Zola Was Here

Amelia stepped out of the time machine into a college bar called the Town Pump on March 18th, 1998 - the night of her rape. Amelia looked with disdain at the name, pulling her sweater over her shoulders and crossing her arms. She hoped that in her own time, this place had burned to the ground. 

The bar was warmly lit, with a beery amber tone from the overhead lights and wall sconces. It was a converted chain diner with the booths ripped out and replaced with a sticky floored cluster of tables for people to drink pitchers of beer. The bell over the door rang with every group of chattering students coming in out of the cold. Snow melted in puddles on the warped laminate floor and the music was a rotating selection of Limp Bizkit and Foreigner and Garth Brooks. It smelled like pizza and bleach, and the bartenders looked haggard pouring pitcher after pitcher of Miller High Life. 

This idea had come to her in a therapy session, virtually, laid out on her own couch in her own apartment processing the aimlessness and flexible sense of self. “Sometimes, I try to dig down to the core of myself and it feels like there’s nothing there. Just cobwebs and dead moths, and old boxes waiting to be broken down,” Amelia had said. Her therapist’s microphone kept cutting out and he said, “when was a time you felt like yourself, and what happened to change it?” 

And here she stood, watching a college night unfold from her past. Amelia was the oldest person at the bar by easily fifteen years. Even the bartenders capped out at maybe twenty five. She felt both extremely on display and invisible amongst the loud conversations and wild gestures aided by the jukebox and beer.

In the back corner of the bar, near the gas fireplace that still had Christmas garlands up on it, sat the woman she had come for. Amelia looked at her younger self, twenty one, reading a book in a noisy bar. She stopped to compare them both, younger Amelia had a blunt bob and bangs dyed magenta, nails painted black and shredded cuticles, and had lined her lips and then coated them in cherry chapstick. Amelia as the present self had stopped dying her hair, now just a brown ponytail with swirls of grey poking through - it seemed more sensible. The clothes had changed from torn fishnets and converse to sensible shoes, Clarks, like her mother, and button up shirts hidden under a layer of cardigan. She dressed conservative and sensibly, telling herself that’s what time did to everyone. But that was correlation. Not causation. Really, it was about creating barriers. And then there was the general quiet that had settled in, the boldness that had been eaten by the monster of wisdom, whereas twenty- one-year-old Amelia was bright, and loud against the contrast of JNCO jeans and oversized jerseys and polos. She even had little butterfly clips in her hair. She remembered how really liberating it had been, when she went to college, being able to dress and adorn herself outside of how she looked in highschool. 

Amelia snaked through the crowd of drunks to sit at the hearth, next to the pink-haired Amelia with a book bloomed in her lap like a flower. 

“Bit of a rowdy night, huh?” Amelia shouted over the din, “Mind if I sit down?”  

“Oh! Of course,” Young Amelia said, breaking eye contact with the words of Zola. She held Nana in her hands, and Amelia remembered the year she had read only Zola and how she could never read him again after tonight and how she’d had a panic attack at the Cezanne exhibit staring at his portrait. She felt such incredible remorse, like she owed current Amelia an apology. I’m sorry I let you give up on this. It was just too hard. 

Amelia felt a panic attack coming on now. The room was hot and confining and she felt the tick of the clock. She had to beat the time where he showed up, and when Young Amelia would feel flattered enough to get in his car. He came out of nowhere, stone sober, and Amelia scanned the room now expecting him to attack. But that’s not where all of this happens, it happens outside, alone for a smoke. Amelia now had a running count of things she didn’t do anymore - read Zola, dye her hair, withstand the print of fishnets into the back of her thighs, smoke cloves. Granted, there was a lot she was relieved to not be quite so much of. She looked down at Younger Amelia’s decomposing Vans slip ons and thought someday you’re going to have to spend a fortune on a mattress because you wanted to be able to fill in the checkers with pink marker. 

“I used to really love Zola too,” Amelia said and Young Amelia made direct and curious eye contact. Amelia wasn’t used to that now, she’d pretty much managed how to avoid being seen. But Young Amelia didn’t have headphones to hide in, or a cell phone to suddenly look up something on. She was open, shining faced, and Amelia felt ancient and alien in comparison to her. 

“Really? I’m trying to read everything he ever wrote. Including the Dreyfus Affair stuff,” Young Amelia said, in a voice a little too loud and a little too fast. Amelia flinched in her nakedness, the eagerness of youth and pure passion that now felt like staring into the sun. Everything was new and the best or completely disastrous. She still had the ability to love things earnestly.

“I’m Amelia,” Amelia said without thinking. She blanched red and kicked herself for not coming up with a fake name. “Amelia...er...Chardonnay.” Panicked was an understatement, and now Amelia secretly hoped she was far more naive than she remembered so that she didn’t catch on. 

“Oh hey! That’s my name too! In fact, you look familiar. Have we met before? You look a lot like my mom.” 

Ouch, you little shit, Amelia thought. She had not expected to find Young Amelia to be so dazzling and young and somehow still just young. 

Young Amelia bounced with an enthusiasm that had long left current Amelia. She guessed she was Old Amelia now. Forty-five had started to set in sharp and fine, and now Amelia looked at herself and saw the heavy burden of youth weigh upon her like a butterfly pinned to a board. “Small world. And you like Zola, I feel like this was fate. Do you go here? Or...teach here?” Young Amelia had closed the book and began to tuck it into her bag. 

Amelia had the brains to come up with a backstory in the quick breaths between Young Amelia’s words. “I’m an adjunct in the literature department,” I haven’t cracked a book since college, “I’m really passionate about the work of Balzac,” read like an excerpt of one of his books and nothing else and am not entirely sure I’m pronouncing it correctly. Amelia felt like a disappointment as she churned out this story, sorry kid, you just grew up to be another woman with no direction and a lot of regrets who corners a tech mogul at a conference and lets him think you’d fund his project if he lets you try his machine. The disappointment she felt in her day-to-day life now magnified in the face of her younger self. She really had no idea if she would be impressed and felt an overwhelming desire to impress her.  

They stayed for an hour, Amelia watching the clock on the wall as it got closer and closer to 2:13am. Young Amelia was sipping a Miller’s High Life, another thing Old Amelia was glad to have left behind. Old Amelia listened as Young Amelia discussed her classes, her major, her dreams, and the boy she was going to meet tonight. 

“He’s my professor,” Young Amelia said, full of excitement and delicate shame that she couldn’t hide at all. 

“I know,” Old Amelia said. 

“What?” Young Amelia leaned her ear closer to Old Amelia to hear better. 

“I said, ‘go on.’” Old Amelia sipped a red wine that tasted like it had been left in a hot car. 

“But he didn’t show up, and I’ve been hanging out here hoping he’ll walk in through the door like an idiot. I actually finished my book and started reading it over again.” 

Old Amelia had forgotten this, had forgotten the yearning. “Is he cute?” 

Young Amelia blushed so hard that she matched her hair, “SO CUTE, and he’s like so smart and so funny.” 

Old Amelia was also glad to be rid of thinking men were smart or funny. She slowly started trying to usher Young Amelia towards the door. In her memory, Young Amelia would go out for a smoke at 2:13am, he would pull up in his distinguished, matte black jalopy, and then everything gets out of hand. Amelia had given this experience so many euphemisms over the years depending on an audience, the incident with her parents, shit that happened to her friends, and to the police? Well. That one was lost to time. It triggered sensations of extreme cold but no words. 

“I’m heading back to campus,” Amelia lied, “want to ride the bus together?” The last bus stopped soon. They needed to leave now. 

The rapist had a name, it was generic, because of course it was. Dan. He wasn’t a stranger or even an acquaintance but an older graduate student who was teaching her french literature class. The morning after the incident he would make crepes in class to discuss Proust. He was shiny and impressive and every time Amelia bit into a madeleine she longed to hear bones cracking, shattering spine, the dislodge of teeth and jaw. He would take her to this place and she wouldn’t have the words to question, and it got complex from there. That’s what everyone who had heard it had called it - complex, layered. She’d wanted so much to be special. 

“Yeah, it’s getting late isn’t it? I should just give up. Message received.” 

Amelia heard his voice in her head, I feel so comfortable around you. You’re so brilliant in class. You make teaching so worthwhile. What’s the problem? Relax. “If it’s any consolation, I would have killed to go on a date with you. And I think you’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for.” 

Young Amelia actually looked like she might cry. Old Amelia had rewritten herself in her mind as tough, sarcastic, no-nonsense, but she saw just how much nonsense had been heaped on her and how little affirmation it took to change her. 

“What’s your dorm again?” 

Young Amelia got up and followed Amelia to the front of the bar, which had gotten quieter. People had started to leave and the people that were going to get non-verbally drunk had brought a hush over the room. The time was 2:00am on the dot, according to the wall clock. Amelia felt the first nagging heft of doubt. She had charged into this convinced this would change everything, and maybe it would, but she examined her life with a new, more precious tone. What if this didn’t change anything? What if she was more than just a list of things that had been done to her. Was the way out also the way in? No matter what you did? 

Amelia looked at her younger self, and all she wanted to do was throw herself between her and the world. Prolong the time of the world’s wonder. Amelia knew she couldn’t prevent something like this forever, there would be more opportunities, but tonight, she just wanted to know she had tried. 

While Amelia deliberated in her mind, and Young Amelia bounced a little on the balls of her feet, a car pulled up and parked in the shadows and in the split second Amelia pulled Young Amelia away from the parking lot towards the bus stop. Amelia looked over her shoulder and watched Dan get out of the car and light up a cigarette. Relax. 

The bus pulled up to the stop and older Amelia dumped the contents of her pockets into the change box. It was eight pennies, a quarter, and four dimes and this amount magically let her pass. It was eight miles to campus from the bar which meant the ride was easily forty-five minutes of stopping and starting. Amelia let Young Amelia ramble about French literature, and nodded and smiled. Amelia remembered trying to feel grown up, cultured, especially about books. She had only read classics and required reading in high school, bragged that her favorite books were by Anais Nin, Kafka, and Nabokov despite only having read their most famous and commonly assigned works. She was trying so damn hard.

They approached the dorm, Verder, that’s what it was called. The markers were foggy but familiar. She’d picked it because it was the art dorm, and hoped it would be filled with Parisian painters but it turned out to be filled with clammy, drunk, and hapless people who reflected her own imposter syndrome back at her. Amelia started to unclench, she’d pulled it off, Young Amelia would now be safe in her dorm (relatively) for the time being. 

Young Amelia turned towards Amelia and started fiddling with the borrowed sweater, “It’s really late. And campus gets really iffy at night. Do you want to come up?”

Amelia paused, this was not how she had seen this going at all. She wasn’t even sure she was reading this correctly, “You mean like spend the night?” 

“Yeah, we could talk more about books and you can crash in my bunk...if you want.” Amelia’s heart welled up at Young Amelia’s advances. She had the awkwardness of someone who had made a choice but didn’t know how to start it. Amelia carried that now, no idea how to start sex or end conversations. Some things never change. 

“Are you sure?” Amelia asked. She’d forgotten how casual sex worked. She’d been crude at it, but relatively devoted to the practice. Another thing she’d toppled into in college and then toppled out of it after this. She didn’t go on a date for two years. “Yeah, I’d like to come up.” 

Young Amelia’s roommate was absent and Amelia remembered her to be one of the people with boyfriends off campus. The dorm shared the bar’s chinzyness and Amelia’s memories were instantly filled with every time she found someone passed out drunk in front of the door, and the smell of rotting food. The curtains were thick and scratchy with flame retardant that would probably give you cancer anyway. Young Amelia’s fingers dug into the cuffs of the sweater and she said, “I’m not sure what happens now,” and giggled nervously. 

“Do you want me to kiss you?” Amelia said over the throb of memory repeating relax, relax, relax. 

Young Amelia went for it, pressing her identical mouth to Amelia’s and Amelia reached back and flipped the light switch so that the scalding overhead lights turned off and the room was only lit by the orange lights from the parking lot. 

Old Amelia could immediately read all the things Young Amelia did to cover her insecurities - get naked fast and get under the covers, tuck your arms in to appear smaller, kiss a lot to prevent them looking at you. She spent time running her fingertips over the parts Amelia was protective of, pulling out anxieties long forgotten and trying to address them. Slowing  down Young Amelia’s rush, pulling away so that they had to look at each other, even in the dark. She wanted Amelia to see that she wanted to be there. She tried to not compare their bodies, to not pine for a past self, but to just enjoy herself, both herselves, and make that as contagious as possible. Young Amelia laughed, and shook, and moaned and Old Amelia smiled, enjoying her. They clung to each other in Amelia’s small, uncomfortable bed, sharing her single flat pillow. 

At 5:45am, Amelia caught the first bus back to the bar, smelling like the perfume she wore in college, and got back into the time machine. When she arrived in her own time, she exited the machine into a Paris street. Her lungs filled with the smell of bread. People were loudly talking on cell phones and tripping on the leashes of dogs. Her reflection in the window of the nearest cafe showed her hair was long but now a deep shade of red. Her sweater was a richer color, largely unaltered, but no longer unassuming. The khakis had melted away to fishnets and swirling skirts. Her shoes were cute, but she was happy to see she had still aged into something kinder on her feet. Some things were different, but some things were the same. She had tattoos of french phrases and riot grrl lyrics, but she recognized her mother in her reflection. Just a little happier. She smiled back at herself and headed up the brick alleyway towards the place she knew was home. 

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Lauren Parker is a writer, zinemaker, and visual artist based in Oakland, CA. Her work has been published in The Toast, Catapult, and Autostraddle, among other places. She's a graduate of Hiram College with a degree in Creative Writing. Find more of her work at laureneparker.com

Photo #1 by Lauren Parker