30 Before 30

by Marina Shifrin

  “Yeah, but you’re not going to really come back.”

  “You’re bein—”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Carl asked as he slid next to me with a PBR.

  “Nothing,” Rebecca quickly answered. “You aren’t,” she silently mouthed at me. I rolled my eyes.

  By my fourth week in Taiwan, it became clear that Rebecca was right. Living in an Asian country awoke a discomfort I hadn’t felt in a long while. A discomfort that would provide the disruption needed for my sedentary life.

  “Are you sure?” Carl asked over Skype.

  “Not really, but when else will I have an opportunity to live abroad?”

  “Never. It’s wild. You’re wild.”

  “You should move with me. You could teach!” I told him. In my mind, Carl would move to Taiwan with me, we’d spend a few years saving up and exploring, then return a little richer, a little more stable than we currently were. Money was a difficult subject in our relationship; Carl didn’t care about it while I was fixated on it, constantly worrying about how little I had and how to get more. Carl had slightly less than what he needed, and he didn’t mind. If it were up to him, he’d live out of a van, off of nature, and play music all day. It drove me crazy and made me hate myself for feeling that way.

  “I don’t want to be a teacher,” he rapidly replied. “I’m a musician.” Our conversation ended there. If we were truly meant to be together, I wouldn’t be moving to Taiwan in the first place.

  Carl silently lay in his bed in Bushwick, while I sat at a desk in Taipei and began to cry. Our inability to compromise meant we were going to break up, and now there was a set date: October 29, the day I was moving to Asia.

  The weekend before my return to the States, my coworkers took me out to karaoke to celebrate my impending move. Going to karaoke with Asian people is a sport of strength and endurance.

  I thought I knew karaoke. In college, the karaoke kids shared a space with the comedy nerds. Tuesdays were for stand-up and Fridays were for singing. There were many parallels between the two groups: we took our performances seriously, we drank heavily, and a few in the crew actually had enough talent to go pro one day. A couple of the stand-ups crossed into the karaoke crowd. Ryan, for example, had an off-brand Frank Sinatra kinda voice and would sing his songs to the front row. Then there was Dan, the host of the comedy nights. Dan knew the song binder better than his own jokes. Kyle, the heartthrob of the comedy scene, would often default to funny monologues in the musical breaks. Pants, the three-hundred-pound tattooed and sober bartender, sang Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” without fail. He was magic.

  I didn’t usually participate in karaoke because my mom made me promise to never sing in public. I once got grounded for singing too loud in the shower. “Stop singing! You’re scaring your little brother,” my mother’s muffled voice came from the door. I sang “Flagpole Sitta” even louder because teens like to do the opposite of what they’re asked. My parents took away my driver’s license for two weeks.

  When my Taiwanese coworkers insisted on karaoke, warm memories of my college weekends flooded to mind. The stage, the little monitor, the bar filled with alt-y kids who wanted to know, if only for a moment, what it felt like to be a star. That’s what I was expecting.

  The actual place you do karaoke in Asia is in a small room with black walls and pleather couches. When you sit down, your thigh grease slides around on other people’s thigh grease. Two microphones with brightly colored foam caps and an old TV filled with mostly Taiwanese and Chinese songs sit at the front. The decor is minimal. (I think there was a flower painting in our room, but it was dark, so my eyes couldn’t really focus.) The monitor not only plays lyrics, but a music video accompanying each song. All the videos start the same, with some sort of screensaver-like nature landscape. After a series of cross-dissolves, you are treated to a woman, usually blond or Asian, prancing through fields, reading books on benches, or laughing at the sky. They all kind of look like tampon commercials with Chinese subtitles.

  Unlike karaoke in America, where there are endless distractions between you and the bar, in Asia you order bottles of alcohol that are brought to your room. Bottles. This was at a time when I drank as if all the alcohol would run out one day, possibly that day.

  I don’t exactly remember what we drank that night, it was probably whiskey and most likely a Johnny Walker type. I do remember that Cathy, a boyish thirty-year-old, was egging me on. Every office has one, an egger, the person who always wants another round. I was happy to see that Asia was no different when it came to office culture. Cathy, who identified as a straight woman, looked like Justin Bieber and was dating a woman. She was a bowl of anomalies and spoke pretty good English, making it easier for me to barter with her.

  “Too much, Cathy,” I told her.

  “You’re a big girl, you need more!” she responded. Cathy’s favorite thing to do was make fun of my weight. I was five-foot-two and about 125 pounds at the time. In Taiwan, this was considered obese. Martti, Cathy’s best friend and partner in mischief, came over to make sure I was drinking. Martti spoke the least English of the crew, but was one of my favorites. Even through the language barrier, I could tell he was charming. The way he leaned in to listen intently to what you had to say. The way his eyebrows pointed upward with concern when he could sense sadness. Everything about him screamed sweetie. It also didn’t hurt that he had defined features and a gentle yet masculine air about him.

  Cathy poured me a fourth glass of whiskey when Meggie, a mousy project manager, put on Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” She placed the mic to her mouth and made a sound I’d never heard before. Like a witch who’d had her throat replaced with a garbage disposal. I took a big sip of my drink before getting up to sing with her … and everyone else who went up for the rest of night.

  At the end of the ordeal, I was so smashed that I tried to get Cathy to go home with me.1 “You’re crazy,” she said. “Go-ah, home.” She put her cigarette in her mouth and shoved me toward the street. I shrugged and began to look for a cab, my brain slowly turning off on the way home.

  I woke up in my room, still in my dress, with a hangover so bad that my face changed shape. My shoes were sitting next to my bed and I was proud of myself for remembering to take them off—a sign that I don’t have a problem. Even my purse made it back with me. Right as my body began to relax a little bit, I noticed there was one small thing missing: my underwear.

  They weren’t hard to find. I spotted them balled up under one of the shiny, gold curtains separating my hotel room from the balcony. Hm. That’s weird, I thought. I grabbed my underwear, threw them in a different corner, and went to check my phone. There was a text from Martti. All it said was:

  Sorry 2 leave. C u work.

  Everything came crashing back into my skull. His chest, my hand on it. My face on his, too close to tell who he was. My skirt pulled over my hips. His hand disappearing. Carl’s beard. How long he hugged me before I left for Taiwan. Carl. My job. Carl. Oh my god, my job. I had to get ready for work.

  I ran into the bathroom, toppled into the shower, and quickly washed the night off. I tumbled out, went to the sink to brush my teeth, and caught my reflection in the mirror. What did you do? I burst into tears and called Carl.

  “Hello?” Carl’s confused voice came over the line. I was making an international call on my Samsung e1105t burner phone, purchased for emergencies. It turns out admitting that you’re a piece of shit is not an emergency, but is expensive.

  “IkissedsomeoneandI’msosorryandsoashamed,” I wailed into the receiver. That was a lie. We did more than kiss, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Carl.

  “Oh, Marina,” Carl said. There was a long pause. “I have to get ready for my show.”

  “Okay,” I told him. A click and the phone went dead. It was a selfish move. We could’ve quietly broken up, let the doomed relationship fizzle out on its own, but no, I had to go and be honest with him. Honesty is not the best po
licy.

  Disappointing someone you love is the worst feeling, especially when you’re too far away to fix it. We were still together. I still had a boyfriend. A boyfriend I’d cheated on. What a nasty word, cheated. In an astonishing attempt to soothe my shame, I immediately called Carl’s sister Barbie to tell her what happened. Yes, counterintuitive, but my anxiety of people discovering that I did something awful is greater than the shame of them knowing. Barbie sounded baffled and sympathetic.

  “It’s okay. I’m sure he’ll understand,” she said. “Weren’t you two going to break up anyway?” I sobbed louder.

  At work, I couldn’t even look up from my computer. I simply sat in my cubicle and cried. Martti came over, but when he saw my face, his whole body dropped and he slunk away.

  Carl eventually came on Gchat after he got back from his show and if I really hated myself, I could probably still find that conversation. I remember distinctly asking him if he was still planning to meet me at the airport. I don’t know was all he sent.

  The bathroom was my only savior. In it, shielded from the wandering eyes of my coworkers, I faced the mirror again. My eyes were the color of wine, giving a demonic glow to my face. I slapped my cheeks a bit, smiled enthusiastically, stretching my lips as wide as possible. I don’t know what it is about smiling like a juggalo, but it usually helps clear the redness in my face. It doesn’t make me feel better, or stop the moisture from gathering in my eyes, it just helps with the redness.

  An idea to salvage the remaining moments of my relationship popped into my head. I bolted to my desk and sat down. Something drastic needed to be done, something to make me feel better. It was my turn to get the guy.

  My plan was to write one hundred emails to Carl; each one listing something that I loved about him. It is important to note that Carl was not ignoring me, nor was he not talking to me—he was simply sleeping as it was the middle of the night in Brooklyn. I look back at those emails, gathering dust in the archives of my inbox and cringe. So hard.

  It took me two hours and twenty minutes of projecting all of my guilt into Carl’s inbox before he Gchatted me. I had made it to 97: “You threw me a fake birthday party when I was sad.”

  Carl: I’m over it

  no need to dwell on things in the past tomorrow will be better;)

  Me: Well I am still not over it but like I said, all I care about is you.

  Carl: I just feel like we are in our 20s why the fuck not kiss whoever you want?

  I couldn’t decide which one was worse, being faux-ignored or being dismissed. That’s the difficult thing about messing up as an adult: you often don’t get the punishment that is necessary to move on. Carl moved on quickly, but I fell into a self-humiliation spiral. It took a long time to realize that he was right. Why the fuck not kiss whoever I want? Hooking up with the wrong people is exactly what your twenties are tailor-made for.

  Back at the hotel room, I immediately hopped in the shower again. I used my mint green loofah in an attempt to wash off the stench of shame. It didn’t work. It’s hard to feel fully clean in hotel showers anyway; it’s difficult for me to shake the image of businessmen peeing in the drain. I got out, wrapped myself in a pure white robe, grabbed my computer, and crawled into bed. Although I didn’t know how to feel better, I did know how to numb my mind with YouTube videos.

  The doorbell unexpectedly rang, distracting me from my mission. I hadn’t heard that sound since the time a hotel employee came in to explain how to use the toilet—there were thirteen buttons on it, none of which I understood. “This one here, sprinkles here,” the poor employee explained while pointing to his ass. “This one here, do this.” He began to act out what can only be described as the YMCA. I missed the last three buttons because I was too preoccupied trying to figure out how much to tip him for the impromptu bathroom charades.

  I cautiously looked through the peephole and was greeted by Martti’s bulbous head. My chest constricted. I wanted to tell him to leave, that I didn’t want to see him, that he ruined my relationship and the rest of my trip, but he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin. That’s the crazy thing about humans. We are truly animals. One animal relayed to the other animal that they wanted to rub bodies, which hurt the third animal. No words needed. We all understood each other’s mistakes. I tightened the belt on my robe and let him in. He immediately hugged my damp body and I felt absolutely nothing. “Don’t cry, don’t cry. Don’t cry,” he quietly said in my ear.

  I truly was unsure of how much English Martti did and didn’t know, so I kept my response monosyllabic: “I’m sad.” I was worried we’d need to resort to his smartphone and I’d have to yell, “Siri, how do you say, ‘You’ve added an unnecessary layer of difficulty to my already complicated relationship and although he and I were going to break up anyway, I’ve now stained my longest record of being a good girlfriend’ in Chinese?”

  “Don’t cry,” he said again. I’m sure Martti is a bright guy, but the language barrier made him sound like a shitty pop song where the lyrics keep repeating themselves until the only way to remove them from your head is to blow your brains out.

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I promise you it is not okay.”

  Martti shrugged, but only because he didn’t know what I was saying. We sat quietly in my room. I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I stared at my feet. It was clear he had so much to say, but he didn’t know how to say it. It was the most bizarre interaction I’ve ever had with a one-night stand. As if they aren’t awkward enough. Our mistake made through physical contact would not be solved through communication, so instead we sat there staring at the ground as if Rosetta Stone was etched into the rug. After a long silence, Martti sighed and looked at me.

  “A woman heart is like glass. It breaks.” He mimed a heart breaking with his hands and then pointed to my chest. I wondered how long it took him to memorize that phrase. If he said it over and over during his cab ride to the hotel.

  “A woman heart is like glass. It breaks,” he repeated to the back of the cab driver’s head.

  “A woman heart is like glass. It breaks,” he said with more confidence in the elevator.

  “A woman heart is like glass. It breaks,” he whispered to my door before ringing the bell.

  “Thank you, Martti.” I stood up and Martti took the hint. He gave me a second, meaningless hug and dejectedly walked out of the room. I’ll never forget how hard he worked to say that sentence and how incorrectly fragile it made me feel. My heart is made of muscle. It is strong and tender, it keeps my body functioning and my mind sharp. It is not made of glass.

  A day later, I was on the sixteen-hour flight headed back to the U.S. I spent the whole time crying into my choice of chicken or fish, which isn’t that different from any other flight. Something about the plane air makes me weepy.

  Usually, landing on solid ground after a long flight is my favorite. The couples kissing, the families hugging, children running around, people drinking alone at 10 a.m.—everything about the airport seems a little better than real life to me. When I landed at JFK, I noticed none of this. I wanted to get out of there and into my bed as quickly as possible. I kept my head down until I got to the baggage claim area.

  There was Carl. He was standing in the middle of a large group of Asians, scanning the faces of people walking by, looking for mine. It was the movie moment I’d always wanted. He smiled so big when he saw me, as if the power of our reunion erased the mistakes of my past. I distinctly remember the rough fabric of his jacket, scratching my face when I shoved it into his clothing. He smelled the same as when I’d left him. To the outside world, we were a happy couple reuniting after a long time apart. Our hug was filled with the raw, passionate energy of a paradigm shift. The airport reunion did feel like the movies. It was big and dramatic. Carl’s face, jutting a foot above the others, will always be seared in my memory. But the scandalous means to my storybook end were not worth it. I didn’
t deserve that moment.

  We walked out of JFK holding hands, knowing that in a month I’d come back to that very same airport with all of my stuff packed in two suitcases and we’d part ways. This time for good. Because relationships, at least the real ones, can’t survive off theatrical moments.

  8

  LIVE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY

  Asia was not at all what I imagined when fantasizing about living abroad. My dreams involved a Vespa, a man with a five o’clock shadow, and some sort of vine-covered apartment building with a charmingly chubby landlord who called me “Bella” or “Amor.” What I got instead was Taiwan, where the men are hairless, the scooters are clunky, the streets smell like rotting fish, and the apartments are sterile. In a way, not getting my perfect Spantalian life abroad worked out in my favor because I had more to complain about, and I quite enjoy complaining.

  My decision to move to Taiwan was made with just about the same amount of forethought as I put into my cocktails. It turned my life upside down. I had to break up with Carl, move out of my new apartment, and give John back to his owner, all in a couple of weeks. It made me miserable, but when I tried to gripe to my father, he wouldn’t play my game.

  “You did this to yourself, Marina. It’s because you’re Russian…” he told me. “Russians like to create their own problems so that they can heroically overcome them.” Which is not only true, but one of my favorite activities.

  “Who’s going to marry you there?” my mom moaned as we folded my clothes into a huge new suitcase. At the time, I was a twenty-four-year-old who was sleeping with more stuffed animals than men. It was a valid point. Who was going to marry me in Taiwan? I’d become good at tricking men into liking me in Brooklyn, but the men of Taiwan would prove to be ill-equipped for my brash personality. The guys I met wanted a peaceful, quiet woman to take care of them and to keep the apartment, and herself, in shape. I was none of those things. Eastern European ladies are like the starter-brand of female—we’re too hairy and gain weight too easily to be fetishized. Our tone is masculine and we rarely care who’s satisfied with us, least of all our husbands. “No one makes me dinner anymore,” my father whined one Monday when he came home from teaching his jewelry-making class. The next Monday, my mom left a frozen pizza on the counter, still in its plastic wrap.