When Kathy was seven, she was caught stealing candy at the checkout aisle. Lumpy bags of gummy bears and starburst slid out from beneath her purple dress as the teenage cashier and her horrified mother looked on. Kathy stood unflinching, too terrified to acknowledge the bags that leaned against her ankles. The teenage cashier seemed indifferent but Kathy’s mother was mortified, and on the way back to the car and locked in her room that night with no TV and no dessert, Kathy could feel the weight of her mother’s disappointment for the first time. It was a heaviness and an anger that had been handed down for generations within their family, and Kathy felt it more the older she grew, equally in her mother’s scolding and in her silence, until one day, before Kathy could realize what was happening, the feeling had become her own. She would feel it within her and throughout the far corners of Dayton, weighing down every resident, like the final relentless days of a long drought.
Kathy was hired to restock aisles when she was 17. There was no formal interview, just a casual chat with the manager, who gave her a speech about the hardships of adulthood and put his hand on her shoulder. To celebrate, Kathy and her friends drank Smirnoff from the bottle on the school playground. They pushed each other on the swings, daring to go faster, to fly farther, until most of them were left throwing up all over the playground’s soggy wood chips.
Sid and Kathy met later that year. Sid was hired to work in the electronics section, to show customers which iPhone was best for them even though he couldn’t afford one himself. Sid spoke minimally and had a gut that was often visible between his khaki pants and blue polo, but he remembered Kathy’s favorite songs and bought her yellow carnations, so within weeks they were kissing and grabbing for each other’s body parts in the storage room on breaks. Sometimes Kathy would grab his penis and mold it with her fingers like playdough, and she’d watch the alien expression in his face as he struggled to steady himself against the shelves of staplers and post-it notes behind him.
Kathy attended classes at the community college one town over, but they were so crowded that it made it hard to hear the professor. Sid dropped her off and picked her up because Kathy didn’t have her own car, and sometimes he’d be an hour or two late because he had to work an extra shift, or simply because he had forgotten. Kathy would sit on the curb of the parking lot waiting for him, watching the sun set across infinite miles of browning suburban lawns while eating peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had been flattened by her fingerprints. During those evenings, Kathy found herself fighting boredom but also another feeling, something less understandable yet even more palpable. As the dust turned to darkness and night surrounded her, she slumped forward with heaviness.
When Kathy was promoted, she stopped attending classes. Her manager had told her the news with one hand resting on her back, and had complimented her on the fine young woman she was becoming. Kathy told Sid and her family that she didn’t think college was for her, and they didn’t argue against it. Kathy had a second cousin who had moved to New York City to study art, but Kathy’s mother would roll her eyes whenever her name was mentioned at family dinners. It was something about dating a man twice her age or dating a black man, Kathy could never remember which. She taught herself to roll her eyes too, yet when her bedroom door was shut and the lights turned off, she’d shut her eyes and think about living in a house next to the Empire State Building.
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