The Lavender Channel

 She exits the highway and begins winding through residential neighborhoods. She is going to Connecticut to help her parents move out of her childhood home. She left New York City late, held up at work. She remembers when her family moved away from Queens, seeing highways without streetlights for the first time. She didn’t even know that roads came that way- that they could get so dark. One detail about the drive is different now: much of the ubiquitous blue glow of television sets has been replaced by a pinkish hue. It the hue of the TV station she works for, a scientific breakthrough called the Lavender Channel. The channel broadcasts an exact shade of lavender that can hold human attention almost indefinitely. There are no hosts, no exercising women, no commercials, no music; it is being refined to the perfect shade almost daily. There was opposition, conspiracies about brainwashing, concerns about the arousal that many people experience. The escaping light from living rooms and bedrooms onto lawns and bushes has lost its flicker, replaced by a static and placid glow.  But she is not thinking about work. She is thinking about a man she just dumped. The first time they hung out, they hit it off. They did accents together: the effeminate southern man, the cockney wench. There was no unnecessary laughter, either awkward or self-congratulatory. Their friends at the party willingly moved to the sidelines. Fluorescent spray-painted Christmas trees hung upside-down from the ceiling. The floor was getting sticky. The crowd was mostly younger. She didn’t know at first that he was the son of a rockstar. She had heard her friends mention him- as the son-of-a-rockstar that we know- but that first night she never placed him. She believes this is why he liked her at first, because she didn’t treat him like the son-of-a-rockstar; as if he had a physical deformity that no one could pull their internal monologue away from. Now that they’ve broken up, of course, having dated him is a delicious badge, especially if conversation can be steered towards this fact naturally. His dad is not just a rockstar, but more accurately a rock-god, a singular personality in a permanent throne. In the relationship, of course, his son’s inherited celebrity began as a hindrance to true intimacy and ended as a depressing non-event. Now the woman arrives at her parent’s house, pulling into the driveway and turning off the headlights. The porch-light and kitchen stove light are on, meaning her parents have gone to bed but are expecting her. A plate of brownies is on the kitchen table under saran wrap.  She takes the brownies into the study upstairs and checks her email. There is a dissertation from the rockstar’s son in her inbox. The message details how she is a bad person.
            This is all true, she thinks. It reads “You want everyone to like you, and think you are this great new person. But that’s it, and then you are done and you move on.” Just today on the drive out of the city, the woman was frustrated because the old man at the convenience store didn’t perk up at the sight of her., and she briefly dwelled on it. Truth be told though, she is the type of person that small children and pets gravitate towards. Little kids demand that she play  pretend with them, and she always ends up inhabiting their make-believe worlds more than any adult probably should. She rarely argues with anyone of any age.
The next morning she wakes up shortly after her parents, no longer sleeping to noon every time she comes home. They hug and give her a cup of coffee. Her dad makes fun of her for never speaking until she has her coffee. Her mother asks coyly about the rockstar’s son, ten minutes or so into their catching up conversation, after an opportune pause. The mother is leaning against the counter while the woman sits slightly hunched at the kitchen table.
            “It’s very over Mom. I’m sorry I didn’t marry us into rock royalty.”
            “ I wish we got to meet him at least.”
            “Well, I thought we were going to be friends until last night. I think I just got fired from his inner circle.” The rockstar’s son takes his friendships very seriously. He demands a full commitment and frequently fires people from the position. The woman remembers walking to work on a grey morning, after spending the night in his village apartment. She was imagining where he might be at the same time, and it made the whole island of Manhattan seem like their mansion- a dirty, drafty, sexy mansion.
            In the afternoon, the woman and her mom go to an aunt’s house on the shore. Her cousin is there, two years younger with a wedding ring on her finger. They talk about the ring. The cousin disdainfully mentions a gigantic ring her ex bought his new fiancé. “(The fiancé’s family is conveniently in the jewelry business on Long Island)”, she says parenthetically. Then the aunt launches into talk about the perpetual process of remodeling, while the cousin leaves through bridal magazines.
“What do you think about a counter island right here?” The aunt asks.
“That would be nice,” offers the woman. “You could see the ocean through the living room while you chop vegetables,”
Her mother muses, “I  can’t picture something that’s not there like she can. I guess it’s what makes an artist.”
“Mom, I’m not an artist. I’m am assistant producer for TV.” The aunt mentions how good the Lavender Channel looks on her giant new hi-definition television. The woman likes being around normal people like her aunt and cousin now. The teenage terror- that their normalcy will absorb her life- has mostly passed. In fact, she is waiting with a macabre anticipation for the time when her cousins are all married with babies, and she will be officially left behind. She would be thrilled to experience the biological clock of lore- it just isn’t happening.  Pregnancy still resides in her subconscious as bad dreams about carrying aliens inside of her. But it makes the woman feel expansive to understand the draw of her relative’s lives: the gradually nicer cars, the private kiss in the married couple’s own foyer at night. Her aunt vacuums flying insects off the ceiling.
Later that night, after her parents go to bed, she forces a  trip down memory lane, remembering the first snowy night she moved into the Connecticut house. She had wandered a little ways into the woods in the back, down a snowy hallway of bushes to the edge of the yellow light from the streetlights. She wonders if this was the first time she felt the drunken recklessness of a new place. She had cried a lot about leaving her friends in Queens, but even at ten years old she became enthralled by the chance to start a brand new childhood. Her mother fears that her daughter’s desperate need for variety will ruin her life, romantically, professionally, or otherwise.
            “Don’t you think you might just be running from yourself?” The mother asked at dinner, after a few glasses of chardonnay. Her mother is surrounded by this kind of hallmark card wisdom. She has a shoebox full of the pictures that come in the picture-frames when you buy them.

            The next day her parents put her to work on the house.  Her mother has given her the task of scraping the glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. She noticed last night when she turned out the light that the stars still glowed bright as ever. As she lay in her familiar bed under unfamiliar covers and stared up, she was not quite transported by the illusion, just like always. Now she goes downstairs and watches for a few seconds as men coarsely tear out the carpet that was a savannah for her mildly-chewed My Little Ponies. It would be a shame to leave those hardwood floors covered by disgusting carpet, she thinks to console herself. Removing carpet is watching America grow up a little bit. Nobody wants to turn their entire house into a bed anymore. The reality of carpet is filthy and worn-down, uncleanable and infantilizing.

In the evening Saturday night, the phone rings for the woman. It is her old friend. In a monotone she asks “Do you want to go to a poetry reading on Williams’ street?”. The friend moved back to town a few years ago, after a tour of Northeastern colleges and mental institutions.
“Um, tonight?”
“Yeah, I could come pick you up at eight.” Despite disarray in all other aspects of her life, the friend is punctual.
“Sure, fine, I’ll see you at eight,” she agrees against her better judgement. The friend arrives at 7:55 in her standard state- vulnerable yet non-responsive. Her small car has the faint residues of some hippy fragance, sandalwood or patchouli or something, and pot. The friend could have been a good writer. She was a drama star in high school, flamboyant jazz singer, devolving into keg party blowjob queen. She stopped growing at some point; all the cds in her car are from before 2000. She lost sight of the difference between dramatic chaos and art.
“Remember when we were little and we would run from nothing?” The friend blurts out on the drive there.
“Uh, I don’t think so.” The woman says as if she is trying hard to remember.
“We would run from nothing because it was chasing us. We’d scream our heads off until we were actually scared.”
“Well, nothing is pretty scary, I guess.”
“It was in the woods behind your house. You don’t remember that?”
“Maybe I do. It’s funny anyway.”
The poetry reading is ridiculous and under-attended. The woman scans the room to make sure she is not the oldest one there, and finds some middle-aged men protecting her from this undesirable distinction. A short, rotund  bearded man walks up to the microphone. The Woman is flabbergasted by his black leather fanny pack, khaki shorts, and sandals with socks. I’ve become a Fashionista, she thinks. But this guy is too much. He gesticulates emphatically as he reads about being the president in his bathtub with a rubber ducky. After the reading, the woman, the bipolar friend, and the organizer of the reading go out for a drink. The organizer is a skinny gay man who lives in a cabin outside of town by himself; enthusiastic and gentle and charming in a weird way. The girl and the organizer hit it off, while the bi-polar friend seems to slip away into a dark place, ceasing to answer questions directed towards her. The woman thinks: well, at least we are out with the head of this scene, even if it is totally lame. Considerations of status are taking up more and more of her mind. On the drive home in the dark, she makes fun of a song on the radio. Her friend laughs abruptly.
“You are so caustic!”  The friend accuses the woman. The woman is surprised; she thought she had concealed her constant judgments and condescension pretty well.
The next morning the woman and her mother are driving to the supermarket. Her mother goes there almost everyday, and complains about it, but it is a place to go, her purchases are sometimes spontaneous. In the passenger’s seat, the woman’s phone rings, and she squirms around to pull it out of the pocket of her jeans.           
“Bad news, kiddo,” the man on the line says in his “the-gig-is-up” voice. It is her boss at the Lavender channel. “We got pulled.”
“You’re kidding.”
            “Yeah right. Listen, when you get back, we’ve got three weeks, so you’d better start pounding the pavement. I’m sorry there wasn’t more warning.”
            “But everybody watches us.”
            Late night’s not enough. We’ve leveled off. We’ll never get more popular. And a color doesn’t sell ads. They’ll package the last signal for disc, but that doesn’t involve us.”           
“Alright. I’ll see you Monday.”
She hangs up and looks over at her mother, who is holding a look of sympathy. “Two firings in one weekend,” the daughter jokes. Somehow, the joke makes her eyes tear up a little bit, even though she doesn’t really care about the station. It still feels like a rejection.
 She goes to the cemetery at the edge of town in the evening before she leaves, to visit the grave of a kid who died in her high school class. She feels a bit like an intruder, like she didn’t know him well enough to come here, that his memory is owned by the kids who stayed behind, holding hippy jam fests once a year in his honor.  She made out with him at a party once, that’s her only claim. She tries to imagine what he looks like in the ground now, twelve years later, but she can’t picture anything realistic. In high school it bothered her deeply to think of him in the ground, as the nights got cold. Now only the laser-etched image on the tombstone bothers her. It hardly looks like he did. A rendering of a dead kid should be flawlessly accurate. Did they have to include a mountain bike, forever trapping him in 1997? Oh shit, she realizes. He is  trapped in 1997. She doesn’t stay for long, just a couple of minutes. “Sorry you ended up being the Dead Kid,” she whispers. The car door beeps as she gets back in and sits down.  She buckles her seatbelt methodically and pulls out of the cemetery, turning towards the city, to start looking for a new job.