Remember, you don’t have to make the whole world romantic, or even the whole bedroom. Just the small space in front of your face. A very manageable territory, even the working women will agree. Because when he looks at you (or she—romance has no biases!), he has to look through the air in front of your face. Is that space polluted? Is it rosy? Is it misty? Think about these questions during the lunch break.
We ate our sandwiches and looked at each other through the air in front of our faces. It looked clear, but maybe it wasn’t. We thought hard about this while we drank the provided soda. This could change everything.
I got up and stood alone in the hallway and pressed my face to the wall. It was wood-paneled and smelled like pee, as so many things do. Romance. My apartment. Romance. My Honda. Romance. My skin condition. Romance. My job.
I turned my head and pressed my other cheek against the wall.
The bell was calling us back together for the wrap-up session. Romance. My utter lack of friends who shared my interests. Romance. The Soul. Romance. Life on other planets. Romance. I stared down the hall. Someone was down there. It was Theresa whom I’d partnered with during breath-mirroring. We had synchronized our breaths and then syncopated them, and then we had talked about how that felt and which was more romantic. Syncopated was the right answer.
I walked down the hall and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best to just sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one. I knelt beside her. I rubbed her back, and then I stopped because I thought it might be too familiar, but that felt cold, so I patted her shoulder, which meant I was only touching her a third of the time. The other two thirds, my hand was either traveling toward her or away from her. The longer I patted, the harder it became; I was too aware of the intervals between the pats and couldn’t find a natural rhythm. I felt like I was hitting a conga drum, and then as soon as I thought of this, I had to beat out a little cha-cha-cha, and Theresa began to cry. I stopped with the patting and hugged her, and she hugged me back. I had made everything just horrible enough to bring Theresa’s sadness down to the next level, and I joined her there. It was a place of overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together. We could smell each other’s shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen, and I smelled that she didn’t smoke but someone she loved did, and she could feel that I was large but not genetically, not permanently, just until I found my way again. The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged their tired histories, tales of being over-and underutilized, floods and famines and never mind, just go. We wetted each other’s blouses and pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died, and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until, finally, it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom. There were things of this general scale to cry about. But the biggest reason to cry was to drench the air in front of our faces. It was romance. Not the falling-in-love kind but the sharing of air between our shoulders and chests and thighs. There was so much air to share. Gradually, we slowed, then stopped, and after a long, still pause—goodbye—we broke apart. Then the euphoria came, warm winds from Hawaii, drying our tears and clearing the path back to the material world. It was joy to be there, beside the chair. We held each other’s hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.
Theresa wiped off her backside briskly, as if she had taken a fall. I pulled down the cuffs of my cardigan. We walked down the hall and entered the auditorium just in time to help stack the chairs. There was no system for stacking, so we accidentally made many substacks that were too heavy to lift and join together. The stacks of various heights stood alone. We gathered our purses and walked to our cars.
Something That Needs Nothing
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a tiny bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse, and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.
We’re going now, Mom.
Where?
To Portland.
Can you do one thing for me first? Can you bring that magazine over here?
We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the studio. This was tremendously thrilling for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we’d met when we were children and seemed destined to sleep like children, or like an old couple who had met before the sexual revolution and were too shy to learn the new way.
We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.
With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We went at it with determination; three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted our ad to the local paper. Finally, the Portland Weekly accepted it; it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Did such a thing exist? We would also accept a woman of average means who had saved up her money.
The ad ran for a month, and our voice mailbox overflowed with interest. Every day we parsed through the hundreds of men to find that one special lady who would pay our rent. She was slow to come. She perhaps did not even read this section of the free weekly. We became agitated. We knew this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Could we pay Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. Was he interested in this old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. He wanted to be paid in the traditional way. Pip grimly began to troll through the messages for a gentle man. I watched her boyish face as she listened and realized that she was terrified. I thought of her small bottom that was so like a pastry and the warm world of complications between her legs. Let him be a withered man, I prayed. A man who really just wanted to see us jump around in our underwear. Suddenly, Pip grinned and wrote down a name. Leanne.
The bus dropped us off at the top of the gravel driveway that Leanne had described on the phone. We had told her our names were Astrid and Tallulah, and we hoped “Leanne” was a pseudonym, too. We wanted her to be wearing a smoking jacket or a boa. We hoped she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin. We hoped that she was
not the way she sounded on the phone. Not poor, not old, not willing to pay for the company of anyone who would drive all the way out to Nehalem, population 210.
Pip and I walked down the gravel path toward a small brown house. There was bad food being cooked, we could smell it already. And now a woman stepped onto the porch, she was frowning. Her age was hard to determine from our vantage point, a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus. She was perhaps the age of my mother’s older sister. And, like Aunt Lynn, she wore leggings, royal-blue leggings, and an oversized button-down shirt with some kind of appliqué on it. My mind ballooned with nervous fear. I looked at Pip and for a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.
She waves and we wave. We wave until we are close enough to say hi and then we say hi. Now we are close enough to hug, but we don’t. She says, Come in, and inside, it is dark, with no children. Of course there are no children. Pip asks for the money right away, which is something we decided on beforehand. It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting. Leslie tells us we are younger than she expected and to sit down. We sit on an old vinyl couch and she leaves the room. It is a terrible room, with magazines piled everywhere and furniture that could have come from a motel. We don’t look at each other or anything that is reflective. I stare at my own knees.
For a long time we don’t know where she is, and then, slowly, I can feel that she is standing right behind us. I realize this just before she pulls her fingernails through my hair. I didn’t think she was the sexual type, but now I see that I don’t know anything. It has begun, and every second we are closer to the end. I say to myself that long nails equal wealth; the idea of wealth always calms me down. I pretend I smell perfume. What if we all used expensive shampoo. What if we were kidding all the time and cared about nothing. My head relaxes, and I do the exercise where you imagine you are turning into honey. My mind slows down to a rate that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour. I see she is standing before us in a slip and it is not really clean and I die. I see that Pip is taking off her shoes and I die. I see that I am squeezing a nipple and I die.
On the long ride home, neither of us said anything. We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand. The money we had just made was also in that hand. Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home, and now we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more. Pip put the money in an envelope and wrote Mr. Hilderbrand on it. Then we stood there, apart, bruised and smelling like Leanne. We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery. I ran a bath. Just before I stepped in the tub, I heard the front door close and froze midstep; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me. With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back tonight. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood here naked until she returned? And then, just as she walked in the front door, I could finish the gesture, squatting in the then-cold water. I had done strange things like this before. I had hidden under cars for hours, waiting to be found; I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time. I studied my position in the bathtub. The foot in the water was already wrinkly. How would I feel when night fell? And when she came home, how long would it take her to look in the bathroom? Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone? And even if she did realize that I had done this impossible feat for her, what then? She was never thankful or sympathetic. I washed quickly, with exaggerated motions that warded off paralysis.
I paced around our tiny room. It didn’t even occur to me to go outside; I had no idea how to navigate the city without her. There was only one thing I couldn’t do when she was with me, so after a while, I lay down on the couch and did this. I closed my eyes. In all the well-worn memories, we were between the ages of six and eight. We were under the covers on her mom’s foldout sofa, or on the top bunk of my bunk bed, or in a tent in her backyard. Every location was potent in its own way. No matter where we were, it began when Pip whispered, Let’s mate. She scooted on top of me; we clamped our arms around each other’s backs. We rubbed ourselves against each other’s small hip bones, trying to achieve friction. When we did it right, the feeling came on like a head rush of the whole body.
But just before I got there, I noticed a clicking noise in the air. It was distractingly present, quietly insistent. I looked up. Above my head, our five Chinese paper lanterns were slightly rocking of their own accord. As I reached toward them, I suddenly realized why, but I was too late to stop myself. I shook a lantern, and from the hole in the bottom, cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling even as they fell. They were planning the conquest of wherever they landed even before they touched down. And when they hit the ground, they didn’t die, they didn’t even think of dying. They ran.
When Pip finally came home, we agreed that the Leanne job was not worth the money. But a few days later, we saw Nas-tassja Kinski in the movie Paris, Texas. She was wearing a long red sweater and working in a peep show. I thought it looked like a pretty easy job, as long as Harry Dean Stanton didn’t show up, but Pip didn’t agree.
No way. I’m not gonna do that.
I could do it without you.
This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive. I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles. In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.
I won’t do it, never mind.
You sound disappointed.
I’m not.
It’s okay; I know you want them to look at you.
Who?
Men.
No, I don’t.
If you do that, then I can’t be with you anymore.
This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew, but because of something else. Because we both didn’t want men to look at me. I told her I would never work in a peep show, and she stopped doing the dishes, which meant she meant she was okay again. But I wasn’t okay. In the last ten years, we had touched only three times.
1. When she was eleven, her uncle tried to molest her. When she told me about it, I cried and she hit me on the chin and I curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest and I could feel her looking at my body and I knew that if I kept my eyes closed it would happen and it did. She slid her hand under my tights and felt around until she had located the thing she knew on herself. Then she shook her finger in a violent, animal way that quickly gave me the old rush. When it was over, she told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t know if she meant this, with me, or about her uncle.
2. When we were fourteen we got drunk for the first time, and for about nine minutes, everything seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter seemed promisingly normal, and in the following days I waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.
3. In our last year of high school, I momentarily had one other friend. She was an ordinary girl, her name was Tammy, she liked the Smiths. There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me. Every day she told me everythin
g she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together. I wanted to talk about myself, too, badly, but it was hard to know where to begin. She was always so far ahead of me, in the minutiae of poems she had written in reference to dreams she had dreamed. So I just hung out, in a loose imitation of Pip. Pip did not think much of Tammy, but she was mildly intrigued by the normalcy of the friendship.
What do you guys do?
Nothing. Listen to tapes and stuff.
That’s it?
Last weekend we made peanut-butter cookies.
Oh. That sounds fun.
Are you being sarcastic?
No, it does.
So she came along the next time I went over to Tammy’s house. This made me a little nervous because Tammy had these parents who were always around. Traditionally, parents did not know what to make of Pip, who looked much more like a boy than a girl, and somehow made mothers feel flirtatious and fathers feel strangely threatened. But Tammy’s parents were watching a movie and just waved absently behind their heads when we came in. As predicted, we listened to tapes. Pip asked if we were going to make peanut-butter cookies, but Tammy said she didn’t have the right stuff. Then she threw herself down on the bed and asked us if we were girlfriends or what? An appalling emptiness filled the room. I stared out the window and repeated the word “window” in my head, I was ready to window window window indefinitely, but suddenly, Pip answered.
Yeah.
Cool. I have a gay cousin.
Tammy told us that her room was a safe space and we didn’t have to pretend, and then she showed us a neon pink sticker that her cousin had sent her. It said FUCK YOUR GENDER. We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings—at least two, probably even more. Tammy seemed to be waiting for something, as if Pip and I would obediently fall upon each other the moment we read the sticker’s bold command. I knew we were a disappointment, meekly sitting on the bed. Pip must have felt this, too, because she abruptly threw her arm over my shoulder. This had never happened before, so understandably, I froze. And then very gradually recalibrated my body into a casual attitude. Pip just blinked when I sighed and flopped my hand on her thigh. Tammy watched all of this and even gave a slight nod of approval before shifting her attention back to the music. We listened to the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, and the Sug-arcubes. Pip and I did not move from our position. After an hour and twenty minutes, my back ached and my numb blue hand felt unaffiliated with the rest of my body. I politely excused myself.