OCD Love Story

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Pour me another glass?” I say. I’m too busy typing and printing and glue-sticking to do it myself.

  “I’m giving up on glasses. Drink from the bottle,” Lisha says. Neither of us holds our liquor well, but Lish gets particularly messy. She still has a crick in her neck from passing out on my couch last night.

  “I gotta get over there. Austin’s. Are you good to drive? Am I good to drive?” I say.

  Shit. Didn’t think this through. This is exactly why I don’t party. In the battle between safe driving and checking on Austin and Sylvia, I have no idea what will ultimately win out. Maybe if I drive even more slowly than usual it will be okay. Or maybe I could hitchhike. Or I could call Beck and ask him to take me.

  It is a bad sign that I am even considering that.

  “But aren’t we checking on them right now?” Lisha says, gesturing vaguely to the computer and the collection of papers growing in towering piles on the floor, the table, the bed.

  “It’s not the same,” I say. I spill a little wine on the computer keyboard. I’m starting to panic with the knowledge that neither of us should be getting behind the wheel.

  “Here’s a question,” Lish says. She’s an aggressive drunk. I’ve noticed this about people: Drinking gives them permission to be the person they’ve always wanted to be instead of the person they actually are. “You make up all your own rules, right? So, like, why can’t the new rule of stalking them be that two hours of internet trolling is equally as valid as driving by their apartment building?”

  When Lish is drinking she has trouble hiding just how little she actually understands about why I do what I do. She’s better at faking it sober, but after a glass or two of wine she’s wrinkling her nose and cocking her head and making all the gestures and movements of a person who simply does not get it. When things were bad before, we didn’t have wine to bring out the honesty, so I never knew what she thought of the mistakes I made.

  It’s lonely.

  “I don’t make up the rules, Lish. Seriously, can you drive? Do I seem sober enough to drive?” I’m giving myself an impromptu sobriety test, which is probably the least useful thing I’ve ever done. I go cross-eyed watching my finger try to meet my nose.

  “I thought you wanted another drink.” She’s taking another swig, and another. Now she’s doing it just to be difficult, just to get me riled up, just to prove that she can and that she’s not going to drive me to see Austin and Sylvia. Little beads of sweat prickle on my spine. I can feel each individual drop as it’s forming. I hate it: waiting for it to fully form and then drop down. A sickening kind of torture designed to make me hate myself even more.

  “Maybe I can call them,” I say. “Maybe I can check on them that way since neither of us can drive.” I’m really only proving Lisha right, that in some weird way I’m making up the rules as I go along, but it doesn’t feel that way. “I mean, I just need to know they’re okay for the night, and then I’ll see them at therapy Wednesday. Right? Do you think that’s okay? I mean, if they’re answering their phone, then that means everything’s cool. And I’ve, like, done my duty.”

  Lisha shrugs.

  I decide Dr. Pat would approve of the slight shift in my routine. If she knew I had a stalker routine. It’s kinda the same thing as Beck washing his hands five times instead of eight: not a solution exactly, not a sign of sanity, but a step in the right direction.

  “This is good. Okay,” I say. Lisha bites her lips and drinks from the bottle with a few deep swallows. She’s all bones and knobby knees and uneaten sandwiches and it’s impossible not to wonder if the wine is maybe the first nourishment of her day. So, you know, her judging me doesn’t have the hugest impact. Harvard or no, she’s not perfect either.

  It doesn’t take much effort to find Austin and Sylvia’s home phone number. Things get easy when you know someone’s address and last name and profession, and before long I’m listening to the phone ring and letting my stomach drop more with each unanswered trill. Their voice mail picks up so I hang up and call again.

  “They’re not home,” Lish says.

  “They will be,” I say.

  “This night blows, Bea. No offense.”

  “Maybe your brother could drive us by there,” I say.

  “Jesus, no.”

  “I could call Beck—”

  “Bea,” Lisha says, loud and sudden like a shot. It goes through me like a shot too. I pinch my thigh. “Please don’t be like you were with Kurt, okay? Please?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I mean, he’s cute and a musician and stuff but—please. I’m exhausted.”

  I don’t say anything. I dial Austin and Sylvia’s number again, listen to the voice mail, hang up with a sigh.

  We polish off the fancy wine.

  “Remember Cooter’s friend Jeff?” Lisha says in a sleepy drunk voice.

  “Hm?”

  “Jeff. You had that huge crush on him?”

  “I know who Jeff is. What about him?” It’s hard to have any kind of conversation right now. I drank an extra half bottle when I realized I couldn’t drive to Austin’s. I figured if I wasn’t going to check on Sylvia and Austin I would do my absolute best to quiet down my mind.

  I’m not even really listening to Lish by now because I want to drunk-dial Beck. I want to drunk-dial Beck and have him come over and take me out and try again to be two normal people liking each other. I mean, first I want him to take me to Austin’s to make sure everything’s cool there, but then I want to go be normal. Lisha’s voice is basically just a distraction from that desire at this point. Little thoughts ride around a carousel in my mind: Austin, Beck, knives, cars, and then once in a while whatever it is Lisha is saying.

  I call Sylvia and Austin again. They could definitely be home by now. Meanwhile, Lish is still chattering on about Jeff, the least relevant person ever.

  “Not like Cooter’s friends with him now, obviously. But did your mom tell you Jeff’s in prison again?” Lisha says, her voice finally coming around again on the carousel of thoughts.

  At first I don’t register the meaning of the words and then I think I heard her wrong, because I’m dialing Austin and Sylvia’s place again and finally someone has picked up (Austin, I assume), out of breath, like he ran in the door and sprinted to catch my call. I’m really distracted by a million things so nothing she’s saying is penetrating.

  Then, just like that, there’s a feeling of zoom deep in my chest and I can actually listen and breathe and focus on Lisha’s face for the first time in a few hours. That is how the carousel of thoughts works.

  I hang up the phone.

  “Wait, why are we talking about Jeff?” I say.

  “I was thinking about all your men. Don’t you ever think about him?”

  Weird that Jeff is coming up right now. Suddenly he’s everywhere. Even when I’m at Newbury Comics, usually it’s my space now, not his. I have a whole sea of memories of Harvard Square that has nothing to do with Jeff. Three years’ worth. But lately he’s staining everything I do.

  “What do you mean back in prison? Jeff was in prison before?” It’s been so long since I’ve even thought of the guy that it’s like I’ve forgotten everything about him and have to start from scratch. I half know everything about him. It’s all fog where his face and biography should be.

  Sometimes I remember little blips of information, like shooting hoops in Lisha’s driveway or the way his face is shaped like Austin’s, but mostly he is a blur that I try not to look too closely at.

  I lick my lips.

  I had just relaxed at the sound of Austin’s voice answering his phone. That was only an instant ago, but already I’m gripping my fingers to my thigh. I do not want to think about Jeff and I can’t really figure out why.

  “Um, hello?” Lisha says. She sighs, a monstrous sound. “Can you stop being such a weirdo? You know all about Jeff having been in prison, or juvenile detention or whatever a while back . . . ?”

  I lik
e Lisha better sober.

  “Right. I guess I forgot?” I say. Some things get buried deep and finding them again is a fucking excavation. I guess this is one of those things. It’s better when I’m in control of these thoughts and memories. I shudder with the recognition of a forgotten piece of information. Something always known but never, ever looked at.

  “Can’t believe your mom didn’t tell you he’s back in there. She’s the one who told my mom about it.”

  But my mom doesn’t tell me any of that stuff anymore. She learned her lesson. She’s seen my growing scrapbook of crazy violent delinquents and DUIs. She’s noticed glue sticks disappearing because, yeah, okay, I’m following those stories a bit more lately. Maybe she knew I’d find out on my own, and that’s why she asked if I was talking to Dr. Pat about Jeff. Maybe that was a hint that something was going on with him.

  • • •

  Lisha falls asleep before she gets much else out. And then it’s just me and the dark and the thought of Cooter and his old friend Jeff and the detention center and Lisha and the knowledge of normal people doing terrible things. I try to wake Lisha up because some combination of wine and hearing Austin’s breathless voice on the phone before I hung up on him, and the insistent longing for Beck over everything else, is clarifying something that’s been stuck in my head for a long long time. Like when you have a kaleidoscope as a kid and things are mostly chaos and blurriness and then for an instant there’s some mysterious click in the toy and you see a totally vibrant, cohesive pattern.

  I see that pattern right now, and I need to show someone.

  “Lisha, hey,” I try.

  “Mmmm?”

  “Lisha, wake up. Hey. What happened with Jeff? What’d he do? And remind me why he was in jail before? How long ago was that?” But she’s passed out now and has the almost curdled smell on her breath of wine and sleep mixing together. I try to join her on the bed and in sleep but I have the spins and a really active mind, and my accidental cigarette addiction (courtesy of Sylvia) is sort of keeping me awake too, so I head to the porch with a pack of cigarettes. My parents are asleep, I don’t have any compulsions to take care of, and it’s too late to call Beck.

  Three o’clock drags in and my mind is a crowded closet of crap, but if you shift and shake a few parts, the missing sneaker, earring, mitten will come into view eventually, right where you left it, right where you knew it always was. Like the kaleidoscope. Emerging patterns and memories and pretty pictures and the unexpected shapes you never knew you’d find in there.

  So I just have to shake the whole messy thing and remember.

  “Boys fight,” my mother had said a few years ago when the whole thing was over. That’s the first thing I remember when I’m reaching in for the memory.

  Then the rest of it.

  My dad and I coming by the detention center my mom had been working at. We waited for my mother in the parking lot by her work, a grim place with disintegrating picnic tables and broken bottles and grumpy security guards on their smoking breaks.

  A kid ran out of the building: a brick block of a place decorated with wire fencing and superstrong floodlights sticking out of its side. I remember because the sound of the shaking fence collided with the flash of lights turning on and the guard on his break stumping out a cigarette.

  The kid ran straight into the guard. The guard said something low and calm, and the kid shouted in response.

  Then the kid picked up a broken bottle from the ground and stuck it quick and hard into the guard’s beer belly. It was about one million times worse than the worst thing I’d ever read about in the newspaper.

  It all happened so fast, but I saw everything.

  There was blood.

  Then I saw the kid’s face. He had freckles and a skinny frame and light brown hair that looked like feathers flopping around his face.

  “Jeff!” I called out. His name hurt my throat, all edges and jagged noise on its way out. “That’s Jeff!” I’d said to my father, who was reaching his arm around my shoulder to turn me away from the scene.

  Jeff, who had kissed me only a few months earlier in Harvard Square. Jeff with the pretty mouth and wet kiss and pointy elbows that always accidentally-on-purpose brushed against mine.

  The Jeff I knew wouldn’t do that. The Jeff I knew kissed softly and flirted under his breath and smiled when I laughed and smelled like Hershey’s dark chocolate, which he ate voraciously. Someone so sweet and so kind and so gentle was suddenly capable of doing something gruesome and violent and bloody.

  I threw up on my father’s shoes. And again in the car.

  I started having nightmares, when I could sleep at all. I’d wake up sweaty and out of breath. Then I’d cry and not be able to stop. It was humiliating. My mother and father let me sleep in their room for months after.

  Thinking about it now, it’s a wonder I ever slept again. It’s a wonder, really, that I ever forgot. I worked hard to bury that memory.

  I fall asleep on the couch downstairs instead of going back to my bedroom, and tell myself it’s because of how thickly I smell of smoke and how I don’t want to wake up Lisha, but there’s something else, too. Maybe if I sleep down here, a comfortable distance between me and Lish, maybe I’ll be able to forget again. Put that tightly packed closet back together. Hide this bit in the back again, and put everything back where it belongs.

  I PRETEND TO HAVE AN appointment before school on Monday morning. Crack of dawn kind of thing. I told my mother I was having a bad week and needed the extra session, but really I overheard Austin scheduling the appointment with Dr. Pat after his last meeting. If Austin and Sylvia are going to be there, I want to be there too.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful you’re taking initiative, honey,” Mom said with a closed-mouth smile and a look over my head at my father like: Hey, it’s going to be okay. “I’ve noticed you’ve been having some trouble lately. With the knives and stuff.” She opened her eyes wide to tell me she’s available to talk more if I want, but I do not want.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you think you feel any improvements though?” She went on when the silence threatened to puncture her enthusiasm. “You know, with the OCD things. Do you think you’re getting all that OCD stuff, um, cleared up?” I didn’t even know how to answer, since she was basically implying OCD was more like an acne breakout and less like a total prison in my head. I shrugged. I don’t even like the way the letters sound coming out of my mom or dad.

  “I just really want the extra appointment,” I said, and they both fluttered around congratulating me for taking care of myself, and holding hands like teenagers without OCD.

  I’m almost depressed at how easy it was.

  To cheer myself up I take the Tryst CD with me and decide this is the moment to listen to it at last. I hit play before I get on the road. I know there will be the distraction of release when the first notes come out and I want to get that immediate sense of ease clicking into place before I start driving. Maybe I’ll even be able to get there in a reasonable amount of time.

  It’s a little sexual, the way the first notes hit my body and the rush that comes on strong and hard and then turns to sweet calm moments later. For one second I am a normal girl, because the excitement and romantic first notes and blossom of release make me think of Beck, the guy I should be thinking of. Not for long, not in any way that would stop me from needing to be near Austin and Sylvia. But enough to let me know there’s something in me that isn’t quite so deranged. Something that has the look and feel and general shape of a teenage girl falling in love.

  Beck told me I was a good-luck charm in helping him get better.

  He held my hand for a few minutes, and only spent five minutes washing it off later.

  It seems like I could show him my bruised thigh and he would maybe kiss it instead of shrinking away from its raw reality.

  I could love the way he’s mostly mouse-quiet with just the occasional burst of joy or terror. I could love the terrain o
f his moods.

  Then it’s gone before I have a chance to really enjoy it. Because I could hurt him if I loved him. I mean, some of the most violent crimes are crimes of passion committed by people with zero history of aggression. If human beings are unpredictable in general, they are total loose cannons when they fall in love. I decide to stop thinking of the possibility of falling in love with Beck, which is maybe a sign of me loving him even more. I lock all the nice thoughts and feelings about him away, for his own good. Try to forget the spinning in my stomach when we make wordless eye contact for more than three seconds.

  I start the drive to therapy at fifteen miles an hour. The last snow of the year is still a few inches deep on the lawns, the remainder of a depressing March snowstorm. I keep the music on very, very low, so I can hear its general shape but not be distracted by it. I’ll turn it up once I make it to the highway. A mother and her kid are making snow angels on their front yard so I slow down in case the little girl runs in front of the car. People should have fences. I am a huge thumping heart as I drive past and I think it went okay, but I don’t know for sure so I circle around. There they are again, windshield wiper motions with their limbs and red, wind-burned faces.

  And I really, really think it was fine, they stayed on the lawn and I stayed on the road, but I have terrible depth perception and just . . . you never know. I drive by again. The mother takes notice. A five-second pause while she watches my car crawl by her house, then she takes the hand of her daughter and drags her inside.

  It’s humiliating, but safe at least.

  I move on at last by turning the Tryst CD up a half level and letting the loveliness of acoustic guitar and a pretty piano solo calm me down. Their voices fill the car: hers throaty and hot, his a choir-boy’s attempt at rebellion. He’s got a clear tenor voice that he’s working hard to dirty up. They sound good. They sing about love. There’s the hint of a fight in their lyrics, in the back and forth friction of the duet.