by Rebecca Dana
Peter thought for a moment.
“You should do it,” he said.
After their lives implode, some people stay put and settle into the hole where everything used to be. This is what Chad did, as far as I know: just stuck it out in the apartment, staring at the spot where my television once sat. Other people, faced with the void, do something dramatic. They go to Mexico for a week or Argentina for a year or a convent for the rest of their lives. Given endless means, I would have run away too. But, as unglamorous as it was, I had to support myself. When you’re alone in the world, you don’t just drop everything and run off to India to meditate twenty hours a day and assume you’ll be able to get another job at some point, especially not one with free soy lattes and Friday brunch. Given these restrictions, about the farthest I could run was the place at the very end of the subway line.
The next morning I sent Cosmo an e-mail saying I’d like to take the room. The reply came back immediately.
hi!
likewise.
TWO DAYS LATER, I brought him the deposit and first month’s rent, $975, in cash. Lubavitchers commonly don’t accept checks.
Mars for a Price
On November 15, my two best friends from college, Annie and Matthew, came with me to my old apartment to help me pack and move. I went expecting postearthquake devastation. I went expecting to spend hours weeping over the desecration of my home. I brought thirty-five dollars’ worth of fancy pastries, which I thought we’d slowly work through, as I held up mementos from my one great love, sobbing, telling the story of how we came to acquire such and such thing and what sentimental value it carried. I burned Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” onto a CD and planned to play it on repeat the entire time.
Ra ra, raaaahh ahhh ahhh
Romah, romah mahhh
That morning I’d prepared for the move with a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond, where I selected one blanket, one pillow, one set of sheets, one roll of packing tape and one bath towel, then fainted on the way to checkout. It was a terrible mess at the time, but there are worse places to lose consciousness than a giant home-supply store. Immediately, three blue-aproned employees descended, wielding Kleenex tissue pocket packs, sanitary hand wipes and bottles of Poland Spring. I was mortified and, for as long as the embarrassment lasted, relieved.
It was another obnoxiously beautiful day. When we arrived at 82 Jane Street, I walked around in a daze, waiting for the first reminder of all I’d lost to set me bawling. But it never happened. Here, in a drawer, were the twelve new pairs of black dress socks I’d bought him the other week. There, in the closet, was the gray scarf we traded back and forth. In the freezer was a half-empty bottle of fancy vodka I’d given him as a present when he left the law firm. We’d had good times, and there were reminders of those, but there was no evidence of the fairy-tale romance I was sure I’d lost. There was nothing in all our shared six hundred square feet that catapulted me into a sorrow-tinged reverie about “that time when”—when he really saw me, when we really connected. Had those times ever happened? They must have, but the evidence didn’t bear it out.
It took an hour and a half to pack everything. We worked in silence. Matthew, recently engaged to his boyfriend Ted, boxed books. Annie, recently engaged to her boyfriend Santosh, handled clothing and toiletries. I have always been inept at packing, and with the added obstacles of sleep deprivation and grief, I mostly wandered around, dropping items in boxes where they didn’t belong, leaving Annie, meticulous and efficient, to trail me, fixing everything. Nothing on the walls was mine. There were no mutual possessions in dispute, except the scarf, which I took. I had sold off all my furniture, donated my pillows, sheets, towels, pots, pans and silverware when we’d moved in together. When I moved out, the hardest part was seeing how few typical grown-up-person things I actually owned. There was a lamp, an ottoman, an area rug, a television, six boxes of books, three of clothing and shoes, and one of miscellany. My entire earthly footprint: enough to fill a shopping cart.
Before the movers came, we laid out the few items I’d captured in my trawling that seemed to carry some real emotional heft. There was a hand-drawn card from our second anniversary. There was a sheet with three photo-booth pictures from a friend’s wedding, showing us making two silly faces and then me kissing him on the cheek. There were assorted cards and letters from his parents, sent to me on Jewish holidays. And there was a stuffed toy Eeyore he’d brought me a year earlier, when he picked me up from having my wisdom teeth removed.
Of these, only Eeyore was perilous. When you squeezed a button sewn into the toy donkey’s hoof, a speaker buried in his belly emitted a low, melancholy version of “Blue Christmas,” a holiday song about unrequited love that was made famous by Elvis Presley and later covered by the Beach Boys. It had seemed like a strange postsurgery gift when I got it, but I’d had the operation six days before Thanksgiving, and that’s what was on offer at the drugstore across the street, where Chad went before picking me up. I’d been terrified about the surgery for weeks before it happened, fears driven by a full mental catalog of bad hospital experiences from my youth. I was not exactly hearty as a child. I was by far the smallest girl in my school—short, rail thin, nicknamed Shrimpy Wimpy by a six-year-old tyrant who would grow to be only five foot one, a full nine inches shorter than my adult height. I had an undiagnosed blood disorder that stripped me of energy and kept my immune system, as a defense force, on par with the Iraqi national guard. (This condition was later diagnosed, incorrectly, by the Yale University Department of Undergraduate Health—nicknamed Duh—as sickle cell anemia. I did an actual spit-take when the poor nurse came in to break the news. I am not only the palest but also in every sense the whitest girl who ever lived. The condition was later correctly diagnosed as alpha thalassemia, which basically means “really tiny red blood cells,” and which is like having an untreatable case of anemia. You’re a little schleppy all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It will shock no one to learn that this is a genetic disorder that turns up in Jews.)
In addition to being weak, anemic, underweight and really into math, I was also violently allergic to every known antibiotic. This was my lot, and I accepted it. While every other kid at school got to guzzle bubble-gum-flavored penicillin any time she had strep throat, I spent a few weeks in and out of the hospital, hooked up to a heart monitor, taking teeny tiny doses of medicine intravenously. I lay in the hospital bed, in my hospital gown and my hospital socks, and stared up at the drip, drip, drip of the IV machine, wondering if this was the drip that was going to send me into shock (again) and maybe, probably, finish me off. These visits, which happened once a year or so, were the only times in my life I have ever prayed without any prompting or company. I didn’t know how to do it, so I copied the nursery rhyme. When no one was looking, I put my hands together, palm to palm (“Here is the church, here is the steeple…”), and spoke my message straight to God: “I’m sorry I only talk to you when I need something,” I’d whisper. “People probably don’t ask often, so how are you? I hope you’re doing well.” (It’s not that I was interested, really, but I was a precocious suck-up.) “Listen, can you just not kill me yet?”
No medical procedure in my life had ever worked out as planned, and so, going into the wisdom tooth extraction I’d put off for a decade, I was feeling fatalistic—justifiably so, it turned out. Complications from the surgery sent me to the hospital for three days, in physical pain not even an IV cocktail of morphine and Dilaudid could touch. I developed an abscess that effectively locked my lower jaw shut. On the plus side, I spoke like a country club WASP, which was funny for a while. On the minus, the swelling began to choke off my airway. Three times a day, two oral surgeons came to my hospital room to check on whatever evil had taken residence in my skull. To do so, they executed a medieval procedure that involved jimmying my jaw open with a wooden tongue depressor. Chad held my toes and whispered that everything was going to be okay. He never once left my bedside. I was blitzed on pain
killers, disoriented and terrified. The doctors decided I needed emergency surgery. “I’m afraid I’m not going to wake up,” I told Chad through my clenched jaw. He stroked my hair. I held Eeyore so tight that after three days the stuffing around his chest cavity had large dents in the shape of my fist.
“What do you want to do with this?” Annie asked, dangling the donkey by one leg.
I formed my hand around Eeyore’s belly and felt a lump rising in my throat. Annie left me alone with my stuffed animal, scuttling off to the bedroom for one final sweep. A large white Hefty bag lay open in front of me, full of newspapers, half-used bottles of shampoo, nail polish remover and empty rolls of packing tape. I’ve never been a person who holds on to things. I didn’t have a camera, didn’t keep ticket stubs or old friendship bracelets. Where would I put this if I did take it with me? In a drawer somewhere, so I’d happen on it many years later and be transported back to a painful episode that the first love of my life helped me survive, sometime after he started harping about my posture and before he started cheating on me? I looked into Eeyore’s droopy plastic eyes and reconsidered. Any memento of goodness, however isolated, must be worth holding on to, I thought. Even if it’s nothing more than a reminder that there wasn’t only badness. Right?
Annie marched back from her sweep of the bedroom, holding something small in her hand that I couldn’t quite make out.
“Do you want to keep this hair thing?” she asked. “You left it on your night table.”
My hair was cropped short. I didn’t use or own hair things, let alone leave them on my night table, which was plainly no longer my night table. One of my hands, the one not holding Eeyore, drifted up to my head. Annie’s face fell. She put the plastic clip down on what was no longer my kitchen table. I could see now that a few long brown hairs were tangled in its teeth.
Annie was a resident at the hospital where I went after my jaw locked shut, and she also sat next to my bed there. She was with me when the doctors said I needed surgery, and when I said I was afraid I’d never wake up, she said, “Everyone’s afraid of that, and it just doesn’t happen.” Then, with all the love in her heart, she said, “Don’t be an idiot, Rebecca. You’re going to be fine.” And I was fine. No surgery. Sometime in the middle of the third night, as they were prepping a bed, the abscess just disappeared. Like it had never been there.
I stared at the hair clip on the table. My gaze drifted over to the Particularity Qatar! shirt, with the three stick-figure donkeys, balled up in the corner of the couch, and I reflected for a minute on how the enduring image of the last three years of my life was that of an ass. Annie came over, took the Eeyore toy out of my hand and threw it in the garbage.
The doll landed on its leg and started to sing. “I’ll have a bloooooooo Christmas without yoooo. I’ll be so bloooooooooo just thinking about yoooo.”
Annie walked over to the garbage bag and with one sneakered foot stomped on Eeyore until we heard a plastic snap, then a few metallic burbles and then, finally, silence.
“OH,” SAID COSMO, returning home from work later after I’d moved in. “You’re here, I see.”
I smiled weakly.
“And you’ve been talking to the boyfriend?”
I’d spoken to the boyfriend, and then I’d spent the better part of the afternoon sobbing into my brand-new Sealy Posture Premier mattress. The giveaway here was my giant red face.
Mhmmm. Cosmo nodded. He stroked his beard, taking an almost physical pleasure in the affirmation of his suspicions, in the unfailing predictability of women. “I am very smart, you know,” he said and pushed past me toward the kitchen to put a kettle on, flipping the light switch on the way.
I followed him on tiptoe, as if the less I touched the ground, the less real any of this would be. The kitchen was, let’s say, spartan. A plastic table and two red plastic chairs occupied one wall. A few stray pots and pans sat by the sink. The Frigidaire was basically empty, emitted a distinctly toxic smell and hadn’t been cleaned in so long—possibly ever—that a rainbow of early-stage antibiotic cultures covered the interior walls. The floor was sticky, grabbing the pads of my feet, discouraging movement. I hovered in the doorframe.
“We should give you something real to drink,” Cosmo said, stretching up and pulling a giant box of Sho Chiku Bai sake from the shelf. I stared at his array of magnets advertising kosher pizza shops and delivery meat markets. A small, painted-ceramic klezmer band played a tiny Celsius thermometer like an instrument on his freezer door. He slid the bottle out of the box and sloshed around the contents: a few tablespoons of foamy liquid a little too thick to be palatable booze. “It’s old but I think still good?”
I shook my head and sniffled. “Just tea, thanks.”
My cheeks were inflated like a party balloon, my internal organs twisted into a hot coil, my sinuses on the verge of collapse. Cosmo rolled a cigarette. He sat down and smoked it slowly and indulgently. When the kettle started screaming, he let it scream, finishing his cigarette and flicking ashes in the big metal sink.
“I have a date this week,” I said. Something benign and nonthreatening, hastily arranged by a colleague.
“You will probably sabotage it,” he replied, poking at the end of his perfectly rolled cigarette with one blunt fingertip, the nail clipped short and clean.
We drank our tea sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, which was covered in plastic bags from House of Glatt and a box of six-month-old handmade Israeli matzos. This was November, Passover was in the spring.
“Why don’t you get rid of these?” I asked.
“They’re expensive,” he said.
Cosmo prepared another cigarette. Watching felt like voyeurism, not least because before I moved in, he had typically done these things alone, and most private indulgences, no matter how benign, take on a sensual quality. He pinched a too-fat wad of tobacco and let it fall loosely onto the rolling paper, which he twisted between his fingers until it was a perfect tube. He licked one edge, careful not to extend his tongue beyond his lips, hypercognizant, like all ultrareligious people, of the exposure of body parts to open air. I watched, pushing up the sleeve on my T-shirt so it rested on top of my shoulder—a mindless habit. In all my years of heathen living, of promiscuity and impiety and the mixing of milk and meat, I had never seen someone roll a cigarette so intently. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he’d rarely been that close to a woman’s bare arm before.
“Do you know of this book, Exodus?” he asked, looking down.
“Like, from the Bible?” I said, trying to smile politely.
“No!” He looked disgusted. “The one about the boat.”
After an extended back and forth that touched on Exodus, the band, I learned he meant the book by Leon Uris about a ship full of Jews that fled a detention camp in Cyprus in 1947 and sailed for what was then Palestine. It is the story of the founding of the Jewish state. It became a movie, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman.
“Oh,” I said finally. “The Paul Newman one.”
Cosmo looked at me with exhaustion and nodded once for “Yes, moron.”
“The author of this book, which I have not read, wrote a story, which I did read.” He was leaning against the sink now, his forearms resting on his chenille yarmulke, which was held on by a single bobby pin. (“Bobby pins are the beginning,” he would tell me later. The beginning of what? “Of vanity. For a Lubavitcher, it all goes downhill from there.”) This was a favorite pose of his, vaguely rabbinical but also poetic, allowing him a wide berth to gesture dramatically, jabbing his cigarette in the air. “The story is about a man who is married for a long time and then gets divorced, and the point of it is that it’s a natural state for a writer to be lonely and sad.” He seemed genuinely pleased by this parable, as if it were the answer to all my distress. “You know, Rebecca, you may be alone for a very long time.”
I thanked him for the insight by staggering off to our shared bathroom with the intention of vomiting i
n the little toilet with the blue opalescent clam-shaped plastic top. My stomach had been doing this a lot lately, sending me spinning off to bathrooms, where I’d curl up on the cold tiles next to the toilet and pray for some outward expression of the internal collapse I felt. It never came.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked up fourteen feet to the water-stained ceiling, with its single lightbulb and unreachable pull chain. On the windowsill, there was a three-year-old copy of Spin magazine and a book of sheet music. The tiny gray floor tiles were caked with brown grime, as was the sink basin and the bottom edge of the shower curtain, dangling by too few hooks from a pencil-thin metal rod. When was the last time a woman had been in this room? Never, I guessed. Three toothbrushes, a box of Q-tips and a bright red canister of Axe deodorant body spray occupied the only shelves.
I noticed a yellowed piece of paper hanging on the wall just outside the door and stumbled over to take a look. It had a series of short Hebrew prayers followed by English translations. The last and longest was:
You are blessed, Lord our God, sovereign of the world, who formed man cleverly, and created in him many different organs and channels. It is clearly evident before Your glorious throne that, should one of these be wrongly opened, or one of them be wrongly blocked, it would be impossible to continue to stand before You. You are blessed, Lord, who heals all flesh in a wonderful way.
This prayer hung six feet from my new toilet, which had horrible plumbing, in my new apartment, which, while only five miles or thirty minutes by subway from my old home, was an infinite distance in space and time from my old life. For a second I imagined what I would be doing if I were still on planet Earth, as I once knew it. I would be curled up on the couch, eating takeout sushi and watching premium cable with the man of my obliterated dreams.