This Is Between Us (13 page)

I noticed a bunch of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that I had stuck up there when we first moved in. I had forgotten all about them. I wondered if they still glowed, if they still worked.

…

I would get dizzy in the morning. I forgot to eat sometimes, and then someone would say, “You look like you’re losing weight,” and I’d think to myself:
Oh, yeah. Food
.

I’d get shaky. I would see little ghostlike shapes (glow-in-the-dark moths) in the periphery of my vision, like I was tripping on mushrooms. I’d sit on the toilet and notice a pattern on the bathroom rug. It was a Persian rug full of circular flower and ornamental leaf designs. One part of it looked like a face with an O-shaped mouth. I imagined it saying, “Eat a banana. Eat some vegetables.”

I made Vince his school lunch. It was uninspired: half of an almond butter and jelly sandwich, a granola bar, and an apple. I knew he probably didn’t care, but I imagined his disappointment and it made me depressed.

I ate one bite of leftover scrambled eggs and called it good. I told myself that it was okay to be hungry.

…

When we were apart, the hardest part of the day was waking up. I’d stand in the shower, letting the morning fog in my head clear away as I peed down the drain and wondered if I had a clean towel to use. I would feel tired, sad, and dull.

I tried to think of things I was lucky to have: a loving son and a decent job and I wasn’t sure what else. It would be all too easy to let those things slip too. As a single parent, I felt that I lacked the strength and creativity required to raise my young son. I needed help with him, and I feared that he would become bored or distant from me, maybe taking up with the other wild screeching kids around the neighborhood, roaming the alleys and mini-marts like packs of wolves. At work, I was becoming unfocused and letting things slip. I was showing up late and unshaved, and I wasn’t saving guest reservations properly in the computer. One day, I lost a couple’s luggage for an hour and made them late for the airport.

I had no idea what other job I could even get if I were fired. There was an old Pepsi-Cola bottling company down the street from me and I always thought I’d have to get a job there if everything fell apart. This imaginary me, wearing a Pepsi uniform and driving a forklift or loading a big truck, would be my lowest low. And if I ever did fall to that, a soulless factory kind of job that barely paid me enough to get me by, I also could see myself eventually failing even more and becoming homeless. Then I’d really be down to zero. I would look back at this numb time in the shower and feel like I had been extremely fortunate even to have had what I had—a half-empty apartment and a refrigerator with four or five items in it.

I tried to ignore the cold feeling of the air around me as I turned off the water.

…

There were days when I was so close to tears that I didn’t know what to do. I walked around, feeling hollow, off-balance. I went to the mall and floated through it aimlessly, hoping that something could swing my emotional state one way or the other. I went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror to see if that would do anything. It just made my eyes hurt.

I sat outside the lingerie shop and let my mind wonder about the women walking in and out, but my emotional state remained flat. I sensed a bunch of vague mental hurdles that I needed to jump over, but it wasn’t happening.

Then I made my way to the toy store and listened to the sounds around me—the excited shouts and the occasional temper tantrum—and it finally came. I made awful creaking wheezes with my throat and my nose ran sloppy with tears and dripping snot.

After I cleaned myself up (the cashiers came quick with the Kleenex), I wandered down to the music store and found a listening station with the most American rock ’n’ roll I could find.

…

When I wasn’t feeling depressed, I would have random moments of euphoria. I would be driving my car, excited that my future could be open, untethered to someone, and I would loudly sing along to the music on the radio. I would drum the steering wheel and punch the roof, the road ahead of me without stop signs or streetlights or speed traps. I would fantasize about arriving at a house in the middle of nowhere, all its windows open with curtains fluttering in the warm breeze, where a beautiful woman I’d never seen before would have sex with me without any strings attached. Then I’d get in my car and drive away as this woman—someone who couldn’t speak English, perhaps—leaned exhausted against her front door, mouthing words that I couldn’t and didn’t need to understand.

…

Should we have considered this “breakup” a draw? Didn’t we both raise our white flags and wave them blindly at each other?

I never thought that you were as unstable as I was. I never knew if we were secure enough to look past all our combined baggage.

Was it sometimes best to ignore certain weaknesses? Did we pretend the scars weren’t there? I learned that some things couldn’t ever add up. Scars plus Time still equals Scars. Your mom had said to you before she died, “Scars last forever, but so does love.”

You wanted to move back in with me. You moved back in.

We tried to focus on the positive. We tried to ignore the negative. We realized that nothing would be perfect. I wondered in my mind what Time plus Imperfection equaled, but I couldn’t care, couldn’t dwell on it. I was tired of math.

You appeared in my bed again at night. Things felt better that way. Life fell back into some kind of order. It was a start. A new start.

…

When you moved back into the apartment, I knew that it wouldn’t be good to separate again. Our commitment had to be deeper this time around.

One night you wanted to take me out for a reunion drink. “This new place I found looks really cute,” you said, driving my car. We pulled into the parking lot for Spirits.

“Oh,” I said.

I couldn’t tell you that I’d been there before, with the wife of a soldier. It would have just caused an unnecessary fight. We went inside and I made sure we sat in a corner booth, where I could keep my eye on the door in case Lucy came in.

I liked Spirits a lot, but I had to make a sacrifice. I started complaining about everything. I said my drink was too weak. I made fun of the jukebox, the neon lights, the other customers.

When we left, you said, “Well, I guess we won’t be going back there.”

We got in the car and I said, “Let’s go to Holman’s.” That was the place we usually went to, so you said okay.

“What’s this place called again?” I asked, pulling out of the parking lot.

“Spirits,” you said.

“I don’t think it will last very long,” I said.

…

We decided to skip work and have a day where we just stayed in bed and talked about things. Sometimes you think you don’t have anything to talk about with me, but all you have to do is turn off the
TV
and the Internet and we find other ways to fill the silence. The slow time.

The blinds weren’t shut all the way, and the sun flickered through, sometimes lighting us up and sometimes going dark. There must have been clouds passing by. “I feel like I’m on
LSD
,” you said. You told me that you had taken three pills for anxiety. I can never remember what they’re called. “I really am a pill popper,” you said. “It’s just part of my makeup.”

We took turns picking out
CD
s to listen to and talking about ex-lovers from before we met. I caught myself rambling on about one woman whom I didn’t even have much in common with. I suddenly felt dumb while I spoke of her, but I wanted to finish the story. I wanted you to hear the end of it (about how the woman moved to Alaska and gave me a fake phone number that I dialed repeatedly for six months).

Then you talked about the one lover that you never thought you’d be able to let go of. You actually had an old letter stashed away somewhere and you found it and read it to me. “Just so you know he was worthwhile,” you said. You started reading the whole letter, and it was long. There was a stream-of-consciousness style to it that I appreciated but sometimes felt lost in. I wanted to stop you but I didn’t. I felt like I had to absorb this other guy’s feelings, and then I would better understand you. But I also felt like that was a previous version of you, and I didn’t want to understand it. I have a new version of you, I thought to myself.

Later in the afternoon, before the kids got home from school, we went for a walk. We stopped for coffee at an espresso cart. I joked with the barista and asked him if he could make a heart with the foam on my mocha, and he said he would try. He said he could do hearts sometimes or he could do apples.

“There’s not much difference between a heart and an apple,” you said to me as we walked away.

“An apple is just a fucked-up heart,” I said.

We stopped at a park and you swung on a swing. “I get nauseous doing this,” you told me. But you were swinging really high, and I was trying to look up your dress.

Before we started back home, you said, “I want us to write love notes for each other.”

We sat by a fountain and you looked for paper and pens. You had two pens but nothing to write on.

We decided to write on our paper cups. I turned mine carefully as I tried to write neatly, my shaky letters spelling out the story of a recent good day with you. You watched over my shoulder for a while and I told you not to look. You wrote something for me too, but your handwriting was much neater.

We traded cups at the end. We read them and laughed. We toasted. We drank. We brought them home and kept them.

…

I still keep all the notes you’ve written for me. Scraps of papers you slipped in my coat pocket with sweet words and dirty promises. Letters you mailed to me whenever we were apart. Birthday, Valentine’s, Christmas cards—some handmade and some store-bought.

I also have the nightgown you wore those first nights we were together, the one that looks like it could have belonged to your grandmother. It’s the color of cloudy lace, with blue and red flowers embroidered on it. A little tattered around the hem, by your left knee. You tried to throw it away, but I wanted to keep it. I put it in a box with other keepsakes. You found it and tried to throw it away again. I hid it from you better the second time.

I have things from other girlfriends too—photos, letters, a guitar, a thermos from a camping trip, an old suit that doesn’t fit me anymore, a stack of poems stapled in the corner.

Once, in my twenties, I was moving and I threw out a box of souvenirs from my high school girlfriends. I regret that now. I sometimes wish I could go up to the attic and rummage through a box and randomly come across a close-up shot of Andrea’s puckered lips coming at me—a blurry reminder that someone loved me even in my crudest hormonal phase. There were several letters from a sophomore girl named Mandy, all of them soaked in her mom’s perfume. I don’t remember her voice or her eyes or what we talked about. But I remembered the way she smelled riding home in my car with me. That’s past tense now:
remembered
.

We’re at the age when we start to forget things from our lives. You’re worse than I am—you don’t even remember all your boyfriends’ names. That’s why I want to store my things away, keep them where I can find them. The good stuff for sure. Sometimes even the broken stuff. There’s a lot of that around too. I can’t bring myself to throw it out. I always think to myself:
I’ll fix that someday
.

The other week, I found a large hourglass that you bought for me when we were in Florida. It was originally about a foot high, filled with dark sand. We had it shipped home and it arrived broken. I’m not sure what I was planning to do with it, but I put it in the attic right away, like it might mend itself alongside the other memories up there. But it was still just shards of glass and sand in the box we shipped it in. I was tempted to run my fingers through it.

…

We watched an old
TV
show from the nineties and chuckled at the jokes we’d heard before, but underneath our familiar laugh track there was an unsettling déjà vu. I used to watch this show with my ex-wife and you used to watch it with your ex-husband. This kind of unintentional nostalgia started to poison the air around us by the third commercial break. We couldn’t figure out why we felt like shit when we got in bed.

An hour later, we were out of bed, putting on our shoes. We walked around our neighborhood, then the next one, and then the one after that. We looked through people’s windows to see what they were watching. We searched the sky for
UFO
s or comets. We started jogging and then cutting through yards, stealing flowers. We sprinted down the middle of the streets. We wanted to sweat this out.

…

We tried to incorporate food into our sex. Whipped cream was an obvious choice, and we used up a whole can of it in a couple of nights.

We played with chocolate syrup, but only in small doses. You didn’t want to get the sheets messy, but you tolerated my enthusiasm.

Then we tried using honey, but it was too sticky and uncomfortable. “It’s fucking up my trim,” you said.

I rolled off of you, licking my fingers. I wondered if we really had to do something different to keep our sex life exciting. Maybe we could try bondage or some kind of kink, but that would feel fake. Still, would it hurt to try something different? It’s funny how self-conscious we became about making mistakes.