Once, at age nineteen, she’d tried changing her first name to Lexie, which didn’t take and, a decade later, still made her feel ineffective and femme. She was an intern. Then she was a paid intern. Then she was a paid intern again.
She also hostessed at a restaurant that, on weekends, let her bartend Boozy Brunch. She made bloody marys, mimosas, maybe forty dollars in tips.
For a long time she’d been getting her food products from a bodega where a radiant clerk sat all day behind some grimy bulletproofing, selling batteries. In the morning, when she came for her coffee, they talked. If she seemed, or said she felt, empty, he would open the cage for a hug. He noticed her moods—mostly detachment. He might mention when her hair was clean. On these days he comped her coffee. Alex felt that they were friends.
Her last day at the poetry press happened to be her thirtieth birthday. The clerk called Alex baby-faced. “You’re much older than you look.”
She wore her hair long and wet over a black dress she’d bought for a funeral the year before. Now people offered their reassurances, not to worries; she “had time.” A sneeze-adjacent feeling that preceded tears prickled behind her nose and eyelids. She had seven dollars in savings. Twelve in checking. She couldn’t even be buying the bottle of sparkling water between them. She wept while he comforted her in soft tones. What could he get her? What did she need?
Already she missed her internship and even her restaurant, which was staffed exclusively by actors, the worst people in the world. She was moving the next day, with her boyfriend, to Ann Arbor—“Uh huh,” she’d complain, all Boozy Brunch, “Michigan.” The youngest, hottest actor staffing the restaurant would yell something along the lines of “Go blue.” He’d gone there for undergrad. A bubble of nausea opened under her ribcage, always. On cue, she poured them both Jaeger shots.
“Babe, it’s a cute college town,” her boyfriend assured her, sounding like everyone she would eventually tell. In this way he scared her, cute being code for banal. Their conversations, too, leaned more and more towards platitude, maybe a consequence of her boyfriend’s increasing good fortune, but they’d lived together a year and still had sex that ended in orgasms and the program offered health insurance—mental, dental, medical—to partners. She’d spent a long time alone with his acceptance packet, a glossy, serious pamphlet that seemed expensive to print. Surely she’d find a real job through which she could distinguish herself in Michigan, having finally—like Freud or someone said—love and work, the things that made a life real.
Health mattered as well. Alex had her weird symptoms she planned to start addressing. The last medical professional she’d seen was a pediatrician called Dr. Gentling. She’d gone in because her chest hurt. Gentling said her “breast buds” were growing. He omitted what they were made of. She could feel the little lumps still. She also experienced facial and digital numbness, headaches that felt like her brain was being squeezed, dizziness, faintness, electric-seeming shocks, an ominous nightly gurgling in what she believed to be her liver. Plus her teeth felt loose in her head. She had friends who’d had teeth fall out eating pizza. Her hands were callused and swollen from opening cases and cases of plastic-capped imitation champagne. She felt, in most ways, unsafe, maybe terminally screwed. She slept fitfully, holding her vagina, through dim layers of slasher and incest dreams.
At the poetry press she worked for these languid, beautifully aging Brooklyn men who translated from the Russian, the Spanish, the French. They all had languid, beautiful girlfriends and played obscure LPs at work. To cut costs, everyone else at the office was an intern. All the interns were attractive, nervous young women with high blunt bangs like little kids left alone with craft scissors. They bit their small square nails, trimmed bangs in the bathroom, refreshed or exited feeds.
Alex was the oldest of the interns. Her bangs were less in season, and, though the interns never teased her, her boyfriend sometimes did. He was younger, twenty-three. As a joke, he’d called her “nubile” in a poem. In her small way, she’d published him. They’d been introduced at work when she was binding his chapbook with a needle and thread and the bone folder, which she loved because she worked so well with the bone folder, pressing and smoothing the poetry paper, thinking she’d get hired as Editorial Assistant. Because she was so careful at work.
She knew she had it in her to be an editorial assistant, to read and assess the manuscripts sent in. Her boyfriend’s, for example, was fine. She liked that he wrote on emotional intemperance, that he was also full of feeling. She liked his voice, and to listen to him read, which he did, for her, every night. Though sometimes he hit the fruit imagery—the rotting something, sad harvest, too hard. But he was twenty-three and gifted, with a chapbook from a respectable press. He was taking himself seriously, saying no one in the city really wrote. They could both escape what, in a total lapse of character, he had started calling “the grind.”
She’d said she would go with him. Her teeth and kidneys ached. He called her nubile a second time. “My nubile companion.” She wondered: did he know what it meant.
Her last day at the press passed in a haze of cupcakes and liquor and the pretty scents of each intern and editor when they hugged her with basically sincere expressions of gratitude and goodwill. She walked home through the heat feeling warm and wet in her gut, an old man’s breath in her mouth. A mile and a half of concrete and two sets of stairs and there was her boyfriend striking intensely at his typewriter.
“Babe,” he said, “one second.”
“K, babe.” It was “babe” all the time between them. Since when had they been talking this way?
Her boyfriend was crying; he sometimes made himself cry when he worked. He had on a Blondie t-shirt and the bloodstained leopard print underwear she wore during her period, which hadn’t happened in six months. Pregnancy was the usual specter: medicine cabinet full of tests from CVS, dark tinctures from the witch store.
“It’s stress,” her boyfriend would say, looking unrecognizably beautiful when he spoke and also in retrospect and still, in front of her, when he cried at his own poetry. She was always forgetting what he looked like, being confronted with his eyelashes or open mouth. It was cute and helpless how he used concealer on the pimples he picked.
She read the word “lover” over his shoulder and arranged herself horizontally on the couch, crossing her ankles. She was still holding her stomach, which felt internally bruised. Hot air floated through the open windows alongside the sound of the ice cream truck. His acceptance packet sat hugely beside her on the couch. Everything else was in boxes, one of which said Art. Her boyfriend must have written it in reference to his stained Hieronymus Bosch print, sketches of French hookers.
He kept silently crying over the typewriter. She still found the typewriter thing sweet, wasn’t thinking: it could be lost in the move. She’d packed the collection of chapbooks she’d printed and sewn at the poetry press; her best 99-cent store toys; an assortment of pseudo-professional clothes constructed in sweatshops; old mail and pay stubs. All her items were together waiting to go on to the next place, which everyone told her was very flat, very cold, very culturally invested in college sports.
Her boyfriend stood up, the tip of his penis resting above the broken elastic of her underwear, and engaged her in desultory unprotected sex. With his SSRI, he couldn’t come using condoms. She’d indulged this for some time.
She still felt sick, so she closed her eyes and said, “Pretend I’m asleep.”
She felt a little better with her eyes closed, thinking vaguely about some hard-core porn she’d watched last week.
He said, shyly, “This is weird.”
The floor of the apartment started to shake.
“It’s not weird.” She kept her eyes closed and smiled. Feeling the train approach made her happy. She liked to the see the train people and for them to see her too. She felt like part of the world, belonging to someone’s commute. “What’d you do today?”
“Wrote,” he said. “Saw Jesse.”
The train passed level with the apartment. She opened her eyes to watch it go by. She saw her boyfriend’s even teeth, a spot of pink-beige makeup on the skin above them, and the people in the lit-up cars holding their phones, looking at the phones or at the two of them, thinking: those people do it like convalescents.
She threw up briefly in her mouth.
“Did the interns give you cigarettes?”
She felt a wide and furry affection for him. Probably this was love.
“Babe,” he said, “let’s go out for your birthday.”
She said, “Babe, let’s just stay in and read.”
In the morning they put the couch on the curb with a sign that said No Bed Bugs. The street they lived on had an emotional, extreme feeling Alex attributed to the heat, smells of people, warm trash, warm laundry and weed. Two men rolled a cage of red and blue parrots into a dark garage. The birds moved along the wire walls of the cage on huge black talons or they hung upside down, wings folded, afraid.
Hey boyfriend said something stupid along the lines of “Goodbye, house.”
She pressed her head to the passenger window of his car and cried inaudibly for five seconds.
Her boyfriend made a note in his diary while she swallowed her morning-after pill with a Coke gifted to her by the clerk. They had hugged for a long time.
“When we have health insurance,” she said, “I’m getting an IUD.” Pain occupied the whole left side of her head.
Her boyfriend nodded sympathetically—“the copper one”—and petted her hair. “Do you want to drive?” he asked, even though the car was important to him and she forgot to signal and drove at dangerously slow speeds.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania he suggested she start writing again also. “You could apply to the program.”
Between ages eighteen and twenty-five Alex had composed small, depressing stories starring herself and, sometimes, her parents. The effect of which was: she’d felt smaller and more depressed. The parents had said a few things.
She’d become a reader only. Her talent was for criticism and escape. She would rather hoard than exploit herself.
In the car, her boyfriend was saying, “Sylvia Plath mined her life.”
She looked at him, floating towards the median, until he apologized.
“I’m twenty-nine years old.”
“Babe, you just turned thirty.”
The flatter the landscape the slower she moved them past the empty fields and Wendy’s signs. No moon in the daytime or extreme or ominous weather. To her surprise, they didn’t pass cornfields. She’d wanted cornfields. Her boyfriend slept. The gages on the dashboard looked more ordinary. It was an ordinary road.
Arriving in Ann Arbor, they saw a CVS and a Salvation Army. Nirvana Unplugged played on the car stereo as they drifted past a group of boys drinking beer on the roof of a wrecked car across which one or more of them had crookedly spray-painted CANCER in army green. Trashed nineteenth century houses stood in a row, most of them fronted by a plastic yellow M—some kind of purchasable or stolen lawn trash—leading to a system of outdoor TVs and couches. Blond female teenagers walked by like packs of ponies in small denim shorts and t-shirts bearing a symbol, talking about business school.
Alex did a little “Fascism’s alive” bit.
Her boyfriend sort of laughed.
They reached the lush and eerily subdued section where grad students lived. Oaks and maples and stone churches. Cottonwood fluff drifting down around the car.
The apartment was a sight-unseen situation, an attic room with a long spooky hallway that led to a bathroom with swinging saloon-style slats instead of a door. The walls had been painted many coats thick in a color between darkest green and blue. Halfway through the door, he was saying cerulean.
“Don’t be pretentious,” she said, “it’s teal.”
She was bleeding and in abdominal pain from the pill but she liked the apartment immediately, especially the apse-shaped hallway and the off-kilter ceiling that sloped over the corner where the bed would be. The walls looked wet. She liked that. She liked the skylight in the bathroom and the tree in bloom above it. The claw-foot tub was alluring. Someone had scrubbed it with bleach.
For dinner they shared a bag of Doritos. He allowed her to wipe the wet crust from her hands on his pants. She thought: he loves me. Then they made a nest of her worst semi-professional clothes and spooned. Always, Alex was the big spoon.
She dreamt she was hugging her boyfriend in a gauzy, spiritual light, then being attacked by small denim children carrying kitchen knives she’s seen an ad for on the Internet. She woke up sweating, half-covered by something black and see-through that smelled like the restaurant’s grease trap. She rolled her boyfriend back and forth. “I had a nightmare.”
He opened and closed his mouth like he did. “Do you have your aromatherapy pillow?”
She found her aromatherapy pillow and inhaled.
“Grab onto me.” He rolled over so that they were facing each other while she quietly affirmed the fact of the nightmare. His cheekbone rested in the socket of her eye. He was soft and cool and smooth. She could touch him.
“Do you like me?” she said, but only when it was very late and dark outside. “Do you think I have a brain tumor?”
“I like you a lot.” He was falling back asleep, opening and closing. “I wish I was a bird.”
She had no more dreams that night. The neighborhood’s silence—no sirens, no buying or selling—disturbed her. She’d seen her first automatic lawn-watering device that day and feared it would affect her personal atmosphere. She worried for her boyfriend. His poetry, too.
The walls expanded and contracted as if breathing. She shivered; her liver gurgled; she had sweaty feverish feelings and chills. Her boyfriend pulled away the pants she’d been sleeping under and hugged them to his chest.
In the morning, she made coffee and drank it next to him while he slept with his hand protecting his penis. He looked pretty, petulant, and capable of great accomplishment and cruelty. She pretended he was a doll she was feeding, sipping some herself then holding the cup up to his lips.
He woke up, drained the mug, and put on yesterday’s clothes for his orientation. His breath was bland and inoffensive, like a baby’s. He kissed her goodbye, complaining about being late.
“Skip it,” she said, arranging herself more appealingly on the pile. She watched the wood grain of the door for several long minutes after he’d left.
But the color and texture of the walls consoled her enough that she could crawl, then walk, to the stove and make more coffee and drink it out on the fire escape sitting down. Outside, summer was still happening. Semi-young people wearing pastel-colored collared shirts parked and unparked their cars, some of them waving up at her uncannily. She was afraid of dealing with it in the streets; where they’d come from the code was no extraneous contact, eye or otherwise. She waved, she thought, exuberantly. She found she liked it and kept waving, pretending she had people here and in other places, knowing her.
Inside, she leaned against one of the oily blue walls. She licked the wall. It made her feel interesting.
He texted from orientation, surprising her; he hated technology and liked to call. From a landline when possible. I wish I was fucking you.
You wish you were fucking me, she thought. You wish you were a bird.
They’re saying we’re worth a million dollars each.
That’s great babe. She picked an eyelash from her shirt.
What are you wearing.
Just clothespins on my nipples.
It went on like that. At the end he said, Sorry I came in your eye.
She grinned. She drank more coffee. She got hungry and had to pee. She felt unemployed, eating dry cereal from the bodega at intervals and becoming sexually aroused at intervals and masturbating while looking for work. On Craigslist she found solicitations for part-time shipping clerks, receptionists, and sex workers. She turned to Missed Connections. It comforted her to know what was happening locally, at the Belleville Meijer last Sunday. We made eye contact nearly every aisle we went down. Back and forth, all through the store. I thought you were sexy as sin.
All afternoon she read weird Amazon book reviews and dated celebrity gossip, letting her head hurt until their health insurance cards came in the mail. She called the office of a robust-looking gynecologist with a rosy web presence. Reading her new Group Number to the receptionist over the phone, she bit her lip and blushed, holding her hand over her heart.
When the sun set across the walls, throwing watery patterns off the trees into the apartment, she ordered a medium plain pizza. The delivery guy high fived her, bringing the prickly feeling to her face. No one had touched or spoken to her in person all day.
Her boyfriend climbed the stairs to the little room and lay down on the clothes. “I missed you. I’ll have to write all the time.”
She mumbled about the pizza, maybe having sex before eating it.
“Hmm?” he said, sincerely, sitting up, looking beautiful, very lovely to her, even though a spot of concealer was being conspicuous on his chin.
“I asked if you wanted to do it.”
“If you do all the work.” He sighed and lay down again.
She looked at him coolly, though he couldn’t see her expression. “What does that mean.”
“It means I can’t move. But I’ll finger you.”
She watched his hand start to creep up her leg. It tickled. The nails looked dirty and malnourished. The fingers seemed to her like the legs on a tiny, ill tarantula, hovering over her crotch till she shifted out of range.
“I’ll kiss you,” he said. “It will be more erotic.” Though then he didn’t kiss her.
“What are the program people like?”
“They’re nice.”
“Young and beautiful?”
He rolled over and tried to burrow between her breasts. She was flat but sometimes he pretended otherwise. He said, “I like that you’re old.”
◆
The IUD insertion was scheduled for the day of her interview at the university press. She scrubbed herself with soap in the claw-foot tub and shaved whole sections of her legs. She drove her boyfriend’s car extra slowly through the hushed intersections of Ann Arbor, raging internally at all the helmeted teenagers and adults biking on sidewalks, next to the bike lanes. In most cities they’d be arrested. Where were the parents?
Everywhere.
She waved at people, making meaningful and intense eye contact. A few smiled cautiously back.
The walls of the doctor’s office were a weak green, though later she would remember them as pink. She filled out forms on a clipboard opposite a fake aquarium with a few plastic fish circling a light bulb. She signed three consent forms she didn’t read before two nurses led her into an examining room.
One nurse was clearly in training. The blood pressure cuff kept falling off.
“You’ll get it next time,” the senior nurse said, demonstrating again how to take a pulse. Turning to Alex, “You’re like a little bird.”
When was her last period, they both wanted to know.
She shrugged. They placed a laminated calendar down on the desk and stared at her until she pointed.
“Two months ago?” the senior nurse said.
She said she had it last week, she forgot.
The senior nurse wrinkled her nose.
“What are you having for lunch?” the nurse in training whispered while passing Alex the urine cup.
The senior nurse reflected, looking soulful and fey. “A sandwich,” she finally said.
Alex peed in the cup, wrote her name on the cup remembering when she would have written Lexie in gel pen with a heart over the “i.” She washed her hands as instructed and went back to the room, hiding the old leopard print underwear deep in the pile of outer clothes, putting on the loose pink gown. Then she sat on the paper on the table with stirrups and pretended to read a magazine. Allison Tells the Story of Her Outfit was an actual full-page spread. Soon the doctor was knocking on the door, not the one she’d seen online but an older woman with short, asymmetrically cut gray hair.
Alex brightened, thinking the doctor was a lesbian, “liberal” in some way. The doctor sat in front of a monitor looking stoic and bored. Alex thought of Gentling’s inoffensive clipboard and fountain pen and his clean, possibly glowing, skin. The doctor had a spreadsheet open, waiting to take down Alex’s family’s medical history. Together they went through the pancreatic cancers, heart attacks, strokes. The doctor glanced at her with open pity before moving on to drugs.
Since when had she quit smoking?
She exaggerated greatly.
How many drinks a week?
She lied.
Other drugs?
She smoked pot sometimes, she said.
There was a pause, dark energy in the room. “Can you do me a favor? Can you eat the marijuana?”
Alex stared at her, wanting to cry.
“Second hand smoke affects everyone, air quality…”
Alex waited a beat and breathed a cautious “sure” before the doctor started to ask about her sexual history, how many partners she’d had in her life.
“Forty?” she said, tapering to involve only consensual sex.
“Have you ever been forced to have sex?” the doctor said.
Alex assumed most women who’d been to college in the U.S. even briefly had been forced to have sex. She’d been forced to have sex by a freshman! She shook her head noncommittally.
Without raising her eyes the doctor moved the cursor past little boxes for five, ten, twenty, and, passing thirty, clicked the slot that said etc.
Alex felt offended and vaguely punk.
“How many partners now?” the doctor asked.
“And how long have you been seeing your boyfriend?”
“What brings you to Ann Arbor?”
“And how long have you been depressed?”
She was made to scoot father down. And then to scoot farther. A little farther again.
“Good. I’m going to pull back the gown.”
“Let’s see if you can go wider. Wider. Good.”
She remembered one of her old friends asking, years ago, what kind of vagina she had. Was it an anemone or a clam. She’d badly wanted not to have the anemone, and yet—
“Here’s the speculum.” The doctor was unwrapping plastic. The room smelled like soap. The light was a cold white glare that druggily brightened and dimmed.
“I don’t like to use lube,” the doctor said.
A headache started behind Alex’s eyes.
“Water is much more effective, in fact.”
She raised her head in mute alarm and saw the doctor wetting the speculum in the sink.
“You’ll feel pressure,” the doctor said. “More pressure,” inserting, expanding, screwing the clamp into place. “Now a little scratching.” She held up a serrated-looking brush, like a toilet wand but slim and sharper. Alex wished she hadn’t been shown it. “I’m cleaning your cervix.”
It seemed like the doctor was scraping her lightly with a handful of ground glass. Her mind turned to her boyfriend’s typewriter. She saw him weeping, feeding it paper.
The doctor produced an oversized needle filled with lidocaine. “Like at the dentist.” The needle was as thick as Alex’s finger and roughly the length of the doctor’s face. “You’ll feel a pinch, then pressure and burning. Your tongue may go tingly or numb. There may be a ringing in your ears.”
It was how the doctor described it: pinch, pressure, burning. She felt her vision kick up a level—more focused. The sound inside her head turned off.
Slowly, the doctor extracted the needle while Alex strained her neck to see.
“This is called sounding. I’m measuring your uterus.” The doctor made a fist and punched her inside. Something like that. Alex heard herself make an unfamiliar noise. She felt it was a vicious, personal pain given to her on purpose, probably due to her smoking the weed. Air quality… she thought, while the doctor slipped the device in and patted her leg like a dog. “Would you like a tampon? You can lie here a while.” The doctor washed her hands, ignoring the mirror. “Good to meet you,” she said almost over her shoulder, already leaving to deal with rooms and rooms of supine, pot-smoking sluts.
Alex lay on her back for an indeterminate length of time, feeling good about getting to focus only on physical pain. She stood up to put her clothes on. Spots of blood appeared on the floor like food coloring. They fell down her leg and onto the linoleum. Feeling naïve—she hadn’t imagined bleeding, and no one had said so—she lined her underwear with gauze and cotton from the cupboard over the sink. Then she filled her bag with bandages, tongue depressors, and swabs.
Her uterus kept squeezing and releasing in confusion while she drove home in her boyfriend’s car. It was low on gas. She missed a stop sign and was pulled over by a bike cop riding nearby on the sidewalk. She was bleeding through her pants by now, trying to talk her way out of the ticket, saying, “But, ossifer…”
The apartment already had an odor of fried eggs and mildew. Her stomach flipped, the little piece of copper floating uneasily below in total darkness. “We should change the license plates.”
“How do you feel?” Her boyfriend was typing but he turned to watch her come in.
“Tender.” She got inside the pile of her least-best clothes.
“There’s Percocet.”
“I have my interview.”
Still typing, he said, “You’ll be great.” He went through one of the boxes and brought two pills over, kissing her absently on the top of the head. She swallowed the first pill. She didn’t want to be stoned for the university press. Then she felt another cramp and ate the second.
After five minutes in the fetal position hating the doctor, she found her feelings had turned to indifference bending toward benevolence. Her phone looked newly phosphorescent in her hand, the green line that meant downloads crawling fascinatingly across the screen. The refrigerator hummed while her boyfriend typed and paced the room, the hallway. Everywhere on her body itched and, when she spoke, her voice came from outside. She didn’t remember what she’d just said. Possibly she’d asked, “Do you love me?”
“What?” He was eating hummus. He helped her dress, picking out the clothes she would wear—a shirt that was too short, actually it was a crop top—and drove her to the university press, getting lost a few times. Her pupils floated tiny and distant in the rearview mirror until she closed her eyes, wanting to sleep and sleep and sleep but being delivered on time, a resume loosely attached to her hand. She found herself standing in front of an intern posing as a receptionist.
“I have an appointment.” She forgot the editor’s name.
“He’ll be right with you.” Who had taught the girl to talk like that?
She stood there scratching herself while her uterus self-sounded.
Someone encouraged her to sit.
The editor of the university press was a large milky person wearing gray tube socks and Velcro instead of laces on his shoes. He had a string of prayer beads around his wrist but didn’t toy with or acknowledge them until later in the interview. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
She opened her mouth. “Here.” Her mouth stayed half open.
“We like the sound of that!” The editor gave her an encouraging look and removed the lid from a Styrofoam cup.
She made an effort to better arrange her face. “I see myself as an editor here.”
He leaned back in his chair and started eating with a plastic spoon. It was chili. “Those jobs are hard to come by.”
“I know,” she said, smiling involuntarily with an underlying sense of chemically smothered despair and pushing forward her resume which had one serious wrinkle and one ink-related thumbprint.
He looked the resume over. “You’re overqualified for this position, I think.”
Did people say that? Her eyes got watery. She scratched her arm.
“What do you like to read?” he said so softly and kindly she almost didn’t hear.
“Everything.”
His expression was so tolerant. He set the chili on the desk.
“A lot of Midwestern writers.”
He nodded. She misquoted Jesus’ Son. The chili had left a small grease spot in the shape of a battered moon on her resume. He flushed, touching the prayer beads. She started to sweat sympathetically in response. “We’ll be in touch.”
She held down the hem of her crop top as she stood to shake his hand.
That night she was still bleeding. She went with her boyfriend and his cohort to a bar. Cohort was her boyfriend’s word. Her head felt packed in cotton, like her pussy but a little less sore. Her boyfriend walked facedown with his hands in his pockets, which he only did when he was upset. Some of the streets were cobblestone. Others were regularly paved.
The bar was decorated with dartboards and taxidermied deer heads and had an entirely teenage waitstaff. Alex was the only one not carded. “Only if you look a hard thirty,” the boy who was serving them said. The cohort laughed nervously and then they shared their astrological signs. Someone asked Alex where she worked, to which she responded, “No.” The girls in the group were pretty and polite and ignored it. Three of them had the intern’s bangs.
Walking home, she said, “Do you really conceive of yourself as a ‘through and through’ Pisces?”
“You’re hungry,” he said.
She woke up early the next day, excited to find her first therapist. She drank coffee inside, moving her lips and face lightly over the walls. She called three women who asked her to describe her problem in broad strokes over the phone.
“Ennui,” she told the first one, who said she dealt with more urgent situations.
The others had the breathy voices of morons, and she hung up.
But the dentist would take her in two weeks. She listened to music and folded up boxes, reading the comments under unofficial music videos posted on YouTube.
Her boyfriend bought books and pens and typewriter ribbon while football season brought war sounds and drunk driving to the town. The guy in the apartment across the way did sit ups and drew still lifes of flowers, pausing to hit a bowl and swipe on Tinder sometimes. The neighborhood smelled like a bonfire. Leaves reddened and stuck to the sidewalk after rain. Bodegas were called party stores. She walked to one every day.
Otherwise, she looked for work or sat on the fire escape or masturbated. After coming, she couldn’t hear or feel her hands. Then they’d tingle and regain feeling while she thought about seeing a neurologist and what she’d do with her final six or so months. She started a list on a Post-it. Ceramics, tantra, heroin, horses.
The editor of the university press called, using the word “gumption.” Editorial assistant. She could start the next week. Copy-editing and reading manuscripts. She felt grateful but not overwhelmed. She went out with her boyfriend and his cohort and drank until she felt she could also see auras. One of the other poets kept touching her boyfriend’s knee.
He said, “Babe, Natalie’s like that. Her mom didn’t hug her enough.”
Alex snorted. Only when someone died did her own mother hug her. Once, deep in the Lexie phase, she’d asked her why she’d been born and her mother said everyone was having babies, it was what people did.
“I’m going to the party store.”
“You just like to say party store.”
Which was true, she did like to say it.
◆
The IUD had settled inside her now, not knowing its purpose but comfortable. At night, a fog came in from nowhere and the empty streets around the house looked haunted. In the daytime dog walkers, joggers, and babies in luxury strollers emerged. Every morning she walked to the press where the editor set her up in the basement with a cup of red pencils and two black felt-tipped pens. The days down there went as slowly as she’d expected them to. She drank coffee and coffee and coffee then beer. Walking home, she fingered the manuscript paper in her bag and sincerely admired foliage while making efforts to look sympathetic to strangers. Students walked by in whole outfits from the university store. She thought she’d buy her boyfriend a school beanie, with a pom-pom, when she got paid.
“Babe I’m home.” She held up a bottle of wine she’d put on a credit card.
Her boyfriend was pressing his fingers to his lips. He looked beautiful and tortured and wasn’t typing. Probably it was a syntax problem. He said, “I don’t know how to say what I need to say.”
He was sitting on her sweater and a fake-suede pencil skirt she never wore. Finally she told him to write it down.
He ripped a page from his diary. I feel strongly attracted to Natalie, he wrote, all in capitals, like a boy.
“You feel strongly attracted to Natalie.” She leaned against the lovely blue wall, closed her eyes and pretended to lick it.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” She pretended to do it again. The wine remained corked. “Are you fucking her?”
“I’d like to, with your permission.”
“Get off my sweater.”
He passed the sweater, avoiding her eyes.
“I moved here.”
“I know.” He started weeping and low talking. She was sure she heard him say Mercury was in retrograde.
“Excuse me?”
“We could fuck Natalie together?” he said.
◆
She explained about her headaches, how she had one constantly now. Her “primary care” doctor provided a printout with three referrals. The neurologist called. She had another exam with blood pressure, heartbeat, eyes, ears, balance. They scheduled an MRI. She bought a mattress, a regular one, and boarded it facedown the day it arrived.
◆
One night, when her boyfriend was at “workshop,” she read his diary. She would not respect his requests to call it a journal. The diary had notes for poems and observations about himself and other people and the quality of the light. “Alex sullen today” was from the day they drove to Michigan. She flipped to his most recent entry.
Alex
| Pros: | Cons: |
| smart | judgmental |
| eyes | doesn’t like dogs |
| ankles | misanthrope |
| toes | selfish |
| well-read | success? |
| experienced | needy, manipulative |
| honest ? (editorial) | depressing |
| v nice to me |
She cradled her tits, not crying. Small blue lights swam in front of her face. On the desk was his typewriter. She carried it to the fire escape and let it fall, aiming for her boyfriend’s car but she had bad upper body strength. The typewriter dropped beside the neighbor’s nice new Subaru. “Oops.” She closed the window and turned off the lights. Still, the neighbor would notice the typewriter dropping from the sky and Alex’s other transgressions. When Alex failed to rake the leaves some of the leaves would drift into the neighbor’s yard, making the whole street unseemly. You had to rake. You had to mow. Smile but not too desperately. Go to the press and give your days alive, in the basement, to some braver idiot’s actual work.
The editor called her a “powerhouse.”
She said, “Greg, I love my job.” After work, she drank beer and ate animals under the stuffed ones at the same dark bar where they’d met Natalie and learned that her sun sign was Aries. Alex liked the badly lit booth, it gave her the feeling that nothing could happen to or touch her again. She was an editorial assistant who lived polyamorously with her boyfriend in Michigan. It was cold but you bought a good coat. Personally, she wanted a down one. Also a crockpot.
◆
When they fucked Natalie together, they drank gin and beer until Alex felt sick.
Natalie’s IUD was also copper. Her vagina was the clam kind. She said Alex was really skinny. “Oh my god, I’m going to write about this.”
Her boyfriend agreed it was good material.
Alex fell asleep early on the edge of the mattress she’d bought.
In the morning, she found a note saying Went out for coffee. She washed last night’s glasses and took out the trash, remembering to breathe in the blue smell outside which she knew to be seasonal and special. The seasons were there to not last.
◆
The MRIs were conducted in a tunnel between two hospital wings. Her boyfriend was in class; it was more dramatic that way. A few outpatients in wheelchairs waited for their people while a janitor mopped. She walked through the tunnel past an empty glass-enclosed place with a sign saying Pain Institute.
FOX news. Old people. Puke yellow door followed by puke green walls. She got the clipboard, checked female, checked single, received her wristband. She was taken into the room where she was given a gown and blue scrubs. “Any shrapnel in your eye?”
No, she just had constant headaches, couldn’t hear when she came after masturbating, saw blue lights, felt tingling, went numb all over and twitched. Plus maybe a thing with her liver or kidneys.
In the next room, with the magnetic fields, Alex lay down on the paper. A technician tucked towels around her head and fixed a white plastic mask over her face. There were yellow earplugs in her head now. The call button was soft, gray, and egg-shaped. She held it gently with both hands. The technician covered her with a blanket, told her to stay still for the scans, and started the machine that slid her in. The tube was narrow and low ceilinged, with yellow track lighting. It became narrower and smaller as she went in head first with her eyes open. The technician stood by the tube. “How do you feel?”
“Scared.” She had expected to be braver about it.
The technician reversed the machine so that Alex came out again. Did she want a cloth over her eyes? She nodded.
She could still see with the cloth but, with the swaddling, let her eyes close. The technician was with her, saying, “First scan. You’ll feel tapping.” There was a sound like curious raccoons punching and scrabbling over parts of the machine. The machine buzzed. There was a loud, atonal sound that felt mean and unforgiving to Alex. She thought: now I’ll know if I have cancer. She started to cry a little. She thought crying might mess up the scan but then remembered how there was always tearwater sloshing around in her head. She felt sorry for herself for having to do an MRI alone in a tunnel next to the Pain Institute. At the same time, she felt sure that she was fine, not actively dying but falling apart slowly like everyone else. She liked cruelty and crying as much as food or her new mattress or sex.
The buzzing lowered. The tube started to rock her. She could see a slot for a screwdriver on the ceiling. She thought of a flimsy airplane, watching a wing bend, feeling the atmosphere through a slightly wet and frosted window while the scan started to go faster, like a dance party where she didn’t have to move. Or it was like being fucked sweetly by someone who loved her, someone pure, an angel.
“The next scan will be a minute and a half,” The technician said through a speaker.
She didn’t have to respond. When she opened her eyes there were webs of yellow light from crying and the tracks in the hood of the tube.
The technician rolled her out again. Another woman had appeared and now gently pushed a needle into the bend in her arm. Dye was going in through a catheter. What was a catheter. She was eager to be back in the tube just for a moment or two.
The last scan was four and a half minutes. She closed her eyes and swallowed. The plugs were in her ears, and the towels around her head, the blanket over her body and her hands on the emergency egg. Again the curious animals. She felt like she might fall asleep. One woman was speaking on the intercom softly while the other one waited to receive her outside. Another buzz, the music, the rocking and pounding. She would stay in Michigan and roll a cart of food and cut flowers through the grocery store every week. She’d drive slowly, having a job and a boyfriend, watching traffic lights, having a short or a long life. Either was fine. And when they removed her from the machine in which they’d put her, and took the catheter from the small hole in her arm that they’d cut, and when the webs of water and light had to disappear, maybe forever, now that the plastic mask and towels were off, they said how good she’d been in the procedure. The second technician, actually, had never seen a patient who could hold herself so still.