Katie Cotugno :: Kitchen Door

walking toward the sound of your voice

Katie — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:58:54 +0000

At an indoor flea market in State College, Pennsylvania, I buy a set of antique green glass measuring cups, a smutty novel by Anne Rice, and a roughly hewn bar of Amish lard soap that smells distinctly animal in nature but promises to clear up both my face and any poison ivy I may ever get. R doesn’t buy anything, although she comes close with a box of dinosaur jelly jars from the 80s. R is getting her doctorate in psychology at Penn State, and she is absolutely bonkers for dinosaurs.

We do a 12-hour pub crawl with the people in her program, who are lovely, all of them from places like Memphis and Michigan and wearing funny hats, which is the theme. They’re impressed that we’ve been friends for as long as we have. ”She was a bitch in high school,” R tells them, which is true. She hands me her beer to finish. “But she’s nice now.”

“Significantly less putrid!” I promise, although I’m actually not. I order a giant plate of nachos to compensate, both for the lie and for all the mean stuff I did when I was fifteen.

Back at her apartment she makes me a turkey sandwich with cheddar cheese and hummus and tells me she’s sorry I got hit in the boob with a flying quesadilla, which is a thing that happened during Hour Eleven. I don’t particularly mind. ”You know what my favorite part of going out is?” I ask her, sitting on her futon in my pajamas and my spex, Netflix glowing red on the TV. In the four nights I am with her we manage to blow through the entirety of Party Down, which does weird things to both of us in terms of getting crushes on Adam Scott and needing to say are we having fun yet? as often as possible. ”Coming home and eating a turkey sandwich.”

On Monday we get tattoos in a shop we have researched not at all, which is either brave and spontaneous or extremely stupid. Happily, neither of us get blood poisoning. The guy who inks a quince below my collarbone is named Justin and absolutely refuses to be charmed by me, which I take as both a challenge and a personal affront. “How do you practice being a tattoo artist?” I ask him. His face is very close to my face. “On like, an orange or something?”

“An orange is nothing like human skin,” Justin says. Still, he smiles at me before I go and I think: victory.

Every morning R makes a pot of coffee and sits on the chair next to the futon to talk to me, like we used to debrief in the hallway before homeroom. The sun comes in through the sliding doors.

ferris wheel kid

Katie — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:01:27 +0000

Some poor slob pukes corn dogs all over the giant swing ride, so Trevor’s got some time to kill while the maintenance guys hose it down. He shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and wanders the bright crowded length of the midway to the trailer where Rue is selling candy apples, looking bored. Rue always, always smells like candy apples. “What are you doing here?” she asks, leaning out the window and peering down at him, raising her voice so he can hear her over the cheerful electronic racket of the water gun game. She’s got a couple of sprinkles stuck to her arm. “Did somebody yak?”

“Yeah.” Next to the Gravitron, the swings are pretty much tops when it comes to average rate of gastric upset per rider. It’s bad luck Trevor got stuck running it this year, but he’s fifteen and the youngest and he has to pay his dues. “Not even a kid, either. An old guy.”

Rue shakes her head in contempt. “People should know their limits. Hey Ma,” she calls over her shoulder, toward the back of the trailer where Leanne is working the fryer for funnel cake, her capable hands speckled with burns. “Trevor’s got a barf break. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Take twenty dollars out of the box and see if you can’t find me some singles, will you?” he hears Leanne say; then: “Hi, Trev.”

“Hey.”

After a minute the door screeches open and Rue hops down, shoving the money into the back pocket of her fraying denim shorts. “Where we going?” she asks. Trevor shrugs.

They weave through the crowd toward the edge of the fairgrounds, past the bandstand and the trucks and the huge humming genny, cables snaking out every which way . It’s August in Oklahoma, and hot. Trevor stops to smile at some pretty girls who are checking him out, cutoffs and flip-flops, one of them holding a puffy blue cloud of cotton candy. Rue rolls her eyes.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

It’s the end of the summer, getting dark a little earlier now, the sun going down pink and purple over the flashing neon spokes of the ferris wheel. Soon they’ll head south to Texas and Florida for the winter: Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Christmas in Spur. They’ve been fair kids their whole lives, him and Rue. There’s a rhythm. “So,” he says, dropping down in the grass near the tree line, digging a cigarette out of his jeans. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she replies, sitting beside him and nodding at the lighter. “Did you steal that from your dad?”

Trevor doesn’t answer. “Tell me again where this place is?”

Rue eyes him, patient. “Massachusetts,” she says, which he already knows. “Boston.”

“And tell me again what exactly you’re going to do there?”

“Trevor,” she says, flopping backwards onto the dry, weedy grass, her sneaker-clad feet flying briefly in the air. He’s acting stupider than he is on purpose, and they both know it. “Come on.”

“What?”

“Cut it out. You know what.”

“I really don’t.”

“Uh-huh.” Her hair’s spread all around her, a curly blond halo around her heart-shaped face. When they were younger, folks around the fair all used to call her Shirley Temple, until she got old enough to tell them to go screw. “It’s a good school, you know.”

“Do you hear me saying it’s not a good school?”

“It’s a real school, not my mom in a trailer trying to teach us plane geometry before we get to Euclid and have to unload for the week.”

“Your mom’s a good teacher.”

“My mom never graduated high school!” Rue huffs out a short, noisy breath. “Do you really want to do this your whole life?”

Trevor considers that. “Well, no,” he says eventually, blowing smoke rings up into the air. He’s been practicing all summer–Joel, who works the carousel, taught him how. “At some point I’d like to run the scrambler. That’s where the real money is.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“Trev,” Rue says softly, and she just looks so sad for a minute, eyes dark and cloudy, like she’s already a million miles gone. And whatever, maybe most of the places he’s been to he’s only seen in passing, always on the outskirts of town, but Trevor knows how the world happens and he knows that if she gets on the train tomorrow then that’s just–that’s it. Show’s over; carnival’s gone. So he does the first thing that pops into his head: he leans over and kisses her, just for a second, soft. She tastes like caramel and wax.

Rue blinks. “What, exactly, was that?” she asks.

“I mean–”

She throws her head back and laughs–not mean at all, that’s not what she’s actually like, not really–but like she is so on to him. She always has been, he guesses; they’ve known each other since they were three. “Did you just kiss me?” she asks, like she can hardly believe it. “Did you think that would make me stay?”

“I don’t–shut up,” he says, shaking his head. Jesus Christ, she really is a pain in the ass.

Rue takes the cigarette out of his hand, inhales. “Creative,” she says thoughtfully. “Would have worked when I was thirteen, maybe.”

Trevor looks at her with some interest. “You had a crush on me when we were thirteen?”

“I said maybe.”

They lie there for awhile, side by side in the grass. The sound from the midway drifts palely back, shouts and music. “What about your mom?” he asks. He feels like a piece of shit for saying it because that’s her Kryptonite, that’s what’s going to make her feel two inches tall, and he knows it and he says it anyway. “What’s she going to do without you?”

“Oh, okay. We can be done now.” Rue shakes her head a little and gets to her feet, brushing dirt off the back of her shorts. “That’s mean, Trevor.”

“I know,” he says immediately. What an asshole he is. “I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously, that sucked.”

“I know.”

He grabs her hand, tugs. “Don’t–I didn’t–Rue.”

Rue sighs again, but she doesn’t let go, which is something. Her grip is warm and damp. And God, he doesn’t know why he’s being such a loser about this–why he can’t just throw her a high-five and say see you when I see you. He guesses he’s used to going, is all. He guesses he’s not used to being left.

Rue hesitates for a moment. She’s still holding onto his hand. “You could kiss me again if you wanted,” she tells him finally. “You could, you know. Kiss me goodbye.”

Trevor blinks. ”Goodbye,” he repeats, like it’s a word he’s never heard before, like it’s regional slang. “So you’re seriously–this is it. You’re actually going.”

Rue laughs a little, quiet, like she almost can’t believe it herself. “Yeah, Trev,” she says, and her fingers lace between his like a promise. “I actually am.”

So he climbs to his feet and he does it, two hands on her tan, smooth face. The cigarette smolders on the dusty ground. The carnival flares in the distance.

sounds like hallelujah for the first time

Katie — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:27:14 +0000

E comes to visit and brings, among other items, two mangoes, a bacon bar, and a pair of wax lips. We’ve got tickets to the Head and the Heart, to whom she introduced me over the summer and whose album, since then, has been on the kind of repeat normally reserved for August and Everything After in the fall of one’s sophomore year of high school. I’ve been listening to it a lot, is what I am saying: humming along while I make dinner, muttering the lyrics like a prayer.

I’m not in fighting shape, to be honest. There’s something evil and muscular in nature happening in my neck that’s sent a white shooting pain up into the right side of my brain and down my arm for the last eleven days. My heart has recently been well and truly broken by something so infinitesimal and simultaneously so huge that I honestly just…never decided how to react to it. And I’m two weeks out from the deadline for the biggest, most important project of my entire life.

“Study break,” we keep saying to each other, and ordering more beer.

It’s a great show. A great show, all tambourine and screaming and a vocalist who is my lady hero, platinum-haired and fierce. I grin myself silly. I jump up and down. My neck, oddly, doesn’t hurt at all.

By ten-thirty we’re the kind of happily drunk that has me proclaiming, “I know where we can pee with no lines!” and marching us confidently into a dorm where I haven’t lived since 2006 (and where we can, for the record, pee with no lines). We eat cheese dip and sit on my stoop in the rain and tell each other stories. In the morning there’s a song I can’t get out of my head.

jackie cotugno, i miss you.

Katie — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:52:58 +0000

this morning on the train i sat across from a six-year-old boy with a black eye who was wearing batman sneakers and doing yoga. just hanging out cross-legged with his eyes closed, so quiet, his small thumbs touching his small fingers.

then his little brother kicked him in the head.

felt right, somehow.

that may be all i need

Katie — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:11:30 +0000

I’m overstimulated to the point where I want to color in a coloring book, which is a coping mechanism I was known to employ in college as if I had some sort of serious developmental delay. I stop short of whipping out the Crayolas and instead spend the weekend holed up in my apartment mainlining soapy Canadian cop dramas and baking loaves of Lahey bread. Also, some cookies. Also, soup.

K and L coax me out with the promise of the Harvard Book Sale, but even there I buy five Baby-Sitters’ Club paperbacks (the originals, not the late nineties reissues; there was a point in my life at which I owned the whole series, and I want that feeling back). They girl at the checkout says: “Oh, yeah.” We meet Tom for brunch at the Station Diner in Newton where we eat large quantities of potatoes and debate the politics of v-neck t-shirts on men: a Glamour Don’t, in general, with sartorial dispensations for rock stars and firemen.

On Sunday we go to the mall, which is another thing I used to do to center myself in college, the incorrigible suburbanite in me finding abject bliss in rows of Bath and Body Works lined up in color order and glass vases full of lip balm from the Gap. We eat at California Pizza Kitchen and I put my feet up on the dashboard, watch the water whiz by and make plans. At night I write some silliness on my laptop, scratching idly at a perpetual itch.

By Monday I am wrung out and happy. The sun feels yellow-warm on my face.

pine tree corners

Katie — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:50:27 +0000

At home I lie on the lawn and chat to my mother, who sits in a rocking chair and smokes. I gossip. She listens to my problems, to one problem in particular, and repeats it back to me with a lucidity startling in its razor-sharpness. I have tried to explain this problem to no fewer than six people at this point, is the thing you have to understand here, and she is the only one who has been able to do that. Not to solve it. Just to say it back. I have forgotten that this is the miracle of her.

Yes, I say, and smile, pulling at damp blades of grass.

forward in this generation

Katie — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:48:14 +0000

In New York I get what amounts to the best news of my young life and Sierra meets me at Columbus Circle to celebrate. We wander up the west side, warm and giddy; we eat french fries and nachos for dinner and drink a great number of sugary cocktails. Topics of discussion include: other people’s hipster weddings, our families, and whether or not she should cut off all her hair. I say, why not? At Prohibition the band is playing Redemption Song and a Dave Matthews tune I can’t remember the name of, only that I know it from a long, long time ago.

Don’t worry, I text Tom, when I get back to J’s apartment. I am very safe and awesome.

i stop feeling sad and feel awesome instead

Katie — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:21:23 +0000

i like that the girl in the walgreens told me, “uh, i’m not hitting on you or anything, but i really like your outfit”

i like that it is so easy to teach pandora new tricks

i like that they are making a tragic love story starring mcadams + tatum, further proof that the secret works

i like ina’s classy icebox cake recipe with tate’s cookies and mocha whip

i like that i am going to nyc this weekend

i like when tom laughs really really for real

i like spending three days boogying with awesome hilarious ladies

i like everything about the voice and how it is a cooler, kinder, more interesting version of idol

i like 75 degrees and sunny

i like holding babies that are not mine

i like the jess lc necklace sierra got me for my birthday

i like that, by virtue of its sheer ridiculousness, the 1994 miniseries of the stand put a quick end to the terror incited in me by the book (although gary sinise was weirdly hot in it, i don’t even know what i’m saying but it’s true, i used to have a friend in high school who liked gary sinise and i made fun of her, i owe her an apology)

i like catching up on six weeks of new yorkers and tossing them across the room like a savage

i like that we are going to be fancy and check out the chihuly exhibit on friday

i like finding fresh ink cards i’ve never seen before

i like summer

i like whatever this is

put your hands up baby put your hands up

Katie — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:38:10 +0000

nkotbsb @ fenway park, june2011

i dream of chicago/i dream about you

Katie — Tue, 31 May 2011 22:29:13 +0000

i have like one thousand things to write about, but instead of doing that i’m going to admire my turquoise pedicure, miss my sister, who left today, and listen to this song on repeat for a little while longer.

(happy summer)