the habit of being

My girlfriend and I live in a house of blood and tears, of wine and tampons and hairs collecting in the bathtub drain. We live in, not a house at all, but a two-bedroom apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in a 1914 building, as far from the nearest subway station as you can be, without being closer to another one. The rent checks are perpetually lost or forgotten. The pipes hiss, the air smells faintly of rot or mildew when you walk in the door, and everywhere there are books. The books remind us of our expectations for ourselves, and how we are not quite living up to them.

Colonies of hairpins camouflage themselves in my grandfather’s oriental rugs, which we hauled up all those stairs and which, like my giant bad, do not belong here, but in that other life I might have had but didn’t. That life with art and hard wood floors.

I make my bed in the middle of the night, I line up loose bobbie pins in rows on my suitcase-table. She fights with her boyfriend on the phone. Through the wall, I can’t really hear what she’s saying, but I can hear sharpness, pain, I imagine ‘I’m not angry at you’ and ‘I’m just so mad.’ I would like to storm into her room, take away her cell phone, stroke her knotty hair until she sleeps, tell her I’ll always love her in those ways boys never do. But because I am meek and don’t do things like that, I feel helpless to help her. We live in a house haunted by the afterimages of boys, of men, of male needs and uncertainties. What is there to say, really? PMS? I sleep till noon and she is gone when I wake up. I eat boiled shrimp and fruit roll-ups for breakfast. I’m afraid she’s not eating enough, but then I’m jealous of her figure.

* * *

Sitting at the library on a Saturday night, wearing my mother’s skirt, my shoes off, my feet up on the desk, I’m licking melted Twix bar chocolate off my finger. There’s a sour taste in the back of my mouth, like an early morning kiss after a night of too much drinking. I’m at the end of my third novel by Joan Didion. I’m feeling a sisterhood.

Didion’s girls are California-crazy, and this is a craziness I slip into easily when I read the novels. I’m mostly Georgia-crazy myself, but I’ve been my own brand of crazy in California, so I can say that she writes it well. She could write me in Redlands with my ever-twisting ankles, counting pills like sheep, counting change at Carl’s Jr. The details of all that are far off now, but the feeling’s still there. Once you’ve traveled a certain distance on the path of desperation and frailty, you never quite get off it, even if run up north where the heat won’t get to you and no one asks you how you’re doing.

Now I get my sleep, I am nice, I only date men with self-control. Maybe some day I might even have some money, but I suspect that I’ll never quite transcend my most desperate self. I’ll be the same girl protagonist in that story about standing on street corners fund-raising for the evacuation of her womb. Somewhere I’m still fainting little by little, living for ginger ale and tropical skittles, using sex to merge my considerable hate with my considerable devotion. The desperation is somewhere in my mismatched socks, my frizzy hair and hairy legs, the way I’m not dressed well enough for the winter or the rain, the scratchiness of the tag in my neckline, my fuzzy teeth, my crying spells.

* * *

A story from my mother:

An English teacher embarks upon the 4th step in AA. The fourth step is a personal inventory - basically, an admission of everything you’ve done wrong. The English teacher was thinking publication from the get-go, and used four carbons when writing out his story. He worked on it for a year before he realized he’d completely missed the point of the fourth step, and still had eight more to go besides.

(The same English teacher was well known for his recording of The Step Book. At Willingway, the rehab patients listen to tapes of other people’s personal stories and of relevant anti-alcoholism literature. The English teacher had a beautiful reading voice, and thus felt it was his duty to sit down with a bottle of bourbon and record himself reciting the classic text.)

Also:

“You shouldn’t complain about your fucked-up family - we’re material.”

“I know you are. Who’s complaining?”

Under the covers, I slowly unwrench my back; my vertibrae pop. First thing in the morning, threadcount is the measure of my happiness. My sheets are freshly laundered. I rub my feet against each other. I do not want to get up.

It is cold and bright outside my bed. I am tired from dreaming so hard. I peak outside the quilt timidly. The light from the window pierces my eye, white lightning strikes my retina, and I retreat. In the sheets I shut my eyes again, tears float up toward the corners, and then the pounding sets in. The apartment is shaking with a drum beat. The clock ticking. The water dripping from the bathroom faucet. My heart echoing. Bam bam bam. Get up get up get up.

* * *

I’d be so thin if only it weren’t for the fat that spills out over my hip bones.

Every headache or mood swing is a potential pregnancy. Every quiet moment is a potential poetry. The more I live the more I realize I am unfit to write. Yet I hope for some revelation.

* * *

I guess we were happy, sometimes. Or, there were some times when we might have called what we were happy. I liked riding in his car when he was driving and it was dark out. When he still had a car. I’d slump down low in my seat and look at the stars. Or I’d lean over and put my head on his shoulder, though there was stuff in the way and most of me wasn’t comfortable. Or I’d put my hand in his pants and later he’d say he thought he’d have an accident. I never could tell the difference.

* * *

I walk around my apartment with a fist full of hair on the back of my skull, searching for a ponytail holder, a “hair tie” as they say in the north. I never think to let go my hand while plundering, and my arm gets tired and the hairs peak out from my scalp in little waves.

I want to talk to no one except my mother. My mother with her hair so like mine, her twin grip unyielding. I wonder if she could teach me everything. I thought not as a teenager but now I find her wise. And yet she says I taught her compassion as a child. I wrote in my very first little journal - My dad has lots of problems. But I love him, just because he’s my dad. Did I? Do I? Yes, I do love my father, but it’s not just because he’s my father. Everyone has lots of problems. It seems the more problems someone has the easier I find them to love.

* * *

A letter comes from my father in That Place. He includes a print out of the Twelve Steps of a Relapse. Step 6: I became willing to help people get rid of their defects in character. He says he couldn’t help but think of my mother. He also sends me seeds, folded in the plastic of a cigarette pack wrapper. They’re little brown seeds in the shape of tiny imperfect hearts, which are not referenced in his note. He’s working at a plant nursery, though, and my little half sister is 13 and really bloomin’. She’ll be dancing in the Nutcracker this year. He says nothing about the seeds and I do not know what they will grow. Or if they’re even seeds. I cannot imagine what else they could be. My mother asks me if they have any smell and says well whatever you do, don’t smoke them.

* * *

A blonde-headed girl in a blue pinafore and little socks stood holding her mother’s hand in the early morning dew. She was dressed as if for Sunday school, but it was not Sunday. It was Thursday - abortion day at Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge. The girl’s mother held a sign in her other hand, a blow up of a blown up baby, and a look of righteous indignation set across her lips. I did not hear the women shouting or the men shouting. I did not attend to the gruesome placards lining the street. I walked along the other side of the road in my ragged clothes with only my head scarf to protect me from all those glaring eyes, and I could not stop staring at the little girl. You shouldn’t be here, I wished I could tell her. I wished I could tell her mother. I shouldn’t be here either.

* * *

I don’t have any realization to impart. I haven’t realized anything new. Not today or the day before. I read on the subway, I sleep in my warm bed, and I long for that which I do not have. These things just continue on. I just go about my living, seeing things now and again. I have occasional silent moments of great calm, and even then somewhere I will tell myself I ought to write about this feeling, but I cannot. I would rather just have the moment and let it be. I will curse myself for it later, when the moment is gone and I can’t conjure it back, but I hope that I have them saved up somewhere inside of me, a little glowing spot. Such greed. Why is it that I am so obsessed with forgiveness and yet give no thought to being thankful?

* * *

My little brother has written a poem or two that we cannot help but admit are good. The thing that seems to bother me the most, apart from that I was supposed to be the writer in the family, is that he didn’t have to do anything wrong to get these poems. They’re not swollen with guilt, loaded with regret. A good writer is made by his honesty, not by his drama. I’d hoped by writing I might somehow make my drama useful.

And there’s also that he hasn’t spent years upon years trying to write before now. How wonderful it must be, to suddenly discover writing.

What if we’ve got only one shot at representing something? The more times one tries to write about something the more confused the something becomes with the writing. What if I’ve mined my life already?

* * *

My stepfather won’t give up his tub of change for Christmas. My mother just doesn’t understand. He wants to fill it up, he says. She says, If I’d've known that I wouldn’t've gotten him such a big tub. It’s a big galvanized silver thing from a hardware store. It has two handles, but even only halfway full I can’t lift it. He puts his pocket change in it every day after work, when he lines up his wallet and his comb and keys. I guess it’s a nearly a year’s worth now. Apparently when she said she wanted it for Christmas gifts, he rolled his eyes. She’s told me this on the phone three times. He must not even like Christmas, she says. But I’ve sure he’ll relent. I don’t know how they’ll get all that change to the bank, but I’m sure he’ll relent.

* * *

I have vague notions of the art I could be creating, and yet I slip into my clean sheets and say, tomorrow, tomorrow. I envy the clicking keys of my neighbor, working, yet let her metronome pass me into dreamlessness, all hopes for tomorrow. But tomorrow I will only again be seduced by vile television, consumerism, candy, politics. Tomorrow I will do no better. There is no tomorrow for an artist. There is only now. If I am not creating now it is unlikely I ever will. And so it is that I meet my worthlessness and caress her in my fresh linens, my messy room, my cold city.

In the lab, I was told that a notebook that loses pages is not a notebook. I wrote this truism down immediately, in my notebook, which is falling apart.

How much of my everyday life would qualify as panic? By professional standards? For instance: my heart is often pounding. My dreams are often bad.

When my benefits come through I could see someone. I suppose.

It took me two months to remember that the second anniversary of my death had gone by. I overlooked it because I was too busy moving. I moved to New York two years, to the day, after my abortion. How else could I have missed it? I know the day very well. Coincidences of this magnitude convince me, more than anything else, that there is God.

I told him that the blood clots were the size of plums. They were plumlike in many ways. He said he had no idea. He held me and I cried. As could be expected.

In the park, a man in a yellow robe handed me a daisy. He smiled and the daisy was white and a little bit droopy.

I vomited on the train. I made it to the second-to-last stop, my eyes closing heavily and opening slowly and everything rocking and rocking. I got most of it into my bag but some on my coat and when I told him, he didn’t understand why I hadn’t just puked on the floor of the train. But then what would I have done?

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and tried to pretend it had not happened, that no one had seen. I got off at my stop and walked home in the late-night drizzle, with my kitten-ear hoody hanging off my shoulder and my bag full of vomit. Someone honked at me. Someone always does. Later, I wiped a mushroom off my cell phone.

I want to get married and have a baby.

I shouldn’t be at home now. I shouldn’t be feeling the lavender-scented bubbles slip down the backs of my thighs. I shouldn’t have been in the bath, reading about crazy women and their lost children and how those lost children made them crazy. But I don’t feel well. I feel dizzy and I don’t know which came first anymore.

Now, when my mother tells me how she cooked something, she does it in a serious way she never had before. Like she’s just realized I am an adult and there is a place in my life for recipes.

The man in the yellow robe was only an actor. His smile was fake. Someone filmed him handing me the daisy. I got up and left it on the park bench.

I did work on Sunday. If I did work on Sunday, why should I have to do work today?

There’s a tin can of grape leaves beside my bed. I have these sheets with a high thread count and two ink stains. I have those screaming kids under my window, the job I didn’t go to, the nausea behind my stinging eyes.

Also, why’d I stop going to my yoga classes? And did someone really call me ethereal? In my presence? Could I OD on echinacea?