Problems (3 page)

I'm not a psychologist, but I could be. It's not that hard to understand how people got all fucked up.

Peter showed up at an open call and got hired as a bartender on the spot. The guy who interviewed him was gay. Gay guys loved my husband. I used to think Peter was secretly gay and that gay guys could pick up on it, so I kept making jokes about him being gay, and then I tried to finger his ass when I blew him to see how he would react to penetration. He freaked out and told me he really wasn't gay and to stop trying to finger his ass. He seemed suspiciously angry, so I figured he still might be part gay.

Peter yelled, “I love you,” through the bathroom door and left for work.

I got back in bed and bunched up the blanket and rubbed myself on it, but I must have fallen asleep before I came.

I woke up starving. I tried to love the hunger. I imagined the hunger was like the vibration you felt under your feet on a train. This hunger would lead to perfection: a face of cheekbones, hip bones sticking out, clavicles jutting. Light and empty.

Smart women are supposed to say certain things. You are supposed to say, “I care about being healthy, not skinny.” Or “[Insert female celebrity] looked better when she wasn't so skinny. When she looked normal.” All women encourage one another to eat. They say, “I'm so jealous of your curves,” as they think, “Yeah, eat more, fatty.” I wanted nothing more than to
be rail thin and say, “It's so annoying. I eat so much and can't ever gain weight.”

I opened a peach Greek yogurt. I had been subsisting on yogurt for the last seven days. I was tired of eating things with the consistency of baby food. When you are not eating, you are scared of yourself. Scared you will accidentally run out and buy a pizza. It's important to eat something so the hunger won't build to the point that you do something crazy, like buy a jar of peanut butter thinking one bite won't hurt, and then you're like, fuck it, and eat the whole thing. As soon as I ate a bite of the yogurt, I felt like a failure.

You are living on an average of 120 to 400 calories a day, and 800 calories a day is considered a starvation diet. You feel empty and light. You feel like a winner, above those losers who have to fill their hole three times a day and then complain they are fat. You have plenty of energy with nothing in your belly. It's terrifying how fast this becomes normal. You can't eat the peach ooze at the bottom.

The more you want to be free of food, the more obsessed you become with it.

Eating so little makes your taste buds restless. You crave salt, sugar, hot sauce, mustard, pickles. Your tongue wants to come out of retirement and be alive. Weird food combinations. Using a tomato to shovel spicy mustard into your mouth, and in between, a squeeze of honey. You are basically eating garbage.

Sometimes I felt like I was pushing against the day, and it wouldn't go anywhere. I sat in the chair. Dust particles in the light. I stared into the mirror. I lifted my shirt. I sucked in my stomach and thought,
This is how it would look
.

Sometimes I sat around and hated my body. I hated how when I got fat it was all in my belly, so I looked pregnant. I was top-heavy, with my belly, huge tits, and fatty armpits being carried by two stick legs. If I were a doll, I would be falling over constantly. My armpits were fat and stupid. I hated how my thighs touched on the toilet seat. I hated how these giant hairs came out of my neck, like, “Where the fuck did that come from?” How so much of my life was spent tweezing and shaving and waxing. My big, sloppy tits. When I ran to the bus it was a scene. I had no ass. It was like a disfigurement, how my back had this little bit of fat hanging with a split in it. I wanted to tear my tits off and stuff all the fat into my ass so I'd have one of those asses men could imagine slapping as they fucked it.

Ogden said, “You're cute.” Cute meant you were a chubby girl with a nice face. All his exes were around my age and looked horse-faced and like they would never stop talking about boring things.

One of Ogden's exes wrote a memoir about her rich, boring life and her brief addiction to coke.

“Finally all the drug cliché memories, put in a blender and into one book.”
—New York Times

“Good for killing small bugs.” —
Chicago Tribune

“Another piece of garbage written by a privileged white woman with too much time on her hands, to whom the world somehow has given the impression that it gives a shit about her stupid life.”
—Everyone who has ever read it

“Ogden, she sounds so boring I almost died,” I'd said to him after I read it. He stared at me blankly, and then said, “Nah, she was great.” He really did think she was great.
If I were a guy, I wouldn't have fucked her with your dick
. He probably thought it was great how dumb and boring a woman could be.

It's not fair how you could be this white girl with a busted face and still be picked in the gym class of life before all the pretty brown girls. It didn't matter how smart and cool you were. All these chill liberal guys who were all
PC
but only wanted to put their cock in white girls. They could be unfair with their love and there wasn't a damn thing you could about it.

The whole world wants young white girls.

You have to play dumb. Guys like being smart and funny. If you want to compete with white girls, the least you can do is learn to laugh at jokes, not make them up. To ask lots of questions and not tell stories.

Sometimes I wondered if there was a correlation between Peter always buying himself the crappy stuff and him choosing me: a thrifty, generic brown one, instead of name-brand white one with blond hair. He had rummaged through the bin and said, “This brown one will do. It has all the same parts as the white one.” He liked things that were a little damaged or messed up. It gave him some kind of weird thrill. He mistook damage for having character.

Peter picked me, and I was throwing myself at an old man who would never ever pick me over a white girl. Sometimes when I was with Ogden, I thought too long about how Peter had really meant his vows, and a terrible feeling came over me that made my heart race. It was scary to have that kind of responsibility. I wished I could just fuck it up already so he would go. The idea of being totally faithful to Peter and trying my best to make it work filled me with dread and anxiety, because what would I hold on to if he left me? I knew deep down that Peter would leave me, so why would I stay faithful to him? Ogden was my safety net. Hopefully that meant I wouldn't hit the ground too hard when it all blew up in my face.

I woke up at 4:25. I had five minutes to get to work. I spent the first three with my face buried in a throw pillow. I spent the last two looking for the last of the “emergency” dope before I remembered I did it all before Peter left earlier.

I emptied the drawers looking for a
T
-shirt. You can never find the thing you're looking for.

I felt like a mess in a mess. What if I were forty and digging through the same pile of clothes, looking for the same
T
-shirt, with no family or friends left? Do some lives stop like that? Everyone leaves, and nothing else happens.

You think,
I only have this much time. I have to do important things
. But then you can't think of any important things.

I stared at myself in the mirror. What about this face made it mine? I scratched off an ice cream stain from my thermal. I felt a dread knotted in the back of my hair and ripped it apart. It was easy for everyone to wake up and shower and brush their teeth, but I lived between the days, so it was hard to know when to do these things.

The courtyard was a major selling point when I had come to see the apartment—large, grassy, with manicured rows of flowers and a few trees. The type of thing people in New York City made out to be a big deal. “Wow, look at this.”

I bought the apartment with the money I had inherited when my father died.

My father had been thirty years older than my mom. He died at the age of ninety. I kept waiting to feel something after he died, like maybe there was some love stored up for him deep in my
psyche, but the only tears that came were for my mother, who looked so gentle and broken at the funeral.

I felt bad for not feeling worse. People always talked about not getting over the death of a parent. When I said my father was dead, everyone was so sympathetic that I felt like a fraud.

Before Peter, all my boyfriends had been older men. I suspected there was a father-sized hole inside me. I called Ogden “Daddy” when he fucked me.

I loved Ogden's crow's feet. He walked fast and talked like Lou Reed. He smoked cigarettes, and instead of using an ashtray, he would leave half-smoked cigarettes standing upright on bookshelves. He was such a New Yorker, the way he talked about leaving New York all the time.

One time I saw Ogden ash on his jeans and wipe the ash into the material. He owned drills and saws, and picked up boxes of stuff and moved them around. I liked men who moved stuff around.

It was my mother's idea to buy the apartment. I loved it because it was old and cheap. Just like me one day. I didn't care that it was on the ground floor and received no light. I didn't care that it was far from the train. It was a cave. It was a womb. I didn't want one of those shiny, crappy, parquet-floored drywall apartments in those new, flimsy motel-looking buildings the broker kept showing me. My apartment had plaster walls. It was solid. It cost 250,000 dollars.

It was cheap because fifteen years ago, a man broke into the apartment across the hall and shot the elderly couple who was asleep there, and then broke into my apartment, drank a beer, jerked off to porn tapes, and shot himself. Later it came out that his girlfriend had dumped him.

That dude was fucking nuts.

The broker told me they used to have real fish in the fountain, but then people in the building started abusing them (her words), and they had to get rid of the fish. She probably said this to me, a potential buyer, to illustrate how she knew every quirky detail of the building's eccentric history. But what she was actually relaying to her clients, and what I had to consider every time I passed that fountain, was that this was a building filled with people who would abuse fish if given the chance.

The day was dreary. I wore the weather like a torn shirt.

Grand Street was buzzing. The regular trio of weirdos in front of the bodega. The girls with their gold chains and tight-ass jeans. Teenagers pushing strollers. A Hasidic woman in black with three yarmulked boys running ahead of her, their faces framed by ringlets. Like a Diane Arbus photo, two little girls, hand in hand, skipped down the sidewalk in perfect unison.

A white yuppie woman with a baby slung over her shoulder. The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me,
Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!

I was pissed at Peter for not having a kid with me.

“My mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she's always encouraging me to do whatever I want,” my future kid would say.

I would be one of those sick mothers who was fat and forever complaining. “I spent my childhood taking care of my mother. She was always sending me to the store to buy two-liter bottles of Diet Coke with her disability checks,” my future kid would say.

Women with kids talk about how they are so busy and tired, but in their eyes they are saying, “Envy me.” I did. I wanted to be so tired and busy.

If I believed in God, I would think he was waiting for me to get my shit together.

It didn't seem that long ago that I would freak out every time my period was late, running into the all-night pharmacy to pick up a pregnancy test and ending up in a girlfriend's bathroom, where we would chain-smoke and then gasp with relief when the plus didn't appear in the oval. And now every second week of the month, I was met with the familiar disappointment when confronted with the smear of blood on toilet paper. A marker of yet another thing not happening. All those years imagining the horror of a screaming red-faced alien forcing its way out of me somehow morphed into the ultimate climactic conclusion of my biological longing. To lie there with a baby sucking on my nipple in a symbiotic bubble of warmth and love. To never be alone again. To have a reason to take care of myself. To love something more than myself. To have a clear and understandable answer to the question, “So what do you do?”

I wanted to erase myself. Where there was a picture of me, there would be a picture of a snotty, pudgy infant, new to the world, with its tiny hand out, grasping at nothing. On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face. Take the best of me, take this genetic line further, and then a little further, till the sky turns black and we freeze and we melt. We are all babies. We will always be babies. All the babies will die. And one day they will be dead forever. But it was nothing to get stuck on. It was nothing to get snagged on. Enjoy the rolling skies of your time-lapsed world: This was where you crawled out of the ocean, and this was where you walked. That was where you were running,
and then you were lying, and now you're looking up at the ceiling, and above the ceiling is the same sky that rolls ahead and will keep rolling on after you are gone. Say, “Look at that.” Think,
I can do that
. Don't be scared. It will all be over long after no one remembers you.

When I was in India to scatter my father's ashes, I saw children just crawling around in the garbage. Better that way—set the standard low. So you could think,
At least you're not crawling around in the garbage
, if you ended up fucking up the kid's life somehow. But of course, you would never say that.

“What size is your shoe?” a hunched-over woman asked me. I thought of that film
The Conversation
. How everyone was once someone's child. Someone once loved this woman more than anything else in the world. Or maybe someone didn't, and that's why she was fucked-up.