Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  When she asked about Jon, I said the same things I’d been saying my whole life. I listed the objects in that small suitcase. So what that he’s an alcoholic, she said. Aren’t you curious? That’s still part of you. I thought about this. Somehow, I’d never thought about it before, or had been having the same thought for thirty years. Something had prompted me to contact my half sister, though it didn’t feel like curiosity. That act had felt strangely drained of emotion. All I had felt that day, and every day since, was for Amaia. She had, it seemed, become the receptacle, the provocateur of all my feeling. Though I knew that impulse to meet my sister had meant something. I knew I did not always feel things at the site of their provocation.

  I’d done this kind of detective work before, scrutinized my actions to determine how I’d felt. You’re so brave! people had said to me after my first book was published. But I wasn’t brave. Scrutinizing my life was the only way I could make sense of it. And writing was the only way I could think clearly. The thoughts in my mind ran on a loop—they were worried, obsessed, and small. They went nowhere. By building a story, I could find a beginning, middle, and end.

  When she asked me if I was curious about Jon, I paused. I knew that my blind spots could be gaping. That other people could be mirrors, if you trusted them. I trusted her, didn’t I?

  I looked at the suitcase that had held the four or five things I knew about Jon. Suddenly, it grew so heavy. Then, it was no longer a suitcase. It was a warm, beating thing. I followed its sinews, the blue rivers of its circulatory system, and I found that it led back to me, to my body. Thirty years ago, a child had decided that I didn’t need it. And it was true; I hadn’t needed it. I had been getting around just fine on one leg.

  You weren’t ready before, she said. Now you’re ready.

  26

  In Iowa, I waited for the hotel shuttle bus. Then I waited in the hotel lobby, sipping tiny cups of lemon water while I waited for Amaia. My mother called and I did not answer. Amit called and I did not answer. My body ached from no sleep. I stared at the same page of a book for an hour. Every time the lobby door spun around, I looked for her.

  When she finally appeared, face flushed from the cold and cocktails, I sprung up.

  My girl, she said, so sweetly. She leaned over me, hair falling all around, and kissed me all over my face. I love you, she said.

  After her lecture, a crowd of young women gathered around her, stars in their eyes. I sat in the front row of seats, now empty, and watched her talk to them. She was a wonderful speaker. I waited, and began to feel a little awkward. The host of the event sat beside me. She held a computer in her lap and on it were pictures of her cat. I leaned over and awwwed. She showed me more pictures, and, grateful for someone to talk to, I told her about my dog.

  As the host drove us back to the hotel, I reached from the backseat and squeezed Amaia’s shoulder. She pulled away from me. My hands, though cold, began sweating.

  What’s wrong? I asked her once we returned to the hotel room. I stood at the foot of the bed. She lay on the bed, staring at her phone.

  Nothing, she said.

  Not nothing, I said. Please tell me.

  We can talk about it later, she said.

  Please, I said. Tell me now.

  You didn’t have to do that, she said.

  Do what? I asked.

  Humiliate me.

  What? I said. My body went cold with sweat all over.

  You were supposed to be there with me, she said. I had been flirting with the host, she said. I told her I had not. I was sure that I had not. I had been glad for someone to talk to, but there was a difference. I knelt on the bed and reached for her. She pushed me away.

  There’s something in you, she said. I don’t trust it. You need people to want you.

  No, I insisted. My hands shook. I told her that maybe that had once been true of me, but not for a long time.

  Loyalty is important to me, she said. We might just be different in this way. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.

  I love you, I said. Please trust me.

  I’m afraid I will never be enough for you, she said. My love will never be enough to satisfy you. You need more.

  I knew she was wrong—the idea that I could want anyone else while I wanted her this much was insane, laughable. But as I lay next to her, I felt that old shame slip into me. I was inappropriate and over-sexual. I did not see myself clearly. I had humiliated her.

  Pandora’s jar isn’t mentioned until Hesiod’s later work—“Works and Days”—in which she has a name. Her name means “all-gifted,” though her gifts mean nothing in the end. She wears a garland crown from the Horae, fine gowns from Athena, and the Charites adorn her in jeweled necklaces. But this Pandora also wears Aphrodite’s gift of “a cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs.” Here, Hesiod also gives her the jar of ruin. Does Pandora even know what is in her jar? Jars are meant to be opened. Her creator gave it to her, and she opened it. Of course she did. Everything flew out—and who else was there to blame? Pandora must have also blamed herself—she had no memories, no history, just those beautiful gifts, just that jar. A later, more accurate translation of her name revises its meaning to “all-giving.” In the end, she has nothing. She stands amid her ruined world with only Elpis, hope, like a butterfly on the lip of her empty jar.

  I lay there all night, waiting for her to touch me. If she touches me, I thought, I will be okay.

  Please, I said.

  Go to sleep, she said, and turned her back to me.

  As the sun rose, brightening the drawn curtains, I was hardly anything left—just a glowing sliver of shame. I didn’t care if she was right or wrong.

  I’m sorry, I whispered.

  Come here, she said, and folded me in her arms.

  27

  The drive from Brooklyn to Torrington, Connecticut took three hours. Three hours, and thirty years. I planned to buy flowers once there, rather than let them wilt in the car. I also suspected I’d want the extra time to find my feet in a strange town, to locate the impulse that brought me there. When I woke that morning in Brooklyn, soaked with sweat, I felt nothing.

  The first leg of the trip is along Interstate 95, the same I take to Massachusetts to see my mother. Gliding down the freeway, I turned up the stereo’s volume, my finger tapping across the radio keys. I filled the car with soaring pop music. That’s all I’d been able to listen to for months. I beat the heel of my palm against the steering wheel to the pulse of these love songs. My phone chimed from the passenger seat, echoed by a clang in my chest, Amaia’s touch firing across the 2,500 miles between us, ringing that bell. Only she knew where I was going, and I imagined her hands cupping my buzzing body, carrying me outside, releasing me like a caught bee.

  After Stamford, the city seeped out of the landscape. On a smaller highway, the road emptied, its surface bleached and pitted with potholes. I switched lanes, switched radio stations, noticed my palms wet on the wheel.

  When signs for Torrington appeared, I slowed. Off the exit, the trees thinned, replaced by squat houses, their vinyl siding faded to pastels. I parked outside a strip of shops and opened a smudged glass door that read PHARMACY.

  Hallmark makes no card for this occasion. I owed no Thank you. No Love. No Condolences. Get Well Soon? Not likely. I bought one with a puppy on the cover and a blank inside and asked the clerk where to buy flowers.

  Real flowers? She shook her head slowly. Maybe at the Stop & Shop? Toward Manchester?

  It is a former mill town, but the last mill was shut down after Torrington was devastated by hurricanes in 1955, and the town never stood up again. It has the grim set of all such towns, reminds me of the Rust Belt city where I taught for one year—pawn and tobacco shops with a few ghosted stares from inside. Endless salt- and ice-crusted winters. Gas station coffee drinkers, the few faces leaning over the Lotto counter white and textured by smoke and sorrow. People with bodies slanted like they’ve been walking against the wind the
ir whole lives, because they have.

  When I parked and walked across the lot of another dilapidated plaza, headed for the Grocery, a cluster of women with puffy coats and eyes fell silent and watched me, heads turning, eyes sharp, chins tilted upward.

  Real flowers? asked the man behind the Keno machine.

  I nodded, the only other man in the store watching me, slack-jawed, a pale slice of belly hanging over his jeans. I smiled at him. I wanted to go home, to drive back to my apartment in Brooklyn, where I could look at my things and remember who I was.

  At the Stop & Shop toward Manchester, I picked out a garish bouquet and a bag of truffles. I joined a checkout line behind a father and his small son.

  You go first. The father smiled at me. We’re still deciding. He gestured at the boy, who considered the candy display with furrowed intensity. I smiled and thanked him, not because I was late, but because his boy was the first unbroken thing I had seen all morning.

  The house sat at the end of a road, stout and gray, wearing a disheveled skirt of porch. I glided toward it, turned off the radio, and wiped my palms on my thighs, one at a time.

  As I turned into the driveway, a man stepped out onto the porch. I hated arrivals. When the engine died, something died in me, too. Or woke. You’re like a train, Amaia said so often. Like a shark. You never stop moving.

  The man took a step toward the porch railing. Hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes and inhaled, the seatbelt pressing against my chest. Please, I thought, stay there. I just needed a few more breaths before I faced him.

  When I opened my eyes, he stood on the other side of the car door. I had been imagining his face for days, but I could not look at him. I threw my vision out of focus, blurred his edges. My chest clenched, released a cool spray of fear into my shoulders, throat, and lungs. Ears burning, I smiled, and unclasped the seatbelt. There was nowhere to go but out. I gathered the flowers and my purse from the passenger seat.

  He stood so close to my door that I waved him back so that I could open it. Behind his glasses, his eyes grasped at me. There were two panes of glass between us, and they were not enough. I opened the door and stepped onto the leaf-papered ground, into the cold afternoon, and faced him.

  Hello, he said, and then my name. Everything about him, but worst of all my name in his mouth, stung—bright as a fingertip on a skinned knee. I embraced him, if you can embrace someone without touching them. My face so near his stubbled cheek, I felt him tremble, smelled aftershave and alcohol. We stood in the leaves and he did not invite me into the house until I gestured toward it. Then I followed him through the back door, the yellowed pantry, into the kitchen.

  Two women sat at a folding table. He stepped back, presenting me. I handed the flowers to the younger woman, who bore a close resemblance to him, and I think, to me. She had tan skin and sea-glass eyes, and her hands shook as she took the bouquet.

  Look! she said to the older woman, who was very old. Real flowers!

  The older woman stared deafly at the flowers, at me, at Jon.

  This is her, Jon shouted. I flinched.

  What? she asked. She squinted and smacked her gums. She had no front teeth, and leaned her speckled forearms on a crossword puzzle.

  THIS IS HER, he shouted again.

  She stared, having heard but not understood.

  LYNN’S DAUGHTER, he added.

  She tilted her head, understanding finally. She clapped her withered hands one time. Then she’s your daughter, too! she said, grinning, her tongue tucked in the space where her front teeth had been.

  Yes, he nodded, smiling back at her, at me.

  No, I thought.

  28

  In his confessions, St. Augustine asks God “why tears are so sweet to the sorrowful.” Euripides, in The Trojan Women, asks, “How good are the tears, how sweet the dirges? I would rather sing dirges than eat or drink.” I, too, have always had a taste for tears. I was a colicky baby and an emotional child. I cried for The Fox and the Hound, for baby birds in our backyard, for bullied classmates on the school bus. Most of all, I cried when the Captain left. I watched him walk away again and again, and I sobbed, thinking Come back, come back. I hugged my crying mother and thought, I will do anything.

  When he was gone, I kept a close watch on my mother, who was good at hiding her loneliness, but not good enough. Some days, a panic gripped me that she would never return from the grocery store. I stared at the driveway, Come back, come back. I called her from friends’ houses, Pick up, pick up.

  The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Disney’s Bambi. Bambi’s father—the Prince of the Forest—is more myth than presence. He leaves the young Bambi virtually orphaned when Bambi’s mother is killed by hunters. When Bambi’s mother died, I was inconsolable. I was three years old and I recognized the breadth of his loss. I knew there were kinds of despair howling enough to fell a forest.

  I decided I needed to toughen up when I turned eight. On the bus, on the way home from school, I imagined each of my family members dying. When tears rose in my eyes, I suppressed them. You can’t cry, I told myself. Or they really will die.

  Around the same time, I realized that my parents would not always be around to make me brush my teeth. Like most children, I did not want to brush my teeth. But even then the idea that I would be lost to the whims of my own desires scared me. I lay in bed and told myself: You will not be able to sleep unless you brush your teeth. I repeated this mantra until it became rote, an induced obsession. It became true. I could not sleep unless I brushed my teeth. I still cannot.

  Most importantly, I stopped crying when the Captain left. I didn’t have to try—I just stopped. In fact, I barely remember his departures after the age of eight. When my mother cried, I wrapped my arms around her, dry-eyed.

  After I stopped crying, I became clumsy. I tumbled down stairs and walked into walls. I tripped up stairs and burned my hands on the stove. I cut my fingers while chopping vegetables and once gave myself a paper cut on my eyeball. A therapist once told me that extreme clumsiness in children is a sign of depression. Severely depressed people do not cry. Nor do severely neglected babies. Tears are an essentially hopeful act—inherent to them is the body’s belief that someone is watching. When the psyche gives up hope that those cries will be answered, the tears stop. I was not severely neglected, nor severely depressed. But I did stop hoping for rescue. My mother begged the Captain to stop leaving. I woke from dreams calling his name. But when he was gone, he was gone. No amount of crying could summon him.

  In my mid-teens, the dry spell ended. The first time I fell in love, I put my favorite PJ Harvey song on repeat and cried all afternoon. That first girlfriend and I would cry like it was a kind of lovemaking—our bodies surging together, damp and entangled. We cried to Kristin Hersh, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Otis Redding, Leonard Cohen.

  Real sorrow needs no soundtrack. Our tears were not crocodile, but they meant something other than sorrow. Of all my tears, these were closest to what the Romanian writer E. M. Cioran coined “voluptuous suffering,” in his 1937 work Tears and Saints. My sobs at sixteen were sensual and sweeping—in tears, I inhabited my body with an abandon that I could not sexually, or in any other way.

  Studies tell us that women are more prone to tears and melancholia, and men to anger. They tell us that we enforce these expressions of feeling by gender, that women’s anger has, over centuries, been converted to tears and melancholia. The only time in thirty-two years that I expressed anger was in my early adolescence, the time during which the Captain still describes me as possessed.

  During the time that I was addicted to drugs, I rarely cried. When I was high, I was high. And the increasing misery that I felt at all other times was the dry kind. Even in the far reaches of my own denial—the enormous kind necessary to pursue any so seriously life-threatening habit—I knew no one could rescue me. That I was the only person who could walk out of that mess. That the only help I could accept was God’s.

  29


  Jon looks like the Captain. At least, he once did. When his sister, Joan, led me into her small study and handed me a stack of photographs that she had pulled from their albums, I blinked. It could have been the Captain, at twenty. The same brown skin and thick hair, the same gentle handsome face. He was beautiful. I studied his grade school pictures as I could not bear to look at Jon himself—searching. I raised their yellowed squares to my face for closer inspection and found my own face at that age—the shy gaze and heart-shaped mouth, the round cheeks and blinding innocence.

  He had disappeared for a few minutes and as I examined the pictures, he returned and peered over my shoulder. I smelled his aftershave, the smoke and beer on his breath. I have always loved that combination of scents. Now, my stomach clenched. Like a hovering wasp, his nearness made my shoulder smart. It was the strongest feeling I had in that house, and the strongest reaction I’ve ever had to another person, except Amaia. He stood too close, stared too long, and emitted a cloying need that saturated the air like their cigarette smoke, which stung and watered my eyes.

  The house was dark and cluttered with inhalers. Joan wheezed and fell into coughing fits that lasted minutes. When not speaking or coughing, she tucked a steady chain of cigarettes and antiseptic-smelling lozenges into her mouth, punctuated by puffs from an inhaler. As I looked at the photographs, she lowered herself into the nearby chair and rested her arms on a card table stacked with albums, newspaper, and a Bible.

  You’re even prettier than the pictures online, she said, and dropped her gaze to the Bible, pinching the threads of its tasseled bookmark. I haven’t read your book, but I mean to.

  Oh, no. Don’t read my book, I insisted. I’d rather you get to know me in person.