Julia Rose Eng

I am eight years old and sitting by the Christmas tree where my mother is showing me a magic trick. It is very standard:

Pick a card

Don’t show it to me

Is this your card? (No)

Is this your card? (No)

Is this your card? (No)

And just as I think my mother would make a fool of herself, beat out by her little daughter, imagine! She drops a card, offers it up to me, and states firmly

This is your card. (How did you know?)

I beg to know how the trick is done. She tells me, When you have children, I’ll show you. There is no What if I never want children, What if I don’t get married, What if I die before then? Because the answer is and always will be the same. 

I guess you’ll never know. 

After all, I am the reason my mother knows the trick. 

But learning the card trick is much more than having children, because before you have children you must find the one. Kissing in the music practice rooms during Thursday lunch, one must not forget that it is all about the hunt for the one, even if the kiss is so good that you tell all your friends about it, even if it is so good that you write about it, which is not what I am doing now, because I have never kissed in the music practice rooms. It’s figuring the game out and playing Blackjack with the boys that they deal to you, “they” being:

1. Fate (questionable)
2. God (and some of his friends, maybe)
3. Luck (like charms, like horseshoes, like the crystal in grandma’s silk bag)
4. You (unreliable)

Knowing about the card trick is opening Pandora’s box, it is the internet that knows no bounds, it is learning from Advice for Teen Girlies Only !!! <3 and from Baddie Couple Goals | LA + NYC, it is a rabbit hole that I delve into in my ever-fitting floral one piece swimsuit every summer.

I listen to bands that might bring some more cards to me, good cards, and I like to tell them that it is my father’s music. This is in part the truth because this is what my father would listen to if he played the radio in the car. Even though the boys that I know like to tug on my headphones, I keep listening so as to say, I am cool, I do not cry here, only alone to the songs that you wouldn’t admit you cry to as well, and I am cider-smooth and I am excited for the day but I am not too excited and by the way have you heard of this band.

I like to put posters up in my room of men that I wish and hope would have finally earned me my card trick. From left to right on my ceiling I say my prayers. Good night, Kurt! My father never did like your hair or your death, but that is not really a problem anymore, and it never really was to begin with. Good night Brad and Leo, of course Leo could be my way to the card trick, I would be the youngest yet. Good night Dark Knight Batman, too busy being Batman/Bruce/Christian to help me learn a silly card trick! Do they even play Blackjack with Jokers? My mother’s trick does not involve Jokers at all.

It is a very scary thing for it to loom over my head, card trick, no card trick. But I try not to let it get to me, after all, I am so young that it seems the entirety of time stretches out before my sight. My mother tells me stories about her before my father. Her crazy college boyfriend. Her days in Geneva, dating Italian motorcycle riders. I am waiting for my moment, always. 

But the card trick is on my mind every time I meet a new boy, a new card.

So I have to hit. And even though it takes forever for it to be my turn, I wait so patiently and so quietly, and I can scream HIT and get a fresh one. 

And so I hit, I hit, I hit. Or maybe I am trying to learn the card trick on my own, but every Is this your card is wrong and I have yet to happen upon a This is your card so far.

And all of a sudden I am sitting in a booth with a new, fresh one at the Olympic Flame Diner, the little spot just two blocks west of Columbus Circle, where the turkey club is the best and the baklava is okay.

He ordered five minutes ago, for himself and for me too. Blueberry pancakes, a smoked salmon bagel, a strawberry milkshake (my idea), and something else but I don’t remember what. I know he would rather be at my roommates’ party and I know so because he told me that he was in the mood to do Molly when I ran into him in the shiny lobby. I told him that the only Molly there was would be dissolved in dented water bottles. Molly Water, I said, so I guess he lost interest in going all the way up. Thus begins the game anew.

Of course, we get to talking. He’s all open like that. He is bleeding the hand he has been dealt and I laugh at his naïve assurance. He’s on-and-on about how he hates Warhol but loves Lichtenstein and complains about how there aren’t enough Braques in the MoMA, and I do my little smile-and-nod routine as he tells me all about Spanish horses that dance and about exotic coffee beans. It is a little frightening to me how much he knows because it seems he knows much more than I do. But instead of jealousy, I feel the resounding pangs of awe in my chest that seem to pull me closer and closer into the table until my back is bent at a craning angle that only results from the magnetism of someone who knows a lot about a lot.

I think about Vacation when I start getting pulled in, since Vacation was practically the only other guy on the island last spring break. Vacation was hot. Vacation wore tight terry-cloth polos and boat shoes and Nantucket red, like a Kennedy, like an old money fucker, but I forgave him in my head preemptively. I first saw him at the Sunset Lounge drinking mojitos with his father, an activity I was unfamiliar with, and he seemed to pop up all over like eager dandelions in spring. I almost hit him with my golf cart too. Even if I never did get around to knowing who he was, I confided in my parents’ drunk friends about Vacation, and they say that he has gravitas. Gravitas is a fun word to use, because I don’t fully understand how to define it, but I can feel it when it’s close by.

Well, what about me? Oh no, he wants to know about me.

Where am I from? What do I like to do around here? Have I read anything interesting lately?

Well, what about me? Well, my mind is going somewhere else right now, it’s floating on LED lights. White lights are made of red, green, and blue lights, and our eyes can’t even tell. Well, I am from a place that I hate but I miss, and I wish I hadn’t stood that one time instead of hitting with that one card because maybe he really could have been something. Well, now I can’t go home because I might see him in his flannels and hoodies and baseball jerseys. Baseball was weird because he liked me and I didn’t like him, and that made me feel very guilty. I could hate myself for, but instead I hate him and home. Well, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Well, I came to the city to lose home, for it to cycle from my blood. Well, I was supposed to be working on myself, but now I’m here with you and you are like lead paint chips that numb my brain. Well, I like all of these male poets. Well, actually, I like all of these male poets because men say that they are good. Maybe he will be impressed by my taste. The poets that I read smell like spoiled beer and rusty copper wire. Well, maybe he thinks that’s how a man ought to smell.

Gravitas shakes my mind for an answer, and I have one, but all of my reds, greens, and blues are shut up inside of me and I’m just pouring white light. I’m turning white, I’m turning red, maybe I’ll be sick all over him, well! that thought makes me sweat. He has a freckle below his eye that holds more knowledge than anything my parents ever taught me. I’ve been sitting on my hands for the past ten minutes and I begin to feel the buzzing loss of circulation in my wrists. I’m leaning in far. So far that my hair is where my food should be. I’m thinking about, oh my god I have never been enthralled by someone so plainly and casually all-knowing. Where is my milk shake, my mouth is dry.

And sitting here on top of my palms and in the Olympic Flame Diner, breathing in the wet, sweet smell of the early midnight, breathing in his smoke-dipped voice, like hardy thread pulled from his throat, his gravitas, his thread, gently herding me back to the table, into the casino pit that begs me to crawl just a bit deeper.

No, but where is my strategy? I must have a strategy, at least this time, and I am thinking about all my past hands. Like about my hand, the one with the four of Red Polo and the Jack of France and then bust with another Jack, not of France of course, but the Golf Course, or the nine of Freckles and the nine of Fox Eyes, when I got too greedy and didn’t like my cards so much, I said HIT HIT please and I paid the price with my cards and my reputation.

But it’s too late, I’ve sat at the table, I’ve been dealt my hand by fate/God/his friends/luck/myself, and I’m obligated to see it through, the meal and the conversation. I keep score in my head, I am intent on winning one day.

So we meet here. The Olympic Flame Diner, Thursdays, open late, we order our order, and we chat. Every day is a slouch towards Thursday. A strawberry milkshake and all this other crap once a week so I can listen to him and wait patiently for the card to turn over and maybe I will learn my card trick after this one. He tells me everything. I learn all of his friends and their likenesses without ever seeing their faces because he is so attentive with his words. I learn how he loves his dad but does not love his mom so much. I ask why and he says

He is scared of his mom, mostly because nothing scares her

And this makes me inexplicably sad but there is a mutual agreement that I can look after him for the time being, since, you know, I’m waiting my turn out of seven or eight billion and I’m sure he is too, because I want to learn my card trick and I want to know if he is the one. 

One day, it becomes winter, and I am nearly snowed into my apartment. He calls me, all apologetic like

We can meet next Thursday, if I want, because his apartment is only a few blocks down from the Olympic Flame Diner (with the great turkey club and the okay baklava), but I am a bit of a hike away.

But I ensure, no, no, no, I will be there tonight, we can order something hot and gooey and sweet so we can feel warm again, and as I talk I hear the rustle of his smoky threads through the phone speaker, and I am happy, so happy, because I am about to trudge through snow for a card that I cannot wait to turn over.

And because it is the Olympic Flame Diner, its lights never go out, plus he has lots of Budweiser in his man-fridge, so we drink so much until it is even darker out and it is only us, the way it usually is before we begin to tell secrets.

He has this insane dream, he says, he doesn’t really know, it’s insane.

And I’m always saying stuff like how insane because guys like to tell their insane dreams in their wet-brained state, and the boys think they are showing me my future, they are listing it all off as if their sleep is waterlogged with insane, stuff like

I wanna run track in college, I wanna be an art dealer,

I wanna be an SNL comedian and if I wanna marry you

I’ll do it in the medieval cloisters at the Ocean Club/in the creek behind my grandparents house/in Italy

and then we’ll Honeymoon in Anguilla/Germany/Singapore/Scotland/Napa Valley, where the wine comes from

and I wanna have three daughters, I want you to have our three daughters

and I wanna only play jazz/mellow gold in our Mercedes 250SL/Kia Soul and show them the real culture

I wanna teach them to snowboard, warn them about the widening sea and roofying, let them love the lightning, the forest,

and I’ll show them how to pet bumblebees

and I think for a brief moment about how, yes, I’ll finally learn the card trick with this boy in tow. He is an ace, an ace of Insane, like I can do anything with this ace because he is everything I want and need and everything I have ever wanted and needed.

But the boys always think that their daydreams are insane because they are just one guy with an incredible vision or check out my band online, and in my life they are hot guy from thrift store in Williamsburg or ex-love I went to the Met with or hated him in high school but love him now, but I have yet to come to terms with how unextraordinary each of them are because their dreams are what they call them:

Insane.

Because I know my father never learned to take care of a daughter. Not really. He never washed my hair with the pink L’Oréal kids shampoo, the “no tears” one that got me nicknamed Strawberry Shortcake at pre-K. He never brushed it, not even roughly and toughly like how I thought a man would. 

Instead, I learned all my words in the back of the silver Mercedes, him cursing into a Blackberry microphone, a voice I still hear in my head occasionally when I fall asleep in the car. I got called all sorts of names, not directly, and maybe on accident, Annie/Cecelia/Ed and sometimes KJ/Gene/incompetent dumbass when things get serious, and my eyes tear up while I walk from the car to school because I don’t know how else to show that it is wrong, very wrong to yell. 

So, no, I am sure I will never learn the card trick, at least for the time being, because the boys and their insane dreams are not enough for me. Leaving the car in the morning left some sticky parasite within me that says they will never been insane enough to cure you, they are not substantive nor are they real, he is too good to be true, and he is going to disappear into the night, and it’s not you he’ll be taking with him.

Now that I am remembering all of this, I’m not sure who stopped going to the Olympic Flame Diner first, me or him. I’m sure that he stopped going, because I recall sitting in a booth alone, thinking about Nine Eleven and how maybe my mom shouldn’t have known the card trick if she had not been late to work that day and whether or not it would be okay to bring a new date to the diner, if that was against the rules or something. Maybe he would even see me through the window and contemplate his replacement.

Something greedy, jealous, and territorial rings in my ears.

The Olympic Flame Diner is closed, which is an upsetting and hardening oxymoron. It is sad because that was my mother and father’s spot, where my mother found the one and learned the card trick just shy of the new millenium. It is sad because sometimes it feels like the Olympic Flame Diner was my only chance. And it is a very scary thing for it to loom over my head, card trick, no card trick.

But I am in Paris with a friend now, and a card puts a cigarette out on my wrist, right where my pulse beats the strongest, where the fountain of youth meets the delta of my hands and flows in small, weak veins, all the way to my fingertips. They decide, on their own, to slap him. And then they decide, on their own, to grab his face and kiss him with the violent sublimity of winning a game on Windows ‘95. The next thing I know, Lighter and I are hungover at the Orsay and I have the sudden urge to call him because I see a sly dog in the corner of painting and I think he would like it. I buy a postcard at the giftshop, but telling the truth is hard so I will never send it. Lighter asks me if I have a briquet, and I ask him if he wants to come with my to the Jardin du Luxembourg and play a game. He seats me in the front of his bike, something my parents scolded me for when I was small, and we weave between the cars, escaping all of those gilded frames and lovers trapped in marble.