Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
-Peggy Lee
1.
Leaving Point Place was surprisingly easy to do. She left a check for rent, scribbling a note of apology for running out on him in a lip liner pencil. She let her mind go blank as she grabbed her suitcases and left the apartment, relying on muscle memory to start up the car and pull out of the parking lot. She didn't allow herself to stop until she crossed the border, driving into Illinois as the sun started to rise. She smoked a cigarette under the welcome sign, wiping away stray tears before getting back into the Cadillac.
Had she ever done anything quite this rash? She was an amalgamation of mistakes and screw-ups, sure, but her sudden exodus would not be one, she decided. It was important—necessary—that she get out before things progressed too far. She had to leave before she became one of those housewives that snuck cigarettes in the dead of night, dreaming about should've, could've, would've.
She had always been too big for her hometown. She had a big city sense of self. She ogled every fashion editorial of women walking down New York City streets, trying to mimic their style, but most importantly, their confidence. Turn up your nose, adapt a wide gait, always stand up straight. She walked along suburban streets and pretended it was like walking down Fifth Ave.
Every boyfriend she had had made fun of her for this studied poise. Why be fancy? It was only Point Place after all.
And that's why it was time to leave. She had outgrown it.
2.
It was a Friday night, and she was holding court with the gang at the Hub. Same time, same place.
She found herself lost in thought as her friends started talking with one another. Well, not thought so much as a blissful emptiness. She pushed fries around with her fingers, not able to focus on their conversation. It was like she was underwater, receiving mumbled noises in unintelligible fragments.
"Earth to Jackie."
They laughed. She sneered in her signature style before softening her features, laughing as if she was in on their joke. She felt Fez sneak an arm on her shoulder; even though they were exclusively dating, he still treated her as if she wasn't really his girlfriend—as if she still had to be coaxed into it. She lowered her eyes, trying to avoid Steven's pointed stares that not even his signature sunglasses could mask from across the table. (Not that he was trying to hide his disdain.)
Something had fundamentally changed, as if someone had messed with the knobs on a turntable, distorting the familiar rhythms of their collective friendship. Everyone seemed out of sync.
Maybe some friendships were meant to play out, needle lifting off the record, and put on a shelf for another day.
Someone had picked an old Peggy Lee song from the jukebox in the corner to jeers from the younger kids that now populated the Hub. They got younger every day and she just got older and older.
Is that all there is?
3.
She feigned luxury when she first rolled into Chicago. She stayed at a nice hotel with a view of Lake Michigan. Rolled around in the goose-down duvet in her finest silk blouses. She harboured no delusion that she could sustain this kind of lifestyle. Her fantasy life was currently unattainable, because of her detachment from what was left of Mommy and Daddy's money. She resolved to stay only for the weekend, adjusting to the city as if she had stepped out of those editorials she loved growing up. She made calls to various magazines and tv stations, hoping to have a media job by the start of the week.
It was proving more difficult than she originally thought. She took a low-paying job as an office assistant for a publishing house. Filing, typing up memos, and avoiding direct eye-contact with the employees lest they think she was interested in any of them. The other secretaries had told her stories of harassment that had to be laughed off as a part of the job, lest it become too much to bear the crushing weight of it all.
She found a not too terribly run-down apartment in an okay part of town, but stayed a full week in the fancy hotel, not quite ready to let go of the fantasy just yet.
4.
"Where are you?" His voice was gravely, obviously interrupted from sleep.
"Chicago." She answered, twisting the phone cord in her fingers. She looked out into the darkness, straining her eyes to see if she could find Lake Michigan in the shades of black that the city was composed of in those early morning hours.
"Jackie…" She could hear the concern in his voice and she almost regretted her sudden departure. "You scared the shit out of us."
She had been gone for a week before she called anyone from back home. First her mother, reassuring her that she was safe. The tone of her voice betrayed that she hadn't known she had left at all. Her second call was to Steven.
"I'm sorry."
"I probably should know better than to ask." He paused to inhale deeply on what she assumed was on a joint. "Are you coming back anytime soon?"
Steven was not too difficult to pin down. She had desperately wanted to believe that he was a complex puzzle that only she could solve, finding herself disappointed when he turned out to be just another Point Place burnout. Did she love him? Of course. Part of her knew that she always would. But she should have known. When a person tells you who they are, they aren't lying.
She could just make out Lake Michigan, an inkinesss with the moonlight highlighting little crests on the softly crashing waves.
"No."
She heard him exhale, long and deep. "Well, okay." Before he hung up, he murmured, "Be careful."
She mumbled okay even though the line had gone dead moments earlier.
5.
"We should live in New York."
He laughed, body rocking against hers. "Dream on, Jackie." He leaned down to kiss her, but she turned away from him. He scoffed, rolling off and turning his back to her. Minutes later, she heard him start snoring.
She should have known then and there. Opposites attract, sure. No one says at what cost.
6.
Men in Chicago were blessedly much more chic than the boys she left behind in Point Place. They wore tailored suits to their middle management office jobs and gold watches that caught every light—even in the dim bar—and spoke unaccented English, as if they meticulously studied newsman's sophisticated mid-Atlantic accents. They erased their past and wore it like a status symbol. Who could be the most mysterious?
She adopted that mentality, trying (with some difficulty), to rid herself of her backwoods Wisconsin accent and her tendency to be nasally. She lowered her chin to her shoulder, à la Lauren Bacall. She changed her drink order from fruity tequila sunrises to scotch, neat.
When she met men at the bar, she lied, telling them she was from anywhere but her actual hometown. Sometimes she was fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, other times she was transplant of Austin, Texas. Occasionally, when she was two or three drinks in, she even convinced them that she was a native daughter of Chicago. They either believed her wholeheartedly or knew not to ask. Everyone was lying, so what did it matter to try to catch someone in one of their own?
Sometimes she woke up at their apartments, sneaking out before they could ask for her real phone number.
As she walked back to her apartment, she realized that she missed the shared history she had with those guys back home. Even if they didn't really understand who she wanted to be, they did know who was she was. They'd get frustrated with her princess behavior, her childishness, but they knew something about her that the new prospects would never understand. The Wisconsin girl who felt completely trapped by her comforts.
She checked her makeup in her bathroom mirror, sure that she must have been a sore sight for any other early risers, but knew that everyone avoided eye contact that early. They all shared variations of the same secret. Hair mussed and tangled, eyeliner smudged, lipstick smeared past the lines of her lips. She took two aspirin, settling into her bed as the sun started to rise.
7.
There were nights that first year that she just sobbed until her eyes stung; nights where she pulled all of her clothes off their hangers in attempts to pack up and return; nights that she downed several tumblers of gin and called Steven, barely able to string a sentence together.
"Jackie, Jackie, Jackie." His voice was soft and tender, like it was at their most vulnerable moments back home. It was a lullaby.
She can never go back—not really. She knew Point Place, in its own way, had moved on without her. In the brief dispatches from Steven that she could bear, he detailed to her the things that had "changed." Eric and Donna were engaged, again. The record store was doing just fine. Fez was becoming a minor celebrity in the tri-county area for his chain of salons. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
She knew she wouldn't be able to wake up back in Point Place as if her time in Chicago had been a bad dream. Going back would be admitting a dark truth about herself—that she prefered the blissful emptiness to crushing loneliness.
Maybe she could convince Steven, through magic or manipulation, that they were meant to be. That they would both be happy raising their 2.5 kids and sending them to the same school they had gone to when they were children. Like their parents and their parents before them had. That they'd promise not to challenge each other at every turn, letting one another slip into low-grade alcoholism and high-grade bitterness. That this is what they really wanted for themselves.
She laughed a little at it all—imagining a version of Steven that couldn't exist, rough edges worn down by her sheer willpower, trying to shape him into a picture perfect husband and father. She was sure he could be with some coaxing, but what was the point in trying to force her dreams onto a person.
An unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
She settled for his disembodied voice soothing her, calling her back from the edge of unhappiness. She took a drink for Mrs. Jacqueline Hyde in another universe, parallel to this one. The one where she stayed and settled.
8.
One day, months later, on her daily commute on the L, she found herself smiling at the way the sunlight glinted off the skyscrapers. She knew the name of every stop, repeating them quietly to herself like a little incantation: Sedgewick, Fullerton, Belmont, Addison, Sheridan, Wilson, Lawrence…
Her calls back home had gotten less frequent. She missed Thanksgiving and contemplated missing Christmas as well, for no reason other than Point Place didn't feel like home anymore.
Maybe she wasn't happy, but she wasn't miserable.
She made a new home out of her uprooted life, counting stops until she reached her apartment.