by Jana Casale
On a rare occasion she would take a bath instead. Taking a bath was a promise that she’d make, usually in simultaneous acceptance of misery. I missed the train and will be late, and they will be mad at me, but later I will take a bath so I can float on their anger.
During her final exams she made such a promise to herself when she had accepted the reality that the next three weeks she would be stuck in her apartment studying. The tub filled as she undressed. Standing in front of the mirror, she ran her hand over the curve of her rib cage, then her waist. She thought she looked very linear and that her breasts looked lovely also. The mirror fogged, softening her poses. She leaned over the bath, the water so clear it was almost not clear at all. She dropped her hand in and let it sink into the stark heat and thought to add bubbles. Deftly she pulled her arm out of the water and held it, letting the water drip as she reached for the bottle at the corner of the tub. It was empty. She placed it back in its spot to continue its reign as the-empty-bottle-in-the-corner-of-the-tub. The bottle sat there for two more months until a Saturday at four o’clock when she was arrested by a whim to do an intensive cleaning of the apartment. The sun was going down as she scrubbed away an ingrained Cheerio on the kitchen floor and thought of what her future children would look like. She threw out everything that had been inexplicably saved in a fluttered moment of grasping the transient nature of life. Reorganizing the bookshelf, she put the Noam Chomsky on a higher shelf between Willa Cather and Proust. The Willa Cather she had read, the Proust she had read half of. She stopped cleaning when she realized she couldn’t wash the window by her bed. It was muddied from the outside, and given the building height there’d be virtually no way to clean it by herself. She thought of ladders and spent the rest of the evening watching TV. Her intentions of organizing her closet went unfulfilled.
She put her hair up to avoid getting it wet and to admire herself in the mirror as she pulled it into a bun. I look best with my arms raised, she thought, but there are so few situations in which to raise them. She sunk into the bath. The sound of the water enveloping her parted the silence of the room. There was her, and her body in the water, and stillness, and her neck against the back of the tub. She looked up at the skylight above the shower. It was remarkably clear despite the steam. The sky looked like early afternoon sky, but she figured it must be around three by now. She lifted her hands out of the water. They looked small and childlike. In so many years they’d hardly changed. She remembered herself at ten in a vain attempt at taking violin lessons. Her fingertips would get raw as she pressed down the strings to make F, F-sharp, and G, or something like that. The instructor told her she had soft hands and said that if she practiced more she would build up calluses on her fingers and the strings wouldn’t hurt her as much. That night she lay in bed, her bird lantern spinning inverse silhouettes of robins and blue jays over her bureau, then closet, then toy chest. She thought of her fingers growing raw as she vigorously mastered “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She pinched her hands to her palms and fell asleep. Two months later she quit violin.
Soon after, her violin made its way casually from the corner of her bedroom, to the closet, to the attic. She didn’t think of it much, but her mother mentioned it from time to time during conversations about “things Leda had been great at.”
Her first year of college she decided to move from the dorms to a studio apartment that was “so cute” and “so full of light.” The place needed bookshelves, so she made the decision to sell her violin. She did not hesitate on the decision, not even as she climbed the small, ill-proportioned stairs leading to the attic in her childhood home, not even as she moved her old dollhouse it sat behind, not even as she carried it to the pawnshop.
The pawnshop smelled like eggs and the man who worked there spoke with a burly voice and didn’t have soft hands. Her violin was in his hard hands that already had calluses but not from violin.
Walking back from the shop, she imagined her little violin, the relic of her fourth-grade musical ambitions, displayed beside other relics of past lives. Her arms felt unburdened as she walked caselessly to the train station. Violin cases are heavy and they knock your knees, she thought. She had gloves on so she didn’t think of how soft her hands were, but she may have thought it if she didn’t have gloves on. She wouldn’t have had gloves if it hadn’t been so cold and hadn’t been winter. She may have thought many things if it had been spring. As she reached the train station, she motioned the few notes she could remember on her wrist. She was deliberate in her spacing, mimicking the ambitious fingering she categorized in her mind as professional violin playing F-sharp C-flat, F-sharp C-flat, F-sharp C-flat. As she boarded the train she thought, This is the last time of this in my life and this is never going to be this way again because this is over. The bookshelves she bought were auburn.
Leda lifted her knees out of the bath. She held them as still as possible until they looked like they were floating. My violin is out somewhere with someone, and it is not mine, she thought. She imagined it sitting there with the pawnshop man, getting dusty as he spoke in his burly voice and wrote receipts with his calluses. She got out of the bath. Her hands were pruned and she was clean. It felt good even though she was dizzy from the steam.
CHAPTER 8
Lunch with Elle
Leda sat casually so that once her friend Elle got there she would think, look-at-Leda-my-casual-friend-who-sits-so-casually. This was not something she knew or understood; rather it was embedded in the posturing she associated with waiting for someone. She wanted to look impossibly relaxed so she kept fixing her hair and taking small sips of water. It was the only way to be sure that she looked prettiest and was hydrated. When Elle gets here I will tell her about that guy who talks to me at the bagel place and offered me a parfait. Elle will laugh, she thought, and fixed her hair again.
Elle was the kind of girl who looked like a paper doll. This was mostly due to her adept mannerisms, and the clothes she wore, which emphasized how unimaginably small her frame was. People would say things to Elle like: “Look how skinny your thighs are! Your thighs are like my arms.” Elle would disregard these comments by saying: “I love cheeseburgers!” As Elle walked into the restaurant Leda thought, I wish I was more linear like Elle, but I’m glad my breasts are bigger than hers.
“I am so sorry that I’m late. Have you ordered? Cute purse, by the way.” The girls embraced before Elle sat down.
“Oh, thank you! And seriously, don’t even worry about it, I just got here. You look great.”
“Do I? I feel like I haven’t slept in days.”
“You really do.” She did, exceptionally put-together, as if someone had simply folded the perfect outfit over her.
“So before we get into anything else. I have some news,” Elle said.
“What?” Leda imagined that the news was in connection to a pair of shoes Elle had sent her six pictures of over the last week and a half.
“I got an internship with a publishing house!”
“Oh my god. Are you serious? That’s fantastic!”
“I know. I’m so excited.”
“What publishing house?”
“It’s called Besting Publishing. They publish neuroscience textbooks that are marketed to universities in Honduras.”
“That sounds great!”
“I know, that doesn’t sound that interesting, right? But it’s a good start, and I mean, it’s hard to get any of these types of internships because so many people apply, and there are usually only like three spots.” Elle took a drink of water and looked around the restaurant nervously.
She thinks I don’t think this is a big deal. She’s worried it’s not important, Leda thought. “This is a really big deal. It’ll be really important.”
Elle smiled. “Thanks. I think publishing is the place for me. I mean, it has to do with what I love, books, and on top of that there are a lot of good-paying jobs if you can wo
rk your way in. You have to network is the thing. The thing is to network. Have you ever had the Cobb salad here? It’s so good.”
Leda looked down at the silverware she had prematurely unwrapped from her napkin before Elle arrived. She had attempted to put the fork and knife back into the napkin, but it looked too messy so she just separated them.
“I haven’t.”
“We’ll have to order it…unless you were thinking something else?”
Leda was planning on ordering the grilled cheese and tomato with French fries. Salad for lunch was a distant notion she associated with mortgages and weddings. Elle ate salad now. Last week they’d had lunch, and she ordered some kind of steak dish with cheese melted on it.
“No, I’d love to try it!” Leda said. She was not about to eat fried food in front of paper Elle.
The waitress came over and Elle ordered with fast control. Her voice clicking on words like iced tea and dressing on the side. Leda thought of how best to order. It was a thin thought sequestered between futile motions of public consciousness. She came to the conclusion to use the word just a lot and to flutter her hands.
“I’ll just have the Cobb salad too. And just water is fine,” she said, fluttering her hands.
The waitress nodded. Just had been successful.
“So what’s new with you, Led? Any news?”
Leda thought about the boy and the parfait, but she figured she should wait with that anecdote now that Elle had such big news.
“Nothing, really…You remember that story I sent to that literary journal? I got a letter from the editor, and she said even though this story isn’t right for them, she really liked my writing and would love it if I sent something else.”
“That’s awesome!”
“Thanks, yeah. I was excited about it. Are you taking Pam’s class next semester?”
“No.” Elle sat up very straight. Her torso looked like a washboard. “I think I’m going to focus more on publishing from now on.”
“I hope you keep writing, though. I always really liked your stories.” She thought back to a story Elle had written about a woman who sold combs.
“Yeah, I mean, I will. It’s just, as far as things go professionally, it’s time for the fantasy to end, you know? I mean, it’s all well and good to keep writing, but I also want to set realistic goals.” Elle smiled.
“Yeah, I get that.” Leda recognized the familiar wave of cruelty and cattiness that lingered in the comment, a rich but common display of the unabashed hatred and simultaneous press for superiority any woman could feel for another woman at any given moment.
“I guess I’ve always figured the fantasy is supposed to last at least through college,” she said. She knew her response was bitchy, but that bitchiness was survival in a friendship like this one.
Elle did a sort of sideways nod and looked out the window. “I guess I don’t really know what I want,” she said.
She seemed sad, and that sadness surprised Leda, in at least as much as here it was right in front of her. She felt like for a moment she could see it all: small, paper Elle in her oversized clothes waiting for Cobb salad. It wasn’t fair to let the vulnerability of her friend stay open like that.
“There’s this boy who keeps talking to me at a bagel place, and he gave me a free parfait.”
“Are you serious?” Elle lit up at the endless potential of talk of an anonymous boy. The girls theorized as they picked at their salads over what the best way was to approach the situation so that she and parfait-bagel-guy would marry. They came to the conclusion that the next time Leda came in for a bagel she should say, “That parfait you gave me was delicious.” The plan was seamless through the glow of easy lunchtime conversation.
On the way out of the restaurant they decided to go for coffee at the same café Leda often frequented. As they sat down, she felt a calm fall over her through the familiarity of the place. The smell was warm and sharp. It was loud in the usual way. Elle ordered a complicated coffee. She got tea.
“The thing is, I’d like to cut my hair shorter,” Elle said.
“How short?”
“Like a bob or something,” she said, touching her hair.
“I think that would be pretty.”
The girls walked out together talking about Elle’s internship. She appeared very sure of herself, as was evidenced in the way she carried her shopping bags and how she clicked on words like opportunity and branding.
“I can’t wait to be working,” she said.
“Oh, is it paid?”
Elle shifted the shopping bags. “No, but it’s like a job.”
Leda nodded, figuring “like a job” meant something for a twenty-year-old or at least for Elle. I hope I never have to have “like a job,” she thought. She looked down at her purse. Here is my purse, which is a purse, and here is Elle, who is like an adult. She is almost an adult but less so than my purse is a purse.
Leda noticed Elle limped a little as they stepped off the curb to cross the street. “You’re limping. Did you hurt yourself?”
“I rolled my ankle while pretending to be a ballerina in my room,” Elle said.
The girls said their goodbyes on the corner. Elle walked off limping a little, with handfuls of shopping bags around her emphasizing the smallness of her frame. Leda imagined Elle in her bedroom holding on to internship as she danced to Cobb salad and bobbed hair. She looks so linear, thought Leda, like she could just blow away.
CHAPTER 9
Joining a Gym
For breakfast she’d meant to have a yogurt but decided she didn’t feel like a yogurt, and why would I ever want to eat a yogurt anyway when I can have a jelly donut? she thought as she passed the donut shop on her way to school. It was so lovely: the silent indulgence, the sweet jelly, the gleeful $2.57 with tax.
The day felt as if it had started off right. In class she offered to read out loud, and when someone asked who Derrida was she had the answer at the ready. Afterward she walked down the hall and smiled at a boy she’d once talked to. He didn’t notice her, but she didn’t care. In that moment she even thought maybe she’d have another jelly donut on her way home. Maybe I’ll get two. As she turned the corner it all fell away—the donuts, the linearity, the boy and his faultlessness; she caught a glimpse of her jumbled reflection in the window by the elevator, and it was awful. She was disgusting. She was fat. She was shaped like a teardrop, a hunched teardrop walking around and smiling at people and living her life like she deserved a place on this earth. Who in the hell do I think I am? she thought, and she fixed her shirt and sucked in her stomach and walked past that reflection as fast as she could, as fast as any teardrop could have managed.
That night she sat down and looked up gyms online for nearly two hours. She found one by her apartment that was rated highly on Yelp, apart from one girl who complained that “the bathroom is filthy” and included a picture of a crumpled-up piece of toilet paper beside the sink. Despite the toilet paper, Leda decided to e-mail and ask what their rates were. A guy named J.C. got back in touch with her nearly immediately and tried to pressure her into signing up for a personal trainer. “Do you have any idea about the potential of your body?” he wrote. “No,” she responded, “but I’m just looking to do the elliptical for right now.” He scheduled an appointment with her, and two days later she was walking herself past the donut shop to the gym.
J.C. turned out to be gay, and it may have been for this reason that she signed up. Maybe if he had been a straight guy, the judgmental straight guy in her mind who’d kick her out of bed and make her feel bad about her hip bones, she may not have wanted to pay $49.95 a month. J.C. was kind, and he talked about his boyfriend. He didn’t care about her hip bones and that was refreshing.
Her first day at the gym she felt vaguely motivated and completely out of place. She walked in wearing the new workout clothes that she’d frantically s
hopped for all weekend. She tried to seem as together as possible. Am I meant to take a towel along with me? What are all these little towels for, anyway? She made her way from the locker room through the weight machines, all of which were being used by men. She walked past machine upon machine, each with an angry-looking man of varying size, lifting and squeezing and bending and pulling. Where are all the women? she wondered, and then she saw them. They were all together in a group at the back wall of the gym using the cardio equipment, running, stepping, pedaling away to a more linear reality. She climbed onto one of the few empty stationary bikes and started to pedal slowly. The girl to her right was wearing earphones and was watching a Real Housewives episode as she pedaled at a calm, rhythmic pace. The woman to her left wasn’t watching The Real Housewives, or anything, for that matter. She was pedaling as hard as she could. The display on her machine said she’d already burned 467 calories. She was drenched with sweat and looked tired and unapologetic. Which one am I? Leda thought as she pedaled harder than the rhythmic girl but less hard than the unapologetic woman.
As she did this she thought about school and about the summer ahead. What she wanted and where she’d be. On occasion she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke from the open window. On occasion she felt melancholy about the potential of having to come back to the gym tomorrow. After about fifteen minutes of rhythmic, fast pedaling, she felt tired and less worried about being a teardrop than she had the day she’d eaten the jelly donut. She got off the bike and felt the pull in her hamstring with each step, a physical reminder of her desperation. As she walked past all the men and their weights, she looked back at the women running and biking and stepping. Keep running, ladies, she thought. You’ll never get away.
