Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

  We spend the weekend moving slowly and sleeping late and wishing the lazy baby would hurry up already. On Sunday morning we’re reading by the deep end of the hotel pool when the shallow end starts to fill with women—a bridal party from what we can make out. They arrive already tipsy, and the pomegranate mimosas—“pomegranate is a superfood!” one woman repeatedly tells the others—keep coming until that end of the pool seems like a Greek chorus of women with major grievances about their bodies, faces, children, homes, jobs, and husbands, who aren’t going to do anything about any of it but get loaded and sunburned.

  I give Mindy the look that women use to say Do you believe this shit? The woman on the other side of her catches the look and gives it back to me over her laptop, and then the woman next to her joins in, too. We engage in a silent four-way exchange of dismay, irritation, and bitchiness, and it is wonderful.

  Then Mindy slides her Tom Ford sunglasses back over her eyes and says, “All I can say is, it’s really nice on this end of the pool.” I laugh and my heart swells against my swimsuit and I pull my shades down, too, to keep my suddenly watery eyes to myself. Because it is. It is so nice on this end of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that. Sober. I never expected to make it to this end of the pool. I never thought I’d get to be here.

  Mammal, Fish, or Bird

  I was running the Bluff Trail at Ebey’s Landing, a historic reserve on Whidbey Island, just to the upper left of Seattle. It’s named after someone named Ebey, who … landed there at some point, I guess. In a boat. Look, I don’t know what the deal was and I don’t really care. I don’t know if he earned having his own landing, or if he just called dibs. I could probably look it up, but then so could you. I am assuming Ebey was a man, though. Women get named after nature, but it’s rarely named after us.

  Anyway. I was running at Ebey’s Landing last September. It’s a six-mile trail that starts at an old cemetery and winds past acres of beet greens; I don’t know much about history, but I do know my plants, especially when they are labeled with three-foot signs that say BEETS. Past the beets, you hang a left and pass through a prairie so many shades of green it could almost make you believe in elves, and luck, and Ireland. At the end of the prairie, you climb an infuriatingly steep but short path to the bluffs, at which point you can gasp for breath while gazing at two of Washington State’s thirty-seven major mountain ranges. Then the Bluff Trail carries you for two miles high above Puget Sound and down a bunch of switchbacks to the beach, where you loop two miles back to the prairie, dreams of Ireland, beets, tombstones, and your car.

  At least this is how it would go if you understood tides.

  I don’t understand tides. I mean, I haven’t tried to. I know they have something to do with the moon, which frankly sounds a little Wiccan to me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The idea that my body automatically makes food for a fetus (like baking a cake just in case someone special drops by) and then gets rid of it through a hole every month doesn’t sound totally legit, either, but it happens.

  So, I don’t get tides. And until that day at Ebey’s Landing, I also did not fully grasp that they applied to me. Which is why I came trotting down the switchbacks, feeling like a world-class outdoorswoman, to find myself staring at ankle-deep water. I had two choices: continue on as planned, slogging two miles through water that, for all I knew, could be ten feet high within an hour, or go all the way back up that hill—the first half of it sand—and return the way I’d come.

  I looked at the water. I looked up at the bluffs. “The way the planet works is totally unfair,” I muttered as I started my ascent.

  * * *

  According to family lore, when I was three years old, my parents took me to a psychiatrist to find out why I talked so much. The dramatic high point of the testing process came during a word-association exercise that went something like this:

  DOCTOR: Peanut butter.

  ME: Jelly.

  DOCTOR: Shoes.

  ME: Socks.

  DOCTOR: Nail.

  ME: What?

  DOCTOR: Nail.

  ME: Which kind?

  DOCTOR: What do you mean?

  ME: I mean is it the kind on your finger, the kind on your toe, or the kind you hit with a hammer?

  DOCTOR (pauses, rises, says in stentorian tones): This child is not mentally ill. This child is a genius.

  Henceforth my parents saw that nothing was wrong with me, and my childhood continued in a stable, accepting environment. Ha! That totally didn’t happen. Instead, I continued to act as family scapegoat for many years. But the doctor’s pronouncement ensured that I was seen as smart, which gave me something acceptable to be, and when I started the Gifted program at school, it opened doors to a world of steadier adults and special privileges. Unfortunately, being gifted ruined me for fact-based, practical learning, like what makes boats float or how to divide one number into another. In Gifted, we wrote short stories, worked out logic problems, and played educational games like Propaganda, where we had to identify the rhetorical flaws in various claims. “Tommy came over to my house last week, and afterward our dishwasher broke down. He’d better not come over again, or the refrigerator will break!” the teacher read, and in unison a bunch of eight-year-olds would respond, “Post hoc!” We played Oregon Trail and died of dysentery. We staged a production of Macbeth from a kid-level script, because all kids should learn about assassination and paranoid insanity.

  By contrast, the long division and state capitals taught in my regular classroom were so boring, so pedantic. (Anything I didn’t want to do back then was pedantic.) I developed the notion that I was too smart to need to know anything. Why memorize a bunch of facts when I could problem solve on the fly or look up the answer in a World Book Encyclopedia? I preferred to spend my time on things that came easily, like reading and writing, because accomplishments and prizes were routes to approval in my family and I could rack those up more easily via essay contests than science fairs. Or T-ball tournaments. Or dance recitals.

  I got through high school, became a National Merit Scholar, and got a free ride to college with a brain crammed with Flannery O’Connor, simplified existentialism, and a few beginning sex tips, but virtually no knowledge of the physical world beyond how to recognize maybe 5 percent of the fish I saw snorkeling. (And kids, whatever your teachers may tell you, knowing how to give a good blow job is way more useful than being able to point underwater and say, “Look, a tetra.”)

  I made it through just fine. I finished college and got a free ride to grad school with a knowledge base consisting of French feminism, Virginia Woolf, and the word “ontological.” They accepted me without my knowing how to use a compass or a tire iron and despite my belief that a solar eclipse is when the sun passes between the earth and the moon.

  I headed off to Michigan with zero experience with nontropical climates, but because I had recently read The Solace of Open Spaces, about a frozen-solid winter on a Wyoming cattle ranch, I assumed life in Ann Arbor would be pretty much the same. I moved with pac boots, a parka rated for fifty below zero, and a ski mask that left only my eyes exposed. Once I arrived, I realized I wouldn’t need a rope to navigate from my car to the door of my apartment and my cows were not at risk of crystallizing. Chastened, I enrolled in Physics for Poets as an elective but dropped it when it proved to involve actual physics.

  And everything was still just fine. Turns out you don’t need to know much about atoms or entropy to be considered a credible adult. Eventually, I got married and my husband, John, amused himself by inventing a game called Mammal, Fish, or Bird? in which he would name an animal and I would categorize it.

  JOHN: Duck.

  ME: That’s a hard one.

  JOHN: Is it?

  ME: Well, it spends most of its time
in the water, which makes it seem sort of like a fish. But I know it’s not a fish.

  JOHN: Do you? Do you know it’s not a fish?

  ME: I think technically it’s a bird, but in spirit it’s really more like a mammal.

  JOHN: And why is that?

  ME: Because it makes eye contact. I’ve totally made eye contact with ducks.

  JOHN: I am sure you have.

  I did make some progress in my war against facts. I had started running, and while it’s true that running is an instinctual thing that humans have been doing since the Stone Age (or whatever the earliest age is), it’s also true that it’s a lot easier and less dangerous when you have some idea of what you are doing. Of course I didn’t realize that until I went for my first run at age forty-two. I had been traveling heavily for work and was in need of a portable way to burn off the anger built up by all the 6:00 a.m. layovers, long TSA lines, and grim meetings.

  I approached running the same way I approach anything new: by assuming I could throw myself into the thick of it and survive on wiles and charm. I put on shorts, a tank top, and some old gym shoes, went to a popular neighborhood trail, and hauled ass for about forty seconds before hitting a wall of hypoxia-induced nausea. I leaned over my legs until I got my breath back, then did it again. Five times in all, never more than thirty seconds at a stretch. (I was probably running about an eight-minute mile, which isn’t a big deal for your average marathon-trained Kenyan but is absurd for someone who lives at sea level and hasn’t moved faster than a brisk walk in decades.)

  It was a painful, humiliating experience that I wanted to repeat, if only to prove I could master it. I’d go to Green Lake Park a few times a week and stagger around as if I were being chased by a blood-drenched clown. One day I wandered into a running store, and a shockingly tall redheaded teenager looked at my deplorable feet, watched me jog on a treadmill, and fitted me with a pair of shoes designed to correct my over-pronation. I hadn’t known that was a condition, and it certainly never occurred to me that a shoe could be used to fix anything, because I tended to gravitate toward shoes that made my feet feel terrible. This will change everything, I thought. Well, no. But it did open me up to the idea that running was something other people had done and that there was a body of knowledge attached to it, some of which might be relevant to me.

  At the bookstore one day, I saw two whole shelves devoted to running. I pulled out one of the thicker volumes and opened it at random. Well, blow me down. I had started to wonder if maybe I had only one working lung, but it turns out that there was an entire chapter on breathing. I perched on a stepladder and read it. Okay, I skimmed the “why” parts (something about muscles, blood, and oxygen) and paid close attention to the “how” parts, which were enlightening. For instance, breathing through my mouth instead of my nose would help my body get more air! I went to the lake that day and watched other runners and what do you know: mouth breathers all.

  “How was your run?” John asked later.

  “So much easier since I started breathing through my mouth!” I said.

  He looked at me. “You’ve been breathing through your nose all this time?”

  “I thought it would help me feel calmer.”

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  Good running shoes didn’t change everything. Neither did adequate oxygen. But the two together turned me into a student of running. Soon I owned an entire shelf of running books, and I turned to them whenever something went wrong, which was always. I learned how to build stamina (grindingly). I learned to tell my gastroc from my soleus (painfully). I learned that when it feels like plantar fasciitis and heals like plantar fasciitis, it probably is plantar fasciitis, versus double foot cancer.

  I started to see that I could start out truly awful at something and get better. Since childhood, I’d been pursuing things I was naturally good at and avoiding stuff that was hard, because if I couldn’t bring home the Blue Ribbon of Parental Approval, I didn’t see the point. As an adult, I pushed this reasoning even further, arguing that I didn’t want to let perfectionism rule my life, so why try hard new things at all? But running was different. And I was different. I needed the experience of working hard at something just to become average at it. So I read about running. I took workshops. I tried things. I put in the miles, and over time I grew from a catastrophic runner into a mediocre one. That was huge for me. The beginning of my running life and the end of my drinking one overlapped by about a year, which meant that in my first days sober I was able to say to myself, “If you can run a mile, you can make it through this night without a drink.” And soon, “If you can go a month without a drink, you can make it around the lake one more time.”

  * * *

  That day at the bluffs, though—there’s really no technique for running up a giant sand dune other than Suck It Up. (Now that I think about it, there may be a codified technique for this. I will look it up.) And I am really not a suck-it-up person. I am the person who’ll pay the extortionate business-class fare just to avoid sharing an armrest with a stranger. I chose my first half marathon based on the course having a net six-hundred-foot decline. I do, however, know how to persevere resentfully. So I did. Quads burning like nuclear rods, heart dry and gritty, leaning over my knees at every switchback to catch my breath and be unhappy—like that, I made it to the top in only twice the time it had taken me to run down.

  At the top, I looked at where I’d come from. The surf was steadily pooling at least three hundred feet below me. You came far, I thought. You were there. Now you’re here. Just from trying. Trying, and accepting the fact that if you didn’t try, you’d end up all wet. How metaphorical can one person be? I would have liked to stand around a bit longer admiring the view and myself, but all I had to eat was a GU packet. It wasn’t enough. I’d been out for longer than planned and would need another two hundred calories soon or I’d get slow and crabby. Based on the gentle roll of the terrain and my usual pace, I estimated I could be back at my car eating a banana and half a Clif Bar in twenty-four minutes. I rubbed some more sunscreen onto my face, checked that the Kinesio tape on my right knee was holding, and ran on. With less than a mile to go, I was rewarded with a close-up sighting of a bald eagle. We might have exchanged a meaningful glance.

  Notes to Self: Rachel’s Wedding

  You can do this. You’ll stay distracted. You will keep in mind that a wedding is nothing more than a big, sprawling novel. But not the one where you end up in the coat closet with Hugo and a bottle of champagne. And not the one where you drink too much red wine and spend half the reception pondering the phrase “till death do you part.” And also not the one where you realize you’ll probably never have that newly-in-love feeling again—or if you do, it will mean a world of trouble—and when your husband asks if everything is okay, you say, “Of course.”

  No. It’s a different kind of novel, Russian in scope, and you’ll read it and sink into it until you forget all about the trays of white wine and that hollow feeling you get when the DJ plays your high school prom theme. You will watch Rachel and Greg make terrifying promises to each other. You’ll remember Harper’s wedding in Indiana with eight marriages among the four parents—a whole conga line of steps and exes, affairs and lawyers and divisions of property. That’s a novel you could have read all night, if you hadn’t been so tanked.

  If you find yourself needing to drown in something, you’ll drown in promises, broken and kept. All those promises made fifty years ago, ten years ago, three months ago. Beth and Mark got divorced within a year. Nora found out soon after her honeymoon that Jackson slept with someone the week before the wedding, and they still stayed married. Mike told Ava he’d get married when gay people could, too, and then, when it happened, he freaked out and left. Drew and Shannon had two stillborn sons in two years, and now their three adopted girls are spinning in a ring on the dance floor.

  Above all you’ll remember that when it becomes too much or not enough, you’ll leave. Say you’re sick. Say you ha
ve a long drive home. Say you’re eloping with yourself. Or you’ll say nothing at all and just go, a runaway bride with only one vow left. Run.

  Permission

  AFTER MARY OLIVER

  You do not have to be good.

  You do not have to “eat clean.”

  You do not have to drink hot water with lemon.

  You do not have to go to your Windex-scented gym and watch yourself run on the treadmill, wondering if your knees really jiggle like that or if it’s a trick of the mirrors.

  You do not have to use “journal” as a verb.

  You do not have to look in the mirror and say you love yourself. You do not have to love yourself. Not today.

  You do not have to go to happy hour and pretend your club soda is a vodka tonic. You could go to the movies. You could lie to get there; lying is fine. You could say you have a dentist appointment and then go to the movies and eat Sugar Babies. Or Raisinets or popcorn or nothing.

  Sugar Babies are really good, though.

  The movie also does not have to be good. It only needs to have people, or robots, or vampires who do and say things. When it ends, you’ll walk outside and it will be dark. It will be time to go home and make dinner. (Unless you need to see another movie. You could turn right around and do that, too.)

  You do not have to make dinner. You could eat pizza, or just the toppings. Leftover Sugar Babies (though who would have leftover Sugar Babies?). Bananas. Croutons. Croutons count as dinner. The starving people of the world will tell you croutons count.

  You do not have to worry about the starving people of the world. Not tonight. You do not have to have a cause. If you do have a cause, it’s okay to shed it for now. The world won’t stop making stray dogs and child brides and sex slaves. They will be there, ready for your help, when you are able to think about them again.