His vagueness irritates me. I am trying to indulge this poor, strange man, and I want Him to be disgusting. I know He has it in Him, so to speak. The audacity to ask for a hand from me (oh, will the double entendre never end?) in releasing His frustration would entitle Him at least to a bit of my respect. I’m tired of people being too chickenshit to ask for what they need.
“What do you want to do about it?” I wonder, trying to nudge Him into the land of sweet, sticky honesty. I want nothing more than to be what He needs me to be, to make someone happy, to take the edge off whatever has led Him to us, to me. What kindness can I ever extend to anyone I actually know? It is only Him I can help, only a stranger; only Him, a stranger who might be willing to ask me for something I can give.
He weighs my odd offer, dumbstruck, before answering. “Uhhhh—” His voice cracks endearingly, like a scared pubescent’s. He lets out a laugh of disbelief. “Ah, I uh…”
I wait, poised to hang up if He won’t be truthful.
“Could you, uh,…could you, could you maybe, um,…maybe just talk to me?” He stumbles. “Just, you know, talk? For a while?” It is only in His postcall, semen-soaked dreams that He has asked this of me, or anyone, before now. I think, in a flash that coincides with a glance at the door out of which Miranda has exited, about our little hotline group. I think about Stephen and Miranda and Jennifer and the rest of them, trusting me to answer this phone; about them having bestowed on me the right to answer. As if I were somehow in a position to take on anyone else’s troubles. And then, somewhere inside, I feel a ticking begin, a dangerous and loose ticking that gets louder and louder in my inner ear each second I don’t hang up the phone.
So I do it: I begin to talk to Him, in a voice slightly higher pitched and more self-conscious than usual. I tell Him I wonder who He is, I wonder why He calls us, what His story is. I tell Him He should make friends, go out into the world and have it dirty Him like it does all the rest of us. I tell Him He should go back to school and become a therapist. I say for all I know He is a therapist; He is someone else’s therapist, He is someone else’s therapist’s therapist. I tell Him I certainly know that things are not always black-and-white and that people are complicated. And I tell Him, in an overshot of compassion, because I don’t really believe it, that I don’t think He is a bad person for calling us all the time.
Throughout my little monologue, I can hear Him breathing hard, like a compulsive exerciser on a binge. “Go on!” He says, my captive audience, inflating my sense of civic duty so that it balloons massively — a true, red, beating heart to prove to me that I matter.
And so I do go on, with the assurance of being heard. It doesn’t matter at all to me that He is not really listening, or that He is, in fact, using me. I tell Him that my name is Miranda, and to make up for the lie I start to tell Him other things, like what it was like when my parents split up, or why we had to move to Baltimore in high school just when I had emerged victorious as a popular girl, or how my dad married his secretary and my mom has no one but me. These are things I don’t talk about, ever. Because they are mine, and once you give these things away they are scattered like useless feathers to the deaf wind of other people’s empathy.
He is still letting out rhythmic exhalations that echo and imitate the beating of my heart as well as the still-present, inexplicable tick tick tick-ing in my head when I have exhausted myself of important things I need to tell Him. And then, like an old lover in sync with me, He comes just when I finish, at the same instant, with a gasp and a pitiful roar. We both sit quietly, spent, entangled in the fiberoptics between us. Dazed and embarrassed, I have nothing to say. It seems that I will never again have anything to say.
Miranda reenters the room and startles me back to myself as unpleasantly as the ringing of the phone took me away. She furrows her brow, jaw dropping in disbelief that I am still on the phone with Him. “This is not cool,” she scribbles furiously on a pad. “What the hell is the matter with you??” I can’t look her in the eye. She is poised with her hand over the phone, threatening to hang it up herself if I won’t.
I want to say something as yet unformed in my brain to let Him know gently that I have to go now. But before I can speak He hangs up his receiver carelessly and easily, thinking nothing of it, with a click like the last tick of a bomb before it explodes.
We Have Trespassed
I was still doing my secret bleeding — a lot of it, and not the normal, dainty crimson bullshit either — when I deplaned, home for Yom Kippur and gingerly half waddling to accommodate my third maxipad in as many hours and the fact that I hurt everywhere. The cramps, as promised by the nice streaked blond at the clinic, were evil itself, and my boobs felt like two overfull water balloons with nerves. I was bodysurfing a weird wave of ache, my head heavy and hot.
My father gave me a little peck on the cheek, a chipper hello. He may have even called me “sweetie pie,” but I could just as easily be making that up, wishing it so. My mother embraced me full on, which killed.
“You look terrible,” she said to me, more observant than I would’ve expected.
“Not feeling so great, Mom.”
“What happened to your hair?” she asked as we slammed car doors.
“I cut it off.” Obviously.
“Yourself?”
I shrugged. It had been a very strange few weeks, indeed. “How’s Lexi doing?”
My mother offered a sigh and looked over at my father, who managed somehow to stifle his own sigh when he replied, briskly, “Not good.”
We were in a big rush to get home before sundown for the Last Supper, a feast of tofu steak, roasted new potatoes, asparagus, and salad, with fruit salad for dessert, all lovingly prepared and presented in honor of Lexi’s having become a vegetarian, if you can believe that. The kicker, predictably, was that she wouldn’t fucking eat any of it.
“Lexi,” said our father.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Lexi,” said our mother, lilting, tight. “It’s vegetarian.”
Lexi, slumped miserably in her chair, tugged at a patch of hair at the base of her neck. “I said I’m not hungry.”
“Lexi.” Our father again.
“I’ll eat later.”
“There is no eating later, cuntrag,” I said, trying to be amiable, flashing her an obscene mouthful of partially chewed potatoes. “That’s kind of the whole point.” I myself was beyond ravenous; I could not have been hungrier. Like I had a hollow leg or something. Only it wasn’t my leg.
My parents had only just recently come (in typical delayed fashion) to a grudging admission that Lexi had some “issues” “around” “food.” By the time I’d left for school in August (sweet escape!) there had finally been a slow meander through the Health and Body section at Barnes & Noble, a family visit to a special “food issues” therapist, a sweet if ineffectual attempt at creating meals she might somehow find more palatable, a monitoring of mealtimes that went pretty much just like this one.
For my Gender Studies seminar I had written a paper about socialized body-image problems and self-esteem, including for anecdotal supplement and sympathy a description of exactly this scene — my fifteen-year-old sister refusing to eat, our parents obsessively tracking her every nonbite — and my cool TA had written, “You poor thing!” in the margin, given me a big A-encircled in red like a plump happy face.
Lexi took a bite comprised of exactly two lettuce leaves and a nickel-size carrot round. She placed the half-loaded fork ever so delicately between her lips. “It’s better to eat less,” she said. “Then the stomach shrinks, and that makes fasting way easier.” Her chewing was slow and exaggerated.