Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women, nonbinary and gender-diverse writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
My best friend Natalie spent the year after college working in a small French town where, a few nights a week, she’d bundle up and walk the cobbled streets to meet a choir of octogenarians whose frequent deaths seriously affected the balance of altos, sopranos, baritones and tenors.
She’d joined the choir to stave off loneliness. If there was a younger, hipper ensemble than the one she’d found at church, she did not care to find out. Simply buttoned up her coat and went. Knowing Natalie, the coat must have been vintage. A perfectly plum peacoat, maybe, or a hearty houndstooth duster. The sort of garment that may or may not have come with tissues in the pockets. I can just hear Natalie now, clip-clopping on the cobblestones as the fog blurred her way to the church, wondering which parishioner would be toast this time.
When we’d talk on the phone, she’d tell me she was the youngest person for miles. Or was it kilometers? There were no candlelit bars or one-night stands for this expat. Nothing but shawls and rain and treble clefs and God. And funerals, I imagine. There must have been an awful lot of funerals.
Meanwhile across the pond, I spent that winter holding on to my first love for dear life. Not tight like a hug, but firm like a fist. The way a child might hold the neck of her favorite plush dog, rubbing it down to its raw cotton jugular. My girlfriend was spending the semester in Italy; I was spending the semester in agony.
“Good morning!!” I’d text her hungrily. “How was your day? What are you up to? Why were you up so late last night??” While she drank spritzes and learned Italian swear words, I moved into a vacant room in the school’s unofficial bohemian wasteland. Once a grand mansion, it had become the pot-scented, haphazardly muralled home of art majors and Kant readers. Not that they weren’t friendly. When I arrived, a girl with prominent nipples in a translucent robe answered the door smiling. She chattered merrily on as I lugged my suitcase up to the attic. “Here is the Wi-Fi password,” she said, “and here is the bathroom, and here is an explanation for the caged rats just outside your door.”
“Don’t worry about those two,” she demurred. The rats had beady eyes and empty food bowls. “Someone’s feeding them for the semester.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s all taken care of.”
The water dispensers were also empty.
“It’s just that they seem … ”
“Well, nice to meet you. Let me know if you need anything!”
With this she scurried, rat-like, back down the stairs, leaving me to unpack my sweaters and stare at the mean, bleak letters of “JANUARY” atop my Horses of 2017 calendar.
A few years later, when we were grown-ups or at least thought we were, Natalie and I shared long, drawn-out phone calls during our work days. I was stuck at an office job in steamy New Orleans, sweating through my patent leather shoes; she was doing something helpful at a New York nonprofit. We’d start the conversation in the morning and take breaks whenever one of us needed to take a phone call or appear busy.
“Just a second,” she’d say. “My boss wants something.”
“Hang on,” I’d sigh. “Someone’s calling the landline.”
Over the course of the 9-to-5, we’d cover everything from cuticles to sisters to the diamond-encrusted pelican brooch I’d found on the office floor and whether I should feel compelled to return it. If there was anyone who could appreciate the value of a brooch it was Natalie. How big? Are the diamonds real? Send a picture. A few weeks later, a woman who could have been in Natalie’s choir appeared, asking around for her bauble. Ah, well. More to divulge on the next phone call.
Over the years, our topics of conversation continued to evolve like fish moving from water to land, growing legs. She wanted to go back to France and start an artists’ colony in a chateau; I wanted to publish a book. I was engaged and then she was engaged and then she was running errands and then I was having a miscarriage and then she was getting a promotion and then I was pregnant again. Sometimes we talked about God. Or pizza rolls. A few weeks ago, I put Natalie on speaker as I washed a bottle with one hand and carried my baby with the other. She was telling me how her mother used to stalk the Krispy Kreme when she was pregnant, how she’d wait for the neon “HOT” sign to light up above the neon “NOW” sign so she could march in, order a dozen, and eat them right there in her car. I could feel the heat of that story through the phone.
We are warm now. Safe and loved. Grown-ups at last. And yet I still think about that first winter, how siloed Natalie and I were. If only we could have been siloed together, sharing the cobbled walk to choir practice or the attic room next to the rats. I can picture us playing Uno in mittens. Speaking French. Rearranging white-haired altos until the harmony clicked.
In my last letter to her, a few weeks before she came home from France, I wrote, “You spent a year abroad; I spent a year with a broad.” By this point, my girlfriend had broken up with me, and most of Natalie’s choir had met Jesus.
As you can imagine, we had a lot to talk about.
