“If it’s meant to happen,” he says, “there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
I let my gaze escape through the window. There are tears in my eyes because for a moment I imagine my father sitting across from me instead of my landlord. He was a fatalist, too, my father. I’m not—I don’t like to think that that boy had to die. I don’t like the thought that Patrick and I were supposed to hurt each other, or that Ralph and I were before that. If that was fate, then I’m the common denominator in a lot of pain, and it’s hard to see that pattern changing. But I’d like for it to change.
Yuejin changes the subject to the abandoned lot near the train station.
“Soon we’ll have our garden,” he says.
Every day he sneaks under the fence to scatter and water the seeds he bought for the empty lot. Sunflowers, grass, Queen Anne’s lace, and bleeding hearts. Sometimes I go with him to help. He tried to get approval from the owner of the lot, a New York businessman who is never in Newark, but once the businessman saw the design for the garden, he said no. It would be too beautiful, he said. People don’t care about abandoned lots, but they get attached to gardens. He doesn’t want trouble when he mows it down. He doesn’t want to be accused of taking something good away from the people. When property values in Newark have skyrocketed, he’s going to make a fortune off that lot by building condominiums.
Water Burial
Before Dee left California for a long-awaited reunion with her sister, she’d gone to a party thrown by her boyfriend’s work. Linus had been with this company almost as long as he’d been with Dee—two years, and though he’d started out hating the job, she suspected he now felt settled in it. Dee wondered if their relationship had taken an opposite course: comfortable in the beginning, it was starting to shock and prick them in unexpected and annoying ways.
The work party had ended dramatically, she and Linus had fought, and now, with Dee away in Boston, they were still on sour terms.
On her third day in Boston, she and Emily went to the Charles River to sit on a bench and watch the sailboats billow across the water. Dee finally had the courage to tell her sister about the fight. Emily spent more time studying lemurs in Madagascar than she did with people and didn’t always understand the way Dee caused trouble with others in her life.
“I didn’t want to fight with Linus that night,” Dee said to Emily. “I don’t even know why it started.”
In truth, Dee had begun to realize why the fight had been brewing in her, why the mix of woes inside of her had turned frothy that night and foamed over. Simply, she just didn’t feel well. In fact, she felt very ill. Her joints were swollen and painful and she sometimes woke feeling as though her insides were swollen, too, ready to burst through her skin. She had an appointment with a specialist, but he was booked for the next month and on the phone she hadn’t expressed how serious she felt her condition was, and because she’d never learned to self-advocate—but was passive aggressive instead—she didn’t think to ask they make room for her somehow.
Emily looked out at the river as Dee spoke.
“I agreed to meet Linus there,” Dee said. “At the restaurant his work had picked. Even though I wasn’t feeling well.”
The night had started well enough; the party was at a restaurant on the Sacramento River, with a porch that swung far out over the water. The sky was partly cloudy and turning pink and gold just as Dee arrived. The delta breezes burned off the heat of the day, leaving a cool silk residue. Downriver the city rose up, its short buildings glimmering in the fading light, and though Dee had never intended to stay in Sacramento after she graduated from college, the place had begun to feel like home.
Dee walked slowly from her car to the restaurant. Her knees had swollen even though she’d kept her legs up and wrapped in heating pads all day. Her fingers were as stiff as pencils and she’d driven to the restaurant with her palms flat on the steering wheel because she couldn’t bend her joints to grip it.
The party, for the company’s five-year anniversary, was not where she wanted to be. Home in bed was where she wanted to be. But Linus wanted her to come. She never felt like doing anything anymore, he said, so she dragged herself there even though each step caused her pain. To her sister she clarified that she hadn’t been honest with Linus about the pain—in fact she’d been hiding her symptoms from him. Even still, she hoped Linus would ask her how she was feeling. But she’d been secretive since the beginning of their relationship, and Linus had adapted to her nature.
Dee imagined she and Linus looked ill matched to outsiders. She was sure their friends talked about how she needed someone more independent and he needed someone more reliable, but in their private spaces Dee and Linus sank into an easy world where they shared a comfortable togetherness. Once the outside world interrupted them, though, they couldn’t translate what worked for them alone into something they could present to others.
Dee found Linus at the restaurant. He was standing across the porch, near the railing, with a coworker named Martha. Their elbows were propped up on the splintered wood and their bodies leaned over the water. Dee caught Linus’s eye and waved to him. He returned the wave, and Dee expected him to excuse himself to Martha and come to her, but he didn’t—he was waiting for her to come to him.
A cloud parted and a rope of sunlight fell on Martha’s hair. She spread her fingers through her hair and shook big clumps of it, as though to spread the light around. Linus appeared rapt, his eyes unbroken from Martha.
Dee fell sullen. She and Linus only treated each other as a priority when they were alone. As though if they appeared too much in love others would be disgusted, or would find them inauthentic. As though as young people they should be looking to hurt each other. Their friends seemed to think there was nothing to be learned from happiness.
Dee was offered a margarita by a passing waiter, which she took. The salt on the rim stung her hands. The swollen joints had cracked her skin open, leaving paper-cut-size slits on her palms and fingers. Dee sipped and pretended to look around for someone she knew, but she had already found her someone, and he was absorbed in someone else.
She remembered when she’d met a woman who was tall and tattooed, with a severe expression, at a party a few months ago. She had intimidated Dee. Her name was Renée, and Dee had assumed she didn’t allow men to give her any nonsense, that maybe she was a ballbuster, but at one point Renée turned to Dee and asked why the men at the party were gripping her hand so tightly when introducing themselves. “They’re about to break my fingers,” Renée had said. “Are they doing that to you, too?” And Dee had realized that she, like the men around her, had assumed certain things about Renée all because of her leather jacket, her stature, and a few tattoos.
Now, Dee felt something like what Renée might have felt. Because she needed her independence, Linus sometimes ignored her. But that wasn’t what she wanted when she said independence, not quite. But maybe it was asking too much of a person to detect the more sensitive tremors of need that run inside another person—especially when she didn’t know how to say what she wanted. When asking felt like whining. When needing to begin with felt like a betrayal of her independence.
Dee was inching across the patio because she couldn’t find anywhere else to go. She wanted a chair, but saw none, so she moved among the tables that were laid out with neat rows of canapés and fanned clusters of napkins. Finally, she was so close to her boyfriend that she could hover no more and simply had to approach him. That she couldn’t approach Linus comfortably spelled trouble, but at the same time she felt there was something special and complicated about their relationship, even if they repelled each other sometimes, even if they had shifting ions of desire inside of them.
But Linus smiled warmly at Dee and reached his arm out to pull her into a hug. He was happy to see her. Dee and Martha shook hands, and Dee tried to ward off the gloom that often followed her relief when she was proven wrong about a feeling that, if only briefly, had trapped her hea
rt so tightly.
“We were just talking about you,” Martha said.
Dee, instead of feeling flattered, felt persecuted.
Dee paused her story and looked at her sister, who was still staring out at the Charles River. The wind had forced the sailboats sideway at forty-five degrees and their bright sails skimmed the frothy whitecaps.
“Everything okay?” Emily asked, because Dee had stopped speaking.
“The next part of the story doesn’t show me in the best light,” Dee said.
“That’s okay,” Emily said. “That’s why you’re telling me.”
Dee had smiled at Martha, she told her sister. Dee said, “Oh really?” and glanced at Linus who smiled a tight-lipped smile, as though he’d known this wouldn’t go over well.
But Martha went on.
“He was just saying that you sometimes make him eat freegan—that is, when you don’t finish your own meal—”
“Yes,” Dee interrupted. “I know what freegan means.”
Since they’d met, Linus had followed a vegan diet. Dee had briefly been vegetarian, but her protein levels had sunk so low she had to give it up. When she told Linus what her doctor said (that she needed to eat a serving of meat the size of a deck of cards each day), she felt he didn’t believe her, that he thought she hadn’t tried hard enough to replace the protein in her diet and was using her weight as an excuse.
Lately, even though she was eating meat again, Dee was still losing weight. It simply evaporated like fog burning off from her body. Her ribs appeared, thin tributaries running over her abdomen. When she swallowed food, the food passed through a balloon of pain near her lungs. Even a portion the size of a deck of cards was too much; she just had no appetite these days.
Even more than Linus hated eating meat, he hated wasting food. If her nonvegan meal was going to get thrown away, he would finish it, citing freeganism. Lately, Dee was simply unable to clear a plate, no matter how badly she needed the calories. Nor could she bring herself not to take any food at all, as if that would mean giving in to whatever was going wrong inside of her.
Linus had never complained about finishing her food. Until now she had thought it was one way they were secretly intimate, breaking the rules of Linus’s diet together.
Linus looked away from her and Martha, at the slowly moving river, brown and murky. A hanging vine reached one tendril into the river and the water parted around it.
Dee’s veins went icy with self-pity. She hadn’t known she was upsetting Linus, trespassing on his life choices by making him feel obligated to finish her servings of meat. But she also understood the pleasure of telling your friends how an important person in your life is harassing you, the attention it garners, the cachet of having difficulties with one’s partner.
Martha, with her calm smile, seemed to expect an answer. So Dee said, “I don’t make him. He can say no.”
“Anyway,” Martha said, “we were just discussing the different ways you can be vegan. I’m thinking of going vegan, too.”
“Very good,” Dee said.
To try to put a stop to the conversation, she leaned between Martha and Linus and rested her elbows on the porch railing. Her skin soaked up the warmth the wood had absorbed from the day’s sunshine. A waiter passed by with a tray of sausages speared with toothpicks, and Dee took two. She couldn’t resist trying to eat.
“Is one of those for Linus?” Martha asked.
“Will you lay the fuck off?” Dee snapped.
She threw the sausages into the river.
Martha went pale. Her eyes darted toward Linus, and they exchanged a look that Dee couldn’t decipher. Maybe pity, mixed with something else, something private.
“I’ll just be over there,” Martha said, gesturing toward the bar.
When she’d gone, Linus said, “Jesus, Dee, I have to work with her.”
“Well, I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk about me behind my back.”
Linus rolled his eyes. “We were just talking about stupid shit. I wasn’t even talking about you at all, I was talking about food.”
“And you could’ve stood up for me,” Dee said.
“Stand up for you? You were the one being mean.”
Linus rubbed his eyes. He had tired eyes, which Dee loved, and a rush of regret plummeted inside of her and landed in the pit of her stomach.
“I have to go fix this.” Linus left before Dee could reach out and touch his arm.
Her sinuses seized up with the feeling that she might cry. She cleared her throat, faced the water, and gulped what was left in her drink. She looked around for another, swiped a glass of sparkling wine from a passing tray. Quickly, the alcohol made her head float. She was on blood thinners because of clots she’d had in her leg last year. Just a fluke, she’d thought at the time.
Dee sulked beside the river while her brain filled with bitter thoughts. She and Linus couldn’t always recognize what they loved about each other—but the problem had gotten worse with Dee’s illness, the pains and feelings she could barely describe to doctors, who prompted her with all their knowledge of how the body works, much less to Linus. And she no longer recognized herself in her new body, with its frozen joints and 8 percent body fat, and how after a certain amount of walking she couldn’t move any longer. She didn’t understand, either, how this new body had changed her relationship with food, how people mistook her inability to eat with refusal, how some said she looked good and others thought she was anorexic. She knew Linus didn’t love her new gaunt body, and when she looked in the mirror she didn’t either, but when people praised her for being thin she felt good about herself. It was something to hold on to—something about her body some people believed to be good—and though she knew she was unhealthy she appreciated it all the same.
She couldn’t express this to Linus. She would sound crazy. So she just hadn’t said anything to him, and now he believed she was shutting herself farther away from him, burrowing deeper inside of herself. Like many sick people, though, she wanted to be taken care of.
A few tears fell from her eyes into the river. Then she steeled herself. She didn’t want to make more of a scene, not here. She lifted her champagne glass and watched the bubbles rocket to the surface. Clumps of clouds wafted through the sky above her—she could smell the clean rain inside of them, and she took a few deep replenishing breaths. She watched the party behind her through its reflection in her wineglass. The chilled glass felt nice against her swollen palm, and she smiled when a clown appeared with an air pump and a handful of balloons. This was the type of thing Linus’s company found whimsical, an ironic throwback to childhood that they could make hip again. Start-up culture.
There was laughter, either of approval, or people just being good sports. The clown inflated a few balloons into long snakes and twisted them into a crown. He handed the crown to Linus’s boss with a flourish.
Dee turned, leaned her back against the rail. She searched for Linus and found him with Martha, in conversation again near the bar. They seemed not to have noticed the clown, who offered dogs and giraffes as he made his way through the crowd. He neared Linus and Martha and, without warning, put a crown on Martha’s head, then began to inflate another one for Linus.
Martha’s hands flew to her head. She grabbed the crown and threw it to the ground; it wafted lazily down. She spun toward the clown, a look of distress and anger on her face. Dee moved closer.
“Stop it,” Martha said to the clown. “Get away from me!”
Her voice was thin. Dee wondered if she was afraid of clowns, but then Martha clasped her throat; she began to gag and cough. She bent forward and her glass of wine spilled onto the ground in a burgundy arc. Dee, puzzled, walked toward her; maybe Martha was having some kind of episode, but her eyes caught Linus’s, and he motioned for her to stop. His face was twisted with concern, and then Dee saw the concern loosen into understanding.
“Latex,” he said quickly. “Latex allergy.”
He grabbed the
purse she’d dropped on the ground. Martha grabbed his arm, one hand still clutching her throat as her breath came in heavy gasps. Linus rooted around inside her purse until he produced an EpiPen. With his arm around Martha, holding her up, he uncapped the auto-injector and drove it into her thigh.
* * *
“We got into a big fight later that night,” Dee told Emily. “I accused him of sleeping with her. Knowing where her EpiPen was just felt so intimate to me.”
“Is he?” Emily asked. “Sleeping with her?”
Dee shook her head. “I don’t think so. He’s just a caring guy.”
Dee hesitated. What she didn’t tell her sister was that she’d felt betrayed by the way Linus had leaped, without hesitation, to save Martha, how he’d intuited so quickly what was wrong with her when he couldn’t seem to see that Dee’s body was becoming an uninhabitable place for her. She took a breath, and she thought she would follow the breath with an explanation of these feelings to Emily, but she felt so ashamed that a sense of competition had sparked in her that night on the Sacramento River. She’d wanted Linus to abandon the suffocating Martha and come to her instead.
The wind was getting so fierce that the boats on the Charles River were tipping over, wind tangled up in their sails, though the day was still warm and beautiful and the sun beamed abundantly. When a boat overturned, its sailors flipped it back over and hoisted themselves in, dripping wet and laughing, but there was a boat in the middle of the river that floated on its side with no one near it.
Dee pointed to it.
“Do you see that?” she asked Emily.
Emily shaded her eyes. “I wonder what happened.”
Dee bunched her hair nervously; it was coarse and windswept and dirt from the park was caught in it. The stranded boat bobbed in the water. The current seemed too fierce for someone to have swum ashore, but maybe they’d climbed into another boat. For a moment Dee imagined herself neck deep in the river, her boat unmanageable, and it wasn’t hard to imagine because her body made her feel like she was drowning on land.
If the Body Allows It Page 17
