You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  Next to the list was a compact orange bong that looked like a gumball machine, with a cover that slid across the opening to hold the smoke inside it. It was packed with sticky, sage-green weed Kate kept in a little Chinese lacquer box in her bureau drawer.

  I pressed the lighter button on the bong and we watched the smoke cloud up the orange globe. I held it up to Kate’s mouth. She leaned her head forward while I slid the cover aside, letting the smoke out and into her mouth. She could hold it for a few seconds. We did this a few more times and then she shook her head when I offered it and gestured for me to have some if I wanted to. I took a few hits and settled back into the couch, my head buzzing softly.

  The bong was my little innovation. She’d been having someone roll joints. Downtown there was a dank little head shop I’d always wanted to go to anyway. When we asked the clerk for a bong for someone with very little lung power, he actually rubbed his hands together. He might have been waiting all his life for a new pot-related conundrum to solve. He didn’t seem to notice that Kate and I, in my jaunty red bucket hat and Kate’s gold hoops, looked as if we had gotten lost on the way to Ann Taylor. He’d directed us to the little orange bong, fondness blazing in his eyes. It was squat and oddly cute in a benign-robot kind of way. We were in and out in ten minutes.

  I was a half-hearted pot smoker, but this weed was really something. Older people must have better connections, or spend more money.

  I was somewhat aware that the television was on. I gave Kate the remote, placing it on her leg beneath her forefinger, and we watched a flashing parade of bad primetime for what may have been a very long time. I was sprawled out on the couch with my feet flopped over the arm. Kate had moved her chair up next to me.

  “Where does Lisa get this stuff?” I asked her. There was a long pause, in which I debated whether I had spoken.

  “Oh, just some guy,” Kate said vaguely. “I should grow my own, anyway. I doubt they’ll raid me, or arrest me even if they did.”

  “The wheelchair gives and gives,” I said. “You could say it was medicinal. Is it medicinal?”

  “Hell, yes,” Kate said. Her head was tilted back against her headrest. She gazed beneath lowered eyelids at the television, looking slightly bleary-eyed but also very tranquil. “After this video I’m going jogging.”

  I was still laughing when she said, slowly and seriously, “It does help. It’s kind of what swimming does too. You don’t feel the inside of your body so much.” She looked confused, then grinned. “No. You don’t feel like you’re inside of your body so much. Or you don’t care, anyway.”

  I nodded. We sat quietly for a few more minutes.

  “I really want some bread and butter,” I informed her. It had just occurred to me.

  “Me too,” said Kate.

  I propped myself on one elbow and turned to look at her. Kate raised her eyebrows at the bong on the coffee table and I hit the lighter button and held it up to her lips.

  “What would you eat right now?” I asked.

  “Tamales,” Kate added after a moment. “Tamales with pork and red chiles.”

  “I can’t make tamales,” I sighed. “You’re totally out of masa and lard.” I looked at her over my shoulder. “Can you believe I knew that?”

  She gave me a long, careful nod. Down, up, down, up, grinning. “Well,” she said, “then it’s all been worth it.”

  “Oh my god,” I said, embarrassed. “You think I’m like those TV movies where the person with the disease teaches everyone how to live.”

  Kate laughed soundlessly. “It’s always so nice of us.”

  We sat quietly. The fire snapped in its grate. Outside the lights glowed hazily, snow falling past. The air smelled peppery. “This is nice,” I said after a while.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Pot’s still fun.”

  “What else?” I asked recklessly.

  She cocked an eyebrow at me. “How do you mean?”

  “What else is fun for you? Do we have enough fun?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Movies are fun. Watching you cook is fun, you’ve gotten so good at it. Hanging out with my friends. Redoing the house.” She met my eye and smiled gently. “Sometimes I can still make it an okay life, Bec,” she said. She swallowed. “I’m not in a hospital bed. I still make my decisions.”

  “You don’t think you would if you were in a hospital?”

  She shook her head. “I know I wouldn’t. You hear stories . . . you go into the hospital, go on a respirator, and they can’t just disconnect you, you know. You’re stuck. You lay there and hope someone comes to see you. You have no control anymore, and you’re there till the end, pretty much. And the end never comes because of the respirator.”

  I almost protested out of sheer politeness, but what she was saying made a grim sense. “That’s awful,” I said instead.

  She nodded, looking into the fire.

  After a time she spoke again, but I was staring out the window. I turned back to her, faintly surprised to find her right there. “Sorry?”

  “Maybe it won’t happen like that,” she repeated.

  “Definitely not,” I agreed. I was about to go on—Nothing like that will ever happen; don’t worry—but I stopped myself. Why be patronizing? She knew what she was talking about.

  “Listen,” I said. “Can you eat bread and butter?” I’d always assumed she couldn’t eat anything at all. In nine months I’d never seen solid food touch her mouth, only drops of meltable things placed on her tongue—frosting, a miniscule smear of soft cheese.

  Kate nodded. “Just takes too long,” she explained. She made a face. “Embarrassing.”

  I set the bong back on the coffee table. “You can’t be embarrassed in front of me,” I said. “You want some bread and butter?” Kate gave one of her tiny shrugs, nodded. “Great,” I said. I gave a long sigh, pretending to be annoyed. I felt like being silly all of a sudden. “I suppose you expect me to get it?”

  I peeked over my shoulder and saw her laughing silently.

  “I keep meaning to tell you,” Kate began.

  I watched her intently. She was very far away from me.

  “There’s a chance I may be slightly paralyzed,” she finished. “Do you still want to take the job?”

  I got up, chuckling, and went into the kitchen, taking out a round loaf of peasant bread and some butter from the refrigerator. I cut the bread carefully, keeping my hand far away from the blade so I wouldn’t have to haul myself, stoned, to an emergency room and leave Kate alone.

  The bread took forever to toast. I sat on the edge of the counter while I waited.

  “Don’t you worry that pot’s bad for you?”

  “Worse than this?” Kate answered.

  “Good point,” I said. She wasn’t being maudlin. She was right. Kate didn’t care about health risks. She had had Lou Gehrig’s for close to three years, and a lot of people died within two. In a way she could do anything. She took birth control pills straight through each month with no placebos, so she never had to deal with having a period. What was it going to do to her?

  I carried a plate of buttered toast back to the coffee table. I broke off a small piece, held it up for her to approve, and when she nodded I placed it in her mouth. Kate chewed slowly and carefully, her head tipped forward so no crumbs went down her throat and started a coughing fit. I took a piece myself and ate it quickly, happily, enjoying the melted butter.

  “I don’t know if I can handle driving,” I said. “I had no idea your pot would be this good.”

  Kate swallowed a bite of bread. “So stay here,” she said. “There’s an extra room.”

  “Okay.” I held up the toast so she could take another bite. Then I sprinkled some salt over my next piece and took a big bite. I thought I could sit here by the fire and eat buttered toast for the next several days at least. Toast was one of the more available pleasures in life. I felt the way I had when I first started working for Kate, and Saturday afternoons we’d come home from the market, cook
, and have drinks with Evan once he arrived. Nostalgia welled up in my chest. Just for summer, I suppose, for cold wine and the porch at the old house. I didn’t like to admit it, but it had been fun when it was the three of us. Why hadn’t they offered me a joint back then? Maybe it had been their little thing, a private thing.

  “Do you miss Evan?” I asked. The words were out almost before I realized it, and I wished I could make them disappear. Kate didn’t look angry. She smiled, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, but she looked content.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Sometimes I do too,” I admitted. I felt I could admit this, softened by pot and companionship as we were. She watched me carefully, and nodded.

  “Sometimes we all had fun,” I said, and I gave Kate another bite. We sat, chewing, in companionable silence.

  thirteen

  LET’S GO TO THE ZOO,” Kate said.

  “The zoo?” I asked. I was holding up a red sweater with a low square neckline. She looked it over and then shook her head, so I folded it up and put it in a cardboard box for the Salvation Army. I loved that sweater, but I also knew why she was giving it away. The last time she’d worn it I saw her do a double-take in the mirror at her own collarbone, which had grown more prominent in the last couple months, notched deeply at the center like a tiny cup above the shadowed hollows of her sternum. It startled me too. I’d given her an extra nutrition shake that day.

  I held up a fuchsia turtleneck. No one else could possibly wear that color.

  “Why the zoo? What are we, kids?” I was only teasing. Lately we had been doing things like this: jaunts to museums, the botanical gardens. She’d been talking about another trip, this time to New York. She was bored, I thought, staving off the winter monotony.

  “Let’s keep that one,” she said. “And I like the zoo. Everybody lets the chick in the wheelchair go straight to the front.”

  I laughed in spite of myself and offered up a sapphire-blue blouse for her consideration. She tilted her head, then nodded toward the “keep” pile.

  “You realize it’s March,” I said.

  She was unperturbed. “We can go to the indoor exhibits. Besides, no one goes this time of year. The animals probably need validation.”

  “Prima donnas.” I turned back to Kate and looked her over. Her eyes were a little watery, her mouth pale. She’d come down with the flu a week before and it had lingered, casting a blurring, pinkish effect around her eyes and her nostrils. It had the opposite effect on her body, paring away any softness until each rib showed even more clearly than before. It had knocked her out so badly that I’d had to sponge bathe her for a few days instead of dragging her into the shower. We usually used so many gadgets and computers that it was soothing, somehow, to be so old-fashioned: squeezing out the big natural sponge into one of those old-fashioned basins, lifting her up from the mattress and wiping it over her neck and her shoulders, down her thin arms and legs, toweling away the traces of water and soap. It wasn’t easy to give someone a sponge bath in bed without getting the sheets all damp. I was good at it now.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” I asked.

  She met my eyes. “It’s just sitting,” she said.

  So we made our way into the gorilla house later that day. It was set up so that it felt as though the people were enclosed in glass and the gorillas had free reign of their hillside. The gorillas lounged around like teenagers, digging through their fur and chomping steadily at something in their mouths—bamboo, I imagined, or gum. One relaxed on a fallen log, gazing up the hill with a foot propped up on a rock. The gorilla picked up a long stick, plucked at the bark, and contemplated it, his brow low and his long, leathery lips working slowly.

  “Watch,” said Kate. “He’ll bend it into a wheel.”

  I chortled. “They’re probably building a barbecue pit on the other side of the hill.”

  I was glad we’d come, surprised to find I still enjoyed something as simple as staring at an exotic animal. Morally, I had my doubts about zoos. You could argue that some of the animals at least were alive here when they were nearly extinct elsewhere, but there was something autocratic and lordly about the whole notion of importing them here for our pleasure, or at least our intermittent interest—what were they supposed to do with their lives in the meantime? That day, however, misgivings or not, I gave in to the pleasures of the privileged, meandering alongside Kate’s chair over the paved, wide paths—at a stately pace Kate called a “stroll-and-roll”—and gazing through the glass at the gibbons and elephants. It was fascinating, actually: What bored prince had been the first to have some beast paraded before him and penned nearby, out of idle curiosity?

  The gorilla’s walnut-brown eyes roved past me as he took up another branch. He seemed so mysterious and unknowable, even a few feet away. Kate murmured something, and I stopped pondering and saw that her hand had fallen from the control of her wheelchair and lay bent in her lap.

  “Sorry,” I said, fixing it. I looked her over once more to see if anything else was out of place; then we turned back toward the gorilla.

  We were sitting right up at the glass. Another gorilla had come up to the edge to stare at the caged people. He looked listless.

  “We ought to be entertaining him,” a voice said. I smiled to myself, agreeing with the voice even before I had registered that it was one I knew. Kate turned her head. “Maybe they need more to do in there.”

  It was Evan. Now both of us turned to look. He was about ten yards away, standing on a deck that allowed a better view of the gorillas. I was about to exclaim at the coincidence, when I glanced at Kate and saw the expression—defiant, sheepish—on her face. Our eyes locked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me why we were coming?” I asked her. We had followed him here. For a moment it all seemed perfectly decipherable: She had sought him out, the first time since they separated. It had to mean a reconciliation. But I had heard the petulant note in my own voice and understood, horrified, how much the prospect upset me.

  I saw Evan look at us, his face slack in surprise before he recovered and turned to one side. The crowd of people shifted, and I saw that he was leaning over, murmuring something to the woman next to him.

  “Cynthia?” I murmured. Kate nodded.

  “Well, my checkered past and I are here, too, so it must be adultery day at the zoo,” I said lightly, refusing to acknowledge any possible reason the scene could upset Kate. She didn’t respond, so I gave up that tack. “I don’t get it. Did you just want to see her?”

  “Sort of,” Kate said.

  There was a silence. I brushed her hair off her forehead and re-draped her red scarf. She resettled her shoulders, squaring them slightly, and I looked toward the exit, hoping for a clear path. She couldn’t want him back, surely, I thought, but her face was a studious blank and I was uncertain. She did miss him, after all. We had followed him here. A streak of pity ran through me, almost stopping me cold. I had never, ever pitied her before.

  “Let’s go over,” she said. I started to protest, but she gave me a look and I stopped. You’re not you, I reminded myself. You’re her. So I followed Kate to the base of the platform where Evan stood. By the time we got there and Kate craned her neck to look up at them, Evan and Cynthia were very still.

  “Hello,” Cynthia said, smiling awkwardly. She wore black pants and a blue silk shirt. I had wanted her to be cheap-looking and brassy, but she was as polished as Kate. There were pearls in her ears and her auburn hair was drawn back in a knot. “You must be Kate.”

  I placed myself close to Kate. It was loud in the ape house.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Yes,” I repeated. There was a silence. Kate looked at them, but they kept looking at me, maybe because I was the last one to have spoken.

  “I guess I mentioned we’d be here today,” Evan said. Kate shrugged. Without meaning to I gave a little shrug myself.

  “We used to come here sometimes,” Kate said to Cynthia. I translated.

  “Yes,
well . . . I hadn’t been to a zoo since I was little,” Cynthia said.

  Kate lifted her chin to swallow and took a breath.

  “How are you, Evan?” Kate asked.

  I could see him debate how to answer without annoying either woman too much. He settled on, “Fine, thanks.”

  “Good,” Kate said. “I’m doing well, too. Thanks.” Her voice, which in its weakness always seemed to issue from some flaccid muscle low in her throat, was higher, stronger, but it shook.

  We all stared at each other. Evan and Kate watched each other. Cynthia stared at me. Finally Evan leaned over the railing at the edge of the platform.

  “This is uncomfortable,” he said. I stepped to one side and looked at Kate. Before she could say anything Cynthia joined Evan at the rail.

  “I don’t quite understand why you came here,” Cynthia said. She too leaned over, holding on to the rail with both hands. Her long nails gleamed with clear polish. “It seems counterproductive, but maybe you just had to see me. I’m not a monster.” She paused, flicking something off the railing, and then said, “In fact, you’ll think I’m crazy, but in a way I understand why you had to separate. Evan too. Think how hard it was for him to watch you go through this.”

  She was crazy. It was obvious.

  Kate sighed. She looked worn out. I had the sense she’d forced herself to come here and speak to them, whether she wanted to or not. I watched her profile—her long nose, the firm curve of her jaw—as she tipped her head back to contemplate Cynthia. I watched her mouth flicker into a smile, something so weary it was almost gentle. What had Kate expected of an encounter like this? I didn’t understand her at all; her face suddenly seemed entirely foreign to me.

  “I doubt you understand why we separated,” Kate said. She looked over at Evan, then back to Cynthia. “I’m not sure Evan even does.” She didn’t sound bitter but resigned, even slightly indulgent, like a parent who’s given up for the time being.