How Other People Make Love

Praise for How Other People Make Love

These stories provide exactly what the title promises: they help us understand how other people love—or do not love—each other, how and why they marry or divorce, how they do or do not cope with a loved one’s illness. Whether rich or poor, urban or rural, gay or straight, religious or unbelieving, female or male or nonbinary, Nissen treats her characters with generosity and compassion. What she has given us is a wise, moving, and often hilarious guide to the human heart.

—Eileen Pollack, author of The Professor of Immortality and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan

"Thisbe Nissen has long been one of my all-time favorite story writers, and this new book not only confirms it but ups the ante exponentially. Few people track as acutely the ways we not only make love but the ways we try and fail to make that love. And how we get back up again and start all over. How Other Make People Love is glorious and funny and bursting with imperfect life and humanness. And for me it couldn’t come at a better time."

—Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others

"Full of tenderness, compassion and wit, these stories in How Other People Make Love may as well share another title: How Your Laughter, Ache, and Loneliness Are Also Mine. Thisbe Nissen is an astute observer of intertwining tragedies and comedies of everyday American life. What a great joy to read a new collection from her."

—Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go and Where Reasons End

Thisbe Nissen knows the terrain of love. Her characters love in fallible ways, some haunted by losing it, but all of them still craving it. Read these stories, live with her characters, and you’ll feel your own heart. These people and their stories of love stay with me, vividly alive.

—Susanne Davis, author of The Appointed Hour

How Other People Make Love

Made in Michigan Writers Series

GENERAL EDITORS

Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

How Other People Make Love

Stories by Thisbe Nissen

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2021 by Thisbe Nissen. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Lyrics from Kathleen, composed and written by Josh Ritter, reprinted by permission of Rural Songs.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4836-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4837-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947079

Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation.

On cover: Laurel, The Thousand Dollar Dress Project, Sonya Naumann.

Cover design by Lindsey Cleworth

Wayne State University Press

Leonard N. Simons Building

4809 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

For Jay and Sonne

Contents

Alone and Clapping

You Were My Favorite Scarecrow

Win’s Girl

The Church of the Fellowship of Something

We Shall Go to Her, but She Will Not Return to Us

Don’t Sweat the Petty

Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass

Unity Brought Them Together

And the Night Goes Off Like a Gun in a Car

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied.

—Josh Ritter

Alone and Clapping

In memory of Kimberly Grace Langford (1963–2006).

About her presence at the Klish wedding Genie Spahr feels somewhat duplicitous. Shelly is an old friend, yes, and there is something beyond their shared past that binds the Aerobox girls, even nearly twenty years after the rise of the Reebok, the battle of the bulge, and the ascendancy—and nosedive plummet—of Dr. Robbie Wax and the Powerout! They’d clung and clustered through the trial, but once Wax went to prison, the displaced girls resorted variously to waitressing, temping, personal training, lifeguarding, escorting, eldercare, stripping, and, in Genie’s case, returning to college—pre-med—with an infant Björned to her breast. A round-robin letter circulated for years, a letter Genie has occasionally hauled out to prove her involvement—her centrality, really—in what amounted to a landmark case in the statutory rape prosecution of an aerobics guru/cult leader. She was not the plaintiff, though she testified on the girl’s behalf. Genie herself had been a perfectly legal almost twenty-year-old by the time she’d lost enough weight to render herself desirable to Dr. Robbie. He had them all on the pill, of course, but Genie’d been one of the statistical outliers—or, if she were completely honest regarding her pill-taking diligence (as she well knows few women ever are) she has to admit she’d been a typical woman who took her birth control with typical regularity resulting in a typical efficacy rate of 91 percent. Genie Spahr, teenage 1980s aerobics-video-weight-loss minor celebrity, had not been—as Dr. Robbie claimed, and took credit for, in the infomercials—perfect. Genie is now, and has only ever been, typical.

If she’d gone through with the abortion, Dr. Robbie would have gladly kept her around, for typical as she may have been, she was also Genie: An Aerobox™ Success Story (the most successful video in the Powerout!™ Series, as Genie is sometimes disturbingly compelled to remind herself). But that was ancient history—before Tyler’s birth, before the trial, before Powerout! VHS tapes were in demand only as kitsch, gifted as gags at white elephant parties across middle America. Genie’s video opens on a photo, a snapshot still of her arrival at college, freshman year, then cuts to video, a year later, to find its heroine, age nineteen, lumbering out of the dining hall licking a soft-serve, rainbow-sprinkled cone, a good forty pounds flabbier, cheeks like a blowfish, thighs saddled like a pack llama. Thus begins the chronicle of a ferocious year of workouts, our heroine shape-shifting through kicks and punches into a svelte little Aeroboxer™, moving up to a spot at the front of the class behind Wax, competing for the favor of the master, and finding herself, by video’s end, sporting a coveted headset mic, counting aloud and whooping and grunting in endorphin-addled ecstasy. Understandably neglected is any on-screen depiction of Genie’s concurrent assumption of a spot in Wax’s bed, which turned out to be more temporary even than the weight loss, hardly exclusive, and far less enviable than her place on the Aerobox arena floor. During the trial, Genie liked joking about a sequel—Genie II: Knocked Up & PoweredOut!—but nobody else ever thought it that funny. Recently, though, there seems to be interest in a Powerout!: Where the Girls Are Now, a proposed follow-up that would find Genie morphed yet again, into Eugenia Spahr, MD, former secretary of the PTA in the Iowa town where she makes her home.

Tyler, Genie’s Aerobox love child, is a gay seventeen-year-old student at the School of American Ballet in New York City where he lives with four teenage ballerinas in an unclean apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. In a few years, if he remains—knock on wood—uninjured, he’ll be soloing with the City Ballet. Tyler is the geode core of Genie’s life and the source of her gravest anxieties. No number of safe-sex videos and condom conversations will ever truly put her mind at ease with regard to her son’s safety. Also, she misses him. Her Iowa nest is not big, but it’s proverbially and literally empty without him, and Genie is—proverbially, literally, existentially, and physically—lonely. The has been virtual talk on the updated, tech-savvy round-robin (now at www.aeroboxgirls.com, and, wisely, password protected) about finding a man for Genie, and Shelly has promised her a wedding-reception seat at a table with an apparently eligible one named Bob Boule. By way of description, Shelly has offered that Bob is forty-five, single, a good man, who likes children, and is smart. This is all it took to get Genie on the plane, about which she feels slightly embarrassed of—and frightened for—herself. Genie is thirty-seven years old. Sometimes she thinks she would like to have another child.

The Klish ceremony is held at a business plaza church off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Genie pans the sanctuary for a man who might reasonably be Bob Boule; she has no idea what he actually looks like. Debbie Beatty, the only other Aerobox alumna present, is in the wedding party, so Genie sits by herself to watch all fourteen bridesmaids float by, each delightfully fatter than the last, as though they’ve been arranged according to dress size. Debbie’s near the middle of the lineup, no heftier or svelter than Genie these days. Shelly looks good, Genie thinks, if somewhat orange from tanning, and about as butch as ever, despite the wedding gown and the groom. Biceps like Shelly’s wither all forays into femininity, Genie will tell Tyler on the phone later tonight or tomorrow. Real life, Genie feels at this point in her own, is infinitely inferior to the version of it she relays in amusing anecdotes to her son. Now she’s Shelly Klish, she’ll tell Tyler. With a name like that, the woman will never cease to be an object of every lesbian’s desire, husband be damned.

The Klishes don’t force their guests through a receiving line; they simply disappear after the ceremony as though they’ve been whisked off to a janitor’s supply closet to hastily consummate the marriage while their guests move, en black-tie masse, to an adjacent office park where a businessmen’s Ramada convention center will be the site of the reception. But, upon arrival, it is discovered that the hall’s not yet done playing host to a bar mitzvah bash—soft-skinned boys in suit pants stealing each other’s yarmulkes, and thin-wristed girls, hose bagging at their knees, checking one another’s braces for trapped food—and the Klish party can’t get into the room for another hour, so the wedding guests make their way to the Ramada lobby sports bar. Amstel Light is on special, and they conduct their predictable conversations (Bride’s side? Groom’s?) beneath life-sized Steelers and Pirates posters while fourteen games play simultaneously on fourteen mounted consoles around the bar. All interaction is punctuated with upward glances at every flash of a screen. We looked like a pack of paranoiacs watching for Big Brother, Genie will tell Tyler, or sinners checking for God. This, she feels, is funnier than the fact of a bunch of adult strangers relying on televised team sports to quell their crowd-borne anxiety. Genie smiles at every passing man between thirty and sixty-five, just to be safe, and though her smiles don’t go entirely unacknowledged, there’s no Bob Boule coming back at her with a, Genie Spahr? The double takes come mostly from women who, consciously or not, must recognize Genie as the girl from the videos. Genie feels fundamentally incapable of deciding whether it thrills or depresses her. Anyway, if Bob Boule’s seen the videos, he’s not making that connection across twenty years and fifty-odd pounds.

By the time a side wing of the banquet hall opens for cocktail hour, the guests are already hammered, tearing at the hors d’oeuvres table like stoned adolescents. There’s cruise ship opulence to the spread—tremendous crystal bowls of fern- and moss-colored dips, surfboard-size giant salmon catching waves of ornamental kale, ice skating rinks of wraps and rolls, mosaics of crackers cobbled like great Italian piazzas, a botanical garden of crudité. The help, in white Iron Chef costumes, wield their steak knives and sauce ladles like majorettes, and Genie’s instinct is to duck and cover every time a blade catches the chandelier light. She would not mind, just now, spending some time underneath a banquet table; she’s drunk far too much on an empty stomach and piles her cocktail plate high with booze-absorbent tidbits. Sadly, for all the flash, everything tastes like everything else: bland and chewy and oiled.

When the ballroom doors fly open at last, Genie is not only still drunk but also stuffed so full she can’t bend at the waist. Upon finding her table, she’s forced to perch on the lip of her chair in a sort of a deep knee bend to ensure the integrity of her straining dress seams. Tablemates arrive, introducing themselves as they claim their assigned seats. There’s a pair of lesbians, Corey and Angie: one in a tux; the other exquisitely beautiful, fine boned and shimmering, her head shaved clean to the scalp. And there’s Jilly and her developmentally disabled older brother, Craig, both siblings chinless with pronounced underbites. Craig’s suit is of a tan stain-resistant material—though stained nonetheless—and woefully inadequate of length in both leg and arm. Jilly’s got an aqua blue blazer over a navy-blue elastic-waist dress, and earrings to match her plastic-beaded bracelet. Everyone stands to shake hands across the table—piled with more china and glassware than an Oneida showroom—but then, once they’re seated, they can no longer see each other over the mounded centerpiece: donut-sized hot-pink roses and enough baby’s breath to choke a baby. Last to arrive at table number seventeen are the photographer and his assistant who make a brief appearance, not to take their seats, but to unload a small arsenal of black ripstop camera bags, tripods, screens, umbrellas, and an antique glass-plate field camera that might have been fresh from the battle at Antietam. All this gear serves to block the table’s view of the rest of the room, and vice versa, which lends to the sense that the guests at number seventeen are more like stagehands in the wings of this reception.

Genie finally picks out Bob Boule from across the room, this recognition accompanied by a twisting abdominal cramp, like the squirm of an intestinal parasite. As Bob Boule comes toward her, the wrench in Genie’s gut gives way to nauseated exhaustion. There’s a wave of heat, and Genie has to fight every impulse in her being not to simply lay her head down on her place setting and die. A tulle and satin goody bag of mints and mini champagne bottles would serve as a headstone. Her epitaph: Do not open in close confines. May cause serious injury.

When Bob Boule arrives at table number seventeen, sweaty and winded from his cross-ballroom journey, he smiles down, ducking humbly, almost bowing, and says, his voice warm and full and disarmingly kind, You must be Genie, and Genie thinks, god, can’t I please be someone else? She is no actress, does not mask disappointment well, so perhaps it’s a purely autonomic response that makes her approximate a smile, stick out her hand, and say, Bob, in a way that makes it sound like she’s been waiting her whole life for Bob, and here he is, Bob, and her relief at finally meeting Bob is beyond her wildest fairy-princess imagination. Only this isn’t the Bob Genie’s been waiting for. Her Bob is taller, she’s sure. Her Bob may be balding, but he’s balding like Bruce Willis, not like someone’s Aunt Myrtle. Her Bob is nothing like this Bob! Where is Genie’s Bob? The Bob who’s like her, but male: the slightly sad, once-handsome, now aging-but-still-sort-of-handsome Bob in whose faded beauty her own will begin to glow anew. Who is this man, Genie wants to know, and what has he done with her Bob?

Well, Bob Boule may be an imposter, but he’s not an idiot. The man is well aware that an existential vacuum has just slurped up every trace of anticipation from this meeting: shwoop, gone. In its place is a corporeal weight landed with the thud of indisputable news: you’re pregnant, you’re bleeding, you’re caught, guilty, dead. Nonetheless, what’s a Bob to do but take his seat beside Genie and plow on down the dead end of this night? As he’s settling in, though, he stops himself, suddenly remembering his manners, and says, Can I get you drink? He’s desperate to flee, it’s clear, but Genie’s no less desperate, if just for a few moments alone to regain her bearings in the face of this disappointment. Great! she chirps, and off he spins toward the bar, speedy as a busboy newly promoted to waitstaff: green as celery and eager to make waiter of the year. He hasn’t even asked what she’s drinking.

Bob’s flight is accompanied by a voice, booming from everywhere. It’s God, in Dolby: it’s DJ Dan! Gangly, double-jointed, on a mic with too much bass, perched on a platform above the dance floor, he’s the emcee, the party-master-meister, and he’s starting things off with pizzazz! He’s motherfucking Bob Barker calling, Come on down, only it’s Ladies and gentlemen—and the disco beat’s a-thumping—"Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear you give it up for the wedding party! And everyone in the ballroom is clapping and swaying, singing right along to Celebrate good times, come on, as one peachy-pink bridesmaid after another gallops in from the double doors marked EXIT, trailing behind her a rental-tuxedoed groomsman. Below DJ Dan’s platform they gather like feudal subjects, dancing in place while he contextualizes each entering pair, painfully mispronouncing every name out of his mouth. Now, why don’t you all give it up for Miss Sharon Gan-e-shan-e-than, who’s known the bride since junior high, and Mister Jim Nach-a-mie, who works in the cubicle next to the groom! And they dance on down the parquet, filing in to wait and clap and cheer for the next couple down the aisle, like the setup for some elaborate square dance that just keeps on setting up, DJ booming, Celebrate giving way to We Are Family," Shelly’s husband’s mom and dad blundering down the aisle like Dorothy and the straw-legged Scarecrow. DJ Dan says their last name so it rhymes with leash. Mom and Dad Kleesh: a cliché that’s lost its accented e.

When it’s finally over—first dance segueing into group dancing, conversation rising in the ballroom once again like ants from a rain puddle—Genie’s sufficiently distracted from the letdown of Bob that she thinks she can cope like the adult she’s supposed to be. He returns to the table with a drink so absurd it might as well come with a garland of orchids and the kiss of a grass-skirted native girl. I asked for something festive, he explains. The drink is blue, the swizzle stick plumed. Bob’s drinking scotch, and from the smell and weave of him Genie’s guessing he put away a few while the bartender alchemized her Sapphire Sizzler. She sips and toasts simultaneously by way of thank you. It’s spiked Kool-Aid. It could be worse.

Bob’s finally about to actually sit when he freezes mid-knee bend at the sight of something across the table. Genie’s eyes follow his. "Jilly Nader?" He gawks, incredulous.

Jilly snaps to attention. "Bob Boule?"

And what do you know: Bob Boule babysat for Jilly and Craigy Nader lo so many years ago back in Tipp City, Ohio, and my god, what are the chances? Bob crosses behind Genie, laying an apologetic and conciliatory palm on her shoulder as he moves, to kneel by Craig’s chair and greet that blank-eyed face. He steals the photographer’s assistant’s empty chair, pulls it over so he and Jilly can catch up. Oh, they’d loved him, Jilly tells Bob: does he remember how he’d also worked part-time at the Frostee Barn and he’d give them free jimmies on their extra-swirly cones of vanilla-chocolate twist? Genie drains her Blue Voodoo in three sips and heads for the bar without a word to anyone. Bob and Jilly will be married within a year; she’s willing to put money on it.

Even before the meal is served, Brother Craig is led away by elderly parental types. Bob Boule and Jilly Nader get up to dance and hardly return the rest of the evening save to wolf down bites of chicken Kiev and braised baby carrots and gulp Pepsi products before they lunge back to the dance floor as though the job they have to do out there is so important, so vital, so incredibly rewarding—like missionaries or disaster relief workers—they can’t bear to be anywhere else.

"That seems to be going well," says Angie, the beautiful, bald, glimmering dyke. Genie understands her to be some sort of counselor or social worker.

"And he was my blind date, Genie confesses. Well, wedding fix-up person. Whatever."

I’d say you got the best end of that deal, says Corey, the butchier, tuxedoed one. She’s got thick, dark, cropped hair, and a sharp jut of jaw. Her smile is crooked and sly as a gangster’s.

That’s kind of you, Genie says.

Can I . . . ? Corey starts, then begins again. We were just trying to figure out . . . are you . . . Do you know Shelly back from Aerobox?

My youth, Genie admits, in spandex.

I knew it! says beautiful Angie, eyes flashing under blue mascaraed lashes.

In the flesh, says Genie. "Substantially more flesh, but . . ."

Oh, feh! Butch Corey swats playfully. "That wineglass has more flesh than any of you in those videos. She drops her voice then, like someone might overhear. Did he starve you?"

Oh no, Genie tells them, we starved ourselves.

Angie says, "It was years before Shelly admitted any of it to Corey."

"So you guys knew her after that all, then?"

I met her in church, Corey explains. Late eighties.

Corey used to be Born Again, Angie adds.

Please excuse my wife, Corey says. That’s her favorite thing to say.

Shelly and I weren’t in much contact then, Genie says. I never knew quite what to do with her whole Jesus thing.

Angie rolls her eyes in commiseration.

Well, says Corey, if it helps explain anything, I was straight back then too.

Thank god for growing up, Genie says.

Praise be, Angie says, then adds, "Just for the record, I was never a Jesus freak, cult aerobicist, or straight."

"Which is why you get to have cancer!" Corey booms.