Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

by Danielle Evans

  “Biting,” the secretary had confirmed, so he’d gone to the school to sort things out. There wasn’t much sorting. Eva confessed to the biting and could offer no better reason than that the boy had been getting on her nerves.

  “I value silence,” she’d said, “and he wouldn’t shut up.”

  He’d had no choice but to take her back to the house and wait for Debra to get back that evening. Debra had gone to the school the next day, the first day of Eva’s suspension, and demanded further questioning of the boy. He eventually admitted to having grabbed Eva’s behind earlier in the day. Debra threatened the boy, the school, and the parents, and Eva’s suspension was reversed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he touched you?” William asked Eva later.

  “Didn’t matter,” she’d said. “That wasn’t why I bit him.”

  The arrival of her salad saved Eva from further strained conversation about the state of her life. She’d already claimed, “I like living in the studio,” and “I’m getting so much work done.” She crunched on a crouton.

  “I’m glad to see you eating,” her father said.

  Eva sighed. “Daddy I’ve been eating for years. We eat together sometimes.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m just saying. You look good. Healthy.”

  She was certain that her mother had encouraged him to say this sort of thing. Eva wished there were a Bat-Signal for the waiter, something to invite him to disrupt them. She hated the inexplicable things between them, the secrets her mother had given away, even though they weren’t hers to keep. She remembered all those school picture days and holidays and recitals, and she liked it better when her father thought of her that way. These days she couldn’t be around him without feeling that, without thinking he was waiting for her to win something and smile pretty.

  She stabbed a tomato. She’d been eating normally since junior year of college, since she’d broken up with the last boyfriend her father had actually liked, the charming premed who’d told her she had cellulite and pretended not to hear when she threw up in his bathroom. He’d asked about that boyfriend all the time she was with Cheese, and twice as often when she was with Maya, until one day she’d said without explaining, Do you want me to hate myself? after which he’d never asked again.

  When she was being honest with herself, which was more often than she was honest with other people, she admitted that Cheese was the first boy who’d ever made her feel beautiful, the first man in her life she was sure was never going anywhere no matter what she did, not that it kept her from testing him. When she talked to Lenny on the phone, or replied to Kim’s sporadic e-mails, or met Irene for drinks, dinner, and conversations that felt increasingly obligatory, she gave them a host of quite rational reasons for why she and Cheese would never really get back together. He was twenty-eight years old and seemed content to be a barista forever; he claimed to love her art but resented the time she spent on it; she had been the first of what was now a line of four artsy ethnic girlfriends in a row, making her feel a bit like he was collecting them the way her old ceramics instructor collected dolls of the world. But the truth was there was something about his availability that unsettled her, that made her want to know what it would finally take for him not to be there when she showed up unannounced.

  She’d done it a month ago, the night she and Maya had broken up—thought maybe this time he would finally tell her she couldn’t do this to him anymore, that they both had to move on—but he’d opened the door and let her in. The girlfriend was still living in the apartment then, but she’d been gone for the weekend, meaning Eva got to curl herself into the corner of the saggy orange sofa she and Cheese had gotten for free off of craigslist two years earlier, and drink the cheap bourbon he poured her a shot of, and tell him what had happened.

  What had happened, first, was that she and Maya had redecorated, taken to painting the walls in brightly contrasting colors, and then hanging brightly printed fabrics on the wall: red against the kitchen’s deep purple, orange against the green of the bedroom. What had happened a few days after the apartment’s transformation was Eva thought of the stark, yellowing walls of her father’s cramped apartment, the faintly moldy smell of them, the way he shrugged off her gentle suggestions that there were plenty of nicer places he could afford to move; he didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood. He would offer some excuse about the hassle of getting the couch down the narrow stairwell without ruining it, as if he couldn’t afford new furniture these days, or about liking his landlord, as if Phil would hold it against him if he moved out of a building that Phil himself had left years ago. But she never pressed, because under the flimsy excuses she guessed her father’s reasoning was something along the lines of Why bother? He saw most of the people he wanted to see at work, had built a network of friends who spent more time at the office than at their own homes anyway. The only person who came to see him on a semi-regular basis was Eva, and although there were only thirty blocks between them—eight subway stops, counting the back-tracking, but walkable, if you were in the mood for walking—it had been over a month since she’d last been to visit, and she almost never invited him to visit her.

  When Maya floated in from work, click-clicking against the floors, smelling vaguely honeyed from her shampoo and mildly sweaty from her bike ride home from the after-school center where she was a social worker, Eva had already been shopping, planned a menu, bought decent wine instead of the cheap stuff she and Maya usually drank, and was a minute away from inviting her father over for dinner the next night, giving him time to get home before she called.

  “What’s the occasion?” Maya asked. She dropped her shoulder bag on the kitchen counter and held Eva around the waist, planting a soft kiss on the side of her neck.

  “I’m inviting my dad over for dinner tomorrow,” said Eva. She could feel Maya’s arms stiffen, then drop from around her.

  “Great,” said Maya. Her shoes clicked backward, away from Eva. Eva turned to face her, watched her arms fold across her body. “Does that mean I have to make plans elsewhere?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Your father hates me.”

  “He doesn’t. He just doesn’t understand—us.”

  “Maybe he’d understand better if you stopped introducing me as your roommate. He knows you’re bullshitting him.”

  “Maya—I’m trying. Everybody’s parents aren’t so awful that they can tell them to go fuck themselves and move on with their lives, and everybody doesn’t have a foster mom who owns a berry farm upstate and makes her own tie-dye skirts and is thrilled to meet her daughter’s girlfriend. He’s lonely, and he’s my father, and he’s never done anything bad to you. To me, either, for that matter.”

  “Is that the standard for parenting these days?”

  “Maya, don’t. I don’t need you to fix this. I’m not one of your kids at the center.”

  “No, you’re not. For one thing, my kids at the center can admit to themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, their parents will never love them the way they are. But you sit there and make garlic bread like a moron if you want to—he’s still going to look at you like the last time you did anything right, you were eleven years old. You will never be what he wants.”

  It didn’t matter how many times Maya apologized, or how much she’d cried when Eva came with Cheese to move the handful of things in the apartment that actually belonged to her. It didn’t matter that Eva admitted, when pressed, that she’d been out of line bringing Maya’s parents into it. There were moments when you knew things about what was inside of people you didn’t want to, knew how deeply they could disappoint you. There was love, and then there was suicide—and then there was whatever it was she had with Cheese. A place to go whenever she needed it, but where she’d never feel good about being. They’d spent the night she left Maya, and most of the following morning, in bed together, until there was the sound of the phone ringing, and with a glance at the caller ID, Cheese took the call and headed
into the living room with the phone. Eva had been ignoring the new girlfriend all morning, but the bedroom suddenly seemed full of things that belonged to her: a woman’s belt, a paint-splattered T-shirt, a bottle of orange nail polish on the dresser. She turned the sound up on the television. On CNN, green bombs were falling somewhere, and Eva felt more chastened by the blurred night vision carnage than she had by the token reminders that another woman lived here now.

  Cheese came back into the room a few minutes later. “Kate,” he said. “She’s upset about something. She was visiting her parents for the weekend, and I guess they had a fight. Eva—”

  Eva exhaled. “If you’re going to console distraught women all day, you’re going to have to be more gentle about getting rid of them.”

  “Look, she won’t be back tonight. But tomorrow—”

  “So I can stay until the replacement gets here?”

  “Eva—”

  “No, fair is fair. But you might have at least been more original. Really, another artistic brown girl? It’s like—”

  “It’s not like. It’s not like anything.”

  “Right, she’s a painter. And a different kind of brown. Watch, though, Arab is the new black.”

  “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  Now? Eva thought. She could not remember the last time things had not been ridiculous.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  She could have stayed, she knew that. She was Cheese’s first Meaningful Girl, and she had left him. She could have stayed the night and been sitting there eating breakfast when the new girlfriend came back if she’d wanted to. When she’d left, she’d thought of it as a grand gesture toward Kate, the kind of supercilious magnanimity that was usually out of her reach. She came back again a week later. The silence of her sparse Washington Heights studio had been driving her crazy, and the noisy parade of life outside was no relief. She’d been expecting Cheese to awkwardly ask her to leave, or worse yet, to awkwardly invite her in and expect her to awkwardly socialize with Kate without letting on that anything had changed. Eva was surprised by the intensity of the relief she felt when Cheese told her Kate had gone to California for a few weeks to think about their relationship. She preferred not to focus on what it meant.

  William wondered if there was a way to tell Eva how badly she needed him without insulting her. He worried that the best years of her life were going to look like the last few decades of his, that she’d be too proud to admit she needed him now, needed someone to let her put herself together, get a real job, go back to school maybe, find a decent boyfriend she could present in public, one who didn’t leave her looking so disoriented all the time. While he was phrasing and rephrasing the invitation in his head, the waiter appeared with their food. He leaned over Eva a little too closely when putting her pasta in front of her, and gave her an overly friendly smile. Watch it, that’s my daughter, William wanted to say, but he had never been able to say that about Eva. He didn’t know what to protect her from, and anyway, she seemed to have taken her protection into her own hands some time ago.

  He thought maybe he would show her a picture of the new place, though from the outside it didn’t look like much. He’d been skeptical when the broker showed him the listing, not to mention skeptical of Brooklyn in general. As a child in the Bronx, he’d hated Brooklyn on principle—too much boasting on the part of its inhabitants, too low to the ground, too many trains involved in visiting anyone who lived there. But the apartment, the converted upper half of a Fort Greene brownstone, had won him over. There were two levels, and three bedrooms, and windows everywhere you looked. He had taken to walking around the neighborhood in the evenings. He ate roti one day and giant hamburgers the next. He was becoming a fan of Brooklyn’s parks. He had once seen a young man in a T-shirt that read BROOKYLN. YOU KNOW BETTER. He wondered if this was the sort of person Eva would know.

  The apartment had cost him the better portion of his savings, but it was a good investment, and good for him, after all these years of living a life he pretended he could leave at any minute, even as he got more and more settled, to own something, to put down roots. Besides, he had been making, for almost a decade, far more than he’d been spending, what with his ascetic lifestyle. He needed a place—and this was a good one, a place where they could rebuild things, a place where he could see Eva living, her art in one room, her in another, until she was on her feet, until whatever sad thing that surrounded her had been lifted.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve moved to Brooklyn. I got a real place to live. It’s beautiful. Lots of room.”

  He did not mention the lack of furniture. He would get new furniture. He was fifty years old and he had never bought a piece of his own furniture. Even in the middle of the divorce, he had let Debra pick out what later sat in his old apartment for twenty years, and make arrangements for its delivery. This time he and Eva could find things they both liked, make sure she would be happy there. He’d thought of her in the big bedroom over the garden, sleeping safely, putting what she wanted on the walls. He’d remembered her racing through the small apartment he and Debra had shared so long ago, running down the hall with the light behind her. He’d remembered her stumbling into the kitchen sleepy-eyed on Sunday mornings, crawling into his lap and helping him grate cheese for the omelets Debra was making. He remembered what it was like to be at home in a place.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s room for you. Two rooms. You must be so crowded in your studio. Your mother says there’s not even room for real furniture. You shouldn’t be living that way. Come with me. We’ll get whatever you need. Stay as long as you need to stay.”

  “Daddy,” Eva said, pushing away the half-full plate of pasta. “Oh, Daddy. That’s wonderful for you, and wonderful for you to think of me. But I think we’d just get in each other’s way. Besides, I like living in my studio, and you need your own space. Everybody needs their own space.”

  Eva saw the look on her father’s face and fought the urge to take back what she’d said. He looked almost the way he had looked when she and her mother had first left him. She closed her eyes and could remember nothing but that morning years ago, dull sky, October leaves on the ground. He had taken her to get a last slice of New York pizza while her mother watched the moving men put the last of their things on the truck.

  “It’s not so far away,” he’d said. “Remember how much Daddy loves you?”

  “The whole world much and then some,” she’d remembered. She’d thought of love being like tentacles, reaching from wherever he was to wherever she was. She’d giggled.

  “Is that funny?” he’d asked.

  “I am thinking of you like a jellyfish,” she’d said, but he hadn’t understood.

  Wherever You Go, There You Are

  I need you to take Chrissie for a little bit,” Aunt Edie says, because apparently I pass for a role model these days. It’s Thursday night, and they’re standing on the doorstep, unannounced. Aunt Edie doesn’t bother coming in. She looks exhausted, her eyes puffy from crying, her usually impeccably braided white hair hanging loose and disheveled. Her last living sibling, Chrissie’s grandfather, has been in the hospital all summer, and odds are he isn’t coming out again. I tell Aunt Edie that I’m going out of town tomorrow—which is true, there’s a half-packed suitcase on my bed to prove it. She tells me I can take Chrissie with me, which more or less settles it. Chrissie breezes past me. Her footsteps on the creaking wood floor of my father’s house swallow her hello. I have a long list of reasons why Chrissie shouldn’t come on this trip, but few of them I’ll admit to myself, let alone to my great-aunt. In any case, she isn’t leaving much room for argument.

  “I’m tired,” says Aunt Edie. “She needs someone to look out for her, and I’ve got other things on my mind right now.” She reaches into her purse and stretches out her hand to give me Chrissie’s cell phone, which Chrissie is apparently banned from using. “Her father’s not leaving Bobby’s bedside,” Aunt Edie goes on, “and T
ia can’t take her because she’s too busy with nursing school, so that leaves you.”

  I stop myself from asking who it is Tia’s supposed to be nursing. Tia is Aunt Edie’s granddaughter, my cousin—Chrissie’s, too—but she is not a nurse or a nursing student. She may possibly own a nursing uniform, but if she does, it has breakaway snaps and she’s generally wearing a G-string under it. I don’t know where Aunt Edie got nurse from, but no one’s allowed to say Tia’s a stripper. Tia’s job bothers Aunt Edie for reasons involving hellfire and eternal damnation. It bothers me because even though Tia’s twenty-five like I am, she looks thirteen. I love her, don’t get me wrong, but she’s got chicken legs, and nothing in the way of hips or boobs, and a big head with wide almond eyes and a long blond weave, and while I can imagine many reasons why men might pay good money to see a real live woman, there’s something unsettling about so many of them paying to see a real live Bratz doll.

  In fairness, there isn’t much else to do in Waterton, Delaware. It’s close to everything else in Delaware without actually being part of any of it—about an hour away from the noisy hedonism of Rehoboth Beach’s and Ocean City’s boardwalks, about an hour from the suburban sprawl subdivisions that might as well be North Maryland or South Jersey. It’s not quite the Delaware that’s mostly pig and tobacco farms, though there are farms in Waterton, and a fresh fruit and vegetable stand every mile or so, and the world’s largest scrapple factory. When you approach the city limits from the highway, there’s a painted wooden sign that says WELCOME TO WATERTON: WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE. It doesn’t tell you that where you are is a city that gets seventy percent of its annual revenue from ticketing speeding tourists who got lost on their way to the beach. It’s mostly a town that still exists because no one’s gotten around to telling it that it can’t anymore. The highlight of most people’s weekends is losing money down at the Seahorse Casino, which is forty minutes away and not even a fun casino. It’s just a big room full of slot machines and fluorescent light, and the only drinks they serve are shitty beer and something called Delaware Punch, which tastes less like punch and more like the Seahorse Casino is determined to single-handedly use up the nation’s entire supply of banana schnapps. Considering the options, it makes sense that Tia does good business here.