Tom Stucker by Debbie Graber

"I sometimes wonder if I would even recognize Tom Stucker if I saw him in real life. He never attended any of the court hearings."

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about voice. About how a short story can — magically! beautifully! — do anything, so long as it does it confidently.

Debbie Graber’s short story grabbed me pretty immediately, with this first person voice that so confidently and adamantly keeps telling us she does not care about Tom Stucker, as to loop her unreliableness all the way back around to almost pure reliability. By the time (on only the third paraagraph) she tells us “It doesn’t matter to me if Tom Stucker is registered as a Republican, Democrat or Independent, although he is registered as a Democrat, thank God,” I laughed out loud and knew I was all the way in for the ride.

A really great voice, an incredibly strong and fun story. Thanks for reading!

—Aaron Burch

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Facebook is a convenient way to keep up with family, friends and former friends. It’s a great place to find baby sloth videos. It’s a helpful tool to learn about hobbies, like high-level military surveillance techniques. It’s not just a way to find out what Tom Stucker is doing.

I already know enough about Tom Stucker — ask me anything: Is he still a marketing manager for Pfizer? Definitely, according to his LinkedIn profile. Is he still married to someone named Brandi, a real estate agent? Questionable, as I found they filed separate tax returns in 2020.

It doesn’t matter to me if Tom Stucker is registered as a Republican, Democrat or Independent, although he is registered as a Democrat, thank God. I don’t care if he’s lost his hair or gained weight. Tom Stucker did not post a photo on his public Facebook page, so I don’t know what he looks like now. I only know what he used to look like, back when I knew him in 1987. I keep an old photo of him in my wallet.

If Tom’s tanned, muscular frame has turned to jelly from too many years spent drinking pitchers at his local watering hole in Madison, Wisconsin (where he purchased a nice-looking colonial in 2010), it’s of no interest to me. If, for some reason, he ever passed me, crossing at the intersection at 72^nd and Broadway, muttering and unrecognizable, trying to cover his distended midsection with a torn flannel nightgown, it wouldn’t register.

But on the topic of Tom Stucker, I’m not surprised that he still lives in the Midwest. Knowing him the way I do, he would be uncomfortable in an urban setting.

Living in a big city means living on top of one another in terrorism-prone high-rise buildings. Living in a big city means simultaneously battling roaches, scooters and manic episodes that all come from seemingly out of nowhere.

Living in a big city means one really has no option other than to take public transportation. Depending on your personal history/mindset, being an anonymous passenger on a crowded bus may inadvertently encourage certain kinds of “acting out” behaviors. These behaviors can result in communicable diseases. These diseases can be unpleasant and require topical prescriptions.

In short, living in a big city is not for the faint-hearted (aka Tom Stucker). It’s not pastoral and small-townie collegiate, with wide-open blue skies, freshly mown grass, friendly neighbors and all that shit. I think Tom Stucker goes out of his way to avoid certain people who live in big cities by refusing to “friend” them on Facebook.

I noticed Tom Stucker right away on the first day of my freshman year in college at our dorm get-together party. It was impossible not to: he was tall, and broad-shouldered, with a shock of dishwater blond hair that fell naturally into his eyes. His eyes really spoke to me more than anything else about him. They are big, brown and sort of vacant, and if you didn’t know better you might wonder if there was much behind them. (If you did know better, you’d find the eternal in just one of his soft, liquid centered pupils; pupils that practically begged you to suck on them like a tootsie roll.)

I didn’t speak to Tom Stucker that day, basically because I had never spoken to any boy before, let alone such a handsome one. But one morning a few weeks later as I left my room to shower, he came out of his room next door. He was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, having just rolled out of bed. I experienced for the first time what it was like to desire another person — explosively, shamelessly and without concern for myself. It was like I could feel every molecule combusting inside of me and then just when I thought the onslaught was over, they would combust again.

Tom must have noticed, because he smiled in an embarrassed way, as though he enjoyed the attention, even from a doughy, acne-scarred girl in a torn flannel nightgown. 

I recently scanned our latest alumni magazine (I always check to see if Tom Stucker has sent in a note about himself — a new job, a move to another state, a new wife), only to learn that Lisa Miller, my freshman year roommate, has relocated back to New Jersey to start an oral surgery practice. It would be very easy for me now since she’s local to reach out, to see if she still keeps in touch with Tom. She and Tom were “friends with benefits” during our freshman year. I should schedule a consultation about having my wisdom teeth extracted anyway.

When I show up for the appointment, I may need to reintroduce myself as her freshman year roommate, in case she doesn’t recognize me. I look in the mirror sometimes and wonder whatever became of the acne-scarred, mixed-up girl I used to be. Over the years, I’ve evolved into an entirely different person. I almost don’t recognize myself. And I’m pretty sure Tom Stucker wouldn’t either.

In one of my fantasies, Tom Stucker and I are doing laundry at the fluff and fold. The dryer has just finished, and we fold up the flat sheets together, each of us turning our part of the sheet to the side, and then walking it up to each other.

I’m a little apprehensive about seeing Dr. Lisa again at my appointment, but the fact that she’s become a doctor of any kind is impressive. The last time I went to the doctor was at the ER — I went because I was having chest pains. The doctor asked me, “Do you have a history of heart problems?” I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I do.” After hooking me up to an EKG machine and running some blood tests, she came back to tell me that everything was fine; that I wasn’t having a heart attack. More than likely, it had been a panic attack. Then she walked out and I got dressed and took the bus home.

I wonder why the doctor didn’t press me on my heart problems. If she had, then I would have told her that I lost touch with the love of my life thirty years ago. But doctors don’t care about such things. They only care about organs, muscles, bones or tissues — they have no time for anything else. I’m sure Lisa is only concerned with teeth and gums. Not with feelings. Or old emotional wounds. She always struck me as pretty literal anyway. 

While Lisa and I had a few conversations while we were roomies, I can’t say that we were ever close like those who become lifelong friends: The kind of friends who stand up at each other’s weddings and donate their ova when one friend is infertile because of endometriosis, the way Dr. Lisa did for one of her sorority sisters years ago. It’s amazing what some people post on Twitter.

After Dr. Lisa scrapes my molars with that instrument that looks like a tiny pickaxe, I could ask her “So, are you still in touch with Tom Stucker?” but I will probably choose not to. And it’s not because I fear being seen as pathetic or ridiculous to still care about such matters. I just don’t need to solicit information about him from any source. Though I’d bet that Tom Stucker and Dr. Lisa have friended each other on Facebook, so she is privy to his photos and postings about his twin daughters Chelsea and Brittan and his Irish setter, Beowoof.

 Recently, I dreamed that Tom Stucker was parked in a minivan outside the United departures area at O’Hare airport. The van was covered with bumper stickers — I remember one read “Piss on Iran.” In the dream, he watched as a doughy teenaged girl awkwardly unloaded the van of its cargo: An industrial sized bottle of Tide, a blue duffel bag with the initials “TAS” embroidered on the side, a bean bag chair, and a giant dildo. Then I woke up. I need to ask my court-appointed therapist, Paula, what she makes of it.

 In another fantasy, Tom Stucker and I are sitting on Adirondack chairs on a huge green lawn in front of a lake. It’s summertime, so it’s still warm and light, even though the sun is setting. Tom gets up and offers me his hand. “Should we go?” he says, smiling.

Even though it has been a long process, I can say that it no longer bothers me that Tom Stucker and Lisa had sex in our dorm room once while I pretended to be asleep, on the night I asked him to the Homecoming Dance. While he was gracious enough to turn me down in a nice way, lying about having Saturday night football practice, his and Lisa’s breathless intercourse that night still left an indelible mark. 

I thought Tom Stucker and I were friends. We used to study together all the time freshman year, both of us being English majors. We would joke around and talk about all kinds of things — music, growing up, family stuff. But over time, something changed in our relationship. He started to pull away from me. He would rebuff my pleas to study in his room. He wouldn’t pick up his phone late at night or answer the notes I left for him on the dry erase board on his door. When I started camping outside of his room, waiting for him to come back from class or from parties so we could hang out, he wouldn’t even look down at me as he unlocked his door. Sometimes he slammed it angrily behind him. Then he started sleeping at his fraternity house, and hardly stayed in the dorm at all.

In retrospect, I guess I came on too strong. I showed my hand too soon. If I had it to do over again, I’d try to tone things down — to play it cool, like Lisa did. I don’t think I’d be able to though. For whatever reason, the universe sent Tom Stucker into my life and there was nothing I could do to stop that freight train. How do you stop a chemical reaction? How do you stop thermonuclear fusion?

In one of our therapy sessions, Paula asked me, “What is the point of spending so much emotional energy on someone whom you cannot get within two hundred yards of? This person clearly doesn’t deserve your love.” Of course, she’s right: Tom doesn’t deserve my love. Love is a beautiful gift, and he squandered mine. He rejected me. He hurt me in a bunch of ways. But in spite of everything, I still feel that love. And I’m not sure what to do with it, if not give it to him still.

I thought that I would see Tom in class after summer break, but at the first meeting of the Eighteenth Century English novel, he wasn’t on the roster. Unbeknownst to me, he had changed his major from English to Psychology. He had also moved into an off-campus apartment without telling me, and got an unlisted phone number. This was a painful period in my life. It marked some of the last times I ever saw Tom Stucker in person.

I even walked over to Tom’s apartment one afternoon a few days before graduation with some kind of fire lit under me to confess my feelings to him. I got as far as the front door and then I chickened out. I didn’t think I could handle telling Tom how much I cared and then have him reject me and/or pity me, or worse. It seemed at the time like that would have really destroyed me. And thirty plus years later, I still think it would have.

In another fantasy, Tom Stucker and I are dancing in a dive bar to “American Pie” on the jukebox. When Don McLean sings, “We both kicked off our shoes…” we both kick off our shoes and we just laugh and laugh about how silly it is.

Paula suggests that I concentrate on my reality-based relationships. But it’s not easy, even with social media as a tool to meet people and maintain friendships. I don’t have the energy to see old friends or attempt to make new friends because I don’t have any old friends anymore.

I sometimes wonder if I would even recognize Tom Stucker if I saw him in real life. He never attended any of the court hearings. The reality is that I might not even find him attractive anymore. Maybe it’s one of my blind spots, but I just can’t imagine that happening. It wasn’t just about the way he looked, although that didn’t hurt. There was some intangible quality about him that drew me in. The truth is that Tom Stucker made a big impression on me at a very impressionable age and now it’s too late to expunge him from my life experience, even if I wanted to. What would I have left in my life if not for him?

 Sometimes, when I get really keyed up from fantasizing about Tom Stucker all day, I’ll chat up a random guy on the bus. As we screw in one of the restrooms at Port Authority, I’ll think to myself, “What would it have been like to have sex with Tom Stucker?” When Lisa and Tom had sex that one time in our dorm room, I shut my eyes and touched myself, and after a while, it was almost like Tom and I were doing it. Not the fumbling, drunken intercourse he and Lisa were engaged in, but passionate lovemaking. I probably made more noise than they did.

I really shouldn’t waste my time thinking so much about Tom Stucker. We can never be together, that’s been made crystal clear by our judiciary system, so why dwell on it? Thanks to Paula’s gentle prodding, I am now willing to admit that when someone gets a restraining order against you in perpetuity, there’s little ground you can make up from there.

But I still carved Tom Stucker’s name onto the counter of the Neptune Diner in Astoria for posterity. After all, hope is maybe the one thing that makes us human.

Paula asks if I am keeping up with my meds, and even though I tell her I am, I find that my head is much clearer without them. For example, I never noticed how little I thought about Tom Stucker until after I stopped taking them. 

Don’t you love the song “Vincent” by Don McLean? I sure do. It’s about Vincent Van Gogh. Some people might see Van Gogh as suffering from acute mental illness, since he mutilated his ear and gave it to a woman who worked in a café he frequented. But I think he did that so that someone could bear witness to the depths of his passion. Depths would be the right word — being in love can be both the apex and the nadir. Would I cut off my own ear and send it to Tom Stucker if I knew where he lived, which incidentally, I can’t exactly pinpoint because he started using several PO Boxes for his address? No, I wouldn’t. If I behaved like Van Gogh, people would say I had a mental health issue. But Van Gogh was a brilliant artist, and that’s why Don McLean wrote a song about him and not about me. But take away the creative genius part, and Van Gogh and I are practically the same.

Paula has written in her notes to the court that I am doing much better — that I’m on a path to success. I agree — my life is moving forward. I found a long-term temp job in accounts receivable at Pfizer that may turn permanent. I plan to ask for a transfer to the Wisconsin office if all goes as planned. Thanks to my mandated therapy sessions, I’m no longer considered “a nuisance to society,” as the attorney prosecuting the stalking case referred to me. But I can’t let what some lawyer and a jury of my peers think make any difference whatsoever.

Paula says that it’s never too late — with the right combination of medication, therapy and behavioral modification, I can really make something out of myself. She assigned me homework last session: She asked me to come up with a positive vision for my future. I thought about it a lot on the bus back to my apartment. I can envision my life in the future to be sort of like Dr. Lisa’s: I’d like to be a woman who had sex with Tom Stucker and who gets to chat with him regularly on Facebook. Dr. Lisa has the kind of life I aspire to, even though when I confided in her freshman year about my feelings for Tom Stucker, she practically laughed in my face. She said Tom was “so far out of my league that we weren’t even living on the same planet.” Then, when she and Tom were drunk and hooking up in our room that one night, I heard her say I was a weird fat freak. Maybe she thought I was asleep. Tom said that I was a fatty and a crazy bitch and they both laughed. Then they had sex and passed out.

But that’s all water under the bridge. I’m actually looking forward to seeing her at my consultation appointment next Tuesday.

I envision that Dr. Lisa and I will have a nice chat about her new house in Jersey. I’ll inquire about her son and her husband and about what it was like to be Tom Stucker’s fuckbuddy. I may ask her opinion as to why she thinks Tom never answered my emails or letters, or ever thanked me for the care package of homemade cookies I sent him for his fiftieth birthday last fall, which I know for a fact he received: I sent it internally from Pfizer headquarters to his office and tracked it online and saw that he had signed for it. I made a copy of his signature that I keep in my wallet.

 Perhaps I’ll show Dr. Lisa the photo I have of Tom Stucker. It may look familiar to her, since I stole it off her desk freshman year. “Do you remember this pic, Dr. Lisa?” I’ll say, “only weren’t you in this shot as well, smiling next to Tom in your cute yellow bikini? Looks like you’ve been cut out. I wonder how that happened.”

Dr. Lisa might get even more suspicious once she looks in my mouth and notices that my wisdom teeth have already been extracted, but by then I will have pulled the box cutters out of my purse, and will have asked to her please, kindly, switch seats with me. She’ll be in no position to argue. Once I handcuff her to the dentist chair and warn her not to scream or I’ll slash her pretty face, we’ll have a chance to really catch up.

I’m confident we’re going to clear the air about some things that I’ve been holding onto for a long, long time. I already feel lighter just thinking about the conversation we’ll have. Paula will be proud of me for paying attention to my own feelings for once. But I’ll keep all this to myself. It’ll be our little secret, Tom Stucker’s and mine.

I doubt that Van Gogh ever planned to cut off his ear; I think it happened out of passion. Maybe it wasn’t destiny that Tom and I met, but things happen for reasons we’ll never understand. Some of the best things in life are unplanned. One time, when we were studying together, Tom reached across his book and gently brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. I felt more alive than I ever felt in my life. The molecules combusted, again and again and again. They’ve never stopped. So you see, I’d give more than just an ear to feel that way even one more time. I’d give anything.

STORY:
Debbie Graber's short stories are upcoming or have been published in Atlas and Alice, BarBar, Zyzzyva and Hobart, among other places. Her story collection, Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday, was published in 2016 by The Unnamed Press. 

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ART:
Donna Vorreyer creates and writes in the Chicago area and hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her art is  featured or forthcoming in North American Review, Waxwing, Thimble Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, and other journals.

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Debbie about this story!

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