Why Did I Ever

by Mary Robison

  “No, you’re right. That’s fair,” he says. “’Cause it is my fault for havin’ my silly ideas.”

  I’m silent.

  He says, “You don’t even believe in such a thing as outer space?”

  “No more questions,” I tell him.

  This Was Your Idea

  On the ignition system of the Boyfriend’s Jaguar is such a thing as an Intox Interlock. In order to start the car he has to pass a breathalyzer test, which he never can.

  So I’m driving but after I make a tiny error he says, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa-whoa-whoa!”

  “Honey, please,” he says. “You must watch goin’ through here. You really have to. ’Cause they’re drunk, see, sweetie? Or they just step right out in front like that. They’re trusting you. That you’ll see ’em and stop.”

  “I mostly will,” I say.

  “Bikes, though, are especially bad,” he says. “And don’t ever, ever block the way of the streetcar this way. Fuckin’ go! That music blasting is what’s nerve-rattling. Now slow way-way down, babe, I mean it. I said that they’re liable to step right out.”

  I look over at him approvingly for using the word “liable” and nearly mow down a pair of jogging girls.

  “Aw, geezy,” he says, “don’t go Clairborne Avenue! I already almost got killed there a buncha times.”

  Dix is his name—Taylor “Dix” Didier.

  Back to the crib with him. He has a fifty-room mansion on South Sioux.

  I say, “Not too spicy, that dinner you’re preparing, Dix. I will be down in your pool.”

  115

  After dark, we roll over to the Saints & Angels Tavern.

  The place has a black marble L-bar and on the wall is a green neon trolley full of coral neon people who are waving hello. There’s also a pink alligator above a Bud Lite logo and framed glass signs for Amber Bock, Shiner, and Chimay.

  “Shiner Bock is brewed in Texas,” says Dix. He says this because it is a thing he knows.

  116

  The man with the woman at the table to our left has forty years of tattoo artistry behind him. He couldn’t begin to say how many tattoos he’s done, maybe twenty-five or thirty thousand.

  He biffs me on the shoulder on his way to the can, and, confusing me with someone, asks, “How’s Vardamin? How’re the kids?”

  “So let’s hear it,” Dix says dejectedly, once the tattoo-maker has shuffled off.

  117

  Not one time but three has Dix been jailed for public intox. Chosen from the drove on the streets of New Orleans.

  With the same brain he uses to remember to buy milk!

  But I have only myself to blame if I listened last night for six straight hours as he argued jujitsu over tae kwon do.

  And only me to blame if I didn’t speak up before he purchased pink girl things for me for my visits—bathroom curtains, sick with cakey-lace, and terrible little ballerina soaps. My God, what a heartbreaking person!

  You Were Saying

  I’m here on the bench. The Deaf Lady joins me. We sit silent for a bit, watching what all’s going on. There are shadows moving, past the intersection on a lot, of some night staff out on a smoke break. There are rills of steam from a lighted doorway. It’s a night after a storm; hot, with no stars.

  She says, “Week or so ago, I let the bathwater run over.”

  “Everybody has,” I say.

  Now what comes by is a high school bus filled with marching-band members and their instrument cases.

  “By a lot,” the Deaf Lady says. “So that it drenched the hallway. Ruined the woodwork all along there. Soaked the carpet through. Probably got the floorboards beneath.”

  “Hmm. Might cost you your security deposit, actually.”

  “Don’t keep emphasizing that,” she says. “What do I care about a security deposit? I’m rich!”

  “You are? Seriously? How rich?”

  “That was hyperbole,” she says. “Of course I’m not rich. But the issue isn’t some damage I did to the bathroom tore files.”

  “Guess it’s not,” I say.

  She says, “What you don’t understand is, they’re putting me in a home. My kids, I mean. Haven’t I explained this to you? It’s a nice home, but that’s where I’m going.”

  I say, “Much later tonight, I plan to take some wine and a blanket, and go someplace and watch the sunrise.”

  “Take me with you,” says the Deaf Lady.

  But this always happens. Damn it. Now I’m not sure I want to go.

  Don’t Bring Yourself Down

  Here they are, they’re at my door, live IRS agents. Two of them, hammering and pounding.

  They say, “Miss! It is to your advantage to speak with us!”

  “Well, you couldn’t mean me,” I say. “I’ve merely stopped in and I’m just here to see somebody.”

  “Go away,” I say.

  I say, “Get the fuck outta here.”

  I say, “Shoo.”

  120

  They leave me with a card that reads:

  important notice. You were out when we called. It is important that you visit or phone the address or number shown below. This card is not for id purposes.

  —the IRS

  121

  Huh.

  122

  Belinda and Penny make a new regulation. It’s that I’m not authorized to think up script changes on my own.

  “Write only what the team of us has already approved,” says Belinda. “Don’t try to get creative. We’re not The Antioch Review.”

  123

  Seven a.m. and here’s Hollis asleep in my living room; his legs under a corner of the oriental and the rest of him covered by a drapery panel he unhooked.

  124

  He joins me in the kitchen, where I’m trying to scrub this stove burner I scorched. He says, “When you’re through with that, you think we could have Cream of Wheat?”

  He sits down and watches me from the breakfast nook. He yawns.

  I say, “I’ve been scouring this now for an hour. It costs what, three hundred dollars?”

  “Never mind that,” he says. “Listen, you woke me up with your humming. That Dial soap jingle? Do you keep that kind of thing in your mind? What if Malcolm X heard you humming that?”

  I say, “You’re back.”

  That’s All Right, the Girl Will Get It

  An article on missing pets advises me to drop pieces of my clothing on street corners all over town. The article asserts that my cat will be drawn to the scent, have a seat, and wait for me.

  I take the suggestion and I’m willing to sacrifice for my cat. A lot of my wardrobe goes out of my life this way.

  126

  I tell myself, “O.K., I promise I’ll shut up but there’s just one additional thing.”

  “Forget it,” I say, “no more commentary. I don’t care what you think.”

  127

  I run into my friend Martin over at Red Lobster and say, “‘Quarter to Three’ by Gary U.S. Bonds. Now, there was a dance song.”

  I say, “‘If I Was Your Woman’ by Gladys Knight and the Pips.”

  “It’s not rated,” he says.

  I say, “Well, don’t you think it should be?”

  “Don’t you think it should be?” he says, doing a cruel but eerily accurate imitation of my voice.

  128

  I drive down to New Orleans and here’s Dix with his arms wrapped in black electrical tape for me, and his clothes have immense and several zippers.

  So I’m deciding I should go somewhere else—nowhere, but definitely else.

  Chapter Four

  129

  For the world’s so dark without you,

  and the moon’s turned down so low,

  and I get so lonesome a
bout you,

  way in the night, you know.

  —james whitcomb riley

  Posted on the rear of this truck is the sign: “stay back 50 feet.” This cautions me that the truck might fling its cargo of glass shards and sharpened metal spears.

  Everyone on this road is a twat. This road is a twat. A word that should be retained for its utility.

  I take the Battier exit, get off the interstate, swerve onto the access road, pitch my sunglasses out onto the pavement, line the car up, drive back and forth over them and back and forth thirty-nine times until they are ground to powder.

  130

  I know now that nothing I planned is going to happen. Whatever it was I planned. Gum! I meant to buy gum. Why was that so impossible?

  This Must Be America

  Battier’s convenience stop has no food, no coffee, no cigarettes, no sodas, no gum, and nobody who wants to wait on me anyway. So this is turning out to be a great day.

  Outside the store, a man in a white apron and a white paper hat sells me mineral water, newspapers, magazines, a fresh tomato.

  132

  “People liked Neal Cassady,” Hollis says to me over the phone.

  133

  Talking to him can be a hell, friend or no.

  I say, “Just answer me straight on this one thing. Would you want such-and-such?”

  “That’s a whole different situation,” he says. “I can’t address that.”

  “But would you? Honestly?”

  He says, “It’s completely different.”

  “I know! I’m asking you to make a simple comparison.”

  “No can do,” he says. “The two don’t compare.”

  134

  I say to myself, “Take Tylenol. I don’t want to put up with your asshole whininess.”

  “That’s nice talk,” I say. “Very compassionate. Impressive vocabulary too, I might add.”

  “Asshole whininess,” I say.

  135

  Rifling this copy of Rolling Stone, I say, “Here’s a full-page ad for the U.S. fucking Army. And do I hate Jann Wenner for running this ad? No. It’s they who don’t write him letters saying, ‘Cancel our subscriptions, Butterball. You better rethink!’”

  136

  To this truck I remark, “Archway, you’re psychotic. I don’t know if you’ve had too many cookies or what, but choose a lane and drive in it.”

  137

  I rumble over the Alabama border into Florida. I have thought not at all about where I’m going. I wouldn’t turn back, though.

  138

  I would give Paulie this fresh tomato, pat his curly hair.

  139

  My headlights glance on signs with silhouettes of moose.

  “Look for moose,” I say to myself.

  I say, “At least back there you didn’t hit an armadillo. And you had the option.”

  140

  I drive under morning stars along the Perdido River, through thirty miles of barrens. Now and then a barn’s side advertises maize or syrup or something else I wouldn’t buy.

  I should turn back. Florida is a horrible toilet. There are a zillion snakes woven into this road and those clouds over there mean God’s coming.

  141

  That fat man driving around with his little pooch? Now why don’t I know him or someone like him? That man, I bet, could make me very happy.

  142

  Can I turn here? O.K., good. I can? Thank you. But what if I don’t know if I want to? Sir?

  143

  I just regret everything and using my turn signal is too much trouble. Fuck you. Why should you get to know where I’m going, I don’t.

  144

  I would say to some ex or other, “I never liked you. I know you were back in the back there, with all my favorite photographs, blacking out the faces, scissoring off the heads.”

  145

  I’m taking a room in the next town, whatever is the next town, and moving into the room to live there until I die and be among new and different people.

  146

  My room is in the Villa Rimy, a place dressed with scarlet shutters and nestled along the sea road.

  I sit at the window, elbows on knees and not moving but looking out, thinking this evening I’ll jog on Boulevard Je to the old port and the city wall and run past that to the parapet and see the blackened fort. I’ll go at dusk when the streetlamps have smeary bowls of light and the sky’s bubbling and everything’s brown, dusted over, baked like pastry, when the wind’s still searing but there’s no shrieking sun to contort things and make them see-through.

  What I have is no real interest in running but a little bit of wonder that my mind can house such a mélange.

  Chapter Five

  Pay the Man

  We’re in a tavern on the Riverwalk, Boyfriend Dix and I. He slows up to lean over a table of people he knows. “She’s forty or so,” he tells them too loudly. He says, “But she is, up and down, a wonderful-beautiful woman.”

  “You’re set for another six months then, Dix,” says one of the friends at the table. “What’re you supposed to do after that?”

  148

  Over here in the corner, two of the waiters are sipping from a helium balloon before calling out their food orders.

  Stay Where You Are, Don’t Come Any Closer

  “You’re saying?” Dix asks me.

  “What I’m saying,” I tell him.

  “But you mean?” he asks.

  “Same as the words mean,” I say.

  150

  Now he’s regaling me with tales of his days in the United States Navy. He says, “You berth a ship, sweetie. You park a big ship where you deep-channeled—you know how they throw those big huge ropes? Those are four and a quarter inches in diameter.”

  151

  He teaches me how to flip my Zippo lighter from hand to hand. He’s an idiot but he knows the one good trick and now I know it.

  A’ight

  Mev and I are seated across the table from each other in the breakfast nook. We’ve been coloring Easter eggs. Mev’s too miffed at me to speak. She snatches up an egg on which she earlier crayoned “Mother” and prints above that, in angry caps, “i am still your.”

  Stuff My Mouth with Gas-Soaked Rags

  There, I’ve created order. The next time I want aspirin it’ll be in the bathroom closet on the second shelf in the sixth row beside the other pain relievers. Right beside.

  Also, I’ve now painted everything in the place, everything, especially the hideous mint-green spine of this Thomas Pynchon book, which I do someday intend to read at least some of.

  I’ve painted the stapler. That and my little travel alarm. The cleaning supplies and vitamin bottles are now Venetian gold. Jade green and lavender blue complement Venetian gold. So does a very deep yellow.

  One problem, however, is I’m no longer sure if I have a lot of something or a little. Before shopping, it’ll be necessary to hand-weigh every item on the shelves.

  And on the keyboard, I shouldn’t have coated gold on the numeric keys. The alphabet I can touch-type but the ampersand is where in the hell?

  Letter to Sean Penn

  I get off a letter to tell Mr. Penn that I rented his movie The Indian Runner, and that, although a few scenes seemed stupid, the movie was otherwise enjoyable and well worth the time and trouble it took to watch.

  155

  I say to myself, “Wash the hands first. Dinner started at six, you’re late, sit up straight at the table, no you may not be excused.”

  I say, “Do you think you could pour that without spilling?”

  For hours and hours.

  I follow myself outside, asking, “Where do you think you’re going? Are you finished with your work?”

  I hav
e to admit, “No.”

  “Then you’re not allowed out, get back inside,” I say. “And hang up your jacket.”

  So I guess I’m not going anywhere. But what’s there to do at home? I pulled the plug on the television.

  No Fun for Anybody

  Hollis looks up from his magazine, reaches and flicks something off my shirt collar. “Onions on your blouse,” he says.

  Why can’t he make it easy for me? Why must he make it so hard?

  Still Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

  I let my mother into my head for a minute and she’s—what do you know?—in there giving a lecture on pharmaceutical marijuana.

  I say, “Damn it, Mom, I said they should do that, back a long time ago. You yelled at me!”

  158

  Now it’s the CD player. “I’m goin’ down,” sings Mary J. Blige, over and over and over.

  Vocabulary

  I’m crabbing at Dix about the blinks on my answering machine that have appeared since I went out and came back in. I say, “Twelve messages in eleven minutes, Dix? That constitutes stalking!”

  He doesn’t know “constitutes,” so we get off on that and we never return to the harassment issue. He likes the word for its government sound.

  160

  In this one message, he’s wishing me a “Happy Good Friday.”

  The Streets Are for People

  I’m at the head of the line at the water company bitching my head off and making a very good point and I would be winning this argument if I had it with the water company and not with the electric company which is where I ought to be, way down on the opposite side of the avenue.

  I’m Sure Someone Can Use It

  Mev and I colored a psychotic number of eggs and made Easter baskets for Hollis and the Deaf Lady.

  Now those two couldn’t be happier. They’re curled up on my couch chuckling and nibbling candy at one a.m. as I traipse off to bed.

  I notice that Hollis separated the yellow marshmallow chicks from his basket and put them into the missing cat’s sacred bowl.

  He’s saying, “Milk chocolate rabbits are delicious.”

  Mustn’t Keep Them Waiting

  Now, is that noise me? I’m slowing down, letting everybody get away from me until I determine if I am the cause of that noise. Or if my tire’s on fire, that fucking thing, it’s my least favorite tire. And this bridge is not correct. It took me twenty-six minutes to find the wrong bridge? I need to be in Petal in one-half hour. Or no I don’t, I’m not going to Petal! Or I could go to Petal if it’s anywhere near here. On the radio is the loneliest piano music.