Rebecca Handler

Stories Can Save Us

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The carpet in the San Mateo Marriott Airport Hotel is a pattern of geometric beige and grey shapes, impervious to dirty loafers and rolling suitcases. Someone designed this carpet, I think as I rush through the lobby. This shall be our carpet, someone declared. 

I am late to the conference. The marching band is finishing a pump it up number, as I enter the back of the banquet hall, balancing a side plate of mini-croissants and sliced cantaloupe atop my conference program, scouring the room for an open seat. I find one in the back between a short man with dreadlocks and a woman on her laptop with a spreadsheet open and a pencil behind her ear. The nametag hanging around my neck is attached to a green lanyard. Most other people seem to have blue or red lanyards. Perhaps I signed up for the vegetarian lunch. I look down at my kangaroo leather boots and try to recall which meal preference I stated.  

It is sweltering outside but inside it is conference weather, drafty from the air conditioning. I am wearing a sleeveless dress and regret forgetting to bring a conference shawl. Everyone else in the room is in long sleeves except for one woman in a sleeveless navy dress with a spider web tattoo covering her shoulder. 

This is my first conference in four years. Well that’s not true. I attended a bloggers conference in Perth where I learned I didn’t want to be a blogger. I wanted to be a writer. 

As a woman with a news anchor haircut officially welcomes us to the conference and reviews the day’s schedule, I polish off the mini-croissants and contemplate returning to the buffet for a yogurt cup. Instead I open my program and circle the workshops I plan on attending. 

I spot a colleague across the room. I text him, Hi I can see you. I see him check his phone and look around. Finally he sees me and waves. He is in a blue lanyard. 

A woman at my table (red lanyard) gets up and leaves behind a pink notebook. The cover reads, in cursive, A Place For Your Dreams. Soon she is back with coffee and two apricot pastries.

It is freezing in here. Many years ago I attended a fundraising conference where the keynote speaker was a man with a disability who climbed Mount Everest. I do not remember his disability but I remember some of his slides made me feel very cold. 

The first clue that this is not a fundraising conference is it is quieter. Also there are more men.

The workshops are surprisingly good. One of them is about storytelling as persuasion, and my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears when the communications consultant in the black jumpsuit says, “Especially in turbulent times, stories can save us.” She has smoky eye makeup and elegant arm movements that make it look like she is gently scooping up her audience. She tells us humans are narrative animals. She says Martin Luther King said I have a dream, not I have a pie chart. 

This is an example of using humor at a conference. 

In another workshop, a woman asks too many questions that aren’t actual questions (red lanyard), and I want to say something but remind myself I am not in charge of this room. 

At lunch I join my coworkers at a round table with cloth napkins and two breadbaskets. We swap stories about the sessions we just attended. Who knew the mayor of Stockton was so dynamic, one of them says. I notice I am happy to be with these people. We are a team, I think, as I unwrap a butter patty. 

Men in black serve us grilled chicken with sides of cooked carrots and mashed potatoes. The lanyard colors didn’t mean a thing. I shiver and dig in.

Instructions: Spa Locker Room

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Do not be alarmed by the soft sound of Tibetan bells. The Spa Locker Room music is here to relax you. You may or may not have been given a tour of the locker room by a woman with a top bun in a black polo shirt. Either way, you will not be able to locate the toilets. They are not in fact behind the shower curtains, but around a corner near the self-serve cucumber water station. In your assigned locker, you will find a robe that doesn’t fit and plastic slip-on shoes that are a half size too small and look like the sandals your neighbor wears when he’s outside smoking. Place your belongings on the shelf and try to secure your locker using the keypad. It will not work and you will want to punch it, but then you remember to press the C button before entering your code. 

Four women are in a huddle whispering. They are not talking about your butt. One of them is getting married or turning 40 or getting divorced, and her friends have brought her to the Spa Locker Room to eat chocolate covered almonds and use the spray deodorant. There is free stuff all around, and you might be tempted to take the eco-friendly bamboo toothbrush wrapped in plastic. Instead, moisturize your entire body with the white lotion that smells like sour peaches from Shaw’s Candy. As you rub your belly, do not fall into the trap of thinking about your younger body. You are alive and you are in a Spa Locker Room. Acknowledge your privilege and moisturize your elbows. 

You might overhear the following:

“And then he said his girlfriend’s a slasher.”

“What’s that?” 

“Model Slash Actress.”

“What a douche.”

There might be a basket of green apples and a selection of tea with names like Margaret’s Hope, Vive Le Thé, and Paris For Her. You can sit by the gas fireplace, on the beige patterned couch, surrounded by beige patterned pillows, and read articles like Change Your Life In Seven Days and Your Best Abs in a magazine called Women’s Health. Toss the magazine back on the coffee table with the small wooden Buddha and consider women’s bodies as property, containers, vessels, weapons, cradles, and caskets. Vigorously scratch your thigh. Recognize your body has been itchy lately. Perhaps it is angry with people who are trying to control it. Think of your body as something to protect fiercely, like a child.

A woman in a cotton wrap shirt the color of a fresh bruise will enter the Spa Locker Room and call your name. You will follow her to a lavender-scented room and undress. 

The Run-In

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I ran into myself today. She was waiting for the bus, wearing a floral print baby doll dress, a black ribbon choker necklace, and clunky black shoes. She had a pixie haircut, deep purple lipstick, and had just recently turned twenty. Black leather bag slung over one shoulder, she was reading the bus schedule posted next to the shelter.

I pulled over and popped on my hazards. I slammed the door and walked towards her. “Hey!” I called out.

She looked over and seemed annoyed and not at all surprised. “Hey yourself,” she said, glancing at my white sneakers. “Or myself. Whatever.”

She smelled like clove cigarettes.

“What are you doing here?” I said, jamming my car keys in the back pocket of my jeans. “You’re not supposed to be here.” I had left my sunglasses in the car and was now squinting at her.

“Well I’m here.” Me at twenty was snarky. She was also chewing gum.

“But you don’t live in San Francisco yet.” I lived in Boston in my twenties.

She scowled. “I’m visiting.”

“Visiting who?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Of course I did know, once I thought about it. “Philippe,” I said finally, shaking my head.

Philippe was a French exchange student I had met earlier that year, in Boston when I was nineteen. He and I worked at the same Tex-Mex restaurant until he moved to San Francisco on a whim, at least it had seemed that way at the time. Of course it wasn’t a whim. His French girlfriend was in San Francisco and he moved here to reunite with her.

This me standing in front of me didn’t know this yet. She had had dinner with Philippe last night. They kissed in the car and he told her he loved her. Then he went across town to fuck his girlfriend but I didn’t find this out until tomorrow.

“He’s not worth it,” I said to my younger self.

“Maybe not,” she said, shrugging. At this point, she was already regretting flying out here for a long weekend to visit Philippe from La Caverna. Tomorrow he will call her, sobbing, saying he’s still in love with Anne-Marie, Anne-Margaritte, Anne-Something. I won’t cry because I won’t be shocked. This was never a real thing. I just wanted to hop on a plane and chase after something.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” I asked her.

“I guess you know that I do.”

We got in the car and she held up my New Yorker magazine that she had found on the seat. “Really?” she said and laughed. “Is this what you’re into?”

“What we’re into,” I said, putting on my sunglasses, suddenly self-conscious.

“Whatever,” she said reaching in her bag for a slip of paper. “Ninth and Judah. I’m going to Ninth and Judah.”

Grace’s apartment. Holy shit.

“I forgot Grace lived there,” I said. Grace was my best friend for fifteen years. “Have you met her roommates yet?”

“Nope, first time.”

“You’re in for a real treat,” I said sarcastically. Grace lived with two supreme slobs who played video games all day. One of them peed in a Snapple bottle in his room instead of walking eight feet down the hall to the bathroom.

“It’s annoying,” she said, propping up her foot on the dashboard and wiping the corner of her mouth where her dark lipstick had accumulated. “How you know everything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, honking at the car in front of me. The driver was distracted and the light had turned green. “It must be really annoying.”

“You must remember this, yeah?” she said.

“Remember what?” I said, turning on Lincoln Drive.

“Running into your older self?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Wondering when it was that I ran into you. Or me. Whatever. It’s weird being on the other side now.”

We drove in silence. I glanced over at her occasionally but she was staring out the window. Her haircut showed off her neck, long and freckled, and her choker was held together by a gold clasp wrapped in scotch tape. I loved that necklace and wore it months after it had broken, peeling off the tape at night and attaching a new piece in the morning.

Younger me scratched her thigh aggressively. I was still having eczema breakouts, hadn’t yet sorted that out with the shea butter and the avoiding wheat. I opened my mouth but decided against saying anything. She’ll figure it out.

I thought about Grace. How we were still close at that point, before her mental health veered into a dark pit. Now, as a forty year old, I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly ten years. She called when my mom died. She was married to a banker and living in Westchester. She had recently spent three months in a locked ward following a miscarriage.

Our mom died. I looked at younger me, and blinked back tears.

“I think it’s that faded pink one on the right,” she said, after glancing at her paper with the address.

I pulled into the driveway.

“Thanks,” she said, looking at me. It startled me how unremarkable she seemed to think all of this was. Later, she’ll tell Grace and the slobs, and they’ll gasp and convince her it was a remarkable coincidence, running into her future self. They’ll think it’s crazy she didn’t ask me a single question about my life, our lives.

She slammed the door and rang the bell of the four-story apartment building. She was bouncy, even in her clunky shoes. As I started to drive off, I watched her and Grace embrace. As I caught a glimpse of Grace’s smile, a lump formed in my throat. Before she fell apart, years later, before her shadow took over, her smile was radiant. It could have saved the world.