Problems

by Jade Sharma

  I woke up at 4:25. I had five minutes to get to work. I spent the first three with my face buried in a throw pillow. I spent the last two looking for the last of the “emergency” dope before I remembered I did it all before Peter left earlier.

  I emptied the drawers looking for a T-shirt. You can never find the thing you’re looking for.

  I felt like a mess in a mess. What if I were forty and digging through the same pile of clothes, looking for the same T-shirt, with no family or friends left? Do some lives stop like that? Everyone leaves, and nothing else happens.

  You think, I only have this much time. I have to do important things. But then you can’t think of any important things.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. What about this face made it mine? I scratched off an ice cream stain from my thermal. I felt a dread knotted in the back of my hair and ripped it apart. It was easy for everyone to wake up and shower and brush their teeth, but I lived between the days, so it was hard to know when to do these things.

  The courtyard was a major selling point when I had come to see the apartment—large, grassy, with manicured rows of flowers and a few trees. The type of thing people in New York City made out to be a big deal. “Wow, look at this.”

  I bought the apartment with the money I had inherited when my father died.

  My father had been thirty years older than my mom. He died at the age of ninety. I kept waiting to feel something after he died, like maybe there was some love stored up for him deep in my psyche, but the only tears that came were for my mother, who looked so gentle and broken at the funeral.

  I felt bad for not feeling worse. People always talked about not getting over the death of a parent. When I said my father was dead, everyone was so sympathetic that I felt like a fraud.

  Before Peter, all my boyfriends had been older men. I suspected there was a father-sized hole inside me. I called Ogden “Daddy” when he fucked me.

  I loved Ogden’s crow’s feet. He walked fast and talked like Lou Reed. He smoked cigarettes, and instead of using an ashtray, he would leave half-smoked cigarettes standing upright on bookshelves. He was such a New Yorker, the way he talked about leaving New York all the time.

  One time I saw Ogden ash on his jeans and wipe the ash into the material. He owned drills and saws, and picked up boxes of stuff and moved them around. I liked men who moved stuff around.

  It was my mother’s idea to buy the apartment. I loved it because it was old and cheap. Just like me one day. I didn’t care that it was on the ground floor and received no light. I didn’t care that it was far from the train. It was a cave. It was a womb. I didn’t want one of those shiny, crappy, parquet-floored drywall apartments in those new, flimsy motel-looking buildings the broker kept showing me. My apartment had plaster walls. It was solid. It cost 250,000 dollars.

  It was cheap because fifteen years ago, a man broke into the apartment across the hall and shot the elderly couple who was asleep there, and then broke into my apartment, drank a beer, jerked off to porn tapes, and shot himself. Later it came out that his girlfriend had dumped him.

  That dude was fucking nuts.

  The broker told me they used to have real fish in the fountain, but then people in the building started abusing them (her words), and they had to get rid of the fish. She probably said this to me, a potential buyer, to illustrate how she knew every quirky detail of the building’s eccentric history. But what she was actually relaying to her clients, and what I had to consider every time I passed that fountain, was that this was a building filled with people who would abuse fish if given the chance.

  The day was dreary. I wore the weather like a torn shirt.

  Grand Street was buzzing. The regular trio of weirdos in front of the bodega. The girls with their gold chains and tight-ass jeans. Teenagers pushing strollers. A Hasidic woman in black with three yarmulked boys running ahead of her, their faces framed by ringlets. Like a Diane Arbus photo, two little girls, hand in hand, skipped down the sidewalk in perfect unison.

  A white yuppie woman with a baby slung over her shoulder. The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me, Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!

  I was pissed at Peter for not having a kid with me.

  “My mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she’s always encouraging me to do whatever I want,” my future kid would say.

  I would be one of those sick mothers who was fat and forever complaining. “I spent my childhood taking care of my mother. She was always sending me to the store to buy two-liter bottles of Diet Coke with her disability checks,” my future kid would say.

  Women with kids talk about how they are so busy and tired, but in their eyes they are saying, “Envy me.” I did. I wanted to be so tired and busy.

  If I believed in God, I would think he was waiting for me to get my shit together.

  It didn’t seem that long ago that I would freak out every time my period was late, running into the all-night pharmacy to pick up a pregnancy test and ending up in a girlfriend’s bathroom, where we would chain-smoke and then gasp with relief when the plus didn’t appear in the oval. And now every second week of the month, I was met with the familiar disappointment when confronted with the smear of blood on toilet paper. A marker of yet another thing not happening. All those years imagining the horror of a screaming red-faced alien forcing its way out of me somehow morphed into the ultimate climactic conclusion of my biological longing. To lie there with a baby sucking on my nipple in a symbiotic bubble of warmth and love. To never be alone again. To have a reason to take care of myself. To love something more than myself. To have a clear and understandable answer to the question, “So what do you do?”

  I wanted to erase myself. Where there was a picture of me, there would be a picture of a snotty, pudgy infant, new to the world, with its tiny hand out, grasping at nothing. On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face. Take the best of me, take this genetic line further, and then a little further, till the sky turns black and we freeze and we melt. We are all babies. We will always be babies. All the babies will die. And one day they will be dead forever. But it was nothing to get stuck on. It was nothing to get snagged on. Enjoy the rolling skies of your time-lapsed world: This was where you crawled out of the ocean, and this was where you walked. That was where you were running, and then you were lying, and now you’re looking up at the ceiling, and above the ceiling is the same sky that rolls ahead and will keep rolling on after you are gone. Say, “Look at that.” Think, I can do that. Don’t be scared. It will all be over long after no one remembers you.

  When I was in India to scatter my father’s ashes, I saw children just crawling around in the garbage. Better that way—set the standard low. So you could think, At least you’re not crawling around in the garbage, if you ended up fucking up the kid’s life somehow. But of course, you would never say that.

  “What size is your shoe?” a hunched-over woman asked me. I thought of that film The Conversation. How everyone was once someone’s child. Someone once loved this woman more than anything else in the world. Or maybe someone didn’t, and that’s why she was fucked-up.

  “Eight,” I said, looking down to avoid her stare.

  “Looks bigger,” she said. Was she crazy or lonely? Crazy people could be lonely. Loneliness could drive you crazy.

  I put my bus pass in the slot. The driver smiled at me. Hot black guy. He had a shaved head, and I could see how muscular his body was through his blue MTA shirt. I imagined lying flat on my belly. How he would spread my ass cheeks so he could get a good look at his cock going in and out of me. Take out all his aggression about his stupid life driving in circles. The smell of potato chips hit me as I walked toward the back of the bus and sat next to a window. Someone’s headphones were too loud.

  My phone was ringing.

  “Have you heard back about your thesis?” my mother yelled into the phone.

  “No.”

  “You should e-mail him.
”

  “It’s only been three days since I turned it in.” This was a lie. I hadn’t turned in the fucking thing. It was another cloud hanging over me.

  “If you don’t hear back by the end of the week—”

  “I will, I will,” I said, regretting I’d picked up the phone.

  “Did you read the story I sent you about the baby eagle in Mexico?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said, feeling guilty I had deleted the article.

  “There was this boy named Miguel,” she started.

  The guilt instantly turned into annoyance. Not now. Not now. “I’m on the bus,” I said, digging around for ChapStick.

  She kept saying, “What?” and I kept screaming into the phone, “I’m on the bus, Mom. I can’t talk right now!” Why did the whole bus decide to be completely silent while I was on the phone? No teenagers laughing, no cell phones ringing, no mothers yelling at their kids not to touch the gum squished between the seat and the window. That feeling of embarrassment that fills you when you see people be mean to their parents. “I can’t talk to you! Because I’m on the bus!”

  Finally she understood, but she took it as a piece of information, not as a reason to stop talking and get off the phone, because she wasn’t a normal person. She was a mother. Her frontal lobe had come out with her placenta. “So what day will you be coming up for your uncle’s retirement party?”

  This was a setup. She asked the question as if we had previously discussed it. When I told her I wasn’t coming, she would act shocked and demand to know why, and then it was just a short hop and skip to the guilt trip, with a brief layover in Obligation City. These were our roles. This was our script.

  “I can’t come because I have to work.”

  There was a pause. I was off script. She had to improvise.

  “Why can’t someone just cover your shift?” Pretty good.

  “I asked, but nobody can.” Volley it back.

  “It’s just a bookstore! It’s not like a real job.”

  “Thanks. It’s just my life!” A fat woman I didn’t know existed till that moment turned around to stare. It was as if God had put extras on a bus to remind me what a brat I was.

  “When are you going to start sending out those applications for teaching?”

  “I have to graduate first! God! I told you that!”

  “Then if you turned in your thesis you need to bother them.”

  “It’s only been three fucking days since I turned it in!”

  When I was a kid, I brought home a picture from art class. My mother stared at it with a puzzled look and said, “Trees aren’t purple. What is wrong with you?” I watched it sway in the air before it landed in the garbage. On the fridge was a test my brother had gotten an A on. A concise little story that played well in therapy.

  Before I was about to hang up self-righteously, she said, “I’ve had trouble swallowing lately.” And just like that, she’d won. It didn’t matter what she had ever done to me. She was sick, and she was my mom. Emotional kryptonite. The lump in my throat. With a snap of her fingers she could turn me into a lost six-year-old with tears running down my face, just wanting my mommy. Somehow that’s what happens when you deal with the very first person you met on Earth.

  I stared out of the messed-up bus window at a drunk taking a piss. This dirty town. “I don’t know where all this mucus comes from,” she said. I listened with an overwhelming sense of fear and dread as she told me all the fucked-up things her body was doing.

  It doesn’t matter how old you are, after your mom dies, you will feel like an orphan, out there completely alone in the world.

  You always feel like a champ when you make your mom laugh.

  I picked shreds of tobacco from the ChapStick, listening to my mother. I found myself saying, “I would come, but I have a lot going on right now.”

  I loved my mother. I felt bad that she wanted to love me, but she did all the exact wrong things. I felt bad that she could be so cruel, like when she threw in my face that I went to a shrink, as if that gave her the authority of the sane, and dismissed all my grievances. Not that it was her fault. Nothing was her fault. It was the way she was raised. She had my brother when she was just nineteen years old; like, what did she fucking know about anything? She’d never lived on her own. She went from her parents’ house to her husband’s house. Her husband. He wasn’t easy. She was so bright and crafty, and she could have lived a whole life and not just been a glorified servant. Who could blame her for being nuts? Her father and her husband had deprived her of being a person. She was raised to believe the best thing to be was a wife and mother. It was so sad. And we were so hard on her. What do you do when your teenage daughter tells you she wants to die? When she cries and screams and disappears for days? What would you do? What would I do?

  My brother told me there was a chair in her shower now. It was the saddest thing I could imagine.

  Indians are always cremated. The body that grew from a baby into my mother would go into the oven and turn to ash with bits of bone.

  It’s important to drink milk because calcium is what bones are made of.

  Her ashes would go where my father’s had gone: the dark cloudy waters of the Ganges. Where sick people bathe. Where there is someone pissing, someone shitting, and someone vomiting right now. And then my brother. And then, finally, me, the baby of the family, the last one to be dumped in the water, forgotten and dead, just like everyone else.

  We would be dead, so we wouldn’t care how disgusting the water was.

  It took all the way from Fourteenth and Fifth down to Astor Place to shake off the guilty feelings.

  I walked into Starbucks. I was always late to work. But after that phone call, I deserved a treat. A skinny caramel latte was 100 calories. But I needed all the sugar and caffeine and fat of a mocha frap, with a big unnecessary swirl of whipped cream on top, because death was serious business.

  All the women in Starbucks were wearing cardigans. All the women of fuckable age, anyway. It was as if someone from wardrobe had come in with a rack of cardigans, and each of the women selected one. There are these moments in New York City when all the women are wearing different versions of the same thing, as if they all had gotten a memo, and you have to decide, Am I going to join this trend?

  If you don’t get on board, you will feel like an out-of-touch loser. (NYC is like high school: trends, being judgmental, and how impressive it is when you find out someone has a car—Really? You have a car!) But if you do go with the trend, you will feel like a poser, no matter how much you actually like the scarf or skirt or whatever it is. Everyone who passes you will think you are just another follower. Loser or poser?

  I walked into the bookstore at a casual pace, sipping my drink, chewing on the straw lackadaisically as I did not rush down the stairs.

  “Jeez, don’t you ever take a break?” I asked Ethan, who was sitting with his legs up on the receiving table with his eyes closed.

  “I’m afraid of intimacy so I bury myself in work,” he said, not opening his eyes.

  On Ethan’s computer was a website of old men who looked like lesbians. Keith Richards. Elton John. Al Franken.

  Justine came out of nowhere, like a ninja. “My ass hurts,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, drawing a stick figure on the info table with black marker.

  “I got fucked in the ass last night,” she said.

  Justine and I hung out, but we weren’t The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants–type BFFs.

  Justine’s moment of glory was when this middle-aged woman had asked how the books were arranged, and Justine sang the alphabet at the top of her lungs.

  Justine labeled the stapler, “Lady Chatterley’s stapler.”

  Before I worked there, former employees had scrawled labels on the reshelving carts, “Who carted?” “Miss Lonelycarts,” and “O brother, where cart thou.”

  Justine told me, Ethan, and Mark about this piece of art that just sold for millions of dol
lars. You fed it food, and it turned it into shit. “I’ve been eating and shitting for free all these years like a sucker!” Ethan joked. Mark asked what would happen if you fed shit to it. Ethan said you would get more shit.

  “Like the same amount of shit or twice the amount of shit?” I asked. Everyone laughed.

  I gave the stick figure a hand and put a gun in it.

  “Maya,” Michelle said. “So I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they’re sending someone to take over the textbook department.” Michelle was the general manager. She grinned as she clapped her hands silently. I smiled back. She went on, “They’re going to expand this whole section. The counter will come out to here.” I didn’t look up to see where she was indicating because I didn’t give a shit.

  “You must be happy you don’t have to deal with textbooks anymore,” I said, slurping melted ice.

  “I’ve worked my ass off at this store, and now all the burden and hassle of textbooks will be off my shoulders. I can finally make the store what I always wanted it to be. We can have readings!” she said, beaming and exposing her yellowed, plaque-laden front teeth. Michelle in her fuzzy sweaters, with her cozy beer gut and her slowly rotting teeth.