The Other Side (5 page)

In the apartment I rent with My Older Sister, we stitch together a family and leave out all the arguing. After work we make dinner while roaches scurry across the countertops. After dinner we smoke cigarettes on the balcony and watch mall traffic collect and disperse at stoplights along the boulevard. Each week we change the message on our answering machine: lately we take turns singing Michael Jackson's “Workin' Day and Night” in squeaky falsetto voices. If I am not working at one crappy job or another, I am sitting in a large lecture class at the university, or having sex with boys I barely know: the short one who lives in our building—in his car in the parking lot, on the couch in his living room, and in his roommate's water bed; the customer service manager at the big box store where I work as a lab tech in the Vision Center fucks me in the
HR
office, the men's bathroom, on the table in the contact lens room. One night I bring home a biker I've met at the bar, who returns the next night and the next, and then he has moved in. On my day off I see an ad for Persian kittens in the classifieds and My Biker Boyfriend drives me to a dark
house where I select a black one with long hair from the stacks and stacks of cages. My Older Sister gets a puppy and we all move from the apartment to a duplex with a yard and a garage.

At the Vision Center I wear protective goggles and feed plastic lenses into the machine, programming precise sizes and shapes on the knobs and dials while music blares from a speaker I've set up in the tiny office at one end of the lab. From the window over the machines, I watch customers checking out at the rows and rows of registers in the main store. The checkers smiling, mouthing the words,
Did you find everything you needed today?

I bevel the edges of the lenses and dip them into tint or
UV
coating before screwing them into frames, checking each pair to make sure the axes of the lenses match the prescription, that the distance between the center of each lens corresponds to the distance between the patient's pupils. One of the technicians pokes her head into the lab to let me know a customer needs a contact lens tutorial. I wash my hands and step into the small room, the tiny table spread with lens solution and clean towels, a mirror and tiny cardboard boxes, tiny mouths gaping open:
Oh
.

In the break room at the back of the big box store, I try to call My Biker Boyfriend at his bar downtown. He doesn't
answer. I smoke a cigarette and buy a soda out of the machine. The technicians in the Vision Center page me over the intercom to come back to the lab. There's a line out the door. One of the techs is a no-show for her shift. After I check out each customer, I adjust their new glasses to fit. The oil from their skin collects on my fingers and palms. I smile and say
Have a nice day
and return to the register to help the next customer. I look up and see My Spanish Teacher checking out at one of the registers in the main store. He pays and walks to the door. I'm busy, but he waits, watching me. All through the evening rush I feel his eyes on me.
I want to see you again
, he whispers in my ear as I'm counting down the register before close, his hand on my shoulder, my arm, the tips of my fingers.

After locking up, I call the bar again. I am eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the tiny office at one end of the lab, the phone in my hand. Finally My Biker Boyfriend picks up. He was out last night doing coke with his friend, he says. I say,
We need to talk when you get home
. He asks, half joking, if we are breaking up. I haven't decided until just now, until exactly this moment. I clear my throat:
Yes
.

My Older Sister doesn't understand why I am moving out. My Biker Boyfriend should be the one to go. She and I should stay together.
We're a family
. I need some space, I
say.
I need to be alone
. I find a classified ad for a studio in a student slum between downtown and campus, where the rent is $250 a month. I have the security deposit because I have just gotten paid. My Older Sister borrows a friend's pickup truck to help me move my things: a bed, a couch that seats two people, a skillet, a coffee pot, the black Persian kitten and its litter box. I have a few books and CDs and magazines tossed into a laundry basket. She's pissed but hugs me anyway before she climbs into the truck and pulls away.

I spend the whole afternoon putting things in their places. After I drag the bed up the tiny flight of stairs into the raised loft, I use a broom I find in the closet to sweep dead spiders to the center of the brown-carpeted floor while the kitten bats at their carcasses. After I put my skillet into the cupboard and discover an inheritance of plastic cups, I arrange the plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower. The kitten drinks water from the toilet. After I make the bed and hang my clothes in the closet, I shower and place a bowl each of cat food and water on the floor. I smoke and pace and look out the windows. I dress again and walk out the door.

My Spanish Teacher leans against the door frame as I pull into the parking lot, as I climb the concrete stairs to his
apartment—his tall, wide frame lit by the glow of the lamp inside. He takes a long swig from a bottleneck beer. I walk past him, through the living room, past the chair and the fax machine, down the hallway, turning lights out as I go. He follows behind me, his hand in my hand. In the bedroom, I take off my coat, unbutton my shirt, my limbs shaking, every hair standing on end. He leans into me.
This is what he wants
, I tell myself, leaning back into him.
This is why I have come
. Because I believe a grown man's rough hands can give, and take from me, what I've lost in coming here. Now my jeans pool around my ankles.
Lie down with me
, I say. Before my teeth shake loose. Before weeds grow from my bones. The unwashed sheets. The open window. His body on top of me: heavy as a pile of stones.

It's strange, I think now, how even what the mind forgets,
the body remembers. How the body remembers apart from the mind: the way of standing-beside or lying-under or sitting-above or rising-from. The body remembers the prepositions: its position in relation to other bodies. The raised shoulders, the lowered voice. How every muscle, even the tongue, can go stiff. Or shudder. How after the other is gone, the body continues on: beside, under, above, from. The shadow, the ghost, the trace.
Habitus
: second nature, a memory so deep the body will always remember.

We drive sixty miles from his apartment on campus, where I sleep every night, to my parents' home in the town with a one-block business district. They're standing on the front porch when we arrive. They shake hands with him, invite us into the living room, say to us,
Have a seat
. I sit with Mom on the floral-print couch by the front window. My dad sits in a brown recliner by the door. The Man I Live With sits on the edge of the other floral-print couch, in a corner, by the bookshelves, where Mom displays her collection of porcelain dolls. Behind him, pastel pink and blue flowers weave up and down the wallpaper. Mom hung all of it herself before we moved in. I felt ashamed of it then. I feel ashamed of it now as we're making small talk:
Oh, yes, the weather is very unusual this year
.

Maybe it's Mom who comes right out and says she is
frankly shocked
at how old he is: thirty-eight, exactly twice my age. Or maybe she first asks if he colors his hair. Then Dad wants to know if he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. I cover my face a little and sink deeper into the couch. The Man I Live With answers honestly; he's told me in the car he will not placate
these people
. He delivers a moving lecture on world religions, including an in-depth deconstruction of the savior myth. Or it is not a lecture. Maybe he just waves his hands while telling my father his beliefs are the beliefs of a small-minded man.

During the argument that follows, Mom occasionally chimes in for some jab about this man's morals, his appearance, his age. He jabs back, more forcefully and with a sharper blade. Within the span of an hour, my dad's face has turned three shades of red and he has left the room, close to purple,
fully saturated with the conversation
. Mom cries, sitting next to me on the floral couch. I pick at a thread on the pillow. I do not say a word.