The Art of Losing
Rebecca Johnson
Sue Lyons in Lolita
Word Count 821
My older sister was leaving home for college. We were driving her to Yellow Springs, Ohio, from Memphis in my mother’s Oldsmobile, the car favored by villains in made-for-television movies. Our family has been falling apart forever, but it has taken us, the children, a while to figure it out, and now my parent’s divorce is making the fault lines painfully obvious.
My sister has packed the things she wants to take with her. Clothes, bedding, the stereo she and I share. It’s low quality, with a penny taped to the needle to keep it from skipping, but I have listened to Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Hair on that stereo over and over. I can still sing all the songs by heart (though I should not; my voice is awful).
We were poor, but not poor poor. We lived in a big house. Our parents went to college. My dad worked in advertising; my mother was a teacher, but the divorce put a strain on our finances. Suddenly, we needed two of everything—an apartment for dad, a second car. There was enough for college tuition because education is everything, but there was no money left for luxuries.
We shopped for our clothes in thrift stores, a handy confluence of us wanting to be cool and needing to save money. Back then, you could still find vintage clothes from the ’50s and ’40s among the tsunami of polyester. We bought pedal pusher pants, beaded sweaters, dresses with shoulder pads. The kind of clothes the stars wore in black and white movies. Our favorite thrift store was called St. Vincent DePaul’s, which made us laugh because it almost sounded like a fancy French designer. One day I found a pair of white cat eye sunglasses reminiscent of Sue Lyons in the movie poster for Lolita. They cost fifty cents. These were truly unique, sui generis. As a fourteen-year-old girl, I, too, wanted to be one of a kind, so the glasses became totemic for me, much as tattoos are for today’s youth-- I may look like an ordinary teenager, but, inside, I am special!
I stared at the stereo in the trunk of the car. I couldn’t believe my sister was going to take it. I went to find my mother. It’s not fair, I told her.
She was exasperated, trying to hold her shit together the best she could. Why did the children keep squabbling? Looking back, I think it’s because we had so little we were determined to hold on to whatever defined us. My sister wanted to be the cool girl with music in her dorm room. She was naturally cool, the kind of flame people flock towards. I am not a flame. I’m not so sure about people, frankly. They seem kind of awful. I think I might prefer to be alone.
My mother told my sister to put the stereo back. Usually, my sister was sanguine about things, so I was surprised to see her so upset. It looked like she might actually cry. I started to feel bad. Maybe she should just take the damn stereo, but my mother had made her decision. She told me to put the stereo back. I took off the sunglasses, and unloaded the stereo. My sister did not help.
When I returned to the car, I looked around for the glasses. I knew they had to be nearby. I looked on the roof of the car, in the trunk, on the passenger seat. I got on my hands and knees and looked under the car. I went back into the house, even though I knew that didn’t make sense. I looked on the kitchen countertops, on the bed, under the bed. I opened drawers, which was completely irrational. I was getting frantic. Where could they be? My mother said we needed to leave, but we couldn’t go until I found them! I was too young to understand what the poet Elizabeth Bishop says in One Art-- “Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
“They’ll turn up,” my mother reassured me, starting the engine. But they never did, and I never forgot that feeling of mystified desperation. As we passed through the forests of Tennessee and into the rolling hills of Kentucky, I continued to brood on the mystery of their disappearance.
Forty years later, my sister told me the truth. She took the sunglasses. She was angry about the stereo and wanted to get back at me. When I think back, I see that is the only rational explanation. Of course, she took them. What amazes me is my own innocence. I didn’t understand then that someone could love you but deliberately hurt you.
“If it makes you feel better,” she said. “I felt too guilty to ever wear them.” Actually, yes, that did make me feel better.
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
