Going in Circles

by Pamela Ribon

  “Yes, you do.”

  “But I hurt all the time.”

  “Yeah, welcome to roller derby. We all hurt all the time. Look, I can’t even extend this arm anymore because I jacked up my elbow so badly.” She extends both her arms, and indeed one is curled slightly at the joint, sending her forearm in the wrong direction.

  I shake my head, letting tears roll under my chin, down my neck.

  “Come on, you know it’s fun,” she continues. “You go fast, you hit hard, and you do something most people are way too chickenshit to do.”

  “Well, maybe those other people are the smart ones.”

  “They’re pussies. Open your hand.”

  She drops five Vicodin into my palm.

  “That’s just a starter pack,” she says. “But take them. Do yourself a favor.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No need to thank me. Put your booty on ice and rest. Call a doctor, but he’ll probably tell you the same. Just promise you’ll come back when you’re all better. And listen. Pastor will be back. Give her some time.”

  I must have looked shocked, because she laughed and added, “Oh, yeah. We all talk. You think we don’t know anything about you? We know everything.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Word on the street is people think you’re pretty cool. And if you want to know the truth, I already have kind of a girl-crush on you. Drive safely.” She turns around, her skates strung over her shoulder, banging against her back. As she walks away, I hear, “And I’m really sorry about your divorce. That sucks.”

  They may not know my name, but they know my secrets.

  After she’s gone it takes a few minutes for me to figure out that I can drive if I roll over onto my hip. I’m pretty much sitting sideways, but it works.

  After I get home, I leave Francesca a miserable message filled with self-pity, begging her to be my friend again. I tell her I don’t want to skate without her, and that I miss her more than she can imagine. I hang up and learn it hurts to do anything other than breathe.

  I may not have any more Lexapro to numb me from my body, but I have Bruisey-Q’s Vicodin. I pop one and shuffle over to the couch. When I can’t find a good way to watch the Fuck You Television on my stomach, I give up on this mistake of a day and fall asleep with an ice pack stuffed in my underwear.

  33.

  Here’s something you can’t do when your tailbone is broken: sneeze.

  Unfortunately, you also can’t not sneeze, because holding it back means your body sneezes internally, forcing you to take it through your spine. That sneeze will travel all the way to where your tailbone is currently a boiling hot welt of fury.

  One sneeze. Just one sneeze and you are done. It brings on such a massive, body-wide spasm of pain that everything else in the world stops. It’s like in cartoons when a guy gets his head smashed between two cymbals, and he rises into the air, a quivering mess. That’s what a sneeze does. You just sneeze and then cry.

  A broken tailbone never stops hurting. Before I had no idea just how much sitting I do in an average day. I’ve now missed three days of work because if I go anywhere near a bucket seat or a hardwood chair, I will start whimpering. I can’t drive, not just because it’s unsafe to drive on one hip, but because potholes and speed bumps are evil. I refuse to buy one of those doughnut hemorrhoid things, as I’m still clinging to some false sense of dignity, but I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve fashioned a fake doughnut out of a jacket or a few pillows just so I could sit down. About the only place to sit that doesn’t overwhelm me with pain is the toilet, and I find that to be the saddest fact in the world.

  Crueler still, it’s even harder to stand up. I find myself grabbing for anything I can use to yank myself upright. I can’t take a bath, I can’t sit on the floor to put on my socks, I can’t take a quick break to watch television. Sometimes I forget and drop to the couch, tucking my foot under me in the process, thinking, “Tra-la-la I’m normal,” only to immediately scream with regret.

  It hurts to sleep, it hurts to wake up, and it hurts to live. It hurts to put something down, move something over, or push something aside. It hurts to laugh. Not that I’m finding things to be all that funny these days.

  But really, more than anything, I cannot stress this enough: it hurts to sneeze.

  Having a broken tailbone takes over your thought process so that every decision boils down to whether or not the action you’re about to take will make you hurt worse.

  This is how I ended up saying yes to Matthew asking to meet me at a coffee shop. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked, so I’m guessing whatever it is he has to say at a place as ubiquitous yet ominous as a coffee shop is going to have some weight.

  But the thing is, anything he’s going to throw at me won’t make me hurt any worse than I already do.

  • • •

  There’s no way I’m going to be able to fake feeling completely healthy, so as I wince into my seat across from Matthew, I tell him the truth.

  “My tailbone’s broken,” I say.

  He shakes his head, confused. His hair has gotten longer, and he has sideburns that seem way more renegade and aloof than Matthew would normally allow for his appearance. Like at any minute he might decide to become a sheriff. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes. Because my tailbone is broken.”

  He’s crinkling his nose and tilting his head, his eyes so filled with concern they’re watery. I haven’t seen him look at me like that in so long. With compassion. Right there, that’s the Matthew I remember.

  After all this time, I still can’t believe we’re living so separately that I can be injured and he doesn’t even know about it.

  Matthew had to take me to the hospital once, a few months before we got married. I’m never lucky enough to get one of those sexy afflictions, the kind of illness where you suffer beautifully, resting in a hospital room with your hair flowing all around you, your lips even more crimson against the paleness of your skin, your body rendered vulnerable due to both the IV drip and your enviably solemn determination.

  No, I got some kind of cyst on my face that could spread to my brain and kill me immediately if someone didn’t lance it open and drain it.

  That sentence contains a lot of the words you hope never to say to someone you love. “Lance.” “Drain.” “Cyst.” Things related to your face that you’d rather not have to share with someone you want kissing said face in the future. But there I was, with this gigantic pus-filled welt on the underside of my chin. If Matthew didn’t get me to a hospital quickly, so that a doctor could squeeze infected body fluids out of my head, he’d have a dead fiancée on his hands. I remember joking that he had to at least get to the “widower” part before I died or it wouldn’t be fair to him. A widower can get sympathy sex, but a guy who loses his fiancée is technically just an unlucky bachelor.

  Matthew insisted on staying with me in the doctor’s office while they cut open my face, so I made him close his eyes. I went so far as to make him promise he’d always have his eyes closed for any medical procedure he might share with me, including any and all possible births. He could be in the room to be a dad, so long as he didn’t look anywhere near me. As far as I was concerned, he was allowed to see all the parts that were visible from outside of me, but anything that came from inside of me was off-limits.

  The lancing and draining was a success, and I went home with my chin a giant cream puff of a bandage. But the next night, I had a hard time sleeping. My pain medication wasn’t working, and I couldn’t find a way to rest my head on the pillow that didn’t make me want to rip my lower jaw from my head and toss it into the trash.

  At one point I turned to my right and noticed Matthew was flat on his back, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling. Our bedroom window was a few feet from a streetlight. Consequently, the room never got that dark.

  “You’re still up,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “I have
to tell you something,” he said, swallowing hard. “But I don’t want you to get mad.”

  I gently eased myself up onto my elbow, trying to look like I wasn’t nervous. “What’s wrong?”

  “I watched them drain your cyst.”

  Instinctively, I covered my chin with my hand. “What? No! Why?”

  “I was curious! It was a mistake!”

  “Yes, it was!”

  Matthew turned to me, his eyes wide with shock. “Charlotte, it wasn’t blood. Not at first. First it was green and then it was purple with this yellow and . . . and it was coming out of your head and . . . oh, the purple was just . . .”

  That’s when Matthew pushed himself out of the bed, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.

  This time he doesn’t have to deal with what I’m going through. The ice packs, the skate-shaped bruise across my ass, the hematoma on my inner right thigh I will eventually have to break apart with my fingertips.

  “How did you do this?” Matthew asks me now, as he leans over the table to sip his iced mocha. I tell him it’s from roller derby, and his mouth drops, the straw momentarily clinging to his lower lip.

  “You mean like girls on skates?” he asks. “Beating each other up?”

  “Something like that.”

  I tell him how I got into it, about Francesca, and about how much fun I’m having. I show him my arm muscles and make fun of my bruises.

  He fiddles with the edge of his T-shirt and I notice his hair is starting to thin at the top of his scalp. It makes him look vulnerable and nerdy. I want to touch it, to see if it feels different, wondering if I will feel different when I touch him.

  Matthew looks back up at me, cocking his head. He is clearly amused. “Did you get a tattoo yet?”

  “No. And I’m not getting one.”

  He scoffs. “But you’re done with roller derby now, right?”

  “Why would I be?”

  His incredulous smirk is so wide it threatens to jump off his face. “Because your tailbone is broken!” he shouts.

  I’m immediately defensive. There’s no need for him to act like I’m an idiot. “Everybody gets hurt,” I tell him. “This is a pretty common injury, actually.”

  He reaches across the table and gives me a patronizing pat on the wrist. “Look, Charlotte, you know I love you, but you’re not exactly the most coordinated person I know.”

  I push his hand off me. I haven’t heard him say those words in so long, and I wasn’t prepared to hear them used in such a casual manner.

  “Come on,” he continues. “You know this. Don’t be stupid. You’re going to break your arm. Or your face.” He reaches over and touches a bruise on my forearm. “Derby, too?”

  I nod.

  “This from the woman who wouldn’t go skiing because she said it was like playing Russian roulette on a mountain.”

  “It is.”

  “I still think you should stop while most of your body is still unbroken.”

  It’s a little shocking how outraged Matthew is, like I’ve just told him I’ve taken up bum-punching.

  “Have you even seen roller derby, Matthew?”

  “I don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to watch that anyway. I don’t want to watch women intentionally hurting each other. I thought you were a feminist. I can’t believe you want to participate in this.”

  “I’m completely participating in it,” I tell him. “In fact, I have a bout in a couple of months with all my feminist teammates.”

  I hadn’t known I was going to say that, but I know I have to be in that Rookie Rumble now. If Matthew thinks I can’t or shouldn’t do this, I have to do it over and over, proving to him just how badly he can underestimate me. I will kick ass all over the place, whether he likes it or not.

  “Brilliant,” he says, shaking his head. “Have fun living the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

  “What do you care, anyway?”

  He slams his plastic cup onto the table. He opens his mouth to say something, but then stops himself. He laughs in the back of his throat as he straightens the empty sweetener packets in front of him.

  With all of the terrible things we’ve said to each other over the past year, I wonder, how much worse are the ones we choose not to say? Especially the words we stop at the last second, the ones we have to swallow before we give them breath.

  “I care, Charlotte,” he says slowly, carefully. “Because I care about whether or not you are hurt. You know that. I would think.”

  “Are you seeing someone?” I ask.

  Charlotte Goodman wishes she could take that question back. She didn’t mean to ask it, but she knows she has to know. She only pretends she doesn’t care, but now that she cannot look at Matthew’s Facebook profile, she knows she’s losing her closest connection to him, even if it’s one-sided. She needs more evidence that their time is coming to an end, hoping that with every fact she learns, the pain inside her will lessen and shrink, until these two people who used to love each other with both fists clenched finally let go.

  Matthew stops rearranging, but he doesn’t look up. “Not exactly,” he says. He taps the tabletop with his index finger. Then he taps again. Two more taps, then one. I see his shoulders drop, the tension lessened.

  I rub my face, frustrated that this conversation doesn’t feel like normal people talking. There must have been some sugar or something on my palm, because the second I stop rubbing, I can feel the worst coming: I’m about to sneeze.

  I lift my chin, staring at the ceiling, which makes Matthew think I’m being dramatic, but I’m so busy concentrating on not sneezing that I don’t have the ability to explain. I just put up one finger, open my mouth, and try to wiggle my nose out of this potential hell.

  It doesn’t work. Too late. I sneeze my pain-yelp: “ach-aaaaaaahhhhoooowww!”

  “You okay?” Matthew asks, looking appropriately frightened at what he just witnessed.

  “I have to go,” I say, knowing that getting up from this plastic chair is going to make for the opposite of a dramatic exit. I end up executing a half-roll, heaving into a standing position.

  “Why are you leaving?” Matthew asks.

  “Because you have no idea how much I love you.”

  “Charlotte.” My purse knocks over my chair as I yank it to my shoulder. Everyone turns to look but I don’t care. I push through the glass doors and keep walking.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I think I know where I have to start.

  34.

  The drive to my parents’ house would probably be much more painful if my blood weren’t pumped full of adrenaline. I have no idea how I’m going to tell them the truth, but I know I have to do it. It’s the first step in making a decision, in having to deal with not just trying to get back to what was “before” with Matthew but what will happen when I finally reach my “after.”

  I’m also doing this for Francesca, to prove to her that I listen, that I take her advice seriously. I know there’s a good chance I’ll get a certificate at the end of this, which I’m hoping for, because it would mean Francesca was talking to me again. I miss her in that way where it can feel like you’re stuck in a dream; how that’s the only logical explanation for why the most important person in your life is missing.

  I try to picture what I’m going to say when I walk in the door.

  “Hi, Mom. Dad. I’m separated from Matthew. Let’s eat.”

  “Hey, guys. Yeah, I have lost weight. And my marriage.”

  “I am now a spinster. Let’s go see a movie!”

  My parents live about an hour’s drive away in an area that’s made for people who technically should live in Los Angeles because they work there, but they want to pretend they don’t have anything to do with that city. When you go out to Lancaster, it’s easy to forget you’re even in California. I like getting out of the city every once in a while, but once I moved inside the metropolitan area, I could no longer imagine doing the kind of commute my father does every day.
/>   The city’s skyline withers away in my rearview mirror as I continue to mentally prepare myself, knowing that there’s no way I can predict what my mother’s going to say when I break her heart.

  • • •

  “Charlotte, don’t you dare get a divorce. Go back to that man and apologize for whatever you did.”

  I might have been able to predict that one, if I’d given it a few minutes’ more thought.

  Charlotte Goodman would love for her narrator to take over here, but she knows it’s best to stay in the present, to truly be in one place, both body and mind. Besides, her mother might lash out or something. Remember: hair on fire. Better to be on guard.

  “Mom, it’s not that simple,” I say, watching her storm away from the kitchen table. I can’t get up to follow her because it took everything I had to ease myself into this chair without her noticing I was wincing.

  “Yes, it is that simple,” she says. “I don’t believe in divorce. You shouldn’t, either.”

  Her anxiety has driven her to clean her already spotless sink, apparently worried that whatever disease I’m carrying that caused me to be a woman on the brink of divorce might contaminate her immaculate home. She pushes the sleeves of her pink, puffy robe until they are up to her elbows and gets to scrubbing. I don’t know how she can be comfortable wearing what looks like a gigantic, quilted Peep costume.

  “How can you not believe in divorce?” I ask her. “Lots of people get divorces. Are you saying you don’t recognize them? What happens if they remarry, are they polygamists?”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” she says. I can’t see her face, so I watch her swaddled backside wiggle as she furiously scours the drain. Her hips are shaking in frustration, as if they’re trying to shimmy some motherly advice up to her head. “Abe!” she shouts, staring straight up at the ceiling as if my father is in Heaven instead of in the living room. “Come and yell at your daughter!”

  My father shuffles into the room, empty coffee cup in hand. He runs a hand over the back of his head where the last soldiers of his scalp stand guard. “What’s wrong?”