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?”