Problems (4 page)

“Eight,” I said, looking down to avoid her stare.

“Looks bigger,” she said. Was she crazy or lonely? Crazy people could be lonely. Loneliness could drive you crazy.

I put my bus pass in the slot. The driver smiled at me. Hot black guy. He had a shaved head, and I could see how muscular his body was through his blue
MTA
shirt. I imagined lying flat on my belly. How he would spread my ass cheeks so he could get a good look at his cock going in and out of me. Take out all his aggression about his stupid life driving in circles. The smell of potato chips hit me as I walked toward the back of the bus and sat next to a window. Someone's headphones were too loud.

My phone was ringing.

“Have you heard back about your thesis?” my mother yelled into the phone.

“No.”

“You should e-mail him.”

“It's only been three days since I turned it in.” This was a lie. I hadn't turned in the fucking thing. It was another cloud hanging over me.

“If you don't hear back by the end of the week—”

“I will, I will,” I said, regretting I'd picked up the phone.

“Did you read the story I sent you about the baby eagle in Mexico?”

“No, I didn't,” I said, feeling guilty I had deleted the article.

“There was this boy named Miguel,” she started.

The guilt instantly turned into annoyance.
Not now. Not now
. “I'm on the bus,” I said, digging around for ChapStick.

She kept saying, “What?” and I kept screaming into the phone, “I'm on the bus, Mom. I can't talk right now!” Why did the whole bus decide to be completely silent while I was on the phone? No teenagers laughing, no cell phones ringing, no mothers yelling at their kids not to touch the gum squished between the seat and the window. That feeling of embarrassment that fills you when you see people be mean to their parents. “I can't talk to you! Because I'm on the bus!”

Finally she understood, but she took it as a piece of information, not as a reason to stop talking and get off the phone, because she wasn't a normal person. She was a mother. Her frontal lobe had come out with her placenta. “So what day will you be coming up for your uncle's retirement party?”

This was a setup. She asked the question as if we had previously discussed it. When I told her I wasn't coming, she would act shocked and demand to know why, and then it was just a short hop and skip to the guilt trip, with a brief layover in Obligation City. These were our roles. This was our script.

“I can't come because I have to work.”

There was a pause. I was off script. She had to improvise.

“Why can't someone just cover your shift?” Pretty good.

“I asked, but nobody can.” Volley it back.

“It's just a bookstore! It's not like a real job.”

“Thanks. It's just my life!” A fat woman I didn't know existed till that moment turned around to stare. It was as if God had put extras on a bus to remind me what a brat I was.

“When are you going to start sending out those applications for teaching?”

“I have to graduate first! God! I told you that!”

“Then if you turned in your thesis you need to bother them.”

“It's only been three fucking days since I turned it in!”

When I was a kid, I brought home a picture from art class. My mother stared at it with a puzzled look and said, “Trees aren't purple. What is wrong with you?” I watched it sway in the air before it landed in the garbage. On the fridge was a test my brother had gotten an A on. A concise little story that played well in therapy.

Before I was about to hang up self-righteously, she said, “I've had trouble swallowing lately.” And just like that, she'd won. It didn't matter what she had ever done to me. She was sick, and she was my mom. Emotional kryptonite. The lump in my throat. With a snap of her fingers she could turn me into a lost six-year-old with tears running down my face, just wanting my mommy. Somehow that's what happens when you deal with the very first person you met on Earth.

I stared out of the messed-up bus window at a drunk taking a piss. This dirty town. “I don't know where all this mucus comes from,” she said. I listened with an overwhelming sense of fear and dread as she told me all the fucked-up things her body was doing.

It doesn't matter how old you are, after your mom dies, you will feel like an orphan, out there completely alone in the world.

You always feel like a champ when you make your mom laugh.

I picked shreds of tobacco from the ChapStick, listening to my mother. I found myself saying, “I would come, but I have a lot going on right now.”

I loved my mother. I felt bad that she wanted to love me, but she did all the exact wrong things. I felt bad that she could be so cruel, like when she threw in my face that I went to a shrink, as if that gave her the authority of the sane, and dismissed all my grievances. Not that it was her fault. Nothing was her fault. It was the way she was raised. She had my brother when she was just nineteen years old; like, what did she fucking know about anything? She'd never lived on her own. She went from her parents' house to her husband's house.
Her husband
. He wasn't easy. She was so bright and crafty, and she could have lived a whole life and not just been a glorified servant. Who could blame her for being nuts? Her father and her husband had deprived her of being a person. She was raised to believe the best thing to be was a wife and mother. It was so sad. And we were so hard on her. What do you do when your teenage daughter tells you she wants to die? When she cries and screams and disappears for days? What would you do? What would I do?

My brother told me there was a chair in her shower now. It was the saddest thing I could imagine.

Indians are always cremated. The body that grew from a baby into my mother would go into the oven and turn to ash with bits of bone.

It's important to drink milk because calcium is what bones are made of.

Her ashes would go where my father's had gone: the dark cloudy waters of the Ganges. Where sick people bathe. Where there is someone pissing, someone shitting, and someone vomiting right
now. And then my brother. And then, finally, me, the baby of the family, the last one to be dumped in the water, forgotten and dead, just like everyone else.

We would be dead, so we wouldn't care how disgusting the water was.

It took all the way from Fourteenth and Fifth down to Astor Place to shake off the guilty feelings.

I walked into Starbucks. I was always late to work. But after that phone call, I deserved a treat. A skinny caramel latte was 100 calories. But I needed all the sugar and caffeine and fat of a mocha frap, with a big unnecessary swirl of whipped cream on top, because death was serious business.

All the women in Starbucks were wearing cardigans. All the women of fuckable age, anyway. It was as if someone from wardrobe had come in with a rack of cardigans, and each of the women selected one. There are these moments in New York City when all the women are wearing different versions of the same thing, as if they all had gotten a memo, and you have to decide,
Am I going to join this trend?

If you don't get on board, you will feel like an out-of-touch loser. (
NYC
is like high school: trends, being judgmental, and how impressive it is when you find out someone has a car—
Really? You have a car!
) But if you do go with the trend, you will feel like a poser, no matter how much you actually like the scarf or skirt or whatever it is. Everyone who passes you will think you are just another follower. Loser or poser?

I walked into the bookstore at a casual pace, sipping my drink, chewing on the straw lackadaisically as I did not rush down the stairs.

“Jeez, don't you ever take a break?” I asked Ethan, who was sitting with his legs up on the receiving table with his eyes closed.

“I'm afraid of intimacy so I bury myself in work,” he said, not opening his eyes.

On Ethan's computer was a website of old men who looked like lesbians. Keith Richards. Elton John. Al Franken.

Justine came out of nowhere, like a ninja. “My ass hurts,” she said.

“Why's that?” I asked, drawing a stick figure on the info table with black marker.

“I got fucked in the ass last night,” she said.

Justine and I hung out, but we weren't
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
–type
BFF
s.

Justine's moment of glory was when this middle-aged woman had asked how the books were arranged, and Justine sang the alphabet at the top of her lungs.

Justine labeled the stapler, “Lady Chatterley's stapler.”

Before I worked there, former employees had scrawled labels on the reshelving carts, “Who carted?” “Miss Lonelycarts,” and “O brother, where cart thou.”

Justine told me, Ethan, and Mark about this piece of art that just sold for millions of dollars. You fed it food, and it turned it into shit. “I've been eating and shitting for free all these years like a sucker!” Ethan joked. Mark asked what would happen if you fed shit to it. Ethan said you would get more shit.

“Like the same amount of shit or twice the amount of shit?” I asked. Everyone laughed.

I gave the stick figure a hand and put a gun in it.

“Maya,” Michelle said. “So I don't know if you've heard, but they're sending someone to take over the textbook department.” Michelle was the general manager. She grinned as she clapped her hands silently. I smiled back. She went on, “They're going to expand this whole section. The counter will come out to here.” I didn't look up to see where she was indicating because I didn't give a shit.

“You must be happy you don't have to deal with textbooks anymore,” I said, slurping melted ice.

“I've worked my ass off at this store, and now all the burden and hassle of textbooks will be off my shoulders. I can finally make the store what I always wanted it to be. We can have readings!” she said, beaming and exposing her yellowed, plaque-laden front teeth. Michelle in her fuzzy sweaters, with her cozy beer gut and her slowly rotting teeth.

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound like I cared. My high was wearing off. My nose was a faucet that wouldn't stop. I wiped snot on my sleeve.

“Listen, I have to go meet John for dinner,” Michelle said.

“Someplace fancy?” I asked. I wondered if it was obvious how much I didn't care.

“We're celebrating. He got a promotion.”

“What does he do, again?”

“He does the same thing as Pete does on
Mad Men
,” she said, sounding as if she had used that line several times before.

Michelle had graduated from
NYU
, majoring in English, and she would work at this shitty job until she started having babies with her fat husband, and no one would wonder why she looked like shit.

When you're a fat girl and you make an effort with your clothes and hair, it's like, “Why bother, you're still fat.” Like you're saying to the world you're content with being fat. But if you just throw
on sweatpants, you are this fat girl walking around in sweatpants. Have some self-respect. You can't win.

After Michelle left, my withdrawal got worse. I was left alone in textbooks. I called up to Mark at the register.

“I have to take a huge dump.”

“Okay, why are you announcing that to the store?” There was laughter. I heard someone clap.

“What?”

“Take your finger off the intercom button.”

I took my finger off it. “I thought it was a one, not an
I
.”

“
I
is for intercom. How long have you worked here?”

“I was born in fiction and raised in science fiction.”

“I'll be down in a second to cover for you.”

Afterwards I stood frozen in front of the toilet, trying to figure out what to do. The toilet had problems flushing toilet tissue, and I had taken the biggest dump I had ever seen. I was simultaneously embarrassed it came out of me and fascinated by how weird my body could be. If only I could cut it up into pieces to make it easier for the toilet to, like, digest it. I looked around the toilet for something I could MacGyver together. There was a generic air freshener that made the shit smell worse by layering a waft of mint on top, sort of like how it's somehow dirtier to wear crotchless panties than to just be naked. I took the toilet brush and stabbed the shit. I ended up getting shit all over the brush and splashing some of the shitty water onto my sleeve. I was scared that if I kept at it I would end up with shit water on my face and spend the rest of my life scrubbing my face off. I put the shitty brush behind the toilet. No one would know it was me. People see shit, and they think of dudes.

“Don't tell anyone about the intercom,” I said.

“I wouldn't, Maya. C'mon,” Mark said. Mark was rail thin. He was Chinese American. Generations of his family had lived in
California. There was a hint of surfer dude accent in his voice. He was so small. Whenever I imagined myself doing him, I thought of a fat brown cow sitting on a beautiful little dove.

“I don't feel well.” My neck was sweating.

“If you want to go in half an hour, I don't mind closing without you.”

“Mark, you're too good to me.”

“I'm too nice. That's why I don't have a girlfriend.”

“No, that's not it. It's your clothes. Oh, and your personality and face.”

“Right. I forgot about those things.”

“Actually, you have a nice face.”

Awkward silence.

“Thanks, Maya.”

“I mean, not for me, but for, like, the world or whatever.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” He smiled. He was so sweet. I was a tease.

Mark went back upstairs, and I was alone. No one came downstairs after about seven or so. Only nonfiction and plays were downstairs. I picked up
Fun Home
, this graphic novel I was reading, but my eyes kept tearing up.