlfriend. They did make Sarah eager to check her phone.
She reached for her pajamas and balled up her day clothes onto the ground. All of her things were still crammed in the black duffel bag she’d brought them in. Lynnie had cleared a space in the closet for her but for some reason Sarah had yet to take the time to hang her things up. It still felt strange to her that her younger sister had a guest bedroom while Sarah could hardly afford her studio apartment. At some point things had begun going out of traditional order, which was probably when Sarah’s mother became nervous for her. Sarah had left her phone on the bedside table and when she opened it she found three unread messages from Leo. There was nothing too sexy in them but he had sent a smiley face and then had asked her what she was getting up to after her sister had gone to bed.
She kept thinking of the girls and wondering about them, as if their energy still lingered on these streets. For some reason, maybe it was sleeping in a twin sized bed again, back in her old neighborhood, she was thinking not about the last time she’d seen her friends, a year or two ago, but about the last time they had been in Chagrin, the summer after college. There had been a going away party for Christine before she left for a year to teach English in Argentina. It was not like it is now, where teaching English is a way for a particular type of privileged person to waste away a year drinking in a different country. When Christine chose it, it was a leap out of the ordinary. She would have her suitcase and the address of her school, passable Spanish, but that was all.
“She’ll be buried under a cacao tree before the year’s out,” Sarah remembered her mother saying and Sarah had been smarmily impressed that her mom even knew there were cacao trees there. Christine’s parents, however, were not nervous. They were rich hippies, or at least that’s what Sarah’s mother had always said about them, and they encouraged it, let Christine run as far as she wanted to, and she wanted miles and miles of lead.
Sarah remembered she had just graduated from NYU and had taken time off of her summer gig playing a dancing lobster at King’s Island and pining after a married man who also worked on staff, though he had been there longer and was in one of the live action shows, no felt costume required. The party had been a fun break in a summer that was billed as an acting job but felt much more like summer camp with none of the woodsy making out or afternoons spent swimming. It was one long hot day spent with the same seven people and some kid was always crying and band-aids were always in high demand and low supply.
She’d been jealous of Charlie who had the good fortune to have family money and so had spent the summer working one day a week at the family owned lake resort and generally wondering what she might do next. Margaret had been in Chagrin with Christine all summer, going out to the bar and meeting boys. Much of the time they were actually re-meeting them, as the people who still lived in town were all people they had grown up with. Margaret admitted to Sarah that it was still a little exciting to see them out at a bar and not have to try and meet them at a neighborhood party and they’d gossiped about how much hotter Graham had gotten, how much fatter Joseph had gotten.
She missed the girls. God, Sarah thought, the memory darkening in her mind, so much had happened since then. Though she knew none of them were in Ohio, she decided to send a message to them. You’ll never guess where I am, the message said, accompanying a picture of the American flag planted on the edge of Lake Lucerne that she’d taken a few days earlier.
She turned back to her messages from Leo, looking at the smiley face and thinking about the scene in the play where she pulled off that decoy set of underwear. Sarah felt her hand slide under the waistband of her pajama shorts. Just thinking of him texting her, his mouth close to hers in that kiss on stage was enough to get her going. This was sad, maybe, Sarah thought, pitiable, even, masturbating to a non-sexual text message from a man who has a girlfriend, but at least it wouldn’t get her pregnant with a boring man’s children.
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