Land of Enchantment

by Leigh Stein

  Jason memorized a monologue he found on the Internet and performed it in our living room; it was from the perspective of a young man who’d lost his girlfriend in an accident and how he would always remember her brown eyes. On paper, I thought it was cheesy and sentimental, but when he performed it, it was sad and haunting.

  “You’ll get it,” I said, and I was right. He was cast as one of the leads.

  Now, every night after work, he put on his jacket and rode his bike to rehearsal, while I sat at home, e-mailing friends, writing love poems. He always came home flushed and manic, with something to brag about. Everyone at UNM loved him, he said. I wanted to be happy for him, that he had a chance to do what he was good at, but then Jason blurted out that after dating me for so long (between five and seven months, depending on which of us was counting), meeting new girls was like opening presents at Christmas.

  “What does that mean?” I said. “You want to fuck them?”

  “They want to fuck me.” But I want to fuck you, I thought but didn’t say. We were having sex less and less. He never initiated anymore, and if I tried, he would tell me, “It’s not sexy when you beg.”

  I would never meet any of these UNM girls, but they loomed large in my imagination: the enemy.

  “What are they?” I finally asked him, by which I meant, What are they that I am not?

  They were dancers. To compete, I found a regimen on a cheerleading website that promised to teach me to do full splits in fifteen minutes a day. I dyed my hair red in the bathroom sink. I took up smoking. Thinking I still might lose him to one of them, I offered the idea of a threesome, and even went online to browse for a girl we could invite over some night. I’m 140 pounds, one of the ads said, but I keep it tight. There was a picture of her from the neck down, wearing a bra and underwear. We never contacted her, but I continued grooming myself, as if training for a sexiness war. Every morning in the shower I shaved my legs, my armpits, the tiny soft hairs under my navel, and then everything between my legs, because he wouldn’t touch me otherwise. Sometimes Jason pulled the curtain back, just to look at me. Other times he came into the bathroom just to watch me pee. I called this lack of privacy “intimacy.” At night we slept back-to-back, butts touching, like two opposing archery bows.

  When we left for Albuquerque, our parents gave us parting gifts. From Jason’s dad, Victor: a gold necklace with Jesus on the cross for Jason and two cookbooks and a clothbound diary for me. From my mom: another cookbook, with color photos of how to truss a turkey, and two self-help books, Transforming Anxiety: The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity and Transforming Anger: The HeartMath Solution for Letting Go of Rage, Frustration, and Irritation. From my dad: fifty bucks to give anyone we could find to help us unload our furniture from the truck. (When I tried to give this money to our new neighbors Ted and Diane, who helped us carry our bed into the apartment, they politely refused to accept it.)

  The first entry in the diary describes our road trip to New Mexico. The fourth entry, from two weeks later, begins I don’t feel safe with myself. Only on these private pages could I record all the things I was too ashamed to admit to anyone: how much I was drinking, how sick I felt. I feel as if this was a mistake. Maybe we were meant to meet and know each other, but this is all too much. I haven’t told him this, but I worry I’d sleep with some other guy and he’d convince me to end it with Jason because I deserve better.

  What’s hard to understand, but what I know to have been true, is that I was more afraid that someone would successfully convince me to leave Jason than I was of staying with him.

  In e-mails to friends I was always carefully measuring what to leave in (I craved sympathy and understanding) and what to leave out (I couldn’t tolerate being told I deserved better, even if I knew it myself, because that meant I was choosing to stay inside the nightmare, and therefore everything he did was the consequence of my not leaving). To my friend Julia in New York, who asked, How is the west? Tell me absolutely everything, I replied with a list of the good and the bad. The good: the weather, the mountains, the food, the fact that I was running and writing every day. The bad: I couldn’t drive, we didn’t go anywhere, and:

  Sometimes I feel like we are best friends who sleep in the same bed and then I feel bad that we aren’t in a romantic relationship. Sometimes I feel like we are in a romantic relationship, but it is a bad, abusive kind that I should get out of. For example, sometimes we roughhouse and wrestle a little bit, but it’s turned into him hitting my legs or my arms sometimes out of anger, and not HARD, but a play slap out of anger is different than a play slap. He hit my arm in Walmart and it hurt so bad I started to cry and then he got mad at me for crying. See? This is abusive and I recognize that and I try to talk to him about it and he tells me I’m always playing the victim.

  I left out the part where a couple passed by us at Walmart, after he had hit my arm, and Jason hissed in my ear to stop crying, “or else they’ll think I hit you.” I left out the part where he threw me against the refrigerator and didn’t believe how badly I said I was hurt until he lifted my shirt and saw the bruises on my back. Then, remorseful, he left me alone the next time he was mad and only punched a hole through our bathroom door. I hope this e-mail isn’t coming off like a cry for help, I wrote to Julia. It’s hard to be really honest. I’m not unhappy and you shouldn’t worry.

  In the Albuquerque Journal “Help Wanted” section, I found a listing for a diner in need of waitresses. I checked the address online, and it was a little less than two miles away. The nearest bus only came once an hour, but that was okay: I could walk. I’d walked all over Chicago and all over New York. Forget learning to drive, or asking Jason for a ride. I would walk all over Albuquerque, too.

  It was approaching a hundred degrees when I left the apartment, hiked up the frontage road to Eubank, and made a right. For interview attire, I’d picked a strapless black cotton dress, meant to be a swimsuit cover-up, because it wouldn’t show the sweat, and pink plastic jelly sandals. I crossed Central Avenue, the old Route 66, and walked another mile and a half, past the Walmart and Del Taco, and over I-40. A man on a bike asked if I wanted a beer. Cars honked. Some drivers stopped to ask if I wanted a ride. When I ignored them and kept walking, they peeled away, blowing dirt and gravel in their wake, scratching my bare legs. I passed no other pedestrians.

  A dry heat. That was the number one thing people told us about the Southwest, before we moved there. But it’s hard to even imagine what dry heat feels like if you’ve only known humidity. Humidity is ubiquitous and punishing, but at least a dry heat cools in the shade. By the time I arrived at the restaurant, I was hot but not melting.

  I’d brought a résumé with me, of my past restaurant experience working as a hostess in Chicago and a coat-check girl in New York, but I still had to fill out a photocopied application. Warren, the manager, hired me on the spot to hostess until I could take a legally required licensing exam to serve alcohol in the state of New Mexico, and then I could wait tables. I was supposed to go buy black pants and, eventually, a black apron for my uniform. From the glass case under the front register, Warren pulled a white T-shirt with an owl and a Route 66 sign on it. He and all the other middle-aged managers were men. All the waitresses were women, whom the managers called girls; the hostesses were girls, too, and the busboys were boys.

  It was a Friday. I was supposed to start on Sunday, during the breakfast shift.

  On Saturday, I bought black pants and then spent the rest of the afternoon stretched out by the pool in my red bikini, getting sun and reading my book about overcoming anxiety. I was feeling warm and fine. I was feeling like a champ at overcoming: I had a boyfriend, an apartment, a job, a novel in progress, and I was a few days closer to my goal of the full splits. A dad was in the pool with two little girls wearing matching lavender swimsuits with built-in inner tubes. He tossed the girls in the air and they came splashing back d
own, asking to be thrown again as soon as they hit the water.

  That night, Jason said he was going to a party and I wasn’t allowed to come.

  “Why not?”

  “You have to let me have a life,” he said. “These are my friends.”

  I’d never told him this, but one of the perks of being his girlfriend was getting to go places with him and be seen at the side of someone with so much charisma. I liked the way other women looked at me. I liked knowing I had something that they did not. I couldn’t think of anything I’d had before worth envying.

  I practiced taking the deep breaths I’d just read about by the pool, and told him I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep without him.

  He said he would roll me a joint.

  But I couldn’t imagine smoking out this anxiety; all I could do was imagine, on repeat, him fucking one of his new Christmas presents while I sat at home, alone. I started to beg, but this just reinforced why he didn’t want me there: I was boring; I was a nag; I was not sexy. When I started to cry, he pointed out that he couldn’t show up to a party with a girl who was crying.

  After he left, I called my mom and surrendered. I didn’t say she was right, I never should have moved to Albuquerque with him. I didn’t admit that he had slapped me and thrown me against the fridge, but I did tell her he wanted to see other people and that I had exhausted every strategy in the Transforming Anxiety book she’d given me. At this point, I needed more than a book. I needed a mother, and mine was a professional at helping people in crisis. She never gasped or yelled or cried. In the same calm voice I’d heard her use behind closed doors, on the phone with suicidal patients, she told me exactly what to do, and I did it, relieved to have directions to follow.

  Using what was left of my savings after all of our moving expenses, I bought a one-way plane ticket. I packed a suitcase. I wrote a letter that began, Dear Jason, This isn’t working for me. I’m flying to Chicago, and left it on the coffee table, placing the joint and the lighter on top like paperweights. I called a taxi to take me to the Wyndham Hotel near the airport, where I could spend the night before my flight left the next morning. I turned off my cell phone so he couldn’t reach me if he tried, and promised to call my mom back from the landline in my hotel room.

  A shitty Checker cab with ruptured vinyl seats showed up and the driver wanted to talk. “There isn’t anything to do in this town except go to the liquor store,” he said, “am I right?” I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to stare out the window and memorize each terra-cotta-and-turquoise underpass on the highway. The night was cool, and the sky was punctured with stars. I was sitting on my shaking hands, murmuring, “Yeah. Uh-huh. I know what you mean.”

  “A bunch of alcoholics,” he continued. “Everyone’s an alcoholic.”

  At the Wyndham, the first room key they gave me didn’t work. Neither did the second. On my third trip to the front desk, I had to make small talk in the elevator with a middle-aged couple from New Zealand, and I could feel myself split in two: one of me was recounting the tragedy of the faulty room key, and the other me was numb and floating away on an irreversible course, like a hot air balloon about to crash into electrical wires.

  I spent the night on the phone talking to my parents, afraid to sleep and afraid that Jason would, somehow, find me. “Love is as love does,” my mom said, and I wrote this on the hotel notepad by the phone. All my dad could think to suggest was a hot bath, and so when I finally hung up the phone, I ran the water and soaked in the deep tub. I realized that for the first night in a long time, I was sober.

  Four weeks to the day after we’d left Illinois for New Mexico, my plane touched down at Midway. I turned my cell phone on while we taxied to the terminal and listened to nine voice mails from Jason. He wanted to know where I was. He wanted to know how I could do this to him. “I’m drunk, I just drank a lot of NyQuil, I went over to Ted and Diane’s to see if you’re there, but you’re not.” He hadn’t believed what I wrote in my letter, that I really had flown back to Chicago.

  My mom picked me up at baggage claim and even though I’d followed her advice to the letter, I’d never seen her less happy to see me. I hadn’t called Jason back yet because I wanted to do it in front of a witness, but I didn’t know what I wanted the witness to do while I called. Did I want her to make reassuring facial expressions? Did I want her to be there in case I cracked, so she could take the phone from my hand? What would that mean, to “crack”? Was I afraid that I would apologize for leaving? The fact that I’d physically gotten away from Jason didn’t prevent all my thoughts from orbiting around him, like planets around the sun.

  She watched me while I called him back.

  He answered immediately: “Where are you?”

  “I told you where I am. I’m in Chicago.”

  “I’m leaving right now, and I’m coming to get you.”

  “In the car?”

  “The motorcycle.”

  I received these words as proof of his devotion. Good idea, I thought. Come and get me. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s going to come pick me up on his motorcycle,” I told my mom, expecting her to be excited about this new development.

  “Hang up the phone,” she said.

  I felt stunned and confused, unable to understand why she was being so cold when I was in such agony. Even though I’d gone through all the actions of leaving Jason, I couldn’t imagine staying away from him for good. Didn’t she know that? Hadn’t I just flown across the country so that he would realize he wanted me back? I did what she told me to do—I left my phone off all night, and hadn’t he learned his lesson now? Wasn’t she on my side? Wasn’t this what we both wanted? It did not occur to me that she and I wanted completely different outcomes.

  “I’ll have to call you back later,” I told Jason, even though a part of me wondered if later would be too late: if he would already be on his motorcycle, flying down the highway, coming to get me.

  We picked up my suitcase from the baggage carousel (I had packed two dozen books I thought I might need until I got back home to Albuquerque) and went to the parking garage.

  “I forgot how ugly the sky is here,” I said, like a petulant child, once we were on the tollway. I was slumped in the passenger seat; I hadn’t driven a car in weeks. The blue horizon was divided by billboard ads: cell phone company, pizza place, strip club, strip club.

  “Is it really so different?”

  Yes. I’d been to Mars and back.

  For the next twenty-four hours I lay on the trampoline in my parents’ backyard, soaking up sun, making phone calls. I called Julia. I called back our neighbor Diane, who’d left a message to see if I was okay. I cringed every time I pictured Jason arriving at her door on Saturday night, drunk, looking for me, and tried to come up with a believable explanation for why I’d run away, without mentioning the threat of other women, or him hitting me.

  “It’s just that sometimes he drinks too much and we get into fights and this seemed like the only way to get through to him,” I said.

  “If you’re concerned about how much he’s drinking,” she said gently, “then maybe don’t buy him alcohol.”

  I felt embarrassed at being chided, and wanted to defend myself, but had no good argument. By trying to absolve Jason, I’d implicated myself. I was the enabler. I was the one who stood in line at Walmart or Walgreens with ID ready while Jason hovered in the background, playing with the whirligigs placed to entice children at the checkout.

  “You’re right,” I told Diane. “I know you’re right.”

  I called Jason.

  “You betrayed me,” he said. “I’ve been throwing up all day and drinking gin. I thought you loved me.

  “Everyone I’ve ever loved has abandoned me,” he reminded me, and started to cry.

  If I didn’t come back, he said he would take all my books out to the parking lot and burn them. />
  I remember nothing of my side of the conversation. I must have kept trying to explain how miserable I was until it seemed like finally he heard me, and changed his tune to one of remorse. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We need to work on this. I love you. I want you to tell me why you’re depressed. I think you’re so smart, and my dad says I should get down on my knees every day and thank God I have you.”

  I knew what the cycle of abuse was, I knew the highs and the lows, and I could recognize that Jason’s remorse and promises were what drew me back into his web. But wasn’t he right? Wasn’t I so smart? So smart that I could see exactly what I was doing in making a choice to go back to him? If we could just work on this, I thought, we could show everyone that our move wasn’t a mistake, that I wasn’t a victim of anything—Jason and I could prove we really were as special as we felt ourselves to be.

  My parents tried to get me to at least stay the week, to make him sweat it out in Albuquerque and really miss me. At least that’s what they said. It would be years before I understood that my parents had thought that by coming home I’d finally become strong enough to leave him. Like when we moved to New Mexico in the first place, my mom felt, as much as she didn’t want me to go, that this was my life, my decision.

  I was home for only twenty-four hours.

  Over the phone, Jason and I reached an agreement: he would teach me how to drive stick, he wouldn’t sleep with other people, he would stop teasing (hitting) me. In return, I had to go back on antidepressants for the first time in years so I would stop acting “crazy.” He promised to pick me up at the airport Monday night. I called Warren and apologized for missing my first day of work, but there was a “family emergency,” and he said I could start on Tuesday, but it couldn’t happen again. I didn’t tell him I was calling from thirteen hundred miles away.