The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

by Jana Casale

  The next week Leda met Rochelle for lunch at a diner that served organically raised and ethically sourced artisan burgers. Leda ordered the watercress aioli veggie burger and pomegranate lemonade. Rochelle got the coleslaw combo. She chewed with her mouth open and left her dirty napkin on the table in between wipes.

  “The thing I hate most about 7-Eleven is that they only have two kinds of toothpaste, but you know, it’s so much closer to my house than Walgreens,” Rochelle said.

  “Yeah, that’s frustrating,” Leda said, and tried not to look at the napkin.

  “Isn’t it? I wrote them about it, but I haven’t heard anything back.”

  Leda tried to stay positive. Do I really need to have friends that are interesting? Maybe she’s a good person, and shouldn’t that be enough? Who am I to not want someone in my life?

  At the end of lunch Rochelle asked her for her number.

  “So that way I can bullshit you at home too,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Here.” Leda typed it into Rochelle’s contacts.

  “Great, I’ll text you,” she said, winking.

  That night Rochelle texted forty-seven times. If Leda didn’t respond right away she would send three or four more texts, usually in the vein of “Hey girl, where are you?” or “I’m watching Big. I love Tom Hanks’s little brother.” And then, “Oh wait I mean his best friend. I always thought that was his little brother. Weird!” Leda kept up with it as best she could. She tried to keep a balance between not seeming rude but not encouraging it either.

  Over the next three weeks Rochelle didn’t let up. She texted nonstop. Anytime Leda looked at her phone there was a notification from Rochelle. The whole thing was maddening, but every so often a text would reveal just how lonely she was and Leda would feel sorry for her again.

  “Ate my last TV dinner. I wanted to go out for lunch, but it stinks to go out alone so much. The waitresses all know your orders,” she texted.

  “We’ll go out next week together!” Leda responded. She couldn’t help herself.

  John thought the whole thing was insane.

  “You should really stop talking to her. I know she’s a sad person, but you can’t be her charity friend. That’s not right either.”

  “I know, but I feel terrible,” Leda said. “She’s so lonely and that whole thing with the rape. I just feel terrible to just leave her like that.”

  “You shouldn’t. You can’t do this forever. You tried and that’s nice, but you can’t possibly maintain this.”

  “I know, but I still feel so bad.”

  “But where will this go? What could this possibly ever be?”

  She saw Rochelle two more times after that. Once for the lunch she’d promised and once again for coffee. There was no breaking point in the whole thing. No moment of the last straw or reason to stop talking to her other than all the reasons that had always been. It just was the way it was. That moment in their lives together, their fragile friendship formed around rape. Rochelle only ever mentioned the beach again once, and then it was a story of how her mom and she flew kites there when she was a child. All the while as she spoke Leda thought of the rape and those surfers, the sand and the seaweed, and the long walk to the car.

  “I was always good at flying kites,” Rochelle said.

  When it was time to go the girls embraced one last time.

  “Take care of yourself,” Rochelle said. “I’ll see you soon.” She patted Leda’s shoulder and winked before she turned to walk away.

  Leda stopped responding to Rochelle’s texts for the most part after that. She tried to think if there was some other way to end the whole thing, but there really wasn’t. Occasionally she’d answer and just say she was busy with a new job. Rochelle seemed to understand. She stopped texting and Leda figured that was it. But six months later she received an e-mail. “Here’s that video of my performance at Berkeley as promised. It took me a while to track down. Hope you are well,” it said. In the video Rochelle was alone on a stage. There was one spotlight on her and this fierce drumbeat was playing. She was wearing a white dress and dancing viciously to the beat. Her hands were in the air, her black hair tossing to the rhythm. It was wild and raw and gutty. It was really quite good.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Beginning of the Descent

  The first change Leda became conscious of was that when she’d drop something she wouldn’t bother to pick it up. She’d been doing it for a while and hadn’t really noticed until she dropped grapes out of the fridge as she went to make herself lunch. They fell on the floor hard. The sound was sort of permeating, as if it made a ring or a boom or echoed in the apartment, but really it didn’t make much of a noise at all. She looked at them on the kitchen floor. It was remarkably unremarkable the way they looked then. Green grapes in a plastic bag on linoleum. Like some kind of modern art piece extracted from its context and no longer art. What she didn’t want more than anything was to pick them up, but that feeling was not an act of defiance or an act of anything more than just her inability to feel a sense of motivation to lean over and take them in her hand and put them back on the shelf in the refrigerator. I don’t even want to lean, she thought.

  The weekdays started to feel like an obstacle she had to navigate. On the weekends things were fine. She and John would take day trips all over the coast. They’d go see the redwoods or drive to Point Reyes. It was monumentally different from the feeling of looking at the grapes. It was youthful and sexy. They’d take pictures together, and she’d post them on Facebook, and all her friends would be jealous of her.

  “I want your life,” Anne once texted.

  These were the best of times. It was as if the city and its landscapes were laid out only for the two of them. Their own little world wielded through snacks in the car and dinners in Carmel.

  But on the weekdays everything once laid out was folded back up. The view of the city, alienating in its outstretch. The hills no longer a vantage point but a steep climb. She’d try to get out of the apartment, but having nowhere to go was depressing. She’d make small tasks for herself—grocery shopping, mailing a package, buying Pepto-Bismol—but she had to walk everywhere because John had the car. The bus was an option, but to get downtown she had to wait at stops in the worst parts of town. It wasn’t like Boston, where there was the train that went everywhere and went quickly and you could stay underground. But really the deterrent was in knowing that every walk, every errand, every attempt to get out of the apartment was only in order to make existence bearable, tolerable, sustainably less depressing.

  Her last attempt at preserving her sanity through forced excursions was on a Tuesday. John had left for work early and already texted that he was going to be home late. She hadn’t written anything in four days. Really, she hadn’t even tried. It was sunny and bright out, and so she thought, Maybe I could write in the park. She took her laptop and walked down to the little park near her house. It was half a dog park and half a children’s playground; the play structures and sandboxes were quarantined away with a fence. Along the side of the dog part of the park were a few benches that were generally empty. Leda sat down on the one closest to the playground. In reality she didn’t belong to either side of the park, but she thought maybe someone would mistake her for a nanny. That’s my hope now. That strangers will think I have a reason to be in a park, she thought. She pulled out her computer and reread what she had been working on. The paragraph she’d written the week before wasn’t as good as she remembered. It was already discouraging, and she hadn’t even started writing yet. She looked out on the playground. A lone child sat on the seesaw. He weighed it down but seemed content despite it. The other few children played around him, climbing on structures or running around screaming, but he just sat there looking up, as if he were anticipating rain but wasn’t bothered by the prospect of it.

  The people in the dog section of the park would pass b
y her and shoot her sorry, accusatory looks. She couldn’t really blame them, as she imagined that she did look odd sitting there with her laptop in a dog park/playground, even for a nanny. A black Lab walked over and sniffed the bench she was sitting on.

  “Hi there, buddy,” she said. He sniffed her hand, but as she reached to pat him he turned unapologetically and went on his way.

  Twenty minutes passed. She tried to start a short story about a boy on a seesaw and his black Lab, but it just came out sounding silly. Just then an older lady holding a terrier walked over to her.

  “You know there’s a café with Wi-Fi just over there.” She pointed across the street.

  “Oh, I know. I’m not using the Internet. I’m just working on something,” Leda said. The lady was dressed in a rich-lady bohemian style. Her gray hair was perfectly done up in a short, strict manner.

  “Wouldn’t you rather work in the café?” she said.

  “Oh no, I’m writing and I can’t usually write in public places.”

  “Isn’t this a public place?”

  “I mean noisy public places.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d let you know so you wouldn’t be sitting here for no reason.”

  “Thanks.”

  The lady nodded, put her dog down on the grass, and walked away. Leda relived the conversation a couple of times in her head and then left the park.

  The weeks that followed were long and empty. She hardly wrote. Cleaning the bathroom became a respite from the monotony of everything else. She tried painting once, but it went awry. She read a book about a man who rode his bicycle into oblivion. She hated it but finished it anyway. Mostly, though, she’d watch TV or go on Facebook.

  “Oreos make everything better,” Katrina posted, and she liked it.

  On a Wednesday she thought, All I do is sit around and think about my arms being fat, and then she picked up a small Styrofoam ball she found inexplicably lying on the bookshelf and threw it against the wall, but it was too light and too soft to make any impact. It hardly hit the wall at all, really.

  John tried to be considerate. At night he’d offer to take her to dinner or to go to the mall. He’d get home late from work usually, though, so most everything was closed. Sometimes they’d just drive around.

  “Have you heard of Youth Lagoon?” John asked her on one of their nightly drives to keep her from going crazy. He’d always discover new bands and tell her about them. Early in their relationship it had been something they’d bonded over, but since moving to California things had changed. Most of the time when she would listen to new music it was in the car or walking somewhere, but now that she spent so much time in the house there were seldom any opportunities for her to discover anything. She lost touch with the latest and greatest, and what was worse was that even the bands she loved from before she no longer really kept track of. At first she didn’t think much of it. John still knew everything and would share stuff with her when they’d drive at night or go on their little day trips on weekends, but slowly it started to get to her. Sometimes he’d play an album for her for the first time and would start singing along. He already knew all the words, and she didn’t even know the band’s name. He was living a life at work and in the car and with music that she could no longer share. His own life was lyrical and new, and she was just waiting around for him to share it.

  “No, where would I have heard of Youth Lagoon? I don’t leave the house. I don’t talk to anyone.”

  “I don’t know. I just thought maybe you’d read something about them,” he said.

  Leda opened the window. It was a typically cool night, but she didn’t care. She wanted to feel like there was fresh air in the car.

  “I think you’d really like them,” John said. “There’s this one track, I think it’s, like, number ten or something.”

  “I don’t want to listen to music,” she said.

  “Well, okay, but just listen to this one track.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m sick of all your new bands.”

  “Let’s just listen to this one track, and then we can listen to something old.”

  Leda rolled the window back up. It was too cold. “I don’t want to listen to old music, John. I don’t want to listen to any music. I’m sick of the music always being your music.”

  “How is it my music?”

  “You’re the one who knows everything new. I don’t ever know any of these bands. I used to know everything. I didn’t even know Jack White had a solo album. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  “Look, I just…I can’t…” She tried to think of a way to phrase it to him. “I used to listen to music all the time, and when I did it was this thing that was my own, and now whenever we listen to music it’s together, and it’s bands that you’ve found and know, and I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “I’m not stopping you from listening to music. Why don’t you listen to it in the house?”

  “Because I don’t like to listen to music in the house. I like to listen to music in the car or when I’m walking somewhere. Most of the time I’d listen on the train on my way to school.”

  “Okay, I get that, but why not just listen in the house now?” His face became illuminated under a stop light.

  “Because that’s not me. That’s not real. That’s me making a fake life so I can live out here for you and your life, John. I already am doing everything for your life.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “It’s not fair, maybe, but it’s true.”

  “You have to find a life out here, Leda. I can’t do that for you.”

  “Find a life out here? I’d like to see you move somewhere with no job and no school and not knowing anyone and just ‘find a life.’ You had a life already built here waiting for you, and I had nothing. I’ve been trying to keep from killing myself. That’s my life out here. That’s what I’ve found.”

  “If you really feel that way, then you should see a therapist.”

  “See a therapist?! I’m going to get professional help to live in San Francisco and support your career? What bullshit is that?”

  “What do you want me to say, Leda? It’s temporary. We’ll move back to Boston, and things will be fine.”

  “Fine, but don’t play me your stupid bands anymore. I don’t want to hear them.”

  “Jesus, Leda.”

  “Jesus nothing!” she screamed. “All I want is my life back. I moved out here and did all this and I just want my life back! I look like a loser. I’m a loser.” She started crying and covered her face. The sound in her hands of her own tears and her own crying was a sound that was real and loud and she could hear it.

  After that John said nice things. He hugged her, and told her that he’d start looking for a job soon and that they’d move back to Boston and that everything would be great like it was. They drove to the ocean and parked by the barrier. It was dark, but they could still see the whites of the waves, the cyclical motion of the earth and the moon’s pull silent in the car. On the way home they listened to Youth Lagoon.

  CHAPTER 28

  Fristmas

  They got a small Christmas tree because they didn’t have enough ornaments to fill up a regular-sized one. Beyond that, it only seemed right, given that it was just the two of them in their little apartment. Leda had visions of getting a bigger and bigger tree each year so that by the time they’d have children they’d have a full-sized one and enough ornaments to fill it.

  Apart from decorating the tree, it hadn’t felt like Christmastime, really. It was sunny and in the mid-sixties most days. On Saturday they went downtown and there was skating in Union Square below palm trees. A band played Christmas carols on Caribbean steel drums.

  “Who’d ever think you could miss feeling cold,” she said to John over a tinny “Little Drummer Boy.”

&nbs
p; They decided to have their own little Christmas the week before they would be going home to visit their families. How oddly comforting it was to have this private little couple’s Christmas. It put so much misery into perspective, as if tinsel and stockings were enough to compensate for all the lonely afternoons spent in the house.

  She cleaned the entire apartment that Friday before “Fristmas” (“fake” + “Christmas”), as they called it. It was an ambitious endeavor; she even washed the cabinets. At first it felt cathartic in the way that cleaning often could, but as the day rolled on, and her back started hurting, and she pulled a piece of floss off the floor from behind the toilet, she started to think about how this was the life that so many women in history had lived, that all they did was clean like this all day, every day, and from them she could not really extract her own form. She saw herself as pale and tired, falling asleep at night from an exhaustion that was cruel and unrelenting and waking up the next day to nothing but the same. And here I am cleaning things John would never think to clean because he’s a man, and he’s never thought about cabinets being dirty. No, he wouldn’t find this floss behind the toilet. No, his back will never ache like this.

  Later on in the day she took a break and looked through a Victoria’s Secret catalog. There was this one picture of a model in cotton underwear holding up a pillow shaped like lips over her breasts. The picture stood out because the model didn’t look that skinny. She was, of course, as skinny as any of the other models, but the way she posed made her look kind of like she had a bit of a belly. Leda couldn’t stop staring at it. It was as if they’d missed this one bad picture. That it had somehow snuck its way into the catalog among all the other glossy, perfectly formed shapes. She had an impulse to cut the page out and save it. As she got up to get the scissors she thought better of it and put the catalog in the recycle bin instead.

  The next morning they woke up and exchanged gifts under the tree. She bought John a guitar that she’d been saving for. He bought her a locket from Tiffany’s. It was an enormous surprise. Nearly six months before, they had gone in to take a look at the jewelry just for fun. She had seen the silver locket and really liked it.