Wishful Thinking by Kamy Wicoff

Author:Kamy Wicoff [Wicoff, Kamy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2015-04-21T06:00:00+00:00

fourteen | NEW YEAR’S EVE

TWO WEEKS LATER, when Jennifer found herself traversing cobblestone somewhere in deepest Brooklyn on the night of December 31, wearing nineties-era dark brown faux-leather pants that she’d had to wipe clean of dust, Jennifer blamed Dr. Sexton. If not for Dr. Sexton’s prodding about “adult kinds of fun,” she thought, she wouldn’t have asked Owen, just a little bit flirtatiously, if he had plans over the holidays, in response to which he had handed her a flyer inviting her to see his band play on New Year’s Eve. If not for Dr. Sexton, she thought, she probably would have tried a lot harder to ignore the tingling warmth she’d felt when, as he handed her the flyer, he’d leaned in to her ear and said, in a voice low enough that Julien couldn’t hear, “I’d love it if you came.” And if not for Dr. Sexton, she probably would have worked much harder to dismiss/repress the fact that she’d had three sex dreams about him in a row. (In the last one, they were trapped in the West End School broom closet and he was wearing nothing but a flannel shirt and black ballet tights.) But Dr. Sexton’s advice had awoken something in her, or at least given her permission (or a mandate, more like), to act on it. So two days after he’d given her the flyer, she’d sent him a simple e-mail: I’ll be there.

He’d sent an equally simple e-mail back: You made my day.

She’d now read that e-mail about fifty times, and it still gave her a little spike of happiness. It had made granting Norman and Dina’s request to spend New Year’s Eve with the boys easy, though she hadn’t told them that.

Now, however, as she stood outside the Brooklyn music hall where Owen’s band, the Dimes, was playing that night, in a line that went all the way down Wythe Avenue, Jennifer felt incredibly out of place. Scantily clad twentysomethings, who, in the rearview mirror of Jennifer’s life, were beginning to appear even farther away than they were, were everywhere, like skinny little mice, smoking and squeaking in the cold. She knew that divorce made some people feel young again, as though they were rejoining a party they’d never really wanted to leave. But divorce made Jennifer feel old, or, worse, it made her feel nowhere: caught between the countries of young single life and middle-aged parenthood, without full residency in either. Sometimes, as she did taking her place in line outside the Brooklyn Bowl, she felt like an impostor, as awkward and obvious in her attempt to “pass” for young as the old man in Death in Venice, dyeing his hair and wearing rouge on the beach. Like an idiot she’d shown up at ten thirty, only a half hour before Owen’s set, too nervous to arrive earlier alone. But when she’d headed to the front of the line as though she were someone important and actually uttered the words “I’m with the band,” she’d found there was a list, and she wasn’t on it.

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