“Adela and MArch the Girl”
Liv Go
“No one knows shit about the Ottoman Empire, anyways!”
It’s Tuesday evening in March and Adela’s dorm room. It smells like an expensive candle and Adela’s blue nail polish. I came over to study, but as red wine stains our teeth purple, we digress into other pursuits.
They are taking a Middle East class together and they just got back their grades for their midterm papers. Adela got an A-. March got an A- . . . /B+.
“SLASH B+! Can you believe that shit?” I shake my head no, “And you know what’s fucked up too? I was actually interested in the topic. I spent a week writing and researching the thing. Adela wrote it in a night. One. Night. She sat right there, I watched her do it!”
March motions to the seat I’m sitting in. I look at Adela and she nods her head laughing.
“It's true. I wrote exactly what the professor said in class. She just wanted to hear herself talk. I feel bad, March’s paper was really good. She even tried to get it published.”
“You did?” I turn towards March in shock.
In pained laughter, she screams, “YES! I submitted it to a journal. I thought surely I wrote a good paper!”
March is the type of person to say words like ‘surely’ in a fit of rage.
“Let me read this last paragraph for you... ”
She positions herself in the front of the room and reads it to us.
Now, I’m sure everything she wrote was very good. But I don’t know much about the Ottoman Empire, so it’s difficult to repeat here, on this paper, exactly what was said. To be honest, I wasn’t totally listening. My mind was on the things I knew.
March was born in Newnan, Georgia but moved to Atlanta as a teenager. Sometimes I have the privilege of hearing March’s southern accent. It comes out when she says words like “pen” and “tender.” She went to the same high school as my roommate of several years. That’s how we met. It was a fast friendship.
“The dissonance between the subjects and the elite bureaucrats...”
We talk about books we like and art we find interesting and our mutual looming anxiety and dread that seems to never let up. March is both a pessimist and an optimist. She’s an outgoing introvert. She has a strict bedtime of 10:30 p.m. It’s easy to reach her, she receives people openly. She can recognize a lovely thing. She’s often moved by other people’s words and passions. She has a gift of seeing people for who they are and all that they can be. She is sometimes sharp, but that’s only because she’s smart and honest and sometimes people deserve it. She loves Nietzche and George Eliot and root vegetables and her coffee maker.
“. . .drafted the laws indicates another comparison...”
She talks about the Ottoman Empire with wildly expressive hand gestures. I feel lucky to know so much about her and a bit ashamed to know so little about the Turks. March is good. She is my dear friend.
She holds up one finger and shakes it to the rhythm of the last words in her paper, “ ...between what a select few thought the Empire needed and those who had to experience the impacts of their decisions.”
She looks at Adela and me for confirmation. I start to clap.
“It’s great, March, it really is.” Adela blows on her nails and sighs, “While you’re up will you make me a little something? My nails are still drying and I’m hungry.”
March and Adela have a Breville Oven. They have shorted their dorm room’s power supply multiple times cooking mini pizzas and chocolate chip cookies.
“Ugh, Adela,” March seems exasperated, but she’s already moving towards their freezer, “What do you want?”
“What do we have?”
March pulls out various food items at reads them out loud, “We have so much shit, I don’t even know where this stuff comes from.”
She pulls out frozen pot pies and mac and cheese and dumplings and in the very back, escargot.
“WHAT IS THIS?” March laughs in shock.
“They’re yummy!” Adela defends herself.
“When are you gonna eat those?” I have so many questions.
“I don’t know, whenever I’m craving them I’ll just pop them in the oven,” she shrugs.
“Snails, Adela? SNAILS?” March shakes the aluminum container at Adela accusingly.
“Just give me the dumplings.” she rolls her eyes.
March puts them in their oven and moves back to her bed, pulls out her laptop, and stares at her screen trying to write a short story for her creative writing class. It is not long before she gets distracted.
“You look so glum Adela, what’s wrong?” March asks.
Before Adela can answer, I interrupt, “I love that word... glum.”
“Isn’t it so good?” March smiles.
I write it down to remember later. It’s got a good feel to it. It’s walking in the rain with flip-flops, mouth-nomming bubblegum, slime-slapping pavement: glum.
“It’s fantastic, I wish I used it more often.”
“You know what another good one is? Sprite. As in, ‘she’s just a little sprite,’” March scrunches up her nose. Sprite is damn adorable. Sprite is the type of word that dances out of your mouth and then apologizes for its disruption. We laugh at its innocence.
“I love it.” I add it to a running list.
March’s Good Words
Surely
Glum
Sprite
Adela feels glum because she feels like she keeps attracting obsessive and crazy people and she doesn’t know why.
“What is it about me?”
“You’re so beautiful and warm, Adela. That’s why people want to be around you.”
“But so are you, March.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a loser.” She laughs in self-depreciation.
“Well, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be around someone as smart as you.”
“That’s so sweet,” March touches her hand to her heart.
Adela is from Upstate. She rides horses and has the best closet I have ever seen. Adela is cool– does mushrooms with her parents and takes spontaneous trips to Europe kind of cool. She never lets things get to her too deep, she lets stuff roll right off her back. It’s a quality that both March and I struggle with. She’s rational and never embarrassing. Stunning and confident, I have never seen her look bad. Last Tuesday, she wore a floor-length green chiffon dress just to go to our Russian Literature class and eat a veggie burger in the dining hall afterward. She’s a force and she’s good for March. I don’t know her very well, but I love her a lot. Every time I introduce her to someone new I say, “That’s Adela. She’s so awesome.”
A big fly buzzes loudly around the room interrupting our conversation. We all pause what we are doing to stare at it. It's comically large, it might be the biggest fly I’ve ever seen. It lands.
Silence.
It sits perched in the corner of the ceiling above March’s dresser. Adela gets up on a chair and tries to swat at it with March’s midterm.
“Wait Adela, not my paper!”
Adela swings, and misses. The fly resumes its noisy flight pattern.
“My paper, Adela?” March looks hurt.
“Oh March, you can print out a new one. I’ll print you out a new one.”
I keep my eye on the bug as it races around the room. It seems to defy all laws of physics, such a big body, and such tiny wings. It lands again. This time on a poster of a lush green forest. I wonder if it’s trying to go home.
“Get it, Adela!” March and I scream cowering from the flying beast. This time she picks up Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and smacks it. It drops to the ground in an anticlimactic end.
“Where’d it go?”Adela looks around her searching for its corpse.
I point to the floor.
“Awww, wait I’m sad now.” March frowns.
“You were just screaming to kill it!” Adela shouts.
“It was loud as hell,” I reassure March. “It had to go.”
It’s so quiet without the fly, “ I miss him. He was just a sprite,” March admits to us.
Adela walks over to curl up next to March on their “mega-bed”: two twin beds pushed together to make a sort of franken-queen.
March closes her laptop, “Don’t read this, it’s terrible.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Adela tells her.
“It’s true,” March rubs her eyes in frustration. “I hate it.”
“Read us a little something,”
“No, I can't,”
“Come on, March”
“Okay. Only a little though.”
She reads us her opening lines, a setting of a scene. She writes about a grungy college noise show we went to together last winter. It’s precise and funny. It’s earnest, just like March.
When she finishes reading, I can tell she is proud of those lines. There’s something about reading out your creative words to people. There’s an initial demoralizing bashfulness, yes, that bit is unfortunately necessary. There’s also a sparkling and not-so-insignificant yearning to be listened to and to be validated over your phonetic agony. We write for our best selves to be heard.
“That was beautiful,” I tell her.
“Well, that’s the only good part I have.”
“It’s okay the rest will come to you. Hearing you read is making me want to write.”
“Well, you’re a writer, Liv.”
“I don’t think I would say that.”
“You are, Liv. I love it when you let me read your writing.”
“You’re a writer too, March.”
“You have no idea how much I was hoping you’d say that.”