If You're Not Yet Like Me (5 page)

Zachary held the driftwood now. I remember he took a moment or two to toss it. I imagined he was absorbing the information I had given him. Finally, he threw it, and we both watched it dive into the sand a few feet in front of us.

“I wonder how far it’s traveled,” I said.

Zachary nodded. “We can’t be the first to have thrown it down the beach.” He took my hand, and squeezed it. “It’ll probably be in Ventura next week.”

I laughed, and then he laughed.

T
hat evening, in his bed, I discovered Zachary had duped me that first time I slept over. “I prefer to lay my head directly on the mattress,” he’d told me. That first night, he had handed me a pillow and said, “Take it. Usually, it’s just for show.”

This time, he told me the truth. “I only own that one.”

“One? That’s it? But what if someone—“

Zachary had already turned off the lights, and in the dark he squeezed my hand, as if to say, Don’t finish your sentence. I heeded his request. No one slept over, I realized.

“Can we share?” he asked.

“Okay.”

Zachary scooted closer, until both of our heads rested on the pillow, and his hot ear pressed against mine.

The pillow probably bore sweat stains, billowing yellow clouds covered by the case. He had probably slept on it since transitioning from the cradle to his big boy bed. It probably belonged to his dead grandmother. This was it: a single, flat pillow. Normally, such a thing would have sent me running, but, somehow, it struck me—as surprising, or endearing, or, let’s be honest—as repellent. And I liked that. Blow #4.

Z
achary and I settled into a routine. Every few days we had dinner, often at my place or his, to save money, and we talked every day, if only for a moment. We were checking in, as they say. We hadn’t met each other’s friends yet, but introductions were pending.

One evening, he called me as I was cleaning the kitchen. I had sworn to keep the place clean; I would not let the recycling bin pile up with my sins.

“I’ve got news,” he said, and I set down the sponge.

He’d scored a job interview. It was for a receptionist position at a dentist’s office.

“Seriously?” I asked.

There was no response.

“Hello?” I said.

“I’m excited about the job.”

“Boring,” I sang, then plugged my nose, went all nasal. “I’ll need to see a copy of your insurance card—“

“Maybe I like to be bored.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so this time, I was the silent one.

Was this Blow #5?

I
can feel you getting excited about Zachary, and that excitement is dangerous, for this doesn’t end how you want it to. This isn’t a story of a woman who sheds her superficiality, who learns to love someone as they truly are, and in the process, learns to love herself. It might have been that kind of story, had things gone the way of happily-ever-after, but they didn’t. The ending changes everything that came before it.

Zachary and I had been dating for a month, and I assumed we were on the verge of I-love-you, that great emotional cliff off of which couples can never un-jump. Had I been so brazen, I would have said it already, and not in the throes of senseless passion, either, but during one of our myriad innocent moments together. The time, for instance, we talked about the paradisiacal beaches of Hawaii, and Zachary, who had never been, asked if they were like a screen saver. Or, when we went on a walk around the neighborhood, and he took my hand in his, and told me about all the instruments he had tried and failed to master. As he spoke of the piano, he instinctively pushed my hand with his fingers.

It was after this month together that he called me to see if I wanted to meet at the coffee shop. At the time, I thought it romantic to return to the place where we met, but now I see the cruel circularity.

He was standing by the counter when I arrived, eyes not on the door, not on me, but on the pastry case. He was gaga for croissants. I called out his name, and he looked up.

“Hey,” he said, in a low voice. He reached out to hug me.

I put my cheek to his chest. “Hi.”

I would have remained there longer, ear to T-shirt, like listening to the ocean, but Zachary was already pulling away.

“I forgot, you have a cold,” I said.

He nodded.

I’d already decided this was the reason we hadn’t seen each other for two days. It wasn’t until later that I added these things up—his absence, his lukewarm hug—as clues to his discontent. Zachary suggested we get our coffee to-go. “Let’s walk and talk,” he said. “And drink.”

We bought our coffee and headed outside, toward the quiet side streets. I remember I tried to take his hand and he pulled away.

“Are you that much of a germaphobe?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

I was still blind, you see. There is a moment, when a woman’s foolishness slips into delusion. The former is forgivable, the latter isn’t. You will never live it down. Remember that.

Even before we got away from the noisy boulevard, Zachary began his speech. He could not even suffer a preamble. “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” he said. “Us.”

I understood immediately; I didn’t play dumb. Unlike Dickens, who had grinned as he broke my heart, Zachary, to his credit, seemed almost ill.

“But I thought—“

I stopped myself. No, I would not protest, because protest would turn into blubbering, and I wouldn’t stoop so low. I was a fool, but I wasn’t crazy.

You want to know what I was going to tell Zachary. What was it I thought? About him, about us? About myself?

To be honest, I’m not sure what I would have said, because in that instant, I willed the original Joellyn to return: big-breasted, carefree Joellyn, the one Zachary had given his business card to, the Joellyn he had been smitten by at the bar, the one who had undressed for him, who had pretended to like whiskey. That Joellyn would take this in stride. She had gotten me into this mess, and she would get me out of it.

“I see,” I said.

“Please don’t be upset.” That he knew me well enough to read my bluff was a special kind of cruelty. “You can’t honestly be surprised.”

We had reached the residential block with its wide-mouthed bungalows. For each driveway’s gleaming and silent car there was a corresponding fruit tree on the front lawn. Lemon, tangerine, kumquat. Volvo, Subaru, whimsical old BMW.

“Come on, Joellyn,” he continued. “You don’t want me. That’s been clear from the beginning. It was a little game you were playing.”

“It was?” I asked.

“I played, too,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong—it was fun at first. A girl like you … “ His voice trailed off. A few weeks earlier, I might have thought he meant a beautiful, invincible girl, a girl who shouldn’t have given him a second glance. But now I knew he meant something else.

“I’m not terrible,” I said.

“We’re not compatible,” he replied, which didn’t contest my statement.

“Actually, I think we get along pretty well.” I was careful not to beseech. From one of the backyards, children squealed.

“I’m probably going to take that job,” he said finally.

“Are you sure you want that?” I asked

He stopped walking and held up his hands. “This is what I’m talking about. Why don’t you go find a dude who drives a Saab, Joellyn? Or a guy with an LP collection, and, I don’t know, a killer set of kitchen knives. Someone who isn’t into Mexico. Someone who doesn’t wear wretched cargos.” His voice had squeaked into a nasal pitch, and his fingers air-quoted.

“Wow,” I said.

He sighed, suddenly blushing. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—“

“I’d impersonate you too,” I said, “if it weren’t so difficult.” My voice was like bathwater I’d neglected to drain: cold as it was flat. “Do you want to know why it’s difficult, Zachary?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re invisible.” I smiled. “You’re nothing.”

“You’re a bitch,” Zachary said, and I shrugged. If things weren’t over between us before, they were now. I took a sip of my coffee, and waited for him to walk away. He did.

You want to yell, “Come back, Zachary! Please come back!”

So do I.

P
eople say all kinds of nonsense about loss: When one door closes, another opens. Everything happens for a reason. This, too, shall pass. A girl will bleed and then she will cry. But none of those lines help; they’re no better than spit, something to toss across your tongue when you’re bored. And when you swallow, it feels like you’re cannibalizing yourself. How long until there’s nothing left?

The new world functions on email and takeout, and after Zachary walked away from me, I took full advantage. For two months after the break-up, I barely left my apartment. The tissues piled up by my bedside, as did the empty bottles of liquor, and the pizza boxes, and the white paper pails that once held General Tsao’s Chicken. During that dark period, the General was my only beloved.

One night, sufficiently pickled by vodka, I decided I needed some fresh air, that walking to a bar to finish the evening off would do me some good. If anything, I needed to escape the mirrors in my apartment.

At the bar down the block, I ordered the specialty: a gin gimlet with a slab of cucumber instead of a straw. The cold liquor was sliding down my throat—oh, sweet relief—when I heard a familiar voice.

“Joellyn.”

Dickens slid onto the stool next to me. His hair was shorter, but there were those cheekbones, those eyes, those shoulders, that jaw.

“Look at you,” he said.

“Look at me,” I said. “Bloated.”

“You’re already drunk. Bad day?”

“You could say that.”

“Poor thing.” He smiled. A girl could sleep on the pink of those gums. I imagined swinging from the punching bag of his uvula.

“Why don’t you come home with me, big boy?” I said.

T
hree weeks later, my period did not arrive as scheduled. I maintained a willful ignorance, though I’m not sure how—usually, my menstrual cycle is like a German train: always on time. I told myself it was stress. Not from heartbreak, from the absence of Zachary, which my night with Dickens only magnified. Oh no, definitely not. It had to be work, I told myself, and finances. I’d sent a copy of my unpaid cell phone bill to my mother with a Post-It note that read, “I’m screwed!!!” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked her for a hand out. I also worried I might have some disease. A female one. If I was dying, I preferred to delay the prognosis.

Of course, from the beginning, the word baby flitted around my mind like a song I was trying to forget. I didn’t take it seriously. Not right away. Part of me figured you might disappear, that my period might come if I just wished hard enough. I was almost as bad as one of those teens who gives birth in the bathroom stall during Spring Formal. A girl won’t bleed, and then she will cry.

I waited a whole month before I took a test. I’d already replaced my morning and afternoon coffees with herbal tea, and whenever someone offered me a drink, I declined. I had opened a savings account. Not because I was imagining you—or maybe I was—but because I’d hit rock bottom with Dickens, and I was ready to crawl my way out. The sun would hurt my eyes, and I’d adjust.

When the test read positive, I laughed.