by Terri White
A little girl and her dad sit directly opposite me. Her pigtails are pulled tight on each side, her face taut. They both stare at me; her hand finds his, nervously. She’s captivated and horrified by my face and I can’t stop picturing hers in my head as I place my hands over my eyes and all I can see is black throbbing around her, framed by fireworks.
Somehow I manage to hold it inside until Coney Island, where I push my way out of the train and to the nearest trash can, which is already, on this boiling hot day, brimming over with discarded hotdogs, burgers, ice creams, sodas, ketchup-smeared fries.
With a primal urge that overtakes me, I grab each side of the can, which is open like a flower reaching for the sun. Food squeezes between my palms and the metal as I grab for my life, my head rearing back just once, snapping my body in half as it flips forwards and I vomit loudly.
As I buck and spew there’s cheering and applause, heckling, from the other subway passengers. When my mouth is empty and my body still, I straighten my back, wipe my face with the back of my hand, spit and spew running between my fingers and down the outside of my hands, collecting at the wrists.
Eat something, I’m told by my kind-of friends, who have looked on in horror. Good idea. I queue for a hotdog and a beer by the beach. The line is thirty-something people deep. They’re in shorts and vests, hugging, laughing and shrieking. I cower in their shadows, sweat running into my hair, down the centre of my back, down both legs into the heels of my shoes. The blue horizon in front of me waves and wobbles. My head swims; my body rocks.
The beer, the hotdog, have barely passed through my mouth and down my throat before they bounce back up, on a fierce wave that has me running, retching, to the most private spot I can find – the other side of a concrete wall. I splatter a new pile of bread roll, sausage and yellow liquid as neatly as possible onto the ground. It’s enough, for all of us: they barely put up a fight when I say I must leave, must go home. That I can’t do this, can’t be here any longer.
I get another subway back, take a handful of blue sleeping pills and sleep until Sunday night. And just like that, two days and almost three nights have been lost. When I wake again, turn on my phone, I see pictures of everyone celebrating the holidays: on rooftops, on beaches, cocktails and sparklers in hand. While I lay unconscious, alone, they were living lives of joy, of love. A life I say I don’t want.
CHAPTER 18
‘Do you know,’ says a woman in my office with a raised eyebrow, ‘that the ratio of women to men in New York is two to one?’ It’s the statistic I hear most often and though it’s not true, it feels like it is.
The other women are toned and tight, with bodies they get up at five a.m. to perfect and punish. They’re perfectly made-up, with hair that they pay to have blowdried most mornings. There are facials and brow-taming and leg waxing and vagina plucking. They are perfectly smooth and hair-free and their shiny faces glow. This is what it is to be a woman in New York. This is what men want.
It’s not even that I feel out of my depth – I can’t even begin to paddle in their pool. My hair is too bright and too broken and snaps between my fingers. I don’t rip my pubic hair out with hot wax. My white belly folds over like sandwich crusts when I sit; my arms are corned beef. I’ve got black tattoos on my hands, my arms, my back.
Even though I’m slashing and cutting and drinking myself into ugliness, I join dating sites, scroll past the men who all look the same, say things like, ‘Looking for a partner in crime for workout dates’ and ‘No to drinking, drugs. Must be fit and no drama. No psychos.’
It’s not unusual to see women of extraordinary beauty holding hands with men who are ordinary, sweating. Every man in New York believes he deserves the most beautiful of women. That he’s entitled to her. And that we’re duty bound to beautify and preen and primp ourselves for them. Anything less than that is a failure on our part.
Saturday night. I’m meeting my friend in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village. I arrive early, order a beer and take a seat at the bar. A man wearing a gold band on his left hand tries to make small talk. I limit my answers to nodding and smiling, with one-word accompaniments. My lack of conversation bothers him, the fact that I’m not responding to his attention needles him. He shakes his head and looks at me, from my toes to my head.
‘It’s such a shame,’ he says. ‘Those tattoos.’
I put my hand over my arm.
‘What?’ I say.
‘They’re just … fucking disgusting. It’s like putting a bumper sticker on a Ferrari. Do you ever look in the mirror? You’ve ruined yourself.’
I swallow hard.
‘Can you leave me alone, please?’ And as he turns his back to me, I burst into tears, which splash off the bar.
A mean streak courses through the men of Manhattan. It fuels them and fires them. They dress it up as honesty and demand you’re grateful. There’s the forty-one-year-old who I go on two dates with after coming to in a Brooklyn bar to discover his mouth on my face and his hand all the way up my dress. I didn’t know who he was or how we’d ended up in that dark corner. When I stand up to leave and he stands too, I realise he towers over me by a foot. To cover up my shame, I agree to a date with him as I leave. We meet for dinner, and midway through my bratwurst he says, out of nowhere, with no prompting: ‘The thing is, I have no interest in a relationship right now. And God, definitely not a serious one.’ After dinner, we go for a walk in a nearby graveyard.
There’s the twenty-five-year-old who lives near me in the Village (‘Well, I technically live with my parents. My dad’s a filmmaker and my mom’s an author’); is a writer (‘Well, I suppose I’m a bartender really, but I have a blog’); straight(ish) (‘Well, there are just too many cute boys in the world to say no!’); and was open to a relationship (‘Well, I suppose I would be if the right person comes along but I don’t do relationships’).
There is the now-sober heroin and crack cocaine addict who texts me hourly after our date, not apparently needing a response. There’s the Anglophile I meet on a dancefloor at a Britpop night in Brooklyn. Beard, hair cut just above his eyebrows, plaid shirt, black skinny jeans, Converse. The Williamsburg Uniform of Mediocrity.
‘Ugh,’ says one of the women I’m with. ‘That’s Justin.’ She leans heavily on that last syllable, balancing it like a razor blade on the tip of her tongue. ‘He’s so fucking boring.’ The only thing receiving more emphasis than the last two letters of his name was the next sentence, whispered conspiratorially. ‘He has cats.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘No, you don’t get it. Like, loads of cats. Seven, or something. And there’s something wrong with most of them.’
‘What is it you do?’ I shout across the dancefloor – or was it by the bar? – as he strokes the torn, wet label of the beer he is cupping, watching me swallow a shot that gets stuck in my throat as it follows its path to my stomach, where it will sit for a few hours before retracing its original steps. I can tell by the arch of his left eyebrow that the man with seven sick cats is not much of a drinker and probably doesn’t much care for those who are. I take great pride in drinking another shot to prove that I won’t be stopped by the judgement of some man I barely know.
At some point, the man with seven sick cats asks for my number. He texts me the next day, as I lie between unchanged sheets and vomit sits in the toilet bowl. We arrange to meet at the White Horse pub, the site of the Bumper Sticker Guy. Sober, out in the daylight, without the tones of Jarvis Cocker to pull us into each other’s orbit, we’re both skittish and awkward. It turns out the answer to my question on the dancefloor was: ‘A photographer. Well, not, you know, for money. I work in a camera shop, but I am a photographer too.’ I ask enough questions, demure in the face of his obvious talent, his confidence bubbling up inside his chest.
‘God, we used to get magazines like yours in,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t even bear to touch it.’ He shakes his head, rolls his tongue around in his mouth like he’s eaten something bad.
Something he wishes he’d just spat out. I flinch, unprepared. ‘How can you live with yourself, really? Doing that for a living? It’s just so stupid and pointless.’
‘What?’
‘Well, I’m just saying.’
‘Well, don’t,’ I snap. I eye the door and consider leaving until he starts to pull us back towards safer ground. He’s talking about the club night we met at while I recalibrate.
‘… and you were flirting so outrageously with Jim.’
‘Sorry?’ I jerk my head up. ‘Who?’
He smiles, but his eyes are dark as he says, ‘The DJ. He’s married, you know. You were throwing yourself at him!’
His laugh has a steely edge. I look at him, bewildered. I barely remember the face of the man who I requested song after song from, desperate to trick my body and brain into believing I was home.
‘We were all talking about it afterwards. How obvious it was that you just wanted to sleep with him.’
Fury burns my chest.
‘Yeah, I’m leaving,’ I say, as I, with as much dignity as I can muster, which isn’t that much, walk out of the pub. I stand, swallowing the hot, toxic air into my lungs, feeling further away from home and happiness than ever.
Of course, this isn’t the last time I see him. He takes me to his apartment in Washington Heights. We get the subway all the way up to the George Washington Bridge and beyond. When we get off, his New York is not mine downtown. He turns the key in the door and the smell of cat piss is overwhelming. His apartment is largely empty. A kitchen with two handfuls of crockery, glasses and cutlery. Next to it, the lounge, which is just a sofa bed and an office chair pulled up to a high computer desk. There’s no TV. In the bedroom, he has a bed, a few books. The walls are bare and white-ish. His cats roam the rooms; they’re on chairs and beds and behind doors. He introduces each to me individually, using a funny, high voice to speak directly to them. One is deaf; two are blind. Or were two deaf and one blind? One has diabetes. As I lie, shrinking on his sheets, they slink and stalk towards me on the tips of their paws; sensing my repulsion, they come closer.
I only attract, am attracted to, men who are at best apathetic or at worst cruel and cold. Whose emotions remain far away from me, kept on ice for the woman who deserves it. The path to my heart was marked out by the boots of my dad – some of the men who walk it follow his lead, put their footsteps in his. They find permission in his grooves, the blueprint for how to treat me. And I lose my ability – if I ever had it – to tell pleasure and love from pain and hate. It all feels the same for me, the language recognisable under my fingertips. I love it when they hurt me and the hurt feels like love.
There are those who regard me as inessential to their life; they can smell, from both close and afar, the poverty, the shame, the trauma that has stuck to me from childhood. Women like me aren’t girlfriend material, never mind wife material. I drink too much, speak too plainly, swear too loudly, wear too much flesh and store too much below it. If I’m very lucky, they want to fuck me.
And I don’t want them to but need them to because the truth I can’t yet speak to anyone I know – only strangers who are blank pages for my confession – is that, after being completely sure that I never wanted marriage or kids in my twenties, I am now consumed with thoughts of both. ‘By the time you’re twenty-eight, ninety-eight per cent of your eggs have died,’ says another woman from my office, setting off a tsunami of panic in my chest. I’ve never been further away from finding someone to love, who I could love enough to join myself with in two ways of such profound permanence.
But it isn’t just a lack of a willing man. I’m still plagued by the horrors of my past, by thoughts of my own parents’ irresponsibility. The bone-deep fear that shakes my voice is this: that I’ll be a terrible mum. That I’m so scarred and twisted by my childhood that I’ll be unable to do anything but repeat it. And that I’ll not just be a bumbling, fumbling, doing-their-best new mum. But a bad mum. That the moment I have the seed of a baby in my belly, the very foundation of who I am will change. That the evil will flood my veins, overwhelm my brain. My eyes will blacken, my heart will stop beating and I will become a monster.
Now, however, the desire for a baby overwhelms my fear. I start to blurt it out to strangers at parties, people I barely know at work. ‘Just go and sleep with any guy and don’t use protection,’ says one. Another sends me a link to an article on egg freezing. One night in Harlem, a gay couple, friends of a friend, offer me $10,000 to give them my eggs. I say no, but not as quickly as I’d have imagined.
CHAPTER 19
Summer 2013, after more than a full year in the apartment filled with darkness, I hit my limit: I can’t squat in the darkness any longer, my skin being stripped off like bark. I wipe the knives clean, pack my bags and find a new place on Craigslist. For the first time in eight years, I won’t be living alone, but I will be living in a room in an apartment where all of the light is kept: a straight-from-the-movies loft in SoHo. The bathroom is white and black-tiled, with a traditional claw tub. The living room is about six times the size of my old apartment – there are comfy sofas, a dining table for ten and big windows. This is the New York I came for.
I arrange a viewing with the live-in landlady, whose body constantly twitches, never still. She offers me a drink, talks manically, spits on me, and I see, feel, know, she’s like me. My major concern about finding a new apartment, about living with another person – that my drinking would be too visible, that the state in which I came home most nights would be too visible – dissolves within seconds. I relax with relief. Most people wouldn’t, couldn’t live like that. But it seems we’re kindred spirits. She clearly could and would.
The pop of a cork and she pours wine like it’s water; her words follow – quick and clipped, ricocheting around the room before you can fully catch them. I recognise her, like her immediately.
‘So?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’d love to live with you.’ We clink our glasses in celebration. The kindling is stacked.
Soon, she will crackle and break and leak in front of my eyes. I won’t be far behind her. She’s high on Adderall and weed and booze and possibly some other kind of unidentified, uppers and her whirling body and spiralling mind serve to distract me from mine. I’m taking Xanax and sleeping pills. They balance out the diet pills given to me by a personal trainer I know, after being smuggled in from Mexico. I’ve decided to take control: of my body if not my mind. To take a different kind of axe to my skin, to the fat below it. Breakfast is coffee, strong and hot; lunch is a small polystyrene carton of watery, tasteless vending-machine noodles; dinner is martinis, by the large icy glass. I want to starve my body, make myself disappear into the steam that shoots out of the deepest part of the city. When the voice saying stop, don’t, I’m hungry gets too loud, I take another diet pill. They buzz through me, speeding up my body and brain and mouth. Then I don’t want to eat. I want to talk; I want to write; I want to walk up and down Broadway for hours, criss-crossing the perfect grid of streets and avenues that makes up Manhattan.
My intense mania is only matched by hers and it hurtles towards me as I laugh and duck, caught in its slipstream. I spend hours looking at the windows of the penthouse apartments across from ours that look like the places normal, nice, sane people live. I imagine – sometimes dream of – their lives, the love, the families that sit inside. The happiness they enjoy.
The landlady turns up in my room – a square twelve-by-ten-foot purpose-built unit next to the living room – most mornings at six a.m., rearranging the two other pieces of furniture over and over again while I stir. She opens my door at midnight and puts her dog in bed with me, under the covers, while I sleep. She cleans with bleach all night long, talking to herself as she works her way through the whole apartment.
But some days and nights are worse than others.
It’s five a.m. on a Monday morning. My alarm is set for 6.15 a.m.
Boom, boom, boom, boom. Smash. Cla
tter. Crack.
The noise of chair legs crashing and wine stems breaking and voices and bodies bouncing off into each other. The boom-tish-boom from the stereo is rattling the apartment walls and floors.
I pull the pillow over my head as the door to my room bursts wide. As my eyes open, she’s already beneath the covers, a hand trying to find my hip, maybe something else. There’s a man next to her I don’t recognise and she’s saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, the three of us,’ as I pull my knees up to my chest and lock my body tight, as I know how.
‘No, no!’
She stops.
‘Come onnnn!’
‘I have to get up in an hour – can you leave?’ Silence.
‘What are you doing?!’
They pause, roll their eyes, laugh at my rejection as they walk back through the door they barrelled through just seconds before.
I pull the pillow back over my head. A few minutes later, her head pops through the crack, as she asks: ‘How about just him?’
I say no once more.
A few weeks later I wake up and my weave is missing. It’s a vital friend. I’d started backcombing my hair a couple of years before, but knew that to get the hair, the height, the protection, I needed more. More than I had. So I’d developed a towering construction of socks and pads and extensions. Each morning I backcombed and pinned and sprayed until my hair was at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The more I fractured, the harder the sadness fell – the harder I fell – the higher, the tighter my hair became. I felt seen and invisible at the same time – I craved, needed both equally.
But now it’s missing.
It was there when I went to bed, on my side table, and now it’s gone. The landlady denies all knowledge of its whereabouts or the circumstances in which it went missing. I go to work with a flat, small, naked head. I feel vulnerable and like everyone now sees who I really am. Someone says how young I look. Someone else tells me I’m pretty now. I feel bereft. Exposed. Like now, somehow, they can see my cuts, congealed blood, the pills that rattle around in the empty space just below.