Wing Back Home
By Olivia Nathan
WE CALL EACH OTHER once a week. We talk when Annie’s trying to park in Silver Lake and everyone’s on a date with sticky highlighter on their cheeks and painter’s pants scrunched into their vaginas, so there’s not a single spot on Sunset or Lucille or Rowena and the girl Annie’s meeting must be wondering why she’s late, must be petting her barky, wire-haired dog Annie’ll end up carrying in a crate to the vet in a month and meanwhile, she’s sweating and still talking on the phone because while she drives we must be talking to one another.
We’re wondering, on the other sides of our phones, on opposite sides of the country—where I’m on the twelfth floor of an apartment building—if I should never be late to a date again and be celibate more often. I get so much writing done and what is happiness anyway, why isn’t it the gray mornings spent running in Central Park with my ass like two fatty frozen slabs of steak or the two-year-old weed I smoke while listening to an audiobook of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories or the prose I type in the Notes app of my phone in bed that night, into paragraphs which sound like conversations we had while one of us was looking for parking in Silver Lake.
WE CALL EACH OTHER every five days. Recently, my father’s started calling me. A reversal of the last decade of me calling him, which means he misses me and three carpeted floors of a house aren’t enough space from my mother.
We talk while he’s walking his new dog (my replacement) in the voluptuous hills of Griffith Park where he’s putting one laced Merrell hiking boot in front of the other, tube sock showing at his calf as his pants ride up. It’s seventy-seven degrees and my father's face has been tanned, pressed with rust, since 1987.
We have not confessed how scared we are to see how the other has aged since the ongoing pandemic and MFA workshops.
I’m in a Heattech turtleneck, Heattech tights, jeans, two sweaters and wool socks looking at slate gray sky through my kitchen window. Sometimes, I think about wearing a beanie as well.
We’re still wondering about potential candidates on the one dating app I was using, which my father calls “The Dating Site,” so I tell him the latest guy is: “Poof–gone. My romantic life trickles downhill into the gutter, but freezes in the tundra of east coast January and is released into the ocean as ice, but quickly melts in the impending doom that is warmed waters and vaporizes into the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide to help ruin us all.”
My father laughs. We’ve reached the top of a dusty hill, the dog and the dad emitting wet breaths over the blue haze of Los Angeles.
My father asks for a ballpark estimate of how long he has to keep up his exercise routine in order to stay alive for grandchildren. We both run in Saucony’s and sunscreen over large ellipses of concrete, with mothers who form armadas of strollers, which force us to greet potential death, running into the street to get around them.
When I was in middle school, my father constructed imaginary boyfriends for me. “When’s Biff coming to pick you up?” he’d say. “Or is it Scooter or Dean tonight?”
Though he named them, I put leather polish in their hair and noted the outline of crucifixes hanging on chains beneath their white t-shirts. When I listen to my mother’s favorite Laura Nyro album and the song “California Shoeshine Boys” plays, I sing to my father’s imagined boyfriends.
They did not at all resemble the very real boys I went to school with. Most of whom were Jewish and studied Japanese and disputed two point losses on Algebra tests. The imaginary boyfriends would always be seventeen, would always tuck a cigarette behind their ears and wave to my father from the driver’s seat before whisking me away and asking for road head.
Now, however, they do come over. They park their American Graffiti cars on Riverside Drive and roll up the sleeves of their t-shirts. They sit on my bed and look out at the moon, tipped in its saucer of Manhattan sky. They lie on my couch on blustery afternoons with a book by David Grann and ask how my run was, if I saw my favorite strangers striding by.
WE CALL EACH OTHER once a month. We text at least five times a week about skincare and hypothetical haircuts and sales at Sephora. You’d never know, reading Clara and I’s blue and white bubbled conversations, that we’re pursuing masters degrees.
I once texted her, before both of us went back to school, that her law school path sounds hard and all but my MFA program will be unbearably rigorous.
She responded in complete agreement. And I had to be like: Clara, I was joking.
We talk in the same sunny, seventy degree room as her boyfriend, who has become like Californian furniture (bolted to a wall and earthquake proof) after all these years. I decided I liked him the time he fought his way on the 405 to Clara’s house one New Year’s Eve and found us all stoned out of our minds: our friend Daisy chatting a mile a minute, Allison sulking and then crying when the boyfriend arrived and while I was catatonic, huddling Daisy into a makeshift tent of a blanket over our heads. But at midnight Clara was getting kissed at the front door of her childhood home. Right beside the alarm system we knew the code to.
Clara asks me what I did this New Year’s Eve and I tell her I listened to my top played songs while shedding some tears (Waxahatchee) and journaled.
“Wow,” she says. Her New Year’s was more exciting than mine. A boyfriend will do that to you.
My apartment now functions as a childhood home. The childhood to my adulthoodits first flat-footed fumblings, lack of appropriate furniture, headboard assembled and laid across the wall from my bed. Pictures of me with family and friends paper my fridge, bookshelf, and window sills but in them my hair is bobbed or banged or bunny-brown so I’m always an antithesis of myself. My favorite people smile beside my fluctuating hair: Annie in our cluttered dorm room kitchen; Clara beside a Las Vegas fountain; my father with a headlamp haloing his head and a book in his hand in a dimly lit room in Tulum, his mouth pursed in the middle of saying, “Mood lighting.”
The girl living in this apartment now looks more like the father in the photos than anyone else.
My father sent me a large, glossy photo of myself a few years ago. I had it on my fridge until the guy I was dating at the time (I’m not sure he would phrase it that way) pointed at it with a “What?” expression and I laughed, like “Oh, let me explain why having this enormous photo of myself at fourteen, seated at the dining room table, wearing my school uniform, my long hair down, eyes down, picking up a green bean from my plate with the look on my face somewhere between Gothic melancholy warmed to room temperature, is perfectly normal.”
Instead I said, “My dad sent it to me. He thought it was funny.” After the guy left, I took the picture down and put it in a drawer.
ANNIE CALLS ME as I’m watching my Irish procedural about corrupt coppers, in which everyone insists on wearing gray to match the office, which is also gray, to match the Belfast sky, which is also gray, to match their interpersonal relationships, which are also gray given they have none because they’re too busy catching bad coppers.
I know romance is far off when I’d rather watch these detective inspectors be great at their jobs. The only time DI Arnott and DI Fleming hug is when Arnott has been paralyzed via a push down a stairwell by the balaclava man who’s been killing a few twenty-something year-olds who are probably 5’ 1” and live alone and pay too much money to dye their hair so it looks honeyed against a backdrop of gray.
Which is all to say, I pause the TV. “Hello!” I say to Annie in our happy lilt. “Hello!” she echoes.
Annie knows about the recent handsome Texan man from The Dating Site. How he came and went. How he came over to watch Friday Night Lights and leaned against my kitchen counter, the ends of his black jeans frayed, his hair in a ponytail, looking at the pictures on my fridge and saying, “Your mom is beautiful.”
How we watched the movie with his hand gripping the inside of my thigh, then squeezing the bones in my left knee. “Parts of the movie,” he said, “are authentically Texan.” I leaned my cheek on his arm and he leaned his head on top of mine; helmets flung off, blood poured, men pounded into each other on screen.
When the movie ended, kissing felt next but it hadn’t started yet. I was still joking about how Tim Riggins never showers. He held my hands, saying how nice they were. He told me I’m kind, which made me think he knew me as a little girl.
We stared. I smiled. “Your smirk is amazing,” he said. “I’m not smirking,” I said.
I thought that if I didn’t kiss him my lips would fall off my face. We kissed and our clothes removed themselves. His chest with a notch I wanted to drink out of starting at his stomach. He felt my armpit hair, said, “I like it.” There was much breast action. It concerned me. They are so small and I searched his face, but his eyes, the color of the harsh, crisp blues of December, just twinkled.
There was only one more date after Friday Night Lights. An emergency, he texted, was blowing up his life and he was no longer in a place to date. Then he was poof–gone. Now I tell Annie, these months later, that I still think about the hot Texan man from The Dating Site and she suggests texting him, but she also says, “He is just an idea.”
“A good one,” I say.
When the hot Texan man from The Dating Site texts me after three months, it’s days after my father asks if I’ve met anyone (I remind him I’m on hiatus) and my aunt says I need to produce something within ten years (I ask her if it can be a book or a baby) and at dinner, a friend asks how dating’s been (to which I say, “Did my father put you up to this?”) then explain I’m not dating, but I still think of the hot Texan man.
“Text him,” says our other friend across the table.
And my therapist doesn’t tell me to text or not to text, only that I shrink my desires, turn myself off so as not to take up space.
When the hot Texan man from The Dating Site asks my phone to float words in its placid glass I look up from the thriller I’m reading and say to my silent apartment, “Annie?” As if she is capable of ordering the events in my life.
After we get dinner and the hot Texan man apologizes for things he doesn't need to be sorry for and shows me more respect than any other man has and leaves faster than any previous men have, I call Annie and say, “I realized I didn’t meet up with him to solve a mystery.” A mystery, which is akin to a crime in my Irish procedural. “If he’d said, ‘I couldn’t date you a few months ago because I got a hangnail and it took some time to heal’ I would’ve been like, ‘I completely understand. What’re you doing Friday?’”
Annie says, “This is not a blow to your ego like so many other rejections are.” But it’s the type of bad timing which makes you doubt your luck. “Who do you want to be at war with?” she jokes. “Yourself or the universe?”
Annie tells me about her relationship with the girl with the barky, wire-haired dog, of which I’m glad to hear. I’d be glad to hear about my friends’ partner’s extended families, the worst plane ride they ever had, the shape of their toes, their favorite kind of mushrooms, anything. This is because I cannot fully visualize or understand any of the romantic relationships my friends are in. I’m used to loving my own understandings, holding them cupped in my palms like flickers of water, but I have little for others’ partners.
Like all relationships, it’s a two-way street. I’ve exclusively participated in romances my friends did not understand. Beyond not understand—they’ve practically sent up skywriting planes to write over the Hudson: “U date him at ur peril.” My father has communicated this as well.
When I told my father I’d started seeing an ex again (I’m not sure the ex would phrase it that way) my father said, “Oh, so he’s being nice to you now?” Though we were speaking over the phone, the pandemic still raging, I could picture my father at the dining room table, not bothering to lower The Times from his face.
I told Annie, “Of course he’s being nice. He’s always been nice.”
And then later, weeks later, I told Annie, “He was never nice. He just believed he was. He convinced me of his niceness, which was really my niceness in believing he was nice.”
But it’s true that sometimes my friends and father understand the person I’m trying to date better than I can—as if they are a modernized, electrical oracle peering into my ear from the tiny holes at the base of the rectangular galactic black of my phone and resting their gaze beside mine.
I CALL CLARA as her boyfriend’s ordering Chinese food after her Evidence lecture class. When asking her about law school I challenge myself not to make strange, wandering comments, the kinds encouraged in MFA programs, like evidence of what? A class on evidence, which examines no evidence. A class on evidence to teach you how to present and define but not discover any evidence.
Writing discovers and defines, but it has no evidence. It’s anecdotal and critiques society, rather than preserving and protecting it. Clara will protect it with her cheekbones contoured in bronzer.
Recently, I was jealous of her Persuasion class. I said, “Tell the dean your friends say you don’t need that class, you’ve persuaded every one of us since we were seven that selling you Park Place was the only way to win Monopoly.”
And Clara gives one of those breathy, pitying laughs I love. We keep each other’s histories entwined in some vein beneath our tongues. Two decades of shared memory is like a weapon or a Frank Sinatra song.
“At least he took you to that NYU gala,” Clara said to me three boys ago. “Unlike Adam, who didn’t even take you to prom.”
I’d completely forgotten my high-school boyfriend weasled out of that one.
Trying on my prom dress for my father in the TV room and him saying, “I guess the boyfriend has to wear green.”
And me explaining the boyfriend wouldn’t be going, that I’d be taking my best friend, who’d be matching me from the opposite side of the color wheel in purple, which Clara would compliment over text when I sent her pictures. Pictures my father would take out on the patio my mother smokes on, my pixie cut so crusted with gel it looked like a wig.
MY MOTHER RECOUNTS a story of my childhood to me over the phone. We talk once a week, yes, but if I write more about this I’ll have to go into our relationship, which is full of matching outfits (purposefully and not purposefully) and the way she cooked dinner every night of my childhood but was not always able to carry those dinners to the table or to arrive at the table herself because she popped too many muscle relaxers or Vicodin or was simply feeling very very sad.
There’s not a run I wheeze through in Central Park without thinking of my painter mother’s color palette. Even when the landscape shivers a moldy gray I wonder what colors she’d name everything.
We Facetime and then fight and then hang up and then I call her back but she doesn’t answer and then she calls me back saying she didn’t see my last call, which we both know to be untrue, and then she tells me a story.
When I was a toddler with a lemon-yellow bob and bangs, I would fall asleep in the backseat on the way home from daycare. LA in those days was full of foam platform sandals, washed-out salmon colored t-shirts and dove gray cement. Drives home to Silver Lake were always thirty minutes or more. To let a kid sleep that long might encourage them to take traffic as a soporific and an afternoon at home as a “Baby Beluga” listening marathon. So my mother would glance at me in the rearview mirror, flicking her lashes lined at the lids with glittering violet, and watch for my eyes to close to call, “Olivia!”
To which I would wake and laugh my ass off. “Olivia!”
And, knowing my mother, she’d pull up short behind a Toyota driven by an undocumented woman probably thanking her lucky stars this lady in a Volvo hadn’t hit her and sent her reeling in medical bills to an ICE detention center and allowing her to drive home to Silver Lake safely, before it became full of toothpick-legged coffee lovers and queer couples causing traffic jams on Hillhurst trying to pull into Lassens Natural Food and Vitamins.
Before all of this there was a little girl gurgling laughter as her mother shouted her name.
As if her name was the funniest thing she ever heard.
While telling me this story my mother yelled it—“Olivia!” and I laughed.
Hilarious to be scooped back into the world like that. To have someone prevent you from leaving it. To catch you drifting off on your own current and steer you back into theirs. I kept thinking: this is how I learned my name.
Olivia Nathan has been published in The Sewanee Review and her work was chosen as a Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories 2025. Her writing has also appeared in Entropy Magazine and Waccamaw Journal. She received an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.