Interlude for Anna — By Summer Wrobel

artwork by Daniel Finaldi

‍Anna can’t sleep without her fan on. Even in the winter, she needs the air, the whirring of its small plastic body. I hate fans, but it’s Anna’s room, and I have asked her again if I can stay, so I take the wall-facing side of her twin bed.

I live on Rutgers St. now, and Anna lives on 3rd and C which means, for the first time in our friendship, we are walking distance apart. We both take the J train from Essex to school and some mornings, we call each other and trade gossip, pool our thoughts from the day before, like how Alyssa told Anna that gold hoops were her thing, or how Corbin sold oregano to Yesennia but called it weed. We don’t hang up until Anna is close enough to loop her arm in mine, and then we descend into the station.

But I’ve started calling Anna at night too. I’ll already be out the door with a change of clothes, but I still call Anna to hear the absolutism in her voice when she says, Of course. You are family.

On these nights, I walk past the pickle guys and Essex St. Market and the Two Boots with their red booths and thin pizza. I walk past the neighborhood pharmacy that I love because other than prescriptions I think it only sells balloons, and it won’t feel small until Rite Aid opens up on the other street. I walk past the Nuyorican Poet’s Café and the storefront with the cheap empanadas I buy when I know Anna is lying about being hungry.

Anna’s parents are musicians and when she buzzes me up to her apartment, I hear her father playing trumpet with his Klezmer band that assembles in the living room. Sometimes, when her father isn’t home, it is her mother I hear, playing the musical saw. It sounds like aliens descending, and I peek my head into the living room to see how something so sharp can become all soft and wobbly.

At Anna’s, I love the bottles that line her fridge—old liquor bottles, blue bottles, skinny bottles with French swing locks that feel sophisticated and slender. They look like wine bottles in our hands even though her parents only use them to chill the tap. The openings on the bottles are so small they suction our lips as we chug, but we forgo glasses and grab bottle after bottle to drink in her room.

It is in this room that we sit cross legged, and Anna tries to teach me how to put on top eyeliner, but my hands are too shaky. We watch TV on her computer with notebooks open on our laps. When we climb into bed, we make confessions. Yes, we laughed at Jessica, but who were we kidding? If Corbin offered us something, we would have taken it too. In the dark, I tell Anna that I dream about seeing my father on the street, that in these dreams I am chasing him down Delancey, past the Tenement Museum and the eyeglass shop. Sometimes I wake up and think he faked his death, and then I remember: I live with my mother and brothers on Rutgers St.

The truth is, if I stay at Anna’s then my mother will have her own bed to sleep in, and I can imagine her at home instead of out on the street. I like to imagine my mother as she is in the daytime. She insists that I have a room of my own even though there isn’t room to spare. She helps me nail up artwork and string lights and lets me buy floral sheets. I don’t know what to do with this mother though, who at night, gets drunk and tosses the artwork and string lights onto the street.  I joke that I have two mothers, daytime and evening, and my night mother is all rage. She is angry at my father for how he died, and angry at me for reminding her of him. By the end of the day, I am no longer her daughter. She opens her mouth and forgets my name.

But in Anna’s bedroom we are still sixteen and worldbuilding, trying to see what it feels like to hold a cigarette in our hand, to lean out her window and cough smoke into the street. The tenement across from her apartment became an NYU frat house, and Anna flips them off from the window though they can’t see. Anna hates the NYU kids with a clarity I envy.  I want to join her in her anger, yell out to the kids a little older than us, but I bite my nails instead. The whole city is changing, and she can’t stop it—right? Side by side in her bed, I want to ask Anna, are my parents bad people? but there is so much more to hear—trumpets and laughter and faraway parties, and the hum of Anna’s fan, the predictability of its spin, pulling us to sleep.

*Names have been changed for anonymity.

Summer Wrobel is a writer and editor from Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she worked as a Graduate Teaching Fellow. Her work has received support from the BreadLoaf Writers' Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and Sewanee Writers' Conference, and has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Crown Heights, where she hosts The Cusp Reading Series, and is at work on a memoir.