Once I Was Cool

by Megan Stielstra

  Contessa lit a Kool. “Ah,” she said. “You have problem.”

  Nancy’s puffy eyes widened. “I do have problem!”

  Of course you have problem! I wanted to yell, but instead sat back and watched as Nancy crumbled into a lawn chair, dropped a twenty on the folding table, and spent the next half hour feeding this Orc of a woman all the information necessary to guess her whole life story.

  “I miss him so much!”

  “Ah, there is man.”

  “There is man!”

  “And this man…he has left?”

  “He has left!”

  “There is other woman?”

  There is seven other woman, I thought.

  This went on for a long time. Contessa chain-smoked. She excused herself twice to answer the phone. She dealt a tarot deck like a Vegas blackjack dealer. Yet somehow, in the end, she made my friend feel better.

  “I don’t know how to thank you!” Nancy gushed, reaching into her free-trade purse for more cash. That’s when Contessa lit another Kool and pointed at me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You come,” she said.

  “Hell no,” I said.

  Looking back on it now, I wonder if she did have some kind of psychic gift, because she leaned back in her chair and said the one thing in the greater Universe that could’ve made me stay: “I see. You are afraid.”

  Had someone told Winona Ryder from Heathers that she was afraid, she’d have made them drink Draino. Afraid? Me? No way/no how! I sat down in the lawn chair, took a Kool out of that pack, and used her Zippo to light it. I was going to say, “Bring it on, Contessa,” but since I’d never smoked before, I just concentrated on not coughing.

  She looked at my palms and gave me the usual: Strong willed, travel far, give the world great things. It was textbook-predictable. Just when I thought she'd bust out the There is great curse on your family. Come back with thousand dollar and I lift it with innards of goat, she switched to tarot cards. That's when things got weird.

  She spread five out in front of me—cups, I think? Wands? Knight of Something I don’t remember?—and she stared at them for a really, really long time.

  Then she said, “Oh.”

  It’s the single syllables that’ll kill you: Your dentist says Oops. Your pregnancy test says plus. Your psychic says Oh.

  “It could be nothing,” she said.

  But I looked at her face and knew it was something. I thought of Winona Ryder from Heathers. She wouldn’t just sit there. She’d grab a switchblade out of her Doc Marten and slam it through this woman’s hand. Then she’d say something very witty and obscene involving household appliances and get the hell out of there, down to the sidewalk and back into the world where free will reigned and fate didn’t reside in some fifty-cent novelty store crystal. Stand up, I told myself. Stand up and get out of here. You don’t even believe in this stuff! You don’t believe in any stuff!—but the thing is?

  Suddenly, I sorta did.

  I imagined all the things that could be behind that Oh. Maybe I’d die tomorrow, maybe I’d kill someone tomorrow, maybe everyone would be killed tomorrow over something I said or did or thought. “Tell me,” I said to Contessa, and it wasn’t me being tough.

  It was me being scared.

  I don’t remember exactly how she said it—something about my middle or my insides or my “lady parts”—but she did use the word broken. She said, “You are broken.”

  And for over a decade, I believed her.

  I never told that to anyone, of course. I was an Atheist! Plus, how stupid would I have sounded, letting some storefront psychic get under my skin? So instead, I’d ignore the panicky feeling I’d have whenever I got a yearly check-up, or held a friends’ new baby, or whispered with my husband about our Far Off In The Future Children. In fact, the first time I ever admitted my fears out loud was at a storytelling performance I gave at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I was eight months pregnant at the time—cranky, swollen, and ready to kill for a pee that lasted longer than ten seconds—but safe from the possibility of Contessa’s prediction. The gallery where I performed was wallpapered with eyeballs—these giant Andy Warhol pop art-looking things that made the audience feel like a thousand instead of a hundred. I stood at the microphone and told them about that crackhouse storefront, about Contessa with her frizzy hair and Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Obviously she was a fraud because look at how pregnant I am! I’m so totally pregnant! Nothing broken here, thank you very much! The crowd laughed, and I pushed harder: It’s not just Contessa, I said, it’s all that mystical, magical hooha horseshit, power of the Universe, my ass!—God? I don’t see any God! It was like those movies where the ship is out in the middle of the ocean and there’s some insane storm—thunder, lightning, waves crushing the deck to splinters—and in the middle of it all, the ship’s captain hangs on the shredded sail, shaking his fist at the sky and telling God where to get off. That was me in the MCA: big ol’ stomach, wall-to-wall eyeballs, yelling my head off at someone I didn’t believe in.

  A few weeks later, my son was born, and that—that—is when I should have believed. I built a human being from scratch. He was healthy, and awesome, and hungry. It wasn’t possible for me to fully reflect on a possible spiritual awakening brought on by the miracle of giving birth! I was a 24-hour bottomless buffet! There wasn’t room for thinking. I fed my kid. I slept. On a good day, I made the bed. I went to the store, the pediatrician, and—six weeks after he was born—my own doctor for a routine post-partum check-up. We did the usual: stirrups, paper robe, How you feeling, Feeling okay. She took some X-rays—“Normal procedure,” she’d said, “Just checking things out.” Then, she asked if we could talk in her office. I remember it was nondescript, sterile even—no art or personal photos, like she never spent time there. We sat on opposite sides of the desk. She had my X-rays spread out before her. She stared at them for a really, really long time.

  Then she said, “Oh.”

  She told me that my ovary was the size of a cherry tomato. And a cell the size of a grain of rice had grown into a tumor the size of a tangerine.

  When I look down the line of my life, there are all these moments—my parents splitting up, my first heartbreak, losing a job I loved—and I cried or panicked or locked myself in a room playing Smiths albums on repeat, whatever; I felt something. But when that doctor told me I had a tumor? Nothing. I felt nothing. Not in that doctor’s office. Not telling my husband later that night. Not walking into surgery the following week. Nothing—right up until I opened my eyes and my doctor said she’d got it; everything was fine. One day, you’re already dead; the next day, you’re back at the office. I cried and thanked her and drank my juice. After all of that, she said, “You’re lucky you got pregnant. If it hadn’t been for the ultrasound, we might not have caught it in time.”

  In that moment, I knew exactly what I felt.

  Something.

  It was so close. Like when I’m on my dad’s fishing boat in the Pacific, out there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by blue, and can’t tell when the sky begins and the water ends. It is vast. It is still. It is—

  Something.

  Or: for years, I lived in Humboldt Park, west at North and Kimball, and a few blocks from my apartment was this church. It was really small, not more than a storefront, but the singing that came out of that place was like nothing I’d ever heard. Every Sunday I’d get coffee at Dunkin Donuts and sit on the curb outside that church. I never went in—there are a lot of things that happen inside of a church that I know are not for me—but sitting outside? I could have the parts that felt like—

  Something.

  Or: my son is three years old now. He is awesome. He thinks he’s Superman, which sounds very cute, except we live on the third floor and he keeps trying to fly. Last week he stood at our balcony door in his red and blue costume, nose pressed to the glass, and said, “Mommy, let me out. I’ll put my arms ou
t far; I’ll go high up in the sky.” And of course, what I did then was check that lock, but what I realized is this: our children save us. They illuminate what’s been there all along. They make us better than we ever thought we could be. My son really is Superman. Without him, I’d have never had an ultrasound. Without him, the tangerine could have grown into a grapefruit. Without him, I might not be sitting here today, and for that, I will believe. Call it God, if you like. Call it The Divine. Call it Not Atheist.

  I call it a start.

  A THIRD OF YOUR LIFE

  PEOPLE THROW THE WORD “CRAZY” AROUND A LOT—those kids are crazy! What are you, crazy? I’m going crazy—but I know what crazy really means because of this guy Eddie. He lives above the breakfast place where I work, and every day he comes downstairs to eat. He’s a big dude with a shaved head, moustache, and he only wears cut-off jean shorts and knee-high suede moccasins with fringe; that's all, so you can really see his whole nine yards: hairy back, flabby front. And he sweats a lot—appetizing? Not so much. My boss, Josh, gave him the whole no shoes no shirt no service song and dance, so Eddie went out and got a suede fringed vest that matched the moccasins. I figure he must freeze in the winter and now, one of those awful Chicago Julys, he’s got to be dying under all that animal skin. But it isn’t my place to ask. What I can ask is, "You want some coffee, Eddie?"

  "Absolutely not," he always says. “I don't condone that sort of behavior." Then he goes on to explain what caffeine can do if you mix it with other chemicals—Lithium or Prozac or Wellbutrin or Lexapro or Celexa, 'cause those are the ones he’s on.

  "Okay, then," I say, and get him juice instead, followed by a red pepper benedict, the Garden section of the Trib, and two crossword puzzles. After that he gets up, lays down a twenty, and goes to work at the Sealy Posturepedic warehouse, driving pillows around in a great big truck.

  "How's your mattress, Megan?" he asks me, very seriously.

  "It's fine," I say, 'cause what else do you say?

  "Gotta be," he says. "You spend a third of your life on your mattress."

  I don't know if he realizes that we’ve had this same conversation, right down to the sentence structure, for nearly a year; that because of him I can define such terms as Depressive Pseudodementia and Psychomotor Retardation with medical exactitude. It’s actually helpful, this front row seat to crazy, ‘cause lately I’ve been thinking I might be going crazy myself.

  Every morning, I get to the restaurant at 6 a.m. I walk from table to table, putting napkins down at every right corner. Then I take the same walk, putting spoons on the right side of every napkin. Then, around again with knives, and then—then—the forks. Napkin, spoon, knife, fork; napkin, spoon, knife, fork; and I've been working here for, what, five years now? I never was very good at math, but that's a lot of forks, right? Right? So what would happen if I switched it up a bit? Maybe go napkin, fork, knife, spoon; or knife, then fork; or maybe really let loose and put the forks on the right side of the napkin. Would the world start spinning backwards? Would the glaciers melt, meteors crash, or humanity find some common ground?—who knows! Not me! So last week, on Monday, I put down all forks. No knives or spoons, just three forks on every napkin. Then, on Tuesday, I didn't put down any forks at all, just all knives and spoons; on Wednesday, no spoons. So, maybe you're thinking This isn't very interesting, Megan, I've got better things to think about than cutlery—and I get it, I do—but it's important that you stick with me here 'cause this is how I lost my mind. For real. Not Oh I'm going crazy, like we say eight hundred times a day, but serious. Certifiable.

  "Uhm, Megan?" Molly asked after a few days of resetting the silverware I'd just set. She'd never dream of second-guessing me—she's only been working here a couple months, and I've been here five years; five years, waiting tables at the same exact place—five. "What are you doing?”

  "I don't know, Molly," I said. I turned around and faced her, her curly hair and careful smile and fistfuls of forks. "Maybe I'm going crazy."

  She laughed. "Totally," she said. "That happens to me all the time."

  I pointed a fork at her and said, "I'm serious. I might be seriously crazy."

  "You're seriously crazy," Andy said, when I suggested we go dancing. We'd just picked up some takeout from Penny's Noodles and were driving back to his place.

  "Let's go!" I said again, having that fun little fantasy where you've got a rose between your teeth and your boyfriend's in tight black pants with a magical, wonderful ass, dipping you low and dragging you slowly up his torso. "I saw a sign back there, let's try it!"

  He stopped at a red light and turned to face me. "I'm from Marquette Park," he said, as if the South Side was where this question would die. "Besides," he went on, "it's almost time for CSI."

  This is what we do, me and Andy. We get take-out food and go home at the end of a long day, mine at the restaurant and his at the ad firm. We snuggle up on the couch and drink beers and relax. He'll have one arm around me, and sometimes we'll make out. And if that gets heavy, we'll go into the bedroom for sex, after which he falls asleep fast 'cause he works all these hours. And that's when I lay there, listening to him breathe. It's something between breathing and snoring, actually, with a little bit of spit rolling in the back of his throat. Sometimes he whistles through his nose. I listen to this every night.

  Every night.

  Every night.

  Every night, and then the alarm goes off at five, and I'm at work by six, setting up the restaurant: napkin, spoon, knife, fork, creamers in the bowls. “What kind of toast would you like with that, sir?” In my hands are the coffee cups, and I imagine throwing them, or flinging plates like Frisbees; they’d smash against the wall right above the line of customers’ heads, and it would be so, so, so satisfying. But instead I say, “Would you like hash browns or side salad?” to the three-top at table seven and “Citrus vinaigrette or lemon tarragon?” to the lady on nineteen. And to Eddie, I say, "You want some coffee?"

  "I don't condone such behavior," he says, and this is our routine—red pepper benedicts, crossword puzzles, a third of your life on a mattress. And on we go, every day, Monday through Friday. Eddie never comes in on the weekends. On the weekends, it’s not breakfast, but brunch. Brunch in Chicago is an almost religious experience. The restaurant is packed, people wait over an hour for a table—it’s way too much for Eddie to handle.

  The day it happened was a Sunday, one of those awful 90 degree mornings where the humidity wraps over you like a blanket. All the customers waited inside for their tables, to be near the A/C, and me and Molly and the other girls could barely shove through the bodies. "Excuse me!" we said, carrying plates high over our heads. "Coming though! Look out, this stains!" I was behind the counter pouring mimosas when Eddie came in, all bare, hairy chest and dangly fringe. He looked shocked to see so many people here, in his place, interrupting his breakfast, his routine. I saw him talk to Josh by the front door. I couldn't hear them over all the people, but I figured Josh told him he'd have to wait.

  That wouldn’t go over very well.

  Eddie stood for a minute, oblivious to the stares he was getting 'cause of his clothes, then turned to the nearest customer—some dad with a comb-over and pleated pants. Don't, I thought, not knowing what he was doing but sure that he shouldn't as he grabbed the guy's arm and whispered something. The dad's eyes widened, and he backed up a couple steps into the lady behind him. A sort of domino-effect happened then—customers backing into busboys backing into waitresses, with Eddie moving forward through the mayhem, grabbing anyone who got in his way, whispering something to each of them. Eventually he made it to the counter—to me. His eyes were glazed, a thin layer of milk coating the iris, and I knew he wasn't seeing me as he wrapped one meaty fist around my elbow and tightened, his fingers pushing through my skin, hitting bone. And it hurt, it hurt, but I knew he wouldn't hear me if I said, "Let me go, Eddie," or "You want some coffee, Eddie?" or "Did you forget the Lexapro this mo
rning, Eddie?" He wouldn't hear my words 'cause he didn't hear his own, like somebody else was speaking through his mouth as he whispered, "If you don't get out of here, I'll take you outside and smash your head on the sidewalk. I'll hold it between my palms and pound it into the concrete.”

  When I think back on this, I don’t remember feeling scared. I remember feeling sad. He was so completely alone.

  In the end, Josh called the cops and Eddie was 86’d—couldn't come into the restaurant without an automatic arrest. I'd see him sometimes, driving the big 'ol Sealy truck packed with pillows, and he'd always ask how my mattress was.

  "Gotta be fine," he'd say. "You spend a third of your life on a mattress." I'd repeat those words at night—a third of your life, a third of your life—as I listened to Andy breathe the spit-sloggy in and outs, feeling my mattress below me, watching the ceiling above me, watching the clock: one o'clock, two o’clock, three. And by then, I was imagining all the things I could stick up Andy's nose: drinking straws, uncapped Sharpies, the corkscrew for wine.

  And one night, a month or so after Eddie went crazy, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. I opened the silverware drawer and took out the knives and forks and spoons, and then I opened the oven and stuck them all in. There was still a lot of space in there, so I got the dishes and put them in, too; and the pots and pans, and the blender, and the electric juicer; and everything on the spice rack. By then, there was too much stuff in the oven, so I took it all out and tried to put it back in a rational manner, like when you're packing for some big trip. You roll up the underwear and the socks and stuff them in your running shoes. You put the extra batteries in with your toiletries. You fold your flip flops into your sweaters—you make it fit. I would make it fit. Fit, goddammit! And suddenly, the overhead light came on, and there was Andy, standing over me.