Problems

by Jade Sharma

  Peter stared at me as I put my hair in a ponytail. “Are you high?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  I lied to Peter because he didn’t understand shit. He didn’t understand how snorting a bag of dope didn’t mean I would end up becoming a toothless, cracked-out skank, or whatever clichéd Hollywood bullshit was implanted in his brain. When I tried explaining things to him, he would hear someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

  He made me feel like I was someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

  I’d been a chipper since I was eighteen. The trick was you never did it three days in a row. I knew enough junkies to know I had to stop for a while, because if I kept using, it would stop providing any relief and become one more problem.

  He apologized.

  I could tell by the way he touched my face he wanted to do it.

  “I love you,” he said. His breath smelled like shit. His hand rubbed between my legs, and I made all the sounds, then his hand went over my tits, pinching the nipples, making them hard so it hurt when they rubbed against my rough thermal shirt.

  He fucked me from behind. Felt like a baseball mitt, stretching. Inside, it was everywhere. Visualize it. Ugly, veiny thing beating in and out of softness, pinkness, perfectness. That’s the attraction, a kind of ruining. I liked it hard.

  He played with my clit while he fucked me from behind, and I came because I liked feeling like his bitch on all fours.

  After I came, I wanted to sleep, and he was taking forever. You couldn’t say, “I’m going to rest my eyes but feel free to keep going.” You couldn’t say, “Stop pulling my hair, it was cool at first but now it’s just pissing me off.” You couldn’t say, “Are you bored? I’m a little bored.”

  Please come already.

  He sped up, pulled out. I turned on my back and lifted my shirt, and he came all over my tits and belly.

  I loved how much there was when Peter came. I loved being drenched in his come. I loved lying there in it. I rubbed it into my skin with my fingertips.

  I felt warm, and I thought of going somewhere new. I wanted to see his same face with a new background behind his head.

  He wiped my stomach with his boxers and threw his boxers into the hamper.

  “You shouldn’t go to the doctor alone tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll be late to work. It’s at four?”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. I ran my finger down his back, zooming around all the moles that had never been checked for cancer because Peter didn’t have health insurance.

  “You don’t need to be there, sport,” I said. I called him “sport” because he drank a protein shake every morning.

  There was no doctor’s appointment. I’d made it up. I was supposed to meet Ogden.

  I lied all the time. Sometimes I lied so I didn’t have to answer questions, like saying my father was still alive so I didn’t have to talk about him dying. I regularly told people my father was white. Not because of some deep-seated issue with being Indian, but because I didn’t know much about Indian culture, and I felt more American than anything else. I lied because it felt true. I said it to get off the hook for answering questions about why cows are sacred or whatever.

  You can’t help the truth, the mundane details that frame people’s perceptions of who you are, like where you were born, what your father does for a living, how many siblings you have. In our lies we offer the world a presentation of how we would be if we had complete control over our existence. That’s why it’s so embarrassing to get caught in a lie. It offers a glimpse into how you want to be seen. These are the things I am insecure about. You take things off the table, clean up your stories, edit out the parts that don’t make sense, and think, Now that’s better.

  I ran my hand through Peter’s soft, sleepy hair. I lied to Peter about Ogden because I didn’t want to hurt him. In a different world, maybe he would have understood that I was only trying to protect him. How if I didn’t, I would drown him with my neediness and insecurities. Peter wasn’t capable of helping me. He knew how to love, but he didn’t know how to talk me through the layers of my neuroses.

  “I don’t wanna go to work today,” he whined, stretching.

  Peter was a bartender at a high-end restaurant on the Upper West Side.

  He must have casually mentioned “my wife” in stories to customers at the bar. They’d imagine the kind of woman a handsome, charming man like Peter would have as a wife. The character in the book never looks like the actor in the movie playing them.

  I straddled him and kissed him as if I was paying a toll on my way over him. I picked up the seltzer from his bedside table and chugged it in front of the window.

  “Put some clothes on. You can see everything through those blinds,” he said.

  “Who cares? It’s my apartment. What are they going to think? A woman is half-naked in her own apartment?”

  Peter was always caring about things that didn’t matter.

  In the bathroom, I plucked hairs out of my upper lip with tweezers. I liked the feeling of the hairs being pulled out of the follicles underneath the skin. Some of the hairs the tweezers could never grasp. I ended up drawing blood, and the hair was still right there. I rubbed the hairs off the tweezers onto my finger. The fat part like the top of a comma. I touched the ends with my fingers. Black and wiry.

  Peter materialized in the bathroom mirror behind me like some kind of bizarro vampire. “How long have you been lying to me?” he said. He took out exhibit A: a rolled dollar bill. “I found this on the coffee table.”

  I shrugged. “That is a rolled bill. It is not a drug,” I said, high.

  “Maya, c’mon. You don’t have to lie to me.” He called me by my name when he was serious.

  “Don’t be serious,” I said, as if I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I’m not an idiot. Whatever. It’s your life. I don’t even know why I try—” And then he said more things. Things I didn’t care to hear. Things that made me try hard to think of other things until he left and I could get more high and not think about anything.

  Ogden never gave me shit. Ogden only listened.

  The ways Ogden drove me insane were the ways I wanted to be exactly like him.

  I wished Ogden could love me the way I loved him, but he never would, because I cared too much and was always opening up to him. Nobody wanted anyone who talked so easily about everything. They wanted a big puzzle and a goddamn treasure map. Find my heart by going through all these torture chambers. That’s what people wanted: challenge and mystery. Poor Ogden. I was like, “Here are all my scars. I’ll tell you my secrets as you die of boredom. Here are the answers to questions you never cared enough to ask.” I lifted up my shirt and said, “Please love me.” I lifted up my skirt and said, “Please don’t leave yet.” I felt empty when his cock wasn’t in me. I wanted him to order me around. I wanted to be his personal come dumpster. I loved when his whole body was on top of me and his arms and legs surrounded me on all sides, like he was a big insect about to rip my head off.

  When Ogden told me it was going to be okay, I believed him, because he was old and knew stuff about life that I didn’t.

  After Peter told me he loved me for the first time, I said, “Peter, I am fucking crazy, and I will fuck this up.” And he nodded. Maybe he saw it as a challenge. Maybe he thought, Well, at least this will be interesting. But he kept coming over, and he kept watching me turn from sane person to insane person to sorry child, and then we’d hug, and I was forgiven. And so you had to ask yourself: Who is the crazier one?

  Peter and I met when we worked at the same bookstore. Peter’s on-again, off-again girlfriend didn’t show up to the store Christmas party. I played chess with him, and then we went back to my place. We talked on the couch. I went to the bathroom and shaved my pussy and thighs. When I walked back in, he was just standing there. We kissed. His beard itched my face. His pubic hair was wild. He put it in me wit
hout a condom. His necklace was swinging as he fucked me, so he flung it onto his back. He said, “What do you want?” He had a cold so he sniffled as he fucked me. There was something sweet about the way he sniffled, like the whole thing already felt normal.

  It felt as though Peter had followed me home one day and never left.

  Sometimes men are like cabs with their lights on, and you just have to be there to pull them over.

  Later he told me I hurt him that night. That he wanted to cuddle and he felt bad because I rolled over and went to sleep. He fell in love with how I didn’t give a shit he was there.

  “Don’t move,” he said to me, when I was sitting naked in a chair. “You look like a painting.”

  We touched so much it didn’t feel like someone else’s skin.

  In the beginning we listened to music and everything was new. Five years later, we watched television and everything felt old.

  Peter hated me for not being there, and then he hated me for being there. I had to keep remembering he loved someone who didn’t exist. As soon as he saw who I was, he would get the fuck away from me like any man in his right mind would. Ogden saw me for who I was, all the bad and all the good. He could keep it all in his mind and still want to fuck me.

  Excerpt from conversation 12,983, Peter to me: “You live like a homeless person indoors.”

  Excerpt from conversation 20,939, Peter to me: “You make me feel like an employee.”

  Excerpt from conversation 56,543, Peter to me: “You don’t understand why it makes me feel bad that you asked me not to speak when Benedict Cumberbatch is on television?”

  In the beginning, I wanted to put Peter in the right clothes. I wanted to dress him up, take him around, and then bring him home and say, “Now take off your clothes and fuck me.” He wore brown, pleated corduroy pants, shirts with corporate logos, and sad brown shoes that his mother had bought him for Christmas. I put him in dark jeans, cool T-shirts, beaten flannels, and motorcycle boots.

  If I divorced him, another woman would get him already fixed up.

  After we got married, I encouraged (i.e., nagged) Peter to get a bartending job.

  This was what Peter did when I tried to improve his life: he told me to leave him alone. A few days later, he would say that after thinking about it, he had come up with a plan, and his plan was exactly what I had told him to do. I couldn’t say how it was my idea to begin with, or he wouldn’t want to do it anymore.

  Peter’s parents were born-again Christians and brought him up in a renovated barn with no heat. For no conceivable reason, his mother didn’t work. The kids were raised on the meager salary of his father, a preacher. His parents took pride in not collecting the welfare or food stamps they were doubtlessly eligible for. He was raised to believe that instead of being sad for what you don’t have, you should be happy having nothing. Nothingness was close to godliness. I was sad for him that they didn’t let him dream.

  He saved change so he could buy a brand-new baseball cap. When he brought it home, his father yelled, “Do you know how much food you could have bought?” When Peter told me this story, I said, “Probably not very much.”

  It broke my heart to think of this little kid who wanted a dumb baseball cap. Paging Dickens. It broke my heart again that his father had won—that he did break Peter in some fundamental way. Instead of teaching his son not to be brainwashed into thinking having things would ruin your life, he made his son believe he wasn’t good enough to have things. Peter would always think the world was divided between those who were served and those who were servers. That was probably why he drank. Achieving anything was hard enough without someone kicking the dreaming out of you.

  I’m not a psychologist, but I could be. It’s not that hard to understand how people got all fucked up.

  Peter showed up at an open call and got hired as a bartender on the spot. The guy who interviewed him was gay. Gay guys loved my husband. I used to think Peter was secretly gay and that gay guys could pick up on it, so I kept making jokes about him being gay, and then I tried to finger his ass when I blew him to see how he would react to penetration. He freaked out and told me he really wasn’t gay and to stop trying to finger his ass. He seemed suspiciously angry, so I figured he still might be part gay.

  Peter yelled, “I love you,” through the bathroom door and left for work.

  I got back in bed and bunched up the blanket and rubbed myself on it, but I must have fallen asleep before I came.

  I woke up starving. I tried to love the hunger. I imagined the hunger was like the vibration you felt under your feet on a train. This hunger would lead to perfection: a face of cheekbones, hip bones sticking out, clavicles jutting. Light and empty.

  Smart women are supposed to say certain things. You are supposed to say, “I care about being healthy, not skinny.” Or “[Insert female celebrity] looked better when she wasn’t so skinny. When she looked normal.” All women encourage one another to eat. They say, “I’m so jealous of your curves,” as they think, “Yeah, eat more, fatty.” I wanted nothing more than to be rail thin and say, “It’s so annoying. I eat so much and can’t ever gain weight.”

  I opened a peach Greek yogurt. I had been subsisting on yogurt for the last seven days. I was tired of eating things with the consistency of baby food. When you are not eating, you are scared of yourself. Scared you will accidentally run out and buy a pizza. It’s important to eat something so the hunger won’t build to the point that you do something crazy, like buy a jar of peanut butter thinking one bite won’t hurt, and then you’re like, fuck it, and eat the whole thing. As soon as I ate a bite of the yogurt, I felt like a failure.

  You are living on an average of 120 to 400 calories a day, and 800 calories a day is considered a starvation diet. You feel empty and light. You feel like a winner, above those losers who have to fill their hole three times a day and then complain they are fat. You have plenty of energy with nothing in your belly. It’s terrifying how fast this becomes normal. You can’t eat the peach ooze at the bottom.

  The more you want to be free of food, the more obsessed you become with it.

  Eating so little makes your taste buds restless. You crave salt, sugar, hot sauce, mustard, pickles. Your tongue wants to come out of retirement and be alive. Weird food combinations. Using a tomato to shovel spicy mustard into your mouth, and in between, a squeeze of honey. You are basically eating garbage.

  Sometimes I felt like I was pushing against the day, and it wouldn’t go anywhere. I sat in the chair. Dust particles in the light. I stared into the mirror. I lifted my shirt. I sucked in my stomach and thought, This is how it would look.

  Sometimes I sat around and hated my body. I hated how when I got fat it was all in my belly, so I looked pregnant. I was top-heavy, with my belly, huge tits, and fatty armpits being carried by two stick legs. If I were a doll, I would be falling over constantly. My armpits were fat and stupid. I hated how my thighs touched on the toilet seat. I hated how these giant hairs came out of my neck, like, “Where the fuck did that come from?” How so much of my life was spent tweezing and shaving and waxing. My big, sloppy tits. When I ran to the bus it was a scene. I had no ass. It was like a disfigurement, how my back had this little bit of fat hanging with a split in it. I wanted to tear my tits off and stuff all the fat into my ass so I’d have one of those asses men could imagine slapping as they fucked it.

  Ogden said, “You’re cute.” Cute meant you were a chubby girl with a nice face. All his exes were around my age and looked horse-faced and like they would never stop talking about boring things.

  One of Ogden’s exes wrote a memoir about her rich, boring life and her brief addiction to coke.

  “Finally all the drug cliché memories, put in a blender and into one book.” —New York Times

  “Good for killing small bugs.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Another piece of garbage written by a privileged white woman with too much time on her hands, to whom the world somehow has given the impressi
on that it gives a shit about her stupid life.” —Everyone who has ever read it

  “Ogden, she sounds so boring I almost died,” I’d said to him after I read it. He stared at me blankly, and then said, “Nah, she was great.” He really did think she was great. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t have fucked her with your dick. He probably thought it was great how dumb and boring a woman could be.

  It’s not fair how you could be this white girl with a busted face and still be picked in the gym class of life before all the pretty brown girls. It didn’t matter how smart and cool you were. All these chill liberal guys who were all PC but only wanted to put their cock in white girls. They could be unfair with their love and there wasn’t a damn thing you could about it.

  The whole world wants young white girls.

  You have to play dumb. Guys like being smart and funny. If you want to compete with white girls, the least you can do is learn to laugh at jokes, not make them up. To ask lots of questions and not tell stories.

  Sometimes I wondered if there was a correlation between Peter always buying himself the crappy stuff and him choosing me: a thrifty, generic brown one, instead of name-brand white one with blond hair. He had rummaged through the bin and said, “This brown one will do. It has all the same parts as the white one.” He liked things that were a little damaged or messed up. It gave him some kind of weird thrill. He mistook damage for having character.

  Peter picked me, and I was throwing myself at an old man who would never ever pick me over a white girl. Sometimes when I was with Ogden, I thought too long about how Peter had really meant his vows, and a terrible feeling came over me that made my heart race. It was scary to have that kind of responsibility. I wished I could just fuck it up already so he would go. The idea of being totally faithful to Peter and trying my best to make it work filled me with dread and anxiety, because what would I hold on to if he left me? I knew deep down that Peter would leave me, so why would I stay faithful to him? Ogden was my safety net. Hopefully that meant I wouldn’t hit the ground too hard when it all blew up in my face.