by Halle Butler
Randy straightened. “Well, anyway, I was thinking it would be fun to ask Carrie to help me do some web design, and I wanted to ask if you thought her stuff would translate well to a website.”
Megan scratched her face. “Yeah. It’d translate well to a website, if that’s all you’re thinking about. But you could do this kind of stuff alone,” she said, gesturing at the magazine. “I mean, well, to me, the real hindrance in working with her—or anyone like her—would be the total hypocrisy of it all. Encouraging someone who considers herself to be a forerunning mind of our generation while all she’s doing is, essentially, coloring in the lines would make me, personally, want to fucking kill myself.”
Randy stared at her.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t see what Carrie does as hypocritical.”
“Oh, you used to agree with me. What, now that I’m applying the same idea to your precious darling Carrie, you don’t agree with me about how stupidly pretentious all of these graphic design assholes are, with their fucking letter-pressed business cards with their WordPress addresses on them? Playing around and being condescending about creative recycling and community-based whatever-the-fuck? Help me help you, Randy.”
Megan paused.
“I’m sure they all shampoo their pubes,” she said.
“I’m only talking about this one spread.”
“It’s hollow.”
“You know, that’s kind of what I do for a living.”
“It’s different.”
“Is it? I do web design for a living, and I like it. You’re talking about what I do. And, anyway, you buy organic produce.”
“Yeah, but I don’t kid myself that it’s a part of a movement I’m involved in. I know it’s just groceries. That self-important look in their eyes makes me puke.”
“Okay, so you don’t think I should work with her.”
“Do what you want, but I just think you or any fucking monkey with a reference image and a laptop could do what she does. I mean, all she really did was finish her homework. She’s not some kind of magic fairy genius.”
“Nobody thinks she’s a magic fairy genius,” said Randy.
“You say that now.”
“And why wouldn’t I want to work with someone who finished their homework? Or a magic fairy, for that matter?”
Not having a direct answer to this, Megan began the painful process of shutting the fuck up. The psychological resistance she felt was intense enough to have a physical counterpart, which was a grating feeling in the center of her chest.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess I just had a bad day. I don’t know why I’m ranting.”
She sat on the floor at Randy’s feet and put her head in his lap.
“How’s your butt?” he asked.
“Itchy.”
“How’s your head?”
“Horrible.”
“How was your day?”
“Uuuunnnnghghg. You know how when you drink a lot, the next morning you usually feel depressed? Just, like, chemically, because your body’s in withdrawal?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Or maybe it’s because your body gives off an excess of serotonin when you’re drunk, so in the morning you have depleted serotonin.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a body thing. There must be some chemical reason why I keep replaying the night.” She had a biting memory. “Over and over. Because I didn’t really do anything that bad. But you know that feeling where you replay and then edit the conversations you had and then you feel really vulnerable and like everyone hates you, even though you didn’t do anything that out of the ordinary?”
“Yeah, I know that feeling. It’s a sugar crash or something.”
“I feel so stupid about that llama thing at the end of the night.”
“What? I’m sure Carrie doesn’t care, and I thought it was funny. It was funny.”
“She thinks I’m so disgusting.”
“No. She doesn’t think you’re disgusting, Megan. She doesn’t think like that.”
Megan started crying.
“Oh, come on, what? What?”
Megan kept crying, and Randy kept saying “What?”
“I wish you’d say something,” said Randy.
Megan’s throat squeezed shut every time she almost started saying something. She opened her mouth, which he couldn’t see with her head in his lap, then closed it, opened it, then closed it.
“Come on,” he said.
“What do you mean she doesn’t think like that?” Megan shouted. “I think like that. I think she’s disgusting and you know it, you know I think like that, so what do you mean she doesn’t think like that? What, do you think I should just go ahead and try to be more like Carrie? Should I get myself some abstract ambitions and start designing events calendars?”
“Oh, come on.”
Megan wailed.
She’s not always like this, thought Randy. “Why are you being like this?” he asked.
“Because I’m dying!” she said. Then she stopped crying.
“Here. Let me get you a Kleenex,” said Randy, scooting out from under her head.
She sat up straight and mucus ran down her face.
“Here,” said Randy. He handed her a tissue.
Megan felt like an idiot, but she also felt a little better. She was embarrassed and got up from the floor without making eye contact with Randy. She walked to the bathroom while blowing her nose. Randy sat back down.
“I look like a Harlequin Baby,” shouted Megan. Randy started laughing. Megan started laughing. Megan came out of the bathroom and looked at Randy.
“I’m still mad at you,” said Megan.
“Why?”
“Because you love Carrie the turd.”
Randy winced and said, “Come on.”
Later, he brought her juice and Tylenol in bed. He didn’t want to feel like they were arguing anymore.
“How’s Jillian?” he asked. A peace offering.
Megan sighed. “She continues to be a thick strand in the malevolent web of my daily routine.”
5
Jillian and her baby were sitting on the couch having dinner and Jillian felt hollow like she sometimes did. Just a body thing, really. They were watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Adam was very involved. Babies and dogs and dogs and cats and dogs and women at barbecues interacted with each other in hilarious combinations, and her son, who had no idea at all about Carla, laughed through his pasta at all the fun the people and animals were having. As she watched Adam watch, she was struck with a vague idea about the promise of life (as represented by the babies onscreen) and about not giving up on passions. While she looked at Adam, she understood that he was a baby with passions.
Jillian reflected on some of her youthful passions, and she was taken by a feeling of total integration. Not just the integration of her body and mind, but also a synthesis of that integrated self with the room, the atmosphere, and with the general chronology and flow of time and events, universally speaking. This was a feeling she sometimes got from motivational phrases, and she knew it to be the feeling of God. Whatever thought was in her mind when she got this feeling, she knew she owed it to God to follow.
“I’m not going to give up on my dream,” she whispered. She had a flash as bright as reality—no, brighter—of walking the dog, and maybe the dog would be big enough for Adam to ride like a tiny pony, or maybe she could get out the stroller and the dog could pull Adam, but either way the dog and boy were happy and her hands were empty and flapping at her sides.
“Yes, I’ll do it,” she whispered.
So what about Carla? Carla was in the past.
“Hey, Adam,” she said. “Which do you like better,
doggies or kitties?”
“Doggies!” he said, but he said it like “d’ah-gaze,” and lifted his arms above his head and made fists of his hands, which resulted in the knocking over of his dinner onto the floor.
Mommy scooped it back into his bowl and set it on the coffee table, thinking one day she’d yell, “The dog, the dog!” when food got knocked on the floor.
Adam was put to bed. Jillian got into her own bed and rearranged the bras and other dirty clothes that were mixed in with the covers so there’d be room for her to sit and, later, sleep comfortably. She looked until she found a website called Pups of Love, which was a rescue center for dogs who had been sexually abused—dogs who had belonged to pet-store breeders and had been pregnant their whole lives. Some of them were still puppies themselves. A one-year-old? Isn’t that still a puppy? Some of these one-year-olds had birthed dozens of babies. She watched half a video and started sobbing. This is definitely it, she thought. And the adoption fee was a fraction of what the Humane Society wanted, so she’d have extra money for other things.
Jillian had a dream that night that she was riding an enormous dog through a meadow. The dog was running at full speed and its mouth was frothing. The breeze caught the froth from the dog’s mouth and splattered her in the face with it. The froth ran across her cheeks and her hair, which was rippling wildly in the breeze, until it separated from her and the dog, hung in the air for a minute, then fell gently onto a patch of little yellow flowers. The meadow was endless and the dog’s energy was endless and the sky had a few nice, white clouds.
* * *
• • •
That night, Megan had a dream that it was her birthday, and Randy took her to Chuck E. Cheese. They were in the arcade and Megan started to play a video game that was underneath a Skee-Ball table. The controller was a large, soft red ball that, when she squeezed it, activated little cartoon mice that really beat the shit out of each other. She sat under the Skee-Ball table for a very long time, rapidly squeezing the ball controller until the alarm buzzed and she had to get up, get in the shower, and take the bus to work.
The bus was the same as always, the elevator and the hallway were the same as always, the greeting from Jillian was the same as always, the way her desk felt was the same as always, the slowness of the computer was the same as always, and as always Megan’s mind idly floated to the subject of suicide.
Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio:
Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m.
I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you!
What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan?
The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something only children did.
The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy.
And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her.
Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all.
I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies!
“Everything okay?” asked Jillian.
“Yeah, what?”
“Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and everything.”
“Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan.
“It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?”
“What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan.
How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-year-olds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?
She copied and pasted Carrie’s bio into an email to Randy and bolded the part about not understanding pain. The subject line was SEE? and the message was, “A little callous, don’t you think?”
Randy had been about to email Carrie about helping with a new contract when he got the email.
“Hey, guess what?” said Jillian.
“Huh,” said Megan. She’d closed the internet and was going to do some work and not think about things for the next few hours.
“I think I found a good place to get a dog.”
“I thought you didn’t have the money right now,” said Megan.
“Weeelll,” said Jillian. “But I really want one. I really feel like this is the right time in my life.”
“Okay. I guess I just didn’t get my first dog until I was in high school because my parents had to pay off their student loans first, so I think of your forties as the time to get a dog,” said Megan.
Jillian looked at Megan like she hadn’t heard. I can say anything, thought Megan, and only what she wants to go in goes in.
“Awww,” said Jillian. “Well, it’s this really cool place with rescue dogs on the outside of town. These aren’t just dogs whose owners can’t take them anymore, these are dogs who’ve experienced real trauma.”
“Aren’t those the kinds of dogs who need around-the-clock care and training?”
“Awww, but I think we can take care of one. I already have it all figured out. With the extra money I get from the coding business I’m starting, I can hire a dog walker, and then when I go down to part-time hours, you know, to work from home more, I’ll only need the walker two days a week.”
Ah, yes, the coding business.
Sometimes Jillian could see what was to come with such clarity it was as if she were already paying the dog walker with a sealed white envelope of cash.
Sometimes Megan wanted to walk over to Jillian and block her airways.
* * *
• • •
As it was Friday, it was now time for serious drinking. On the walk home from the bus, Megan picked up a twelve-pack at a discounted price. Before taking her shoes and jacket off, she opened a can and finished half of it in the kitchen, standing by the door.
* * *
• • •
Jillian picked up Adam and drove home and, while they were eating dinner, asked him if he wanted to have a doggie. He l
ooked at her earnestly and said, “Yes, I want to have a doggie.”
* * *
• • •
Randy hadn’t asked Carrie to help him with his project after all, even though it was something he really thought would be fun. While Megan was standing by the door, ravaging her can of beer, Randy received a text message.
“Oh. Do you want to go to Will’s house?” asked Randy.
Megan took off her shoes. “Yeah, sure.”
He came to hug her.
“Hold on, let me get my stuff off first.”
She took off all her crap, handed him a beer, put the rest of the beers in the refrigerator, gave him a side hug and a kiss on the cheek, then walked to the living room and sat on the couch.
“Ah,” she said. He sat in the chair by the couch. “How was your day, honey?” she asked.
“It was good,” he said. “We got a new client who wants us to make a website for his barbershop.”
“Cool.” Megan nodded, maybe a second too long.
* * *
• • •
Jillian thought she should really clean up before the dog got here, but she needed to lie down first.
* * *
• • •
Megan emptied the rest of the beers into her purse and they walked over to Will’s. “I feel like I’ve been waiting to get wasted all week,” she announced.
“Hmm. The weather is nice,” said Randy.
“Um, is it usually nice this time of year? I can’t remember.”
“Well, I think it’s usually nice like this some days, and then not so nice other days,” said Randy.
“Yeah, right.”
Mercifully, there were people at Will’s when they got there. Megan felt a little anxious, but she had a plan. She sat on the couch next to an ashtray and got a beer and a cigarette out of her bag. The beer distracted her from the inevitable Friday question, which was, “Hmm, what am I going to do for the next sixty-two hours now that it’s the weekend?” Four beers calmed that pretty quickly, and the cigarettes helped her drink faster and more. If she started to get the spins, she could switch to cigarettes exclusively.