by Jo Ann Beard
I went to Florida once to work on a writing project. I borrowed a house on Key-something, with a million-mile view of the Atlantic, sliding glass doors, expensive furniture, and cockroaches the size of a man’s big toe. My friend’s sister, who was lending me the house, showed me how you had to spray Raid directly on the bug in order to make it die. At first it seemed unfazed, and then it wandered about a foot away and fell over. “They aren’t cockroaches,” she explained firmly.
“I’m not afraid of bugs,” I told her. “I like bugs, actually.” In fact, I’m married to one, is what I thought to myself. This was during a down phase in my marriage. I was there in Florida because he wouldn’t stop seeing the wife of his best friend. “We’re not doing anything,” he would explain. “What are you — nuts?” The wife herself was miffed at me. “Why can’t we still be friends?” she asked. I would speak to her only when cornered, and then only to call her names. She kept trying though, calling my house at odd hours to ask me how I was doing in a concerned, schoolmarmish voice.
“Quit calling my house and quit screwing my husband,” I’d reply evenly. She’d sigh; I’d hang up. Once I took the phone off the wall and threw it out the front door into a snowbank. Eric retrieved it wordlessly, dried it off, hung it back on the wall. “You suck,” I told him. He stared at me for a long moment and then went back to whatever he was doing.
I was trying to make him miss me by going to Florida, but it wasn’t working. On the way down, while driving in my car, I would have long imaginary arguments with him, where I hit every point square on the head and he was left speechless and remorseful. I had him apologizing to me left and right, every hundred miles or so. Between that and singing to the radio, it was a pretty productive trip down.
So, my friend’s sister left and I wandered around her house, upstairs, downstairs, finally setting up my typewriter in front of a large glass door that opened onto a balcony with a view of the water and some boats. I organized all my writing paraphernalia, sharpened some pencils using a paring knife from the kitchen, and then sat down and began having a nervous breakdown.
Eventually the sun dropped into the water, leaving a fakey sunset, gaudy pink and yellow stripes along the horizon. The boats disappeared, one by one, and a group of long-legged storklike birds flew past the large glass door, out over the water, and then were gone. They weren’t the kind of storks that carry babies, thank God; not bothering to have a baby being one of the things I deeply regretted the minute my marriage started unraveling. As soon as it got completely dark, the glass door turned into a giant black mirror, showing a ghostly image of me sitting in a wicker chair in the dimness. My hands were folded calmly in my lap. I looked like a dark painting of barely controlled hysteria, surrounded by wicker and the long fronds of tropical plants. I felt like I was on an elevator that had burst through the top of the building and was still climbing. At some point I stood up creakily on my stiff legs and went looking for something to put me to sleep.
Three warm beers later I stretched out on the king-size bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt like myself as a six-year-old, lying in bed for hours, making up frightening stories in my head, waiting for my sister to wake up and torture me. Me as a kid: skinny and pale and jumpy, terrified of a particular cartoon character who was thin and wiry with a narrow, whiplike mustache. He wore a black outfit with a string tie and he tied girls to railroad tracks or to conveyor belts with buzz saws at the end. On the way to the bathroom, I heard the sound of a Frito crunching. It was a cockroach, stuck to my foot.
I began freaking out in earnest.
Heart pounding, I scraped the bug off, peed, and stared at myself in the dark mirror. I was spooked and looked it. I walked on my tiptoes back into the bedroom and jumped onto the bed. I pulled the sheet around me and curled into my usual sleeping position (fetal). I imagined everyone in my life abandoning me, all the while assuring me they weren’t. I replayed a scene from several years ago: my mother in a hospital bed with Eric at her side, extracting a promise from him, he listening solemnly, speaking to her in a whisper, nodding, holding her hand; me in the hallway, exasperated and worn out, rolling my eyes, one last opportunity for defiance, sassing back even then.
I started a low-grade whimpering to keep myself company. It was dark and dark and dark and then it began to be light and light and then dawn showed up. I used a remote control to turn on the television and page through the channels. There was a religious program on, a Bullwinkle cartoon which was the last thing I needed, a worm’s-eye view of a woman doing an aerobic workout, and CNN. I watched CNN intently, with the sound off and my eyes squinted almost shut.
I kept remembering some footage I’d seen of a plane crash that happened a few years back, where a seat with a passenger strapped to it was thrown hundreds of feet from the wreckage. The seat landed in an upright position, and the passenger, slightly charred, was sitting quietly with an arm on each armrest, deader than dead. I replayed the footage over and over, trying to make the passenger wake up, but to no avail.
At some point I went into the bathroom and threw up, then stared at myself again in the mirror, surveying the damage. My eyes looked like two red holes in a pink blanket. My stomach hurt.
I found the telephone, a cordless job, and carried it out onto the balcony with me. The Florida sun was climbing, the air felt like hot, wet lint. The same old boats were making their way back into view, chugging along silently, leaving trails of foam that leveled back out into flat blue. I sat with the phone in my hand until there was nothing left to do but dial it. I called my own number at home and a man answered. He said hello about five times and then hung up. It was my husband.
Everything was overwhelmingly bright, my eyes couldn’t stand it. I went back in to the king-size bed. Suddenly the phone, still stuck to my hand, started ringing. I stared at it until it stopped. When the digital clock said 10 I called Chicago.
“Where are you?” Elizabeth says cheerfully. “I called you and Eric said you ran away from home or something.”
“I’m in Florida, at Taylor’s sister’s house,” I say. “I’m supposed to be writing.”
“You sound weird,” she says. “Jo Ann? You sound weird.”
I am weird.
“Why are we not talking?” she asks gently. “Are we okay?”
No, unfortunately we’re not. I swallow hard and stare at my clenched and hysterical feet. My stomach still hurts. I’m sitting in the center of a giant bed in a giant house on Key Nightmare.
“I’m freaking out,” I tell her. “I’m ready to jump off a balcony into the sand or something.”
She considers this for a long moment and then says, quietly, “Uh-oh, this is a marriage problem, right?” As far as she’s concerned, her own marriage is as solid as a house, but the truth is, it’s just about this time that her husband is beginning to notice what beautiful eyes his receptionist has, how the sound of her typing is like water rushing over a falls.
For about five minutes I can’t talk, but instead nod or shake my head when she asks me questions. Her voice has taken on a soothing, reassuring tone I’ve never heard her use before. It makes me feel like crying. The bedroom is starting to really bother me so I close my eyes and grope my way out, still holding the phone to my ear.
“I’m walking,” is what I finally say to her.
“Good,” she responds quickly. “If you’re walking, then you’re okay.”
This is encouraging, so I walk some more. I walk out onto the balcony and stare at the phony boats on the horizon. I try to tell her what is happening to me — that my heart is beating so hard my T-shirt is moving, that I threw up because of some plane crash footage I saw two years ago, that I keep remembering being stalked by a cartoon guy with a whiplike mustache and a string tie.
“Well, I hate to break it to you,” she says firmly, “but that sounds like Eric.” Eric is pretty thin and so is his mustache.
“Well, Eric’s certainly not stalking me,” I tell her. I start to cry suddenly,
which is a relief. “He’s doing whatever the opposite of stalking me is.” Now that I’m crying I can’t stop. I’m leaning over the balcony railing and tears are dropping into the sand below me. I tell Elizabeth this.
“Why don’t you just please get off that balcony, and go back in the house?”
“I’m not going to jump,” I say. “It’s only about ten feet from the ground, for Chris’sakes.”
“Oh,” she says.
The problem is, whenever it occurs to me that he’s leaving me, I start to feel like throwing up again. Also, I haven’t slept for a couple of days. Or eaten. And it feels like there’s an alien in my chest.
“You can’t not eat,” she says. “That’s what we’ll fix first.” She sounds so confident that I feel myself relax a little. I’m still trapped in the elevator but I’ve lost that terrible zooming-upward vertigo feeling. I look at my feet. Under her direction, I walk downstairs with the telephone and stand in the kitchen. “Tell me everything there is to eat,” she says.
One cupboard has rice cakes, spices, and vegetable oil, another has cans of things, boxes of cereal, and an envelope of mushroom soup, another has pots and pans, the refrigerator has mayonnaise and a jar of green olives. The sight of the pimientos makes me sick for a minute, I have to lean over and think of something else. When I say green olives to Elizabeth she immediately says, “Don’t look at the pimientos.” There is a basket in the middle of the kitchen table that holds two bananas, a paper clip, a packet of sugar substitute, a blue marble, and a ballpoint pen. “Perfect,” she says.
She wants me to eat a banana.
“Any one can eat a banana,” she says smoothly. “People give them to babies, they’re so easy to eat.”
“I’ll throw up if I look at it,” I tell her. My heart is pounding again.
“Oh no you won’t,” she tells me. “A rice cake would make you throw up; bananas don’t make people sick, else they wouldn’t give them to babies.” I can’t argue with her logic, but I can’t look at the bananas either. “I’m going to call you back in exactly half an hour. You take one bite every five minutes.” I give her the phone number, set the telephone down on the kitchen table, and peel a banana without looking at it. Thirty minutes later the phone rings.
“I ate it,” I tell her. Actually I ate half of it.
She has me take the phone in the bathroom and inventory the medicine cabinet. I do so obediently, the banana sitting in my stomach like a wad of clay. “Midol; emery board; Ramada Inn soap; Nyquil; unidentifiable pills way too big to take; sunscreen; sunscreen; eyeliner; generic aspirin; Bic razor, crusty.” I sit down on the edge of the tub. The medicine cabinet has made me panicky again.
“Perfect,” she says. “This is what you do now: put your swimming suit on and walk on the beach for one and a half hours, okay? Then come back and drink two doses of Nyquil and lie down on the couch. You don’t have to sleep or anything, just lie down.” She reiterates this. “In fact, it’s actually better if you don’t sleep.” She’s using reverse psychology on me.
The beach is empty, except for some old cans and a broken fishing pole. A bloated fish lies half buried in the sand, one tarnished eye staring placidly up at the sun. I step over it and make my way down the beach at the water’s edge. Water is soothing, Elizabeth told me, water is soothing, water is soothing. I feel calm all of a sudden, looking at the water and the sky and the fins of sharks circling about two hundred yards out. “Those are dolphins,” I say out loud. Each time I come across a bloated fish or a squashed something, I say, “That’s not dead.” When I feel like my legs are going to drop off I turn around and head back. By this time the sun is hanging about a quarter-inch above the part in my hair. My shoulders feel scorched and I’m sort of hungry. Back at the house I eat a rice cake with a glass of water. It tastes like Styrofoam, which is somehow better than having it taste like food. I drink as much of the Nyquil as I can stand, stretch out on the couch, and count sheep with my eyes open.
Five hours later the phone rings off in the distance and I come to. I feel swampy and disoriented, stand up quickly, and then sit back down on the couch. It’s hard to tell where the phone is located. Staggering through the house, I follow the noise into the bathroom.
“Guess who,” she says cheerfully. I report to her on what I’ve accomplished — the walk, the rice cake, the Nyquil nap. “Whew,” she says. “For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to come rescue you; I even called the airline.”
I feel deeply touched by this, and begin weeping. I’m not completely out of the woods.
“Oh honey,” she says quietly.
“He’s dumping me,” I wail. “For some pliant, rat-faced little nurse practitioner who doesn’t have an unusual bone in her body.”
“What’s her husband think about all this?” she asks.
“Who knows. He’s probably relieved, wouldn’t you say?”
We ponder this for a while. “I called him a couple of days ago and asked him if he missed me,” I say.
“Uh-oh,” Elizabeth says.
“He had one of his honesty attacks.”
“Why, that little fuck,” she starts. “I’d like to get my hands around his skinny neck.”
“He’s already left me,” I say, “he’s just too chicken to take his body with him.”
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she says carefully. “But it seems to me that you wouldn’t be this upset about him wanting to leave you. I think you’re this upset because youwant to leave him.” This makes my stomach lurch in a very sickening, grain-of-truth-to-it way.
“But I love him,” I tell her. “He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.” Even I know how trite that sounds. I feel like a character in a Gothic novel.
“Keep in mind who you’re talking to here,” she says dryly.
“I can’t believe I said ‘He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.’ I’m supposed to be a writer,for God’s sake.” I might be starting to snap out of it.
“It’s time for the other banana,” she suggests. “And I’m gonna talk to you while you eat it.”
Seventeenth summer, a farmhouse full of boys on the edge of town, a car full of girls heading toward it. It’s Elizabeth’s red convertible, prone to running out of gas and getting stuck in places that cars don’t belong. As soon as we leave the city streets and hit the back roads, everyone except Elizabeth gets up and sits on the edge of the car instead of on the seats. When we go around curves there is a long moment where it feels like we might fall out and be run over by the back tires. We like this feeling. Because we’re too young to die, we assume we won’t. Also, alcohol is involved.
It’s the year of Look Ma, No Bra, and extremely long blue jeans that drag on the ground and get caked with mud. Shoes are unheard of; hair is everything. We comb ours frantically as soon as the car stops. My own is long and lank, reaching just above my waist; it’s useless to even try and restore order.
“Here.” Renee takes my comb and starts working out the tangles gently, starting at the bottom. She raps me on the head with her knuckles when I tip my head back to finish my beer. “Stay still,” she commands, in the voice she uses on the babies.
“Ouch,” I say mildly.
Elizabeth assesses herself in the sideview mirror. She’s trying to see if her rear end is sticking out. “Why do I have an egg-butt?” she asks. This is rhetorical.
Renee finishes my hair and asks if she should braid it. A vote is taken: two for the braid, two for leaving it down. I throw my vote in with leaving it, we do some last-minute adjustments, and then, making Janet go first because she has confidence, we step through the front door and into the farmhouse.
The living room walls are painted black and the furniture consists of a sprung couch with no cushions, an old dentist’s chair, a black-light pole lamp, and a giant stereo system. Right now a guy named Dave is changing the album. Like a priest performing the sacrament, he kneels before the altar and removes the record from its sleeve. Holding the edges and bl
owing softly on it, he sets it on the turntable, moves the needle into place, and gently drops it. Deafening sound ensues.
Except for one guy named Bob, all the guys who live here are named either Steve or Dave, all have ponytails of varying lengths, and all worship Ted Nugent. They refer to him as Ted and speculate on his whereabouts constantly. They’re a year or so older than us, high school graduates who are busy amounting to nothing. We all have crushes on one or another of them. Mine is in the kitchen right now, mixing up a concoction of lemonade and Everclear. He’s a sweet-faced Steve with a charming personality and a massive drinking problem. He hardly ever notices me, but when he does I think I’m going to die. “Here,” he says, handing me a plastic cup of potion. I take a sip and try not to shudder. It tastes like sugar-flavored eau de cologne. “Hey, that’s good,” I respond brightly. I’m working on having a better personality.
“Ted here yet?” he asks me.
“Uh, no,” I reply. He wanders into the living room and I wait a second, then follow him.
Elizabeth and Janet are sitting on the funky couch reading album covers. Renee is on the floor, cross-legged, smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed. No sign of Carol. I look around. One of the Steves is missing as well. I drink some more of my medicine.
The music is so loud that the sound is distorted. I want to turn it down slightly, but I don’t dare. It is an unspoken rule that girls don’t touch stereo equipment. When the record ends there is a sudden leaden silence that rings almost as loudly as the music. Everyone looks startled and uncomfortable. A Dave gets up and pads over in his sock feet to put something else on. A different Dave loads a bong and passes it to his right. Someone switches off the regular light and switches on the black light. This is a relief for those of us who are worried about how we look; now everyone is equal, with velvety faces, lavender teeth and eyes.