I’ve tried to tell the story of Kristin a thousand times. She’s been a dream, she’s been a poem, she’s been a sigh after a long breakdown of tears, she’s been a smile after a brief moment of joy, she’s been a rumor to others before I met her, she’s a legend to those who I’ve met after. “She’s been a leather jacket on the back of a motorcycle,” my husband once said. “You are mistaking her with someone else.” And yet now she’s that too.
Here’s attempt 10001 –
November 1999. I’m home from college for the weekend. We are driving to the home of our friend’s new girlfriend. “We” as in me and the three white boys I had been rolling with for the past few months – my friend Steve, my boyfriend Steve and Travis, the one with the new girlfriend. I had known these boys since grade school but we weren’t really close until this past summer. That’s when we became good friends, the type that wear each other’s t-shirts and know the smells of each other’s homes.
We had been spending so much time together since the summer that Travis pulled me aside one day.
“Listen Nina, we have to talk.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“This is getting too hard, we have to give the Steves different names.”
“You’re right,” I said.
And with that, it was decided. My friend Steve, Steve Levitt, became Leviticus and my boyfriend, Steve Kitt, would become Stevonnegut. Travis and I decided to keep our names with neither Leviticus or Stevonnegut protesting. Travis’ girlfriend had a name too, Kristin, but for a while, we simply called her the Older Woman.
“Did you hear that Travis is dating an older woman? Have you met the Older Woman?”
Everyone had been talking about her – the Older Woman, older as in we were 19 or 20 and she was 26.
I sat passenger side as my guy, Stevonnegut, steered my Jeep Cherokee – the car that my parents had bought for me and that was at the epicenter of so many of our adventures. We were traveling from my suburb, Edison, to Kristin’s Scotch Plains. Our final destination was Northern Jersey, Continental Airlines Arena, to see Phil and Friends, Phil being Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia died four years ago. Phil shows were Dead shows when you couldn’t see the Dead.
As we made our way to Kristin’s house, the suburban homes grew closer, more compact. “It’s this one,” Travis said and he jumped out. The Jeep idled in front of a narrow 2-story home with beige aluminum siding, identical to house next to it save for a bright yellow VW bus parked out front. Grateful Dead stickers were plastered all over it. A large banner sprawled across the windshield, the band name emblazoned in giant all-caps gothic font. A rose nested in the middle of “Grateful” and “Dead.”
The Jeep was dark and all I remember was a rumble from the backseat, this woman placing stickers on our winter hats, each stick accompanied by a high-pitched squeal of glee. She’s the Older Woman? I remember thinking with every squeal. Now I wasn’t the only woman. Now the group was changing. She was a white woman, an older white woman of 26. I was a brown girl, a somewhat younger brown girl of almost-20, my birthday was coming up in a few weeks.
“How many Dead shows have you been to?” Travis asked her as she settled in. “She’s been to over 90,” he said before she could speak.
And even after this introduction, I didn’t really hear many complete sentences from her, just more squeals – squeals of excitement about the music to come and wishes for the set list: “I am hoping for a killer Magnolia!” and squeals about her dogs, Winter and Sativa, two majestic rescues now at home with her mother’s nervous lapdog, Murphy: “Smurfeeee!”
In the face of all that excitement, I felt old. I couldn’t match that enthusiasm if I ever tried.
I remember the show being long. Dead Shows are so long and so white, I’d think but never say. I just focused on the long part. “Bathroom,” I said to Stevonnegut. And as I stepped out, I felt a wave of secret relief to be momentarily away from the wilds of “Space” into “Dark Star” and in the stark neon of the halls. I must have gotten a look at Kristin sometime during that interminable evening but I don’t remember exactly when. She’s forever a blur.
Long black hair done up in white-girl dreadlocks, bouncing with her quick step. Their heft was a counterforce on a petite body, a narrow face with sharp features and wide eyes. And then there were the dogs, not there at the show that night but with her all the days after, jumping up and down and all over her. She was always dressed as if she was ready to walk them. A hoodie, jeans, a couple leashes off the belt loop, a joint or blown-glass bowl buttoned up in some stealth pocket, tinkling as she walked. I remember her always in motion. But I can’t tell you when I first really saw her – not the night of the show, not any other.
Maybe I never wanted to look at her, to look getting older in the face.
I was a 19-year-old brown girl doing her best impersonation of a white hippie. I don’t know if I thought past 20. I could only barely look at this older woman of 26. I could barely look at myself. And I saw any age except ours, mine and the boys’, and anything we were doing beyond what we were doing, tooling around in the Jeep Cherokee, attending Dead Shows and going to college in between, as extremely terrifying. I was a shy girl and found what felt like unlikely community in these friends and then found a greater community in Deadhead culture, people like Kristin, whose ultimate joy was to come together, be kind and generous and love this band.
*
Dropping Kristin and Travis back to her house after the concert, I felt a difference in the Jeep, a different kind of quiet than when it was just me and the boys, a restless quiet maybe. I was supposed to love that there was another woman now. Now I could be with someone more like me, someone who would make me feel less alone with these dudes, someone who would get me in the way they didn’t. But hearing this girl, the Older Woman, express so much squealing glee, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I was bothered that if she could be that enthusiastic, what did that mean for me? I didn’t want to be that enthusiastic.
Do people like that exist? I wondered. People who seem to delight in cacophonous squeals of joy? Is this a way to grow old? I laughed too, with the boys and with my college friends, but Kristin’s laughs felt different. Happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, an insistence on joy for joy’s sake. Our laughs, mine and the boys’, were a shared snicker, from years together, years we went to the same private school and hated it and lived in the same town and hated it and loved and hated the same bands, movies, you name it. Her laughter was from a life beyond all that, a life we didn’t know, a life I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
I just wanted her gone. I didn’t feel alone. I felt the only.
“I only knew her for a year,” I say now if Kristin ever comes up in conversation.
I always put this at the end of a sentence, at the end of a list of three:
“I have a friend who was murdered.”
“A random act by a serial killer.”
“I only knew her for a year.”
I want to call this the story’s button, a last line that buttons-up the whole thing: “I only knew her for a year.”
*
Kristen was dead at 27. In November, 20 years after we first met, I’ll be 40.