You Must Not Know About Me by Maggie Andersen

When I met him in a courtyard in Prague, I held court all night long. My hair was streaked with pink, and I wore flower barrettes in my hair. We were part of a summer writing intensive, and we spent our mornings in writing workshops, afternoons in history lectures, and evenings in bars. He liked when I was tipsy and a little arrogant and even when I told him to blow it out his ass, which I did, often. He fell in love with me in the middle of July, but he hated me for the first time then, too. 

*

I have always hated dancing. Always played the limited-dancing roles in high-school musical theatre. Hung close to the bar at friends’ weddings. Never understood what women meant when they said they felt most free when dancing. It’s always made me feel imprisoned in my body.

*

One night in Prague, I did a shot of Becherovka and then spontaneously started jigging. The man I was with told me to stop, with a pained expression on his face. He had only just recently fallen in love with me, but I could already see his disdain. It wasn’t embarrassment, though that would’ve been warranted. Something about my happiness, separate from him, made him inexplicably angry.

“Stop,” he said. “Just stop it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” I said, sweaty and twenty-seven and slightly drunk. “Nobody tells me what to do.”

“For once in your life, will you please just shut the fuck up?”

He was a professor of literature, and had only known me for a few weeks. For once in my life.

*

My college girlfriends and I frequented Chicago bars in our early twenties, and I preferred to stand on the bar and play the one-armed drums, a la Def Leppard, because that was preferable to having to confront my own lack of rhythm.    

*

Was I standing on a bar in Prague? I don’t know; I only remember the cruelty in his eyes. 

I went back to the States at the end of summer and didn’t call him, but he pursued me. He called, sent long, lyrical declarations of love, and promises of a future as a university couple. He convinced me to come and stay in the small city where he lived, and take some writing classes.

I met a woman in one my writing workshops, and loved her immediately. He did not.  

She danced to The Smiths and Morrissey while I sat at the island in her kitchen, drinking wine and singing along. She lived in a luxury apartment, paid for by her parents, and made everything look pretty. She only bought wine bottles with pretty labels, and books with pretty covers. She wore handmade jewelry and vintage coats. She made little dance floors appear wherever she went. She was rich and spoiled and open-hearted. She bought me a record player, too, and then we danced in our apartments at night like little indie Muppets with records scattered all over the floor.

He rolled his eyes about her.

“She’s a little kid,” he would always say. “You’re a grown-up and a serious artist.”

I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three. He was forty with no sense of humor. But I wanted to be an artist very badly.

She and I wrote and read each other drafts in one of the last cafes with a smoking section, where we smoked Parliament Lights and laughed loudly, in a way he would’ve disapproved of. She loved my stories of growing up working-class Chicago Catholic, and I her stories of growing up wealthy East Coast Jewish. He didn’t like the way I smelled after I was with her. He said that cafe was for undergrads and I should act my age. 

One afternoon, as she and I were driving away from the coffee shop in her Volvo, I broke the rules and played a Top 40 song.

“Listen,” I said. And then I started singing, nervously.

“To the left, to the left…”

But soon, I was really belting it.

“You must not know ‘bout me, you must not know ‘bout me. I could have another you in a minute. Matter fact, he’ll be here in a minute.”

When the song had ended, I felt lighter, and looked over to see if she’d understood.

She pursed her lips and blinked.

“I had no idea you liked Beyoncé,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was judgmental or charmed. Most of the time, she was younger, but sometimes she was older.

*

He played Leonard Cohen when we woke together in his drafty apartment. “I love you in the morning…” We brought John Prine for our picnic lunches on the beach. “You must be Daddy’s little pumpkin. I can tell by the way you roll…” I was listening to John Prine with him and drinking pinot grigio from a high-end grocery store while she was waiting at a bowling alley for me to celebrate her 25th birthday. He was in a good mood and didn’t want to go to a party with those people, and I was buzzed and felt indescribably sexy in my plaid bikini and knew it wouldn’t last. I lost her a little that day, and never really apologized. 

She and I sat across from each other in a café one day, as we often did, and I complained about him, as I often did. She drank black coffee out of a thick mug, and told me to leave him.

“Just do it,” she said. “Now,” she said. “Before it gets too late.”

(She was always good at giving the advice she couldn’t take.)

Then she leaned in closely and whispered in a Southern accent, “Jump, Maggie, jump.”

I told her I didn’t get the reference, so that night, we watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in her living room with the high ceilings and canned lights, and I felt it all in waves. He and I left each other in waves. He started acting generously toward her because he felt ashamed of the way he had snuffed something out in me, and he knew she might be able to summon it back. He didn’t want to be burdened with the guilt.

One night she met us at an author reading, and then we all three went to a bar that the undergraduates loved. On weeknights, the dance floor was sad and empty. 

“So, how’d you like the reading?” she asked us.

The author had read a story about two cats, and one of them was prettier. The last line was, “Winter’s coming soon, Matilda.”

“I liked it very much,” he said, and then he started in on one of his unsolicited barstool lectures. 

At some point, I heard him say, “Well, it was about life and death, of course.”

“Really?” she said. “I thought it was about someone young and pretty getting older and losing her looks. I thought it was about the end of a romantic relationship.”

She was right, but when he cut his eyes at her, I was too afraid to say so.

“What do you think, Maggie?” she asked as a blush rose up her neck.

One of the shames of my life was watching this woman stand up to a man twenty years her senior, seeing her certainty waver, and not saying a goddamn word.

The Beyoncé song came blasting over the speakers and she said, “Fuck you guys.”

She walked out to the dance floor and started running back and forth to the song. She tried to sing the lyrics, but couldn’t remember them. Trust fund girls do not know how to dance to Beyoncé.

“Come on, Mag!” she called to me. “Please! I know you love this song! Don’t tell me you don’t!”

She pushed one arm to the left with the other hand on her hip, and looked totally ridiculous. I wanted, more than anything, to laugh, but felt so irreversibly humorless.

“I know you want to!” she cried. “Come and dance with me!”

He looked ashamed of himself, and it must’ve been that he couldn’t see the woman from Prague anymore. The one who had told him to blow it out his ass, the one who had flown back to the States perfectly prepared to live without him.

“Go and dance, babe,” he said in a strangled voice.

And I stood there at the edge of that floor, watching my pretty friend and thinking about Matilda, the cat. Winter was coming soon and I wondered if we were prepared. She was laughing now, and maybe trying to breakdance? I must’ve looked like a battered woman or a total bore, and I guess I was a bit of each. I tried to tell her telepathically that I was in trouble, like a cat on a hot tin roof. She danced alone, I stood still as a statue, and he didn’t deserve a space on the floor. But the sight of her spinning wildly did allow me to finally leave him, and return myself to myself. 

*

She’s a famous editor now, which is what she wanted to be, and I’m a small liberal arts college professor, which is what I wanted to be. He still lives in a dying Midwestern city, and I’m not sure if he ever became what he wanted to be. She and I text each other a couple times a year and heart each other’s posts on Instagram. She doesn’t call when she comes through Chicago, but we did run into each other at a conference once. A mutual friend told me they were meeting for drinks, and I should join. I hadn’t seen her since I had first started dating my husband, and now we’d been married several years, and had a kid in the first grade who had just lost his two front teeth.

When I saw her, across a tiki-themed hotel bar, it was like seeing her on that parquet floor again. She looked exactly the same, as she sipped a cocktail with purple flower petals floating in it. She had decided not to come to my wedding, and that had bruised me, but I also understood her decision. A mutual friend told her it was the best wedding she’d ever attended, and I wondered about her role in that: had she taught me how to make things beautiful? I thought of her record player in a baby blue vintage suitcase, her Jackie Kennedy pillbox hats, the country and western blouse with the shiny buttons, wine bottles with birds on the label, her grandmother’s China, and Elizabeth Taylor lighting up a screen. 

She took a sip of her flower petal drink, checked her phone, and I wanted to run to her, spin her around and around, scream the Beyoncé lyrics in her face, and fall down on the floor laughing with her arms around my neck. 

“Hi,” I said to her.

“Hi,” she said, a performance. “How are you?”  

I knew she was noticing my extra weight and forehead creases. I knew exactly what she was thinking; she was familiar to the point of pain. I ordered a Hawaiian beer, and then our friend joined us for small talk. 

I gathered, from context clues, that she had a boyfriend who played in an indie band and lived in her condo when he felt like it. And after two of the flower petal cocktails, she said, “I don’t have real friends anymore, but I do have a very good career and lots of acquaintances.” She shrugged her shoulders: c’est la vie. My husband and son are my friends, I thought, and I was proud of my career too, but it occurred to me that I didn’t have real friends anymore either. It was supposed to be her all along and it was never supposed to be him. What do we sacrifice? What, in the end, is lost? Why can we never get it back? I shared a Lyft with her that night, and never said any of these things.

*

I hope a million people read her magazine. I hope her boyfriend likes the way she dances to the Smiths, and I hope she sings Beyoncé when he forgets how lucky he is. If only he could’ve seen the way she twirled on that dance floor all by herself, sweaty and small, underneath a disco ball spinning for no one. I want to tell him that she wants the wedding and the babies, no matter what she says. I know her better than anyone.  

I wonder how she’d edit this story, and don’t know if I want to know, but I hope, when she sees a roof, she remembers how to jump.

Maggie Andersen is a Chicago-based writer. She has essays forthcoming in the Laurel Review and DIAGRAM, and has also published prose in Sleet, the Baltimore Review, the Coal Hill Review, CutBank, Grain, and the Southern California Review, among others. In addition to teaching at Dominican University, she serves as Literary Manager at the Gift Theatre Company.