The Roxy Letters

by Mary Pauline Lowry

  I’ve gone online to www.nestlife.com and watched one of your cult leader Nina Sylvester’s YouTube videos. I admit: she is dynamic and attractive (That glowing skin! That mane of silky, dark hair!), and if I dare say it, even convincing. She claims orgasms are the cure for modern women’s spiritual hunger, that partnered “orgasmic meditation” is a panacea. I can see how you might have fallen sway to her powers. But I beseech you to pull yourself back to reality. I mean, group fingerbanging as a pseudo-spiritual practice? Ugh! That might have been how the Manson family got started.

  The bottom line is that a group founded on words such as “stroker,” “strokee,” and the oh-so-odious noun “nest,” a group whose main tools involve a timer, lube, surgical gloves, and said “nest” is a group to be avoided like the syph (which you would probably contract from your fellow members anyway!).

  I grieve you have fallen prey to the vision of Nina Sylvester, Nest Life’s founder. You have been bewitched by this beautiful siren and, like Odysseus, have been lured off course. I implore you, throw away your gloves and timer before you forget to engage normally with both women and the world!

  Hang on a minute. I seriously need a drink.

  * * *

  Okay, I’m back.

  It’s true that I have blended and consumed a margarita to try to clear the swirling fog of curiosity and confusion about Nest Life (and maybe more than a little pique at you for keeping your new activity from me, and at myself for giving you credit for self-improvement where no credit was due!). I have just sipped my way through several more Nest Life videos and interviews with Nina. (The only video of her I haven’t watched is her TED Talk, which is too long to tackle just now as I have to clip Roscoe’s nails before bed—a distressing task for both of us!), but I can say that her vision of a world in which all men know how to nurture female sexual energy and apply proper pressure to a clit is laudable.

  GAH! What’s happening to me!? Everett, come home. Let’s talk this through. I know I cannot trust you to clear the fog of deception Nina’s lovely and articulate face has brought down around me over the past half hour, but just your human presence at this time of confusion would be a comfort.

  OMingly… wait, no… skeptically?

  Your morally discombobulated ex-girlfriend,

  Roxy

  P.S. Let me say it again: FOR WEEKS I THOUGHT YOU WERE NEVER HOME BECAUSE YOU WERE IN SCHOOL! I hid my (false) knowledge from you to protect you from a sense of pressure and expectation! But I will hide my truths, half-baked assumptions, and letters from you no longer! This one’s going on the kitchen counter!

  July 21, 2012

  Dear Everett,

  I’ve been in a swirl of emotion since you told me you’ve decided to move out because:

  A room for rent has become available in the OM house. (Who knew such a place existed! Are the cupboards stocked with lube, gloves, and fifteen-minute timers?)

  You claim to dislike my “judgmental attitude” toward your new sex cult.

  You made your announcement hurriedly and then rushed off while my mouth was still agape with shock. It was uncomfortable, to say the least. While I had imagined I’d celebrate the day you announced your impending departure, the news felt unexpected and disconcerting.

  Perhaps I should consider this chain of events fortuitous, thank Venus, and let you leave. But while I worry about you falling even more under the influence of Nina Sylvester, her followers, and their questionable sexual practices and beliefs, I also must admit that some part of me fears abandonment, if only by my underemployed ex-boyfriend.

  Everett, I can’t retract any “judgmental” statements I may have made about your new sex cult, but if in truth it’s my complaints about your presence here that have driven you to decide to leave, I want you to know you are more than welcome to stay.

  Sincerely,

  Roxy

  July 22, 2012

  Dear Everett,

  O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Yesterday after you declared that you are indeed moving out soon and left (to go… where? To the OM house to check out your new room, which is certainly dripping with hazmat? To an OM meeting to forget about our argument and lose yourself in clit “stroking”?), I tried to distract myself with that mindless stuffer, Facebook. What I saw was so unexpected and awful that it’s sent me into a total tailspin.

  You know months ago I heard through the Austin rumor mill that Brant Bitterbrush and Cold Connie Caldwell got married. I had accepted that fact (though I did go on a social media fast to avoid any photographic evidence of their happiness together). But today when I got on Facebook for the first time in ages I saw on Brant Bitterbrush’s mother’s page a photo (knife through my heart!) of Connie and Brant Bitterbrush’s newborn IDENTICAL TRIPLETS! The horror! The horror!

  They are Brant’s spitting image. My heart has broken all over again. (While part of me is outraged no mutual acquaintance told me of Cold Connie’s pregnancy, part of me is glad to have found out in the privacy of my own home!)

  For the last hour I’ve been on a sad journey down memory lane—all the way back to when I was nineteen and Brant Bitterbrush and I worked together as lifeguards at Barton Springs for a seemingly endless summer just after I returned to Austin after my gap year travels. Back in those days, when Brant and I tried to pretend we weren’t falling in love, Connie Caldwell was just an uptight, annoying coworker famous among us for pulling out her calculator at restaurants so she could calculate what everyone at the table owed down to the penny. A total dud, she once said to me—and I quote—“I don’t like women.” (I can’t believe that on not one, but two separate occasions, Brant got together with Connie after he and I broke up! But I jump ahead in my melancholy tale.)

  I can still replay the memory of our first magical night together—I see it in my mind like a film in HD. Brant and I climbed up onto the Barton Springs office roof, still warm from the sun. The glow of the full moon caused the water below us to sparkle, creating the perfect conditions for a romantic first tryst. And yes, Venus was out in the night sky. It was practically written in the stars that Brant and I would fuck for the first time on that fateful night, under her light.

  From then on Brant and I were tangled together like puppies. But our love was eventually marred by his overindulgence in alcohol and meat products—we bickered about the little things, like his Sunday morning bacon-frying fests and my tendency to be “slightly messy.” But the real problem was that Brant wanted to have children. Not someday, but soon, like before we were even thirty, which seemed absolutely insane. (“Twenty-seven is as old as Kurt Cobain ever got,” he’d say. To which I’d reply: “That’s no reason to have a baby!”) But he swore he wanted to be a young dad. Also, he’d developed an apathy toward me that spoke of a great discontent—when I came over he’d often turn on the television instead of listening to me recount the details of my day. (Everett, you know I can tolerate almost anything except (1) the idea of procreating, and (2) being ignored.) Of course, once I broke up with Brant he realized I was the sun his world revolved around, but it was too late. We tried to remain friends, but anytime we saw each other we both wept. I remember how sad I was to find myself single on my half birthday when I was twenty-three. (I felt so old to be alone, which makes me chuckle darkly now.)

  Once I was totally over Brant (so I thought!), you and I had our voyage of love, which shipwrecked a year later, leaving us both—miraculously—somehow fairly unscathed, though on new shores. After that were three years of being a swinging-single wild child. (Not on an Artemis scale, but back then I definitely had game—though I have to ask myself: Where has it gone? I believe it was crushed by abject heartbreak. But I get ahead of myself again.) Then… Screw Venus for making me run into Brant at that coffee shop—I never would have gotten back together with him if he hadn’t been there. He was, of course, fresh out of a relationship with Cold Connie Caldwell. (Back then I felt as cheered by news of their breakup as when I heard Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise.
) The chemistry between us was (still) electric. As we sipped our coffees and caught up, it was clear that we felt the fiery rekindling of our love. Brant had (seemingly) outgrown his tendency toward emotional withdrawal, and his former angst at being a poor community college student was replaced with pride at his job as a paramedic and his side business as a barefoot running coach.

  Since Brant and I already knew each other so completely, we fell fast and hard back into being a couple, except this time there was all the magic and none of the drama. Within a few weeks we were spending every night together, and planning our life. We got a miniature dachshund puppy together (Roscoe!). Brant told me that he thought being the father of a fur baby would be enough for him. He’d decided he didn’t need the hassle of parenting human children. We’d get married, maybe get another puppy, all was right in our world. I felt happy and whole for the first time, maybe ever. I was drawing like crazy and developed two characters named Duckie and Lambie. Brant asked if he could “collaborate” with me by making Duckie and Lambie out of some FIMO I had lying around. I said of course. The two little colorful clay figures he created were charmingly imperfect, a symbol of our love. Though I never said it to him (as some things are both too beautiful and cheesy to be expressed in words), I always thought of him as Duckie and myself as Lambie.

  But then after only three months of bliss, Brant became moody and distant. At night, he’d often forfeit sex for the numbing blue light of television. (You know I love curling up on the couch to watch a movie as much as the next person, but Brant was doing some high-schooler-on-summer-break level binging.) I tried everything from dragging him out for drinks, to a honey jar love spell. Sometimes I even just watched hours of television with him, since that’s what he seemed to want to do. One night we were watching a Hallmark movie—this is embarrassing but will tell you what kind of state we were in—and when the pregnant teen girl gave birth to her baby, I looked over and saw that Brant was crying. “Shit,” I said, trying to make light, “maybe we better get another wiener dog puppy, prontito.”

  “I miss my old life,” he said. And I shuddered to think he might mean his old life with Cold Connie Caldwell. But when I pressed him for details, he clammed right up. The next day I was working the deli counter when I received an earth-shattering text:

  I CAN’T BE WITH YOU ANYMORE. I WANT TO BREAK UP.

  I had barely begun to process that one, when another arrived on its heels:

  I’M GETTING BACK TOGETHER WITH CONNIE.

  That was it. That ghosting motherfucker didn’t answer another text or phone call from me. Ever. I left him long messages, I sent him a torrent of emails, but received nothing in reply.

  My grief was profound and visceral. I threw up violently for days and took, weeping, to my bed. I considered beating on his door in the night or lying in wait for him outside the ambulance bay at his work, but my pride stopped me. But pride or no, I did need to get back my shit—I’d left half my scant wardrobe at his place.

  Since I had a key to his duplex, I went there to gather my things one day when I knew he’d be at work on the ambulance. He had intuited I’d come and had left me a note—that’s how well he knew me—that said:

  Don’t worry, Roxy. You’ll find your way.

  P.S. Do you mind if I keep Duckie & Lambie as, like, my thing?

  How had I been in love with such a heartless, patronizing fuck?

  In a blind fury, I wrote across the bottom of his note: You can have Duckie & Lambie and I hope you shove them up your ass!!!!

  I packed my stuff in a hurry, but before I left, I pulled out strands of my long platinum hair and tucked them in his bed, his T-shirts, the zippers of his jeans, everywhere, so that dark-haired Cold Connie Caldwell would certainly find them. In the face of my great heartbreak, it was a pitiful rejoinder. But my innate sense of dignity prevented me from a Carrie Underwood “Before He Cheats” sort of attack. And of course the thought of Cold Connie Caldwell spotting one of my platinum strands dangling from Brant’s zipper provided more satisfaction than taking a baseball bat to his Honda Civic ever could. Still, it was a lonely, brokenhearted satisfaction.

  I was devastated. I saw all men as betrayers. But then you called me and we went out for smoothies and vegan hot dogs at JuiceLand, and I was reassured that not every man I’ve loved is a heartless flake. That was so healing, Everett, and I’m still grateful for the ways you’ve helped me.

  Then came another heartbreaking twist in this sordid tale: the day I was walking through the Whole Body section of Whole Foods and saw a giant display for Duckie & Lambie moisturizer. On every bottle there was a photo of the brightly colored clay Duckie and Lambie that Brant had made. When I read the label I saw that the moisturizer contains DUCK FAT and LAMB’S MILK as the key ingredients. “What the fuck!” I yelled so loudly the Whole Body manager hustled me over to the bulk bins.

  You know what a disaster I was after that. Finding out that Brant Bitterbrush used MY DUCKIE AND LAMBIE to create a moisturizer laden with animal products gave me instant and profound artist’s block that I have still not been able to shake. I considered suing him for taking my original characters and using them to make a fortune off the suffering of animals—I planned to donate the proceeds to an animal shelter—but the lawyer I consulted said that since I’d given him written rights, I had no legal leg to stand on. Now that Annie’s on the fifth floor, I’ve asked her to look into the company and see what she can find out.

  It sucks to think that Brant ghosted me so heartlessly and yet now has the family of his dreams, while I am lovelorn and lonely. Since he left me, I haven’t so much as been on a date. And the most horrible thing is, though Brant Bitterbrush has crushed my heart and my artistic drive, I miss him still.

  I’m an emotional hot mess, Everett. And this is going to sound pitiful, but I really hope you don’t move out right now.

  Forlornly,

  Roxy

  CHAPTER THREE

  July 26, 2012

  Dear Everett,

  When I came home from work three days ago Roscoe ran to me as usual, but instead of barking and wagging joyfully, he gazed up at me with sad, wet, devastated eyes. I wandered to what I now and perhaps will forever think of as “Everett’s room.” You’d stripped your sheets and put them in the washing machine, a move that to me seemed more dramatic than thoughtful. Even your loom and your Motörhead posters were gone. That’s when I knew you had really moved out—you’ve left me to go live in an OM house.

  I still haven’t heard a word from you.

  Today I was thinking about the night of my disastrous five-year high school reunion. (If comedy is tragedy plus time, then a five-year high school reunion is the equivalent of a joke told way too soon.) I never actually had a boyfriend in high school, as I was too weird and artsy to attract the attention of most Austin High School guys, but by five years out I had a great degree, was drawing and painting furiously, and felt good enough about myself to want to return in triumph with you on my arm. But by the time we left the reunion, I was furious at you. You’ll recall your total social collapse at that event where, instead of chatting with my fellow members of the class of 2002 while looking at me adoringly, you’d sulked at a table alone, binge eating chips and queso. But then in the car on the way home, you told me you had a surprise for me. We stopped at Magnolia Cafe for takeout love veggies and then hiked down to the Hike and Bike Trail. In the dark we walked to the middle of the MoPac Pedestrian Bridge spanning Town Lake and you showed me how to climb over the rail and leap down three feet to the ledge jutting from the pylon holding up the bridge. It was like having a silent, moonlit private patio over the water all to ourselves. We sat down next to each other, our backs against the pylon. “Does it matter if you were popular in high school?” you asked me. “Or if you are ‘successful’ in life if you can enjoy this?” And I knew then I was having more fun, and feeling more understood, than anyone at that bullshit reunion.

  So yes, I’d thought I would feel light and
unburdened at your departure. But instead is it any wonder I am weepy and estranged (and also rather angry you have left me living vulnerable and alone next to a drug den)? Is it any wonder that I am still writing these letters to you, my beautifully flawed friend who has always understood me, and has always known the thing to say and do to make me feel better?

  Owner of a Lonely Heart,

  Roxy

  P.S. Everett, while I would never actually admit this to you, I’ve started wondering, “Why did I break up with Everett in the first place?” True, due to your tight right psoas muscle, you are often unable to hold down a low-wage job; and you are prone to nonsensical and boring monologues about government conspiracies, but you’re amazing with animals and were actually decent in bed—and that was before all the OM practice you’ve had since our breakup. Perhaps I should reconsider my hard stance against revisiting a romantic relationship with you.

  P.P.S. I just texted Artemis to float the idea by her and she said: “Getting back together with an ex-boyfriend is like eating your own vomit.” I’m not sure I understand either the simile or her vehemence on the matter. Instead of being sympathetic that you’ve moved out, she’s exuberant—but her excitement isn’t contagious.