It was twenty below, one of those horrible Chicago winter nights with the snow advisory, the blizzard advisory, three layers of gortex and still your fingers are ice in your mittens and every breath freezes your insides. If you’re smart, you stay home, wrapped under afghans with hot chocolate and thermal socks—but me?
I was out there, midnight on a Wednesday trying to dig my car from its parking spot which was totally futile ‘cause every shovelful of snow was immediately replaced with more snow, an easy eight inches on the ground already and did I mention I was wearing heels? And a dress? And two coats of mascara frozen in black icicles—my entire everything was like ten seconds away from hypothermia and right about now you’re thinking, “Were you insane? Why were you out there?”
Because of a guy.
At first, Christopher was a friend of a friend—we’d see each other from opposite sides of the party. Then, after a while, we started meeting up for drinks, catching a movie here or there, or he’d come into the brunch place where I waited tables.
“Who is that?” said Ellie, one of the waitresses I worked with. It was a particularly slow morning, and the entire staff was packed behind the coffee bar, watching Christopher eat pancakes on the other side of the restaurant.
“He’s cute!” said Sharon.
“He’s tall!” said Beth.
“He visits Megan all the time,” said Molly. “And—” They leaned forward. “—he tips 25%.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” they all said, ‘cause 25% is totally hot.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
They laughed.
“No, really,” I said. “We’re not dating.”
“How come?” they said. “Is he weird/is he an addict/is he gay?” These were characteristics of my previous boyfriends. Christopher was none of those things. He was smart, and funny, and one time, I’d had a few too many and he gave me a piggy back ride from his car to my front door. Then he set me down, and I looked up at him—he’s six five, so you’ve really got to bend your neck—and I know this’ll sound crazy but it was like a giant YOU ARE HERE sign hung above us, as though my whole life had been leading up to this. single. moment.
“It’s worse than weird,” I told the waitresses. “He has a girlfriend.”
Beckie.
With an ie.
And let me tell you, this girl? She was… I mean, I can’t even… I met her one time, at a dinner party, and she was…
Fine.
Perfectly nice and pretty and fine.
It would’ve been easier if she’d been horrible, if I had a reason to hate her beside the fact that she had him and I didn’t, but—nothing. Christopher and I were friends. We went to the movies—friends. We met up for drinks—friends. We read each others’ writing—still friends! and for nearly a year I ignored the fact that I was so in love with him I could barely breath.
Right up until that frozen twenty below night.
I was in my apartment, heat blasting, buried under the covers with Kafka’s Collected Short stories. That summer, I’d be moving to Prague for a year to teach for a Study Abroad program, and I was working my way through all Kafka’s novels, journals, biographies—FYI: if you’re going to read as much Kafka as I was reading, please have plenty of Prozac on hand ‘cause that shit can mess with your psyche. I must have jumped ten feet when the phone rang.
“Hello? What, hi!”
It was Christopher, asking me to meet him for a drink.
“Now?” I said. “It’s nearly midnight, and like a million below zero, have you seen outside? My window is a solid sheet of white and you know I hate snow—”
“Beckie and I broke up,” he said.
“I LOVE SNOW! IT’S FLUFFY! YOU CAN MAKE ICE CREAM OUT OF IT, JUST ADD MILK AND SUGAR AND—”
“Meet you in a half hour?” he said.
And I knew my entire life was about to change.
I’d like to talk, just for second, about the act Getting Ready. Christopher and I had drinks all the time and usually I’d run out the door in jeans and sneakers but this was different. This wasn’t just going out to meet Christopher. It was GOING OUT TO MEET CHRISTOPHER. It required an OUTFIT. A HAIR STYLE. EVENING MAKE UP—which is significantly more time consuming than day make-up but nevertheless an absolute necessity because this was the night I convinced my future husband that he couldn’t live without me.
Hence the high heels in eight inches of snow.
We met at Ezuli, this late night place on Milwaukee Avenue. It’s not around anyore but you’ve been somewhere like it: dark, candles on every table, a glow coming off the bar where backlights caught the colored bottles. The place was dead when I got there and I positioned myself at the bar, trying to find my most attractive angle: face left, face right; legs crossed, not crossed; do I lean forward on my elbows, looking contemplative or sit straight, back arched, chest out, stomach sucked in, look thin look thin don’t breath look thin—
“Are you okay?” Christopher asked, appearing suddenly behind me and peeling out of his coat and hat and gloves and scarf and sweater. He looked… great. It was the first time I’d ever seen him… single.
“What? Hi! Yes?—wait, what was the question?”
“Are you okay?” he repeated. “You’re twitching.”
We ordered hot, steaming whiskey and settled in for The Talk, you know, the one where he tells me—his friend—all about the break up and at opportune times I say to him—my friend—“Oh my god” or “no way!” Or “I know” except I was having a real hard time listening to him ‘cause 1) The music was really loud so we had to sort of lean into each other to talk 2) He smelled really great, like chocolate and amber and man and I’m sorry but 3) It’s really hard to be a good friend when all you want to do is climb someone like a tree.
Tell him, I thought. Just tell him.
“We were together for so long,” he was saying, and I reached across the table for his hand.
“I don’t remember the last time I was single,” he said, and I opened my mouth to to say it: “Christopher—”
“I just need to be single,” he said, and I said, “I—Wait. What?”
“I need to be single for a while,” he repeated.
I pulled back my hands.
“I’m not going to date til it’s 82 degrees,” he said, and I looked out the front window: the screaming wind, the solid white wall of blizzard, the mountain of snow burying my car.
It was a really long winter.
Gray and frozen and stopping and starting a hundred times over so one day it’s like Sunshine! Chirping birds! And the next it’s Blizzard! Icy dead things!—and all us poor Chicagoans can do is take it one day at a time. And complain, loudly, with very colorful language, but mostly it’s getting through the day which, for me, meant mornings at the brunch restaurant, afternoons teaching, and nights getting ready for Prague. Who cares about men, I’d think. I’m going to Europe. I’ll meet a Lord. With a … manor. And enough money to buy my own damn summer ‘cause I’m over this cold, brittle darkness, this cabin-fever lockdown in my living room, this four separate layers before I leave the house but then!—I had That Day, that glorious day when you rush out the door in your four separate layers and immediately start sweating. The sun is high in the sky, you’re blinded without sunglasses and—Oh my god! It’s … warm! There’s like, grass! What’s that?—a bird! We go back inside, dropping fleece at the door, get a stool to go to that top shelf in your closet with the shorts and the sandals, and of course we haven’t shaved our legs and we’re horribly pasty white, like we’ve been rolled in flour, but who cares! We’re saved! We’re rescued from the tower, a steak in front of a starving populace, and what do we do on such an amazing day, Chicago?
We go to brunch!
The restaurant was packed, people waiting three hours or more for a table. They lined the sidewalk, baking in the brand-new sunshine, and crowded inside to get at the bar: sorbet mimosas, Peppar bloody maries, iced lattes with Kaluha—I couldn’t keep up. “Okay okay okay!” I yelled, lining glassware down the bar and pouring champagne from bottles in both hand. “I’m going as fast as I can!” That’s when I looked up and saw Christopher.
Just his head at first, high above the rest of the crowd, but he shoved closer to the bar, closer to me. It had been a while since I’d seen him, steadily saying no to his invites of drinks or movies. I’d told myself it was because I was leaving the country but the truth was? I couldn’t keep doing it. That YOU ARE HERE sign hanging above him hadn’t gone away, and seeing him was salt on the wound.
It was easier when he had a girlfriend.
A girlfriend I could at least kill.
(in my mind).
(repeatedly).
“Hey,” he said, once he got to the bar. “It’s good to see you.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” I said—‘cause that’s what I would say to a friend.
He paused—to this day I don’t know what he was thinking—and then shook his head. “I’m waiting outside for a table,” he said. And he turned and walked away.
“Are you crazy?” said Ellie, appearing at my elbow.
“He came here for you!” said Sharon, at my other elbow.
“And he’s so cute!” said Beth.
“And tall!” said Molly, and I slammed the champagne bottles down on the bar. “Don’t you all have tables?” I said, storming off towards the dish station for more glassware. The racks were empty and the washer steamed, meaning it needed a couple minutes to finish the cycle so all I could do was stand there, listening to the bodies packing the bar, imagining the pile of drink orders growing, staring at the window in front of my face and
On that window was a thermometer, one of those outdoor digital jobs with the suction cup. It was 82 degrees.
Before, when I was single, I’d ask my friends in relationships how they knew. What was it? I’d say, wanting to hear some mathematical equation, some John Hughes character arc, some self-help step-by-step of finding my perfect person. If there were steps, I could execute them, I could work towards something, I could be an active participant in not only finding love but finding it now.
But it doesn’t work that way. It works like this:
How do you know?
You just … do.
So what I did was walk out into the restaurant, pushing through the bodies to the door. Outside, the sun was blinding, the air warm against my too white skin and I looked up and down Milwaukee Avenue, everyone in their new summer clothes, everyone waiting for pancakes, everyone loving this new perfect day and there, sitting on the sidewalk with a newspaper, was Christopher. I had no idea then that within the week, I’d move in with him; within the month, he’d follow me to Prague; within the year, we’d elope on Lake Michigan; and two years after that, our son would be born.
All I knew was in that moment? Standing there in the 82 degrees?
I just… knew.
Megan Stielstra is the author of Everyone Remain Calm, a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, and the Literary Director of Chicago’s 2nd Story storytelling series. She’s told stories for The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week Festival of Writers, Wordstock Literary Festival, The Neo-Futurarium, Victory Gardens, Chicago Public Radio, and regularly for 2nd Story and The Paper Machete, along with all sorts of conferences and theaters and bars. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Other Voices, The Nervous Breakdown, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Shareable, Monkeybicycle, Hypertext, Cellstories, Perigee, Annalemma, and Punk Planet, among others, and have been performed by Theatre Seven of Chicago and Bohemian Archeology in NYC. She teaches creative writing and writing & performance at Columbia College and The University of Chicago.