“I need to lie down,” I said to no one. I went back to the bedroom, crashed on the bed.
Fuck dope. Methadone was the new frontier. Only three bucks a pill. I leaned back against the wall. Hole up in the apartment. Should just stay good and fucked up. Get real junkie skinny lying with my lovely hip bones sticking out of my dirty jeans. Some man I don’t even know yet can curve his hand into my pants. Stay wet all the time. Read all I want in my room without having to think of dumb things to say about it. When I’m king. Jump in the ocean. Let the water go up my nose, I don’t care. Drive Upstate with the windows down. Go fuck in a little tent. Pull weeds out of the ground. Drink beer. Pick at the label. Go for a drive. Park on the side of the road. Stare at the stars.
I woke up with dried drool all over my mouth and a craving for chocolate ice cream.
Elizabeth was lying next to me with her eyes closed, a lit cigarette between her lips. Night of the living dead. I took the cigarette and put it out.
“It’s been real,” I said as I passed Candy taking a piss on the toilet. She gave me a Courtney Love face, half-closed eyes with a lipstick smear.
High. Walked down the street like I had a cock. Like the city was my bitch, and I was fucking it in the ass. You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine.
I walked into the front door, and it slammed behind me. The apartment was quiet and dark. I had managed to walk past a million bodegas. Big crinkly bags of kettle chips and chocolate-fudge-brownie ice cream. The only thing at home was peach yogurt.
I went back out to the bodega. Just to look, I thought. Maybe a candy bar. Something that wouldn’t make me feel guilty. I tried hard to remember the envy I felt staring at Elizabeth’s beautiful, tiny thighs. How her body looked so perfect and clean, and mine looked sloppy and messy. I always thought I was doing okay until I spent time around her and realized I was nowhere close to being thin.
It was smarter to buy a pint of ice cream, but I knew what started as a few spoonfuls would end with an empty pint and a sick feeling. There were granola bars with chocolate chips and peanut butter. The thought of more granola. . I knew this was dangerous territory, and this could spiral into a need for a treat every night, then pints of ice cream every day, and it would be gross.
I bought a Snickers ice cream bar. The chocolate broke into pieces and released the creamy vanilla ice cream. There was nougat and the swirl of caramel. The first taste was a dull sensation of sugar. At first you think, What’s all the fuss about? But then you find yourself wanting to go back and remember all the tastes: the salty nuts, the white cream, the thick caramel, the soft nougat, all mixed together. What exactly was nougat?
They should have girls with eating disorders do commercials for food.
I ate all but one bite and threw it in the garbage. There was a strong desire to take it right back out and finish it.
I found my phone, but it was dead. I found a charger, but then I realized it was Peter’s. So where’s mine? All this technology, and you end up like a caveman, hunched over, trying to figure out what plugs into what.
If I called Ogden, he would be pissed off. It pissed him off to hear about my feelings. He kept me chained a million miles from his heart, and when I cried, he thought, See, this is why I keep her chained so far away.
He could be cold as fuck. Sometimes I cried and his eyes turned to these points of endless apathy, like, “Go ahead and fucking die.”
Peter was too stupid to take care of me, and Ogden was too fucked-up. I would be middle-aged soon, and who in the world wanted to be with a middle-aged woman?
I called Ogden. He didn’t pick up. The blurry images of him with another girl. A blurry girl with long brown hair and fresh white skin and tits with huge areolas. Opening her legs. I kept calling. I cried into his voicemail. I shouted into his voicemail. I sounded like a child. I sounded like someone you might not want to call back right away. Where is a good emergency when you actually need one?
When men stop wanting to fuck you: Poof! You disappear.
I took three Xanaxes and watched Bob’s Burgers on my laptop till I passed out on the couch.
* * *
“We’re going to be late,” Peter said. It was twenty past seven. We had to be at Penn Station at eight.
“It’s not going to take forty minutes in a cab,” I said.
“There are no cabs.”
“There’ll be one, just wait.” The wind blew in my face. My head hurt. Why did I ever agree to go to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving? I cursed the past me, the one who hadn’t considered what the present me would have to go through.
The past me was always fucking with the present me. Like agreeing to go jogging at nine in the morning, like agreeing to help people move, like making doctor’s appointments at eight o’clock. Thinking naively, “It will be good for me to start the day early.” But when the day finally arrived for whatever, that past me with too-high expectations for myself had totally fucked present me.
The psychiatrist had given me Suboxone. Suboxone was the new methadone. Like methadone, it blocked dope, but Suboxone took longer to leave your system. You could see people nodding outside methadone clinics. Suboxone never did that. It didn’t give you a real high like methadone, but it was something. It felt like you had drunk an entire pot of coffee and then took some shitty speed.
“Maya,” Peter started, but then a yellow cab with lights on turned the corner and I was saved from whatever tangent he was about to go on.
I slid into the seat, put my headphones on, and turned up the music. It was some indie band, singing, “Everything’s a mess,” and then something about a heart, and then I couldn’t understand the words. Peter put our bags in the trunk and slammed the door a little too hard.
Penn Station was packed. Kids twirled around. Tired parents studied the departure board. Peter went to pick up our tickets. I stood and waited for the gate number to appear. I called Amy, my college roommate. Amy had been calling me every night since she started working the late shift. She was going to be visiting her in-laws.
“Hey.”
“Hey, what’s up?” she said, sounding tired.
“I’m at Penn Station, and I don’t want to go,” I said, sweating in my big coat.
“It will be fine.”
“They don’t know we smoke. I’ll have to sneak around like I’m fourteen again. The sister is a Jesus freak. The brother and the brother’s girlfriend, Sue, who is hot and is studying to be a doctor. . a fucking doctor. How do I compete with that? What do I do? I’m fat, and I do nothing.”
“You’re working on your thesis.”
“Amy, I’m not.”
“They don’t know that.”
“Amy, I’m using.”
“When did that start?”
“I never stopped.” I had told her I stopped. “But I stopped today. Today I’m clean.”
“Good,” she said. “Are you anxious?”
“I need a Xanax, and we haven’t even boarded the train.”
“Yeah, well, pause for a moment and feel bad for me. I’m in weirdo white-trash world Upstate with Dennis.”
“Yeah, how’s his mother?”
“Maya, this morning I woke up, and she was sitting on the couch dipping saltines in a jar of generic mayonnaise. Watching an infomercial like it was a real show.”