But this is ordinary stuff, the way we do ourselves in, hardly bar material. The only drama in it is the fiction, the emergency crew I conjured the couple times a paper towel got caught too far down, how they would bring the stretcher in past the bakery and lean it up against the paper towel holder as they pulled me out. And for those few seconds of frightened silent coughing, I wondered what people would say to my parents when they heard I had drowned in a supermarket, in a toilet bowl full of coffeecake. I never came up with those lines.

Instead, I’d tell you the good things: That my mom took me to watch the NBA draft at a movie theater downtown when I was nine, and that in first grade, my next door neighbor Andrew and I spent months extracting the entire contents of a fishbowl that my parents had tossed in the gravel in my backyard, thinking we’d found a great vein of turquoise. I could tell you about watching a mare give birth in an empty barn one morning before church, or about my California boyfriend, whose last girl had been a fire-eating hula dancer he’d met at a pig roast, and whose bedroom contained one mattress and three surfboards. You’d say everyone has a story like that. For you, maybe it was the woman who fixed violins, the one with the bad skin and good fingers, and when she held you, you could feel how her hand wished it were a violin neck she was holding.

And if we were being reckless and trading firsts, I’d tell you that I was first undone one February morning to that song Hallelujah, the Jeff Buckley version, snow coming down and the window of his bedroom cracked because the radiators stayed on seventy-eight all year long in that house, and after, I wanted the whole weight of his body on me. And what was yours, I’d ask. You’d draw the girl for me in broad strokes—big chapped lips, painted nails, the pale hair that clung to the back of her neck, the smooth hot fear between you in the car, or the den, or your bed with the posters still on the walls above you. You’d just tell me most people don’t really lose it to music the first time. It’s not like in the movies. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because he doesn’t remember what was playing. And what could you say to that?

Say I met you on the dance floor. I’d tell you about that girl I knew who could dance. Melanie. How she danced and kept these beautiful sketchbooks with illustrations of steeples and bacteria, but none of that stopped the van that didn’t stop for red, riding her bike in Tucson three years ago, early morning late December. Finals were over but her roommate said she was on her way back to campus, must have left something in lab. What I wouldn’t say to you then over the din of the music is that I had forgotten Melanie until just now. Three years of not remembering her at all—not that night at the bar in Budapest when I first saw her dance, or how she was a binger. At eighteen, the rest of us were impatient with weakness and just rolled our eyes as she paced up and back the bus aisle eating our snacks, leaning over our young and private conversations to help herself, can I have one, her fingers feeling along the luggage rack for the shape of sugar, getting sloshed against the seats as the bus made its way across the Hungarian countryside, can I have one, but that night we all envied the way she held her arms above her head and closed her eyes and bled rhythm.

You might stop me to remind me we’d never meet that way, because you don’t dance. Well anyway, to Melanie. You’d lift your glass, too. I probably couldn’t find words to say that I thought I’d never forget her, the habits I despised so much, how she acted more stomach than girl most days. And then like that—all the reckless eating undone by that driver three winters ago. Three years it has taken me. And I didn’t remember until I became her.

Say you ordered a pilsner next. I’d think Czech, maybe ask you about your regrets, how much of this you’d give back if you could. If you asked mine, I’d offer another toast: And this is to the man who married the woman he should have, same toast I made on his wedding night four years ago, except I wasn’t there. He was stateside, me in some expat bar in Prague along the river, same pale beer, same half-smile certain that things went as they should. Before all that, there was an autumn of walks and letters in winter, and questions—his—what could you know about someone after five years, or five months, and did the laws of physics or probability permit him to feel something for me but love someone else full and well? Ones I fielded all right, for the rookie I was.

Maybe if you looked a certain way then, at me, or into your beer, I’d admit that I think about him on that night every year and that he is my math problem, the one you waste all your time on, showing how you arrived at the square root of the quadratic of something, but it’s the wrong equation altogether and you don’t finish the test in time. That I haven’t gotten points for showing my work since tenth grade. That I might have loved him, if either of us had thought to ask.

Here’s the part I couldn’t say: That when he wrote me years later, saying he might have loved me, he could see that now, that was the day I promised I would stop putting paper towels down my throat. But by the next week, I was buying drugstore cookies and taking trash bags filled with vomit to the curb, because I had a weak toilet and no garbage disposal in that apartment. I wouldn’t admit to you that of all the things he told me, the follies and his short history of failed romances, I remember best when he told me he liked how thin I was. It wasn’t what mattered, and he knew it, but he did. I was on the portable phone in my parents’ guest room, and I think I told him that’s okay, that’s all right to feel, but who was I to say? And if we saw each other again, would we hello or just a nod, the kind that says he made the right choice.

Next round, an eye on the TV to keep us sober, you might say that it’s the fourth quarter and my hair is just now dry. At this point in the game, it’s okay to admit you noticed. I’d tell you how I’ve never dried my hair, even when I was little, how my dad was in charge of combing it before school on mornings my mother was gone on business. He’d use this really fine comb, and little flakes of his own dandruff would come off in my part, which he’d get straight after several tries, the times I’d let him finish it at all. Other times, impatient for what, I just got up off the stool in the bathroom and went for a hat, leaving him there with his tie draped over his shoulder and the pale green comb in his hand. And now if I could go back, I’d let him part it anywhere.

Maybe I’d touch my hair then, like I’ve said too much, or you would, tuck it behind my ear and tell me it reminds you of wheat, barley, hops. And I’d tell you that my boyfriend’s scalp smells like leaves waiting to be raked, like home, and you’d say: Boyfriend?

So, I’d buy the next round.

By then we’d be slowing down, probably sneaking olives from the garnish tray. Someone wiping a chair down with a rag. And if you asked then, I’d say no, no kids, but that if there are kids, I want them soon because I remember sitting on my mom’s sewing chair, asking her why they’d had me so late. I was nine, maybe ten, I cried and so did she when she said they had thought hard about it, but had wanted me very much. And now the difference is I’ve stopped asking, but still I am living perched on that chair, watching their lives pull in to themselves, like wings to a body, like landing, and still I am sitting there, stretching my legs toward the pedal as if I could mend all this, no longer asking why but how long. How long do we have.

Game over, or closing time. Detroit rallied, though neither team broke a hundred. We’d wrap it up, coats from off the chairs, help with the collar. There are only so many things you can keep from saying before the spaces spell out leaving.

And I kept them all till we left, though I think you knew, that small look you gave me as you tucked dollars under your glass seemed to say I'd left a few things out, but I just said home? And you agreed, home. A door held, a street between us, then gone, and no time to ask you where that is, if it is anywhere near mine, which is in a place like before—before the head rushes and sore throats and empty pie tins—a before I can almost recall: Leaving Budapest by train, slipping across Bavaria into France in a car full of strangers, lonesome miles I wouldn’t know how to purge. A bicycle ride along the canal, my trousers slipping down on my hips, eating salmon baked in tinfoil at Laurette’s and running through the wheat fields behind her house in the mornings, the colorless stalks purpled with daybreak. I mean home as a remembered motion, another kind of weight: The sag of cherries on their July boughs, the swish and ease of my legs moving through all that unmade bread, a time when under my ribs, in the small captivity of my body, my heart felt like the heaviest thing.

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