My First Book, page 4
Dogs are girls who care. Girls who ask too many questions are dogs. Dogs comment on how high the ceilings are. Dogs want to know who this rooftop really belongs to. Dogs ask what your dads do for work. Dogs post sunsets on Instagram. Dogs throw up when they drink tequila. Dogs beg for games of rooftop tennis. Dogs ask where the Eiffel Tower is. Dogs wear too much perfume. Dogs stink. Dogs get mad when the boys kiss me or Zoe. Dogs don’t know how to keep it casual. Dogs whine. Dogs don’t want the boys to be happy. Dogs want to be held after sex, to be petted, to be taken care of. Dogs make a big deal when you get them pregnant. Dogs don’t know how to just take care of it while you’re with your boys in Greece. Dogs are too loud. Dogs get excited too fast. Dogs need you. Dogs just don’t get it. Dogs don’t get to hang out on the roof. It’s too high, they’re too wild, they might fall and then we’d have to catch them or something.
Little Lock
When I was ten I begged my parents for one of those diaries with a lock. I couldn’t wait to be thirteen. I couldn’t wait to have secrets. I couldn’t wait to write them all down and lock them all up. It’s no secret that I don’t always get what I deserve, but I do always get what I want. I’m spoiled and I’m a brat and for my tenth birthday, I got a sparkly pink diary with a tiny lock and a tinier key.
I want to be skinny. I want to be famous. I want to be loved. In that order. As much as I’d like to think these desires are secret, I know that they’re not. The yearning sits on my face as plain and clear as my freckles. All my vapid wishes are as obvious as my crooked front teeth. One smile and everyone sees it all, every secret hope I’ve ever had.
When I was eleven, I had a crush on a boy named Charlie with dirty fingernails and perfect pop star hair. Using my most special purple gel pen, I wrote his name in that sparkly pink diary again and again and again. Six hundred purple Charlies in fifth-grade looping cursive. I wrote it expecting something to happen, expecting him to feel it and notice me. He didn’t.
I realized that secrets are not magic. I wrote his name in Sharpie on my thighs. Thick uppercase Charlies all over. I wore my shortest skirt and guava lip gloss. I let his friends notice my legs, see his name, tell him, say my name.
I couldn’t read until the third grade. I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I could properly wipe my butt. All the suicide attempts I’ve ever made were half-assed. Are those secrets? Have I told anyone? Probably. Let me try harder. Let me think my most shameful thoughts. That’s all secrets are.
When I was twelve I watched beheadings before dinner. After dinner I went on Wikipedia and tried to figure out if they deserved to die. I didn’t ask my parents about what Charlie meant when he said that the song about she whose milkshake brought all the boys to the yard was about a whore. I wondered what whores did and why they had milkshakes. I didn’t ask my parents about the beheadings either. I loved not knowing. I loved that the world was full of secrets.
I want to have a baby. I want to get pregnant. I want an excuse to get fat and a reason to never make another half-assed suicide attempt. Don’t tell my boyfriend. I think cutting is healthier than Xanax. Don’t tell my psychiatrist. When that thing happened in high school I just chose not to feel violated. Don’t tell my classmates. I think trauma is boring. Don’t tell my friends. I think I might be evil. Don’t tell my mom.
When I was thirteen I got ugly. Nobody told me, but I knew it. It felt like the whole world was keeping a secret from me. I decided that I wouldn’t keep any of my own. I left my diary unlocked in hopes the whole slumber party would read it. They thought I was so weird, but then came Tumblr, etc., etc. I wasn’t weird for long. No one is weird anymore.
It’s not like I tell everyone everything. That would be boring. I keep things from my parents and I lie to therapists for fun. I don’t tell my long-distance boyfriend about the boy I sometimes sleep next to at school, but he knows I get lonely and that it’s cold there. When I’m home alone I’ll eat an entire loaf of bread. At night I wake up because I’m convinced there are bugs crawling into my holes. I thought Pizzagate was probably real. A secret satanic elite runs our world. I think about it all the time. I don’t tell anyone, but if they asked I would.
Part of me still believes that secrets are sacred and special, that secrets are what make women women, grown-ups grown-ups, and the world worth living in. I wish I could turn that little key and open that lock and write something for the first time about cheating or stealing or wanting or itching someplace awful. I wish I could turn that little key and string it on a chain around my neck and close that lock and put the diary away under my floorboards or pillows, someplace only I know of. I want to be skinny, famous, loved, and ten and thirty and held and able to hold that shame tight, the shame that I want and want, but I can’t. I never could and I never will. Instead I leave the key in plain sight. Everyone is invited to my slumber party.
Fig
I asked her lots of questions. Are you feeling okay? Does it hurt? Should I Postmate anything? Want a milkshake? Do you need to throw up? Did you know that I’m related to Sylvester Stallone? Whatever came out of her was also related to Sylvester Stallone. He wrote or cowrote most of his sixteen films, including the first three popular franchises, and he even directed many of them. I puked up the four GoMacro bars I ate while sitting in the waiting room. I don’t want to go anywhere. I used to want to go to Mariupol, but now I’ve almost had a kid and the war is already lost so why go anywhere?
It was not a mortal sin anymore. According to the new pope, it was grave but forgivable. She downloaded an app and told me it was about the size of a fig. It had fingernails. A forgivable fig with fingernails. A grave but forgivable little fruit of a sin. It would not have a grave. We’re burying it in our memories instead. It won’t be a big deal soon. Soon we can forget.
I’m thinking about how they say you can really gauge a place on how much you bite your nails and cuticles during the duration of your stay. When we went to Ground Zero I stared into the deep holes of those fountains and didn’t bite my nails once. I bought a mug that said never forget. She said the mirrors of the gift shop there were skinny mirrors. We took selfies. She told me how to pose and to look solemn. It was a place of mourning after all. It was our third date. Of course, I didn’t call it that at the time. Advice and insight about places you could go on a date interests me less than watching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Caligula on Broadway, Dasani water, or wearing a condom. I often flounder in disgust—imagine being a mathematician, there is simply too much to count.
The months went by and it was Christmastime. There was a blizzard warning that morning but the receptionist said, come in anyways. When we drove home through the snowstorm, the headlights illuminated the snowflakes, giving them little trails like sperm or like time travel or like Space Mountain. My cuticles were bleeding and so was she. I drove fast.
Time comes at you fast. The Plan Bs had become a prayer. She’d attributed her signs to gluten bloating and other gastro issues. Hot girls have IBS, or whatever that meme says. If I had to take a shot in the dark, she was two or three months. It must have happened in September. We weren’t being careful. It was a hot month, Indian summer or whatever. Maybe that expression is insensitive, like “Indian giver.” Crazy expression, when you think about it. That’s kind of what she was when I think about it, but I try not to. It’s insensitive and she’s so sensitive and even if it felt wrong it was her right.
It was so hot. We had just met. She was this vagrant girl with too many teeth. It felt like fall would never come. I remember us absolutely yipped up at the fancy bodega, buying her week’s allowance of nine 100 Grand bars and a tub of vanilla Häagen-Dazs to make milkshakes with. With her lips cracked and nose running, she told me about how she started seeing angels around the time of Trump’s election—very possibly just a coincidence that he had been elected and that she had been touched at exactly the same time, but I’m not a big believer in coincidence. The day after the election, the Archangel Michael appeared outside of her apartment window. He was fifty feet tall and built like a bodyguard. Later that week, he accompanied her and that veteran she met in workshop, who she used to see at that time, on a weekend getaway to Atlantic City. She still counts him as a good friend. Before she left for Thanksgiving at her aunt’s house somewhere in the Midwest, or maybe Florida, I forget, there was something she needed to tell me. But it’s something we can deal with after her trip. The angel was of course too large to stay inside the hotel, so he spent the weekend on the beach.
The blizzard warning people were right. I was driving. She was crying in the back seat. I wanted to look over my shoulder at her and smile a sympathetic smile, but there was black ice. I told her that soon it will be September again, and before that it will be summer and she can guzzle wine in Valencia and let the minnows bite her toes in my parents’ pond. I tell her that I’ll take care of her. And I do take care of her, after she took care of it. That’s what we’re calling it. It. It’s gone now. It’s going to be okay.
Before she left for Thanksgiving, she said she just wasn’t ready to be a mom. I wonder if my mother felt the same way. She never would have gotten rid of me, even though sometimes I wish she had. Ew. Sometimes I wonder what it is that I’m missing, or when I lost it, or where it went. Is it the flowers in my dad’s office, the plastic ones I watered anyways, or the war I never got to fight in, the mud and blood I missed, or all of my au pairs who went away? Then I remember that this loss is just the loss that comes with being born. Boring. My mother used to speak in tongues every morning, but now she watches Fox & Friends. Now she gets a mammogram every few months. She’s not even at risk for cancer; she’s just addicted to good news. If my mom hadn’t been born in Ohio she could have fulfilled all the prophecies ever written, but instead she was just a debutante with holy ambitions. She wanted something different for me, so I was born at Lenox Hill Hospital. The Holy Spirit still filled her up all the time. We used to get along, but now she’s dating this blockchain guy, Rick. As soon as she told me, I was planning the whole thing out, my whole fall: I’m going to have to help him carve up elk steaks, but before that, while I’m still here, we’re going to get rid of it. It’s just one of those things that has to be done.
I couldn’t help but wonder why the gynecologist, this normal, boring upstate Jewish guy, decided to become a vagina doctor. I mean, the nerve he had! That’s bravery. It’s so rare to be in the presence of bravery in our times. I told her it’s okay that she wasn’t ready. She was brave.
That September, after the day at the museum, we went back to her place. We shared wine with ice cubes in our new mug and toasted ketamine bumps off of a Medeco™ key. With her head on my chest, under her glow in the dark constellations, I thought not of her, but of where she might have come from, of my dad’s boat, of my Eurotrip and the ice hotel and how the cigarettes were so cheap in Greece. I wouldn’t have gotten up and left her asleep all alone if I’d known, but she didn’t have air-conditioning and I had no idea. By the time I got out of there, I barely wanted her anymore. There was a whole city to get through. On my walk home I stopped in search of Evian, spelling it backward in my head. I noticed the they/them at the self-checkout purchasing Vagisil. Their (?) kind mouth intrigued me, like a Maxim cover. I smiled at them. I could do anyone, probably, but I don’t.
In my daze and wonder, I missed most of the details, but she tells me it should be long over by the middle of her winter break. I wondered if she’d write a poem about this next semester, if the veteran would offer gentle constructive criticism. When we made it back to the cabin, I put her to bed and told her about the part in Rocky IV when Rocky takes the worst beating of his life but refuses to fall until she fell asleep and bled all through my Tempur-Pedic. I’m going to order one of those Caspers. A blood clot the size of a fig or a baby or a fetus or whatever. Did you know that Tempur-Pedic is spelled Tempur-Pedic? I didn’t either, but now we do. She tells me a fig is the size of a baby’s fist. She tells me it only becomes a baby at birth. It has to be over quickly, because Mother needs me in Jackson Hole. Rick has a place there. By the fireplace, I’ll let him go on about cryptographic keys and Byzantine fault examples. Then maybe I’ll smoke some hash I have tucked away from that extended Eurotrip. And if I get high enough, I’ll FaceTime her, and when she doesn’t pick up I’ll send her a heart emoji, the red one. Everything will be taken care of by then and no one will go to Hell. My mom and dad and her and him and all the they/thems and whatever was inside her, we’re all going to Heaven.
Cancel Me
It’s 2019. Max is canceled. Oliver is canceled. Kian is canceled. Evelyn is canceled. Rob is canceled. Bryce is canceled. Carter is canceled. These are names of people I have met. Names of people who have been canceled and stayed[*] canceled. Here are some names you definitely have heard: Roman, Louis, Woody, Kanye, Mario, Avital, Richard, Lana, Jia, Lorin, Luc with a “c.” I could go on. Some of them are rapists, some of them are racists, some of them used slurs, some of them did other things that we wish they hadn’t done.[*] I could go on. You could go on. We could go on together—write articles and fill out Excel spreadsheets and tweet a thousand tweets. I’m not in the mood, but I’ll put a blank space right here if you’d like to go on for a little while: ______________________.
If that blank space is not long enough, feel free to use the margins or to whisper the name or even yell it. Sometimes it feels good to yell. Let me tell you about the last time I yelled.
This Is the Story of the Last Time I Yelled
Jack[*] and Roger[*] are mad tonight. Jack and Roger are Ivy League boys with kitten-sharp teeth and Accutane skin. Their names are on that list and they don’t even care anymore. I am at the CVS with Jack and Roger tonight and we have been loitering, so cultured, so privileged. They are yelling at me and I am yelling at them. We are all too loud. The cashiers hate us, they just want to go home. We have no home tonight. We didn’t plan well at all. It’s pouring rain, uptown acid rain, hot Columbia rainforest rain, jungle rain. Jack and Roger are soaked, angry at the weather, angry at the world. I buy a thirty rack because Jack and Roger are trying to get drunk tonight. I can’t believe I’m here tonight.
Jack and Roger are sharing a piece of that one-dollar New York pizza. Their fingers are dirty, hair greasy, lips shiny. Their eyes are glassy Beanie Baby eyes. They don’t offer me a bite. They know that I’m on a diet tonight. They know how hot I’d be if I lost twenty pounds. They know I’m too nervous to eat. Jack and Roger are Fulbright Scholars hopped up on Adderall, ready to fight, ready to torture a baby water buffalo, ready to kill the Viet Cong, ready to party. They didn’t ask for this. But there was a sort of draft.[*]
Jack and Roger have been moving boxes and hating women. They are dripping. They are scowling. They’ve never looked better than they do tonight. They are sweating, shining under the fluorescent drugstore lights. Too bright for the cashiers. Too bright for anywhere but here. Too bright to ever go back to where they came from.
Piggy is having a party tonight. I’m invited. Jack and Roger are not, but Piggy’s building is right by the CVS and it’s raining and Jack and Roger are shivering. We arrive. No one buzzes us up. The ceilings are so high, it’s pre-war[*] or something like that, and in the lobby there’s a mirror that makes me feel like we’re at Versailles. I imagine Jack and Roger cutting Piggy’s head off. I imagine the things they carried. I imagine going to this party with my hands in theirs, but Piggy’s apartment actually belongs to Mimi. She pays the rent, she has roommates, and we are not allowed up. Understandably.
Piggy texts me to tell me that he knows what sort of boy I associate with. He knows, because he is one of those boys. Still, he wants to know what Jack and Roger are like. I don’t know what to tell him. I wish I could tell him that Jack and Roger are like us, but I don’t know what like us means anymore. After all that stuff happened, Piggy changed. There is no me and Piggy anymore, no us. Piggy is careful and impolite, fat from Abilify[*] and scared of everything, especially other boys. In response to his query about Jack and Roger, I tell him that they are wet. I send him a photo of Jack and Roger and their slice of pizza, to which he replies, “Oh, of course, you’re with that Jack.” I don’t need anyone to tell me that Jack is bad news. I don’t need anyone to tell me anything, especially not Piggy.
Jack and Roger are across the street now, yelling up at Piggy and Mimi’s pre-war window. The skinny silhouettes of Barnard girls take no notice. Jack and Roger are, after all, at war. Jack and Roger pull off condoms[*] and laugh.[*] Jack and Roger drink cheap vodka and read Jünger and dream of a more noble conscription. Jack and Roger ride skateboards to their therapist’s[*] office. Jack and Roger shoot BB guns off the roof of the Carlton Arms. Jack and Roger like to push it. Jack and Roger like to push each other. Jack and Roger like the smell of cement. Jack and Roger get so drunk. Jack and Roger are canceled. Jack and Roger make me so horny. Sometimes they make me laugh, but mostly they make me cry. I like laughing, but I love crying.
Uptown, upstairs, and on the internet, Jack and Roger are the bad guys, but they are not bad guys. They are just guys. If they’d been in the Ia Drang Valley or at Khe Sanh they would have been the good guys, kind of. They wouldn’t have run off to Canada or faked flat feet in the draft.[*] They might be in trouble, they might have done something bad, but they aren’t like Piggy.
