After cheating on Peter and leaving him, I became confused and sat around with my mouth open. I was confused because I was at the start of something, and I believed that meant I’d finished what came before. But I wasn’t finished, because I hadn’t received the rewards of experience yet: wisdom and its social accessory, grace. I knew I deserved my rewards because I felt miserable, which was difficult, like working, and work is finished when you get paid. So my work wasn’t finished. And yet, I was at the start of something: my new life.
I started my new life by waiting for my rewards. While I waited, I decorated. I had to— look the part. I tested my chairs and highball glasses in different locations, bitterer by the minute. When the locations were squared, I sat down and went back to surrendering my visual consciousness to paranoid rotation, like — the yellow eye of a lighthouse. My heart rate seemed elevated all the time and I wondered whether I was burning calories, which would be good. After letting my eyeballs roll around in my head for a while, I’d go to the window to sing Elliott Smith to my neighbors, really loudly. You once talked to me about love, and you painted pictures of a Never-Never Land, and I could've gone to that place, but I didn't understand, I sang, super, super loud. I didn’t understand, I didn’t understannnnddd, hmmmm, ahh, ahhh, ahhh, ahh. Everyone was out for their COVID walks.
Management wanted me to demonstrate I could defeat misery with beauty in order to receive my wisdom and grace package. The pitch of this effort was pretty tiring and required a lot of resources and communication and consistency like— being a live-in super. I knew if I demonstrated excellence as a live-in super, eventually I’d save enough money to— buy the building. My exhaustion promised my future as a landlord. I reassured myself of this as I complained unstoppingly about my misery and rhapsodized elegiacally about the beauty of all things, especially the ones I already owned, like the tiny bubbles I owned which occasionally sputtered spontaneously out of the soap bottle I owned. Everything was fine and I wanted to die in the sense that I wanted to go back to being a person who didn’t want to die. I walked around asking, What would it be like if I never saw this pharmacy again? Or this fruit stand? Or this tutoring center? Or this Mediterranean restaurant? I didn’t understand how difficult it would be to never see all the stores collectively titled my home ever again.
I went on that way, minute by beautiful minute, talking to myself all the time in two voices, the baby who asked and the mother who explained. Wise, graceful women I knew from movies fucked a lot of men. I got right to work. All these men came over. I made them fine meals so I deserved the lessons they were going to teach me about my body’s uses and pleasures. One management consultant filmmaker I saw a few times looked like Tom Petty. His managers at Deloitte thought he was camping in Patagonia when he was at rehab in Connecticut for his heroin addiction. That’d all transpired before we met, but it was important that he’d successfully broken some pretty big rules. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, he said about being a communist management consultant. Johnny’s Crabs was my favorite of his YouTube movies. It was a comeback story for Johnny, whose crab restaurant got a bad review in the local paper. In the climactic scene, he eats crab à la mode with his hands and his face covered in chocolate ice cream. Even though the guy’s avant-garde sensibilities were respectable, I remained unconvinced about the true quality of his soul until we started crying together at a bar in Williamsburg for the loss of Soviet life in World War II. Then I knew he was good, and that I would do my best to love him. We took a cab to my apartment but he was too drunk to stay hard so we fell asleep in one another’s arms.
He’s big, I told my friends. He’s spiritually big. And they said, But he wasn’t really crying about the Soviet death or whatever. I said, What are you saying?
They said, He couldn’t really be crying about that.
I said, Why not!
They said, Because it has nothing to do with him.
I said, Exactly!
And they said, Come on! It’s the opposite of big! It’s pure small!
I said, What the fuck, Andrew!
He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about!
I told him I was talking about responsibility.
Where do you locate your sense of responsibility? What are you responsible for? I demanded as he chuckled uncomprehendingly.
I came around to his objection more or less immediately and defeat moved through me like— a slug of nice coffee. I was happy to be defeated, because it meant I was learning something. I didn’t know exactly what I’d learned, something about how you can’t take people at face value when it comes to crying. The process was working and my rewards were being packaged for delivery. The management consultant and I fell out of touch, but I recently reminded Andrew of our conversation.
Remember the communist consultant who wept for the loss of Soviet life with me? I said.
He said, Yeah, I remember.
I thanked him for his acuity in matters of the human heart.
No problem, he said.
We worked a little on how to describe the phenomenon of misattributed feeling.
Then he said, But don’t you remember? And I said, What? And he said, In the end you said the number. I said, What number? He said, The loss of Soviet life in World War II. We were stunned.
Oh, I said.
Of course, I was tired of waiting for my rewards as soon as I began, and wondered if I was a cynic. I never thought so because I love colors and can spend a long time looking out the window. What qualifies someone as cynic? Is it only believing in miracles and standardized testing? Inputs and outputs? Merit-based pay? Drugs? Have you ever decided to go to the store twelve minutes before it closes? Walking? Walking? Then skipping kind of? Then running? And you can see the door? It’s right there? There’s someone inside? You can see their back in a shirt through the glass of the door? And the lights are on? And you get to the door? And you know they’ve just turned the lock but you pull anyway? And you can’t believe anyone calls you a cynic? So you’re just standing outside the store with the lights on and the employees inside? Sweating and breathing? You have to do whatever it takes to get inside, with the lights and the employees and the shelves.
I’d already worked so hard for the children, the poor Black children. Sometimes things happen in the name of — equality — which enter the news cycle. But no one really ever cares about schools because they’re for children. At Success Academies, the first six weeks of every school year are spent training the children to coordinate their movements with a corresponding number of claps. One clap means put your pencils down, four means walk. Each classroom is equipped with a treasure box filled with— mini yo-yo’s — distributed under the condition of collective compliance. The rest of the year is spent taking practice tests. While the children take tests, the teachers walk up and down the aisles of desks with trackers which list each student’s name ahead of a row of empty boxes. Each box represents a test-taking strategy the children have been taught to use, such as underline key terms. You walk up and down the aisles and look at each student’s test and if the key terms of each question are underlined, you put a check in that box next to their name. At the end, they get two scores— one for the test and one for test effort, as measured by execution of test-taking strategies.
Before I set my sights on smaller problems, my enthusiasm for helping Black children attend elite colleges— raged. You can ride the equity gap on the subway, I wrote in my application materials for Teach For America. Get on at Woodlawn and get off at 86th St, I suggested. I’d never been to Woodlawn but assumed there were plenty of poor people and shitty schools there. I had no delusions about the challenges ahead. My parents, Soviet immigrants, had lived in that shitty, poor borough where — Woodlawn was — when they first arrived in America. My mother, I told Teach For America, is a house cleaner. I didn’t trust the Teach For America people to know that medical transcription is a poor people job. My mother had to do a more classic poor people job to undersign my own credibility and Teach For America’s, too, being that if she were a house cleaner, I would be a testament to the power of education upon which Teach For America is premised. I was willing to do whatever it took to save America’s neglected children, including suggest my own neglect. It was worth it. I knew I’d have some Latino children in my class, but images of their poverty didn’t move me — all that nice fruit and sunshine — and whatever America’s culpability in creating the conditions of their suffering, in trade and labor agreements, election tampering, human rights violations, what American companies did to their lands and waters — all that was above my pay grade; it was just the story of the world, which had nothing to do with me. I was just a regular American.
So I’ve always known how to speak management’s language. It was obvious that my wisdom and grace application also required some finessing. Just cheating on Peter and leaving him wasn’t going to cut it. I had to rearrange the variables such that Peter and I were both victims of the guy I’d cheated on Peter with, Les. We’d both been swindled by his fun vibe. But I still wanted to talk to him. He’s a wonderful guy, I miss him just like I miss everyone. We texted.
I miss you, I said.
I miss you too, he said. When do you think we will ever see each other again?
No telling, I guess, I said.
He said, Sad.
I said, Your biochemistry talks to my skin cutie.
He said, Same.
I said, You sit so well in chairs.
He said, lol I practiced it in middle school.
Peter is also wonderful in chairs. They’ve both got celebratory outlooks, one of my favorite qualities in people.
The last time I saw Peter I was living in my childhood home in Wall Township, New Jersey. He’d come to drop off the cats. I was going to keep them for a while and introduce them to nature. I loved to watch Oofie chase butterflies. My heart — booms — as I recollect it. Walter didn’t take to post card pleasures. He is not an athlete or interested in pounding the pavement for awe like his mother. But he always stayed out longer and went further away, for days at a time. That’s what I believed at the time— Walter, despite his lethargic affect and fatter big boy belly, was secretly the more courageous cat. But he was just in this hole under the garden shed, a mole’s house. I loved to scoop him out of there and hold him to my— heaving bosom.
Peter and I had spent some number of months apart and then he appeared in my parents’ driveway in a cube-shaped rental car and the cats crying in the backseat. I opened the front door and watched him park. We used to have a language but it didn’t seem appropriate to use anymore. At that time I had to show Peter I’d learned my lesson about what’s appropriate. So when I saw him for the first time after a long time after I cheated on him and left him, I said, Welcome to my crib. We sat on the deck and talked about whatever. I told him I needed a grill. We got in the cube-shaped rental car and bought one from a guy with a lot of bikes in his yard. We used to go around doing things like this all the time. Once we took a long trip which included on its itinerary China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and India. We didn’t know what to do in any of these places because we didn’t know anything about them. We just looked at them together. No better meal in the world than a feast for the eyes, you could say. It was thrilling to clutch his waist on motorbikes. Peter is mechanically-minded and unflappable. But we were often sick from disregarding rules for travelers about food and water in these regions, believing our digestive systems reflected the stout courage of our very hearts. By the time we reached India we were bored and dehydrated. But when we got to the room in Delhi, we realized we’d lost the charger for our Chromebook. We thought it fell off the top of one of the jeep taxis the gacked out drivers flung around the mountains. We spent days and days trawling Delhi’s endless markets. Do you have something for this? we pointed to the— power hole. We shopped unsuccessfully until it was time to go home.
People like to sell their used stuff to a young upstart couple. It’s patriotic. When we got back to the house with the grill we stood next to each other on the deck. He — gazed — at the grass and I knew he wanted to walk in it. Do you want to walk in the grass? I asked him. I was just thinking that, he said. I wanted this synchronicity to mean more than it did, my one wish for everything. The grass was lush and clean beneath our feet and I guess I apologized a few more times for cheating on him and leaving him. I always had the sense that I hadn’t clearly apologized because he hadn’t forgiven me yet. This sense created a lot of repetition in our conversations. We took a few laps around the yard and sat down. Can I touch you? I asked. Okay, he said. He put his head in my lap and I massaged his scalp. We had this language too once but it’d also expired. There was nothing in his hair that communicated to me though I did my best. I dug my fingers deep behind his ears, I worked. I slid my thumbs over his eyebrows; he likes that but he didn’t like it. We ate chicken drumsticks for dinner. He showed me how to scrub the grate while it was still hot. He slept in the guest bedroom. I heard him crying in there and decided to go in. I lay down next to him and kissed the crease between his chest and armpit in the dark. He stayed stiff and crying until I left.
Don’t sit like a hippo in the river, my father told me about my melancholy. You’re in the river waiting for bodies to float by. My father noted my lameness, while my mother was surprised. I didn’t know you were so soft, she told me, and frowned. You need to be tough, she told me, and flexed her bicep. She suggested I go to Washington D.C. to work for the Department of Education. My mother loves Washington D.C. because it’s our nation’s capital. You couldn’t stay in the capital, she explains to me all the time. If you were from the provinces you weren’t allowed to stay in the capital. Because of my mother’s poor person job, all I can remember her doing is screaming and convalescing. But I love my mother when she has fun. She has fun like a person in a hospital, watching soaps and eating puddings. When she scurries from the kitchen to her soaps with a treat, she really does— she scurries. And if you happen to be sitting somewhere along her route she’ll tell you what she got— a cup of cocoa, for example — and giggle and say she loves it. She often announces she loves things. I love rice, she says, I love computers.
There was this guy who couldn’t remember anything, like the cross streets of his last apartment or why he had a green screen in his room. He could remember that the green screen was for a project but he couldn’t remember what the project was, like he couldn’t remember why he’d lived in his car for a while or didn’t go to college. He had a soft voice and a nice, open face so you believed him when he said he couldn’t remember anything though it was hard to understand. He had a high-riding tush and a jaunty way of walking in his gray holed shoes, tall. Sometimes he picked me up, took a few steps, and set me back down. I liked that. He had small hands, hairy knuckles and a nice belly the tautness of which I deemed incongruous with his lifestyle. Why do you have this? I asked, pointing at his muscles. Tension, he said. He was funny. Did you feel sorry for yourself when you lived in cars? I asked him. Not really, he said. A lot of people would tell this differently, I said. What do you mean? he said. They might say something about tenants’ rights, I said. Oh, he said, I don’t know what those are.
We spent some number of evenings and mornings together. His empty memory stymied the cumulative mechanisms of intimacy which give authority to a metric like the quantity of evenings and mornings spent together. It was disorienting but not disqualifying. I liked him even though I couldn’t tell if his non-remembering was genuine or protective. I liked to caress my eyelashes with my mascara wand and go to his apartment. Eyelashes like fish bones, the shuddery attention of this chore, my mother in blue gloves peeling the flesh off a smoked mackerel in our kitchen in New Jersey in 1996. When you do this, my mother said, you need to wear gloves. Otherwise your hands will smell like fish. My hands will never smell like fish, I promised. The one minute I spent applying mascara I felt really wise. Thoughts about the nature of life occurred to me as I gaped open-mouthed at myself in the mirror. Life, I intoned, it’s like — doing a piñata. First someone blinds you. Then you hit the donkey hanging from the ceiling over and over. When it breaks, you crawl around the floor competing for its candy entrails. Then you have some candy and it’s stale gum. It tastes pretty nice for stale gum for thirty seconds and then it becomes a rock in your mouth. O Mary!
The guy shared his apartment with two women who were never around when I was. His room had its own entrance and a clutter of designated areas — sleep area, desk area, project area — which created an adolescent sense of completeness. I liked to pretend to give him advice about how to improve his life and how he pretended to listen. I believed I could fall in love again this way, how I’d done it before; a make-believe of reduction, the cooperative, mutual removal of unusable qualities, so that whatever’s left is what everyone likes. Playtime, elemental, all the possibilities of water when it’s in a tub and you’re in the tub with your friend. It’s not stupid or coy or manipulative to pretend, just the condition for good play— commitment, generosity, spirit. Only upside in filtering time through the shared device. The game was I was a silly genius with a perfect heart of self-sacrificing goodness who must be protected and he was a sweet free thinker on the brink of realizing his creative potential but in the meantime floating mellowly through— Brooklyn. I didn’t know then that I couldn’t reduce my way into falling in love again, because I’d gotten too— self-reflective.
One time, he had to tell me something. It was that his penis hurt. He’d gone to the doctor, who’d run a number of tests. The tests had come back negative. And yet his whole dick continued to hurt. I said, Okay. He said, You should get some tests, too. I knew I would get the tests but never see this guy who couldn’t remember anything again. I barely scrounged up the creative energy for a pretend goodbye. I took to his belly. It was my little pretend plot of pretend land. In every kiss I pretend seeded and pretend harvested and the pretend sun beat down upon my back. You have to keep hoping, they always tell you that. The guy who couldn’t remember anything hummed approvingly and I never saw him again.
I went to the doctor and found out I was pregnant. For some number of weeks I imagined what it would be like to have this thing that I’ve wanted my whole life. I wanted it so badly I believed I was barren; that’s why I was pregnant. I told the guy who couldn’t remember anything that we didn’t need to use protection because I was barren. I believed this because I have a common irregularity called polycystic ovarian syndrome, one symptom of which is difficulty getting pregnant. I assumed because I wanted a baby so badly that the expression of this symptom in my body was total reproductive incapacity. The force of my desire is unlivable. I have to raze my possibilities to zero to make it through. And what happened in this case was my method worked.
The doctors at Planned Parenthood worried about my crying. They asked me if someone was forcing me to have the procedure. No, I said, it’s just sad. I cried some more afterwards, when they gave me apple juice in a juicebox. I hadn’t tasted apple juice in a long time. I reluctantly noted the mild absurdity of sucking on a juicebox after an abortion. My reluctance was an admission of boredom. The juicebox was a canned detail. I wanted a better detail to give meaning to the pain I was experiencing. I wasn’t mourning a possibility. I was mourning an impossibility. I wanted a detail for that.
The real, physical pain came after. I went to the pharmacy and bought a laxative that’d been awarded a gold medal, took the recommended dosage, and looked forward to reliable relief. Soon after falling asleep I woke to piercing stomach cramps. I was astounded by the intensity. Reviews online related similar experiences. This is my favorite one:
“I picked dulcolax because it advertised gentle relief. This was the beginning of my doom. I honestly thought my organs were leaving my body, it felt like a never-ending evacuation out of my rear end. I ended up passing out on the toilet and falling into the bathtub. Upon waking up I stood up to get myself together and I passed out again. Ended up having to call an ambulance and went to the ER where I had the pleasant experience of explaining to every medical professional I came in contact with that I had passed out while pooping. TWICE. It did thoroughly clear out my bowels but I would not recommend this nightmare upon anyone. As women we are strong but this brought me to my knees. Whoever invented dulcolax, you were wrong.”
After the pain of the dulcolax subsided, I decided to take a bath. I took regular baths because I regularly needed to calm down urgently. But first I scrubbed the tub with toxic cleaning sprays and thought about my mother and how she says, All I ever did in my life was scrub the bathroom. This time, it occurred to me that the most comforting part of the ritual was cleaning, which made me feel like my mother, but not really. It felt like lying on top of her in the suspended entirety of time. And what that felt like was hugging. And then I was released from the present. And when I was released from the present, I was released from waiting, intermittently.
I was relieved to stop begging my chairs and soap bubbles to take responsibility for my life. And I remembered another time bubbles were important. How I used to tell my students to puff up their cheeks with air, so they couldn’t talk, so it could be silent. We called this putting your bubble in. It was for walking in the hallways. Who’s got the biggest bubble? Who’s got a watermelon bubble? Javon’s got a bubble, Natalie’s got a bubble, Aboubacar’s got a bubble. If I’m not saying your name, that might mean you don’t have your bubble in yet. This method was called positive narration. We protected the dignity of the children by only suggesting which ones were bad by only naming which ones were good. When everyone had their bubbles in, we could walk. But there were a lot of stairs in our building. It was a long haul to and from recess— five tall flights between the classrooms and the yard. Sometimes you came across a stalled unit; there were not enough bubbles in and it was not silent. Then, if you happened to be on a prep, scurrying to the office for a coffee, you could be the good guy. Who’s ready for a fastball? you’d ask as you tossed fists of air into the children’s mouths. They were tired of standing in the stairway, anyway, and thirsty. Listening to you was just another way of not listening to someone else. When you finished, all there was to hear was air being pushed into and out of thirty small noses and you could be proud of yourself for helping.