My older brother is a roguish forty-one—his beard is graying but the hair on his head is still brown. Under the blinking blue lights in this karaoke bar, the crescents beneath his eyes make him look like he's been punched.
My younger brother, who is thirty-four, has been in the bathroom. He comes back and thuds into the booth beside me, too fat, marinara-shirted after all the ziti he dropped on himself at dinner. He and I are softer than our older brother, less impressive. We'll pull mean faces through the other patrons' group sing-alongs to "I Will Survive" and "YMCA," where our brother, who used to hold us upside down by our ankles, will heckle and throw ice chips.
All three of us are neither young nor old. There aren't many things we are too old for. But we are too old for this.
Onstage there is a young guy singing "Hungry Heart" by Springsteen, getting his body into it, leaning back and bawling at the foam-tiled ceiling about how hungry everyone's heart is. This guy is a baby; he's like twenty-two, with dyed blond hair and a smooth face, a smooth Ralph Lauren polo on.
My song was Oasis, "Don't Look Back in Anger." I didn't do a very good job with it. I chose it because I thought people might like hearing me sing of "the brains I had [having gone] to my head," but I garbled that lyric, my favorite. The rest of my performance was totally phoned in.
So, Sally can wait. My brothers never met this woman named Sally I knew a year and a half ago, an adjunct at the college where I teach. Okay, not Sally. Sarah. But still, they never met her.
In the next booth is my wife with a bunch of her friends from work. She doesn't mind my sitting apart from them, and I have agreed to duet with her on "Baby It's Cold Outside," so all is fine. She peeks over the backrest for a second, the straw of her whiskey sour pinched between her front teeth, to make sure the three of us are still miserable. Having decided we are, she exaggerated-winks at me, like in a vaudeville show, then turns back around.
The girls from my wife's office are mid-twenties—they report to her. They're loud and chirpy and seem to spend their entire paychecks on high-heeled boots. Earlier, one of them went up to do "Walkin' After Midnight," a trite choice anyway, and didn't know half the words. My older brother really wanted to yell "Show your teats!" at her, arguing that saying "teats" instead of tits made it non-offensive. I convinced him not to, because my wife likes her job.
The kid finishes "Hungry Heart." People applaud him; he swings the mic over his head by its cord, causing feedback squeals. Then, as he goes to his seat, I see him pass a woman sitting at the bar by herself. She offers him a hi-five. He contacts her hand lightly, without gusto, and they share a sad smile. It doesn't look like they know each other.
This woman has a short haircut stacked on her head like a pile of raked leaves. Under the hair she is pretty, with strong eyebrows and teeth—a nice-looking, not gorgeous, thirtyish woman. But she sits up very straight on the stool, poised, wearing a sleeveless turtleneck that shows off her lean arms. She takes the hand that she did the hi-five with, crosses it over her chest, and rests it on the opposite, bare, shoulder. I'm some ten feet away from her, but I see that she has scratched her shoulder with her fingernail and made a faint line of blood. I wonder why I noticed this from so far away, and I wish I hadn't.
Because I think about Sarah, instantly—I remember Sarah sitting on the fire stairs, her head against the banister. I was leaning against the wall on the landing below her, smoking. While she watched me she rubbed her temple on the banister knob like a cat would, because she was tired and, I realize now, afraid. Then she asked me what I liked to do. Not what would I like to do—what I liked to do.
My little brother has caught me looking at the haircut woman. He rubbernecks so he can look too and also alert my older brother. My big brother gives us a shrug, then adjusts the sleeves of his jacket and looks away, staring dully into the giant monitor above our booth. Two Korean men take the stage and start to sing a Korean song.
The woman's feet are hooked under the stool. She still has her hand on her shoulder. The pad of her middle finger moves slowly back and forth over the scratch, which is about the length of a lotto pencil.
Not, "What's your biggest regret?" or "Are you a happy person?" or "What are you thinking about?" Sarah just wanted to know what I enjoyed doing, what my hobbies were. So I sat next to her on the step, put my arm around her, and told her I like to read detective novels and the DSM-IV; to cook a giant brunch so my whole family can come over and eat it; to go on my message boards to fight about records. I remember that the stairway was cold—my ass felt chilled on the cement until I'd talked for a good twenty minutes, Sarah's face burrowing into my armpit.
Certainly she loved me.
But I still think it was weird, how long she was willing to listen.
Amanda Nazario was born in Greenwich Village in the late '70s and has a BFA in screenwriting from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She represented team NYC-URBANA at the National Poetry Slam in 1998 and 1999. In September 2007 she earned her MFA in fiction writing from the City College of New York, where she now works as a writing tutor. She is also a dog walker on the Upper West Side.
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