“I came for my shit,” I said to the walls.
Stacks and stacks of Cosmo and Marie Claire and Us Weekly. The only movement in the living room was the swirling screensaver on Reva’s enormous Dell, which sat on a little side table in the corner and was mostly obscured by a drying rack weighed down with Ann Taylor sweater sets and Banana Republic dress shirts, matching bras and panties. A half dozen discolored white sports bras. Pairs and pairs of flesh-colored nylons. “Reva!” I called out, kicking through a pile of brightly colored sneakers in the living room.
In the kitchen, a dried-out sheet cake with finger gouges in it sat on the counter next to a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and sugar-free maple syrup. There were stacks of dirty dishes in the sink. A small trash can overflowed with junk-food packaging and apple cores. Half a toaster waffle smeared with peanut butter, a murky bag of baby carrots. Crushed cans of Diet 7UP filled a cardboard box next to the trash can. Diet 7UP cans everywhere. A glass of orange juice with fruit flies floating on the surface.
Her cabinets contained exactly what I’d expected. Herbal laxative teas, Metamucil, Sweet’N Low, stacks of canned Healthy Choice soups, stacks of canned tuna. Tostitos. Goldfish crackers. Reduced fat Skippy. Sugar-free jelly. Sugar-free Hershey’s Syrup. Rice crackers. Low-fat microwave popcorn. Box after box of yellow cake mix. When I opened the freezer, smoke billowed out. The thick frosted inside was crowded with fat-free frozen yogurt. Sugar-free Popsicles. A cloudy bottle of Belvedere. Déjà vu. Reva’s new favorite cocktail, she’d told me—had I been on Infermiterol?—was low-calorie Gatorade and vodka.
“You could drink this all day and never get dehydrated.”
“Reva, if you’re hiding from me, I will find you,” I called out.
Her bedroom was hardly any bigger than her king-size mattress, which she’d told me she’d inherited from her parents when her mother got sick “and so they got two doubles because my dad couldn’t sleep at night with all her fidgeting.” Green numbers on a digital alarm clock glowed between cans of Diet 7UP on the bedside table. It was 4:37. I smelled peanut butter and again, the bitter tang of vomit. The comforter was Laura Ashley, folded back from the bed. Food stains on the sheets. I looked under the bed, found only shoes, more magazines, empty little yogurt containers, paper bags from Burger King punched flat like deflated footballs. In the drawer of her bedside table, a purple vibrator, a diary with a waxy green cover, a purple eye mask, a pack of cherry Lifesavers, a Polaroid of her mother wearing a Tigger costume, smiling shyly, her eyes caught midblink, sitting on that plastic-covered sofa in Farmingdale, a five-year-old Reva dressed as a tiny Winnie-the-Pooh on her knee, Reva’s mother’s hand cradling her fuzzy yellow potbelly. I picked up the diary and looked inside. It was just a daily log of numbers, mathematical sums and subtractions, the final results circled and annotated with either smiley or frowny faces. The last entry was marked December 23. Reva seemed to have abandoned her daily numbers game when her mother died.
I thought of Reva sleeping in that bed each night, probably drunk and full of Aspartame and Pepcid. In the mornings, she prepped and set out into the world, a mask of composure. And I had problems? Who’s the real fuckup, Reva? I hated her more and more.
The bathroom looked like it belonged to a pair of adolescent twins preparing for a beauty pageant. I could smell the mildew and the puke and Lysol. A pink expanded toolbox burst with brushes and applicators of all shapes and sizes, drugstore makeup, nail polish, stolen testers, a dozen shades of Maybelline lip gloss. On the shelf, there were two hair dryers, a curling iron, a flat iron, a bowl of bejeweled barrettes and plastic headbands. Cutouts from fashion magazines were taped to the edges of the mirror over the low vanity and sink: Claudia Schiffer’s Guess Jeans ad. Kate Moss in her Calvins. Runway stick figures. Linda Evangelista. Kate Moss. Kate Moss. Kate Moss. There was a bowl of cotton balls and swabs. A bowl of bobby pins. Two huge bottles of Listerine. Next to the cup that must have held a dozen toothbrushes, each head of bristles yellowed and frayed, a prescription bottle of Vicodin. Vicodin! From the dentist. There were twelve pills left in the bottle. I took one and pocketed the rest. I found more pills under the sink in a wicker box with a pink ribbon tying the lid shut—an Easter relic, I guessed. Maybe when Reva bought it, it was full of chocolate eggs. Clearance sale. Inside: Diurex, ibuprofen, Mylanta, Dulcolax, Dexatrim, Midol, aspirin, fen-phen. A Victoria’s Secret gift bag was tucked into the back corner of the cabinet. Inside, glory! My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud. The draft sucked the bathroom door shut with a celebratory bang.
I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Snapshot. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene. “Forget me, Reva,” I’d say, flapping the photos in her face. “You’ll never see me again.” But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home. But this moment was ceremonious. I had my magic back. This is mine now, I told myself. I’m going to sleep.
The water in the tap was orange and tasted like blood. I didn’t want to wash down my nice pills with Satan’s sweat. I’d get water from the kitchen sink, I thought, so I went to the bathroom door and tried to open it. It did not open. I fiddled with the lock, turning the knob back and forth. “Reva?” Something was jammed or broken. I shoved the handful of pills into the pocket of my coat and twisted the knob again, pulling and wrenching. But it didn’t work. I was locked inside. I pounded on the door.
“Reva!” I called again.
There was no answer. I sat on the fuzzy pink toilet lid and fiddled with the knob for what felt like twenty minutes. I would have to break the door down, or wait for Reva to come home from work, I thought. Either way, it would result in a confrontation. I already knew everything she’d say.
“I’ve stood by the sidelines long enough. You have a problem. I can’t just look the other way while you kill yourself.”
And what I’d say back.
“I appreciate your concern,” me seething, me wanting to kill her. “I’m under a doctor’s supervision, Reva. There’s nothing to worry about with me. I wouldn’t be allowed to do this if it wasn’t kosher. It’s all safe!”
Or maybe she’d go the heartbroken route.
“I buried my mother a few weeks ago. I’m not going to bury you, too.”
“You didn’t bury your mother.”
“Cremated, whatever.”
“I want a sea burial,” I’d tell her. “Wrap me in a black cloth and throw me over. Like a pirate.”
I pulled back the mildewed shower curtain, hung my coat on the towel rack, lay down in the tub, and waited. In the hours before Reva came home and let me out, I did not sleep. I knew I wouldn’t. I needed a way out of this—the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life.
When the solution to my problems came to me, it landed in my mind like a hawk on a cliff. It was as though it had been circling up there the whole time, studying every little thing in my life, putting all the pieces together. “This is the way.” I knew exactly what I had to do: I needed to be locked up.
If one tablet of Infermiterol put me int
o a state of vacuous unconsciousness for three days, I had enough to keep me in the dark until June. All I needed was a jailkeeper, and I could live in constant sleep without fear of going out and getting involved in anything. This all seemed like a practical matter. The Infermiterol would work for me. I was relieved, almost happy. I didn’t mind at all that when Reva finally came home and wrestled the bathroom door open, she shrieked, expressed her grave concern for my sanity, all while rushing me out the door, I guessed, because she had a stomach full of junk she wanted to puke up.
I left the pills with her, all but the Infermiterol.
At home, I called a locksmith, arranged a meeting with Ping Xi for the following afternoon, and called Dr. Tuttle to tell her I was going off the grid for the next four months.
“Hopefully I won’t ever need to see you again,” I told her.
“People say that to me all the time,” she said.
That was the last time we spoke.
Seven
“ARE YOU SURE you won’t wear this stuff? What if I stretch something out, and then you want it back?”
I had called Reva to say that I was cleaning out my closets. She brought over a collection of large paper shopping bags from various Manhattan department stores, bags she’d obviously saved in case she had to transport something and needed a vessel that would connote her good taste and affirm that she was respectable because she’d spent money. I’d seen housekeepers and nannies do the same thing, walking around the Upper East Side with their lunch in tiny, rumpled gift bags from Tiffany’s or Saks Fifth Avenue.
“I never want to see any of these clothes again,” I told Reva when she arrived. “I want to forget it all existed. Whatever you don’t take, I’ll donate or throw away.”
“But all of it?”
She was like a kid in a candy store, methodically and vampirically pulling out every dress, every skirt, every blouse, hangers and all. Every pair of designer jeans, every bit of packaged lingerie, every pair of shoes except for the filthy slippers I wore on my feet.
“They kind of fit,” she said, trying on an unworn pair of Manolo Blahniks. “Good enough.”
She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won’t wake the gods. Most of the clothes still had the tags on them.
“This is good motivation to stick to my diet,” Reva said, lugging the bags into the living room. “Atkins, I think. Bacon and eggs for the next six months. I think I can do it if I really set my mind to it. The doctor said the abortion won’t cause any dramatic weight loss, but I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can get. Especially now. Size twos are a challenge for my hips, you know. You’re sure you won’t want any of this back?” She was gleeful and flushed.
“Take the jewelry, too,” I said, and returned to the bedroom, which now felt hollowed and cool. Thank God for Reva. Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity. I started picking through my jewelry, then decided just to give her the whole box. She didn’t ask why. Maybe she thought I was in a blackout, and if she questioned me, I’d wake up. Don’t disturb the sleeping beast. The white fox in the meat freezer.
I went down in the elevator with her, the bags in our fists heavy yet cloudlike, the air in the elevator shifting pressure as though we were flying through a storm. But I felt almost nothing. The doorman held the door for us as we walked out.
“Oh, thank you so much, that’s so kind of you,” Reva said, suddenly a lady, gracious and verbose. “That is just so sweet of you, Manuel. Thank you.”
His name. I’d never bothered to learn it. I gave her forty dollars cash for the ride crosstown. The doorman whistled for a taxi.
“I’m going on a trip, Reva,” I said.
“Rehab?”
“Something like that.”
“For how long?” Just the slightest twitch in her eye, barely balking at the lie that was obvious in its vagueness. But what could she say? I’d paid her off in high fashion to leave me alone.
“I’ll be back on June first,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll stay longer. They won’t let me make phone calls. They told me it’s best not to have contact with people from my past.”
“Not even me?” She was being polite. I could tell she was already hatching plans, all the hunting for love and admiration she’d do with this new wardrobe, flashy armor, the brightest camouflage. She blew on her hands to warm them and craned her neck at the approaching cab.
“Good luck with the abortion.”
Reva nodded sincerely. In that moment, I think our friendship ended. What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me. I felt a kind of peace about Reva seeing her off that day. I’d cost her so much dignity, but the bounty she was now shoving into the trunk of the cab seemed to make up for it. I was absolved. She gave me a hug, kissed my cheek.
“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I know you can get through this.” When she pulled away, there were tears in her eyes, maybe just from the cold. “I feel like I won the lottery!” She was happy. I watched her through the tinted glass, smiling and waving as she drove off.
* * *
• • •
AT THE BODEGA, I got two coffees and a piece of prepackaged carrot cake, bought all the garbage bags the Egyptians had in stock, then went back upstairs and packed everything up. Every book, every vase, every plate and bowl and fork and knife. All my videos, even the Star Trek collection. I knew I had to do it. The deep sleep I would soon enter required a completely blank canvas if I was to emerge from it renewed. I wanted nothing but white walls, bare floors, lukewarm tap water. I packed up all my tapes and CDs, my laptop, unmelted candles, all my pens and pencils, all my electric cords and rape whistles and Fodor’s guides to places I never went.
I called the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop and told them my aunt had died. Two guys came with a van an hour later, lugging the garbage bags four at a time into the hallway and out of my life forever. They took most of the furniture, too, including the coffee table and the bed frame. I got them to carry out the sofa and the armchair and leave them on the curb. The only pieces of furniture I kept were the mattress, the dining table, and a single aluminum folding chair with a cushion whose stained gray linen cover I threw down the trash chute. Ta-ta.
What I kept for myself amounted to one set of towels, two sets of sheets, the duvet, three sets of pajamas, three pairs of cotton underpants, three bras, three pairs of socks, a comb for my hair, a box of Tide laundry detergent, a large bottle of Lubriderm moisturizing lotion. I bought a new toothbrush and four months’ worth of toothpaste and Ivory soap and toilet paper at Rite Aid. A four months’ supply of iron supplements, a women’s daily vitamin, aspirin. I bought packages of plastic cups and plates, plastic cutlery.
I had instructed Ping Xi to bring me one large mushroom pepperoni pizza with extra cheese every Sunday afternoon. Whenever I came to, I’d drink water, eat a slice of pizza, do some sit-ups and push-ups, some squats, some lunges, put the clothes I was wearing into the washer, transfer the washed set into the dryer, put on the clean set, then take another Infermiterol. In this way, I could stay in the black until my year of rest was up.
When the locksmith came, I told him to install the new lock on the outside of the door, so that anyone inside the apartment would need the key to get out. He didn’t ask why. Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.
* * *
• • •
BEFORE PING XI CAME over on January
31, I took a final walk outside. The sky was milky, the sounds of the city muted by the hard ruffling of wind hitting my ears. I wasn’t nostalgic. But I was terrified. It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey. So far, I thought, I’d been wandering through the forest. But now I was approaching the mouth of the cave. I smelled the smoke of a fire burning deep inside. Something had to be burned and sacrificed. And then the fire would burn out and die. The smoke would clear. My eyes would adjust to the darkness, I thought. I’d find my footing. When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything—the whole world—would be new again.
I crossed East End Avenue and shuffled across the salted walkway through Carl Schurz Park toward the river, a wide channel of cracked obsidian. The collar of my fur coat tickled my chin. I remember that. A couple was taking pictures of each other by the railing.
“Can you take one of the two of us?”
I pulled my limp, pink hands from my pockets and held the camera numbly.
“Stand closer together,” I said, teeth chattering. The girl rubbed the wetness from her top lip with her gloved finger. The man lurched forward in his stiff wool coat. I thought of Trevor. In the viewfinder, the light did not find their faces but illuminated the aura of the wind-whipped hair around their heads.
“Cheese,” I said. They repeated it.
When they were gone, I threw my cell phone into the river and went back to my building, told the doorman that a short Asian man would be visiting me regularly. “He’s not my boyfriend, but give him that kind of consideration. He has my keys. Full access,” I said, then went upstairs and took a bath, put on the first set of pajamas, lay down on the mattress in the bedroom, and waited for a knock on the door.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Page 19