After I decide, I’ll think of where to buy it. The sensible, economical thing would be to take a bottle from the winery’s cellar, but I don’t really want to drink that shit. I could go to one of the vineyards between here and Silenus, only I would run into people I know, be forced to answer questions. And dressed as I am, like Zelda, I’ll probably raise a few eyebrows. At home, in Paris, I have a favorite wine store, a tiny box on my market street where I can duck in and snag a bottle on my way home, before stopping at the fromagerie and the tabac. I indulge in a moment of fantasy, of meeting Nico at home with a bottle of something just outside my price range, of us sitting by the window in my tiny nook and sipping out of my petite wineglasses, considering where we’ll go when the bottle is gone. But those fantasies are too abstract for my purposes here. Today, I will go to a liquor store in Watkins Glen, and I will browse the racks looking for just the right bottle. I tell myself I will buy an eleven-or twelve-dollar bottle, something decent but not extravagant, but I will walk out with a fifteen-dollar bottle if I’m very lucky. Today might be a twenty-dollar-bottle day.
Then I will have to decide where to drink it. Sometimes I want company, people to talk to while I uncork it. When I’m feeling festive or exuberant, I want to chat and burble, marking my journey into tipsiness with my verbal outpourings, measuring my drunkenness in confessions and, eventually, incoherence. But often, I want to just be alone, to tell myself I’m not that drunk, to pour myself another glass without an audience. I want to sit somewhere beautiful, by myself, and drink.
My ritual is interrupted when I notice a meter woman (my politically correct millennial mind refuses to call her a meter maid) writing a ticket and snapping it under my windshield. I lurch out of the truck.
“Hey, I’m right here,” I say. “I’m just about to leave.” She looks at me dispassionately.
“Too late. Already did the printout.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sitting in my vehicle, ready to pull out of the space. I just got here.”
“Rules are rules, miss. You’re in a loading zone.”
“This is a fucking joke,” I say. “I don’t have time for mindless rules today. I’m sorry that the only meaning you derive from life comes from sanctimonious little strips of paper. I just don’t have the patience to play nice while we pretend you’re anything other than a parasite and a miserable fucking human being with a subpar GED.” I’m shocked at what I’ve said. I sound like Zelda. This is Zelda’s doing too. She’s turning me into her. One of her favorite games used to be for us to swap clothes and try to fool parents and teachers. Of course she would get off on this. She was always better at the game.
I was born face-to-face with my fetch, and we’ve been competing over our lives ever since.
“Well, miss, I’m sorry to hear that. Feel free to complain at the court.” The meter bitch wanders off, and I’m left seething. More bills to pay. Fabulous. I smother a scream that threatens to escape from my clenched and aching throat, then drive directly to the liquor store without taking the ticket off the windshield. It’s in Zelda’s name anyway.
—
After buying the wine (twist-offs, fuck it), I get back into the truck, feeling calmer. Before turning the key in the ignition, I look at Zelda’s phone again. There’s a new message.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Dun dun dun
June 23, 2016 @ 5:04 PM
Dearest Twinlet,
Debt, debt, debt! I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. Which you’ve doubtless disconcertedly discovered. Does my disappearance make more sense now? You’re surely putting together the pieces, Ava darling.
Silenus has been on a downward spiral for the last little while—since before you left, really; it was starting to slip under your watch, dear professionalized twin! But it has gotten really quite bad of late, and I’ve had to take certain measures I’m not entirely proud of. We needed new equipment, had to pay everyone who works at the vineyard. (Honestly, this living-wage shit is a thorn in my side. Gasp away, my socialist sister. My politics have gotten distinctly rural since the family farm started going under. If there were illegal Mexicans to employ in this neck of the woods, I’d be scooping them up by the truckload.) The bills are due, and we have no more money. Bankruptcy is inevitable, I think, but it will destroy what’s left of our mother’s shriveled heart. Marlon’s, too, I reckon, in some small way, though he has done his best to emotionally divest himself from this place, from us. I hope it hurts him, I really do.
You know, it’s interesting. They didn’t falter when I sauntered into the bank asking for money. There I was, twenty-four years old, no assets, no college degree, in possession of just a failing business and a failed parent. I was not a good financial risk. But they just signed that check right over with barely a blink and a background check. I was relieved, but I have to say, more than a tad concerned about our national finances. Here we are, post–global financial collapse, and our local bank seems blithely uninterested in vetting its future debtors. Don’t we learn through repetition? How many times does shit have to go wrong before we change our fucking behavior? I say this on a macro as well as a micro level, dear sister.
I’m not sure I’m cut out to slum it, though. Penny-pinching is not in our bloodline. I’m afraid I find myself very resentful when confronted with the necessity of “cutting back.” The prospects are grim. I was holding out for this particular vintage, one you presided over, Little A, perhaps you remember: a tasty Gewürztraminer, one of the classic Finger Lakes grapes. It was from 2011—do you remember the season? We took a risk and held off harvesting until October, which was dangerously, riskily late, but we were hoping it would pay off with more intense flavor. We wanted a Gewürztraminer with very low residual sugar, nice and dry, low acid and low pH. It was a mild winter, and a nice damp spring gave way to a hot, lovely summer. You and Wyatt were prowling the fields and fussing over your tomato plants like first-time parents with a colicky child. You were working on an internship for your degree and took obsessive notes. Zephyrs scraped across the whole dilapidated vineyard, gouging deeper those juicy fissures we plowed, burrowing into the maxed-out wrinkles that already produced such poor-quality nectar. We hadn’t bothered with cover crop that year, relying on chemistry to do the work. You were pinning it all on the Gewürz but by the time the cloudy autumn rolled around, you were flipping the fuck out over Botrytis bunch rot, which had you quaking in your boots. I swear, I could hear your moaning about it at night.
I was hoping that all this nervous energy, this studious and scientific stewing and fretting, would give us the light, expressive, and crisp wine you were after. How could you bear to leave before you knew if the fruits of your labor were everything you’d hoped? If wine is a story, you left just before the ending! But, spoiler alert. It was not a happy ending. Your tweaked and micromanaged vintage was just another uninteresting, slightly puckery table wine. It tasted heavily of cheap floral perfume. Quel dommage.
But moving on from past harvests and all the grapes already plucked and fallen. (Why dwell on the done deal?)
Your Scheming, No-Good, Very Bad, Undead Sister,
Z is for Zelda
I almost throw Zelda’s phone across the truck in exasperation. I finally scream, letting out the pent-up, hoarse yelp that has been caught in my throat all day, making me gag. I slam the heel of my hand against the steering wheel and shake my head like some sort of feral animal. A fellow boozehound in the parking lot glances at me in concern before tucking both of his brown paper bags more firmly into his armpits and ambling to his car. He probably thinks I’m drunk. I’m not yet, but boy, do I plan to be.
I throw the truck into gear and drive back to Silenus. I know exactly where I’m going to drink.