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Friday, August 6, 2010

He put his face close to mine. He held me by the arms.

“Stop,” I whispered. We were standing outside. He was supposed to be working. Nobody was around, but there were people standing on the sidewalk across the street, smoking, and maybe they could see, if they wanted to.

He put his mouth near my right ear. I closed my eyes, listening.

Then he put his lips on my neck, and then a little bit lower, on the skin very near where my shoulder begins. He pressed his mouth there, sort of like a kiss and sort of not. He has a small mouth with thin lips, and you can sort of feel his mouth’s smallness (and by you I mean me), but it is soft, not wet, not dry, just slight and warm. He has a beard, also, and it has a soft, brushy feeling that I like.

“Um,” I said. I wavered slightly. I turned my head very quickly.

“What,” he said.

I tugged myself loose from him, no longer only uncomfortable, but also humiliated and surprised by my own physiology. I felt, now, a pleasant panic, and the panic had worked its way out of my neck and into my brain and arm. There was, too, a neurological prickling.

“Um,” I said again. “I, ah.”

He frowned.

“The hair on my arm stood up,” I said to him in a whisper, “when you did that just now.”

We are not yet able to read each other. He thinks I am angry sometimes, and instead I am amused. This time he was smiling at me, and I didn’t know what it meant. Here is what it meant, though: he didn’t believe me.

“Really?” he asked me.

“Mhm,” I whispered, warmth creeping into my neck and jaw. I looked at him and frowned and squinted, as if he were too bright to look at.

He leaned in and, slowly, pressed his mouth in that spot between my neck and shoulder again.

“Ah! Ah!” I said. “It happened again!”

Now I felt like a scientist.

“But only on my right arm!” I said to him.

“Huh,” he said. “Just on that side?”

“Oh, you’re right!” I said to him. “I wonder whether it has something to do with the brain’s hemispheres, or which side controls --”

And I was trying to remember a freshman-year psychology class, and so I wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, and then I was startled, because his mouth was suddenly on my left side, against my left clavicle, and I felt my whole left arm, from my neck to my wrist, wake up.

“Oh, wow!” he said.

“Holy shit!” I said, looking down at my own limb. “Just the left arm, that time!”

“I know! I wouldn’t have believed it!” he said, his face still close to mine. He had been looking down at my arm, too, watching for it. “That time I saw it happen!” He looked up at me.

Then we eyed each other, grinning like kids.

Last night I’d had a drink too many. We were sitting beside each other, and I had lengthily described a terrible fit of jealousy. And though the jealousy itself was resolved, I was still a little bit angry over nothing.

“For me, you will always be unknowable,” I concluded, then, angrily and quietly, “and that is wonderful.”

--

I have read about sex writing and how to do it only a little bit before, and also, I am pretty fascinated by Robyn’s creative nonfiction reading series, because a lot of that is sex writing. When I was working on my nonfiction reading-piece for Robyn, which was this crass awful thing, I’d told a close friend about my anxieties for attempting sex writing. And then he let me know that I was lying, that the horrible thing I wrote about having my leg touched in a bar was also sex writing, absolutely. So I told him that OK then maybe that was the only sex writing I’ve ever done, but that really is the all-of-it. Now I am wondering whether this also counts as sex writing. Does it? I hope not, because I’m already embarrassed to death as it is.

I never liked D. H. Lawrence that much when I was a lit major, but now, thinking back, I liked how he described the distance that grows between two people even from inside their most intimate moments.

I do know that things are starting to hit me with much too much force, and so while I feel very much as I always have, it’s like I’m also on Adderall. I’m exhausted from the exertion, but it’s very pleasant, too, to not feel half-dead.

Filed in Life in Syndication, Livejournal, Personal | | Comments Off

The Backstory 2010-06-06 16:25:37

Sunday, June 6, 2010

What's your most memorable caper from before you and your friends 'became people who drink'?

Backdated to a few days ago, but no Internet at home :(

Hello, stranger,

Even though you have written this question in a really jovial and twee way (Capers! Capers, you say! I keep a jar of capers in my refrigerator!), I have left your answer unwritten for three whole weeks. I have had a lot of trouble meeting it, see, because your question hints at something very dark in my life that is difficult for me to shine a light on.

Obviously I have, in the past and in here, suggested that my relationship with alcohol is none too healthy, and I come by that bad relationship genetically but also emotionally (and here I actually stripped out the phrase "but not without accountability" because, why lie?), and I think you are asking me to address this. Of course that is difficult for me.

One time, a few months ago or more, I had stayed out late, clearly up to no good. When I recounted my shenanigans, and I was consumed with weird and maybe unnecessary guilt feelings, a close gal friend had said to me, "I don't understand why you're so upset with yourself, because this seems like a pretty normal behavior."

"This is not normal behavior," I'd said to her. "Not for me."

Or I'd like to think that, anyway.

"But these things are only bound to happen," she had sighed, "because you spend time with people like us."

"People like who?" I'd asked her, shocked. "What kind of people are we?"

"Night people," she'd said lightly.

At the time I think I'd thought she meant 'people on cocaine' and I was just completely horrified (ha! I'm kidding sort of), but now I think she really does mean people, singly-living people and maybe hard drinkers, who get off work late and stay out even later and go to work the next day late. But her answer, coupled with her sincere lack of surprise and gravity, injures me every time I think of it.

Or, OK: only somewhat recently I was walking down an ill-lit residential street with a partner-in-crime, and we were heading out at a bad hour, probably intending in only a half-conscious way to tear up the city. As we walked, I told him how happy I was to have met a nice couple--new people! new people!--and we, the three of us, when we'd first met, had talked about Scrabble and literary reading circles, and maybe the couple had thought, because of the place we had met and what we had discussed and our total circumstances, I was a different sort of person. And then I told my friend, as we were walking, how unhappy I was to have lost sight of this couple in the course of my binge-y evening. I'd thought, fretfully, maybe I would never see them again, and the very idea had made me miserable. The following day, though, the girl I'd liked had found me online, and I was happy all over again, and we made tentative but exciting plans to go out exploring. She had felt like an old friend.

"There is a certain kind of, I don't know, aging youth culture that I love but is foreign to me," I told him, and this was tough to express, "where everyone cooks and listens to records and wears aprons. I have aprons, too," I said to him, "I have a collection of aprons even, and I have a book about collecting aprons, but I don't have anyone I wear an apron with."

I think I was trying to explain midcentury supper club or group macrame, which are the sorts of subdued, domestic adventures a nebbish, bookish woman like me would enjoy. Like, even in my spare alone time, I play Professor Layton or Sudoku or crossword puzzles: I do those things late at night, and drunk, generally, but that's how I occupy myself. And I think my friend did come to understand the sort of person I was trying to describe, a doe-eyed and emotionally generous person for whom even the smallest things are adventures. I told him, also, "I go out to drink, but I hate drinking," and he said, balking, "You hate drinking?" I guess because I probably look like I really really love drinking.

And, to drive a point home, I also made this same partner-in-crime night-owl friend cook two quiches with me in the middle of a weekday, and I wore my favorite smock.

"It feels like a Sunday," he had said to me, then, smiling broadly and like a kid as we were baking things (!), which had made me so indescribably happy. I hadn't really planned to leave home ever again, but he made me leave my apartment to buy bacon anyway. And he was in my huge catshit kitchen, and I showed him my collection of cookbooks, and I offered to give him an apron with skeleton bones printed on it.

But later that same criminal night, and I mean the one I was describing earlier, I had whispered to my friend that I tend to get in trouble because I just don't know when to leave. The night had worn on, and I was getting appropriately anxious. "The problem with me," I'd whispered to him, "is I want to find out what will happen, or I overdo it and I wait and wait until finally people with guns show up."

And really, I think that is the problem with night people: we want to learn the endings to yet-unwritten stories, because we do not understand that, rather, we have our own stories to write for ourselves, and so we stay and stay and stay because our worldviews are so twisted up in fatalism, not possibility.

You asked a question about the person I used to be, before I became a person who drinks. I didn't have an answer for you before, because I could not remember that person. That makes me sad.

Today at work, I discovered a letter sitting on top of all the other mail, addressed to me. I actually recognized the handwriting, which is distinctive, as my college roommate's, and since I was alone, I opened the envelope along a seam with a blade and I read it right there. In that letter, my college roommate, who is now a real adult and completing her PhD at Yale, remembers my nineteen-year old self for me.

She describes the time we organized a mass exodus to a restaurant in Chicago and the flyers we'd made for it. She writes that, at peculiar intervals in her life, she associates with me "small and silly things [...] like eyeglasses; nail polish; comic books; a well-cared-for wok." Then she asks, "How are your aunt and uncle, I wonder?" (Bad.) "You must still be writing?" she asks. (Barely, but a little, like this.) "Are you still computerizing?" she wonders. (Hardly, but a little, like this.) "Are you still dulcimer-izing?" (No.) "Other things that always remind me of you," she lists: "Edward Gorey; fiery, striped tulips; free Internet typography."

Here she adds: "Being nineteen was being still in a process of discovery, of being YOUNG!, and living with you was for me one moment after another of learning or being exposed to something new. I still remember the way it felt to have neurons fire [...]. Also I remember how much FUN and how HOMELIKE it was to live with you. Do you remember how good-looking our room was?"

I was alone at work, and since no one was looking I cried, because suddenly I did remember. I have kept every piece of correspondence I have ever received from this person, and she is so so special to me for all the same reasons she names, and I know I want to write a letter to her, and I know I have pens and a desk and special stationery saved up, but I don't know how I will ever begin. And here I am, shooting some of the things I'd love to tell her off into outer space, where I hope she never ever finds them, because I don't really want her to know.

But my college roommate's letter jogs all my old memories and feelings. Capers, you ask?

I used to meet people in the middle of the night for scrambled eggs, because they'd call and they knew I'd be awake still, and we would meet up and read or draw and talk, or we maybe would never talk. Oh my goodness, I racked up so many good stories I have never told. And here's something weird: I used to give car rides, like at 5am, to indigent people. I never felt that sense of fight-or-flight you're supposed to feel, I guess because I was so naive.

One time, in fact, a homeless person recognized me in Wrigleyville, and this is a story I actually have told to people, and I ought to have been terrified because he was totally visibly out of his gourd, and he grabbed me by the neck and dragged me down the street by my throat because he remembered liking me. Someone intervened, and maybe that's how I lived through that. Or! I used to skip classes in college to go to brunch or to the movies. One time, a pack of us German language students all snuck out to a matinee of the first Tobey Maguire Spider-man movie, and before the previews, in front of the packed theater, I pulled my pants down to my knees and shimmied my then-scrawny ass, shouting, "Hey you guyssss I wore my Spider-man skivvies," to raucous applause. Or! I used to organize game nights in my apartment, with Atari in one room, GameCube in another, and board games at the dining table. Those were really fun times. I liked being a hostess. After a particularly well received party, I sent out Katamari Damacy -themed thank-you cards. At a group writing workshop in my living room, where I served pimiento cheese sandwiches cut into neat little triangles, a college friend called me "a real hausfrau," and I became furious and I extricated myself from my apron and threw it across the room, just to show him how I felt about that.

The absolute best, though, was when I and a friend named Tom left a diner to follow a stranger home. Our strange host was a failed 80s science fiction writer, and he lived in a carriage house, and inside there were all these projects he was doing--and this was pure coincidence, and we didn't know it at the time--for our friend Melanie's art class. He painted this really gruesome picture of me for that class, eventually adding real actual plaster for my nose, I think. But that day the three of us watched a movie on cable in his tiny kitchen. (And if you're wondering, the movie on cable was a film version of Margaret Edson's play Wit, which I love love love, but it was on TV and I think on HBO, directed by that dude who did The Graduate and HBO's Angels in America, oh who is that, Mike Nichols? Yes!, and Tom and I and the writer just all sat around sobbing.) I also sang in a rock band and worked with a comics-themed performance art troupe, and things back then were really nice, and we had people over to watch movies, and my boyfriend always said how nice it was that I knew so many neat people from college, because back then they all still lived here.

Here was the beginning of my sense of adventure's dying: I had been living with a man about my age, and somehow it was wearing me out, and about a year into cohabitation I successfully stayed indoors for three solid months. My neighbors actually believed I had moved away! One day I popped out to buy frozen food, and my neighbor Roger was like, holy shit!

But I had become terrified of the kinds of people you find out there. And I got myself into this horrible place where I could not look anyone in the eye without drinking several beers first. One time a flight attendant put two big free beers on my tray table, just to keep me from flying out of my aisle seat in a screaming panic. Of course I was diagnosed, eventually, with agoraphobia, and while it no longer impedes my going-out habits--ha! ha! hardly!--I have a lot of trouble sustaining any kind of social enthusiasm without bringing a partner-in-crime along (a "safe person"), or drinking, or ingesting Xanax before flying or speaking.

I shouldn't drink. I know I shouldn't drink, and I never should have started. One night I couldn't stop bleeding, probably because I had replaced all my blood with whiskey. I don't remember much about it except that I ran into a friend's bedroom screaming. She tells me that she sat up in bed, flicked on the overhead lamp, and saw little receipt papers all bound around my wrist, pasted to my skin with blood and with all these fluttering paper ribbons hanging off. She was totally traumatized by the whole thing. In the doctor's office, the assistant softly whispered, and please please be truthful, she said, tell me who did this to you. Oh, my Christ, and I started laughing because I had to tell her I'd somehow done it to myself and I didn't know how, and it was impossible to reassure her. A few days later, I remember, because it was getting itchy, I surreptitiously pulled up my right sleeve and lifted the gauze underneath, and there was bright pink meat under there, exactly like pork, and I stared and stared, and I was terrified and humiliated.

I swore I would stop drinking after that, because it had finally become evident that, if I kept drinking alone, I would die, and somehow even in death it would invariably be humiliating. I guess that's a pretty un-memorable caper, actually, since I can't actually remember it. On the nice side, I haven't had a night since then that I couldn't remember, which is some sort of bleak, not-good-enough progress.

These are terrible, terrible things for me to write about myself, probably, but I've always felt really liberated by this kind of seeming Internet anonymity because, if I cannot see the person asking the question, maybe I can also shield my eyes and look in the opposite direction and approximate the truth. You know? Well. Hopefully, you don't know.

No, I know the real truth, and it's so much worse. Here is the problem with confessional writing: its author, compelled by guilt but not apology, wants her reader to absolve her. Because she believes in determinism instead of morality, she wants you to know about her quirks and traumas so she can make you believe, as she wants to believe, that she was always destined to have trouble getting out of bed.

Filed in Change (Lack of), Drinking, Life in Syndication, Livejournal, Personal | | Comments Off

Friday, pt. 1

Saturday, May 29, 2010
I woke up, and I was so hung over. I poured a cup of iced coffee into a travel mug, ran a hand through my hair, and vacated. Later I explained, "It took me five hundred thousand years to cold-brew an iced coffee and five seconds to drink it. The whole thing seems so silly and stupid now. So I have decided that the price of iced coffee at Atomix is not too bad, and I will probably keep letting them make me iced coffees." That's what I told Jim.

All through my workday, everyone kept telling me how they were hungover, and I began to get paranoid that I looked hungover, too. I did notice, in the morning, that my skin looked like a dead person's. Can dead people still have acne? Also, why Thursday night? Why were you all out? I know, I know, the good weather. But still. You are all crazy.

I had actually stayed indoors on Thursday night, specifically to torture myself. I'd had a glass of white wine, and I'd read the Cosmo that Peter had given me earlier that day. Then I'd tenaciously read three more Cosmos, which had required the whole fucking wine bottle. I was miserable. I thought about deleting my Sunday Night Sex Confessional and showing up to the reading with four Cosmos instead.

Then I tortured myself by reading portions of the Internet on my iPhone. Then I reviewed old text messages. Oh, boy, was I sad. I was crying! And then I ended up typing a really funny thing that you will never ever read because Good God it is incriminating, but it's about my first trip ever to a bar called Innertown.

In that story, which is all fact, this woman keeps groping me and saying she might lay me later in the night. I get really mad. And then I find out she's all doped up on ketamine! And then I have to ask someone else what ketamine is. And then R and I go outside to smoke R's cigarettes, and this man, who is about my age, is standing there urinating on the bumper of a Jeep. R encourages him, but I am shushing her and hiding my face, terrified that I will accidentally see his penis.

Then he tells me his penis is nicknamed "the Yellow Dart" and, without looking at him, I ask him what is that from, oh gosh what is that from, because I nicknamed my canary the Yellow Dart and I don't remember what that is from.

"Homestar Runner," he says to me.

"Yes! That is so totally it! Thank you! Oh my God!" I say to him, my eyes averted the whole time.

Oh, Birdie McGee, the Yellow Dart. You were fifty bucks at the fish store, because you did not know any songs, you poor thing. You started out as such a quiet little bird. But we learned to sing, didn't we? Because I played you all those CDs of birds singing. How I loved you, little yellow dart. You sang right through every episode of Jeopardy!, probably because you knew all the answers, you tiny genius. And you had a girlfriend right outside the window, a little songbird trilling in that nearby tree branch, and she would hop down the branch, almost but never actually touching the dining room glass, and you and she would trade little songs. And you loved her so much, and you puffed up your little yellow chest and sang so hard your tiny lungs filled the room with melody. And then your girlfriend built a nest with some other bird, right in front of you, because she was a little sparrow whore. Oh, Birdie McGee! This world is full of heartbreak.

So I went to work, and the whole day was off-kilter. I had run my heart into the ground the night before, just purposefully wracking it until the sun came up, and now I was staring blankly at the wall.

How had this happened? Recently I had renewed my commitment to emotional receptivity, to recognizing that possibilities are my own to grasp, to knowing that there is no plan except the plan that I devise and mold. Be so bold! Be fearless! Have moxie! I had reminded myself that moral, ethical living has everything to do with rejecting fate, and that I need to live and press on to at the very least spite my genetics and upbringing. And here I was, anyway: dour at work, pressed into a corner, squinting ruefully at the sunlight, and perhaps! even still a teensy bit drunk.

Ploosss came in to say hi (I just made up that name, just this second) and I stood up and showed him how my skirt is falling off. I demonstrated that, with one errant motion, at any moment, it could fall all the way down to my ankles.

"I think I'd rather still be fat and have my skirt fit again, because this is the best skirt," I said to him. I yanked at the waist of my skirt, pulling it away from my stomach, so that I looked like a TV infomercial.

"That is some pretty dramatic weight loss," he said. "How did you accomplish it? Crack?"

"My ex-boyfriend said a pretty dick thing about how since I am living alone now I obviously can't feed myself properly," I sighed, "but you know what? He's right. I am poor now."

Ploosss picked at my skirt. "Here's the seam," he said, tugging at something he had found on my skirt along my butt. "We can take this in pretty easily."

"Don't you mess with me," I said, turning to face him. "You better not be joking around. I'll buy you a whole pizza if you fix my skirt."

Ploosss announced that he was hungover and going home to sleep, and I hugged him a lot and then I let him leave.

Thinking about the barter-pizza I wanted to buy Ploosss had made me pretty hungry, though, so I started reading the online menu for my favorite vegan restaurant. The menu changes daily, so that every day is special. Today, eggplant! That made my stomach really rumble.

Then I told J and my boss I was planning a trip to the vegan restaurant, and that I was going to drive there, and by then I had memorized the day's menu so that I could recite it. What can I pick up for you? Will it be yams? Coconut spinach? Mock chicken salad? There is a panang curry dish, too, and brownies, if you will have them.

I took down their sandwich orders on post-its. Then the owner of the vegan restaurant coincidentally walked in, and it was so surprising because I had not seen him in eons, and I told him I was planning a trip to his restaurant. I wanted to hug him, but I wasn't too sure because he's pretty thin.

A little later, this woman to whom I owe money walked in. I had been expecting her, and I reached for my wallet, but then she took off her sunglasses. And her eyes were red and puffy, and she started crying. I dropped everything I had been holding.

I wish I could tell you what she told me then, because it was the total worst. She'd left the house and she couldn't go back, and what had happened was a tragedy. Someday when we are all far away from one another, maybe I can describe it, pretending that it is only a story.

(But then again, maybe I can't. Because you just can't imagine it, it's so unbelievable. And when I say "can't imagine" I don't mean incredible poverty-porn cinema or Greek melodrama or even semi-relatable character-driven studies about human fallibility and lying and inexplicable callous cruelty, because those things are absolutely conceivable and imaginable. The real mundanity of this rug-out-from-under-her nightmare is just... just... OK, here's one: J, who is 24 years old, hasn't spoken to her mother since December, because for months upon months the woman didn't tell J that she had decided to put J's dog to sleep. Seriously, what the fuck is that? Multiply that anecdote by a million.)

I got off my stupid chair and parked it under her. I told her to sit. She put her sunglasses back on, and she sat there.

"You're in shock," I said to her. She nodded.

And she really was in shock. She and I are not even friends. She has walked in here to see me because here I am just around the corner from her, and she needs to run away, because she is in shock.

I was in shock, too, I think, from what she described to me. I felt a lot of things. I wanted to be her mother, just then, or a friend, and I was angry because she had been so betrayed, and I was also feeling a lot of guilt. My mind reeled: could I ever have been so cruel? So heartless? I weighed my goodness in my head.

"You have to see this one text message," she said.

I watched her look for it on her cell phone. She was torturing herself.

"I don't think I want to see it," I said carefully.

She looked up at me. Her mouth was drawn.

"No, of course not," she said then.

I told her to stay put until my lunch break, and we would go on this vegan odyssey together, if she wanted.

She had slumped on the chair, apparently dying, by the time a real customer arrived. He threw open the front door, and his comparatively uncertain friend lumbered in behind him.

"I am Guillermo," the first man said, stopping just inside the doorway to gesture broadly. "Jenn? We spoke on the phone." He walked over and shook my hand. He was wearing a large thin dramatic scarf, I guess to protect his long-sleeved shirt from the harmful sunrays.

Guillermo looked around, sizing the place up.

"What the fuck is all this shit," he said.

I shrugged. I pointed a couple things out that, from our phone conversation, it sounded like he might want.

"Oh, fuck all of it, I don't even care," he told me, waving his hand dismissively. He stalked around for awhile, cursing at everything. But then he was standing over some of the boxes in mystery packaging, eyeing them.

"I don't get this," he said to me. He looked at me quizzically.

"You have to buy it before you can see what you got," I said.

"What. What is the fucking point," he said, balking.

"Well," I said to him then. "I can tell you the idea is borrowed from Japan. You put money into a machine, and a little toy pops out, right into your hands, like gambling. Someone once suggested to me that, in Japan, there is real cultural relevance there. Maybe you pay for the privilege of chance and mystery and whimsy because it defies the ordinarily rigid structures of everyday life. You are paying to not-know, to enjoy the thrill of possibility, which is culturally a kind of aberrant behavior."

"Deep," Guillermo's friend said, nodding.

"Yes. I really don't give two shits," Guillermo said. He hovered his hand over the boxes, trying to pick one. He sighed.

"This is all for my girlfriend," he told me then. "We are stationed in Afghanistan. She loves this total bullshit garbage. I am on leave. I have a week. We are staying in Afghanistan in a shithole."

Then he described, for me, roadside bombs and the perpetual specter of death's imminence. His explication was tremendous. I thought of Dostoevsky, pressed against the wall and facing the firing squad, hundreds of little deaths all pointed at him.

Guillermo was forming a little pile of gifts for his girlfriend at the front desk. I stood near the register, tired.

"Do you think I have enough?" he asked me softly. We both looked at his little gift pile.

"Ah, I'm not sure?" I said, frowning. "Is there an occasion, or...?"

"It's for my girlfriend!" he said impatiently, angrily, but he also put his palms out toward me in a way that made him look so helpless, and harmless.

I shook my head. "I'm sorry," I said. "I usually can help with occasions. I guess I --"

and I looked at my wet-eyed woman, sitting in the chair next to me. She nodded at me slowly.

"I guess I... I... I'm not sure I can remember a boyfriend... ever..."

She nodded emphatically.

"...I can't remember ever being given something unless it were a holiday. I don't think anyone has ever given me anything just-because."

I said that, and the very last word caught and hooked itself on my throatbox.

Later, as the day wore on, I realized that in recent years this had become a concrete and palpable lie, because I can even name the thoughtful gifts from fellows -- a necklace, a poster, a DS cartridge, cheese curds, salt and pepper shakers, seven issues of Cosmo -- but at that very moment, it sounded like the truth. I thought about gifts I had given others, just-because, and how they had been received, and how stupid I had felt.

I looked at my sad woman wanly. She nodded, she nodded, and her lips and chin trembled.

Guillermo smiled so warmly at me then, and he walked over and grabbed another mystery box, and he placed it in front of me.

I stared down at it blankly.

"For you," he said gallantly. "Add it to my total. This one is for you."

Such bravado! Such showmanship! But I didn't doubt his sincerity at all. I felt my face become soft. I smiled at him, but it was difficult because I was so moved.

I felt the feeling rise and fall and catch in my eyelash and stay there, fat and wet.

Had he seen it? It didn't matter, because he was already shopping and cursing again.

"What is that," he said, pointing at something.

"Ah! A classic --"

"Sold," he said, plucking it from the shelf.

"Do you think this is enough," he whispered then, bringing it to me and setting it down carefully.

"I think," I said to him, "you have done wonderfully. And," I concluded quietly, "I know she'll love it."

After he was paid up, he thanked me, clasping my right hand between both of his.

The very next customer bought a small vinyl turtle, because the day before, in a park, he and his girlfriend had seen a turtle. This vinyl turtle was for his girlfriend, to commemorate their day in the park with the real-life turtle.

The woman in the chair wiped her eyes. "So many good boyfriends," she marveled, whispering.

"I know!" I said, trembling. I said to him, "We think you are a great boyfriend."

He left with his little turtle, and then she went outside to take a call, and I took the seat away and put it underneath me again, and then I was back to carefully examining my clean spot on the white wall.

When it was time, I collected my belongings for my lunch break. I wouldn't have found her outside at all except that she waved at me from far away up the street, from that very spot where I used to phone my mom or smoke cigarettes with Bart. The feeling rose and fell again, and I waved back at her. She clapped her phone shut and hurried to meet me.

"I have a ride, so never mind, but thank you," she told me.

"OK," I said to her.

I agreed to be on call and at-the-ready just in case she, after my workday ended, wanted to grab some alcohol together.

"I just don't have any girlfriends," she said. I thought it was all going to come wide open again, but it didn't, and she adjusted her sunglasses, and we parted ways. I knew what she meant, though, because only for the first time in my life I have a lot of galpals, and maybe things are better now.

I had crossed the street to use the ATM when I saw Sean. I apologized to Sean for something.

"Oh, it's fine," he said to me. He gave me a little hug.

Sean described his stressors, and even though he always seems very mellow and put-together, I drank with him once, so I know there is something clicking in there in a mechanically dangerous way.

We shared my cigarettes. We talked about his hopes and plans for a little while.

"Sorry I'm so spacey," he said to me then.

"Please," I said. "I am also in outer space."

Then I said to Sean, "My mood is very tremulous today. Anything could tip the scales in either direction. This is not a healthy spot at all. This is bad." I pointed at my temple, at the loose screw inside.

"Oh, no, that is bad," he agreed.

"I hope lunch will tip everything in my favor," I said to him, then. We hugged again, and I walked to my car.
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