The Roxy Letters

by Mary Pauline Lowry

  As I started in on my second bottle of Pliny, a teenage girl near me pulled out a makeup mirror and reapplied her eyeliner. Why, I wondered, in the twenty-first century, were there no women or girls skating? I literally did not spy a single one. Everett, thanks to Title IX, we’ve made tremendous progress in team sports, but this skate park remained utterly devoid of female participants. I tried to remember what I was up to when I was nine or ten, the age Patrick likely had been when he got his first skateboard. Had I been watching television? Playing with my pink convertible Barbie car? Holed up in a corner reading a book in an effort to find the intellectual stimulation my public school education lacked, while simultaneously trying to deny the existence of my physical body, which would soon betray me utterly by going through puberty and growing cumbersome boobs and an ass I perceived as oversized?

  By the time I was halfway through my second bottle of Pliny I approached the teenage girls with a friendly swagger. “Mind if I join y’all?” I asked.

  They shrugged. I sat.

  “How come y’all don’t skate?” I said, in a way that was very casual. I started to feel a bit like an immersion journalist. Like Joan Didion in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, plunged into the youth culture.

  Again, the girls shrugged.

  “It doesn’t have to be just for guys, you know,” I said in a way that was more inspiring than didactic.

  A blond girl with corkscrew curls looked skeptical. “But you don’t skate,” she said. “I mean, you’re too old.” Ouch! It reminded me of the part in Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” when a bunch of dropout kids in the Haight told Didion that at thirty-two, she could perhaps aspire to being “an old hippy.” Did she take it personally? Hell no. Instead she used it as witty fuel for her scathing exposé.

  I realized it then. These girls needed a role model, an inspiration. Someone who wouldn’t tell them girls could skate, too, but would rather show them. Patrick popped up over the rim and said, “Hey, glad you made some friends.”

  “Actually, I was just going to show them that skating doesn’t have to be a pillar of the kyriarchy,” I said.

  “The what?”

  “The kyriarchy,” I said. “You know, a set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. Sexism, racism, classism—all the ‘isms’ combine to make up the kyriarchy.”

  He still looked confused.

  “Never mind. Just give me your board.”

  “What?”

  “Give me your board. Just for a minute.” Doubtfully, he held the skateboard out to me. Even buzzed on Pliny, I knew better than to try to skate the bowl. Instead I put the board down and stood on it with one foot, pushing myself along with the other. I put both feet on the board and suddenly I was flying along. It was exhilarating, magical, so much easier than it looked. I couldn’t believe I had missed out on this glory all my life. The wind caused my hair to stream behind me. I was goddess-like, an inspiration even to myself—the alternative sports role model I’d never had. “See!” I yelled so that the teenage girls could hear me. “Sisters are doing it for themselves!”

  Just as I sailed out from under the shade of the giant tree and into the blinding light of the August sun, the board shot out from under me. The top half of my body fell in slow motion, arms akimbo as if trying to find some nonexistent purchase, while the bottom half of my body moved at the speed of a gunshot, my legs flying into the air as if I was a cartoon man who’d just slipped on a banana peel. I landed on my tailbone with the most insane sensation of my entire spine cracking, vertebra by vertebra. I’m embarrassed to say it, Everett, but I started to cry.

  Patrick rushed over, asking, “Are you okay?”

  No, I wasn’t okay. It took Patrick and two of the teenage girls to get me to my feet. Patrick had skated to work, but one of the girls volunteered to drop us off at the emergency room. “I’m not ready for this crazy-ass shit to end” were her exact words. I rode in front and the blond girl drove. Patrick was crammed in the backseat with three other teenage sylphs, which I worry he was actually enjoying.

  “Y’all are lifesavers!” he said, when they dropped us off at the door of the ER.

  Diagnosis: bruised tailbone. Treatment: sit on a donut pillow for the next six weeks. (It hurt so badly I was very slightly disappointed nothing was broken.)

  When I came out with the donut pillow, Patrick and I both started laughing. He insisted on paying for an Uber to Ken’s Donuts on Guadalupe, so I could sit on my donut pillow while eating an actual donut. In the Uber we were giggling and talking really easily, as if my fall from the skateboard hadn’t just practically cracked my tailbone, but had also broken open the awkwardness between us.

  Once we settled into a table with our donuts I said, “Maybe there’s a reason no one learns to skate when they are in their late twenties.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m sorry if I wrecked your street cred,” I said.

  “At the skate park where you busted your ass? Or here at Ken’s Donuts where I’m being seen with a woman sitting on a donut pillow?”

  “Shut uuuuppppp!” I said. Flirting made the pain recede a little. He leaned forward and kissed me, lightly, on the lips. I had a bite of donut in my mouth so I couldn’t really advance the kiss, but it was still nice and (pun intended) very sweet.

  Since I am out of practice at sex and have a bruised ass, I decided that in lieu of trying to further our sexual relationship, I’d better call it a day. Patrick had his skateboard, so I insisted on ordering my own Uber to take me back to my car, which was still in the Whole Foods parking lot.

  As I placed my donut pillow in the backseat and climbed inside, Patrick said, “I had fun with you today.” And then he smiled his orthodontically perfect smile, and closed the car door.

  As soon as I got home I ran to my room and whipped out the merman. It took me a bit to get settled on the donut pillow, but after that it didn’t take a minute at all.

  Pluck the day, Everett, for it is ripe,

  Roxy

  CHAPTER FOUR

  August 4, 2012

  Dear Everett,

  I woke up yesterday in a panic thinking about the inevitable ER bills I’m going to receive, and with an insane pain in my tailbone to boot.

  My mortgage was due last week and I paid it in full myself. But now my bank account is down to almost zero and I’m still paying down the vet bills from when Roscoe got into my dirty laundry hamper and ate the crotches out of my underwear. I can’t help thinking about you holed up in some disgusting OM den while I’m here alone trying to keep myself afloat financially. I’ve been considering putting a “Room for Rent” flyer up on the bulletin board at work, but as you know, this house is small and the thought of sharing it with someone I hardly know seems daunting to me and potentially traumatizing to the furballs. Perhaps the pain in my tailbone makes the possibility seem even bleaker than it really is.

  So I broke down and called my parents.

  They put me on speakerphone, of course, and I told them about my fall, leaving out Pliny the Elder and even Patrick.

  “Tell me again what you were doing at a skate park?” my mother asked.

  “I told you, mentoring at-risk teenage girls. They were clearly desperate for guidance.”

  “But you don’t even know how to skate,” my father said, bewildered.

  “A recent Harvard medical study showed that sixty-two percent of personal bankruptcies result from medical expenses,” I said, bringing us back to the point. “I am responsible. I have health insurance through my job, but the deductible is two grand.”

  “Just mail us the medical bills when they come in,” my father said with his usual droll calm. “We’ll pay them.” Since he’s a retired dentist, he understands the way that medical expenses can crush a person.

  “Thanks, Daddy,” I said, almost gagging at the sound of my own self-infantilization.

  When I was younger, hitting my parents up for money didn’t sting.
But now that I’m in my late twenties, working almost full-time and still unable to pay my medical and vet bills, it feels humiliating! It’s so freaking hard to be a grown-up! I’m almost thirty and still can’t seem to manage on my own. It makes me question my own Austin slacker ethos, which emphasizes “cool” employment over actual financial stability. But what well-paid job am I even qualified for?

  Today Annie met me outside the store on my break so I could show her my donut pillow. “Artemis is going to make so much fun of me,” I said.

  “When do I get to meet the famous Artemis?” Annie asked, her voice dripping with envy that I have a new friend.

  “Um, at some point,” I mumbled. Annie and Artemis will HATE each other, so I’m not in a hurry to introduce them. Annie is mono-focused on career advancement in the name of animal rights, while Artemis is obsessed with her own brand of artifice and sexuality. If they ever met, each would find the other’s interests incomprehensible. And I’m sure they would be vying for status as my best friend, making it impossible for them to spend time together without a landscape of iciness and resentment.

  “I don’t need to meet her to know she’s a questionable influence,” Annie said.

  To change the subject, I asked Annie for advice on Patrick. She said I should wait for Patrick to call me, or for us to naturally run into each other at work. “He’s a man-child,” she said, “and man-children balk if they feel pursued.”

  “I’m not going to pursue him,” I said, though I’d been planning on cruising Beer Alley on my next break. Annie took me to hang out for a bit on the fifth floor. She’s finally asked out one of the IT help desk identical twins. The only problem is she doesn’t know if it was Jeff or Joe. We cruised by the IT desk and she waved breezily at both twins, who are smoking hot individually, but next to each other are smoking hot squared.

  Not only is Annie’s love life perking up, she’s already convinced Topher Doyle that Whole Foods should only source lobster from ethical “growers” who require two cubic feet of aquarium tank space per lobster. She’s also made him agree to give 10 percent of local store proceeds one day a month to Austin Pets Alive!, everyone’s favorite no-kill shelter. She’s been at her new job for only six weeks and already she’s making a real difference in the lives of countless animals. (One thing she hasn’t done is rid the store of the moisturizer everybody loves to hate—Duckie & Lambie.) Though I feigned happiness for her, she could of course sense I was moping internally. (I wonder what percentage of female “joy” at the success of our friends is actually false performance, little bouts of emotional labor that barely cover our own feelings of inadequacy and jealousy?)

  “What about you? Could you try a little watercolor or something?” Annie asked. “Now that Everett’s out of the house, you’ve got no distractions.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “It’s hard to explain how paralyzing it is to have had my art stolen from me and used for a purpose anathema to my beliefs. And to support the ex–love of my life and his new brood!”

  Annie looked at me like she wanted to stab me AND Brant Bitterbrush. “How about something nonartistic, then? I’ve read it’s good to do something else creative if you are feeling a little blocked. Cook a colorful stew or whatever.”

  “I’m not cooking a fucking stew.”

  “But what would you LOVE to do, just for fun, to get you out of this rut?”

  There is something I’ve been thinking about ever since I read Dear Sugar’s advice on how to get “unstuck,” but I was reluctant to tell anyone, even Annie, because it sounded so crazy. “I do have this one idea. This one thing I feel passionate about,” I said. “But maybe it’s totally ridiculous.”

  “Well, what is it?” Annie demanded.

  I took a deep breath, a little worried that if I said it out loud, somehow I would have to follow through on it. And how would that change my life? It’s impossible to say. “I want to tackle the Lululemon at Sixth and Lamar to the motherfucking ground.”

  “What does that even mean?” Annie asked.

  “It means, I want to force it to close down, to move the fuck out of that location.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Organize a protest. A store boycott. Whatever.”

  “YES!” Annie yelped. “And you could make all the signs yourself. So you’re taking social action and making art. Or at least making something.”

  I had expected Annie to say the idea was a clear no-go. Her enthusiasm caused me to backpedal. “I wasn’t serious.”

  “Maybe you should be.”

  “I’ll think about it. But for now I’ve got to get back to the deli.”

  Annie walked me to the elevator, and when the doors dinged, she gave me a kiss on the cheek. As I entered and the doors began to close, she yelled, “Don’t pursue the man-child!”

  Back in the store I felt a pull to Beer Alley, but instead muttered to myself, “Man-child, man-child,” as I headed back to the deli. I stuffed my donut pillow in my locker and got back to work, all the while scanning the store for signs of Patrick headed toward the deli. Surely he would get hungry and come over on his break? I know how he loves our revolting chicken salad.

  But it was Artemis I spotted headed my way. As she pretended to order large amounts of food from the deli and I pretended to package it for her, I whispered a quick account of the skate park incident. “So did you…?” she asked, using her signature lewd finger gesture.

  “I mean, we kissed in Ken’s Donuts.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Have I taught you nothing?”

  I shrugged and then explained Annie’s theory about man-children.

  “You’re not planning to ask him to marry you!” Artemis said. “You just want to break your dry spell.”

  True. It’s confusing how convincing she and Annie both can be in the moment. I tried to bring my own philosophical convictions to the situation but felt overwhelmingly that if I could just hang out with Patrick—man-child or not—it would cheer me up and perhaps even alleviate the pain in my tailbone.

  “Next time you have a break, saunter over there to Beer Alley and say hello. And after work, meet me over at Deep Eddy Cabaret for a beer,” Artemis said. “Oh, and bring your friend Annie. I’m dying to meet her.”

  There’s no way I’m putting those two in the same room. “I’ll meet you at six thirty,” I said.

  When I arrived at Deep Eddy, Willie Nelson was playing on the jukebox as usual, his voice soothing, every word he crooned a reminder to everyone in the bar that we are not alone in this world—we all have Willie to guide us. Artemis was already there, settled in at a table under an old Shiner Bock ad. As I sat down, my phone dinged. Though, as you know, I loathe technology and only have a smartphone for bare bones social reasons and in case of pet emergencies, I could not resist checking the email. It was from the Bucknether Art Competition! I’m a quarterfinalist! And in only three weeks they should announce the finalists! I was so excited I blurted out the news to Artemis.

  She leapt up and gave me the hugest hug. “Oh my God, I’m so fucking excited for you!” she said. Then she looked flustered. “I’ll be right back.” She ducked out the front door. Everett, it was weird—she just left me—but I was getting sort of used to Artemis’s unpredictable nature. It was part of her charm. I went up to the bar and ordered a Lone Star, which I was halfway through when Artemis burst back through the door waving a bottle of champagne. She popped the cork and yelled, “Congratulations!”

  “You can’t bring that in here,” Lulah the bartender said. You probably know Lulah? She’s a tough lady in her fifties, the type who doesn’t put up with any shit. I held my breath.

  “Lulah, I’m toasting my friend,” Artemis said. “Have a glass on me.”

  And sure enough, Lulah set out three more pint glasses and Artemis poured her a half pint of champagne and then brought the bottle and the other glasses over to me. That’s when I saw the label on the bottle. Dom Pérignon Brut Rosé 1998. “Shit, Artemis, where’d you g
et that?”

  “At the liquor store just down Lake Austin Boulevard,” she said, gesturing in that direction. She poured us each some champagne, then took a swig off the bottle. “Delicious,” she said approvingly. “What was that Tom Robbins line about champagne? ‘I’m drinking stars, I’m drinking stars!’ ”

  I took a tentative sip. It tasted incredible. “How much did that bottle cost? Did you pay for it?”

  “Of course I paid for it. It was like three hundred bucks.”

  “Artemis!” I said, shocked. Her love language is clearly extravagant gift giving. Shit, maybe she really does have a trust fund or a sugar daddy.

  “My girl can’t drink swill the night she finds out she won the Bellwether Award.”

  “Bucknether. And I’m only a quarterfinalist.”

  “So far!” she said. “You did it. You motherfucking went for something. And it’s paying off. If that isn’t worth celebrating—” She drank again out of the bottle. “So, world conqueror, what’s up next for you?”

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I should press the issue of the champagne. I mean, did she fucking steal it? Or did she really spend $300 on it? I’m not even sure which would make me feel weirder. But she seemed really happy for me (and not like she was doing emotional labor pretending to be happy, but who knows?). So instead of pushing the champagne issue, I let myself be carried along on the wave of her enthusiasm. “Well, I have been thinking about this one project.”

  “Spill,” she demanded.

  “This champagne is so good.”

  “You’re coy as a virgin on prom night.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought my whole idea was just me being aggro and contrary, but I told Annie and she was all for it, which surprised me.”

  “Well, what the hell is it?” Artemis asked.

  So I told her about my ridiculous idea to protest Lululemon.

  “Genius!” Artemis said.