the habit of being

I tried to get a third bottle of wine on the way to the subway but it was after eleven and the store was closed. I wound up getting tonic and lemon from the bodega and a takeaway bag full of ice from the Bageltique in Park Slope, to go with the Sapphire Calgary stole from one of the million restaurant jobs she kept losing last year when everything was shittier than it is now and we used to go to the Magician for happy hour and one of us always got sick. We took their two bottles of white and the gin and the tonic and a corkscrew and a blanket and a thermos full of ice and my backpack and a computer and a camera and sweaters for if it got cold and a book to stick in the door so we weren’t locked on the roof. They poured the wine and I poured a very strong G&T because it was dark and I couldn’t see. Calgary taught me how to do kung-fu kicks and we talked about sex. Sex we’re not having and sex are having with people we shouldn’t be and sex we’ve had and sex we want to have and how bad kissers are just not worth the effort. We laughed and laughed and took pictures with the flash and the Manhattan lights were blurry and Carrie finally gave in and peed on the roof next door. We were 23 and almost-25 and almost-27. By two in the morning I was demonstrating yoga adjustments I learned in teacher training in 2003 and Calgary took pictures of me pressing on Carrie’s hipbones and she asked when it was her turn and apologized for not having shaved in a while. I wanted to get a bagel from the Bageltique which is open 24 hours but there was still another bottle. The computer took pictures of us and there was one spot where we could check our email, especially if I used my leg as an antenna. At one point Calgary said hey we’re having a good time, I’ve never had a group of friends. And I wasn’t sure three qualified as a group but we decided it did. Tomorrow we can get a manicure I kept saying. There’s this place on Christopher Street where there are manicures for $8.50. When we went downstairs it was after four and we needed to do handstands against the wall in the kitchen and that was when we realized how drunk we actually were. All three of us got up though. It was decided that I couldn’t go back to the West Village and we were having a slumber party and Carrie said I think I might take a shower and then the water was running. I still wanted a bagel but no one wanted to go to the Bageltique anymore so Calgary made me a minibagel with soy cream cheese but at first she didn’t turn on the oven. When she got out of the shower Carrie blew up the air mattress and gave me some yoga pants to wear and fell asleep in a heap. It was five and Calgary and I set two alarms for noon because she had to leave for the restaurant at 2:30 and we both went to sleep in Carrie’s bed. We got up at 10 or 11 and we were all hungover and hungry and Calgary took pictures of me and Carrie with rashyboo hair and sleepy eyes and it was Sunday so we needed vegan brunch. We decided to go to this place in the East Village which meant we had to go on the train and walk a ways and I kept asking are we there yet and then we almost didn’t know where it was but then we did. We had a cute waiter who was slow with the coffee and we all ordered the breakfast burrito with tofu scramble and vegetables and beans and guacamole and also the virgin sangria. Carrie couldn’t eat all of hers because she has a small stomach but Calgary and I did an impressive job considering the burrito was huge. Afterwards it was raining and we didn’t have an umbrella and Carrie forgot her leftovers but didn’t go back because that would be embarrassing. We weren’t far from my new favorite bus, the M8 that goes from the West Village to the East, which I had just learned about from Calgary who looked it up for me so I could come study with her at Sympathy for the Kettle. We found the M8 and got on it and they got off at St. Mark’s Bookshop and I went home to my apartment and it stopped raining and by then it was afternoon.

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?”

I watched the mendhi artist crounched down on the floor in her sari, going so fast with her brown hands on the Bride’s white feet. I answered people’s questions so she could keep on working. (I knew things because I wanted to do it myself once. I’d had a plan for a summer job at least, and had a kit shipped to me from India.) She told me her back hurt and that she’d been decorating brides the night before their weddings for 14 years.

I chipped the dried henna paste off of my hand with a butter knife at 6 am, then crawled back into M.’s bed and didn’t sleep enough. I dreamt I was a crazy heroin addict, walking around barefoot in wet green grass in the dark, disoriented and confused. I woke up anxious and cried over coffee. We’d overslept. I put my new pink dress back on and my bangles and my heels which I never wear because I’m so tall already.

I dried my tears in a Peruvian hand-made scarf I bought from my friend A. after we got back from the Mendhi Night. I went through the big duffle bags of soft fuzzy colors and she told me which ones were most fragile and which ones looked good on me and how long they took to make. She’d worked on an organic farm in Peru for a month and got them from a Lady there who made them without even a loom. I picked a deep red.

A. walked around her apartment naked and couldn’t find her lighter so we couldn’t smoke weed, but we watched Pirates of the Carribean and drank green tea. She fell asleep on the floor and I snuck out at 2 and went to the bar where M. was doing his reggae night and got a gin and tonic.

M.’s drunk best friend said “happy belated birthday, ma’am” and asked me what it was like to be 21 and Old. I cried about it when we got home at 3:30 and M. said “don’t cry,” because he was happy I was there and that I was with him. Then he fell asleep. I kept crying a little longer and looked out the open 7th floor window and I had the breeze on me and then had that awful dream where I was sick.

In the morning, my mother called and said she was getting ingredients for a lemon meringue pie and asked, “How was the party?” I said fun and good food and I got one hand painted and a billion bangles and it took an hour and a half to do the Bride. I didn’t tell her about A. being naked or M.’s friend asking me what it was like to be 21 when he really meant what’s it like to be 21 and sleeping with his friend, who is 38.

Today, I’m going to an Indian wedding.

i have had an epiphany. (just thought you should know). it is this: my Problem Of Late is not due to lack of friends, lack of money, or lack of sex. rather, it is due to lack of literature. somewhere, I stopped reading. i mean, not completely… but picking up Generation X or the fuzzy-handcuff chronicles for a few hours a week at Barnes and Noble is not Reading. i used to Read. my house, in georgia, is practically a library. reading is all but my mother’s full time job.. a week where she hasn’t read four or five novels is no week at all. and i was like that too! I was always reading something! something good! even when I was traveling.. god you should have seen that copy of War and Peace we had held together with duct tape, and our rained-on Rilke and everything.. and anyway, I Need that! I need books. lots of books. Literature, no less. and i’ll probably never have this much free time again in my life, and I’m not reading jack shit. i haven’t read anything really really amazing since The English Patient.. and what was that, a year ago? until now, that is! i absolutely devoured The Sound and the Fury this weekend, and it feels so good. like parts of my brain, parts of my heart even, are getting turned back on… and anyway, I bought Light In August too. and I’m going to go get in the tub and start that one. and maybe I just won’t stop. a fulfilling reading life is oftentimes just as important as a physical one.

. . .

All I want to do is Meet Someone, but I read and write instead. It’s more noble that way.

James used to tell me that if I sat around writing in public, eventually Someone would come up to me, someone who wrote too, and ask me what I was writing about.

I would tell them my whole life story, which is my wont to do, and I’d thus have a friend, or a lover.

No one, in my entire life, has ever done this.

. . .

I decided I wanted to go back to the Mountain. I decided the fact that there is only one coffee shop and no cucumber rolls to be had was workable, considering the natural beauty, the seclusion, the cathedral. To share an alma mater with Quentin Compson’s father and to have my financial aid provided for by Tennessee Williams would make up for having to live in the middle of nowhere for at least three years. However, having taken all this into account, I did not realize until I was already halfway through the application and had paid the fee that none of Sewanee’s merit-based scholarships are available to transfer students.

. . .

Every other week an Indian summer. My nails are chipping. My resolve is slipping. I am making a fool of myself.

. . .

again and again. i had a lovely time too, as always.

one of these days, though, in lieu of a thank you, i’m probably going to need to have this whole situation explained somehow. i honestly don’t have any idea what i’m getting/have gotten myself into. not that not knowing is necessarily a bad thing, but i’ve just never learned how to do the whole casual once-a-week thing. i don’t know the rules, not that i buy into having rules for emotional things in the first place. but anyway, i’m used to superheavy superintense superdrama (i.e., the anti-casual), complete with enough baggage to give atlas lower-back issues, and i’m still kindof trying to deprogram myself.

but hey, one day at a time, they say. today, for instance, i was at the grocery store (gasp), and i actually Put The Jar Of Ragu Back and got onions, peppers, tomatoes, garlic.. I am going to cook something myself. i don’t even know how long it’s been since i’ve done that. months. i feel like a bear coming out of hibernation! very exciting. maybe it’s the wind.

. . .

Sitting around with girlfriends drinking red wine and talking about penises. Talking about Peru. Andrea is going to climb a mountain. Lisa says put it on your credit card, it’s worth it.

I fearlessly ride the metro escalator, tipsy, with my torn suede coat and hobo bag. I haven’t had sex in a month today.

. . .

I rolled out of bed mid-afternoon, dragging the last ten unfinished pages of my book sleepily into the kitchen, where there was light. There is no unread Faulkner in the apartment now. My roommate lovingly ordered a used copy of As I Lay Dying from Amazon.com. Literature As Sex Substitute is my way of life this month, and it may as well be high school all over again.

. . .

I wonder if fiction writing can fall on you, like a sickness.. if one day I might wake up with some other storyline in my head. God, please let this happen to me. I would like so much to be freed of this diary. Please let me discover the third person. Please let me out of here.

. . .

Not so long ago, I was in a room with a hole in the wall. There was a Batman poster, a computer monitor covered with post-it notes, and a muted television set with a fuzzy reception. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there, but at least I was happy.

I slept with a man and his neighbor’s old black cat. It was after 3 and he fell asleep, so I turned off all the lights and set the alarm clock and tossed and turned. I barely knew him, and that’s what made this lovely to me: when you’ve slept with a man before you’ve even fucked, maybe there’s something there.

Maybe there’s not.

. . .

It’s not only that I don’t want to go home to the dirty apartment I should clean up and the fridge with no food. We threw away the moldy applesauce and there are not even any Poptarts left now.

It’s not that I come into work in the morning and scratch things off my list all day and add more and scratch more and yet always I seem to overlook something.

It’s not just the two hours on the phone with my mother, wherein we conclude that there’s no way for me to go to school for cheap now, the best way to kill yourself is by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge (it’s very hard to fail and you’re washed out to sea), and there are only two types of people in the world - mean and pathetic.

It’s that this was a happy conversation. A laughing conversation. For the both of us.

. . .

I want my Southern accent back. I may as well have lost an arm.
. . .

so it’s the beginning of thanksgiving and i just finished angela’s ashes, which is good for reminding me how much i have to be thankful for. because as much as i worry about having to pay three months of overdue this and that, i know as sucky as that is i can still pay my rent on monday and have plenty of food to eat. and even if none of my family lives here and i’m not doing a damn thing today and everyone i know is out of town, i don’t even eat turkey anyhow, and at least my personal brand of good-for-nothing-alcoholic-father called me from whatever treatment center he’s in this year to wish me a happy thanksgiving. and even when i was at my very lowest, i still lived in a country where i could be standing in a line at a convenience store in missouri or someplace with a rag on my head and hadn’t bathed in who knows how long counting change to buy some tropical skittles and the lady behind me in line would up and hand me fifty dollars saying “you look like you could use a break.”
i cried when frank finally confessed to the nice priest in the brown robe about having his first pint and hitting his mother and sending theresa to hell. i’ve always secretly wished i were catholic.
jenny’s in florida till sunday. maybe i’ll have another cleaning frenzy. or just keep right on reading.. chronicle of a death foretold (marquez) is next on the list.. and then as i lay dying (faulkner, again)
i hope you have a happy thanksgiving.

If you drink in the same house with others, but you don’t speak to any of them, is it the same as drinking alone? Does that make it wrong? Perhaps I should forgo the tonic run in favor of the keyboard - my original plan for the evening anyway, before I went to sleep at five in the afternoon, listening to thunder crashes and wishing the rest of the world might sleep too. I roused myself at nine, and reminded myself that after three hours and nearly $200 at the salon yesterday, I have very nearly the hair I have always wanted, and that should make a great difference in my life somehow, shouldn’t it? I also bought one of Kundera’s novels I’ve never read and The Artist’s Way at the charity used book sale for a buck each. Not that I don’t already have a pile of half-read and need-to-read books next to the bed, and the Japanese brush painting kit, and the 150 very small sheets of origami paper, the inch and a half thick September Vogue, the diary entries I haven’t typed up, the books to bind, and other projects contingent on my being home and planless and awake and not too depressed or uninspired to do something other than sit around thinking about how I don’t write enough/well enough/anything meaningful and how I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life, last some vague New York epiphany about how I could just keep studying the things I’m “studying” now (writing, yoga, Buddhism, etc) in college.

Monday night was Sex and the City, passed notes, Greek salad, and looking at teenage ice skating photos. Tuesday night was a non-corporate coffee shop, a massage, an attempt to spice up my sex life, reading Yoga Journal in the morning. Wednesday night was the Tori Amos concert, the third I’ve had tickets to and the first I’ve actually been able to attend. I know we’re not supposed to like her anymore, but I knew the words to every song she played, and sat there drenched and happy, feeling like a genuine long-time fan, quietly singing along. Thursday night I ate some sad egg noodles with Prego sauce, hormonal and pissy, my 1920’s finger waves mostly destroyed by a sweaty yoga 3 class all of an hour after I left the hairdresser, and felt better almost immediately after getting the hell out of his apartment around eleven, though I neither explained myself nor had much desire to have him understand my many and varied discontents. Tonight I slept, drank some raspberry vodka, was decidedly antisocial. Tomorrow, there’s sushi and a lesbian club. Such is life after returning from New York. The coming weeks promise long hours at the studio, and hopefully some much needed frugality after the insane spending I’ve indulged in these last few. I record these mundane things because someday they will interest me greatly?