by Jade Sharma
The morning after Thanksgiving, I woke up shivering. I had to pee. I lay there until I was in physical pain. I poked Peter in the face.
“Whhhat?” he yawned, after the third or fourth poke.
“I’m freezing.”
“So?”
“Fix it,” I said.
“Didn’t you bring a sweater or something?” He rolled over to face the wall. He was always rolling over and facing the wall. It was no use. There was no way I could fall asleep again. The only way I had fallen asleep in the first place was all the Xanax and the wine. Then the nausea hit. It was my second day of being clean. I made myself get out from under the covers and find the Suboxone in my purse. I put it under my tongue and then took two Xanaxes. Suboxone dissolving underneath the tongue is unpleasant. It made me gag. I was covered in sweat and shivering. I went back to bed till the Xanax kicked in. I took a shit in the bathroom. Popped two more Xanaxes. You can’t be too frugal with the Xanax the first few days. Soon the Suboxone would kick in and give me a nice buzz and some energy. I couldn’t imagine doing this without any meds. I would be naked in the corner, bawling and vomiting, my shit-covered drawers on the floor, and no one on Earth would sit in that room without praying I would fall asleep for a while. Peter would leave me to hang out with his family or to work or whatever. He wouldn’t take a wet rag and wipe my face. He wouldn’t try to feed me a spoonful of broth. He would tell me to take a shower. He would lay out clean clothes. He would gasp with relief as soon as he walked out the door and could think whatever he wanted. Bad things. And because marriage is really a war, he would have new weapons to use against me: “Oh, the junkie says I’m an alcoholic.” I found my phone and put my smokes in my coat. After I took a piss, I went to the fridge. I had already decided I wasn’t going to eat today, but I wanted to look at the food like a weirdo.
Peter’s mother and father came into the kitchen. “Where’d you guys go?” I asked, shutting the fridge. I was slurring a little and having a hard time standing. Don’t lean on the fridge. Don’t furrow your brows like every word they say takes all your concentration to understand. I put my face back in the fridge. Was it rude to dig around someone’s fridge? They said to make myself at home, but had they meant it? Why couldn’t people just say what they meant?
“I had some blood drawn for my surgery next week,” Sandy said.
“What surgery?”
Rick smelled the milk.
“Hip surgery,” she said. That’s why she waddled.
“Are you in pain?”
“Well, it’s gotten worse, but once they replace the hip, it should be fine,” she said, washing a dish. If it had been my mother, no one would have heard the end of it. “Here I am with a broken hip, but don’t mind me. I’ll just end up dying here, washing your dishes.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, not bothering to show them the phone. I would be making idiots of us all if I kept pretending I wasn’t going out to smoke. I must have reeked.
The day was bright, and the air was crisp and clean. The Suboxone must have started to kick in because I felt a surge of euphoria. I knew I was going to have a horrible time in the bathroom, but right then I felt pretty awesome. A little too awesome. Giddy. Excited. Kind of manic. I walked over to the shed and lit a cigarette. Then I heard a car door slam. Fuck. I put out the cigarette on the ground.
Jake, Sue, and Peter were milling around the kitchen in their boots and coats. I embraced Peter and kissed him. “Why is everyone dressed? Where are we going?”
“Rake leaves,” he said.
“Are there enough rakes?” I asked, praying to an imaginary god there were not.
“Yeah.”
We walked outside. Leaning against the shed were four rakes. I ran back into the house and grabbed my iPod. Some Young Buck, some Lil Wayne, some Jay-Z should keep me pumped.
Everyone spread to opposite corners. I picked up a red rake and walked to the far left of the yard. Jay-Z, in my ears, “Ain’t no love, in the heart of the city.” The sun was out and warmed my face. I had boundless energy. I formed the leaves into a pile like connecting the dots, forming the smaller piles into one large pile. When I had most of my corner of the yard raked, I yelled for Peter. He looked up at me and shook his head.
“Maya, that’s where the leaves are going to be dumped.”
“What? I don’t get it,” I told him.
“Where you’re raking, that’s where the leaves are going to go. We are going to take all the leaves in this yard,” he waved his hand, signifying the rest of the yard, “and put them in this corner,” he said, pointing at the ground I’d just cleared.
“Why wouldn’t we throw the leaves away?”
“We gather them all in that corner,” he repeated, sounding like a little kid. I cracked up. I couldn’t stop laughing. Peter smiled, but I could tell he was trying to figure out if I was high or crazy.
I looked over and saw Sue laughing with a wheelbarrow full of leaves, with her cute little hat, her pink pj’s tucked into a pair of cowboy boots. Where did she even get a wheelbarrow? Jake helped Sue, both of them laughing, like in a montage at the beginning of a cheesy sitcom, rushing across the yard. I watched them dump the big mass of wet leaves into the corner I had worked so hard to clear.
Peter’s father came out with a tarp. We heaped the leaves onto the tarp, and then Peter, his father, and Jake lifted the tarp from the sides and dumped the leaves in the corner. What the fuck was the point of this? Why weren’t we throwing them away? I wanted to ask, but then I didn’t really care either. We spent all morning putting a bunch of leaves into a corner of a yard where they were going to get spread all over the place again. Whatever. Doing stuff was dumb.
Sue said, “They said it was going to rain, but it looks clear.” She gave me a gracious smile.
“So, kids,” Peter’s dad said, “I want you to know when the economy gets bad or if you ever need to, you’re all welcome to come back and live here. We can grow our own food, see.” He pointed to some ground. “That’s where I grow vegetables . . . and you know, we could just all live here.”
My eyes got wet. I wanted to burst into tears imagining how he must have thought about this and was naive and sweet enough to think of all of us living here like this forever. Ignoring, of course, the weird paranoia about society crumbling.
“Dad, I don’t think it’s going to get that bad,” Jake said, looking slightly pained. And everyone kind of laughed, but I didn’t, because a part of me did want to move there and grow our own food and get a dog and have dinner at the table every night and sit cross-legged on the floor and listen to them sing songs.
We headed into the house. I sat down at the kitchen table while Peter’s mother scrambled eggs. I was ready to stuff my face again. Peter nudged my arm, and I went to the enclosed porch with him. We sat on the couch.
“I love you,” he said in my ear.
“Yeah, I love you too.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know . . . wasn’t really into raking leaves.” There was a pause, and then I said, “Whatever, it was fine. I’m tired.” I said it as a way of getting out of the whole thing.
“You didn’t have to.”
All of the sudden, he looked good to me. So clean. So wholesome, with his big smile and flannel and dark jeans. The fire was going, and for the first time since I’d gotten there, I actually felt warm. I liked it there. “What do you want to do?” he asked me, putting his arm around my shoulders. He smelled good.
“I want to check out some thrift stores,” I said.
“I’ll ask Grace and Mom if they know any.” He smiled and walked back toward the kitchen. I leaned my head back against the cold boarded-over window. Sometimes I felt this horrible ache, like I already knew whatever was happening would become a memory I would think of and cry about after Peter left me. A premature nostalgia, like when you took a picture and imagined what it was going to be like one day to look at it and remember how happy you had been. A part o
f me was always aware of how painful it would feel after the happiness wore off. So I was never really happy, like, ever.
We all got into the car to drive to Burlington. Jake drove. Sue sat in the passenger seat playing with the radio, and Peter and I were in the backseat with Grace. My head on his shoulder.
“Are you excited about the thrift shop?” he whispered into my ear, in the same tone he used when we were fucking and he’d say, “Yeah, you like that big cock deep inside your pussy?”
“Yeah, I can’t wait.” I wanted to somehow convey how good I felt about him, but I didn’t know how. If I took him aside and tried to express something deep, he would think I was trying to start some heavy fight. You couldn’t say to a man, “I really need to talk to you.” No man on Earth has ever wanted to talk.
The consignment store was in a little crappy house. Peter bought two shirts that I picked out for him for two dollars each. It was the best situation for us: I got whatever I wanted, and he got to pay for everything without that pained look on his face. I found salt and pepper shakers that looked like cheeseburgers and a small blue suitcase with white stitching. Sue and Jake bought a similar suitcase that was more expensive, in better condition. We joked about how we should go on a trip together with our matching suitcases. Grace tried on jackets, but she obviously did not get the whole thrift store thing. How you were supposed to find things that were either practical or totally silly, not “nice” things for a job interview. She tried on a worn green blazer from the Gap. Her fat strained the buttons as she stared into the mirror, and my heart broke for her. I guessed food was the only thing left once you took all the sinful stuff that made people feel good off the list. It hurt to see a hopeful look in her face, like, “Well, this isn’t bad at all, hmm.” But she looked terrible. Her greasy ponytail, the hair frizzing out by her ears, her bad skin. I wondered if she had ever seen a penis. If she ever touched herself. She must have had urges. Maybe she did and then felt really bad or cut herself. Maybe she was in love with Jesus. Or she was in love with her father. It was weird how she always deferred to him. In some families, the daughter and the father are the couple in a nonsexual but still creepy way.
“That looks nice,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s only four dollars,” she said, still looking in the mirror. Her smile brightened.
After the thrift store, we went bowling.
“Did you see the Dunkin’ Donuts when we drove in?” Sue said, as we waited for our shoes.
“Do you want donuts? I’ll go get them,” I said. It was my ticket out of this group. My chance to stop smiling for a second.
I went outside and lit a cigarette. It was me and the gray sky. The nicotine hit me in a rush, a strange mixture of sadness and exhilaration. I steadied myself. I took out my phone and saw Amy had called. I called her back.
“Hey,” I said.
“They’re so weird,” she whispered.
“Why are you whispering?”
“I’m hiding in the bathroom.”
“Why?”
“I’m never going to get rid of him.” Her voice quivered.
“Are you crying?”
“How am I ever going to break up with him? He would end up here if I threw him out. I’ve only been here for, like, two days or whatever, and I want to kill myself. His mother will not leave me alone. I went to the office to go on the internet, and she came with me and worked out on the bike, and then I went downstairs, and she came with me. I don’t think she works. And his brother and his wife live with her, but they only have one car. How did I end up with this life that doesn’t look like anything I wanted?”
“Just leave him already. It isn’t your problem what happens to him. You didn’t give birth to him, you know,” I said, frustrated. How many times had I said those words to her?
“Sometimes I just think, you know, I’m thirty-one, and if I want to have a kid, I’ve got to get going. Did you know that after thirty-five the rate of Down syndrome goes up?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that.” This was actually the third time I’d heard that statistic in the past month. There was always this ticking clock, ruining everything, little by little, the longer you lived.
The Dunkin’ Donuts was packed. There was nowhere else to go in town. Two old men came in behind me. The line wasn’t moving. There was an image of an egg croissant with bacon. My mouth watered. They had hash browns now? I wanted it all. I wondered if there was a way to buy an egg sandwich, hash browns, and three Boston creams and scarf them all down without being suspiciously absent for too long. Then I could go puke it up. I was doing this more and more, sneaking food and then puking it up. I wasn’t good at it yet, but it was awesome to stuff yourself and then have an empty stomach. One time last week, I scarfed down five Hostess cupcakes before I came home but was caught when Peter asked innocently, “Is that chocolate on your teeth?” It was exactly like when he found a bag of dope in my pockets.
The bathroom: keeping America’s secrets for decades. Snorting. Puking. Crying. Leaving weepy messages on Ogden’s voicemail.
Whenever I talked to Ogden, it was anticlimactic. To have all these feelings of wanting and longing, a hole in my heart and none of it translating into the dull words passing through my lips, “I miss you,” or “I think about you,” or “I wish you were here.” They came out of my mouth and disappeared but the hole was still there.
“Hi, I’d like an egg sandwich with bacon, and hash browns and a dozen donuts,” I said. I turned just as Peter came in.
“What is taking so long?” he asked, annoyed. I ignored him and told the woman what donuts I wanted. Eyeing the overly large bag and the box of donuts the woman handed to me, he said, “How many things did you order?”
I looked behind me. The place was completely empty except for two people. “It was packed. It had nothing to do with how much stuff I ordered,” I huffed at him.
“Are you getting a dozen donuts?”
“Yeah, for everyone.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” He put his arm around me. “I just didn’t know what was taking so long.”
“I’m sorry I’m fat,” I said.
“Stop it, you know how annoying that is. I like you just the way you are,” he said, patting my butt.
We walked back to the bowling alley.
I sucked at bowling. Sue beat me, Jake beat Peter, and Grace couldn’t play because of her burnt hand. I wondered if Jake fell asleep in front of the TV all the time like Peter. If he lay around in sweat shorts and old T-shirts on the couch, playing with his balls and generally being a disgusting man. Sometimes Peter itched his balls and smelled his hand afterwards. Was this something he had always done, and just now something he felt comfortable doing around me? Did he think I didn’t notice, or did he not care? Why did balls itch so goddamn much?
After bowling we found another thrift store. Sue and I looked through the women’s section together.
Peter found a leather jacket, like MacGyver’s. It was terrible, the color of mud or diarrhea, with some rips, and the waist was too short and puffy. The type of thing someone’s dad would wear.
“Isn’t it great?” Peter asked, smiling, so excited.
“I hate it.”
“What?” He looked like I had stabbed him. “What do you hate about it?”
“I’m sure there’s one that’s better. Let me look.”
“No,” he said sternly, “I looked through them all, and this is the one I like the best.”
“It’s just so bad. The color, the fit.”
“It’s only twenty dollars.”
“It’s worth less.”
“Why are you being a bitch?” he said, walking away.
Mallard ducks. Peter had a tapestry of mallard ducks on the wall of his room in Queens. The ducks weren’t cartoony. They weren’t whimsical ducks going in every direction. They were serious ducks in serious colors, blank-eyed in straight rows like little communists. His dead grandmother had made it. Before I said something like, “Can’t
you love her without displaying this awful thing on my wall?” I realized it meant a lot to him. He was like someone on Hoarders who thought the thing had to do with the person. There was also a frightful portrait of Winston Churchill his grandmother painted. When we moved in together, I didn’t say anything as Peter, without a second thought, put the mallard ducks up in the bedroom and the Winston Churchill in the center of the living room wall. I would forever be reading a book and look up to find this awful, fat, uniformed man in front of me.
The worst part about the ducks and Winston Churchill was they made me hate myself. Why did I care? If they made Peter happy, why wasn’t that more important than my apartment? I had slowly but progressively filled my apartment with perfect things. That was why I spent forever finding the exact right fridge, stainless steel and tall, but thin so it wouldn’t go past the doorway of the narrow kitchen. The dish drainer was Swedish and cost seventy dollars. Instead of getting a regular toilet brush, I got something called a toilet wand with disposable toilet scrubbers. I spent a whole paycheck on one thing. I wanted my little corner of the world to be an uncluttered, peaceful masterpiece. And then Peter came in with his mallard ducks and his Winston Churchill and his colored bottles, which he put on every fucking surface. What was it with men and bottles? But what was it with me, letting a tapestry and Winston Churchill cause friction with the one man who was willing to spend his whole life with me? Why did putting sentiment over aesthetic beauty make Peter a freak? Wasn’t it natural to hang something on your wall that reminded you of someone you love?
Sometimes I imagined dumping all of Peter’s things in a corner and saying, “This is your corner.”
Maybe I was trying to help him. Even with, “I don’t want you wearing that jacket and looking like a moron.” Future me would cringe every time.
I followed him to the rack of leather jackets, trying to find anything better. I pulled out one, but it had fringe, and so I kept looking. Too big, too small.