Problems (7 page)

They should have girls with eating disorders do commercials for food.

I ate all but one bite and threw it in the garbage. There was a strong desire to take it right back out and finish it.

I found my phone, but it was dead. I found a charger, but then I realized it was Peter's. So where's mine? All this technology, and
you end up like a caveman, hunched over, trying to figure out what plugs into what.

If I called Ogden, he would be pissed off. It pissed him off to hear about my feelings. He kept me chained a million miles from his heart, and when I cried, he thought,
See, this is why I keep her chained so far away
.

He could be cold as fuck. Sometimes I cried and his eyes turned to these points of endless apathy, like, “Go ahead and fucking die.”

Peter was too stupid to take care of me, and Ogden was too fucked-up. I would be middle-aged soon, and who in the world wanted to be with a middle-aged woman?

I called Ogden. He didn't pick up. The blurry images of him with another girl. A blurry girl with long brown hair and fresh white skin and tits with huge areolas. Opening her legs. I kept calling. I cried into his voicemail. I shouted into his voicemail. I sounded like a child. I sounded like someone you might not want to call back right away. Where is a good emergency when you actually need one?

When men stop wanting to fuck you: Poof! You disappear.

I took three Xanaxes and watched
Bob's Burgers
on my laptop till I passed out on the couch.

* * *

“We're going to be late,” Peter said. It was twenty past seven. We had to be at Penn Station at eight.

“It's not going to take forty minutes in a cab,” I said.

“There are no cabs.”

“There'll be one, just wait.” The wind blew in my face. My head hurt. Why did I ever agree to go to his parents' house for Thanksgiving? I cursed the past me, the one who hadn't considered what the present me would have to go through.

The past me was always fucking with the present me. Like agreeing to go jogging at nine in the morning, like agreeing to help people move, like making doctor's appointments at eight o'clock. Thinking naively, “It will be good for me to start the day early.” But when the day finally arrived for whatever, that past me with too-high expectations for myself had totally fucked present me.

The psychiatrist had given me Suboxone. Suboxone was the new methadone. Like methadone, it blocked dope, but Suboxone took longer to leave your system. You could see people nodding outside methadone clinics. Suboxone never did that. It didn't give you a real high like methadone, but it was something. It felt like you had drunk an entire pot of coffee and then took some shitty speed.

“Maya,” Peter started, but then a yellow cab with lights on turned the corner and I was saved from whatever tangent he was about to go on.

I slid into the seat, put my headphones on, and turned up the music. It was some indie band, singing, “Everything's a mess,” and then something about a heart, and then I couldn't understand the words. Peter put our bags in the trunk and slammed the door a little too hard.

Penn Station was packed. Kids twirled around. Tired parents studied the departure board. Peter went to pick up our tickets. I stood and waited for the gate number to appear. I called Amy,
my college roommate. Amy had been calling me every night since she started working the late shift. She was going to be visiting her in-laws.

“Hey.”

“Hey, what's up?” she said, sounding tired.

“I'm at Penn Station, and I don't want to go,” I said, sweating in my big coat.

“It will be fine.”

“They don't know we smoke. I'll have to sneak around like I'm fourteen again. The sister is a Jesus freak. The brother and the brother's girlfriend, Sue, who is hot and is studying to be a doctor . . . a fucking doctor. How do I compete with that? What do I do? I'm fat, and I do nothing.”

“You're working on your thesis.”

“Amy, I'm not.”

“They don't know that.”

“Amy, I'm using.”

“When did that start?”

“I never stopped.” I had told her I stopped. “But I stopped today. Today I'm clean.”

“Good,” she said. “Are you anxious?”

“I need a Xanax, and we haven't even boarded the train.”

“Yeah, well, pause for a moment and feel bad for me. I'm in weirdo white-trash world Upstate with Dennis.”

“Yeah, how's his mother?”

“Maya, this morning I woke up, and she was sitting on the couch dipping saltines in a jar of generic mayonnaise. Watching an infomercial like it was a real show.”

“That's disgusting,” I laughed.

“There was a pork chop on the counter. I mean, with no plate or napkin or anything.”

“Get out off the phone. The train is boarding,” Peter said, tickets in hand.

“I got to get on the train. I'll call you,” I said.

“Okay. Have fun.”

The train would have made a great target for a terrorist attack. It was packed.

“I don't think we'll be able to sit together,” I said as we slowly made our way through the car.

“Shouldn't we at least check the next car?”

“We could, but what's the point?” I said, eyeing the car for an empty seat by the window. There wasn't one. I collapsed in an aisle seat. Peter stood there like a wounded child. A woman in the next aisle stood up and offered him the window seat next to her.

I closed my eyes. If there was a bomb, it would be so fast. What would I feel? Probably heat and pain, and then nothing. It could happen any second. The train started bumping along. No such luck. Mom, in that big house in the suburbs slowly wasting away, always complaining of her failing body. The thought of a quick death didn't seem like the worst thing. Age is meaner than death.

There were trees and sky, and the city receded farther and farther behind us. Another world. It was hot. I wanted to take off my coat. I thought that ten more times before I actually took it off. I'd worn my denim skirt and a red blouse. At home in front of the mirror, sucking in my stomach, it had looked elegant, but as I sat there, my fat rolls pushing against the elastic of my skirt and falling over the top button, it felt awful. My stomach growled. The worst was to feel both fat and hungry.

Peter came over. “Want to go to the dining car?”

“Yeah, okay.”

The only thing Suboxone didn't help with was the sweats. The back of my head and neck were wet.

The windows were huge, and the air felt easier to breathe. We sat in a booth.

“Can you buy me a bottle of water?” I asked him.

“I only have two singles.”

“Just use your card.”

“I don't know if they take cards.”

“For Chrissake, Peter, go and check. I'm dying of thirst.” He got up. Cheap bastard. Never wanted to spend a penny. He rolled his own cigarettes and refilled my old water bottles to take with him everywhere, even though he made good money. When we'd first met, he worked in the bookstore as a merchandiser and made next to nothing. “I make everything pyramid shaped,” he'd said on our first date. What good was all that nagging to get a better-paying job if he still refused to spend a dime? “But we're making more money,” I would say. “Yeah, well, we need to save it.” I'd asked a million times but never really understood what we were saving for. He came back with a brown box and a can of beer, a bottle of water, two packs of M&M's, and chips. He sat down in front of me. His eyes, as innocent and guilty as a child's, tried to gain my forgiveness.

“I had to spend at least ten dollars to use my card,” he explained.

“Oh, thanks,” I said. He was trying to be nice.

“Are you mad?”

“You were just being so awful this morning.” All morning, bustling around like a maniac, sighing and cursing to himself. Annoying the shit out of me.

“I'm sorry. I just get so anxious. Can we please just try to be nice to each other? I don't want to have a bad time.” As if I did? That was the implication, that I wanted everyone to be miserable. He popped open the Bud and took a long sip.
Great
, I thought,
just drink. Go be fucked-up in your world, and leave me here alone to deal with reality
.

Lily Tomlin once said, “Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.”

“Okay, well, don't act like a jerk,” I said.

“Can we please just watch
The Simpsons
on the laptop?”

He opened the laptop while I looked out the window, trying to decide whether or not to let him off the hook. My brain was tired. The sky looked so open outside of New York, not just above, but all around. A few brown trees, open fields. People were always saying how crowded the world was becoming, but outside of that window, there was so much space left.

Grace, Peter's sister, met us at the train station. She was wearing a flowered, matronly dress and, strangely, one white glove. She hugged us. I was pissed I couldn't sneak in a cigarette before she came.

It was colder. I zipped up my coat and buttoned it. They walked ahead, Peter carrying my two canvas bags and his one small tote.

Christ
, I thought.
It's happening. We're really here
.

“What happened to your hand?” Peter asked Grace in the car.

“Oh, I burned it. I was frying zucchini in a pan and put in too much oil, and I tried pouring some of the oil out into a bowl, and it dripped down my hand.” She laughed the way girls laugh, like, “I'm such an idiot, aw shucks.”

“That sucks,” I said. Peter shot me a look. “Sucks” wasn't the right word. Should have gone with awful. “How awful”; that would have been the right thing.

It was an unspoken rule that everyone dealt with Grace with kid gloves. Grace was the type of girl who had “victim” written on her forehead. She was so trusting and so unsure of herself.

“So, what did you think of Sue?” Peter asked. His voice had changed already. A little bit more corny.

“Oh, she is
so
nice. Last night she helped with dinner, and she's so much fun, which is good for Jake. You know how serious he is.” Her face relaxed in a little smile.

Helped with dinner? Oh god, this Sue was worse than I thought. When I came to visit two Christmases ago, I hadn't helped with anything. I caught the flu on the train down and spent the entire four days of our visit shivering or sleeping in their clapboard house. Only one small
TV
in the enclosed porch, which the whole family crowded around. Peter's mother bringing bowls of chicken broth, his father not knowing what to say, eyeing me.

“I thought you liked working at the bookstore,” his father had said when Peter told them about the new bartending job I had “encouraged” him to get. Jesus, why did he have to implicate me in it? So now I was this girl who made their son work himself to death in some sinful place so he could buy more stuff for his fat wife to stare at.

At least it wasn't Christmas. On Christmas, Peter's mother, Sandy, sat down and asked if I knew the story of how Jesus was born. “Like, in a barn,” I had said. And then she told the story with the wise men. It was long and didn't make a whole lot of sense. Their depressing tree and his mother wearing a reindeer sweater would break your heart. I got thermals. Peter got socks. They talked with unabashed glee about how cheap the gifts they got for one another were. It was like upside-down world. “There was a bin marked 50 percent off,” Grace said as her father admired the gloves. “Oh wow, and they're green,” someone said about their socks. You had to keep saying nice things. I wasn't very good at it. There was a moment when my disappointment showed as I opened a present. The whole thing was so weird—to spend as little money as possible and to be as excited as little kids about receiving stuff that sucked. How was this fun? What was I going to do with these green paisley slippers made for a five-year-old? Without a word, I instantly put them on. Peter texted me; I hadn't said thank you, so I said, “I forgot to say thank you. I love these slippers.” I couldn't pull it off. I should never have said anything.

I tried every year to teach them about gift giving by giving them actually nice things, but this seemed to embarrass them, like I didn't understand the cheapness rule. One time I gave them each an eight-dollar bacon-chocolate bar from Whole Foods in their stockings, and really nice bubble bath stuff for Sandy, perfume for Grace, an iPod speaker that looked like a panda for Jake, and for their father, an iPod shuffle. They eyed the bacon-chocolate bars but wouldn't even open them. I tried not to get involved when Peter bought his family gifts, but it was hard not to interject and pick out better things.

We pulled into the driveway. The sky looked naked without any buildings to cover it. The house was small and yellow. Before I could figure out a way to sneak off to smoke, Grace nodded at me to follow her through the side entrance.

Everything was way too bright and way too noisy. I thought of the sanctuary of Elizabeth's bedroom when she was strung out: darkness and a movie playing on a tiny laptop screen. Candles. Getting off dope was like coming back from the dead and like being reborn. The way to kick was to make the world as warm and womblike as possible. The birth experience of the bustling scene at Peter's parents' house was jarring and raw. Everything hit too hard, and emotions came out of nowhere. Their sad little house they were so proud of. How they had worked hard and done their best. How they loved their children. No matter where you went on Earth, there were parents who loved their kids and laughed at their jokes and wanted to know everything they did.

Behind me, Peter was carrying all of our bags like a Sherpa. Their skinny, tired son carrying all the bags while I walked in empty handed.

“Oh, it's so good to see you,” Peter's mother said as she embraced me. His father asked if Peter needed help. Peter shook his head. “Where are we sleeping?” he asked.