Nashville Combat was the biggest thing we’d ever worked on, and the most personal. We both had the sense that the project was an extension of ourselves. A sense that it would become our shared history for as long as we were immersed in its making—that I would give up my own personhood for a while and double down in Mel’s, for as long as it took to finish.
It was the most energized I’d ever seen Mel. She spent hours talking into a handheld recorder, rehashing old stories, grasping to recall each possible detail. She sketched school lunches: the olive-green plastic tray, the pizza, the chocolate milk, the corn. What her mother tended to wear around the house in 1989 (brief cutoffs, occasional Def Leppard T-shirt), what Mel herself wore on the first day of third grade (Reeboks, same Def Leppard T-shirt). She went online, found the make and model of the double-wide in which they had lived, and contacted the company. They explained that her particular model, River Blue 973, had been discontinued, but sent the blueprints with their compliments. We started with the details. Two years of work, the story stemming from the little things, then growing out and out.
But when the project was done, I left it behind. At day’s end, the story was Mel’s—a narrative of how she got from point A to point B, and, now that she was at B, how to get shed of A as completely as she could. The telling of the story was the furthest she would ever travel from her old self—to stepping outside that world and, from a safer distance, watching. It was a project I’d wanted to start because, callous, I thought it was funny; for Mel, it was much more. And maybe she knew it, because she was the cautious one, the one who knew that the next step we took could be into a pothole.
The last scene of the excerpt lingers on the trailer as the sky grows darker. You know, the voiceover continues, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there’s the reality that we’re not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint—all the ridges and gathers—on who we are? Do we have a choice?
I let the scene go dark and stop. There’s a fluttering in my middle now. It’s enough to make me lean over, close out of Firefox, and open the blinding light of Word.
WASPERS AND SNAKES
“Welcome home,” Mel says.
It is the crappiest one-story house I’ve seen in a long time. Two bedrooms, a grimy kitchen, a bathroom with a filthy water heater in the corner. The deck is the house’s saving grace, looking out onto a backyard lining a swamp. The grass here is sparse but dark, pocked with sandy soil running down to a grove filled with spiny overgrowth, wild and tangled all the way to the water’s edge. The leaves closest to the bank are as long as my leg.
In the living room, Mel has assembled a makeshift studio. Two drawing boards assembled from plywood stacked on two old desks with coffee tables turned on their sides to make the angled sketch surface. It’s been cut, hammered, and polished to a glimmer. There are pencils, inks, oils, rolls of easel paper. Onionskin she got from God knows where.
We’re renting the place from a guy named Jesco, who thinks it’s hilarious that we’re from New York and doubly hilarious that we’d want to live in this house. He laughs and shakes his head every time he encounters us. “So this is the other’n,” he says when he meets me. “The other cartoony gal.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“From New York City,” he wheezes.
“We’re transplants,” Mel explains. She’s told him this before. “I’m from here. She’s from Kentucky.”
“Uh huh. So you’re a wildcat,” he says.
I shrug. “Sure.”
“I tell you what. Y’all are crazy to want to live in this piece of shit.”
“It’s short-term,” Mel says. “Sharon here needs to rest and recuperate.”
“Well. I wish you’d take the place with ye when ye go.”
The rent is two fifty a month. When the toilet breaks our second week here, Jesco installs a porta-potty at the side of the house and outfits it with lime for sprinkling and a flute of plastic flowers. “Watch out for the waspers,” he tells us. “And the snakes. We gotta horrendous snake problem. They like high grass, and they like womern. Always slitherin round the womern. So y’all watch y’allselves.”
Mel’s attentive. She stays in the hospital lobby when I go to physical therapy, and we do the grocery shopping after: fruit, sandwich makings, cases of vanilla Ensure. In the evening, we take to the deck with ginger ale in tall glass bottles, watching their necks cloud as the stink and steam rise from the swamp. She rations cigarettes out to me, never more than three per day. “No weed yet,” Mel says. “I read up on it. You smoke up right now, it could make you slow.”
“Who says.”
“Encyclopedia Brown, babe.” She looks off, squinting at something down in the bushes. “I’ve cut back myself. Only after hours, now.”
“Seriously?”
She looks offended. “Well, it won’t kill me.”