sabrina carpenter

MY EDITOR CALLED ME. He said that he wanted me to write not one but two profiles of Sabrina Carpenter. “Sabrina Carpenter?” I said. “You mean that blonde lady with the fuzzy eyebrows?” “She’s an acclaimed singer-songwriter,” my editor said. “Men want her and women want to be her.” “If you say so,” I said. How out of touch was I becoming, or had I become? I had never even had a TikTok account. I had never heard one of Miss Carpenter’s songs, though I had heard her talking about a childhood crush on Paul McCartney on some American late night show. Paul McCartney, now that was someone I knew of. I was more of a Sir Paul person.

At that time, I was at my aunt’s house in Sand City, waiting for my father to pick me up. Or was I supposed to meet him at the conference center? There had been some miscommunication about the getting picked up or meeting up part. I kept calling him but each time he answered, I could only hear the sounds of the conference behind him, while he yelled, “Where are you?” through the phone. Then he would lose the call. I’d redial and then be met with that recorded message, “The mobile phone you’re trying to reach is either switched off or out of area.”

My aunt was stroking a new puppy all this time on the porch of her house out there in Sand City. To think, I had originated in this bucolic, waterside town. But that was a long time ago. “Why don’t we go visit the old dairy,” she said, referring to a farm down the street from my grandma’s house. Somehow this had become closer, even though it was in a different town. We started to walk to the old dairy together when a sky blue bus drove past and parked on an adjacent lawn. “That would be your Cousin Linda,” my aunt said. “She’s back from Amsterdam.”

Cousin Linda was living in the blue bus. She had a new daughter and was nursing her as she spoke to us. She had also got a new husband too, a Dutchman named Jan. When this goateed Dutchman came in to check on his wife and daughter, my cousin answered him back in Dutch. Linda was now fluent in Dutch. “Well, I haven’t seen you in a while,” Cousin Linda said. “What are you doing back in Sand City?” “I don’t know,” I told her. “My father left me here and went to a conference. Which is a pity because I’m supposed to be working on two profiles of Sabrina Carpenter for a magazine.” My cousin, who was even older than me, squinted. “Who’s Sabrina Carpenter?” she asked. “An acclaimed singer-songwriter,” I told her. “With fuzzy eyebrows.”

Just then the phone rang again. It was my father. I could hear the conference noise in the background. My father was trying to make himself heard. “Where are you?” he repeated. “Where the hell are you?”