Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “You go around selling this overpriced crap—and then getting drunk—”

  “Oh really? How the hell do you know?” I shouted. “When was the last time you ever worked or cooked, you spoiled little brat!”

  Who hung up first, I could not tell. That was the thing with cell phones—they just cut off suddenly—there was no satisfying, definitive click.

  For a few minutes I sat there shaking, fighting the urge to call back. I felt whiplashed, nauseated all over again. Kids: They knew exactly where to plunge in the knife, how to twist it precisely between your ribs to gut you with the most damage.

  The fastest route home would’ve been to go back the way I’d come, north on I-75. But in my upset, I made the wrong turn and ended up heading south instead, which immediately snared me in the traffic for the Ambassador Bridge that arced across the river to Windsor, Ontario—Canada—just minutes away. I had my passport in my purse—I carried it with me as a matter of routine now, because I sometimes did demos over in Windsor—and since 9/11 you suddenly needed ID to cross the border—sure, okay, you could get a special license now, so you wouldn’t need a passport, but that meant dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, which I was convinced was the sole reason people became anarchists and libertarians and antigovernment survivalists in the first place—it wasn’t air-pollution regulations or the finer points of the First Amendment in the end—it was having to sit in the jaundiced light of the goddamn DMV for hours just to get your tags renewed while some soporific clerk sat behind a NEXT WINDOW PLEASE sign drinking a Big Gulp—so I always had my passport with me—though it was stampless and nearing expiration. And it occurred to me—just for an instant—that instead of driving west, I could just slip across the bridge and disappear entirely into another country.

  No sooner did I think this, of course, then I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. My husband was in the emergency room now with multiple facial abrasions and a splint on his nose, no doubt. My horny, surly, wounded child—whether he realized it or not—was in need of reassurance. And Ashley? Somehow, I would have to fix this. I was due home.

  Yet, oddly, heading south, after I crossed the Rouge River into Lincoln Park, I missed the exit for Outer Drive, which would have taken me west, then passed the next turnoff, for Route 39. Without realizing it, I’d plugged my phone into the sound system, and the Cure’s “In Between Days” thumped deafeningly through the car.

  Why was I the only bad guy here? I wondered. M-o-o-o-m, the drunk. M-o-o-om, the enforcer. How had I ended up the sole villain in all of this?

  How could Joey say I’d relapsed so casually?

  Sure, I made jokes about AA, rolled my eyes. But that sobriety token on my key ring was living proof of each excruciating hour I’d actually managed to master a craving that ravaged me. Sometimes I fingered the warm metal disc like a talisman. All those days I’d counted, surrendering to a Higher Power I doubted wholesale, reciting a Serenity Prayer that brought me no real serenity—just a sense of futility, really—faking it until I made it, as they said in the parlance. All those nightmarish Koczynski family wakes and Thanksgivings and Christmases I’d managed to endure sober—calling the potato pancakes placki instead of latkes, the cabbage rolls golumpki instead of holishkes—allowing their Polish-Catholic heritage to prevail over my Jewish one—sipping Diet Vernor’s while my sisters-in-law waylaid me: how I’d smiled and nodded and pretended I was listening to their chitchat when all I could really focus on were the lurid glasses of red Zinfandel they balanced so casually in their manicured hands? At night sometimes, I actually dreamed about alcohol the way other people dreamed about sex.

  A sign flashed past, welcoming me to Ohio. I’d have to turn around near Toledo. On my iTunes now: the Clash. “Straight to Hell.” “Oh my God. You know what? You know what else?” I said aloud to the empty car, pounding my fist against the steering wheel. “Not only don’t I drink, I don’t even eat, either!” Once, when Ashley was eleven, we were walking across a parking lot in the sunshine. “Mom?” she said fretfully, motioning to the dark silhouettes of the two of us elongating on the pavement. “Do you think my shadow looks fat?” And instead of saying to her, as I should have: “Ashley. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re perfect and beautiful,” I had stopped in my tracks and replied, “Well, Ash, if you’re so worried about your weight, don’t eat so much. You’re not a little kid anymore. You can’t just put anything you want in your mouth without consequences.” (Good God, was it a surprise she’d become a vegan? She ate nothing now, my beautiful daughter. Only coffee with soy milk, raw root vegetables, joyless mashed beans. I felt a wave of shame.) I couldn’t remember the last time since my own middle school days when I myself had eaten a second slice of pizza. Every single thing I put into my mouth, I knew the calorie and carbohydrate count of, and I kept a running tally in my head like a meter. This was simply a reflex: The numbers had been drummed into me like music.

  But Joey? I thought with sudden fury, leaning on the accelerator. Mr. President of Phi Delta. Mr. Dentist. Where was his sense of self-restraint? He clearly felt no compunction about indulging his most prurient desires in our own home. His pornography, his personal dominatrix! Hell, he had a whole store—a whole community—entire industries, in fact—dedicated to helping him “be his authentic self” and fulfill his darkest, most primal appetites. He had a friend he could confide in—who’d never breathe a word—because their business practice and their fates were intertwined—and probably because, as men, everything for them seemed to be excusable under the banner of “HORNINESS.” How goddamned lucky for him! For a moment, I wished I’d had a fish spatula in my hand and he was close by so I could beat him bloody all over again.

  I’d had an Arjul once, I thought miserably, defiantly—a friend I’d lived with, worked with, trusted completely with my deepest, most shameful secrets, whom I felt I could be my most “authentic” self with. My housemate at college, Brenda.

  I thought of who I had been back then, when Brenda and I used to drink cheap jug wine and make ramen noodles for dinner, dancing around to Prince and Tone Loc in our communal kitchen—pulling all-nighters together—writing papers for The Modern American Novel—me helping her run lines for her part in a campus production of Antigone—her coming to my gigs—all the confessions and parsing about boys and sex and mothers and fear—our late-night tarot card readings and political debates. I’d had my guitar and my pink hair then—all that ambition—the songs and poetry pouring out of me sometimes—I was a rock chick—I was going to be famous!

  And we’d remained best friends for years after, until? Well, I wasn’t sure, exactly. Her career went white-hot, my time got taken up by the kids—blah, blah—until now? Suddenly, I was about to turn forty-five in a Subaru. Look at me. It was pathetic.

  By accident, I turned onto the highway running east of Toledo instead of I-75 going northwest. A horn blared—I’d almost strayed into the lane of an oncoming tractor trailer—I jerked the wheel to the right. The highway rose slightly, the land splayed beneath it at a remove. I was fully beyond the border in Ohio now. The sun was setting. The edge of the highway was beaded with bluish-silver lights against a purpling sky. Joan Jett had come on rotation on my iTunes, then Patti Smith, Echo and the Bunnymen, Prince, early U2. I became aware now of a throbbing by my armpits, crescents of pain beneath my breasts. Only then did I realize that underneath the T-shirt I’d thrown on, I was still wearing the corset. I had been encased in it for hours now. My waist felt garroted. My lungs felt compressed. I needed to take it off immediately.

  At the first exit, I pulled over onto a darkened roadside, undid my seat belt, removed my T-shirt. I looked down at the shiny pleather contraption restraining me. How the hell was I supposed to get this off by myself? Groping around my back, I was able to unlace the stays halfway, but the intricate hook-and-eye closures between my shoulders were impossible. After a great struggle, I tried desperately to tug it around, so that the back of the corset was in my front, but after all tho
se hours encased in the airless plastic, my flesh had grown sweaty and swollen, and the garment stuck to me like adhesive. Yanking and grunting, I managed to move it only an inch or so before giving up. The underwires and boning were now misaligned. While the places they’d been gouging began pulsating with relief, new points on my breasts and my ribs were getting jabbed. It felt as if my skin might puncture. I realized, too, that I still had on the fishnet stockings—and the miniskirt—which had crept up into my lap like a rubber band, the hem of it squeezing my thighs, cradling my belly, revealing just the smallest little mound of my underwear. Everything from my neck down bulged and hurt and throbbed.

  Given the traffic, I was at least two hours from home now. I looked deranged. There was no way I could make it back to Michigan in this state. Where could I possibly go for help dressed like this? Then a single word came to me. It came to me like a religious epiphany.

  Walmart.

  Quickly, I googled it. Praise be to God, the nearest one was just twelve minutes off the Ohio Turnpike in Fremont. Ashley was not a fan of Walmart—she often berated me for getting her prescriptions filled there because of its horrible labor practices—and a few years before, the company had done knockoffs of several Privileged Kitchen products. But at this moment, Walmart shone to me like the City on the Hill. Walmart was my salvation.

  By the time I arrived, I was nearly incandescent with pain. Just limping across the parking lot in my stockings and flip-flops proved a challenge, as my toes had broken through the netting, which now sawed into the tender flesh between them every time I took a step—and my skirt, which bound my legs as tightly as a tourniquet at this point, kept riding up. The only mercy was that my VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS T-shirt was so oversized—it had actually been Joey’s—that it fell to mid-thigh. By the time I reached the automatic glass doors, however, I’d given up on the flip-flops entirely. I was now essentially barefoot and appeared to be shopping in nothing but a giant souvenir T-shirt. Even for Walmart, it must have been appalling, because the other shoppers quickly jerked aside with their carts as I approached.

  I grabbed a pair of yoga pants off a rack, a shirt, a bra, a pair of granny underwear. A sweatshirt with some daisies on it off a SALE rack. I found a cheap pair of canvas ballerina flats in the shoe department. Though Joey would disapprove, I used my teeth to break the plastic wire that conjoined them and slipped them on right there in the aisle. Padding as quickly as I could through the housewares section, I found a pair of industrial scissors that looked like they would do the job. I paid for the lot with a credit card, then tromped quickly into the ladies’ room. With my now-shaking hands, I ripped the scissors free of their packaging, then sliced into the corset, first into the peplum fanning around my waist, then carefully through the thick plastic encasing my swollen, throbbing torso. When my flesh was finally unleashed, it was like emerging from a chrysalis. My breasts and lungs seemed to spread out like wings, expanding in the air. I groaned with relief. Then I hurriedly went about hacking off the rubbery miniskirt, then the waistband of my fishnets, stuck to my belly with sweat. In the narrow metal stall, impeded by the urine-sprinkled toilet and the metal receptacle overflowing with discarded feminine hygiene products, it was hard to maneuver. But I finally managed to peel everything off, layer by layer, and for a moment, I stood completely naked, my bare feet tiptoed atop the ballerina flats—the only thing between me and the grimy tiled floor—letting my flesh cool and breathe and fill its own space. The boning and elastic had left deep, angry red welts all over me—I could see the imprint of the entire corset on my torso, in fact, as if a surgeon had drawn on me with red marker, mapping out incisions—and as I tried to shake out my limbs they began to tingle with that pain that comes when your foot’s fallen asleep. It was an intense, concentrated ache, followed by a flood of relief—the relief that, by its very nature, read as pleasure.

  As I stood there in the bathroom at Walmart—listening to other shoppers tromping in and out, kids whining, plastic bags ruffling, jeans unzipping, the hiss of pee hitting the bowl, stalls slonking open and closed—I finally began to understand S&M. This tide of endorphins after so much accumulating pain: This was the endgame, the great erotic payoff.

  But so fucking what? Why should I have had to suffer like this at all in the first place? It was just way too much work.

  The hacked-up fabric looked incriminating somehow, so I squirreled it away in my shopping bag. I was loath to reharness myself in any sort of bra or underpants, but one can stand naked and shivering in a bathroom stall at Walmart for only so long. Snipping the tags off my purchases, I put on my cheap, new chemical-smelling clothes and headed back into the blaze of the store.

  By now, my whole body was sore and I had a splitting headache. In the pharmacy section, I got a jumbo bottle of ibuprofen, then some toothpaste for the downstairs bathroom because we were out, and then—because I was there anyway—I got in line for the kids’ prescriptions I was supposed to have gotten filled that morning—the Adderall Austin took for his ADD was running low; Ashley needed a three-month supply of her antianxiety medication, Ativan, shipped to her soon in London—and I stood there, still wanting a drink and wondering why Walmart didn’t have open bars in their mega-stores along with everything else—tell me there wasn’t a parent in America who didn’t crave a cocktail while shopping there with their kids—if they’d just let you wander the aisles with to-go cups full of margaritas or open bottles of Budweiser—the corporation could pay its workers twenty bucks an hour and still make a killing.

  As I waited there for my order, all these families around me were getting on with their lives, cattling past me with shopping carts, buying jumbo bottles of shampoo and laxatives and cheap Halloween decorations, one little girl begging her mother OhpleaseohpleasepleaseIpromise, clutching a gallon-sized carton of malted-milk balls—all around me, people were shopping and buying and paying and eating—in a carnival of consumption, everyone trying to get something nice, something a little better, for themselves—and then the pharmacist handed me the clear, fist-sized, burnt-orange vials stapled tidily into the white pharmacy bags—and I could feel my phone vibrating in the zippered pocket inside my purse, and the idea of getting into my Subaru and turning around and walking back into that blood-spattered kitchen suddenly felt repellent and physically impossible to me—and I thought: Everyone thinks I’m on a bender anyway. So get your own damn milk shake, Joey.

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  When my brother, Toby, and I were little, the sodium lamp over our garage filtered into our window at night, casting an eerie salmonish glow over our bedroom. We liked to convince each other it was oozing and bacterial. Squealing with fear, we’d scramble to barricade ourselves against it. Toby would pull our beanbag chair on top of him; I’d tuck my covers in so tightly around me I was practically mummified. Beneath them, I could see only blackness, an absolute, infinite void. It was, I imagined, what floating in outer space must be like—or death. My whole body would tingle with the exquisite terror of it.

  Now, as I barreled blindly through the Rust Belt, the sensation I felt was not dissimilar. Tract houses and then commercial strips flashed by like comets—Dunkin’DonutsShellDenny’sPetco7-ElevenHomeDepot—ribboning together in a smear of color and light that quickly slid backward into an obliterating darkness. I was there, but not, exhilarated by my own audacity, hurtling in my rocket full of gasoline and music.

  However—I don’t know if it was the Diet Cokes or the Adderall (I’d taken just one pill, one pill only, as a precaution, so I’d be sure to stay alert)—I kept needing to pee. In Norwalk, Ohio, I found myself having to swerve over and stand outside in a silty wind behind a gas station, fumbling with a restroom key that the owner had chained to a block of wood to keep people from stealing it. What seemed like only minutes later, I was sixty miles farther east inside a Starbucks, bouncing from foot to foot behind a beleaguered mother weighed down with a toddler and a baby and a giant quilted diaper bag—both of us t
rying to ignore the suggestive, watery hiss of the espresso machine—hoping to God that the teenager who’d gone into the one toilet stall with her rhinestone phone and makeup bag would hurry the fuck up already. In my adrenalized fugue, I urinated my way through Medina, Akron, Youngstown, Ellwood City: a bitch marking her territory, I supposed.

  All the while, my phone vibrated insanely and ignored in my handbag. I should have shut it off all together, but what can I say? I found myself growing giddy with Joey’s frantic attempts to contact me, the mounting “missed call” alerts, the urgent bubbles of text. He’d wanted me to punish him for being a Bad Sissy Maid?

  Well, now. Here you go, pal.

  Yet somewhere near Pittsburgh, in a town called Cranberry—how the hell I got there, I don’t quite even know—my exhilaration started to curdle. Good God. What was I doing? My hands grew icy on the steering wheel; all I wanted to do was wriggle out of my skin. You know what will take the edge off, I started to think. I slammed the accelerator. C’mon. Certainly, you can handle it by now. It’s not like five years ago. Some walnut-sized part of my brain knew that now was exactly the right time to pull over and google the nearest AA. But the serpent within me kept hissing louder and louder: Hey, you deserve this.

  On the road up ahead, an Applebee’s materialized. I could just go in and order a cheeseburger, I decided. A cheeseburger and, okay, a single drink. As of midnight, after all, I was turning forty-five. Certainly, a forty-five-year-old woman was entitled to a single fucking drink on her birthday. Certainly, a forty-five-year-old woman could handle that much.

  As the homey, red neon apple came into full view, though, it occurred to me that if I went into an Applebee’s, I’d be surrounded by the exact same decor and the exact same menu that I’d been surrounded by eight hours earlier, three hundred miles away, at lunchtime. Such generic, metastasizing cheeriness suddenly struck me as all wrong, even sinister. I began to worry that if I went inside Applebee’s, I would find myself caught up in some bizarre time loop, where I’d step through the glass door and find myself with Joey back in Michigan at the other Applebee’s, exactly where we’d left off earlier, doomed to relive the same horrid chain of events over and over.