Ramona
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
It’s snowing in New York. It’s early in the morning of the kind of day you imagine writing letters you never send. The snow melts off the fire escape and drips down like rain to the pavement. The radiator hisses.
We were at Hooligan’s the last time we saw you. Robby doesn’t remember, because his memory is generally foggy, whereas mine is vivid and insistent, if no more reliable. You bummed a cigarette from me on the back steps, by the loading dock—the only part of that building that still looked the way a bar in Adrian should. It was starting to snow, quiet violent snow, that fell like golden meteors in the streetlight. I remember when I learned that you were gone, and I remember telling Aunt Nancy. I remember ever word she said to me: Ramona was one of the smartest and most talented students I ever had. I always felt like if she believed in herself, she could have done anything.
That last time, at Hooligan’s, your boss locked herself out of her office and we had to pull the pins from off the hinges to get her in. She didn’t offer us a drink for saving her night; it was you that made our tab disappear. I told her you were the best waitress and if she ever fired you we’d stop coming. She told me that the poster in the window was from Nazi Germany (those kids in black and white smoking cigarettes) and that she’d put it up because that’s where Obama was threatening to take this country—that’s how long it’s been since I’ve seen you. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve been to Hooligan’s, a bar I hope to see closed every time I go back home. I could say it was the owner’s politics, or the dark, Hollister decor, or the appetizer menu I was usually too broke for—I could tell you it was lingering resentment for them shuttering the Barley House and replacing it with something, anything, new—but the truth is after you were gone, I never scraped together a reason to return.
You left Adrian in a Hudson-filtered Ford Econoline Club-Wagon. A mattress in the back, your clothes in a suitcase, your cat in the passenger seat. You were what all the Mercedes-Sprinter trust-fund glampers dream of being: free and unafraid. You filled your Instagram with sunlit photographs: Moab, Big Sur, Durango, warm-filtered: Hefe, Valencia. You were that good. Brave enough to jump into the universe, knowing you would catch yourself. You don’t know the half of it, you told me. The half I do know: the strangler fig on the red mangrove in Florida, the long-haired boys in tattered jeans and trucker hats you travelled with. You and your new man: thin mustache, bare shouldered; your cat curled on his lap in the passenger seat. The sundrenched bungalow you live in: Inkwell, dark shadows from the pagoda dogwood. Paducah or Cadiz or Cairo—you vanished, so you never said where.
It warms an angsty, teenage part of my heart to hear you say I vanished. You said you dreamed of me a week ago, a very Natty Berry appearance in my dreams, which made me curiously scared. Your doctor said you need glasses that make you look like an old lady—can you believe we’re not fifteen anymore? When we talk, I still am, or am again. It is always the hour after school and we are walking down the cracked sidewalk on McKenzie Street, it is always the first day of autumn and the leaves are burning in the air. You are there, your hands in the pockets of your white coat, stretching it down to your knees, smiling like you knew that me and Ruth and all the others were just phantoms you’d concocted for a dull and pleasant dream.
Ruth sends her love. I saw her in Trestle Park more than a year ago, when I was on my way to Marathon and she was walking her dog. Her husband works nights in Clinton, which she likes. I asked her if she hears from you—I would have been jealous if she does. We looked you up on Instagram: soft-focus pictures of the summers in Kentucky. X-Pro2 green grass hanging tall over the floorboards on the porch. You live in a land where it is always summer, where it is always the hour before sunset, and the cicadas are always singing. You are on the porch, Lark-filter, open cans of Hams and a glass ashtray, fireflies, weed-smoke, ash-stains on the paint-peeled rail, creaking floorboards, an old song plucked on an unplugged Fender. Old photos. Nothing new for years.
Come back now and then, if only as a dreamer. Write our places, show me how to feel about them. Downtown, the vacant stores we used to dream of fixing up are gone: they’re coffee shops, cigar bars, fusion restaurants in the great Ann Arborizing bubble. The Croswell leaves its lights on all night long, Maumee lit up like Freemont Street.
Hometown storefronts dressing up for other people makes me really believe that we aren’t fifteen still, or twenty-one again—we are not sharing cigarettes on the loading dock of the last good bar in Adrian, a place they’re going to shutter before we get much older. Let me tell Aunt Nancy that you’re thinking of her, and I’ll let you tell her the rest.
The dog curls up beside me. Blue light through the alley, Perpetua sunrise. I hear Loren stir in bed. There are no good bars in New York either—maybe they’re gone, everywhere.
