a girl named eleanor

She left Jack behind, and her parents, and Stacy and her hometown and bicycle rides down Sandpiper Road to the beach, and Huffnagle's beautiful summer afternoons, and the ocean. Of them all, she would miss Jack.

Four years in college, four years of drowning the dreams with studies, with men, with the steady pressure of bodies packed tight around her in clubs. She made friends in ways she never had before; shutting the dreams up in some nifty internal closet made making connections a simple affair, though not one any more true for its sudden easiness. With these friends she danced and drank and slept and laughed and lied. The lies were the worst, the hardest; she spun them out and rolled in them until they were wound so tightly about her that they became her. She let the hopeful young thing she once was start falling one day, let everything she had so many years ached for plummet with the memories; she was simply a girl named Eleanor.

Senior year, a cold November night in the city, the buildings sketched over with early frost, the clouds rumbling like giants overhead, the smell of snow on the wind. Eleanor stood in a line outside a club called Dub-Dub's, stood in a small knot of girlfriends, and watched the stormclouds bloom like steel wool spun slowly. She thought for a moment of the trembling skies over the Pacific, of the snap of the ocean wind against her face. She closed her eyes and, without thinking, let herself remember, but only briefly: the doors to the club opened and she was pulled into the black.

She drank, too much, probably, and danced, and the bodies multiplied as the hours passed. Eleanor was an easy drunk, always felt the rush hit her hard and fast, and the sudden heat of the stupor kicking in reduced her world to the small space she occupied in this tangled weave of elbows and knees and breasts and bellies, and Eleanor knew before it happened that she was going down. Her legs went weak beneath her -- Too much, too much, how fucking stupid of me, she thought -- and she fell like a tower imploding, slow, folding in on herself in shelflike angles and edges.

Like something out of a movie she was caught up, abruptly pinched between strangers who passed her between their bodies without even noticing, anonymous and oblivious human transportation devices. There was crowd-surfing, but this was crowd-swimming. Eleanor felt her feet lifted off of the floor, and then she let go, and the haze swallowed up her thoughts the way the crowd swallowed her body. The silence lasted only a moment.

She woke to the sensation of hands on her head and saw the scattered half-moon of revelers drawn back from her, saw a man in a white shirt and gloves on his knees beside her, felt the slow, warm, thickening roll of blood down her forehead. The paramedic's name was Rusty, and he took her to the ambulance parked outside on the street and cleaned her cut and butterflied it. The music resumed inside, staccatoed by the opening and closing of the club doors as people slipped in and fell out. It all seemed so ridiculous to her in that moment. And when she arrived home and disappeared into her own bedroom, she was not surprised at all to find a message blinking on her answering machine. It was Jack, he was in town, she had somehow called him without saying a word, he was here, carrying in the lilt of his voice all of the things she had given to him and hidden from herself, and she was not surprised at all. She played the message again, repeating out loud the number he left, and dialed. He said, "Hello, Eleanor," and the certainty in his voice brought her home again.