by Wendy Dale
My plan was to get a quick job and make the money I needed to return to my boyfriend, and Michael and Sharon’s plan was to get me to Colombia in as sober a state as possible. My current lifestyle that included drinking before noon was not exactly gelling too well with their lifestyle that included eating a well-balanced nutritious breakfast, so I figured I could at least make an effort, and I started adding orange juice to my vodka in the morning.
Trying to get a handle on all of my vices and please the friends who were being so kind to me, I decided to also cut down on my cigarette use, limiting my smoking to the time I was drinking. It was a good plan in theory, but now according to my own rules every time I wanted a dose of nicotine, I also had to pour myself a cocktail—so instead of cutting back on smoking, the result was just an increase in my alcohol consumption.
Realizing that this couldn’t go on much longer, I decided to resort to drastic measures. With a great deal of effort, I finally threw out my pack of cigarettes, slept through my last hangover, and fit myself with a new pair of running shoes.
I liked the track where I had chosen to go jogging. It was just four blocks from Sharon and Michael’s house, was usually uncrowded, and partially shaded by trees. The only problem was that it was next to a mental institution. Unfortunately the lunatics liked to use the track during their free time (which people living in asylums seemed to have a little too much of).
Now had it been the personality-less catatonics who were accustomed to head out for a nice leisurely stroll, there wouldn’t have been much of a problem (other than the getting-them-to-move issue), but for some reason my running track seemed to attract every loudmouthed patient with Tourette’s syndrome. Each time I passed them, they would bark “woof woof woof” at me like angry German shepherds.
Then there were the people who didn’t quite understand the purpose of the white lines painted onto the asphalt. Instead of seeing them as friendly guides to help them stay in one lane, the patients viewed them as obstacles to be jumped over. Every time they heard my footsteps behind them, they would begin hopscotching over the lines, determined to keep me from getting past. I’d go to the right, they’d go to the right. I’d move to the left; they’d do the same. The only way around them was to head onto the grass, which for some strange crazy reason they seemed to have an aversion to.
But the most unsettling patient was the “I want some of that ass” guy. Each time I would sprint on ahead of him (I wouldn’t have had nearly as many problems had the lunatics been in better shape and run a bit faster than me), he would launch into a lengthy monologue on the quality of all of my most private physical features (most of which were described as “juicy”) and remind his companion that he was gonna get himself some of that juicy ass.
The bright side was, I ran extra fast on lunatic days.
I still missed Francisco terribly, but somehow over the next two and a half months, I managed to settle into a simple routine that was pretty close to being happy. The change was physical as well as mental. The healthy food and exercise were having their effect and my body was turning into a mass of hard muscle that I no longer recognized. I’d run my hand over my newly flat stomach, my toned limbs, amazed that with all the experience I had owning arms and legs (twenty-seven years), not once had it occurred to me that they could ever look like this.
In the past, my muscles had been like petulant children, doing my bidding only at the prospect of a reward. “Come on, if you take me to the fridge, I promise you’ll get a beer.” “Just a few laps around the track and we’ll have some nice chocolate, the kind you like from Switzerland.” But now, there was every indication that my little limbs had finally grown up. Getting them to move no longer required guilt trips or pleading. They did my bidding simply because I asked them to. Now I could run five miles a day without struggling. Even when I was simply strolling across the room, there was an agility I had never experienced before.
The improvement I was making to my physical self began spilling over into the rest of my life. With a bolt of confidence, I had whizzed my way through an interview at a nearby temporary agency and was now a full-time secretary at the City Attorney’s Office, which sounded dull but was actually a mellow job working with nice people. My boss was a well-meaning, slightly timid lawyer just a few years older than me, who treated me as his equal, enthusiastically accepted my edits to his dictated letters, and cheerfully tolerated the misspellings I inserted into his correspondence, a result of having written exclusively in a foreign language for the past two years.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t mind the routine of going into work every day. This was partly because I realized how important my job was to my future—it was my only means of returning to Francisco—but there was something else as well. Now when I looked outside the window of the office, the world looked different, in a way that had nothing to do with the view. In the past, having a job had meant missing out on something. But now, instead of longing to be out there, instead of wondering what lay beyond the window—now I knew.
This realization was almost spiritual. For someone without religion, whose actions weren’t centered around earning brownie points to be redeemed in the next world, my creed had long been an attempt to get the most out of the life I had, the existence I was sure of. I had been striving to avoid the destiny that plagued so many of the people I knew. Growing up, I had gotten the same advice repeated to me—sometimes it had been from a teacher, other times from a friend of my parents, a woman in line at the post office, or a man selling shoes at the mall—the faces were different but they all had the same thing to say: Don’t marry prematurely. Don’t have kids early. Travel as soon as possible. You’re only young once.
I had done exactly as they had advised, but without the end result they had anticipated. They believed that if you managed to cram enough happiness in by the time you were thirty, it would last you for the rest of your life. You’d always have a pleasing memory to call up from the reserve tank when times got tough. I was free of children, I had yet to get married, I had traveled, but my attempt to avoid responsibility had been fleeting. Travel didn’t protect you from the dark side as I had once hoped. It merely allowed you to experience everything—the good with the bad—more fully.
When I relived the memories of the past two years of my life, I recalled terrible things: hunger, fear, sorrow, and loss. I had seen prisons and war, crime, and injustice. I hadn’t found lightheartedness; I had discovered intensity, which probably served me better. The people who had populated my childhood still looked out the window holding on to the illusion that happiness was out there. I looked outside, content for once to be where I was, aware of the fact that I wasn’t missing out on anything.
Of course, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, just when you’re sure the foundation for your life is sturdy, one new piece of information can shift the continental plate of your existence, making your whole worldview come tumbling down in an instant.
When I opened the e-mail from Francisco and read the introduction, I knew to expect the worst.
Dear Wendy,
Something has weighed down on me for weeks. I thought I would tell you about it when you got here, but I can’t stand the guilt.
This was not my favorite e-mail greeting. As far as good openings went, I tended to prefer the romantic “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me,” “My darling dearest,” or even the trite “How are you? I am fine” to the heavy “There’s something I have to tell you” bit. This was not good, not good at all.
The e-mail confirmed what I had feared all along. Out of hunger, fear, and a desire to take action instead of idly sitting by, Francisco had gotten himself a fake passport in the hopes of scoring a trip to transport drugs abroad. He regretted it, he was sorry, he promised he wouldn’t go through with it. It was the only solution that had occurred to him on a day when he hadn’t had anything to eat.
The e-mail terrified me, but I forced myself to see his side
of the situation. After all, I knew the power that hunger could wield. Francisco hadn’t carried his plan out; he had confessed. I would have to forgive him. I would be there in just three weeks. Twenty-one short days to go.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s imagine for a minute that Francisco wasn’t a part of my life. Let’s say that something happened to him, something painless and relatively benign—he got abducted by aliens (the nice kind, not the cavity-probing variety) and they decided to take him off to their home of Politak, a planet where they spoke a slightly modified version of Portuguese and (in what turned out to be an incredibly strange intergalactic coincidence) spent their days preparing for Carnavalak, a holiday that consisted of wearing elaborate costumes, a festive parade, and the consumption of Tumorak, the planet’s most popular beverage (a success it had achieved in spite of the unfortunate double-entrendre of its marketing tag line, which roughly translated meant “This tumor’s for you.”)
Okay, so let’s imagine that Francisco is out of the picture, residing far away on a bucolic planet drinking lots of cocteles do tumor, and I’m in Gainesville, Florida, living a relatively contented existence now that all the city’s known serial killers have been rounded up and prosecuted. What would I do? How would my life change if I didn’t have to consider Francisco’s welfare?
Okay, so maybe these weren’t the nicest kinds of thoughts to be having, but it could have been worse—I could have had Francisco stranded on Ort, a place without festivities of any kind where the only variety to be experienced in this homogenously boring planet covered completely in sand was the ingestion of a drug called plob, which was the earthly equivalent of getting shot up with novocaine. I had the decency to get Francisco exiled to an intergalactic paradise, which I actually considered pretty generous on my part. On second thought, after learning what Francisco had recently done, perhaps Ort was a better place for him.
It wasn’t just that Francisco had purchased a fake passport. Based on his most recent e-mail, I had learned that he had accomplished this with the aid of my checkbook. Granted, the five-hundred-dollar check he had forged belonged to an account I had closed long ago, so I wasn’t out any money, but who knew what this would do to my credit—and I especially didn’t relish the idea of having any document with my name on it in the hands of people who made illegal passports. To do something stupid was one thing; to do something stupid that screwed me in the process—well, this was what got me to thinking about Francisco’s hypothetical interstellar disappearance in the first place.
Had I been just a few years younger, I might have looked on it as a challenge to start over again, to go back to Los Angeles and build myself up from nothing, but I was too drained to even contemplate this idea. For once, I wanted to follow the easy path. Returning to Colombia had been my goal for three months now. I didn’t have the energy to start looking for someplace new. I had no choice but to move on with what we had planned.
When it comes to relationships, the lesson that has come hard to me is that you’ll never get anyone to do anything they don’t want to do. Oh, you may do okay at getting your way for a little while, but every tiny success you get is on credit—the bill comes later— and it’s itemized.
For me, this lesson occurred four days before I was supposed to leave for Cali. I had my ticket in hand, my bags halfway packed. I had been sorting and re-sorting clothes and bath products into three equal piles so that my suitcases would be evenly weighted—this was when the phone rang.
“Hola, mi amor,” I said, happy to hear the sound of Francisco’s voice. “Can you believe it? Just four days till I see you.” I thought it odd that he didn’t answer immediately. After all, I hadn’t said anything that required much reflection. “Francisco, are you there?”
It’s ironic that I asked if he was there, because he literally wasn’t.
“I’ve left Cali. I’m headed to Europe in the morning.” It was a tone of voice I had never heard him use before. He was so cold and clinical with me, like a doctor detaching himself emotionally in order to break the bad news to the patient.
“Where are you?”
There were over a hundred right answers to this question. I could have forgiven him for being nearly anywhere, in any nation except one. “Costa Rica,” he said.
It was the worst kind of infidelity—he had cheated on me with a country. I had given up everything to get him out of Costa Rica yet he had risked his freedom to go straight back there. I didn’t know how he managed to get in, but it didn’t matter. Everything we had been through suddenly didn’t count anymore—he had wound up exactly where I had first met him, a year and a half of my life in vain.
“I had a layover here. I’m delivering a shipment of shoes to Italy.”
I knew this was code for making a drug run. “Why?” I needed to know.
“I need to earn a living.”
Not the Italy part. “No, I mean, why Costa Rica?”
He took a deep sigh. “I thought I’d stay for a day or two and ask Laura why.”
I couldn’t believe it. He said the word Laura with real affection. The bastard. After all that she had done to him, I didn’t know how he could stand to even be in the same room with her. He had gone all the way to Costa Rica to see his ex after all that I had endured for him?
I needed to say something. I knew it was the last moment I would ever have to convince him to love me again. It was my last hope to get him back. But nothing occurred to me.
“So, well, take care. I won’t bother you again,” he said.
And the line went dead. The man I was never going to leave had dumped me just like that.
This is the lowest point—the nadir, to use a nice literary word. This is as bad as it gets. I have to go through it because we all have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make, as much as we may try to avoid responsibility. We all have to grow up, as painful as it is. But I’m thinking, this is my coming of age story. You’re completely innocent of the stupid decisions I made. And you’re probably a very nice person who has shelled out good money for this book. You don’t deserve to have to go through this with me. So if you want to skip on ahead, I won’t hold it against you.
Life is hard enough. Come on, avoid the pain, take what happiness you can get.
All I saw was beige. The beige of the carpet. I was lying face down in it and for a minute, I couldn’t remember why. I had this nagging feeling that there was something I’d forgotten, but I had no idea what it was. I was staring at each little strand of carpet, marveling at the tiny curl of the fibers.
And suddenly it came back to me. The phone conversation. Francisco. Gone forever. The thought made me want to cry. I touched my face, but it was already all wet. I realized that I had been crying all along. I’d been examining the strands of the carpet and sobbing.
I tried to focus on the carpet again because it seemed less painful than the other topic on my mind, but it didn’t work this time. I would never feel his arms around me again, I realized. I would never touch his face. I would never see him walk through the door again. I curled up in a fetal position and shook with sobs.
For a brief moment, I remembered the carpet again. Yes, the carpet. I was able to focus on the rug under my body, but suddenly I hated it. As if the carpet were to blame for everything I was going through, I could no longer stand the sight of it. I hated the feel of it on my skin. I didn’t want to see beige anymore. I needed to see black.
I crawled the four feet from Michael and Sharon’s living room into my bed and covered myself with a blanket, hoping that by shutting out sound and light I could turn off my brain. It worked for a few seconds. It was quiet and still. Black and calm. I took a deep breath. Oh fuck! It’s just not fair. I rolled over onto my stomach and pounded my fists into the mattress.
“You fucker! You bastard! You asshole! You shitface! You—” I had run out of expletives. “Fucking expletives!” I screamed.
Now what? Should I yell some more? Would it help? “Aaaaaaah!”
I shouted. “Grauphhhhht!” I added.
I suddenly felt exhausted. I needed to rest. I rolled over onto my back. I was going to sleep. Just for a little while. I would fall asleep and then I would figure things out. I closed my eyes. It was hot. The comforter was too thick. I could barely breathe. Who bought such thick blankets in Florida? I poked my head out.
I sat up in bed and pulled aside the curtain in front of the window. A cricket was in the grass, hopping around just like nothing had happened. How could he be so callous? I wondered. Fucking cricket acting like everything was okay. I hated that cricket.
I felt a sudden surge of energy. I stormed out of bed, marched through the living room and out the front door. There he was, the cricket that had been taunting me. He reminded me of a hornet— he was shiny yellow and black—but he was nearly six inches long and practically as big around as a quarter. I tried to step on him but he just soared into the air and landed a few feet away. He looked evil. Maybe it was a she. No, I hated him—it was definitely a he.
I took a step forward, but ready this time, he wouldn’t let me get too close. He jumped a few feet away.
I took off my shoe and aimed, but I was too slow. My shoe landed with a thump. I removed the other one and raised it over my head.
I was ready to fling it at my nemesis when I heard my name being called. “Wendy! Wendy, what are you doing?” It was Sharon. Sharon and Michael had come home. Suddenly I realized that I looked mad—I was barefoot standing in the grass. If anyone attempted to charge me for the attempted murder of an arthropod, I would be exonerated on the grounds of temporary insanity.
I looked at my friends and lowered the shoe. “I hate crickets,” I said. And I hugged Sharon and began to sob.
At first I hated myself, hated how stubborn I was and stupid I was and unlovable I was. I wanted to be a different person, the kind of woman a man would never abandon. That was what I had expected of Francisco. I thought that if I could do enough, if I could stand by him during the worst times of his life when everyone else walked away, he couldn’t help but love me. He would be the one person who would never leave. He would fill the void left by my parents. He wouldn’t be like them. He would always be there for me, spending the rest of his life trying to make it all up to me.