“All I can imagine is babies wailing, and Noah and Candy passed out on the floor with lit cigarettes in their mouths and the stove on,” I said.
“Men our age are giant pussies,” Elizabeth said. “I need a real man. Like an old-school dude who won’t put up with my bullshit, you know? Someone who can take control of my life.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, pouring the dope onto a copy of The Rum Diary.
Lying on the bed. Giggling, on our bellies, swinging our feet. We were two girls at camp. She said, “Oh, Maya, when will we be swans?”
Elizabeth’s clavicles were pronounced. She had long dark hair. She could have been a model. Sometimes I wanted to touch her stomach because it was perfect, how flat it was. Her shirts hung flawlessly because nothing was there to push them out. Men fell in love with her. Men followed her down the street trying to guess her name, like in a movie.
She always dated men who were losers and assholes.
Haven’t you, haven’t you seen it all before?
I was in love with Elizabeth. I wished we could be together, cooking, laughing, talking. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I just always wanted to be with her and to hear her laugh at my jokes and to protect her. Or I wanted her flat stomach and size-zero jeans and low-affect attitude, as if nothing could fuck with her. Elizabeth would not cry in a grocery store if her sixty-year-old boyfriend didn’t pick up her phone call. Or maybe I did want to have sex with her. Who knew.
Elizabeth had lost her father very young. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was thirty-six and she was seven. In her living room, there had been a hospital bed with a machine attached to him that gave him chemo. The cancer spread to his brain. No one told him he was dying. Elizabeth’s mother told her not to tell him. The very last time she saw him, on his deathbed, he tried calling his office to tell his boss he couldn’t come in. When she hugged him, he whispered to her that he would take her to the beach for her birthday.
After her father died, Elizabeth’s mother assumed her husband’s four brothers, who lived close by, would help out, but they didn’t even come by, let alone lend her money. She was a middle-aged woman with two kids, and she had never worked. Overnight her life resembled nothing she could have imagined. She was a widow with bills to pay. She drove Elizabeth in circles all night, crying and cursing her dead husband and his family.
Elizabeth went to eleven different schools. Her mother-packed lunch was always the same: a small can of tuna, a plastic fork, a V8, and one of those little red balls of cheese. “I was the girl who smelled like tuna,” Elizabeth said with a smile.
At seventeen her mother bought her a one-way ticket to Boston. In Boston she lived in a house with other runaways and drug addicts. She got a job bartending. She tried heroin for the first time. Then she made her way to New York.
Elizabeth was always telling me her plans. She was always on the verge of getting clean. Then she would go into the bathroom, where Noah would shoot dope into her arm and her slight body would slump over, and then I would hear the obligatory toilet flush, as if anyone thought she was actually using the toilet. But she had been doing dope in secret for so long it was part of the routine.
I used to feel good. Elizabeth used to feel nothing. She used till the money was gone. She would vomit in the toilet, pass out on the floor, wake up, and do more. She told me once, “Ever since my dad died, I don’t care about being alive.” She mixed pills and dope and drank on top of it. She wanted oblivion, she said, and death would only be a welcome side effect on the way to her goal. How her ninety-pound body could handle it all was a mystery. How she was able to maintain a job, working ten- to twelve-hour days as an editor for a magazine, was also a mystery, but it was mostly a curse. She was stuck in the cycle of making money to blow on her habit and needing dope to sustain the long hours at the office. She always was saying that if she only made this much more then everything would be fine. But she would always need more money, no matter how much she made, because that was the nature of the problem, and the problem would never be solved as long as she could make money or keep her job. There was nothing to throw a wrench into the cycle, no free time to offer a moment of clarity. Where was bottom? She worked high up in a building, and then she went home to her apartment and shot all the money in her arm to feel nothing at all.
There used to be this D.A.R.E. commercial where this woman walked in a circle and kept muttering, “I have to do drugs so I can work so I can make money so I can do drugs so I can work. .”
Where the fuck was bottom?
Elizabeth thought it was bullshit that I complained about my father. “At least you had him growing up,” she said. There are no competitions for pain because no one can be objective. We all have our own private hells. Mine was a father who showed no interest in my existence. That’s a hard problem to have because the precise problem is the absence of problems.
When I was a kid, I literally thought his name was “Dad.”
But then I asked myself, Who would I be if my father was a great dad? What if what drove us — our sexual habits, our ambitions, our talents — all stemmed from someone not hugging us when we were kids? The best parts of us developed from overcompensating for something we weren’t given. They say ugly girls have to develop a personality. Whatever hole was made when we were kids is the same size as our ambition and need for attention. So is it better to be interesting but damaged, or mediocre but stable? At NYU there were students with parents who were so encouraging it seemed to verge on another type of abuse, giving their children unfounded confidence in anything they put their sticky hands on for five minutes. This one girl told me how her parents had her read her stories during dinner, and they would all applaud.
My parents had thought I was an idiot. They had treated my interest in writing as a symptom of my failure to grasp reality. “You’re so smart. You could have gotten an MBA,” my mother said.
There was a knock. Elizabeth opened the door, and Noah stuck his head in. “All right, I’m going to go get some crack. You want some?”
“Here,” Elizabeth said, handing him a fifty.
“My kids are everything to me,” Candy said for the millionth time. “They are the whole reason I’m alive.” Then, “You have beautiful hair.” She was so skanky. Someone should have put a cock in her mouth, if only to shut her up. But she probably wouldn’t. She would probably babble some incoherent shit even while you fucked her. I wanted to throw up.