“You know, when someone decides it’s over there’s nothing you can do.”
“I know. I just thought, finally I have everything sorted, finally I-holy fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Look out your window.”
I did. A residential street, cars parked on the opposite side. Some house lights on, some off. Almost-invisible droplets of rain blown sideways, showing up as a shower of orange under the streetlight. “Yes?”
“It’s his car. It’s your ex’s car.”
I squinted. The eyes are not quite what they should be these days, but I don’t drive and have readjusted my notion of “normal newspaper reading distance” to approximately two centimeters from my nose. But yes, it looked awfully like the Boy’s car-Fiat, V reg, half a block down.
An inadvertent shiver. It was cold by the window and I pulled the drapes. “Lot of cars like that around.”
“Wasn’t there when I parked,” N said. “None of your neighbors have one.”
I turned back toward the sofa, unfolded my arms, picked up the cup of tea and sat down. “Mmm. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
When N left an hour later, the car was gone, anyway. dimanche, le 8 fevrier
So: it is the mid-eighties. Sometimes in the summer my mother leaves me with a Jewish youth group on weekdays. Usually we hang around a community center, playing board games or being forced into strange sports no one knows the rules of, like korfball. Sometimes we take trips.
One time we go to the beach in two minibuses. It’s not a warm day, but the beach is a treat (we are told), so we mustn’t waste the day (we are also told). A teacher at school once brought back a bleached starfish from her holidays abroad, so I spend the day walking barefoot up and down the shore looking for one. Of course there are none. Some other girls are sitting cross-legged in shallow water, pretending to shampoo their hair with sand. They ask me to join them but I don’t. It looks too cold.
We are brushed down obsessively by the leaders before being allowed back in the buses. But there is still sand in everything when we come back, so the adults order the girls into one room and the boys into another to change out of their swimsuits and shake out their towels. Between the two rooms is a cloakroom-cum-corridor, and the boys don’t realize, but two older girls go to watch them change.
I didn’t get to look. Not from want of trying: the older girls were tall enough to block the view, and wouldn’t let anyone else near. They described what they saw (inaccurately, I later realize). For years after, I believe the male member has a spiraling ridge going down it, the physical equivalent of the verb “to screw.” When someone’s older sister has a boyfriend, she is “being screwed.”
There is a popular song all the older girls like, and they argue about who loves the singer most, whose name would sound best with his. His protestations of asexuality are meaningless to them. No, not meaningless: they make him harder to win. He is as separate from the boys around us as a person can be. He is beautiful, antique, otherworldly, and from Manchester-and if we know anything, it’s that Manchester is far cooler than where we are.
In my first flat after university, I am unpacking dishes in the kitchen when the song comes on the radio. It is the first time I have heard it without a chorus of twelve-year-olds singing along.
That summer of the youth group was also the summer my parents’ friends start to call me “the little Alice.” As in, through the looking glass. “Where is the little Alice?” they ask, and I run from wherever I am, happy to impress. I am brought out at gatherings to impress with feats of memorization. They keep me in the room, a bit of a parlor game, come watch this ur-adult. I know they’re patronizing me by speaking this way, but at the same time I am pleased because I can talk back to them in their own language. One friend of the family refuses to dine at our table if not seated next to me. He asks what I think about politics, and I am surprised to learn I have an opinion. However uninformed. It really hasn’t changed much since, either. Then he asks me to recite poetry, going over it line by line. I recite it back verbatim. “Someday you might even absorb all this,” he says, laughing.
So I am in the kitchen, alone, listening to this song as an adult, not as Little Alice. The lyrics are quite sad, actually. Without realizing it, I have begun to cry.
FUCK: A SPOTTER’S GUIDE
• Good Fuck: makes a lot of noise, alerting neighbors to actual sexual activity on the premises. Leaves nothing behind and does not phone immediately after. In short, should probably be charging for services rendered.
• Bad Fuck: counts ceiling tiles, then demands betrothal.
• Fuckable: not so much conventionally attractive as exuding animal qualities. Unless, of course, that animal is an otter.
• Fuckwit: not likely to engage in actual fucking anytime soon.
• Fucking Helclass="underline" is populated by women of the tanned arid blonde variety who would rather talk about their diets, spirituality, and tiny dogs than engage in sex. See also: Chelsea, Tantalus.
• Fucked Over: no longer the recipient of regular fucks. mercredi, le 11 fevrier
In the last week, I have been set up on three more dates. This might mean my friends are concerned about my emotional well-being, or afraid of what might happen if I am single for too long, or both. And I don’t want to get attached to First Date too quickly; while he’s a nice person and we get on well, the more I think about him, the more I find his intentions a little… intense.
None of the intended gents, however, were quite what I had in mind for a love match.
Bachelor #1 was a lovely bloke-tall, strange dark eyes, devastating Welsh accent. If there’s anything that drives me batty, it’s the mellifluous tones of men from the Valleys. Superficial, I know, but we all have our weaknesses.
Alas, the fellow must not have been clued on the details of my working life. Halfway through the starter, he related an elaborate anecdote which essentially came down to ridiculing his best friend for “dating a whore’s sister.” Ah. Well. Pity.
The meal was nice, though.
Bachelor #2 met me at a pub already drunk. Another fine figure of manhood, but having distinct problems negotiating the relationship between his body and the force of gravity. Inside of half an hour he was clinging to the bar for support, having discovered I am unsuitably small to support fifteen-odd stone of wavering man-weight.
A couple of hours later we were in the queue for a club. In spite of the rain and general yuckness, they were operating a one-in, one-out door policy when the place itself was clearly nowhere near full. Bachelor #2 took umbrage with this indignity and decided to address the bouncers on the matter. They, quite reasonably, chucked the lad out on his ear. I peeled him off the pavement, got him back to his in a taxi, located a bag of peas in his freezer, and slapped it on his swelling cheek before making my excuses. Being already unconscious, I doubt he noticed.
Bachelor #3 was the sort of person for whom the mantra “Better to keep quiet and be thought dim than open your mouth and remove all doubt” was created. After a solid hour of my bright chatter (being personally unafraid of whether people think me dim or not), he finally came out with a few winners:
“I can’t say I’m a fan of [the subject I studied at uni].”
Wiping out an entire academic discipline with a single sentence. That’s fine, that’s okay, I’m not precious about such things. So off again the conversation went, this time to music, a subject about which he was somewhat more animated.
“I’ll listen to anything, except country and western.”
What, a life without Dolly? Without Patsy? The Flying Burrito Brothers? Admittedly, the current crop of Nashville output is appallingly samey, but to write off the likes of Wilco and Lambchop altogether?
To paraphrase the country-and-western diva, I waxed my legs for this? jeudi, le 12 fevrier