Today I go to the city pool and am relieved to find teenagers working who don’t give a fuck about me. I linger to pay the $3.50 entry, but the teens are busy watching a mound burn on a plastic canned nuts lid. In one’s hand, a bottle of lighter fluid. Another plucks dead flies from a hanging yellow strip and flicks them into the flames.
From the pool’s edge, I eye the bleached plastic of the tricolor tube slide, the frayed edges of the swim team flags. Beside the deck is a row of magnolias with waxy dish leaves that don’t budge in the breeze. The straps of my one-piece torque my neck and upper back, the muscles that gift me tension headaches and slippery ribs. I intend to strengthen them by paddling around like an exiled dog. For now, I adjust the straps. Water slips around my feet. The older lap swimmers look at me. I look past them. I have strict boundaries to maintain.
My ex-girlfriend vilified my obsessive personality. She’d effuse that our late-night conversations energized her, that the tiny ringlets around my face after a shower were the cutest things she’d ever seen, but whenever I said I might love her, she’d put a finger to my lips. We barely know each other, she’d say, even after four months. She believed all obsession to be shallow, as if I were falling in love only with the way her stern eyebrows twitched while she cooked or how, in the middle of the night, she’d wrap her arms around my middle and hold me to her, grip-tight, like I was saving her from a nightmare or an errant, lonely future.
We weren’t living together or anything. I still think I could have loved her for a while longer, if she’d embraced our love like I had. The last time I saw her, she said absolutely not, through sniffling tears that I hadn’t expected from her. Crying, she refused to open the inner screen of her door, as if I were a feral animal. I do admit that I was obsessed with her in what turned out to be a shallow way. I can’t even remember what we used to talk about.
Three months ago, seven weeks before our breakup, I hit a woman with my car. I’d been driving, listening to a great song, dancing with my shoulders, while trying to catch every registration tag that passed. I’d just paid a leg to retrieve my car from the impound. I thought towing was harsh—who pays every single year on time?—but as I drove, I saw that everyone else had green or blue tags, never last year’s orange like I’d tried to get away with.
While I was discoing and scanning for fellow orange-tag losers, the woman I hit, Larissa, stepped two inches too far into slow traffic. A stretch of sidewalk had been annexed by smug cafe tables. Larissa tried to circumvent them. My bumper smacked her hip. Well, her butt cheek, but we both said hip. She staggered a step or two before crumbling. Then she was up again, hanging her body over my open window frame, her white face drained of color.
“Stop!” she groaned. I was stopped. I’d slammed on the brakes. “Stop crying!”
I hadn’t realized. I looked hard at her to try to figure out why my cheeks were wet. Red blurred around her neck, pale skin pixelated from nerves or heat, not blood. There was no blood. We exchanged information and I agreed to call a car to send her home. I would have offered a ride, but in her shaken eyes, both myself and my Toyota were violent aggressors. Still half in the bike lane, emergency flashers on, I sat and watched the app’s car icon ascend a nearby hill.
Nothing was broken, but from not-private social media, I learned that Larissa was experiencing deep, skeletal pain. Yoga was her life, so the pain was ruinous. To the rideshare address, I sent SalonPas hot/cold patches, the big ones, and a CBD tincture with THC, technically illegal to send USPS, but in my experience, pure CBD is about as effective as water, maybe less. If she couldn’t afford regular chiropractic, which she likely could from our large and ongoing insurance settlement, I recommended Flexeril, my favorite muscle relaxer. Taken four nights in a row, it is the equivalent of a chiropractic adjustment and a massage put together, I DM’d her from the account I once created to review books as a distraction from back-to-back Scorpio crushes. I edited my photo captions to ensure she knew chronic pain was my life, too. These short stories were a sensual balm to my spasms, I wrote with a photo of a book I set beside a ceramic mug, my lamp floating a moon on my coffee. I didn’t mention that my pain began after an accident, too. A disgruntled TV exec had rear-ended me at 3 am and sobbed as we waited for a tow. I’d hated her tears. They seemed to blame me, to steal my victimhood.
◆
“Yeah, pain is everywhere. It’s called capitalism, um hello,” said my on-the-way-out girlfriend when I started talking about Larissa. I didn’t remind her that it’d been a car accident. She could have easily argued that there are no accidents under capitalism, that my fast pace of life, distracted driving, avoidance of payments to the state and mad search for others with whom to compare my personal failings were all designed for small daily bloodshed, which barely fell on lackadaisical white girls like me, for whom an expired registration traffic stop wouldn’t even require getting out of the car. All true. “Pain alone doesn’t connect people,” my girlfriend said.
But our names, too: Larissa and Alyssa.
In the end, my girlfriend felt I was more interested in Larissa than I was in her. I told her these were two different kinds of interests and not to think in binaries. She wiped her tears and cracked her screen door only to shut the wooden one in my face, giving me a new interest—monitoring her social media and Venmo and Spotify, aching for the sucker punch of clues that she was splitting bills with someone new. After a day, she sensed the psychic invasion and blocked me across platforms. Larissa didn’t sue for more than treatment and loss of work. No emotional distress, though I knew she was in it. I received this as an act of love.
I moved back into my mother’s rural Oregon home after my breakup. My plan was straightforward: I wouldn’t talk to anyone and would avoid the internet. New people and online stimuli—key drivers of obsession. My mother was in the state of Illinois indefinitely, helping her boyfriend’s daughter with a colicky newborn, so the house was empty. I would work my e-commerce job remotely. I would lunchtime lap swim and lay out after with headphones in. I would not think about how Larissa could likely not rest on a floppy chaise lounge without pain.
But today, just when I thought there was no one in this town to give two shits about me, so vice versa, I stay at the pool too long. I know it when I see the line of kids and a selection of rich or unemployed parents winding along the fence behind me. I pull cotton shorts over my damp suit. The locker room is clogged with swimmers. Goggles pinch heads and dangle from forearms. I focus on the red exit sign across the wet tile. In front of it, my oldest friend, Cherie.
She doesn’t see me at first because she is looking behind her at her young daughter, Ophelia, soft face and pink nose, fine hair curling down her back, and two others, a brunette teenager with gaping ear gauges and a toddler who could be the teen’s sister or child.
“Lyssa!” Cherie puts her bag-loaded arms out to both sides, her chin cozying my neck crook. “Visiting your mom?”
“Yep,” I say. Cherie and I met in kindergarten. We’ve always been more like cousins than blood-and-bracelet-swapping best friends—steady, but never electric. Despite this disruption to my routine, I feel oddly at ease with her.
“My mom doesn’t let us swim at her pool anymore, so we’ve been coming here,” Cherie says, unapologetically dragging the three girls into mother-hate with her. A mutual friend told me something about Cherie’s parents wishing Cherie had stayed with her horrible ex, Ophelia’s dad. I’ve never understood why, but since Cherie was young, her family has viewed her as the enemy, once as a pre-teen harlot, now as a welfare mommy. “O, you remember Alyssa?”
Ophelia looks at me and nods. She flashes all of her teeth before dashing ahead.
“Walk!” Cherie yells.
The girl runs straight onto the deck without a shower. Cherie takes my hand and leads me to a section of the grass where she dumps her bags and towels. The girls catapult into the pool, the littlest wearing a bulky swim diaper and puffy inflatable shirt.
In the shallow end, Cherie and I make waves with our arms at our sides.
“I wish Myles came with,” she says. “My new guy. You have to meet him. I’m in love.”
When she says this, her eyes get big and her sing-song tone drops into a groan, like she’s scared of herself. I’ve always thought of the reckless romance that drives Cherie’s life as separate from my own tendencies. I didn’t date until college and, even then, never told Cherie about the last-minute flights I’ve taken for misguided passion. We are more alike than she knows.
“I’d really like to meet him,” I say. “Sometime.”
“He’s different. I like how I can’t quite put my finger on why. He just glows.” She grins at the water. “Of course that’s not enough for my mom and brother, constantly down my throat.”
“He sounds amazing,” I say. I’m disoriented enough that my brain doesn’t immediately track to others I’ve known and loved that also just glow. My headspace is usually a knotted nest of jumpy connections, but I stay with Cherie, my big toe scratching at the rough pool bottom. “I’m sorry they’re still so judgmental. You put up with so much.”
“It’s okay, I’m used to it. Best part is Ophelia has siblings now. Basically. Myles’s older daughter Kathryn is still kinda suspicious of us, but the baby is O’s best friend.”
In the shallow corner opposite us, Kathryn bounces the laughing toddler. Ophelia keeps trying to grab the child’s hands. When Kathryn yanks them away, Ophelia thrashes like a caught fish, soaking her sisters of two months and everyone nearby. Cherie’s eyes are on her own ballerina-pointed toes drawing circles under water.
“Wanna come over tonight?” she asks. “The kids are going to be with my mom.”
“She watches them?”
“Yeah. She won’t come in, but Ophelia cries if I don’t let her see Grandma, so.”
“Maybe another night,” I say. “I’m still settling in.”
I do want to go—I’ve been lonely—but it is my project to doubt my gut reactions.
“You just seem heavy,” she says. “I know how that feels. We’ll have a night of healing.”
With this, she sinks under the water, her hay-colored hair matting on the surface of the pool, then turning to undulating silk underneath.
We never talk on the phone and rarely text, but I know about Cherie’s health issues from Facebook. Her page is plastered with filterless selfies of her thin shoulders bathed in morning sun, her stoic, pale face and hairbrush full of lost strands. Her hypotheses of gene mutations, mold, PTSD. The anti-inflammatory diets and celery juice that have made a surprising impact. I believe her. Since we were in high school and her family suggested Cherie had brought her first abusive relationship onto herself, I have believed her. I also believe the articles she’s posted positing a link between trauma and chronic illness, and wonder who, in her life, she blames.
She is quick to write long posts about love, too, punctuated by bible verses, depending on the religious leanings of her lover. She hasn’t posted a picture of Myles yet. Maybe he is different, or maybe she is tired. Last time I visited, she was living with a 22-year-old chef. She said that at first, she liked Ophelia having a man around, but then Cherie found herself parenting both of them. Also, she said they weren’t attracted to each other anymore. In pictures, Cherie laughs into the air, while the chef gazes adoringly at her open mouth.
“We had an arrangement that no one seems to get,” she tells me today, after explaining that she broke up with the chef and moved into her new place with Myles over the course of a month.
We’re hanging onto the edge of the pool, our feet kicking lazily behind us. Water rushes in and out of the chipped gutters below our chins.
“So, you’ll come?” she says.
The specter of her potential infidelity hangs over us. I can’t say no.
I park my mom’s car under a huge pine. Its needled branches scatter light from the small solar lanterns that line the driveway. The yard looks landscaped, river rocks arranged into flower beds. A lantern below the kitchen window casts a leaf pattern onto the siding.
“Is this Myles’s house?” I ask, sliding my shoes off. It is all nicer than I expected. In the entryway, an Ikea cube shelf has each kid’s name Sharpie’d above a cubby, like in a preschool.
“It’s our house,” she says.
I don’t ask questions. She’s often broke and looking for a new job that better suits her, but also has random cash flow that allows for vacations to Sedona and occasional holistic health care. She has to forgive her parents for every dollar they give her, I think, to lease out their only granddaughter, like she’s doing tonight.
“It’s nice,” I say. “Looks so lived in and comfortable.”
“Thanks. I tell Myles he has an eye for design,” she says.
The walls are draped with tapestries and psychedelic bookstore posters.
“Baby,” she says, as he comes sparkling down the hallway. “Meet Alyssa.”
Myles extends his arms as he walks, preparing for too many steps to hug me and all of the air around me. He holds on tight, smelling of beeswax. His curly brown hair bunches in my face, one section twisted into a matted dread that could be accidental but is likely not. Because we didn’t know Myles in high school, I lump him in with other strong-bodied, summer-tanned white boys who move to this area for weed or organic farming. Cherie meets them all. I am impressed with her ability to charge past old, damaged ties and find fresh community here.
“So, so nice to meet you, Alyssa,” Myles says, his voice a deep, ringing bell.
“Same.”
“I’ve heard great things,” he says.
“Me too,” I say.
He drops to his knees to put on a Thievery Corporation album. Cherie reemerges from the kitchen balancing three marbled glasses and a bowl of hummus, a bag of crackers pinched between her elbow and her ribs. She’s been a server at every nice-ish restaurant in town. The bottom of each glass peels with a Cost Plus World Market sticker.
“Kombucha we made,” she says. “Sorry, it’s pretty potent.”
It tastes like vinegar, with sharp ginger that bites my throat. I cough.
“Nice,” Myles says, as if I was coughing after dragging on a joint.
Cherie switches on two conical salt lamps and turns off the living room light. She sits on a pillow on the floor. The rug is strewn with books and toys and a few orphaned socks.
“So, Lyss, what’s really been up?” she says.
Myles looks at me too. At the pool, Cherie told me that their relationship is different because he is a very feminine man, can girl talk, knows how to please her. Despite this, in their home, Cherie’s tone has shifted away from its easy poolside looseness. She said welcome to our home and Myles has an eye for interior design, with airy control, like we’d just met. Or, like the many times we’ve sat across a cafe table over the years, when she was going through harder things and so had her narrative down pat, each word and inflection tightened to fit her predetermined comfort level and desire to be seen, only so much, so she could pass her existence to me by just moving her lips, more scripted radio program than conversation. I look at Myles’s relaxed smile and imperfect teeth and wonder if today, Cherie’s script is actually a match to my script, her plastic shield a response to mine. I thought my shield was new, an intentional move to thwart obsession, but maybe I’ve been like this with her for a while now. I hate that she can sense it. I don’t want to remind her of why. She seems to have moved on.
“It’s been rocky,” I say. “Two months ago, I hit a woman with my car. Larissa.”
“Larissa, Alyssa,” Cherie says, wincing, shield down one inch.
“Fuck,” Myles says.
“It wasn’t terrible, no blood. But I have this feeling. That she’s not okay.”
Talk about yourself! my vitriolic ex would scream. You are projecting!
“Car accidents happen, babe,” Cherie says. “Like, constantly. But I get that you’d worry. Little things can fuck up our bodies for so long.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Seems like you feel pretty guilty about it,” Myles says.
“Yeah, are you okay?” Cherie places her hand on the carpet in my direction. “Did the collision worsen your back, too?”
“Oh no, I was fine. I wish I could go back and undo it, but yeah, I’m fine.”
They nod empathetically. I resent that by virtue of them knowing only me, not Larissa, they side with me, push to absolve me of my guilt. It’s too easy to make uneducated alliances when we’re all so lonely and hurt.
“Well, we can’t undo time,” Myles says.
“True,” I say.
“I, for one, never want to move backwards,” Cherie says. “Only forward, please.”
This should relieve me, but she is talking in abstracts.
“My love,” Myles says. “Always looking towards the future.”
Not getting stuck, moving full speed ahead. Enviable.
But no. I have been the one who moves forward, desperately, leaning on delusional over-connection to slingshot me into a future. Cherie’s touching the knee of Myles’s linen pants. Her dry hair sticks straight down her back, only wavy around the front, from where she tucked it behind her ears when it was pool-wet.
Years ago, Cherie needed me. It was my first semester of college. I was totally consumed by another person for the first time, a girl I only dated for five months, but whose cells I wished to merge with mine, whose voice in the morning stopped my heart and made me want to stay in bed, on our island, for all of time. I was with my girlfriend, walking down a tree-arched street, talking about our childhoods, when Cherie called. My heart plummeted. She only ever called me with bad news, of which her life had much. She left a two-minute voice message. Its length scared me and my hunger for my girlfriend filled me up, so in my brain there wasn’t any space left, I thought, to hear Cherie’s story, to respond to it. As the phone rang in my hand, I told my girlfriend this, shamefully. She asked if Cherie was there for me like I always was for her. Not really, I said, because I never reached out to Cherie like she did to me. My girlfriend said that relationships were reciprocal, that I was allowed to have boundaries, to obey my capacity, which, I didn’t say, was entirely dedicated to her. I didn’t call Cherie back. I didn’t listen to the message. A month later, I deleted it.
“What are you thinking about?” Cherie says.
“Oh nothing,” I say. “Zoning out. It’s been a wild few months.”
I put my right arm across my chest and hook my fingers on my left collarbone, a calming posture, holding myself. Cherie looks at my fingers.
“Myles can give you a massage,” she says. “He’s amazing.”
“I’d love to,” Myles says. “You probably have a lot to release.”
“Oh no, it’s okay. Thanks, though. Tell me about you guys. How did you meet?”
“We caught eyes at the Community Circle he started at the church,” she sings. “I brought Ophelia on the day they discussed healthy masculinity, so she could be around some good men.”
“The first thing I thought was, what a wonderful mom,” Myles says.
“That’s so cute,” I say.
“We got to talking,” Cherie says. “He’d just broken up with his ex-wife, a real toxic witch, and I was, you know, also dealing. Fast forward and we’re on this family journey together.”
I wonder, for a beat, about the ex, the toxic witch. Does she live in town or did she leave?
“That’s beautiful,” I say.
Cherie smiles and looks at Myles, who’s eyeing my shoulder and massaging his left hand with his right.
“It’s interesting,” he says. “Of course your struggles, all of them, are in your body, but I wonder if hers are too. Larissa’s. Where in your body is her pain?”
“I don’t know,” I say. This line of inquiry is a surprise bomb, interrupting both my guilt and my distancing plan. Larissa’s pain, in my pain? The idea lights me up. But my ex’s voice: Larissa is not mine to worry about, definitely not mine to repress within my muscles and joints.
Myles slides over on the couch and hovers his hand above my shoulder.
“May I?” he asks.
I look to Cherie to see if she finds it weird that her boyfriend has sidetracked from discussing their romance to solving my body problems. She looks proud of him, full of adoration. I nod. He pinches my shoulders and kneads at the knots.
“Like I expected,” he says. “Tight as a brick wall.”
“Do you want to lay down? We have a massage table,” Cherie says.
“You don’t have to do all that.” My voice comes out shaky.
Cherie rises and uncloaks a raised leather surface.
“I got it for free off Marketplace. Myles reupholstered it. He’s a real healer, you know.”
I move towards the table, touch the leather.
“Sure, okay.” Though I fear I’m slipping down a hill into the kind of soft-core porn made by women for women, I want her to know that I approve of her life with this man, of her new family.
“Great,” Cherie says. “Go ahead. We’re not looking.”
I hadn’t planned to take my shirt off, but their backs are to me, looking at the wall like kids ordered to shut eyes while the others hide. The leather is cold on my bare chest.
Then they are both beside me. Cherie drizzles almond oil onto my back. Myles’s rough hands become smooth in it. I thought she was proselytizing, but his firm touch does make me breathe, makes me take a deep breath to the middle of me. My skin suddenly has air above it instead of pressure. Cherie is sitting at my side, massaging my hands. Through the table’s head piece, I see her tan feet, small and wrinkled from the sun, toenails painted bright white with toothpick-made dotted daisies on the big toes. She presses the core of my palm and I realize how many muscles overlap there. I wonder how often he massages her, how often they are alone, without the three girls, if Ophelia trusts him yet, if she trusted him sooner than she should have, but it was okay. I wonder if Cherie is healing here, with him.
Then his fingers begin walking down my spine until they arrive at my seventh and eighth ribs, the hellish ones that dance and dislocate, causing me knife-sharp spasms, and he stops. He begins to press what I think of as the head of my rib and the spine socket where inflammation builds, though I don’t know if that’s the actual anatomy. I do this exact massage with a pink ball against the wall, morning and night, but his fingers move like a fast tide against rocks, rippling with force, and he makes new room there and the rib-spine space overflows something into my body and I’m flush with heat and cold, and my chest fills and my throat breaks and I am crying, no, sobbing, my head hanging in the open circle of the table, my hidden face contorting in the circle, dropping tears onto the carpet, and beside his hands, now, are both of Cherie’s hands, just holding steady, and I can’t glom onto anything, anyone, because I am a hole.
After leaving the message, Cherie didn’t call back. My first girlfriend broke up with me—we’d shared everything we had to share. A winter passed where it rained every single day from October 27th to July 2nd, and in the summer, I saw Cherie at a small gathering of old friends and, before I could apologize for being out of touch, she told me that it was okay, but she really wished I would’ve picked up that day, or called back, because she’d been the most alone she’d ever felt. She’d had to choose to lose and mourn a nascent baby she never got to meet, all alone, to manage her faith, her grief, her future. That summer, her story was neatly packaged, a moving, well-edited college essay. She’d had to package it. No one had been there to hold it raw.
◆
Myles’s fingers loop out from my rib joint to skate along my spine.
“Let it out,” Cherie says softly, and I hate myself. I keep crying, keep dripping snot.
As we stood on opposite sides of her screen door a month and a half ago, my ex-girlfriend told me quietly that she did want to be loved by me, that she had wanted to be.
“But you don’t even like me,” I said. “What about me could you possibly like?”
“I think you’re funny. Sometimes our chemistry feels really good. And I guess I like that you like me, that you believe that there’s greatness in me or something. God that sounds stupid.”
“I thought you hated how I like you? How much,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying too. I want you to like me, not this image of me that you have in your head. Can we slow down and like, actually get to know each other? All this brain-numbing, you’re perfect, baby, codependence, and we can’t even fucking see each other.”
She spoke the word codependence as if it leaked with sticky garbage run-off. I didn’t understand what she had against it. It was my greatest wish to lose myself in someone else.
“It feels like you’re criticizing me,” I said. “You are always so critical of me.”
“Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want to hear.”
I guess it was. Her tears came next, the ones I hadn’t expected. I wrote them off as overwhelm. We were both so overwhelmed. She was in pain, I realize now. I thought she was a cold bitch, uninterested in how I’d hurt Larissa and the deep shame I felt about it, but really, I’d hurt her, my girlfriend. I’d refused to open up to her. I’d refused to know her on her own terms. I’d been too busy running past her towards a blurry us, too scared to slow down.
“We all hurt people,” Cherie says softly, about me and Larissa, I think, and maybe about me and her. I am grateful I don’t shift into territory where I believe Cherie, my old friend who I also once refused to know, can read my mind.
Myles kneads, his knuckles more shallow now, and I catch my breath. Cherie brings a hot rag, drapes it between my shoulders. She puts her fingers in my hair, scratching at my scalp. My hair catches her knobby silver ring, but I don’t yelp, don’t say a thing. Myles’s hands lift from my skin and I shiver without them, then another hot rag lies down. Silent, I watch through the table hole as Cherie’s feet walk out of the room, following the sound of Myles’s footsteps.
There is quiet and the trancey album plays and I lift my head from the table a few inches to see them in the kitchen. Cherie fills a glass of water, takes a sip. Myles takes a sip. They kiss. First I feel alone, then I am relieved. I am background, again, dissolved.