by JoAnna Novak
I spat the chewed-up apple in the sink. Marissa’s Eyeore ’tude, her bratty snark enraged me. I should’ve punched her in the ribs. She was a spineless version of Lisa: she didn’t deserve me. Ef eating, get to the library, I told myself. The Xerox is slow. Like Marissa!
I chucked my apples across the bathroom. The fruit scattered on the floor, ear-shaped splotches. It reminded me of spooge on the girls’ faces in Terrible Twos and Twisted Threes, the video Lisa and I’d watched the last time I saw her outside of school, a few weeks ago at a sleepover before Christmas. It was her dad’s tape: Mr. Breit was freaky.
Truth or dare?
Truth: Ever since watching it, I’d been a touch traumatized.
The movie had me wondering: Did my own dad, Rolf, amuse himself with stuff that sick, all these weeks he’d been in Europe, on business? What would a human dick look like in real life? What if confronting the organ ruined the one boy I like-liked, Ethan Suva? What if some day he wanted me and I’d been repulsed forever by a porn penis: Barbie-tall, pink, foldy like Jabba the Hutt? (Hidden in the vaginas, it hadn’t been so bad, like the penis was a potato replanted in earth.) Ever since that sleepover, XXX images thaumatroped across my brain, sex and girls; girls, sex; Lisa, me.
Daddy, make me a juice box, one porn sister’d said. When Lisa was too grossed out to watch, her fingers latticed across her eyes, I’d relayed to Lisa how wide and wet and gummy a mouth could be, exhausted from blow-jobbing, how his stomach heaved like a woodchuck; the way she sucked him, lovey-dovey, like she was unclogging a milkshake straw. After all that, she wouldn’t return my phone calls. She avoided our trophy case meet-up spot. Today, she hadn’t been in science.
I slid off the counter. My blood pressure painted my head with highlighter fluorescence, radial midnight. What did Marissa know about me or Lisa? I was tired of waiting for our friendship to heal itself, for Junior Carlos to break up with her, for Lisa to go back to being super skinny.
I checked the bathroom mirror. I gave the flaky zit one last scratch. I smoothed my bun. I didn’t want to be like my clients, bruising my knees for a breakthrough. Sometimes I felt like the only girl who tried, the only Park girl who wasn’t slouching through life; I paraded like coronation was imminent. One day I woke up and I was different, I’d written in Real Talk: girls needed to believe they had the power to reset their own lives. Maybe I needed the same wake-up call, too. I needed to listen to my own advice. Puissance, my mom had taught me—and Anna was always right—power was something you orchestrated yourself. I shook my Trapper: two quarters, one phone call. It jingled.
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In my black turtleneck covering my black training bra hiding my black xiphoid process and my black-blooded, Lisa-lusting heart, I headed to the payphone. Low Mozart issued from the choir room; a struggling modem whined.
I turned down an elbow of hallway, where last quarter’s best artwork hung. Dawdling predated my diet, but hunger helped me fantasize. Adolescence is one big detour. Now, I imagined I wasn’t at Park, but Manhattan two summers ago, with Anna. Anna said imaginative play, gambols or gambles, could be profitable; school should be less structured, more sympathetic to individuals’ constitutions. I shouldn’t miss a chance to hop a train of thought. Trusting her made me strange, but I relished every breath that separated me from Other girls. Other girls hated their moms and feared the unknown; their skinniness was one more attempt to smite the womb. When those girls visited NYC, they flashed peace signs in Times Square, caught the fatuous Broadway shows that came to Chicago. I’d been to Soho—according to Anna, rejuvenated by the muse. For a month, I’d wandered in my mom’s wake, prettied by her company, maître d’s sending us champagnes and Shirley Ts. I’d sat in a diner with black coffee, a leatherette notebook from The Strand, trying to write stories and plays and poems surrounded by burnt bacon butterscotch milkshakes hazelnut coffee toast, heady conversations, micro-dramas and epics; harangues, squabbles, jokes. Anna was right: everyone hung out in someone else’s aisle. She’d taught me how to look—not just at a Jeff Koons, but all over—to see art anywhere: steel drumming muzzied with pot in Washington Square Park, needle-heels lisping across Bergdorf carpets. Art was what to eat (an onion bialy, we chewed and spat in paper bags) and how people behaved. Once, we’d rounded a blind corner onto a gust of cigarette smoke that materialized into a scruffy man, who unleashed a legit Brit lexicon: pardon me, loves. Anna went soft as spoiled fruit. Farther down Mott, she’d said, El, that one got me throatily.
In Park’s glass cases, each pinch pot looked wormier than the next; linoleum prints stood on easels, placards whorled with the calligraphy Ms. Washburn used to make everyone’s name seem special. I stared, bored. Arms over my chest, lips pursed: my reflection was so gaunt I couldn’t see my whole self, only parts. In Soho, there hadn’t been a mirror in our sublet, just jungle-green walls, so my mom and I roamed the city, where a single color couldn’t asphyxiate us.
I walked on. The framed watercolors were big as bedroom posters. When I saw my own, I gagged. My portrait was a black-and-white of Michael Jordan and Spike Lee: it sucked. MJ’s eyes looked meaner than in the Nike ad, like Tim Curry in Home Alone 2. It’s bad, don’t hang it, I’d said to Ms. Washburn; I’d felt guilty, especially after she’d told me not to be a brown-noser. Well. I wasn’t good; I wasn’t like Mike. He’d been my idol since the Flu Game when, parched, nauseous, dizzy, he’d led the Bulls to victory against skeeze-bearded Karl Malone and the Jazz. I’d watched with Rolf, who cried as Scottie Pippin slung MJ’s arm over his shoulder. That’s teamwork. Exceeding your capabilities when you’re surrounded by people you trust. My dad dabbed his red eyelashes with a monogrammed hankie; he was more emotional than me and Anna combined.
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A punk had plastered a Mustard Plug sticker around the payphone receiver, but the mouthpiece wasn’t covered.
I fed my quarters into the slot. They were my assertiveness fund, a tool I used with clients. Go on, I’d say in the Park Snack Shop. Make the right choice. Yesterday, I’d nearly depleted it, coaching Rocyo, my newest girl, at our trial: I’d walked her to the line, given her a dollar’s worth of coins, told her order wisely. Dunk-a-roo con fresas? she’d said. I’d frowned. Fresa frosting. No.
I dialed. Park was quiet; the ringing went on for a week—could time stop and forget me? I saw the Orlowski-Breit’s phones lighting up, rattling on their receivers, the black cordless in the living room, the furry pink princess from Limited Too on Lisa’s nightstand, the UFO-shaped speaker-answering machine combo in the den. If I got the machine, I’d wait. Phone calls meant hope. Lisa could call back. I pictured her in the ratty blue-green flannel pants she’d worn the last time we hung out, when we’d exchanged presents and watched porn, dozing on the L-shaped black leather couch. Sick, sniffles, a cough. Sneezing like Betty Boop. Blowing her nose rosy, raw. Hoarse. I felt like a mom: I hoped she didn’t have to be alone, that someone was taking care of her, straining the noodles from her Mrs. Grass so she could score a sick day slim-down.
I’d never ditched, but if Lisa needed me, I would. If, before wind chill, the temperature was negative thirteen degrees; if, like this morning, I had to hop on one foot to keep warm, waiting thirty minutes for the bus because black ice made the route run on the inclement schedule and my mom was too late to give me a ride; I would find a way to Lisa. Frostbite could have my fingers.
The ringing stopped. I heard her open her mouth, Angelina Jolie lips. “Hello?”
She didn’t sound at all sick. She sounded fine, a little husky, mature. More beautiful than ever. My pulse snagged. I couldn’t speak.
“Who is this?” She cleared her throat. Coughed.
“Hey! It’s me. So! Random question: Marissa Turner. She went postal during a photo shoot. Like, when she finally let me take her pic, she wanted one together and I wouldn’t and she flipped out, and acted like a total nut, and said something’s up with you. Do you have Lisa Logic? What’s her dealio?”
Lisa exhaled
a craggy sigh. “Ugh. Who are you people? We don’t want what you’re trying to sell. So, like, why do you keep calling?”
“What? Wait—Lisa?”
Her voice lowered. “Listen: I’m not talking to you unless you get help.”
I felt like my brain had been dunked in Jolt. “What?”
“El. You. Need. Help. You know what I mean.”
She hung up. I stared at the black receiver, streaked with hand grease. There was no misunderstanding Lisa. Clear, blunt, honest, real Lisa, at home, a victim of Junior Carlos’s menticide. Idiot, I thought. Trying to fatwash me.
2 ·· ANNA
HOW MANY FUCK-UPS DO I get? How many occasions to make the wrong choice? Amendment: how many occasions to knowingly make the wrong choice, to court the wrong choice from across the dance floor, to buy the wrong choice a rum and diet, to engage in light banter with the wrong choice in the trance of house music, to let the wrong choice cup my hips and steer my engine, to despise dancing but hatefully dance, hard and wild as a hartebeest against the wrong choice’s hot heart-center, to get in the wrong choice’s roadster and ignore the wrong choice’s slurring stanzas, to close my eyes and listen to the wrong choice sing-along to Eurythmics, “sweet dreams are made of this” wrong choice, not-breathing-and-so-not-in-my-body wrong choice, wrong choice of Sauvignon blanc and seltzer, wrong choice of knees in the seat and feet out the window, panties on the pavement wrong choice, wrong to want this wrongness, wrong to wrong the wrongness and not just witness, wrong to unzip the wrong choice’s pants, to choke on the wrong choice?
The right choices are few and far between. I savor them:
1. I have not given up the code to the faculty bathroom. This is good. The faculty bathroom is a Glade-scented haven where I don’t have to worry about running into students or colleagues. I really don’t like anyone. The faculty bathroom is adjacent to the faculty lounge, which is across from my office. You punch *678 on a metal numerical keypad to gain entry. Oh. Shit.
2. I have confiscated Carlos Rottingham Jr.’s cocaine. Me. His last-semester ENG 101 Professor. Not Tory La Fraga, cowgirl chief of campus police; not Alicia Aurelio, Dean of Liberal Studies’ shoe-obsessed secretary; not Glenn Decklin, Building 13’s whiskey-haired guard, with whom I swap Seinfeld jibes. I, Anna Egleston, knocked on the frost effloresced driver’s side window of Carlos Rottingham Jr.’s emerald BMW at nine a.m., and said, with nary a quaver, why are you sitting out here in the Antarctic and what the fuck is that in the cup holder? Excuse me, hey, you, didn’t we talk about this? Yeah, I don’t know, he mumbled, proving even a graduate of the best high school in the state of Illinois and the progeny of two émigré moguls, one Irish and one Italian, a kid fluent enough in Spanish to volunteer at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona last summer but a self-professed “ghetto geek,” a counterculture wunderkind, can be a cotton-mouthed slacker with the ability to lose all sense of eye-contact-based decency on a dime.
Slavering for inconspicuous suicide. Not wanting to live, but being too apathetic to die.
Like, the horror.
“Give me that,” I said to Rot, motioning toward the plastic bag. He was all cheekbones and blue metal eyes, black hair parted in the center and framing his forehead like parenthesis. And I was too too-much—too cold, too hungry, too angry, too revved from my run—to pause and ask myself why I cared so much, to hold a mirror to my heart and ask of it, what are you doing, Anna, and shouldn’t you be minding your rosters and advisees, couldn’t you be writing? Instead, I snapped at Rot, like I would never even snap at my own daughter. I snapped at him like he had spurned me, lover.
“What did you tell me about this?” My head was in the car: had Rot not been reclining, my lips would have brushed his cheek, streaky pink, my Black Honey pucker marking that flushed cheek, which, coupled with my power, my position, my tits nearly shoved in his face and my nipples bullet-hard beneath my black coat, a lace bra that itched when the heat in my office went into overdrive. All of this made me feel tingled up, vaginally alive, my being was thrival, thrum of an electric shaver in my grip, somewhat unwelcome, on this occasion, in this most public place, the College of Cook County campus, in the oceans of concrete we’ve all been singing about for the past it-seems-like-three-thousand decades, next to a gray Plymouth Voyager with the passenger side collapsed and a Chicago Bears decal flapping off the bumper, in Commuter Parking Lot D.
“I said, what the hell did you tell me about this?”
“I wasn’t going to, fucking, supply you,” he said.
“Give me that,” I was lunging a little, leaning with attitude. I think that constitutes narc status. I saw a bumper sticker on one of my colleague’s Volvos: [Anytown]: WHERE THE COFFEE IS STRONG AND SO ARE THE WOMEN.
Rot squeezed the bag in my hand. “What the hell, professor?”
I ignored that last word. I ignored his resemblance to Jared Leto, the grottos of shadow that give a well-built face such a sexy, suck-out look. I pocketed the drug and walked back to the building, concentrating on my ass.
3. Thirteen years ago, I ignored my thesis advisor, Arlene, that Luftkopf, when she said, a PhD or motherhood, hm. I have never been an either or. I’m always both.
4. And Rolf, my husband, from the Ritz-Carlton, Vienna, even this morning, has again assured me he loves this: how I take freedom by the reigns, all the right choices I make. Like no breakfast. Like afternoon coffee with a shot of espresso, an indulgence for which I absent myself from campus. Like trysts. And the declension of our monogamy, more subversive than divorce. This subversion reminds me why I fell in love with Rolf to begin with, which really dumps coffee grounds and motor oil and banana peels in the proverbial water. O Rolf and the acceleration of our cyber messaging, its familiar froideur over AOL! How he loves our daughter Elliot’s independence—independence, he writes, in no small part fostered by her mother. Her mother’s lust for life. Her mother’s—my (so easy to be subsumed by a role)—predilection for working through lunch. For not concerning herself with the stupefying chores of home.
5. Microwave popcorn.
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The faculty bathroom is private. The fake geranium is carnelian blossomed, the purse rack teal wire. There is usually a back-up stack of brown paper towels—today there is not. There is a full roll of single-ply toilet paper. The floor is shades of honeycomb and caramel, rectangle tiles the size of dominos that run both perpendicular to and parallel with one another.
It is an unnecessarily busy floor. My head aches to look at it now, with my blood galloping and my brain aroar. The floor, the soles of my boots click against. The floor is always sticky. Piss? Soda? Lotion? And yet the room is an icebox: shouldn’t whatever’s tacky freeze away?
Faulty logic, I think. But I flounder when teaching argument, too. Poet: doesn’t know it, per my department-meeting repartee.
The toilet is white enamel like the sink, minus the hairline cracks. I twist the hot and cold, and the water surges. There I am in the mirror. Silver and exact.
The pedant in my brain hates me: which to enjoy is not to consume. I have become a woman that memorizes Sylvia Plath.
A woman heaving in the bathroom?
It is surprisingly easy—though I’ll be vaporized after.
Butter Blasted was my lunch and now my mouth tastes malolactic. My lips are slippery. The center of my tongue, raked into numbness. Marauded by my congestion, the bathroom smells like dander. The moment is pixelated by sensations. Mountain Dew coruscation of over-sink light. Peals of girl-squeal through walls. Smudgy dun of the faucet. Glossy white paper towel dispenser and its jack-in-the-box crank.
Thank hell I ran first thing this morning. I used the college’s cobbled-together fitness center, pounded the shaky treadmill with the ribbed belt closest to the indoor serenity pond—really, a flotilla of rafted plants the color of soggy green olives—five miles, forty minutes. I’m not fast; I don’t aspire to be fast: I want constancy and consistency, the steady pummeling of chronic, unflagging, devotional,
genuflectory dedication. It’s so much easier with my body than my head or my heart. On treadmills. At the gym, for which I am grateful, especially today, when this morning, I couldn’t handle outdoors: the roads have been agony, black ice everywhere, an inhuming, already, too much, this winter; and El was out the door, satchel and apples, black mantis-legs sticking out from her black parka, early for the bus.
There’s an alternate schedule, she told me. For inclement weather, which I’d say this constitutes. Oh, weird one: is there dew point in winter? Mom? Anna?
And I was pulling on my running tights and slicking back my hair, mind hiding in a thousand corners, finding my papers and filling my water bottle and considering calling Rolf—whose cheer and dogged optimism, even after factoring in the seven-hour time distance, when all reasonable men would be further day-calloused, can sometimes make teaching tolerable, minor, detourish, and petty—and deciding against calling Rolf—whose same cheer and dogged optimism can other times make teaching an insurmountably dire indentured servitude, a schooling. Then opening the crisper and finding there weren’t salad mixes to bring for lunch. Entertaining whether or not I avoided grocery shopping in order to tempt the Butter Blasted fates (did I have a postprandial agenda even then?) and cramming apples in my tote.
What, El? I said before I realized my daughter had already gone.
The invisible fan cycles on and the faculty bathroom gets colder. Everything metal hums. I pull my black sweater up, over, my hair statics, my sweater hugs my crown, head, off, over, on the hook. I wear a black lace balconette bra. Under my black wool pants, a black lace G-string. My husband has been in Austria for two weeks, but it feels longer because this trip is one block in a tower of business travel. Jenga, we used to play with Elliot, listening to a tape of The Magic Flute. Which one of these timbers will cause the construction to topple? Another outcome: how high can the shaft grow before you all grow bored and start deciding who deserves the nickname Piccolo?
