Head Case (18 page)

Nothing, there is nothing here that I can tell her. I nod and smile and say, “Well … it was about the face and the soul, and if, if we change our faces, do we change, do we change who we are?
But
that's obviously a very essentialist—”

The moderator interrupts me. “OK, so a feminist rescue read of Orlan. Great. That's all the time we have.”

Charlie drives the SUV back to the Motel 6, where we eat chocolate chip ice cream out of the container with a shared plastic spoon, unwrap the plastic cups from their sanitizing cellophane sheaths, fill them with whiskey, and toast to my inaugural academic flameout.

When Charlie and I open the door to my apartment back in Oakland, Stacey is standing in the middle of the kitchen in a T-shirt and her panties, cutting the hair of some skinny tattooed guy who's sitting on a stool. She has a giant scrape on her chin, which she scratches at before taking the guy's hair between her fingers to measure her next cut.

“Hey, how's it going?” The guy smiles at me, clearly pleased with the situation.

I muster a cold “Hey” and head to my room to place my bags on my bed and take a moment to myself to assess what I've witnessed. Charlie follows me quietly to my room and then, sensing that I could use some breathing space, cracks open the door just as my pantsless roommate is exiting the bathroom.

“Hey—what happened to your face?” he says, with a look of concern.

“Oh, I fell. Isn't it
sexy
?” She strikes a model pose.

Never great with sarcasm, he responds plainly, “No. It looks upsetting.”

I suggest to Charlie that we go grab lunch at an Indian restaurant down the street.

On the way, I try to explain, calmly, “It's never a good idea to call a woman's face upsetting. Even if she has a bruise. It doesn't make her feel good about it.”

“Oh, OK.” He pauses to think this over. “I agree. Well. What should I have said instead?”

“How about: ‘That looks painful, I'm sorry that happened to you'?”

“Oh. Right. OK.”

The next morning, Charlie drives back from Oakland to Santa Barbara. Charlie and I have made this trip together many times. The last time that we did it, we stopped in Sacramento and spent the night at his mom's house.

“She's doing so much better. She has a job and her own place and it's … A few years ago it would have been impossible to stay with her. Out of the question. You don't understand what a big deal this is, that it's actually clean enough for us to stay there.” He was looking at the road before us, but I could hear in his voice that he was tearing up.

Minerva was meeting us there the next day, but that night, it was just us. Charlie's mom was a square-shaped woman who smiled a lot. Her apartment was dark but clean. Before we got into the car to pick up Minerva from the train station, she said, “Wait, hold on, I need your help cleaning out the car.”

“Mom, we're taking my car.”

“I know, I know, I just … while you're here.”

She handed each of us a garbage bag and took one herself. We headed to the parking lot. It was obvious which car was hers.

When Charlie and I got into his car, after cleaning out his mom's car, I said nothing. I acted as if it had never happened. I didn't know what to say. We were both silent for most of the drive. Finally, he said quietly, “She really is doing so much better.”

I put my hand on his thigh. “I know.”

*   *   *

A few days after Charlie left, I'm in the small living room area of the Oakland apartment checking my email and drinking coffee around ten in the morning when Stacey walks in. We exchange morning acknowledgments as she's dialing a number into her phone and then begins speaking sharply to whoever picked up.

“Hey. Thank you. No, I don't have any plans. I was supposed to have lunch with my sister, but she bailed on me. No. I don't want it to be my birthday. Oh, OK, fine. Maybe we'll meet up later.”

She hangs up the phone.

“Happy un-birthday,” I say warmly, trying to make a joke.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Do you have any plans?”

“No. Well, tomorrow night I'm renting out a bar. But I don't have any plans tonight.”

She comes home at 3:00 a.m., opens the door to my bedroom to wake me up. “Daaaaaarling, daaaaaarling … can I have some whiskey? It's my birthday!”

“Happy birthday.”

I press the half-empty bottle of whiskey left over from Charlie's last visit in her hands and close the door to my room. She heads to her room with a guy and blasts heavy metal.

The next morning, I see her as I'm walking up the street. Her little Yorkie puppy runs toward me, looking like a little burrito with bangs. When I practiced the following words in my head, they somehow sounded like the perfect act of self-assertion, with a dash of wry humor to deflect anger. “Hey, so I know it was your birthday last night, but in the future, maybe not power ballads at five-thirty in the morning?” I smile nervously. Yeah. Great. Way to go, me. Her silence confirms my dread, but it's too late; I must press on.

“So, are we good?”

She says nothing.

“OK?”

She nods.

“OK.” I bend down to pet her little burrito. “See you in a bit.”

I head into the apartment, make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and sit down at the dining room table. This moment is crucial; I must appear relaxed and chat about little things to defuse the tension of our confrontation and to show her that I harbor no resentment toward her and the moment is fully behind us. She enters with the dog, both of them skittering into the kitchen.

“So,” I begin tentatively, “I hear that they want to make a speakeasy out of the basement?” Nice, building chatter, safe ground. She stiffens.

“I haven't heard anything about that. And even if it were true, I doubt that anyone would tell me because I'm technically the building manager. Look. So now I can't have a party in my own room? On my birthday? I can't have a party in my own room on my birthday.” She's boxed herself into a little pouty blond rectangle of limbs on the couch, her arms crossed over her legs, which are pressed against her chest.

What I should have said in response: “No, of course you can do whatever you like in your room. You can fete yourself into a coma just because it's Wednesday—a nice, quiet coma. I really don't care as long as you don't wake me up.”

What she said: “I just don't know why you're always in your room and you never sit and watch TV with me. It's just so weird, you're just, I don't know, you're just being so weird. You're not acting comfortable. I'm just not sure that this is going to work.”

I am being thrown out for not being comfortable. This does little to ease my comfort level.

“You have your own silverware,” she continues. “Who has their own silverware? Why don't you just use mine?”

“I owned silverware before I lived here, and I brought it with me?”

I'm furrowing my brow and waiting for a break in her tirade of my offenses when her cell phone breaks out into Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” She pounces on it.

“Yeah? OK, you want to get some food or something? No, hey, meet me at the BART station on Twelfth, and we'll get some food.”

I just sit there and wait for her to finish her call so that we can resume arguing.

“I don't know, we'll figure it out when we get there. Just meet me there, and we'll figure it out. Look, I've got someone on the other line; just meet me there, and we'll figure it out.”

She switches over to the other line.

“Hello? Oh, I'm OK.” She shoots me an accusatory look. “Hold on.”

She switches over again.

“
BART! Twelfth Street!
” She mumbles, “He's still on drugs,” and switches back.

“Can I call you in like an hour?” Again with the look in my direction. “OK. Great.” Click.

I grab hold of the pause in conversation to begin my defense.

“Look, we obviously didn't get off on the best foot,” I say. “When I first introduced myself, it was obviously not the best time—”

“I just got out of the shower! Obviously! Who does that? Who trails someone
out of the shower
?”

But I had waited! I had intentionally waited! I don't want to derail the conversation by defending myself to her. At this point, however, I'm no longer sure what the point is or what my intended outcome was. Am I fighting to stay here? Am I throwing down the gauntlet and moving out? Am I being thrown out? Can she even do that?

While I was trying to quickly consider my strategy, she had continued her rant, and now I'm confused. Goddamn it—I'm toast. But, what's this? She seems to have meandered into a personal anecdote.

“I just got out of rehab,” she tells me, “and my boyfriend broke up with me, and then I got mugged…”

“Wow. I'm really sorry that all of that happened to you; is there anything I can do to help?” I sound like an empathetically programmed robot.

“I just don't want there to be any
animosity
between us!” she screams.

When I stare at her blankly, she slaps both hands on the collaged coffee table for emphasis; this apparently signals the endgame because she stands up as if something has been settled.

“OK, so, no hard feelings, bitches,” she says.

Then she juts her fist out, as if to punch me. I wrap my arms around her; she is so much smaller than me. This is self-defense disguised as affection.

“Um,” she says. “I was trying to bump you. Like, fist-bump you?”

She then gestures toward her phone, which is silent for now.

“He's a famous graffiti artist. Flake.”

“Huh?”

“That's what he goes by; his handle is Flake.”

“Oh yeah, I know Flake.”

Flake is best known for tagging album covers of 1980s hair-metal bands with his handle, in bright neon bubble letters.

“Yeah, everyone always says, I mean, said, ‘Ohmygod, your boyfriend's
Flake
?'” She shakes her head in a mixture of mockery and evident pride.

I obviously need to get the hell out of here. Charlie's not ready for me to move in with him in Santa Barbara. He's started making noises about wanting to see other people “but not break up. I'd still come to the Bay Area once a month.” I am too afraid to address his proposal directly, and eventually he stops bringing it up. At this point, we've continued to date through a variety of geographic inconveniences, but although the physical distance is less than it was when he lived in Seattle and I was in school in Valencia, the difference between his busy grad student life and my lonely unemployed one is a wider chasm than the literal distance. I'm not sure where this leaves us. With no job in sight and a relationship at loose ends, I see no other choice but to move back to the same city as my parents.

 

August 2009

Portland, Oregon

Ditzy.

Definition: impulsive, silly.

Synonyms: bemused, brainless, bubbleheaded, capricious, careless, changeable, changeful, dizzy, empty-headed, erratic, fickle, flighty, flustered, frivolous, gaga, heedless, inconstant, irresolute, irresponsible, light-headed, punchy, reckless, reeling, scatterbrained, skittish, slaphappy, thoughtless, unbalanced, unsettled, unstable, unsteady, vacillating, volatile, whimsical, whirling, wild, woozy.

Antonyms: calm, careful, level-headed, sensible, serious.

I am a young woman. That's why I bring my mother with me when I sign my rental agreement for my new apartment in Portland and consult her about the math. This is my first studio apartment, my first attempt at living independently. The representative from the rental company arrives in a dark suit and opens the door with a flourish. He is about my age, and once I tell him I am on Social Security, he stops making eye contact with me and speaks mainly to my mother. The apartment broker and I have entered into a silent understanding that is still new to me. He cannot ask why I, a perfectly healthy and able-bodied twenty-eight-year-old, am on Social Security. In exchange for my privacy, he can assume whatever he wants. This is the latest calculation I've learned to make—bargaining for my privacy with my dignity. I just wish he would return to looking me in the eyes when he speaks to me. Still, I'm very lucky; being a young woman is a wonderful disguise. Being a young man would have been a much worse disguise. Men are expected to know and to lead; there's less cultural space for men to just be ditzy. I would have had a much harder time hiding out as a man.

A week after I move in, Charlie and I have a fight on the phone about how I failed to call him back when he called to say that his aunt was ill. He breaks up with me; I send daisies to his cottage in Santa Barbara. The note attached is a quote from one of our favorite movies,
The Big Lebowski
. “Nothing is fucked here, Dude.” It's not quite as true as we'd both like it to be, but the gesture acts as a tourniquet, not healing everything but stopping the relationship from bleeding out until we can tend to it properly together in person. He calls me to say, “I like what we've built, what we've built together. I'll come to Portland in a couple of weeks, I'll see your new place, and we'll work this all out.”

I'm naked in his arms in my new bed when he says to the ceiling, “My therapist said that I shouldn't bring this up unless I'm serious. I've been attracted to other people, and that's something I'd like to explore. But I don't want us to break up.”

“We've been through this. If you want to see other people I get that, but I don't think that I could be one of those people.” He says nothing for a long time. My mind starts to race.

“Is there … someone specific?”

He opens his mouth to speak, shuts it again, opens and shuts it again, then finally and unconvincingly settles on “No.”