When Lydia returns to the waiting area, Emily leaps from her seat, only to find that her arms won’t open into a hug. It’s time to console her, the Emilies declare, to acknowledge Lydia’s grief and introduce it to a sample of Emily’s own. Instead, she pictures Lydia entwined in ropes of blood, an umbilical cord crown on her head. Mimicking Lydia’s briskness, Emily follows her into the corridor.
“Just wait a minute,” Lydia says, ducking into an alcove. She leans against a wall, hanging her head. Lydia’s cheeks are so blatantly and disastrously white that it occurs to Emily that she can help her by just acting like everything’s normal. She offers her some blush.
“My whole universe got better when I learned to apply blush properly,” Emily says. She thinks of the words as a kind of self-parody, compressing her personality down to something bite-sized, easily digestible. Expected. She retrieves a massive brush from her purse. “Ripe sunset, the perfect shade for you.” She wants to give Lydia back the control of her body. To make her impenetrable again.
Lydia doesn’t protest. With shimmering peach powder, Emily sculpts a cheekbone onto the left side of her face, careful not to touch her skin directly with her fingertips. Before she can start on the right, Lydia pushes Emily’s arm away.
“At least let me make it symmetrical,” Emily says. The thought of Lydia walking around only half-finished panics her. Everyone will notice something is wrong.
“I just want to get out of here.”
With a movement as abrupt and necessary as a sneeze, Emily hugs Lydia. She feels the pain shivering through Lydia’s body and she’s prepared to share it. To let its unruliness pass from Lydia’s body into her own. Lydia is hot and smells of soap. This isn’t so bad, Emily thinks, this is what being a friend really is. Handing over control. Supporting them on their own terms. Emily hugs and hugs her. She moves her hand in circles on her back. Lydia’s hands hang by her sides.
Emily is alone in the glow of her television, painting her fingernails pink with white crescents at the tips. She looks back over the afternoon, returning each time to the hug. In the throes of it, she’d been free from the clutter and slap of the Emilies’ judgment. She’d barely thought. It wasn’t until Lydia was out of sight, the bus door wheezing shut, that Emily noticed the mucus on her shoulder. She wiped it off with a Kleenex.
The hosts of the show are in a woman’s house, guffawing in front of her open closet. There are T-shirts with Disney characters on them. There are purple polyester pants, long sheer dresses with fur trim and paint-stained stonewashed tapered jeans. All in the same closet! Sequined tube tops, floral frocks and rainbow suspenders. On shelves to the side, fishnet tights and holey toe socks. The hosts want the woman to get rid of it all. The woman sags. She objects.
All seems lost until, suddenly, miraculously, the woman is throwing things out. She realizes nothing in the closet fits. There is fast, frantic camera work. Music blares. It’s religious. She is converted. A close-up shows her clenching wads of fabric and cramming them into garbage bags. Black plastic distends and stretches clear. The music develops a steady electronic beat. The hosts smile with their inhumanly white teeth. The woman sways with unfocused frenzy. Everything is too big or too small. Everything is stained or see-through or clings to her love handles. She has seen the truth! She wants to change! Everything she owns pops open at the boobs or is slack in the crotch. Nothing is her! God, who is she? She is someone who could become someone else if she bought new clothes and got her hair cut in jagged layers and learned how to apply highlighter cream just below her eyebrows!
Emily doesn’t get an opportunity to speak to Lydia all morning. Lydia appears to be swamped with work. She has a frazzled, do-not-disturb expression on her face. Emily is surprised—almost dismayed—to see Lydia wearing the same old outfit: black cardigan, corduroy skirt. How could anything stay the same? When Emily looks at the picture of her high school friends, she barely recognizes their faces. They have nothing to do with her. She lays the frame down flat on her desk.
In the afternoon, there is a goodbye party for Tony. He’s leaving the office for a job at an office down the hall. As far as anyone can tell, his new job is more or less identical to his current one. It’s no improvement or enhancement. Nevertheless, to celebrate his moving sideways in the world, they decide to eat grocery store sheet cake and drink sparkling grapefruit juice.
Lydia puts Bob Marley on so loud it’s hard to think. No woman, no cry. Mary turns the music down so low it’s a murmur, a suggestion of ocean waves. Tony and Roger swap statistics. Baseball or hockey. Roger produces a flask and pours something clear into Tony’s cup, then waggles the flask at Lydia who rolls her eyes and extends her cup. This worries Emily. Lydia shouldn’t be drinking in her condition, still fresh with grief.
Between mouthfuls of pastel icing, Mary tells Emily about her son’s peanut allergy. Emily nods and asks appropriate questions about EpiPens and food labelling, thinking only of Lydia’s presence, where she is in the room, how she’s feeling. She breaks away from the conversation when she notices Lydia in the corner alone, cutting herself some cake.
“That looks great,” Emily says, pointing at Lydia’s slice decorated with lopsided baby blue rosettes.
Lydia sighs and turns to Emily. “Nice necklace,” she says as though she is talking to a seven-year-old. “Is it new?”
“Sort of,” Emily replies. It’s a gold heart on a gold chain. Before Lydia can interrupt, Emily adds, “So do you want to maybe go see a movie this weekend? Or go shopping?”
“I can’t,” Lydia says. “I have a date.”
Emily tries not to look disappointed.
“Honestly,” Lydia says softly. “I do.”
Although Emily understands that Lydia is lying, that—like Emily’s other two friends—she is trying to brush her off, she can’t help herself from pursuing the issue, however desperate she might seem. “What about next week?”
“We’ll see,” Lydia says.
She’s still wounded and recovering, Emily tells herself. We went through something big together and that has to mean something.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Lydia says. “I need to take a piss.”
Waiting a minute to make it less obvious, Emily follows Lydia to the washroom. Would they ever be the kind of friends who go together, who hand each other tampons or extra squares of toilet paper underneath the stall?
Lydia is at the sink washing her hands. “Hey,” she says, without looking up.
Water rushes sloppily out of the tap, the sound amplified in the small space with its humid, pre-breathed air, its dim sour smell of gastric juices and sweat.
“Why me?” Emily blurts.
Lydia rinses the soap off her hands and wipes them once on the back pockets of her skirt.
“I didn’t want my friends to know,” Lydia says. “But I do appreciate it. I couldn’t have done it on my own.”
On her way out, Lydia squeezes Emily on the shoulder, her fingers, still damp, leaving splotched prints on Emily’s silk blouse.
After Lydia is gone, Emily stays in the washroom and cries in big ugly gasps, mascara-thickened tears dribbling down her cheeks. She doesn’t care if someone walks in. Let them. Let the whole office see her. The worst part of it is that Emily understands—even empathizes with—Lydia, who just wants to control the narrative of her life, to make it coherent and intelligible. And who doesn’t want that?
They have so much in common.
The Emilies, who have been quiet all day, now chime in, tentatively, with slow reassuring voices.
“I feel sorry for her,” Emily Brontë says.
“Imagine not being able to trust your friends with your secrets,” Emily Dickinson says.
“What kind of a friendship is that?” Emily Davison says.
Emily, smiling a fragile smile, nods at the Emily in the mirror. “We tell each other everything.”
Lean into the Mic
I.
“So high schools all take different a
pproaches to sex ed. [Lean into the mic.] My school was the condom-on-the-banana-terrify-kids-so-that-they-think-they-could-contract-aids-from-a-wet-dream-or-from-a-lingering-wink variety. [Left eye wink, right eye wink makes whole face wonky.] Heavy on the pictures of oozing sores and pus-filled blisters fostering a general sense of dread and panic around sex. [Pacing.] Which makes everyone’s first time so special. [Stop pacing.] I’m finally going to go all the way! And contract some horrible disease and transform into a ginormous slug, and I’ll be forced to go to all the local high schools, a goopy mucus mess gooping behind me, and tell my sad-sack story [lean into the mic]—with the help of a retractable tentacle language interpreter—as a cautionary tale. Basically, if the sex ed at my high school was a movie genre [lean into the mic] it would be [long beat] horror.”
People chuckled with one or two guffaws thrown in. I could hear each chair-adjustment creak and beer-gulping swallow. Up on that small stage I felt alive, converted into a viler, wilier, wilder version of myself. At parties I often stammered or bit my lip, uncertain of my role, but in this context I knew what was expected: people came to the open mic to hear people tell jokes or, more commonly, to hear themselves tell jokes.
I knew I wouldn’t be the worst person there because a few people always bombed. At least I had some grasp of structure: setup, punchline, topper, callback. I’d taken classes and watched YouTube videos and Netflix specials. I threw myself into different voices. Laughter fortified my confidence and encouraged me to be bigger, bolder. I paced and stomped and curtsied.
When the clapping stopped, my anxiety surged. The room shrank. The stale smell of beer and bodies overwhelmed me. I hurried off-stage and beelined for the washroom, a tentative smile twisting my face. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone because I was certain they’d give me a look swollen with pity or scorn. Two years of stand-up and still a wimp. I locked myself in a stall and performed deep breathing exercises, visualizing every inch of skin gulping restorative oxygen. They laughed, right? For sure, for sure. They definitely laughed.
I used to spend this time checking my Twitter feed, a zing of energy skipping through my blood when someone favourited or retweeted one of my tweets, but I’d deleted my account three months ago. Dopamine surges of social media approval couldn’t counteract the added stress of seeing how many more followers other comedians had, how many more gigs and opportunities.
Calm enough to face any of the regulars who were still milling at the bar, I exited my chamber. One pint after a set is my rule. You never know who might want to talk to you or book you for a real gig. Most people had already wandered into the night, but along with a few older amateur comics—the ones who still made jokes about how women love shopping for shoes more than sucking dick—there was a skinny, curly brown-haired guy wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, sitting by himself and sipping a glass of red wine.
I sat and ordered a beer.
“Slugs have astonishing sex lives. The Kama Sutra would be their kindergarten textbook.” The guy, who I now saw was barely older than a teenager, angled his stool to face mine. “Leopard slugs swing from branches on self-created mucus rope like Cirque de Soleil silk aerialists, entwining themselves—caressing, devoted and present. Each lover both male and female, exchanging roles. It’s very consensual and very hot.”
“Good to know?” I glanced at the bartender to see if she was hearing what I was hearing, but she was at the other end of the room in a cloud of dishwasher steam. “Are you a biology student? An art student?”
“I’m just saying you might want to rethink that part of your set. If there were a sexually transmitted disease that could make me a slug, I would fuck everyone who’d consent to have me.”
“Duly noted.”
He chugged the rest of his wine, nodded at me and left.
As I walked home that night, weaving between troupes of stumbling drunk twenty-year-olds, I tried to parse that conversation, tried to decide whether I would spin it as funny or creepy when I told my husband Ben about it. I didn’t think the guy had wanted to impress me with his comedic timing. Too earnest and spacy for that. Then again, maybe he was just a shitty joke-teller; most people were, most of the time I was.
And bringing up sex immediately was an aggressive move. A power play, one all women are used to, but this time it hadn’t felt as icky or boring as it usually did. Maybe because of his young age? His ambiguous sexual orientation? Maybe because I’d found the slug sex description intriguing, even beautiful? Maybe because I hadn’t considered changing anything about my set for months, for years, and the prospect both excited and terrified me.
I couldn’t resolve my feelings about the encounter yet, so when my husband stirred from sleep and asked drowsily how my night went, I told him, Fine, same old, same old, get some rest you have to wake up early for work, then went to the living room and read everything I could find about slugs on the Internet.
II.
“You know what I always wanted though? [Lean into the mic, long beat.] One of those fake babies, one of those fake crying [speed up and some pacing], fake pooping mechanical ones you’re supposed to carry around and care for over a week while you’re trying to finish your calculus homework and go to swim practice, so you realize all on your own that you don’t have the emotional maturity for a baby, and that—no duh [throw hand in the air, casually]—you should stay far, far away from penis or at least wrap it up. Anyway, I was asking my husband about whether or not they had these baby cockblockers at his school and he said, no way, they were an all-boys Catholic school and you absolutely didn’t talk about sex, you just were not allowed to have it. [Lean into the mic.] I was like, um, you’re not supposed to have sex with the babies!”
The reception to this joke depends, even more than normal, on audience intoxication. Drunk people love dirty jokes, even better if they involve babies, while sober people are more likely to temper their laughter based on cues from their friends or dates. Since it was only eight, the audience coughed and tittered politely, punctuated by a table-slapping cackle from my friend Janice, an investment banker and amateur Muay Thai fighter who attended my open mic sets at least once a month, often with a new gorgeous, Eastern European girlfriend in tow. Today she was alone, her muscular legs spread wide, treating herself to a pitcher of sangria.
As I progressed through my set, the lines, normally as instinctive as breathing, now felt angular and garish in my mouth. I stumbled self-consciously. How many times had Janice heard me say the exact same words in the exact same order? What was cute coming from someone in her twenties was surely contrived, try-hard, tragic even, coming from someone in her thirties.
Somehow I finished and headed to the washroom. My meditation retreat ended when Janice banged on the stall.
“Did you drown?”
I opened the door. She entered and slid the lock closed. From her purse she produced a baggie of cocaine and did a bump on the end of a shiny gold key before offering me some. I declined. Janice was confusing me for the younger me, the one who wrote all those jokes. She snorted a bit more.
“More people might have come if you’d tweeted about the show,” she said.
“I deleted Twitter. Remember? Mental health, panic attacks, night terrors, et cetera.”
“I thought you’d decided to be serious about this comedy thing.”
“I am serious.”
“Then Twitter would make sense, career-wise. I’m just saying.”
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile.
We headed to the bar area, Janice practically skipping, her pupils as large as billboard periods. The slug sex guy was there, wearing the same outfit and drinking the same wine. In this lighting, he resembled my high school boyfriend Dave, a devout Christian who’d begged and begged to watch me masturbate then broke up with me, disgusted, after I’d complied.
My throat was scratchy. My heartbeat whirred as though I’d received a contact coke high. Should I talk to him or ignore him?
Without not
icing the shift in my mood, Janice led us to two seats directly beside slug-sex guy and proceeded to flirt with the bartender.
Filling my lungs with air, I tapped the man—boy, really, as he couldn’t be over nineteen—on the shoulder.
“Banana slugs have been known to get their dicks stuck in slug snatches and then either he or his partner has to gnaw off the penis to free it.” I’d rehearsed this fact this morning and I couldn’t stop talking or I’d lose my momentum. Janice and the bartender and anyone within hearing distance focused their attention on me. “It’s called apophallation. How does that affect your slutty gastropod theory?”
He drew back and stared at me with glazed, blank eyes.
“Sorry,” he said in a meek voice. “I’m not sure…”
“What the fuck, Amanda?” Janice said. “And I thought I was the wasted one.”
“Are you a comedian?” he said. “I’m new here. Probably just too stupid to get the joke. Sorry.”
Janice put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He winced. “Apologies for my friend. She’s off her meds.”
“I thought… I must have mistaken you for…” My cheeks burned. I kept my eyes on the foam deflating atop my beer. “Excuse me.”
Once in the washroom, I splashed cold water on my face. What happened out there? Was it the guy’s twin brother? Was he blackout drunk last time? Was I just exhausted and confused? That could be it. I’d barely slept last night or the night before that or really since the last show. Still, that didn’t explain it. Did it? Remembering the boy’s soft, innocent voice, his genuine appearance of confusion sent new surges of embarrassment through my gut. I needed a distraction. I took the phone out of my bag and navigated to the Twitter home page but stopped myself at the last second.
Difficult People Page 5