No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  I got to my friend’s house, and we sat on her couch, shared a joint, and caught up on everything that had happened over the summer. In the midst of me complaining about something, my friend jumped up and exclaimed, “Oh, shit, what’s that stain on the couch? Is that chocolate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have chocolate with you?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t have chocolate. Why would I have chocolate?”

  She rushed to the kitchen to get sparkling water and a rag.

  I put my hand in my pocket and when I pulled it back out, it was covered in melted chocolate from Hershey Kisses I had stashed there who knows when. And it suddenly occurred to me . . .

  “Ohhhh. This is why my mom wouldn’t let me stay at her house.”

  * * *

  My parents finally agreed to help me rent an apartment because I had nowhere to live and couldn’t keep causing mayhem in everyone else’s home. I teamed up with Melinda once again to find one that would suffice. To my surprise, we quickly found an apartment and of course considering my karma, it happened to be in Melinda’s building. It didn’t have an alarm system, but it didn’t need one; there was only one door with one lock, which is easily the greatest thing about living in an apartment. The difference that having only one door makes for my nighttime security ritual! And there was no way Link could escape here. I realized apartment living might lead me to be the least anxious version of myself I could ever be.

  “See?” my mom said. “Aren’t you happy you didn’t get the house? Everything happens for a reason!”

  “No. Please stop.”

  A few nights after I moved my backpack in, some of my friends came over to hang out and drink wine. I hadn’t bought furniture yet, but I had bought wineglasses, because only one of those two things was a necessity. We put on music and Cheers’d to my future in this apartment, a future that wasn’t as bright as the one in the house but brighter than the one where I could have woken up with a knife-wielding stranger breathing over me. It was also nice to be able to have a conversation without shushing my friends every five seconds so my dad wouldn’t wake up screaming.

  After an hour so, someone knocked on the door. I slid over in my socks to answer it, assuming it was a neighbor welcoming me to the building.

  I was right about the neighbor part, but judging from the look on her face, she was not welcoming me.

  “Do you live here now?!” she said as soon as I opened the door.

  She was old, roughly mid-eighties or an unhealthy seventy, with the haircut you accidentally give yourself as a child when you first discover scissors.

  “Yes, I do! I’m Cazzie.”

  “Pat. Are you renting this apartment or did you buy it?” she asked in a severe tone that I hadn’t heard since I was sent to the principal’s office in seventh grade for illegally selling gum for a dollar a piece so I could buy myself a Sidekick.

  “I don’t see how that’s important, but I’m renting it.”

  “I already called management to tell them about you. You are way too loud! We have rules here! You cannot play music past ten!” She said this like it was the twentieth time she had told me to keep it down rather than the first.

  “I’m sorry, I just moved in. I didn’t know the situation with the walls—”

  “Well, the situation with the walls is that they’re really thin!” she said mockingly.

  I looked over at my friends, who were all huddled together in the living room listening to the old woman berate me, likely thinking of all the fun times we would never have in this apartment.

  “I’m sorry; we’ll keep it down. I didn’t know.” I thought she had to be done.

  “My husband is DYING. So it would be great if you could be quiet!”

  “Okay. I’m so sorry.”

  “And we can hear your heels stomping around every night, so maybe you can wear sneakers!”

  “I don’t own a pair of heels, so that’s impossible, but even if I did, I think that would be an inappropriate request.”

  She turned and left, leaving me in the wake of her bad mood. If she weren’t so rude, I would have felt terrible about her husband dying, but she was a bitch so I felt only a normal level of bad.

  “I guess we have to be quiet,” I said to my friends.

  “We weren’t even being loud,” one of them said.

  I shrugged because that made less noise than speaking.

  Pat and her dying husband quickly destroyed my dreams of free will and happiness. Every time I put a plate down on the counter, I’d do it delicately so as not to disturb them. I watched movies with no more than a level-twelve volume and never once put on music again. I even took my sneakers off as soon as I walked in. Pat, of course, would never know any of this. All she’d ever see me as was the loud spoiled brat who’d moved into her apartment building. It’s not like the building was even all that quiet—you’d hear sirens at least once a day from ambulances that would come to the front of the building to transport residents. It turned out that most of the residents were around Pat’s age, and I was essentially living in a retirement home. Almost everyone had a walker or a wheelchair. There were nurses entering and exiting left and right. I quickly realized that instead of the apartment allowing me to envision my best self, it was forcing me to envision my oldest, nearest-to-death self. All the time.

  I remained terrified of Pat for months. I’d sprint to the elevator anytime I left my apartment, then press the button repeatedly for it to come faster out of fear she’d leave at the same time and we’d be stuck awkwardly riding the elevator together. But while the circumstances weren’t ideal (Melinda, Pat, the elderly, and the ambulances), it was worth it for the calm I felt when I closed my eyes at night. For the first time in my life, I was able to fall asleep without being scared.

  When the holidays came around, I decided I should probably get Pat a gift as a (very) late apology. We had yet to run into each other since our standoff, and I figured a gesture could clear the air for the inevitable day we’d exit our apartments at the same time. When I’d moved in, two people had sent me an orchid, which felt like something a respectable adult would give. I bought a white one in a gray ceramic pot, wrote a note to go along with it, and left it for her in the lobby.

  Later that night I had three friends over. I was so paranoid we would wake up Pat and her dying husband I ended up having to reluctantly shush them a few times, telling them apologetically, I know, this is so annoying, and it’s weird because I live in my own apartment, but my neighbor hates me, so if we could just shhh . . .

  Regardless of my whispering rule, they ended up staying until two in the morning. I was relieved when they finally decided to go and made sure to continue shushing them through the hallway and until the elevator doors shut.

  The next morning, I went to get coffee for myself and my doorman Julio. When I came back, Julio told me he had given the orchid to Pat and said it was very nice of me to have gotten it for her so quickly.

  Quickly?

  “Oh, I thought you knew . . . Pat’s husband died last night.”

  I gasped.

  “She called me last night to complain about the noise coming from your apartment . . . I went up to check if you were being as loud as she said, but I didn’t hear anything, so I didn’t knock, and I came back downstairs.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Pat and her husband’s last shared moment together was talking about how loud I was. Pat called downstairs to complain about me during her husband’s final hours. I was probably the last thing he heard before he died. They were saying goodbye to each other forever over my friends’ laughter. And to top it all off, she had just received my orchid with a note that said, Pat! Happy holidays to you and your husband. Hope I’ve been keeping it down. :) Cazzie.

  My recently developed ability to perform the magic trick of falling asleep in the apartment was gone. For weeks, I was up all night, frantic Pat’s husband was justifiably haunting me. I decided I had to
move out. There was no other choice. If I was going to be haunted by anyone, it would be by my dad and his door code.

  * * *

  Erase Me

  Her failures are likely to induce stress and feelings of inadequacy and she is likely to incorporate blame rather than being able to appraise her circumstances and the demands they make realistically.

  —Excerpt from neuropsychological evaluation of Cazzie David, 2007

  Every Christmas, my family spends the morning together. It always goes the same way. We gather at nine thirty in our pajamas after fighting the night before over how early I have to wake up. I’m always tired. My sister is always mad at me for being tired and not showing enough Christmas spirit when greeting her. We always have toasted sesame bagels with lox. My dad always goes on a rant about how pathetic it is that we’re Jews celebrating Christmas: “I can’t believe there is a tree. How do you all not feel stupid sitting around this stupid tree?!” And without fail, my mom always gives me and my sister a terrible present.

  Before you slam the book shut for how insufferable of a complaint that is, I’m telling you my mother does this on purpose. Any gift is, of course, a privilege. I’m just unsure as to why she does this. Does she get pleasure out of seeing our disappointed faces? Does she think there’s some justice to giving two Jewish American LA private school stereotypes ChapStick on Christmas? I confronted her with this absurdity only once, during the Christmas of 2014. My sister and I ripped open our gift, naively expecting something better than a pair of socks or whatever new hair ties supposedly damage your hair less. But, alas, we each got an extra-large bag of pistachios. I was certain that this had to be a joke. It’s not even like pistachios were my favorite nut. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to thank her through gritted teeth. Instead, I burst out laughing and said something along the lines of “Very funny! You’ve outdone yourself!”

  As you can imagine, this was poorly received. A fight ensued about how ungrateful I am and how there were millions of kids who would be thrilled to receive a bag of pistachios on Christmas morning. Which left me feeling like shit because that’s probably true.

  The Christmas of 2017, my mother was more excited than usual to hand out the gifts she had gotten us. My sister opened hers first while I took my time, anticipating the usual bar of soap or all-natural deodorant stick that doesn’t work at all. Everyone insists they’ve found the one natural deodorant that works, but none of them do. You just smell like palo santo body odor and I smell like rosewater seagrass body odor.

  Suddenly, my sister gasped. “Oh my God!”

  “What?” I said.

  I ripped the recycled brown wrapping paper off the gift, a particular thrill because it was the first time in history my mom hadn’t yelled at me for not carefully unwrapping the paper to use again.

  Inside were two booklets on South Africa.

  “We are going. On an African safari. In May,” my mom said.

  My sister screamed again, the kind of scream that’s reserved exclusively for the girl in the movie when she finds out she’s not actually the orphan child of two chimney sweepers but the princess of Monaco and Stanley Tucci is about to give her a makeover. It may not surprise you to learn that I’ve never screamed out of joy, only the regular reasons people scream.

  She ran up to my mother and tackled her with a hug as I sat there staring at the photo of a roaring lion on the pamphlet.

  My mom had gotten us an incredible present. Anyone in the world would be overjoyed. Even all of the millions of ungrateful shitbags who wouldn’t have appreciated pistachios would have loved it. Everyone in the world but me, apparently.

  Let me explain. I’m what any person who has been on a trip with me, but mostly my mother, describes as “a bad traveler.” For I possess the two qualities that make it impossible to take pleasure in it: laziness and neuroticism. I hate jet lag; I’m scared of leaving my house; I hate being on planes; I’m scared of getting sick; I’m scared of food. If I could, I would stay in one place for the rest of my life. I know that’s really pathetic but I just don’t feel the need to see the world to be a more well-rounded person; I feel like my insecurities have done enough rounding for me. All I truly care about is my health, and shooting through the sky in an enclosed metal tube filled with one hundred strangers breathing directly into my mouth can be hard on the body and mind. Did I mention I’m a germaphobe?

  “So we’re going to . . . South Africa,” I clarified.

  “I know you’re a bad traveler, but this trip is required and life-changing. These animals are going to be extinct in fifty years. We have to go see them and experience them before they die and are gone for eternity.”

  Another well-intentioned sentiment with an underlying apocalyptic twist.

  I let out a monotone “Wow” to show her that I was grateful, but my anxiety was already kicking into overdrive. How long was the flight? How many days would I be stuck with my family? Did I have to get shots? Were the shots bad for you? Did I have to take malaria pills? Did malaria pills have side effects? Will I shit my pants?

  My mother had predicted my nerves and was prepared for my questions. You don’t have to take malaria pills, she told me, but it was recommended, and, yes, they did often have side effects, usually stomach problems. Stomach problems or malaria was a hard choice to make, especially since I was too afraid to look up what malaria involved.

  “Why don’t we all just look up pictures of South Africa on our phones together instead?” I suggested. They laughed. But I was serious. “There’s an African wildlife photography book in the living room! I’ll just go get that and we can have an experience safely in our home.”

  “This is going to be the best trip of your life!” my mom enthused.

  I longed for the Christmases of nuts and organic tampons. In fact, I was in such denial about the reality of the trip that when my friends asked me what I got for Christmas, I told them trail mix. I remained hopeful that something would arise in the next four months that would stop the trip. Anything could technically happen. I could die. Someone else could die. You never know—better to be positive about it.

  When April came around, and it didn’t seem like anyone was going to die, I did what I had to do—tried desperately to sabotage the trip.

  I programmed South Africa news alerts on my phone so I could immediately know if something happened that could be of use. I was elated when a notification popped up about a severe drought. I’m sorry, elated is not right. It’s truly so awful. But also how perfect? I couldn’t believe my luck to have something of this magnitude to use to my advantage. There was no way our trip could still happen. I texted the article to my mother: South Africa is in a drought! There’s no water!

  I got a text back that said Hmm. She ended up doing some research and decided it was fine because they were apparently set to run out of water in July, not May.

  Comforting.

  But won’t we feel bad using any of their water? I don’t want to take any of their water . . . it’s wrong, I texted.

  I’ll talk to some people about it.

  A few hours later, it was another No worries. Apparently, our presence would not affect the drought, my mother said, even though she was the one who’d told me “Every drop counts!” since I was old enough to turn on the sink myself.

  When it became clear that no divine intervention was going to show up for me, I had no choice but to start mentally preparing. I asked for more details and found out we were flying to Holland first, which made me more anxious because it meant the trip was even longer than I’d thought.

  “What’s in Holland? Why do we have to go to Holland?”

  “We’re stopping to split up the trip, and we’re going to go see the Anne Frank House.”

  It was too much. An entire second trip? To experience history? “Mom, don’t get mad, but I really don’t want to see the Anne Frank House. It’s way too sad for me.”

  “Cazzie! It was sad for her! She had to hide in an atti
c for two years! Be grateful. Do you know how hard it is to get tickets to the Anne Frank House? They’re coveted! We had to apply months in advance.”

  Admittedly, that was pretty surprising. Not to diminish what would be a transformative and meaningful experience, I just didn’t know that trying to get into the Anne Frank House was like trying to get tickets for the Beyoncé Hollywood Bowl concert.

  I resigned myself to my fate. It was no use fighting this; we were going. When my mom handed me a pair of khaki safari pants that I wouldn’t have been caught dead in, I decided to say an early goodbye to life as I knew it. I was fully ready to be killed in a plane crash, to be eaten by lions, or to die of sadness at the Anne Frank House.

  * * *

  Before we headed to South Africa, my entire family and I would go to DC for Romy’s college graduation. I’d packed two weeks early so I could brainwash myself into loving traveling by looking the suitcases straight in the eye whenever I was in my room and telling myself, You love this! You love packing a bag and going off to see the world!

  There was one other thing I would do that week before my trip, which was initiate a break with my boyfriend at the time—an exceptionally hard task when it makes you sick to your stomach to think about hurting someone, let alone someone you love, let alone someone who is codependent.

  He had been all I’d known for two and a half years. The first time we met, it was immediate grotesque middle school crush infatuation. And that feeling never subsided. People hated being around us because—and I know, ew, I’m sorry—it was like we were the only two people in the room, never letting go of the other’s hand no matter where we were or what we were doing, sharing conversations that must’ve seemed alien to those who weren’t us. We were like kindred spirits, always laughing and making fun of everything, and when we weren’t, there was still something weirdly romantic about us moping around together wearing matching black hoodies in ninety-degree weather in our own cloud of pot smoke.