Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The text message on my phone said two packages had arrived for me at work. "I'll drive up," I texted back, "just as soon as I watch this Jersey Shore episode."
From 10 AM until 2 PM, I sat on my sofa. I watched the fourth episode of MTV's "Jersey Shore," I paid my bills, and I waited for a sandwich I couldn't be bothered to make to arrive via delivery.com. I did all of this from within a bright blue Snuggie. I was terribly pleased with my productivity, coupled with my ability to keep from moving, multiplied by my Snuggie, which is saving me a fortune on gas bills.
I drove to work, fishtailing on a speed bump and slush-skidding down the street. When I opened the packages in the back room, I was furious: inside the boxes were two books and a travel mug! I was actually really pleased about the two books and the travel mug, but I was furious that my own curiosity had repelled me from my couch.
"Ah," my boss said when he or she saw me. "Today is shopping day?"
"Yes," I grumbled. I didn't want to shop, or to be out at all, but Christmas is nearly here, and a certain gift for a certain C.N. has been on hold at a certain store for about a month and a half. I wandered out for a cup of coffee, where I read the beginning of a book, and then I wandered around the corner, down a street, and blew all my money in one store. Also, I spent the rest of the day feeling guilty about that, and hoping no one would see what I bought. I wandered back to work. I wandered around work. I apologized for flitting, admitted I didn't know what to do with myself, and wandered over for another cup of coffee. I felt sick after drinking it. I wandered back to work. I wandered to my car, dusted the snow off it, drove in it for a few minutes, parked in a new spot, and wandered back to work again. This paragraph, in all, took up six hours.
During my second cup of coffee, I talked to Fred.
"Can I ask you something?" he whispered.
"Sure, OK," I said, nodding.
"How much did you spend on Christmas shopping?" he asked.
Immediately: "Including me, or just gifts?"
"Now, that is the second time I've heard that answer today," he said. "What does that mean? What does that even mean?"
"Well," I sighed, "when anyone goes shopping, OK, with shopping actually in mind, right? You start seeing shit you want, too. So I can give you two different figures. There's what I spent in all, while I was out shopping, and then there's a smaller dollar amount, which is what I actually, literally bought for others. But it's so hard to keep from buying little things here and there for yourself, and instead of feeling guilty, I guess you chalk it up as collateral shopping damage."
Fred was nodding. "Ooooohhhh-kaaaay," he said, "now I get it."
Later, I told Jon I had been wanting to experience the McRib, because I don't eat ribs because they have bones in them, but I recently learned that the McRib is solid fake meat stamped and fashioned to look as if it has bones in it, but in actuality contains mostly nothing. This is endlessly fascinating to me! Because it is so fascinating, last night I propositioned almost everyone I knew to share in a McRib with me, and everybody I asked straight-up refused.
I told Jon all of this. So Jon and I went to McDonald's.
Now, I am not sure how I became convinced that the McRib was Back for a Limited Time, but either somebody lied to me or, more likely, I've inadvertently read Old News on the Internet.
"We haven't had a McRib for years," an employee told me. "Unless you mean the Mac Wrap?"
Oh, my god. The similarly-named Mac Wrap is a Big Mac, but in a low-carb tortilla. I ordered two. Jon ordered a double cheeseburger.
Over my two Mac Wraps, I metaphorically spilled my guts, as I am prone to do, and eventually Jon said this:
"I don't think you're sending mixed signals, or bad signals, at all. I think... you have... a quirky way... of doing things right."
And I stared, and I said, "Thank you so much," and I realized it was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to me, and so I said so.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
I bitch about Chicago winters because I actually sort of enjoy them, and because I'm really, really, super duper self-flagellating. Chicago is, in fact, a great place to cultivate self-loathing, righteous indignation, and ice-slick road rage. In his Burn Collector, in I think a later issue, Al Burian has written wonderful things, things that really completely defy expression unless you've sat indoors hiding from them, about Chicago and its winters.
I haven't seen snow in a few years -- I'm a Texas girl, Bay Area -born, Pacific Northwest -bred, and now a San Francisco ex-pat -- so I decided it would be a great exercise in character-building to walk to work. You know, maybe test my mettle, build my constitution, all that. Also, I don't feel like scraping the ice off my car anymore, and I prefer to leave it where it is parked, to navigate all this urban treachery by foot.
Noting it was 4 degrees Fahrenheit out-of-doors, I added an extra sweater and a scarf to my repertoire. I marched out the front door onto the stoop, where Sal the building manager introduced himself. He was sprinkling chemical salt on the stoop.
I saluted my car and walked away from it.
It wasn't long before I got my winter legs back. Trudge, trudge, trudge, stamp stamp stamp through the intersection, tapping the toe of the boot against the cement to shake snow from the soles, pulling the coat hood back slightly and turning with my whole torso to look for cars. Easy! Like riding a bike! No one will ever be able to guess I'm not really from the Midwest.
In a storefront reflection, I could finally see that my coat is massive. In it I look like a parade float or a shoplifter. Except that it makes me look fucking gigantic, I like my coat. It's the kind of coat a 15-year old with overtweezed eyebrows and gold jewelry would wear, and it was $30 at Burlington.
Coats are why I like snow winters: everyone looks like a parade float child, like big bubbles with skinny legs, trudging down the street with splayed limbs like puffy snow angels. Midwestern girls aren't vain because half the year they conceal every inch of skin under bundles of swaddling that make them look fat anyway. Men in coats, if they also wear eyeglasses, are especially handsome.
No one was out on the sidewalk, no one as nutcracked about the snow as I am, until I got to the bus stops. At the Ashland intersection, I saw a woman who looked like me: buried. I looked at her. "Hi," she said grumpily.
Here I should point out that, on snow days, grumpiness is a sort of familiarity. I asked the mailwoman, who delivers mail on foot, how she was today, and before she could answer, I laughed: "Ha, ha!" And she rolled her eyes, but she was grinning. People in California don't really understand these proprieties, I don't think, and they don't feel very connected. In a giant, cold city like Chicago, in the snow and ice and sleet, everyone loves one another because we are all pissed off.
"Where did you walk to work from?" Fred asked.
I was entertaining a brand new cup of coffee in one hand. It used to be called a "Mr. Turtle" but now it is called a "Gamera." It is expensive and complicated enough to be charged to a credit card. I told Fred where I'd walked from.
"Wow!" he said. "That's a pretty good walk. You're tougher than me!"
I flexed one puffy arm. "It wasn't too bad once my legs and face went numb," I admitted. "But for the first few blocks, the wind was punching me in the face, like," and I punched the air in syncopation with my free hand, "fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Monday, November 23, 2009
"Hello?" he asked the apartment, and it echoed.
"I'm in here," I shouted. "I'm using your -- I'm in here!"
I finished and flushed.
"I'm sorry," I said, drying my hands on my thighs. I walked into the kitchen. "When I got out of work, all I could think about was the toilet, and then it was your toilet."
"I'm taking asparagus to dinner," he said. "I tried to tell you."
"What dinner?" I said.
"I didn't want to talk in the checkout line," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said, "I couldn't make out what you were saying, I didn't know where you were. I just drove here."
We talked about dinner. I found a cardboard box and filled it. As I was taping it shut, I ran out of tape.
"I don't believe this," I said. "I just ran out of packing tape."
"So," he said to me, "you're coming to dinner?" He smiled.
"Couldn't that be awkward?" I asked him. "Do you want me to go?"
"I don't want you to feel left out," he said. "I asked you."
The oven made a sound.
"They're playing your song," I said.
"What?"
"It's done preheating."
He blinked. "Oh," he said.
"Maybe I shouldn't go to dinner. Maybe it's good you're going and I can just do all this." I gestured around the living room.
"I'm not going to ask you, I already asked you," he said.
"You might want to talk about me when I'm not there," I said.
His mouth worked into a sharp, long line.
"Or," I said, "maybe it will be awkward for me."
"You don't have to go," he said.
"I got phone calls from [my mom] all day at work," I told him. "She couldn't have known I was working today."
"What was she calling about?" he asked, grunting a little over asparagus.
"I don't know, I was scared to listen. But I listened to a voicemail from a number I didn't recognize. It was the nursing agency. She fired all of [my dad's] nurses. The agency called to tell me."
"Why did she do that?" he asked, surprised.
"I don't know," I said. To ruin our lives, I thought. "I'm going to call her and shout at her. Not right now."
He looked at his cell phone. He punched something into it.
"You're telling them I might be coming," I said.
"Yes," he said.
"Oh, good."
"So you're not coming to dinner?"
"I never said that."
"So you are coming to dinner."
"Who knows."
I paced.
"I don't know where you're at," I said, then, "but please don't flirt with anyone in front of me."
"That is the stupidest thing you could say to me," he said.
I asked him to drive. The asparagus was propped on my knees, with a folded towel between my legs and the Pyrex. We parked. He carried the asparagus in. I carried beers and lemons.
I met the hostess on the patio. "I ran out of packing tape," I told her.
"I'm glad you ran out of packing tape," she said.
Inside, her husband greeted me.
"Thank you for joining us," he said. "Was this an accident?"
"I ran out of tape," I admitted.
We gathered at tables with our plates of food. He was talking about his grandfather, and his own whistling habits as they related to his grandfather, and everyone was listening.
"I love it when you," I said, and then something enormous caught between my throat and chest, "whistle."
One girl started laughing.
What I was going to say was: I love it when you whistle in the shower.
I steadied myself.
"You whistle while the water is running," I said carefully. I tried to smile and make it sound like a joke. "You whistle when you're in the bathroom in the morning! Or while you do the dishes! All this running water."
His eyes widened. "That's true!" he said.
"He whistles really well," I told the girl. "He has this incredible range, he has this vibrato."
"Do you," she asked him, smiling.
"I've always dreamed of doing a whistling part in a recording, like in a song," he told her.
After dinner, Julie the French girl asked me to the patio, I think to borrow my lighter.
"Now," she said to me. "We met in June, but I don't remember a thing about you. I'll start. I'm Julie. I'm French. I am a singer and musician. I live across the street. Now you know everything there is. So you go."
"I'm Jenny," I began. I hesitated. Then I told Julie about the fired nurses, about missing Thanksgiving and Christmas and flying home in January to watch a surgery.
"That's wonderful that you take care of your parents."
"But I'm not taking care of them. I'm here," I said, and I held my hands out to show that I was sitting in a lawn chair on a patio.
"You can't take care of them every second," she said.
I sat in the dark, staring at the dark.
"Thank you," I said finally.
We left early, but not too early.
"That was nice," I said to him as we walked back to the car. I found my keys. "When I'm packing and upset tomorrow, I'll remind myself how nice this was."
"It was great," he said. "I'm glad you came. The thought of you sitting there alone made me sad."
While I drove myself home, I thought about what it was like to have everything you ever wanted, for your life to finally be all your own and nobody else's, and how the feeling should be good, but instead it is dull and sick
That was last night.
Today, I was walking to my car, thinking about its engine freezing, thinking about whistling, thinking about the fired nurses, thinking about the movers coming tomorrow, thinking about money and how I have none, thinking about packing tape, wondering how much gas is in the car or how much it costs to repair a fuel gauge and get oil and antifreeze and wiper fluid and to fix the power steering, thinking about playing and reviewing and ranking 14 games, thinking about rescheduling my internet installation, thinking about being a giant baby, thinking about people who have disappeared from my life. And my stomach started churning, and my eyes started watering, and I was cold.
And I got to my car. I stared at it, doubled over, and projectile-vomited all over the side of it. And people were looking at me, and it was just several seconds of black coffee and bile spewing against my car door. And I opened the door and sat down inside and wiped my face with my sleeve.
