Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  Leslie Royce, a lawyer who had known my dad and who had once helped me with a contract thing for my coaching business, texted me, Oh my God! Michael was the best. Call me anytime. I’m here for you. Whatever you need help with. To be polite, I told her thank you and that I was fine. My aunt texted me questions about returning the remains and I said, I have literally no clue. Whatever you want to do. I’m going to take a nap. ♥ I drank coconut water. I ate an entire package of Twizzlers. I texted my therapist: My dad died. Can you talk? I saw the three dots appear like she was typing her response, but then they went away. I ordered a chicken burrito bowl with extra sour cream and an orange Jarritos on Seamless. I made a list of who my bridesmaids would be and couldn’t think of one. I drank more coconut water and puked until I saw the base layer of Twizzlers come up. Relieved, I cleaned up with a Clorox toilet wand and took a long shower.

  I was shaving my legs, carefully navigating around the eczema patches, when a thought came to me that had never come to me before. The hand holding the razor seemed to be in conversation with a part of my mind that I wished would shut the fuck up. Who would find me if I did something? No one. Would that be a good thing? The hot water hit my back like tiny needles. My mouth tasted like smoky bile from the chicken. I sucked up some phlegm at the back of my throat and spit three times, ptuh ptuh ptuh, like I was creating a barrier between myself and evil. Then I pulled the curtain aside and threw the razor across the bathroom.

  There was a text from Maren when I got out: Holy shit are you okay?

  We hadn’t known each other for very long. It was light outside when I called her, but I couldn’t tell whether it was 8:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m.

  “I’m an orphan,” I said. “I’m a twenty-seven-year-old orphan.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “When my friend Daphne’s stepdad died, I sent her flowers and she can’t even comment on my posts?”

  “Maybe she’s sending you flowers right now.”

  “She doesn’t know my address.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She doesn’t have my new address.”

  There was an awkward pause I rushed to fill.

  “When I was in the shower, I kind of thought of hurting myself,” I said. Now I was crying quietly, covering my mouth so she wouldn’t hear.

  “Jesus, let’s call someone,” Maren said. “Who could we call? Like a best friend. A cousin? I don’t think you should be alone right now. You can share the contact with me and I can call for you,” she rattled on. The more I tried not to cry, the more my chest pumped like a machine.

  “Do you think maybe you could come over?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Maren said, sounding surprised. “Of course I can.”

  “I’ll give you my address.”

  “I have your address. I sent you a postcard from my vacation, remember?”

  She slept all night in my bed.

  * * *

  ...

  “I met Maren right before my dad died,” I was telling Evan at the mixer. “And the two of us, we just realized how hard it is for women to take care of themselves sometimes and we thought about what we could create to make self-care more—”

  “More of a given, less of a luxury,” Maren said.

  “Yes, and but still with that luxury feeling,” I added. Maren was the one who taught me yes and.

  “Luxury,” Evan said. “I dig it. My girlfriend—well, I guess she’s my ex-girlfriend now—got me into Kiehl’s beard grooming oil and now . . .”

  “Now it’s your ritual,” I said, zooming in on the word ex.

  Maren grabbed my shoulders and I was so startled, I dropped my cigarette. “That’s it!” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. But that’s it; that’s the name.” She grabbed her phone from her tote bag and opened her notes app. “R-I-C-H-U-A-L, get it?”

  I’d never seen Maren look so happy about anything before. I wrapped my arms around her waist, which was cinched with five different leather belts, and smiled at Evan while he took our picture.

  “The founders,” he said. “I’ll tag you.”

  “Wait,” I said, “can I see it before you post?”

  “I’m searching right now to see if I can buy the domain,” Maren said.

  Snow White was walking in my direction, smiling. Maybe she recognized my costume and now understood the coat was mine. Maybe I wouldn’t need to say anything at all.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “No worries,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

  “Excuse me,” she said again, and I realized she wasn’t smiling at me at all. She was smiling at Evan.

  “Rachelle Tanaka,” Snow White said, holding out a hand.

  “Hey,” Evan said. “Have we met before?”

  “No, I just recognized you from your Twitter profile. I’m @TanakaTabata. I think we follow each other?”

  “It’s available!” Maren said.

  “These are my friends,” Evan said, “Maren and Devin. They’re cofounders of a startup that’s empowering women to take the time to add some luxury back into their self-care routines.”

  “That’s incredible,” Rachelle said. She was wearing the most beautiful black-green eyelashes. “Have you been following Carlotta Krause-Steubenfeld? She is doing something similar, but with gels.”

  “Gels?” I asked.

  “Oh my god, I can’t believe you haven’t heard of her! Let’s exchange info, I’d love to introduce you. I think you’re working in a very similar space. Very similar. It’s a space where she’s really dominating. Carlotta is amazing.”

  Everyone had their phones out now, so I got mine out, too, and sent an email to Rachelle so she would have my contact info.

  “I’m texting her right now,” Rachelle said. “What did you say the name was?”

  “Richual,” Maren said. “Richual, R-I-C-H, dot com. We’re doing a redesign right now, so she won’t be able to see much yet on the homepage.”

  I opened my calorie-counter app and entered the four ounces of wine and three grapes. Then I opened Instagram and saw that Evan had already posted the photo and it was from my bad side, where my underbite was worse. It was too late to redo.

  “I can’t believe this is where we’re meeting, of all places,” Rachelle said to Evan. “I saw on social that you’re into counting macros. Can I steal you for a few minutes to tell you about what I’m working on?”

  “Ladies, I’ll catch up with you later. Let’s get a lunch on the books. Sugarfish?”

  “I love Sugarfish,” I said, but it was too late. He was already gone.

  “Well, that was productive,” Maren said. “Should we go eat some real food?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Please will you go get my fur? There’s a human tampon sitting on it.”

  “So tell her to get off.”

  “Please, Furiosa,” I said. I thought I might start crying so I laughed instead, so hard I doubled over, shaking.

  Maren

  My mom and dad never married. It wouldn’t even be accurate to say that he left her because they were never really together. I was their John Lennon meme: the life that happened when they were making other plans.

  Steve already had a wife. I wanted to know all about this other family (a girl, a boy, another girl just a few months younger than I was) and what they looked like (braces, Little League uniform, freckles) so I could compare myself in the mirror. A couple of times, when we stopped by their house so my mom could pick something up, I saw a pale face watching through the blinds of an upstairs window. By my estimation, they inhabited a castle. Our house could have fit in the garage.

  Did the face in the window mean they thought about us as much as I thought about them? I believed the haunting should be mutual.

  If I wante
d to, I could see my dad every day. All I had to do was turn on Channel 7 before school and there he was, delivering the news. “Wake up with Steve and Stacey, starting at five thirty,” the promos said. I inherited his broad forehead, his thick brow, the dismissive expression he gave Stacey if she flubbed one of her lines on the prompter. I was the kid in class who wouldn’t hesitate to correct the teacher, even if it got me in trouble. I memorized the date of every field trip, the correct spelling of Principal Szalkowski’s name, the rule on tank top strap width. Not the prettiest in school portraits, or the best runner in PE, or the girl you could trust to keep your secrets. I was the know-it-all.

  The one thing I didn’t know was how much Steve was supposed to be paying in child support, but he paid something. For much of my childhood, my mom and I lived in a small white rental house with two bedrooms and a huge backyard we shared with the family who owned the main house. I was allowed to play on the trampoline if I was invited, but our landlord’s kids were older and hardly ever included me in their games.

  One winter, the checks stopped. Mom took a second job, waking up at three thirty in the morning to deliver newspapers in the frigid dark, before she got me ready for school. Sometimes she put her head on the kitchen table and passed out cold while I ate my oatmeal.

  “Why don’t you tell on Daddy?” I asked, shaking her arm.

  “Who would I tell?”

  There was a call-in part of the morning show, where viewers could dial in and talk to Steve or Stacey about a local issue, like zoning for a new mall or a scandal with the school board. I had watched so many times I knew the number by heart.

  “715-777-1515,” I sang to her, making a phone with my fingers. “Hello? I’m a longtime resident of Marathon County and I’m calling because one of your employees is a very bad man.”

  This made her laugh, but not as much as I hoped. She rubbed one eye with a knuckle.

  “And I think you should fire him,” I continued.

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “Then Steve really wouldn’t be able to help us.”

  You forgive the guy who writes the check. You stay optimistic that it will all sort itself out, while you try to fill in the gaps created by his negligence.

  She accepted our landlords’ invitation to attend a meeting at their house about a business opportunity to achieve financial independence by working only part time. All we had to do was brush our teeth with Glister toothpaste and start taking Nutrilite vitamins.

  “You and me,” she said, “we’re dreamers.”

  There were black vinyl organizers filled with cassette tapes of motivational speeches that she listened to in the car to and from work, to and from seminars. Show the plan, share the dream! I chanted it with her. Our positive thinking must have worked: the proof was in the visit from a couple in her upline, who drove to our house in their tan RV and I got to go inside for a tour. I thought everything would be miniature, like a dollhouse, but the bed inside was way bigger than my own. I marveled at the way a little table folded down from the interior wall. If this was the house they lived in when they were on the road, what did their real house look like?

  Our monthly product order, the tapes, the tickets to seminars and conferences, gas to drive to meetings, the copies of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and How to Win Friends and Influence People—all went on her new credit cards.

  “I’m fired up,” she told me.

  So was I. That summer, I was allowed to go on the trampoline whenever I wanted.

  I still didn’t know how much my mom lost, trying to go Diamond.

  * * *

  ...

  Our kitchen smelled like old bananas. There was a coffee-stained Rachel Maddow mug and a small tower of plates stacked in the sink. A take-out container speckled with rice had been left out for at least two days. Was the sheen of grime on the countertops representative of the slob I cohabited with or was it evidence that my beloved was too dedicated to his art to be disturbed by domestic chaos? According to the fridge magnet John got me for my birthday, I should “Keep Calm and Drink Wine.”

  “I was just about to do those,” he called, when I had already started soaping the sponge. I ignored him and scrubbed at the brown ring around the faucet handle and the old scuzz under the dish-drying rack. I pictured Evan at home, lighting a fire by tapping an app, commanding Alexa to play Nina Simone, drinking something expensive in a glass with a single giant ice cube, examining the life choices that had brought him to this moment, the privileges that protected him from being held accountable sooner.

  “You can take out the garbage,” I told John.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Yes tonight.”

  “I’ll do it first thing tomorrow,” he said, planting a kiss on my head. I was trying to scrape some congealed egg off a plate with my thumbnail. It wasn’t even my egg. It was his egg. John poured me a glass of pinot grigio.

  “Listen to this.” John held his phone in front of his face. “This woman on Facebook—her profile picture is an American eagle holding a gun. She posted this under an MSNBC clip: So what if Jared Kushner met with the Russian ambassador? Hillary didn’t win, libtards!”

  “Do you want to get Thai tonight?” I said. “Or Indian.”

  “So I commented: Reagan would be rolling over in his grave if he knew how many American conservatives were fans of Putin.”

  “That’s what Obama said.”

  “What?”

  “What you just said. Obama said that.”

  “Maybe,” John said, frowning. “Empanadas?”

  “I’m sick of empanadas.”

  “The fancy mac and cheese place?”

  When my hands were dry, I found our most recent order and clicked Add to Cart, charged it to my credit card. John hadn’t said anything about the money he borrowed and I carried around his debt like my pet, stroking it when I wanted to remind myself how much he owed me.

  On our first date, John showed me his business card. On one side, there was an outline of a ghost. On the other, the same ghost but with a silhouette of a man inside. I thought this was very clever, possibly because this was the first date I’d been on with someone important enough to have their own business card.

  “How much does someone get for ghostwriting a celebrity’s book?” I asked him.

  “Guess,” he said.

  “A million dollars.”

  His cheeks burned red and he shook his head.

  “Two million dollars?” I hadn’t yet learned how to read his expressions.

  “No, it’s usually a six-figure deal and I get a percentage of that. Some upfront, some later. But I’m, uh, in between projects right now.”

  “Let me buy the next round,” I said and he didn’t argue.

  John’s ex cheated on him for months and he never had a clue. Once she finally told him, he was so depressed he couldn’t work. He lived on unemployment and credit cards. I met him while I was working at my nonprofit, so we were broke equals. We went on cheap dates: take-out arepas, dark dive bars with pitchers of bad cold beer, midnight showings of classic movies where we smuggled in our own Raisinets.

  We’d only been out a few times when he started telling everyone about me. The breakup with his ex had been so bad, like stage IV cancer, a life-threatening event you don’t recover from, and I was his miracle remission. I was his prize for surviving. Like a minor celebrity, I was beloved by people I hadn’t even met. When John read his friends’ emails and texts aloud to me, I flushed with happiness. One said, after seeing my picture, that we’re biologically drawn to people with big eyes, because it makes us want to take care of them. I thought I could take care of myself just fine thank you, but if my eyes made John choose me, then yes, I wanted to be chosen.

  Now that John was working again, when he did get a big check, once every six or twelve or eighteen months, we splurged. He didn’t have the foresight to t
ake $20,000 and divide it into allocations for the months when there would be no checks at all. I could tell him what to do, but it wasn’t my money. I wanted to feel carefree, too. Let’s go to Blue Hill at Stone Barns and eat waste-fed pork ribs with pickled lardo and fiddlehead ferns. He needed a new MacBook. I needed Hamilton tickets.

  This is what it will be like all the time, I told myself, once Richual is acquired. It was like a dress rehearsal for my future life. Trying on clothes off the rack without checking the price tags first.

  We refilled our Metro cards and paid rent. Then John took whatever was left and sent it to the credit card company, or made a back-taxes payment, and we were back to living on my salary, ordering Seamless, entertaining ourselves with HBO Go.

  When I needed a rush of sanctimoniousness, I could always go online and read other people’s money diaries. There was a urologist who didn’t think she’d ever be able to buy a home because the only time she ever felt good was when she was shopping and all her disposable income went to paying her credit card balances. An itemized breakdown of the skincare products in her medicine cabinet totaled $3,600. You’re an idiot, I thought. I religiously followed the blog of a single woman who shared her income and expenses every month as she tried to pay off the debt she’d accumulated having a baby: first, two rounds of IVF not covered by the only insurance plan she could afford as an aerial yoga instructor, then hiring the doula-tographer, needing a lactation consultant, and then the six weeks of time off from teaching yoga postpartum. At least with student loan or medical debt, there was some finite ending to the balance. But a baby? Get a real job, I thought. There was the married couple with over $200K in student loan debt from law school, but the wife stayed at home, and they sent their two kids to private school and only shopped at Whole Foods. Their parents paid the grandkids’ tuition, they said. The Whole Foods was nonnegotiable, they said. We’ll probably have this debt until we’re dead, they said.