Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  “I’m just trying to speak your language,” he said.

  We walked down the road until we found a couple bars of cell service, so I could log in to my Chase app to see how much I had in checking ($1,242.18) and then Venmo him a thousand. My money was like my time—it always seemed to spend itself, with little oversight or control from me.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” John said, kissing my forehead. “If Richual keeps scaling at this rate, you’ll be at two million monthly active users by when, the end of this month? Ten million by the end of 2017?”

  “The worse this administration gets, the more women need self-care.” That’s what I would say to VCs.

  “Once you’re acquired, you can walk away,” John said. “You can do whatever you want. We can buy a yacht.”

  “What if we get lost at sea and run out of food?”

  “I give you permission to eat me. I want you to live, no matter what.”

  * * *

  ...

  That night, John lit a fire and we sat around the hearth in our pajamas, taking videos of the crackling logs that our future selves could watch through the lens of nostalgia. Devin played me a gif of Winona Ryder’s disturbingly elastic face at the SAG Awards and then my boyfriend held up his phone long enough for me to take a hit of a Times headline above a picture of the press secretary, whose saggy under-eye bags were the consequence he paid for his complicity. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to check on my internet, too.

  “What’s the wifi password?”

  “Don’t tell her,” Devin said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Babe,” John said. “It’s for your own good.”

  “I hate my own good. Ruin me. Please. Shoot me up. Shoot it into my neck.”

  “Lawdy,” Devin said.

  “This is what we do at home,” John said. “Intervention roleplay.”

  One of the logs on the fire popped. For a few seconds, no one looked at their phone. I finished a glass of wine I’d forgotten to count.

  “This is actually nice,” Devin said, stretching her legs across my lap on the couch. “We should do this more often.”

  “What do you think?” I asked John. “Should we become a throuple?”

  “What does Devin bring to the relationship?”

  Money, I thought. She brings money.

  “I have a very positive attitude,” Devin said. “I notice how people bring out the best in each other. Like the way you finish each other’s sentences.”

  “I can’t believe—” John started.

  “—he’s our president,” I finished. “What else?”

  “And how John feeds you pieces of cheese when he thinks I’m not looking.”

  I couldn’t solve the riddle of why Devin was single. I could only imagine that men were intimidated by her: she was beautiful, the size of a stalk of asparagus, scented like an expensive bouquet. Maybe she went out with insensitive dicks who underestimated how many self-empowerment books she’d read. Or maybe dating in New York was the problem: it was like being at an exclusive party with someone who was always looking over your shoulder. John and I were together because it was easier to remain a couple than it was to ask ourselves if this was what we truly wanted.

  “Who do we know?” I asked John. “Let’s set Devin up with someone. Someone really hot. But also nice.”

  “My personal trainer?”

  “Who’s your personal trainer?” Devin asked.

  “He’s joking,” I said. “Have you seen him?”

  John stood up. “I’m going to the kitchen now to eat my feelings. Anybody want anything?”

  “Please and thank you,” I said, handing him my empty glass.

  When John was gone, I ran my hand slowly down Devin’s shin.

  “Now about that wifi password . . .”

  “You’re sick. Seriously.”

  “What are the top three qualities you want in a boyfriend? Go.”

  Devin lay her head back against the couch and let out a dramatic exhale.

  “It’s not a checklist, Maren. It’s a feeling.”

  “But how will you know where to look for the feeling if you don’t define some criteria?”

  “I don’t believe algorithms make love.”

  “Oh yeah? Where do you think baby algorithms come from?”

  “You know what I mean,” Devin said, raising her foot in the air for me to massage it. “You and John are, like, comfortable with each other. But that’s hard to find.”

  “That just takes time,” I said. “We’ll find you someone.”

  “You don’t have to find me someone.”

  “You know nothing motivates me more than being told not to do something.”

  Watching the fire burn and glow and then smolder to cinders put me into some kind of trance state where I experienced time at the same rate it was happening, not sped up or interrupted by the little pings I’d been programmed to react to. I felt almost stoned, only able to think one thought at a time. Devin’s legs were a warm equal sign across my lap. John ate popcorn with one hand and scrolled through Facebook with the other, occasionally scoffing in disgust. Before he could read me the latest offense, I held up a hand to let him know I was very busy experiencing time.

  “I think I’d like to stay,” I said.

  Devin was delighted. “Selena Gomez took ninety days off from her phone.”

  “Let’s not get crazy. I just want to take the week.”

  “So I guess that means I’m driving Devin home?” John asked, actually looking me in the eye so I’d pick up his desperation.

  “Quid pro quo, babe,” I said.

  On Sunday night, after they finally left, I dreamed I was falling from a skyscraper and the only way to activate the parachute in my coat pocket was to press a precise sequence of numbers on my phone except that I couldn’t remember the combo and so I kept falling—the touch ID wouldn’t even recognize my thumbprint and I knew, I absolutely knew, that the phone wanted a drop of my menstrual blood, to prove my identity, but just when I started to roll the phone into the shape of a tampon, I woke with a jolt from the dream, wet between my legs.

  * * *

  ...

  On Monday, all I had was time. There were no action items I needed to follow up/circle back/close the loop/just check in on. Khadijah could keep the plates spinning without me. And for all the rest, let them get my auto-response! I thought, with a thrilling rush of indignation, especially when I thought of the pushy women who sent emails asking for status updates on things I never committed to doing, or the vague invitations to “pick your brain” over coffee when I was already so caffeinated that my brain was like a fluorescent sign. Why couldn’t they read it from a distance?

  After breakfast, I didn’t brush my teeth or wash my face or put my contacts in. Who would know I hadn’t? No one. I pulled a dusty hardcover copy of Sophie’s Choice from the shelf and went back to bed. Nothing like the Holocaust to put your own life in perspective. I flipped to the first chapter: “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.” Those days were 1947. I reached for my phone to Instagram the passage, before I remembered. Was there a point to reading if I couldn’t share it? I willed myself to focus on the next few pages, but it was just the young narrator going on and on about his ambitions. Stingo reeked of white male privilege. Where was Meryl Streep?

  Around the headboard, patches of the ugly yellow wallpaper were peeling off, as if someone had stuck their nails in at the seam and pulled. Underneath, there was just more wallpaper, a navy pattern with white swirls and dots.

  I could have masturbated to pass the time, but Zoloft flattened my arousal and I looked forward to orgasms about as much as I looked forward to low-cal margarine spray. The most erotic moments John and I had recently shared involved watchin
g the brothel scenes on Game of Thrones while we sat next to each other on the same couch, not touching, our fan brains completely disassociated from our bodies. Penetrative sex was a foreign country I spent some time in before the election, a beautiful backdrop for memories. I had no idea when or if I’d ever be able to return.

  On Richual, we promoted a waterproof vibrator called the Overachiever that synced to an app to analyze and optimize your orgasms. We ran a popular ongoing photo series, “Healing Crystal or Dildo of Antiquity?” (Khadijah’s brilliant idea.) There were products for exercising your pelvic floor and e-courses for meditating your way to an O, sold alongside content about the orgasm gap and what it means for gender equality.

  At least at work, I never had to be alone with my own thoughts. If I wasn’t writing an email or in a meeting, I was on a video conference call, watching everyone make eye contact with their own image. There was someone Slacking me. Hey, do you have a sec? I gave away all my secs, all day. She was generous with secs my tombstone would say. As overwhelmed as I felt, I didn’t know how to be unflappable like Devin, how to just say no with a smile, have everyone love you anyway.

  Be more like Devin, I thought, and it felt almost subversive. A totally radical idea: what if I put myself first the way she did, every single day?

  I found a perfect spot to sit on the rug in the living room where the warm sunlight hit my face. I closed my eyes and breathed in long and slow through my nose, out through my mouth, like she taught me. After just a few rounds of this, I could already feel a difference, a silencing of my brain hamsters, a softening in my belly, an unclenching of muscles I didn’t even know I was holding. Minutes passed. I counted my breaths up to ten and then started over again at one.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  I was sucking oxygen on inhale number five when I heard it. The sound came from inside the wall to my right, like the house cracking a knuckle. Old houses make sounds, I reassured myself. Watch your thoughts come and go like clouds, always changing.

  I turned my attention back to the slight rise and fall of my sternum and scanned the rest of my body, noting the feeling of my butt on the rug, the yolky sun on my forehead. One of my legs was falling asleep. Shit. Should I shake it out? Watch your thoughts come and go like—oh, I recognized the click and the whir of the central heat kicking in, and the crinkle of the aluminum vent flushed with hot air. That’s all it was. The sound of heat.

  But then I heard a flutter, like the rustling sound of running a hand through a row of dresses hanging in dry cleaning bags.

  I opened my eyes and was about to call John’s name before I remembered.

  I was no longer breathing. Turning around, I stared at the long white wall that bordered the brick hearth as if somehow the silhouette of the animal might appear, a shadow puppet.

  It had to be a bird. What else could it be? The sound of desperate wings was now unmistakable, and I tried to imagine what John would do if he were here, while simultaneously berating myself for using a man as my model for taking action. At the far end of the white wall, there was a pocket door I hadn’t noticed before. I had no idea where it led—the dining room and kitchen and deck were all accessible from the opposite side of the living room. How did the bird even get on the other side of the wall? The door must slide open to a den or a study, with windows.

  Open the door, Maren. Do it quick! Don’t think about it! Just do it!

  I couldn’t do it.

  I tried a more psychological approach. If I were a bird, I thought, what would I want?

  Light. Air. Trees. A nest where no one would bother me. If I unlatched the living room windows and turned off all the lights in the room and opened the little pocket door and hoped, would it see the escape route I’d made and fly free?

  FluhfluhfluhFRSHFRSHFRSH went the wings.

  As soon as I stood up, pins and needles rushed down my leg and I stumbled to the windows, fumbling with the locks and screens until they were all open to the cloudy cold. I wiped the sweat from my upper lip.

  Open it.

  Behind the door wasn’t a den or a library at all but a mechanical closet with a boiler and a metal hutch and pipes plugged into more pipes. There wasn’t any bird I could see and then suddenly there was—black—but it flew by in a flash, not out into the living room where I hoped it would go but farther in, disappearing into a gap around one of the big pipes that fit into the back wall.

  Squinting, I remembered I didn’t have my contacts in. I limped closer to the tangle of pipes and found yet another door—this one dark, thick wood with a brass knob, like a set piece from Hogwarts, completely out of place in a utility closet. The house seemed bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside. Disoriented, I didn’t know if I was currently facing the road or the backyard. “Everything is going to be okay,” I said aloud, faking it till I made it. The light was still coming in at my back, and once the bird saw it, she would escape.

  I put my hand on the brass knob and counted to three before I turned the knob.

  The door was locked.

  I would have to find the key.

  Devin

  Maren’s problem was that she wanted do everything herself because she believed she was better than everyone else at literally everything, but the key to becoming successful is to delegate, delegate, delegate. You have to give people little stuff they can’t destroy, before you can trust them with the keys to your penthouse. (Not that I had a penthouse, but it was on my vision board.)

  When Khadijah asked if I had any task to give our intern Chloé that she couldn’t fuck up if left unsupervised for thirty minutes because babysitting was not in her job description and I said, “Why don’t you give her something in editorial?” and Khadijah said, “Because she is barely literate,” I said, “We all have different learning styles” and that I’d get back to her after I took twenty to meditate on the sheepskin rug under my desk, the only place I could truly be alone.

  After I meditated, I Slacked Khadijah and said just give Chloé a company AmEx and tell her to research the best infused water recipes on the internet, go shopping for ingredients, make ten of them in our kitchen, and then Khadijah could decide which was the best to put in the glass dispenser at the pitch meeting on Monday morning. And get the other intern—I couldn’t remember her name, but it didn’t have an accent mark so the branding was forgettable—to film Chloé in the kitchen and post the winning recipe to Richual because recipes aren’t copyrighted, which was something I learned at my own internship at Vogue.

  Maren must have forgotten we set up this meeting with Dragg & Dropp because she didn’t mention it once this weekend and I wasn’t about to remind her, even though it was her idea to source creative solutions to the conflict in our comments section.

  I was wearing Paige ultra-skinny jeans in White Fog Destructed wash, a sister wife–style blue cotton blouse with a ruffled lace-trimmed bib from Isabel Marant, and Louboutin suede flats.

  We’d hired an emerging formerly homeless artist to do a rendering on the wall of a Kanye tweet that Evan chose: “Do you know where to find marble conference tables? I’m looking to have a conference . . . not until I get the table though.” The lemon, lavender, and agave water looked fresh and elegant on the sideboard, with lemon pinwheels floating in the tank. Chloé had also taken the liberty of using the AmEx to buy pink tissue paper garlands that she hung above the windows, and tiny glazed celadon bowls filled with feminist candy hearts (“no means no”) to put on the table. She was a Richual fan before she became our intern and it showed. Gold star, Chloé, I thought.

  I took my seat at the head of the table, farthest from the door. Evan and Khadijah came in together, laughing over something she was showing him on her phone, with Chloé and the other intern trailing behind, carrying little notebooks and pens. Katelyn, our brand director, rushed in, wearing earbuds, typing o
ne-handed on the MacBook she was carrying and sat to my left.

  “Did you see this?” she asked. It was a YouTube video of Ed Sheeran performing “Shape of You” on SNL.

  I could sing the words even when I couldn’t hear the sound.

  Our receptionist, hot pink Beats around her neck, ushered in Doug and the rest of the Dragg & Dropp team. I still got a little thrill sometimes, seeing the conference room filled, thinking, You did this you did this you did this. Thinking, Don’t fuck up don’t fuck up don’t fuck up.

  “We’re thrilled to be back at Richual,” Doug said, nodding at a female assistant to pass around black velvet Dragg & Dropp swag bags. Doug was like fifteen or twenty years older than Evan and I, old enough to have bought a Nirvana CD back when that was the only way to hear music, but not old enough to be our dad. He was wearing a plaid dress shirt with an open collar under a navy wool vest and jacket. “Love what you guys are doing with gossip protocols to drive engagement.”

  “Thanks, man,” Evan said, “for noticing.”

  “And I’m Chloé.” She stood up and extended the length of her tiny body across the conference table to shake Doug’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Chloé,” Doug said. “Devin, how goes it?”

  “Did you watch the Oscars last night? Hashtag OscarsSoRight!” I only got home from Litchfield County in time to watch the final hour, but what a historic moment to be a part of. I tweeted at Barry Jenkins, but he hadn’t favorited it yet.

  “Loved Moonlight,” Doug said.

  “I actually wanted La La Land to win,” Chloé added.

  “Well, you guys, I mean, gals.” Doug cleared his throat and reached for his water. Chloé watched him sip with eager anticipation. “Are we waiting on anyone else?”

  “Maren is taking a personal day,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the intern with brown hair taking a photograph of a lengthy rash on her left arm with her phone.

  “Very on-brand of her,” Doug said. “So, without any further ado, I’m going to hand it over to Clementine. Clem has been a part of our Culturally Relevant Production Envisioning, or CRePE, team for six years, and is the mistressmind behind such viral IP as America’s Most Winning Wedding Singer, Amputee Reel Life, EDM Sober House, and, most recently, Hit Me Baby: My MMA Fiancé.”