Sociable

by Rebecca Harrington

  Elinor put her college sweatshirt on. Mike rested his hand against the small table of the kitchen. His fingers drummed against the Maxwell House. This was making Elinor even more tired.

  “Nothing,” said Elinor.

  “Oh,” said Mike. “I hope Andrea wasn’t mad you just sort of lay on the ground while she was here. She had to go home. I know she felt awkward, which I’m sure was your intention.”

  “She didn’t have to go home because of that.”

  “Yes she did,” said Mike. “It was a cue to go home.”

  “Uh, okay!” said Elinor. “I’m sorry for being tired?”

  “You’re always sorry.”

  “What?” said Elinor, dazed. She propped herself up against the wall and drew her blanket around her legs.

  “Like, you just did a really shitty thing. You were like, falling asleep while we had guests here. It was so rude.”

  “It wasn’t rude,” said Elinor, blinking. “I’m so tired. I just had the shittiest day. That party was so—”

  “You always have a shitty day,” said Mike, sarcastically. “Everything’s always a mess.”

  Elinor was awake now.

  “I don’t think that’s true. At all. I mean, maybe it wasn’t a shitty day, maybe it was more stressful.”

  “It absolutely is,” said Mike. “You were just so fucking rude for no reason.”

  “I’m not rude. Having random girls here without asking me, now that’s rude.”

  “Elinor, what? What?” said Mike, yelling now. “I didn’t have a random girl here, Elinor. Andrea is my friend. She’s my friend, okay?”

  “Well, you didn’t come to Sheila’s party with me, but you bring Andrea here?”

  “Oh my god, Elinor,” said Mike. He was angry. “You are always so unbelievably ridiculous. This is outrageous. You’re rude to Andrea, and now you’re taking it out on me?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Elinor, quietly. “I know she’s your friend. It’s just that I was tired.”

  “It’s the worst,” said Mike. “She’s just a friend. She’s just a fucking friend.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor, blankly. This was suddenly so serious and hysterical. But how did it even get this way? Now Mike was sighing loudly.

  “I feel like we’re always fighting,” he said.

  “No we aren’t.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “Couples fight.”

  “Not like this,” said Mike. “I’ve just felt like the past year has been such a fucking mess.”

  “No it hasn’t,” said Elinor. She heard her voice get higher as she spoke. “What are you talking about? No it hasn’t!”

  “Like, our apartment sucks,” said Mike. “We don’t have a bed. We live in this wack place on the Upper East Side. I wanted to live in Brooklyn like a normal person, and you picked this weird-ass apartment, with a superlong hallway.”

  “I didn’t know you really wanted to live in Brooklyn,” said Elinor. “I picked the apartment when you were living at your mom’s and I couldn’t find anything—”

  “Everybody lives in Brooklyn!” said Mike. “Everyone!”

  “Okay, no!” said Elinor. “Sheila lives in Murray Hill and I picked this place because they—”

  “Anyway. We’ve been fighting a lot and there’s just been a lot of tension. And I feel like you want me to do things with you all the time. But I have my own life, okay? I can’t always be making you feel okay! I have to have my own life.”

  “I know that,” said Elinor. She got up off the foam pad and walked over to Mike. His eyes had a watery film over them. She tentatively grabbed his hand and rubbed her thumb along his palm, but he didn’t even hold her hand. He just stared over her shoulder, like he saw something on the other side of the room. Elinor felt a pinprick of panic. Although she and Mike often fought (as you, dear reader, have seen), he had never made such apocalyptic allusions before.

  “Elinor, why are we doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Fighting all the time,” said Mike.

  “Couples fight.”

  “We need to take a break. We can’t keep doing this to each other.”

  “What?” said Elinor. She started backward. “What are we doing to each other? What?”

  “I just think we need to take a break. This isn’t working.”

  At first Elinor felt nothing when he said that. She felt like she was watching the movie of her life and someone had stopped it in the middle and panned out and it wasn’t in Elinor’s head or point of view anymore. Elinor felt sad for this Elinor she was watching, in an odd, fuzzy way. Then she felt a dull ache in her stomach like she was going to vomit.

  “I just, I came home,” said Mike. His eyes were full of tears. Plop plop plop went the tears, Elinor thought nonsensically. She almost laughed. “And I had had this great day at work. This really amazing day. And I just wanted to be here with my friends, okay? And you just come in here and go to sleep? You make it so uncomfortable that Andrea has to leave. My god. And I should be excited to share my day with my girlfriend, you know? But I just wasn’t. I wasn’t excited to tell you anything about it. And that’s not right.”

  “I think I’m going to vomit,” said Elinor.

  “I think things have been wrong for a while,” said Mike. He sniffled, but he wasn’t going to cry, it seemed. He was just going to get choked up.

  “How have they been wrong for a while?” said Elinor. Her voice was hoarse. She couldn’t help it. “I never noticed they were wrong. I mean, we fought sometimes, but all couples do. Everyone fights. I mean, we live together.”

  “I don’t know, E,” said Mike. Although his eyes had filled with tears, now he seemed calm in a way that was almost more frightening, like the previous hysteria had been some kind of theater, and now he was getting to the real meat of the thing, the crux of his emotional being, and there was no time or inclination for the sluicing of sentiment that had come before. “I have a new job. And maybe I am too consumed with my career at the moment to be in a relationship, and that’s unfair to you too.”

  Elinor stared at him dumbly.

  “I love you, Elinor,” said Mike. He took her hand. His eyes turned beseeching, which because of its suddenness, made Elinor feel as if it was also a self-conscious choice, like he had seen someone act this out before. What was happening? She needed to think! “I do. I just wonder if we need to be apart right now. I mean, who knows what can happen between us? We might just need some breathing room.”

  “Please,” said Elinor in a small voice. Was this really going to happen? Was Mike really going to leave her? She was going to have to move because she had fallen asleep. It was all over.

  Without warning, her mind flashed to the time when she had looked up her and Mike’s astrological signs when they first started dating. In the beginning of their relationship she was constantly looking up signs that she and Mike were meant to be. She Googled numerology, she took quizzes in the backs of magazines. The best part of it all was that she was a Taurus and he was a Virgo. They were actually the most compatible signs of the zodiac. Everyone else was with less compatible people.

  “Oh god,” said Elinor. “Please don’t go. I mean, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll change in any way you want. I won’t get as jealous. I’ll change. But I wasn’t even mad anyway, I’m just tired.”

  “I’m definitely not sure this is the end of us, but I think we do need a time-out. I’ll pay my share of the rent for this month, so at least you can stay here and figure it out.”

  Elinor started to cry. The sounds of her crying made her even sadder. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life.

  Chapter 6

  Facebook: 1 post. Caption: “Sometimes, you just need to see some good news when you’ve been sobbing all day.” Link: “The Cutest Thing You’ve Ever Seen: A Monkey Takes a Bear Under Its Wing.” In the still image, previewing the video, a monkey is wrapped around a bear’s neck. The monkey looks like it’s str
angling the bear, but maybe the bear actually likes it. One comment, from Elinor’s aunt: “That is so cute! Hope you aren’t feeling too down. What’s wrong?” No answer from Elinor.

  Twitter: 23 tweets. Sample: “Take this quiz to realize whether you are a psychotic murderer! The results may surprise you #Murderquiz.” (Link to article.)

  Instagram: No pictures, but 2 quotes—a bad sign. The first? “What doesn’t kill you inspires you later.” The quote is in white script on a black background. The second: “Happiness is a decision you make every day. People who don’t want you to be happy aren’t helping that decision. Haters to the Left.” That is in pink script on a gray background. Lots of likes. Some comments of the “You go, girl,” variety.

  Snapchat: A video of a crowded bar, Botanica! The camera scans the tops of heads. “Wait a Minute” by the Pussycat Dolls is playing faintly in the background.

  · · ·

  “I just can’t believe it though,” said Elinor. “I can’t. I can’t believe it!”

  “Did you think you were going to marry him?” said Sheila in a drawling voice. Elinor was sitting in Sheila’s apartment on Sheila’s L-shaped couch. It was three in the morning, but Sheila was happy. Ralph was there. Ralph was sitting on the other side of the L-shaped couch, playing a video game on a gigantic TV that stretched in front of them like The Last Supper.

  Mike had offered to leave the apartment and sleep somewhere else for the night. Elinor had pleaded with him not to do that. Instead she left the apartment. She didn’t take any clothes and then took a cab to Sheila’s. She had taken two cabs that day! She had only twenty-five dollars left. Looking back, she didn’t quite know why she was so dead set on Mike staying put in their apartment. Maybe she didn’t want to think of him calling Andrea, or sleeping on a couch at a friend’s and actually saying, “Elinor and I broke up,” to that friend. Sheila was surprised to see her and probably pissed at first, considering Ralph had made his entrance at 2:00 a.m., after the party.

  “I don’t know if I thought that,” said Elinor. “I mean, I don’t know. I guess so? I never really thought about it. But yeah. I mean, we were living together. Maybe I thought we were going to end up together. I mean, of course I thought about it, but I wasn’t always thinking about it. I wasn’t obsessed with it. I mean, he just said we’re taking a break. I’m not even sure we’re broken up. It could have just been a really bad fight.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Sheila. They didn’t speak for a while. The only sounds in the room were from Ralph’s PlayStation. Something violent was happening on-screen. Elinor watched it like a zombie. Ralph was driving a car and then occasionally he would get out of the car and kill a woman who looked a bit like a prostitute. Then he would get back into the car and drive away.

  “Do you think I wasn’t cool enough?” asked Elinor. That was one of the things Elinor had always been worried about with Mike. Elinor felt like she was cool sort of, but not really. She didn’t really look that cool. She was a journalist, which was a cool job. But she felt like Mike, in his ideal world, would like a girlfriend with a cooler job—maybe someone who didn’t work at the Journalism.ly, but who did cut her own hair. A hipster girlfriend. She just knew he would want that.

  “I don’t know, maybe?” said Sheila.

  “What do you mean, maybe?” said Elinor sharply. “You think he did?”

  “I don’t know, Elinor. You always said that. I’m just going off what you said. Hipsters are stupid.”

  “God, that would just be the worst,” said Elinor, whose eyes started to brim with tears. “I really hope that’s not it.”

  “Oh, it’s not,” said Sheila. “I was just agreeing with you. I don’t really think that. Mike’s just going through a rough time right now. I’m sure he’ll come to his senses.” She patted Elinor on the back. “Ralph, can you finish this game? You’ve been using the TV for like, an hour. When are you going to be done?”

  “I’ll be done in ten minutes,” said Ralph.

  “You said that thirty minutes ago!”

  “Your fucking friend is here.”

  “Ralph!” said Elinor.

  “Shut up, Ralph,” said Sheila, but she didn’t really seem annoyed. Ralph played his video game in silence.

  “I’m going to make popcorn,” Sheila announced to the room, but mostly to Ralph. Ralph acted as if he had not heard her.

  Elinor drearily followed Sheila into the kitchen area. Sheila put a bag of popcorn into the microwave and slammed the door. Elinor was still wrapped in a fleece blanket with the logo of their college embossed on the front. She pulled the blanket around her head like a cape with a hood and sat on a straw barstool positioned against the island.

  “How are you feeling now?” asked Sheila. The popcorn popped helpfully in the microwave.

  “Still shitty,” said Elinor.

  “At least you like your job?”

  “I don’t. I really don’t like my job.”

  “You are going crazy,” said Sheila. “You have to stop this. You can’t just freak out and ruin your life.”

  “I know that, Sheila,” said Elinor. “It’s just been like, six hours or something since I got horrifically dumped by my live-in boyfriend. Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Okay, whatever, sorry,” said Sheila. She took the popcorn out of the microwave and placed it, delicately, in front of Elinor. Elinor tore open the bag even though it was really hot and burned her fingertips. She ate a huge handful of popcorn and scalded her throat.

  “Fuck,” said Sheila. “I’m so tired. I can’t keep waiting for him to give up the television. Do you mind if I go to bed?”

  “Not at all,” said Elinor. “Can I stay here tonight?”

  “Of course,” said Sheila. “You can sleep on the couch. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” said Elinor. She walked back to the couch. She curled up in a ball and laid the college blanket over herself. Then she watched Ralph play video games until she fell asleep.

  * * *

  · · ·

  After a dreamless sleep that almost felt like a coma, Elinor woke up on Sheila’s couch the next day. She was half awake for five minutes when she realized that Mike was gone and that she was sleeping on a couch and not a foam pad. If not for that, however, it seemed like it almost didn’t happen.

  She woke up to the sounds of Sheila making coffee.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee?” Sheila stage-whispered at her from across the apartment. Her fingers were laced around a blue clay mug. She was already wearing her scrubs. One of her roommates, a tall girl with very puffy hair, was standing near her, and looking suspiciously at Elinor.

  “It’s okay,” said Elinor, feeling, again, sort of separated from her body. “I have to get to work.”

  “Okay,” said Sheila. “Ugh, I have so much work today.”

  “Really?” said Elinor.

  “Yeah, I’m working a double. And I’m so tired from last night. Not that you shouldn’t have come over. It’s just late for me to go to bed and my whole day is kind of shot.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Elinor.

  “It’s fine. Are you still really upset?”

  “Yeah,” said Elinor. She felt a pain behind her eyes and in her nose, like she was going to cry. She blinked.

  “You know,” said Sheila, putting her mug down on the island. “I didn’t want to say so last night, but I think it’s still totally possible to get Mike back.”

  “Really?” said Elinor. “Why?”

  “I think you should just go to him and be like, ‘Listen, I’m sorry I fell asleep while your guest was there. That was rude of me.’ I feel like that’s all you have to do.”

  “Do you think so?” said Elinor.

  “Yes, definitely,” said Sheila.

  “I mean, do you think it was really rude of me to fall asleep while Andrea was there?”

  “I don’t think it was rude necessarily.” Sheila took a sip of her coffee. “He just probably felt like it was rude.
All you have to do is apologize, I think. I mean, he likes you so much, Elinor. I know him, and I feel like he’s a really sensitive guy. I just don’t think you guys are broken up, you know?”

  “So you think I should text him?”

  “Absolutely,” said Sheila. “But wait until the end of the day. I think the morning will seem too desperate.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor hopefully. Maybe, despite the thrill of finality she’d felt last night, she and Mike weren’t actually at cataclysmic odds. This would just be a really terrible fight they looked back on and laughed about. Later, she would say to Sheila, “I actually thought I was never going to see him again,” but it would be over drinks, after she and Mike had already gotten back together.

  “Okay,” said Sheila. “I got to go. I’m already late and Ralph is still sleeping, ugh. Don’t feel too terrible. This will all work out.”

  “Okay,” said Elinor. “I’ll walk out with you. Hold on for like, one second.”

  Elinor carefully folded the blanket she’d slept on and put it on the armrest of the leather couch. Then she went into the bathroom and put on the clothes she’d had on the night before, a knit dress, wool tights, and a pair of boots that had a square toe and came up to the middle of her shins. She looked in the mirror. Her hair was greasy. Her makeup had pooled in dim smudges beneath her eyes, and her skin seemed to be falling off in little, ruddy patches. Maybe she would buy new underwear at Victoria’s Secret with the twenty-five dollars she had left to her name.

  She walked out of the building with Sheila. The wind cut through her coat as if it didn’t exist.

  “Am I leaving you here?” said Sheila. “I just walk down First Ave.”

  “Yeah,” said Elinor. “I’m going to take the N train to work.”

  “Okay,” said Sheila. “Bye! Feel better.”

  “Bye,” said Elinor, who walked in the other direction. She was fully intending to take the subway, but then she realized it was five or six blocks away. She hadn’t noticed yesterday, but that was really a long walk. After a couple of minutes of walking in the direction of the subway, she found a cab, its number half illuminated, and took it. The ride cost sixteen dollars. She put it on her credit card.