The Nevers

BRENDA

I’m obsessed with the name Charlotte. It’s the perfect name. First off, there are so many nicknames. You’ve got Char, Charlie, Charles, Arlie, Arlo, Charlo, Lottie, Lots, Lot, Lot-Lot, Cha-Cha, Charcoal, Charlottery (or just plain Lottery). That’s just an example. You could probably come up with more. Compare that to some plain old girl name like – Kristen. You’ve got two choices: call her regular old Kristen or bubblegum-and-pigtails Kristy. And what if you named your kid Kristen and she didn’t turn out to be a regular old Kristen or a bubblegum-and-pigtails Kristy? Name her Charlotte and she’ll find some nickname that will fit her. Listen, that’s my problem. Do I honestly look like a Brenda to you? Wouldn’t you say more of a – Zooley, or a Quincy, or a Rubix – something not too common, with lots of end-of-the-alphabet letters? I would. There’s nothing good can come from Brenda. Bren? That’s barely even a syllable. It sounds like a cereal.

MAGS

So go by Charlotte.

BRENDA

I can’t. Not where I live.

MAGS

Why?

BRENDA

My dad’s ex-wife’s name is Charlotte.

MAGS

Well, I don’t know your dad’s ex-wife, and I’m calling you Charlotte.

BRENDA

Nah. Don’t. I’m sorry I brought it up, it’s stupid.

MAGS

Charlotte. Or would you like one of the nicknames? Which did you say – Lottie? Charlie? You’re not a Lottie.

BRENDA

I said don’t. Brenda is fine.

MAGS

But maybe a Charlie. Definitely a Charlie.

BRENDA

Don’t call me Charlie.

MAGS

In a couple days tops I’ll have the whole campus doing it. A whole new you this summer, Charlie.

BRENDA

Don’t!
(Beat)
I was kidding. I like Brenda.

//

HOSANNA

Late drunk nights in a friend’s apartment after another failed geometry quiz, another failed family dinner. Tuesday night, too early in the week for the nail-polish burn of Absolut chased by Hawaiian punch but we’re washing our mouths with it anyway, clean us out before bedtime, instead of Colgate, instead of Listerine. We all have our own ways of doing it. My chemistry teacher used to drink a third of a cup of white vinegar in the mornings before school. That was his way of cleaning out. We could smell it on our tests when he passed them back, the red ink – minus, minus, minus – filtering through the white pages; like some slit-wrist albino bleeding his life out on a linoleum floor; and so I associate vinegar with chemistry, and chemistry with death. Alcohol is chemistry. Alcohol is the sourest death of all. Late drunk nights in an apartment in Oakland, in a dorm room, in a parents’ basement, in a deserted parking lot or a clearing on Mount Washington but mostly in an apartment with my college friends, the ones I met through my brother. Me, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and they’re twenty-one, two, three. Some older. They can’t pass Intro to Logic and I can’t pass geometry. We’re stagnating. Together wedged onto the couch six at a time passing around the shot glass (there’s only one, from somebody’s parents’ trip to Vancouver too long ago to remember), overfilling it each time, trying to toss it past our tonsils – usually missing, gagging. Larry drinks tequila for the first time one cold January and he’s gone, so gone, and somehow it’s me next to him on the couch, his hands all over my thighs, everywhere. Pretty soon it’s all of him all over all of me, everywhere, and we leave the couch together somehow holding hands, and the funny thing is, I don’t know what happened. Where we went, what we did. I don’t know if I’m still a virgin or not. And the next day I failed another geometry quiz, on proofs this time. My cell phone’s cluttered always with frantic messages, my parents, “Susie. Susie. Please call home. It’s two o’clock in the morning and we don’t know where you are. You haven’t been home in three days. Susie.” I never answer. They can’t do anything. I’ve worked full-time since I was fifteen, I’m a manager at the restaurant now, I am self-sufficient, I can pay for anything I want or need. They should kick me out of the house but they won’t. I only go home to paint. And recharge the batteries on my CD player. Drunken nights, they last forever, wet paper memories. Because afterwards it mostly comes back, but in pieces – not a smooth photograph but an impressionistic Monet – better, a pointillist Seurat. Bits of static that come together into something comprehensible if you step back far enough but beset with incongruity, dark nothing between the bright colored pinholes, irretrievable, invisible moments that may as well never have happened, even though they existed once in the painter’s mind, because you can’t see them there now. I fill the darkness with sound. It’s why I always have my CD player. The same soundtrack, over and over, since freshman year – that way, in case of emergency or malfunction, I can still hear it playing in my head. Sarah Brightman is my only angel. Why do you think I’m called Hosanna?
(Singing)
“Hosanna hey sanna sanna sanna ho...”
(Pause)
I don’t know how to live in daylight anymore.