Bathwater Blues: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “This feels weird.” Addie grabbed her bag and crumpled it up in her hands, the burger still warm and squishy inside.

  “You’re just nervous,” Jessica said. She messed around with her phone a little longer, and then looked up expectantly. “Now what’s your number?”

  ✽✽✽

  Her mother didn’t hesitate getting up when she came through the front door, jumping instantly from her seat in the kitchen, mouth jabbering, like a guard dog greeting an intruder.

  “You sure left in a hurry this morning,” she said. Addie kicked her shoes off and dumped her keys. “Did you hear me speaking to you, or did you purposely ignore me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Addie gave her a fleeting glance as she turned down the hall toward her room. Her mother followed, footsteps quicker and lighter than her own, though she felt their vibrations at her heels like scurrying rats.

  “I’m guessing you don’t work today?”

  “No, it’s my day off.”

  “Maybe you’d like to help around the house then?”

  Addie stopped in her bedroom doorway, turned to face her mother. Her mother stopped, folded her arms, head cocked back, an accusation of some kind.

  “Like with what?”

  Her mother studied her for a moment, looked her from head to toe, seemingly forgetting the conversation altogether.

  “You really went out looking like that?”

  Addie rolled her eyes and made to shut her bedroom door.

  “Wait a second,” her mother demanded. Addie paused. Her mother shifted her weight agitatedly from leg to leg, chewing the inside of her lip. She flicked her head, sweeping hair away from her face.

  “What?” Addie asked.

  “I think you should ask to move in with your boyfriend,” she said. The color was rising into her gaunt face. “I think it’s high time for that. I’ve had it with this attitude of yours.”

  Her mother turned then, leaving back down the dim hall toward the kitchen. Addie stood frozen in her bedroom doorway, shaking her head.

  “I’m not the one with the attitude,” she said, and took a step into the hall after her mother.

  Her mother wheeled around on her, jabbing a deliberate and vicious finger in her direction.

  “You’re twenty years old. It’s ridiculous that I’m still taking care of you, especially given the way you treat me. You’re ungrateful for everything you’re given, and I won’t put up with it any longer.”

  “You haven’t given me a fucking thing,” Addie said, trembling. Her legs were icy beneath her, wobbly, hands tingling, shoulders tense. “You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for dad. You’ve done nothing for any of this. I don’t owe you anything.”

  They faced each other in silence for what felt like a very long while. Her mother tapped her foot on the carpet. Addie realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled noisily. Then her mother grunted. She waved her hand at the air, a signature gesture at this point. She returned to the kitchen.

  Addie took a deep breath, swallowed a lump in her throat.

  She returned to her room and shut the door.

  ✽✽✽

  Her phone rattled on top of her dresser, startling her. She set her book aside, crawled to the end of her bed, and snatched it up.

  “Is this Addie?” the text read. An unknown number. She hesitated, holding her phone tight in her hand. Her eyes drifted beyond her phone, burning a hole into some imaginary portal in the background with wordless, panicky, weed-whacker thoughts.

  “Yes who is this?” she replied.

  She set her phone down.

  She knew who it was. But suddenly her stomach was alive with beating paper wings. Ice cubes. Some giddy fizziness. She had nothing to be excited about, she knew. She’d tell him it was a mistake. She shouldn’t have given Jessica her number. In fact, she already—

  The phone vibrated against her leg.

  “This is Sam. I think Jessica mentioned me?”

  Addie hesitated once more, but not for long.

  “She did. She was very… adamant about you. Sorry.”

  She threw her phone onto her blanket by her feet and fell back onto her pillow. Flushed. It felt like charity. Jessica felt sorry for her, seeing her how she was. Why she’d set her up with Sam was unknown, but… maybe Jessica thought it would be a nice gesture, a pity date with a friend. Addie had to find a way to back out as nicely as possible without wasting any more of his time…

  ZzzzzZzzzzZzzzz.

  She swiveled around on her bed, snatching up her phone hungrily as she did.

  “Don’t be sorry! As embarrassed as I am that my friends have to figure my dating life out for me, I’m glad they do sometimes. :)”

  Addie didn’t know what else to say. Perhaps now was the time to turn him down. He seemed nice, but that was easy in text. He probably was nice, though, which was even more reason to save him the trouble…

  The phone buzzed again.

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  She hung her head, ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Not much. Why?”

  She didn’t drop her phone this time. She cradled it in her lap, staring intently at its dark glass until it illuminated again with the promise of another message.

  “You want to get something to eat? Pizza? Or whatever you’re in the mood for. I know you had a burger earlier, so I won’t suggest that lol.”

  Addie caught herself smiling. She looked to her bedroom door, a ghost of guilt settling in. She leaned across her bed and pulled the blinds in her window apart, letting in the dying daylight. She was mostly convinced she wouldn’t hear from Carter again, so was there really anything to feel guilty about?

  “Pizza sounds fine. What time?”

  A dozen seconds.

  “How about 7? That’ll give me a couple hours to adequately doll myself up.”

  The butterflies were still there, but she didn’t feel sick. Surprisingly, she felt excited, a swelling in her lungs.

  “Lol sounds good. Where at?”

  She’d need to finally shower and put on proper clothes—clothes which might even please her mother, though that wasn’t the goal.

  Her phone buzzed again, and she found herself smiling before even reading his next message.

  ✽✽✽

  She finished getting ready. She stood before her bathroom mirror and observed herself, something she normally avoided. Her clothes were simple, but simple was all she owned and she didn’t think pizza required anything more. Jeans—nicer than the ones she’d worn earlier—and a green, short-sleeved button-up shirt she liked. She hated doing her hair for any occasion, and simply brushed it. Not bad. Not horrible. It was as she studied herself, getting ready for her date, that she realized she didn’t even know what Sam looked like. Did he know what she looked like?

  She left into the hallway and started for the front door, intent on leaving wordlessly as she’d done before, though she knew her mother couldn’t have it.

  “Where are you off to?”

  Addie glanced up as she bent to put her shoes on. Her mother approached her in the darkening foyer, and flipped on the light.

  “You sure look cute,” she said cynically. “What’s it for?”

  “I’m going on a date,” Addie replied. She took her keys from the dish.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Her mother clasped her hands together at her belly. “Maybe he’ll ask you tonight.”

  Addie paused, straightened. Her mother assumed the date was with Carter, of course, as anyone would.

  “Ask me what?”

  “Well, to move in!” Her mother grinned. “Seems likely.”

  Addie remained still, considered nodding politely and leaving. Such course of action was often best with her mother. But something about the way she smiled then unnerved her: her excitement to be rid of her, like a weight off her shoulders. It wasn’t anything new… but for one reason or another, tonigh
t it made Addie’s teeth grind.

  “Or…” She hesitated. Letting out her frustrations now would only spoil her mood for the rest of the evening. Lately it seemed harder and harder to hold back… “Or maybe he plans to dump me tonight.” The smile faltered on her mother’s lips. The keys in Addie’s fist started to pinch. “I mean, it’s been months since he’s asked me out anywhere. Maybe this is his way of finally ending it. Letting me down easy, like the perfect gentleman he is.”

  “Why would you say that?” Her mother put her hand to her heart, as though she’d just received devastating news. Addie had seen the gesture a couple times before. “Why the hell can’t you be happy about anything for a change?”

  Addie scoffed. “You’re the one saying how great he must be to want someone like me. Maybe he doesn’t anymore. Maybe he finally sees me the same as you.”

  She turned, pulled open the door, stepped onto the cool porch, shut the door behind her, and stormed across the lawn toward her car, wishing she hadn’t opened her mouth, wishing she’d left without turning back, wishing she hadn’t even responded to Sam’s messages in the first place.

  She got in her car, stuck the keys in the ignition, paused. She could still cancel. She could tell him something came up, something important, something she forgot. She could lie to him. Or she could not say anything at all. She could stand him up, leave him clueless. That was something Addie would do, she thought, something selfish, something rotten. What she did best: hurt people. She didn’t have to say or do anything, and she could hurt them just fine, an attribute written in her DNA. People saw it in her face, her eyes, like an aura. Ugly. Inside and out, they sensed it. Her mother saw it. That was why she wanted her gone. Why Carter wanted her gone. Why Sam would want her gone.

  Why the hell can’t you be happy about anything for a change?

  Addie started the car, cranked the radio until it crackled, and pulled away from the curb. She accelerated against the dark asphalt, stained yellow under streetlamps, a sky of stars and branches full of twinkling green overhead. She rolled the window down to let the biting wind inside.

  Her eyes would never see the plummet waiting beyond. Such things were impossible to see, to predict: thoughts into words, words into actions. A jagged cliff, its edge kissed by a starving void, and nothing at the bottom to catch the wreckage…

  She drove on, into the suburban night, familiar and frightening.

  Chapter Four

  There was a car parked at the pizzeria with a silhouetted body in the driver’s seat. Addie parked next to this car. She shut off the engine and waited, taking shallow breaths. The other person turned their head to see her. She patted anxiously at her jeans, staring at nothing in her lap but watching from the corner of her eye. The interior light came on in the next car, then off.

  A couple seconds later there came on a knock on her window. She looked up and smiled as if surprised. She opened her door.

  “Addie, yeah?”

  She looked into his eyes very briefly as she stepped out of her car, almost just a blink, and then turned them down to the ground at her feet. She nodded in response.

  Don’t act so nervous.

  She led them toward the pizzeria’s entrance across the parking lot. She looked over her shoulder as Sam followed. He was watching her, a faint smile on his lips. He looked friendly enough. He was handsome, wholesome. Whereas Carter relished being skinny and pale as part of his image—his comfortable-in-his-own-skin attitude—Sam’s appearance was much more… meticulous in comparison: carefully dressed, fuller in body, not a hair out of place. Addie thought his eyebrows, while thicker, looked more precisely plucked than her own. She felt shrunken before him.

  They approached the doors and Sam reached ahead and pulled one open for them both. She tried to say thank you, but her voice only cracked in a pitiful whisper.

  A couple minutes later, after going through the counter line, they sat in one of the booths, their chosen pizza slices on plates before them.

  “So Jessica told me a little about you…”

  Addie looked at Sam again, only the third time so far, and was stunned by how even more handsome he’d become under the indoor lights. She took a drink from her cup of water. She feared what he saw then, what she must look like under the bright overhanging fluorescents. How could Jessica possibly think they’d be a match?

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, she said you were both friends in high school. Not super close, but in the same circle. She said you were the smart one.”

  Addie paused mid-bite. Sam smiled. She looked away, wondered if he smiled at the thought of her being smart, or if he smiled at how awkward she was. She’d never known herself to be “the smart one” nor had she ever heard it from anyone else. Where had Jessica gotten that from? She also realized she’d only smiled once so far, and that’d been out in the parking lot. It was hard to remember your face in the midst of so much blinding anxiety.

  “I don’t know if that’s accurate,” she said. “Maybe the quiet one. There’s a big misconception about that.”

  “About what?”

  “That the shy, quiet people are secretly smart.”

  She smiled then, but couldn’t hold it for long. Sam smiled as well, but softly under a furrowed brow. She was being insecure. He felt sorry for her. He was probably beginning to recognize the differences between them, she thought. He was one kind of person, and she another. Lesser. He was probably used to dating women similar to himself: confident, independent.

  “Well,” he said, and took a bite of his pizza. He continued speaking with a mouthful, and Addie was glad. He wasn’t completely perfect. “I’ve also heard that many truly intelligent people underestimate their own intelligence. And likewise, many dumb people overestimate theirs. There’s a term for that, but I can’t remember.”

  They ate their pizza for a short while without saying anything at all. Addie couldn’t think of anything to say, and guessed it was just as well. He must not have known what to say either, given how uninteresting she was. And the less they spoke, the sooner they’d finish their pizza, and the sooner they finished their pizza, the sooner they could part ways and forget all about each other…

  “So what do you like doing?” he asked. “With your free time, I mean. Hobbies and such.”

  Addie considered. “I read a lot…” She considered some more, and found it difficult to come up with anything unique or remarkable. “I listen to music…” She could hardly look at him for more than a second. Next she could say she enjoyed sleeping. “Actually… I really don’t get out much.”

  It was honest. That had to be worth something. But judging by the healthy glow of his skin, he probably wasn’t accustomed to staying home like she was.

  The more she spoke, the larger the wedge became.

  Sam nodded and took the last bite of his slice. His eyes wandered around the restaurant. Getting bored, she thought.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “I could use some of that in my life, actually. Keeping busy all the time is overrated. We all need to slow down sometimes.”

  Sometimes, Addie thought—try all the time. When she reflected on the last few years, she remembered it as a slow blur, an empty halt in both life and time alike. Insignificant. But his words were purely meant to be agreeable. He was being nice. Nothing more. He’d lost interest, she could tell, and was only trying to let things fizzle out calmly. What was worse, she thought, was that he probably didn’t think she realized it for herself. They’d go to the parking lot, hug, maybe even only shake hands. He’d tell her not to be a stranger, and then they’d never see each other again. She fleetingly wondered if she could save the date by suggesting they leave, go to his place. She’d give him what he wanted, and get something for herself in that way. Carter seemed to enjoy it. Maybe Sam would too. There were other stimulations than conversational. Perhaps she could prove to Sam there was something yet to like…

  “Well, that was good,” Sam said, and clapped a hand to
his flat belly. The transition to getting the hell out of there, Addie knew. “How was yours?”

  “Good,” she said. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  “No, thank you!” he said. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you.”

  It didn’t feel like they’d talked about anything at all. Addie didn’t think they’d been in the pizzeria for fifteen minutes. It didn’t take long to disappoint…

  “I’m sorry if I’ve been a bore,” she said. “I’m not used to this whole dating thing.”

  “Oh, you have nothing to worry about,” Sam said. Beads of sweat gathered on Addie’s temples. In a flash, it seemed her face might slide clean off her skull from the heat. She couldn’t believe she’d apologized. Pathetic. “I’m honestly terrible when it comes to settings like these. I never know what to say. I get pretty nervous myself.” He laughed.

  She couldn’t do it any longer. She couldn’t listen to another second of his sympathetic reassurance. She wished he’d be honest, that he’d tell her directly that it wasn’t going anywhere. He could even phrase it kindly if he wanted. He didn’t think they were compatible. She’d understand the real meaning: that he’d expected better. He’d probably message Jessica later, facetiously berating her for setting him up with such a dud.

  She got to her feet.

  “Well, I enjoyed having dinner with you.”

  He looked surprised. Possibly relieved, she thought. He stood as well, staring directly into her eyes as he did—observing her, it seemed—and she pulled her gaze away. She noticed other couples sitting at tables and booths, smiling, laughing, in deep conversation, lip biting and bedroom eyes. She looked at him once more, remembered her frightened face, and smiled curtly. Then she turned away and led them toward the doors.

  She thought she might scream once inside her car, once he’d driven away. That’s what she wanted to do. Replace the humiliation with self-sorrow. Melodrama. Something to wash it out. An outburst large enough could numb you for the rest of the day, she knew.