Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  She didn’t care who won the Roller Derby matches, and sensed the audience was there more out of bloodlust anyway. Indie-rock shows she couldn’t get into unless she already knew the songs, which she never did. Otherwise, it was just like being forced to listen to the entirety of someone else’s favorite album in a high school basement. She always ended up staring at the bobbing backs of other people’s heads, letting the fizz go out of her beer. If there was a surgical enhancement that would affix a look of permanent attentiveness to her face, Anna would seriously consider it.

  Brie, on the other hand, never seemed to have a problem enjoying anything. Her appraisal of any social occasion was inevitably expressed entirely in caps. Parties were unfailingly GREAT! Shows were always SOOOO FUN! The thing was—and Anna hated herself for feeling this way—fun things weren’t fun. Sooner or later, the necessary inconveniences always began to grate: the delays on the F train, the overpriced drinks, the wait at the door and then the beer line and then the line for the ladies’ room, the way you had to sit for the entirety of the show, or stand for the entirety of the show, and the obligation to keep passing the same careworn questions back and forth with the uninteresting person to your left or to your right, asking them where they were from and telling them where you were from, when hadn’t both of you ditched those godforsaken holes as soon as possible to move here? Inquiring as to what they “did” and explaining whatever it was you didn’t do. She was constantly being forced to agree something was awesome when that thing was at best mediocresome. In fact, she was convinced there was actually some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy afoot to recast mediocresome things as awesome. And that somehow Brie was part of this movement to enshrine mediocrity, a movement powered by ecstatic Flavorpill bulletins and overcaffeinated, PR-driven previews in some online hipster broadsheet. It was always someone else’s marketing that landed her in this club/café/shop/rink/piercing salon. Somewhere, someone’s neck was on the line. Someone was being paid to make sure asses filled seats. These people were hyping the shit out of everything out of pure self-interest, and the truth was that it was impossible to fill the quota of fun they promised, not without a flour sack of cocaine. Why is it that her favorite activities were never trumpeted? She had half a mind to go put up her own stupid flyers: Stay home and have a long circular conversation with a friend! Why not take a bath? Just sleep in! Sleeping is awesome! The hard sell was just meant to pry her away from what she really wanted to do, which was stay home and work on her laptop tan. And when did it become shameful? Why couldn’t she brag about the hours logged surfing the same way Brie bragged about the number of mai tais downed? Why was the breathy admission “I got sooooooooo wasted last night” a marker of stamina or derring-do at least worthy of a giggle, whereas the equivalent “I surfed until my eyes felt dry” earned her only a sad look, an awkward pause, or an invitation to someplace she didn’t want to go?

  The morning after these events, Brie would always get up early to google herself and read about the time she’d just had. There would be a guilty encounter at the kitchen table, where Anna would make excuses for having slipped away early. “I came back from the bathroom and couldn’t find you!” But it didn’t matter to Brie that Anna left early, what mattered was that Anna was a buzzkill for the brief time she was there. No, more like a buzz slaughter. So it had been months since Brie had asked her anywhere. Sometimes Anna wondered whether her antifun stance was really just the cold hand of agoraphobia on the back of her neck. Even worse, because of all her buzz slaughter, Anna feared that a subtle chill had descended over her relationship with Brie.

  When Anna first began her life-coaching sessions with Leslie, Anna had announced she wanted to be more like her roommate. Leslie had, of course, pointed out the obvious: that Brie was ten years younger, a serial intern with no direction in life and named after a cheese. Leslie also couldn’t help but add that Anna had only found Brie on the Internet a year ago. It’s not like they’d grown up together, like she and Leslie had.

  “Yeah, but I like the way she can do things unironically, just because she feels like doing them. Just because she enjoys them,” Anna had said.

  It was true. Brie once wore Lee Press-On Nails for a month, unironically. Not in a showy, making-fun-of-the-proletariat-while-pretending-to-be-them kind of way, just in a wouldn’t-it-be-fun-if-my-nails-looked-like-giant-Tic-Tacs? kind of way. She had a lightness to her, Brie did. She never seemed to overthink things. And her pixieish attitude served to insulate her, keep her strangely unreachable. Everyone always shaped themselves around Brie, her random whims and verdicts, not vice versa. Everyone including Anna, even though she hated herself for it. Even now, Anna fought the urge to take back what she’d just said and agree to go see the horrible-sounding indie-rock band—to burst out and apologize to Brie for all her prior social failures as well. Realistically, though, she knew that she would never do any such thing, because she and Brie didn’t talk, not really. Brie made sure their conversations only skimmed the surface of things, like the animated ball bouncing over the lyrics on a karaoke screen.

  There was a sudden muffled thud from the living room.

  “Fuck,” Brie yelled. “Anna, when are you going to move this crap away from the door?”

  “Sorry!”

  The door slammed shut. She kept forgetting about the AVCCAM box, but it would have to wait another day—now she needed to figure out what to wear for lunch with her mother.

  11

  Once a month, her mother came down to the city from Connecticut to shop at Century 21 and have lunch with Anna. She always stayed uptown with her friend Margaret, a woman who shared her interest in energy drinks and hangar-size department stores. Today her mother had suggested they meet at a French restaurant in midtown, even though she knew Anna was a vegetarian. This, Anna assumed, was her mother’s subtle way of inducing her to eat salad. Still, the right choice of outfit could help Anna negotiate even these treacherous channels. Her mother had always been the kind of woman who looks at a person’s shoes before their face. More than once, the scrutiny of a choice scarf snagged at Barney’s once-a-year warehouse sale had saved her from closer inspection of the bulk that lay just below.

  The A train was delayed, of course, so Anna had to hump across the avenues, estimating the ratio of blocks to minutes as she ran—that depressing New York calculus of lateness. Billboards of angular women dangling from uncomfortable furniture or angular women sucking inexplicably on jewelry or men with scalloped cheeks laughing explosively into their TAG Heuer watches flashed by. She looked up at the skyscrapers, thought of tycoons vomiting billions into one another’s mouths overhead. When she finally arrived at La Petite Folie, she found her mother already seated.

  “Anna,” her mother said, smiling as much as her taut forehead would allow. Anna kissed her cheek. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Anna said.

  “It’s OK if you don’t want to tell me.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, you weren’t fine last time.”

  “That’s because I wasn’t fine last time.”

  “So you found a new job?”

  “No.”

  “How is that fine?”

  “Would you like it better if I said I wasn’t fine?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then I’m fine.” Anna was almost out of patience and she hadn’t yet sat down. “Did you already order something?” she asked.

  “Just a water,” her mother said, relenting.

  Things, Anna thought as she inserted herself between chair and tablecloth, were already off to a brilliant start. She opened up the menu and found a parenthetical calorie count inserted next to every appetizer and entrée. Flipping it over, she noticed another section subtitled in red: “Meals Under Six Hundred.”

  “I’ll have the Niçoise,” Anna said to the waitress who materialized, sensei-like, as soon as the menu hit the table.

  “Two,” her mother said.

  “So…,” Ann
a said, bracing herself for the sinking prospects for their conversation.

  “You don’t have to say anything; your face is very expressive.” Her mother pulled a pack of Capri cigarettes out of her purse and laid them on the table. “But I’ll be gone tomorrow. And would it kill you to wear some makeup?”

  “How was Century 21?” Anna had long ago adopted the anticonversational strategy of ignoring most of what her mother said.

  “I haven’t gone yet.”

  For the past eighteen years, Anna’s mother had worked as an admissions officer at a community college outside the small town in Connecticut where Anna had grown up. Now that she was retired, she sold clothes on eBay.

  “Mostly I came to see you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I’m concerned.”

  “Oh.”

  If there was one thing Anna hated, it was her mother’s concern. That free-floating cloud of anxiety waiting to be ionized by the misery of others. If not Anna’s misery, then the misery of people she barely knew. Better still, the misery of unknown, unseen relatives of barely known people. Denis Dystck’s son went back into rehab for the third time, Anna’s mother would announce with relish. Eva Rohneson’s baby was diagnosed with nonketotic hyperglycinemia and will spend the rest of his life in a diaper. Valerie Omarshadian found her husband making out with their babysitter at a stoplight outside Starbucks. Mr. Kim’s anal tumor? Malignant. So terrible. Can you believe it? This is how their lunches usually went, with her mother recounting a litany of horrors, eyes glistening with synthetic sympathy.

  But just at that moment, and to Anna’s great relief, their salads arrived and her mother was distracted by the lack of Dijon mustard, which she had ordered on the side. The ensuing argument with the waitress gave Anna a rare chance to examine her mother’s face unobserved. She tallied up the latest damage. Her mother had had her first face-lift back in the eighties—the horse-and-buggy era of plastic surgery—and the scars from those two incisions still stood out clearly just below her earlobes. Back then Anna had remembered dismissing it as a symptom of being bored and living in Connecticut. The “vacations” to Antigua started only after Anna finished college. After that, her features kept moving steadily north as though someone had selected them in Photoshop and repositioned them with a mouse. First, her eyes were pinned higher on her forehead. Then her cheekbones seemed to grow closer to the tops of her ears. Her nose tilted skyward. Was this the hidden key to beauty? Eyes, nose, cheeks, all racing toward the hairline? Anna felt sure she’d had other work done, too—down there—but she never asked her mother that for the simple reason that she and her mother had never discussed any of her surgeries. Not once. Not even the Botox treatments that were sometimes so fresh her face looked like it had been raped by bees. Of course, why should Anna bring it up when it served her better to say nothing? The undiscussed surgeries lay like a weapon on the table before them. Her mother knew, despite the jabs about Anna’s weight and the pointed comments about her unemployment, that as someone who wandered the plasticized wilderness somewhere between Joan Rivers and Michael Jackson, she should go only so far.

  “What?” her mother said, and Anna realized she’d caught her staring.

  “Nothing.” Then quickly, “No, something.” Because suddenly, she didn’t want it to be this way. What was it Leslie had said? Act the way you want to be.

  “Mom, what was your dream?”

  “Last night? I don’t usually dream, Anna.” Her mother raised her twin black arches, charcoal gravestones marking where her eyebrows had been. “Only if I eat chocolate at night, which you know I never do.”

  Anna pushed aside thoughts about the respective speeds at which they were eating their Niçoise. “No, when you were young. Your dream.”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  For a moment, Anna felt sure her mother would wave her away with one of her passive-aggressive bons mot: Save your breath and chew more slowly—you’ll feel fuller afterward. But that’s not what her mother said.

  “I wanted to run a funeral home,” she said. And then she laughed, surprised by her own words. “Sounds funny, doesn’t it?”

  “Why?” It was the least likely thing she’d heard her mother say today. Possibly ever.

  “There was a funeral home and it was on my way home from school, and every day these expensive cars would pull up. Mercedes, limos, Cadillacs. Always black. There were hearses, too, but to me they were just fancy cars. The women would stand outside, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk in long dresses, hats. To me it looked glamorous, like a dinner party. But we didn’t have a lot of money back then, and I was just a stupid kid,” her mother said. She chewed her salad, then added, “Well, you asked.”

  “Weren’t they crying?”

  “From a distance, crying looks like laughing.”

  Anna could see that.

  “Then I grew up and figured out what the place was. Can you imagine?” Her mother gave a bark-like laugh. “I bet the fumes would take the paint right off your nails.”

  “Well, what was your dream after that?”

  “After that? I don’t know. To work in college admissions, I guess. To marry your father.” She poked her olives. “Of course, that’s before I knew what was what. I might have been better off with the funeral home. Have you heard from him, by the way?”

  “Dad?”

  “Since last time?”

  “Not since last time.” Anna’s father had last called her a year ago from Thailand. Her phone rang at 3:30 in the morning and they talked for fifteen minutes on a crackling line, mostly about her father’s business investments. Something about exporting souvenirs made from coconut shells and the exchange value of the baht—she hadn’t understood a thing. How was it that even such a hallmark domestic tragedy, her father leaving her mother, had insinuated itself into their lives so uneventfully? His business trips had grown ever longer and more frequent until one day he’d simply eroded into nonexistence. No papers filed, no divorce. It sounded bizarre when Anna explained her father’s absence to others, but back home it was treated as just another stale fact, like the square footage of the garage.

  “Anyway,” Anna’s mother said, exhaling heavily. “I sent you an e-mail a while back and you didn’t write back.”

  “What e-mail?” Anna said, knowing exactly what e-mail that must be.

  Without a word, her mother took a brochure out of her purse and slid it across the table toward Anna. It was a brochure for the Aveda Hair Institute.

  “Mom—”

  “I’ll pay for it. Tuition. Books. Hair-cutting utensils or whatever. Twenty thousand dollars, Anna.”

  “It’s—”

  “Eight months. Then you take your test, get certified. Voilà!”

  “But I don’t want to cut hair.”

  “Maybe it isn’t what you planned to do in life. I know we all have these pictures of ourselves, these ‘dreams,’ but Anna, it’s time to grow up. Take a look around.” Her mother took a dramatic look around. “Everybody has hair. Everybody needs a hairdresser.”

  “Everybody needs an undertaker, too,” Anna said.

  “You see an undertaker once, when you’re dead, but hair keeps growing. Even after you’re dead.” Her mother moved the egg from the top of her salad to the side of her plate as if it were a cancerous cyst. “This Brie person still doesn’t have a job yet either, does she?”

  The chance for communion, Anna realized, was slipping away. Without thinking, she suddenly blurted, “I met someone.”

  Her mother’s hand froze on its way to pick the remaining potato wedges from her salad. “Another one from the Internet.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” Anna said. It was technically true, depending on your definition of met. Hadn’t they first met in fleshy person, at Halal Wireless Café?

  “Oh, Anna. I don’t know…”

  “What don’t you know? I haven’t told you anything!”

 
; “But I know you.”

  “So?”

  “So I worry.”

  “Stop worrying. Please. Just stop.”

  “Instead of looking for a job, you’re looking for men on the Internet.”

  “He’s not from the Internet.”

  “What about that one from Delaware?”

  “That was five years ago. Why do you have to keep bringing it up?”

  “Because he had two kids.”

  “I know that.”

  “He’s a total stranger, Anna. You don’t know him.”

  “Everyone’s a stranger until you know them!” Anna practically yelled.

  And even her mother couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so she changed the subject.

  “How much of Clara’s money have you got left?”

  “A lot.”

  “How much?”

  “Mom—”

  Her mother gave a loud exhale. “I worked in admissions for eighteen years, Anna, and believe it or not, I know a thing or two about things. You have a gap in your résumé right now and you’re not filling it with anything. At least not anything you could explain to a potential employer. Your gap is growing. I want you to think about that. And think about this,” she added, tapping the brochure significantly. As her mother stared at her, tapping, Anna couldn’t help but wonder about the relative rates at which her gap and her hair were growing.

  Suddenly it was clear this little speech had used up what little self-control her mother had left. A “fuck it” look crossed her face as she grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. The waitress was upon them in an instant.