Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

  Outside work, though, I claimed I’d been sleeping with a twenty-year-old Spanish man I’d invented out of thin air. He was very sexy. Another time, I alleged I’d had a lengthy romantic relationship with a friend of a friend, even though we’d kissed exactly one time before he ran away from me forever. He was less sexy. And I lied about mundane things, like whom I was out with the night before or who my friends were. These stories didn’t come out of me often, but it happened enough that I feared I would never be able to stop. And if I never stopped, I would never truly be me.

  * * *

  I do not lie anymore. I’m sure that’s hard to believe, since I just spent 1,500 words telling you I used to drop more falsehoods than Donald Trump does at one of his Special Very Good Big Boy Appreciation rallies. And yet it’s true. One day I was a liar, and the next I was not. I haven’t quite figured out how that happened, but somehow it did.

  When I was twenty-five, I did start seeing a therapist. I went because I was depressed enough to make people worry about me, particularly the two people who birthed me and figured they’d somehow managed to screw me up. My therapist was a sharp-toned middle-aged woman who had an office in the West Village and always started our sessions about ten minutes late. I talked about a lot of things with her, like how I worried constantly that I was too short to love. She mostly asked me questions about my mother. And at some point, early on in our time together, I revealed to her my deepest shame.

  “I’m a compulsive liar,” I told her. “I used to lie all the time, and now I still lie sometimes, and I can’t seem to stop doing it.”

  My therapist peered at me over the notepad on which I assumed she regularly spent forty-five minutes scribbling INSTITUTIONALIZE THIS BITCH.

  “Let’s talk about your mother,” she said.

  “But don’t you want to discuss my lying?” I asked. “It’s a really big problem!”

  “I’d rather talk about your mother,” my therapist said. Or maybe she didn’t say quite that. I can’t remember for sure, and I don’t want to lie to you. Either way, we didn’t discuss it, and we definitely did talk about my mother for the next fifty sessions.

  At the time I didn’t find all that focus on my mother helpful, yet four years later, I cannot remember when I last told a big lie. In fact, something perhaps more horrible happened to me—I became mostly incapable of telling lies. I have never had a good poker face, despite all my falsehoods, but in my subconscious quest to stop telling people I had a boyfriend in high school, I became a brutal truth teller, unable even to placate wounded friends with harmless white fibs. It turns out telling your buddy you think her boyfriend is ambulatory sludge isn’t a good way to make that friend feel better about the fact that he called her fat, and that when people ask you, “How are you?” they don’t expect you to divulge all your fears about a suspicious lump you found under your armpit or mention that you were too depressed to get out of bed last week. People no longer want to try on clothes near you. It’s hard to break up with people when you have to tell them why (a good work-around is to just block them on your phone).

  On the other hand, the more I told the truth, the less I suffered panic attacks over the possibility of being revealed as a fraud. And the more I became comfortable with existing in the world as myself—the more I told my truths, listened to other people’s, and stopped treating bar nights like a Moth storytelling slam—the more I learned to enjoy the experiences I had, not the ones I made up. My friends did not abandon the real me, not even the aforementioned friend with the shithead boyfriend. Perhaps I used savage honesty as a way to repent, but in the end it did help cut out the root cause of my compulsions. I may not have learned to love myself (a task best left to psychopaths and people who like things made of hemp), but I was at the very least enough as I was.

  In journalism, you tell Universal Truths and the Truths of others. In fiction, you attempt to tell the emotional truth in a false reality. In neither of these disciplines are you required to slice open your head and reveal the madness inside; in both, you are invited to manipulate the truth, to present it as you want it to be seen, and to smooth over the bits that don’t fit if need be.

  Serious writers sneer at personal essays all the time, and it’s true that it takes a certain kind of narcissism to think your own shit is interesting. But essays do require the writer to present an unairbrushed version of themselves, one without journalism’s veil of objectivity or fiction’s innate Photoshop. I once took a class on creative nonfiction and wrote a story about learning to dive as a child. I concluded my piece with a scene in which I do a perfect swan dive, even though I have probably never done anything in water that did not resemble a hamster drowning. My instructor was not impressed with the self-celebration. “We are never the heroes of our own stories,” he said. “People want to see you fail. It’s funnier.” He was right, though I’m not sure I agree with his reasoning. It’s not so much that people want to laugh at you when you fail. Mostly, I think, since we’re all failing all the time, someone else’s failures make us feel better about our own.

  I read a lot of stories with happy endings in my youth. The quirky weird girls still came out okay in the end, and no matter how hard I tried, I did not. But those quirky weird girls had adult writers gifting them hot boyfriends and clear skin—in part, I assume, because that was the story the adult writers had wanted for themselves but never got. It’s not fancy to write an entire book about a girl who spends her spare time making the eyes of Sims characters bigger, but that’s who I was. Sometimes I wonder what I might have been had I known it was normal to walk through the world feeling like I was made wrong.

  Everyone lies. Compulsive liars do it blatantly and detest themselves more for it, but there isn’t one idiot walking this earth who doesn’t lie at least once every day, even if that lie is just answering the question “How are you?” with “Fine.” We lie to our friends, we lie to our families, we lie to our employers, we lie to our lovers, we lie to our children, we lie on social media, and we lie all the fucking time in the mirror.

  My grandfather once told me it was better to be nice than to be honest. I will never be nice. I will never be better. I will be good. Niceness only helps incubate the lies we tell ourselves and the ones we present to others. I choose the truth, even if the truth is selfish and stupid. It is better to be good than to be nice, even if “good” means showing all your warts and being okay with telling people you spent the night marathoning Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of partying, that you ordered chicken on Seamless because you don’t know how to cook it, that you didn’t vote for Bernie Sanders, that you are scared of big dogs, that no boys wanted to kiss you in high school, and that you worry all the time that you are too unhinged and intense and demanding (and maybe too short, because therapy hasn’t fixed that) to love. I will not lie to you about my warts, and I do not want you to lie to me about yours. If it is the truth, it’s enough.

  Sometimes Your Irrational Fears Come True and Fire Destroys Your Home

  As a child with an overactive imagination, I was afraid of everything. I knew that everything on the planet was specifically designed to kill me, so I stayed away from high ledges and the monkey bars and sand. The world is a scary place for children who are aware of their own mortality, and my nights were haunted by visions of hidden dangers like car crashes, plane crashes, trees crashing into buildings, rabid dogs, and salmonella.

  If my family left our apartment empty for the weekend, I envisioned returning to a pile of ash. There was always the possibility that someone forgot to unplug the toaster or blow out a candle or check the closets for a hidden pyromaniac just waiting for the chance to strike. If we were out together in the neighborhood, I’d hear fire truck sirens and expect them to meet us back at the barren pit where our building once stood. Firefighters would shrug and gesture at the rubble. My mother would blame me for leaving my bed unmade near an outlet.

  To combat some of this pyrophobia, I made plans, should the need to evacuat
e ever arise. We practiced fire drills in school, collectively Stopping, Dropping, and Rolling in attempt to extinguish imaginary flames that had engulfed us, an exercise I also practiced at home, just in case. I would take with me, should a real fire happen, my favorite doll, Dollydoll, and the blanket I used as a pillow, named Pillow Blankie (my aforementioned imagination did not extend to naming comfort toys). I would make sure my parents and my sister were with me, as I’d need them later for cash and emotional support. We’d run down the side stairs and out of the building, into safety across the street. If somehow the flames caught up with me, I’d “stop, drop, and roll,” per the aforementioned drills. Then when the fire was finally extinguished, I’d dig through what was left of my home, finding what few belongings had survived. Bad things were always around the corner. I just hadn’t experienced them yet.

  Fast-forward a decade or two. When I first moved back to New York after college, I lived in an apartment in Williamsburg that I loved but couldn’t afford. After spending a year sobbing over each rent check, I decamped for a lofted room in Bushwick with a much lower rent but many more mouse infestations, bedbug scares, midnight experimental music jams, and nearby bars with unclear policies regarding outdoor noise. One year, I roomed with an actress who neglected to tell us she intended to move her boyfriend in with us about five seconds after signing the lease. Every night he’d come over at one a.m. so they could spend the next several hours loudly bickering with and/or sexy-biting each other right underneath me. They are now married! I wish them well.

  In April 2015, I abandoned Bushwick and moved into an empty bedroom in my friend’s apartment in Greenpoint. It was a charming little space, and though it hardly fit the two of us—indeed, the kitchen was so small the landlord had had to lop off half the counter to wedge the fridge in—it was the first place I’d lived in that felt like home. I had a real room, with a regular ceiling and walls that had yet to have bedbug-fighting poison drilled in. I had a living room with a television. I had a sunlit view of Manhattan Avenue. I had a $10-a-month gym next door and a yoga studio up the block. I had trees on my street. I did not have drunk NYU kids screaming outside my window at three a.m. on a weeknight. I was in heaven.

  Six months into this utopia, my roommate, Emma, started dating someone, and it looked like it was going to turn serious. I was happy for her but also started considering my options. What if they wanted to move in together when our lease was up? What if she wanted to move anyway? What if she hated me? What if the rent went up? What if someone else moved in? I knew once I got too comfortable somewhere, something bad would come along and take it from me—after all, when things were good, there was only room for them to go bad. I had bounced around from one miserable living situation to another over the years, and I was too happy with this particular one to stomach the thought of living next-door to one more amateur jam band. Which meant, of course, that I was doomed.

  I was particularly plagued by this concern on the night of October 19. I had just come from a glorious yoga session and was unwinding with a nice glass of Polish Christmas wine. Emma’s boyfriend, with whom she usually stayed in his one-bed in Prospect Heights, was crashing with us because his landlord hadn’t turned on his heat. I checked the listings in Greenpoint, just in case, then closed my computer and went to sleep. I dreamt of nothing.

  I woke up to knocking. Emma’s voice wafted into my room. “There’s a fire,” she said. “We have to go.” I sensed a faint smell of smoke in my room and a definite haze. Siren lights blinked in through the window. I had been sleeping pants-less in a crop top, as was my fashion-forward custom, so I pulled a pair of crumpled leggings off my floor, stepped into an old pair of Top-Siders, and took my leather jacket, my phone, and my keys. In my sleep brain I assumed we’d be let back inside momentarily, but when Emma, her boyfriend, and I walked into the hall, I spotted smoke billowing out from under our neighbor’s door. When we got outside, the first thing I saw were the fire trucks clustered around the building. The second thing I saw was the literal fire, which lit up the hardware store located almost directly beneath my bedroom. We were in for some shit.

  The thing about watching disaster unfold is that you don’t realize it’s disaster while the shock is giving you a hug. You just keep watching. There’s nothing else to do. We stood inside the deli across the street and watched the drama go down, though the madness seemed farther than just a few feet away. I drank a hot chocolate as the firefighters hooked a ladder to the building’s facade, right under my window, then pulled my window out of its little home. I watched through the window socket as they flipped my bed over and climbed into my room. Briefly, I considered the mess their big firefighter boots would make on my floor, before I watched one pull out an axe and hack through one of my walls, à la Jack Nicholson in The Shining. “Our rent better not go up,” I said, sipping my drink. Emma laughed.

  The flames were still going strong in the hardware store, so it appeared we wouldn’t be going home for the night, assuming we’d even have a home after this. Fire inspectors and representatives with the Office of Emergency Management took down our information while our neighbors filled us in on the parts of the night we’d missed. The drunk chick in “Suite #1” had come home late and smelled the smoke, so she’d awoken her roommates and everyone else in the building. God bless the drunk chick. Maybe she saved our lives—at the very least, she saved me from waking up to a firefighter chopping through my window, which would have taken more therapy to recover from than I could afford. As my neighbors spoke, I realized my leggings were inside out. I was still wearing my retainer. I am very responsible.

  I texted a friend that my building was on fire, knowing he would come. He showed up with a coat. Emma and her boyfriend relocated to his apartment in Prospect Heights, promising to meet again in the morning to go through the wreckage. My friend took me to his apartment, where he gave me a blanket his mother made him and set me up on his couch. I listened to him breathe through the door of his room and wondered what would happen if I went in there and climbed into bed with him. I didn’t know if that was what I wanted, but I didn’t want to be alone on his couch and in my head.

  My hair, skin, and clothes smelled like cedar and burnt plastic, a sickly-sweet smell of wood gone bad. In that moment, the only things in the world that I owned were my crop top, leggings, Top-Siders, and jacket. I kicked myself for leaving my wallet. I recalled an old yoga refrain, lay on my side, and felt the earth—er, couch—beneath me. At some point, I suppose, I slept. All of this happened within the span of a few hours. I was in shock until morning, and even when I woke up, smelled the burnt plastic—undeniable evidence of what had transpired—remembered where I was, and why I was there, I felt as if I were moving in someone else’s body, watching myself lie on the couch from above.

  I returned to my building to discover it was still standing, which was at first a relief. On closer look, I wasn’t so lucky. Most of my belongings were ruined. My mattress was in the living room, where I assume it landed after the firefighters axed it. My roommate’s collection of used VHS tapes lay shattered on the ground. The whole place was covered with a fine layer of ashen, toxic smoke that had made its way into almost everything I owned. The apartment and everything in it smelled like a campfire—not a comforting one, but one filled with tiny particles that would invade your blood cells and turn them against one another. The particles lived in my couch, in my bed, in my laptop, in my television, on my plates, and in every dress, shoe, T-shirt, and towel I owned. It was all poison.

  As I’d oft envisioned in my childhood fire dreams, I gathered up my favorite things and threw them into plastic boxes Emma and her boyfriend procured, in hopes that the power of dry cleaning could save them. At the very least, I didn’t want to leave the things I loved most behind in the noxious place I was about to abandon. I called a boy who’d broken my heart a few months prior and asked if he could drive me and my ash-covered combat boots up to my parents’ place on the Upper West Side. He said yes. I m
ade him buy me pizza. He got a parking ticket. For a moment, I was pleased.

  * * *

  A lot happened in the aftermath of that night. I had renters insurance, blessedly, so a few days after the fire I met with an insurance man, who came to the apartment to make sure it really had been destroyed. He looked around—not just at the hacked-up walls and soot-stained floors, but at our ratty couch and freestanding IKEA closets—and suggested throwing everything out. “All of it?” I said, thinking of the five drawers stuffed with clothing in my bedroom. “Do you . . . really want it?” he said, glancing at a mounted portrait of a man’s torso with a bottle opener attached to his crotch. He had a point.

  So I had to dump all my junk and hope I’d get enough fancy insurance money to buy new junk. This required me to spend several hours combing through each piece of clothing in my wardrobe to decide which of my beloved $50 Urban Outfitters dresses were worth dry cleaning. Turns out, none of them were, and they all went in the trash.

  A week later, my apartment still smelled like burnt plastic and was deemed unlivable by the Department of Buildings, so I moved in with my parents. Now Brooklyn and my old life seemed really far away (at least a forty-minute train ride, with transfers!), and I spent intermittent days of the week crashing on people’s couches and in their unoccupied beds. My sister had just graduated from college and was also living at home, which meant the two of us were back in our childhood bedroom fighting over who got to use the bathroom first in the morning. Most of my clothes were toast, so I ended up wearing a lot of relics from high school, like Chuck Taylor slip-ons and a pair of 7 for All Mankind jeans on which I once blew all my babysitting money. I had a curfew. I had to make my bed, which naturally was an extra-narrow twin. I shared it with a dozen or so stuffed bears, all of which had their own distinct personalities and complex familial backgrounds.