by
Miranda July
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“We went back to her place.”
“Okay.” I stood up. “Okay then.” I sat down. I put my hands to my cheeks and then clasped them in my lap. “All right. All right then.”
He watched me, braced for whatever was coming. I crossed my arms and looked away. So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it.
“I think this is good,” I rasped.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.
I waited for her to say more, but she was done talking, so I took over. Yammering away, I went back and forth in my mind about whether there was a charge between us—I wasn’t overcome by lust, but then, she didn’t seem to be, either. She was sober so I decided not to vape. If I wasn’t aroused by the time things got physical I could astral-project myself into a more taboo situation, clamp the invisible screen over my face. Of course some people didn’t have sex on first dates, she might be like that. Or maybe I was mistaken, maybe this wasn’t a date, given that it had been three hours now and neither of us had laid a hand on the other. By one a.m. and with great disappointment I started to give little hints that we should wrap it up. I yawned and she said, God, I’m not usually this nervous; come over here.
cute
He was supposed to be working at a Sacramento Hertz, lost in memory and yearning. Or pacing around their shitty little house with Claire telling him to take out the trash and him saying What? And her saying Take out the fucking trash. Blazing around the stage, doing the thing he was put on this earth to do while encircled and adored; it didn’t get better than this. This was the one shared dream that wasn’t only a dream.
I prayed for their dance to go wrong somehow. Not an injury, God no, but some kind of creative faux pas that would break his spell over everyone and return him to me. Maybe Davey and Dev wouldn’t know how to end it, they would wear out their welcome—or plagiarism. Did they have that in dance? It only took one bad review to ruin a career, especially if plagiarism was invoked.
I was aware that I was being profoundly ungenerous—miserly, small-minded—but that only made me more wretched.
“Oh, I go out,” I said too quickly, as a joke. “I’m constantly out.” No, of course I didn’t hang out in bars. I had been in my converted garage for the past fifteen years, working at the table with one short leg. And when I had gone out, it had been to attend my own events or the events and openings and premieres of my friends and peers. The bar was having trivia night and people were excited about that. They had time for that. I hadn’t planned on becoming this rarefied; I had just spent every waking moment trying to get across what life seemed like to me, only allowing undeniable things—the child, a bad case of the flu, hunger and thirst—to take me away from this trying. And apparently time had, meanwhile, been passing—great swaths of it, whole decades. Indoor smoking had been banned and this young man was leading me to a table outside. The air was perfectly warm. We drank tequila and I wondered if the upside-down triangle of his upper body—his bony but broad shoulders narrowing down to his small waist—was perhaps a classic proportion with a kind of ancient resonance. Something to do with Michelangelo’s drawings or Da Vinci or whoever it was. The Da Vinci code. Like if you measured the angles of his upper body would you discover those same measurements in the Bible or inscribed on a Greek vase and would they also correspond, if scaled up, to a larger, cosmological measurement, perhaps between stars? Celestial music—what was that? If I’d been at home, working, I’d pause to look it up. But, stunningly, I wasn’t at home working and I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t really want to look anything up, ever again. We were sipping our drinks and talking; I was trying to explain what my work meant to me. How life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me. Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control. I said this last part half standing, with my arms grasping the air as if to catch a bird. I really got why people drank to unwind after work, this was great. I tried again to guess his secret passion.
<3
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a tiny bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse, and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.
heh
We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone ’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.
At dinnertime I asked Clee if she wanted to join me for chicken and kale on toast. If she was surprised by toast for dinner, I was going to explain how it’s easier to make than rice or pasta but still counts as a grain. I wouldn’t lay out my whole system at once, just a little tip here, a little tip there. She said she had some food she’d brought with her.
“Do you need a plate?”
“I can eat it out of the thing.”
“A fork?”
“Okay.”
I gave her the fork and turned up the ringer on my phone. “I’m waiting for an important phone call,” I explained. She glanced behind herself, as if looking for the person who might be interested to know this.
lmao
At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.
chuckled at this
But most nights we didn’t do anything. I cooked, took a bath, read in bed; she talked on the phone, watched TV, heated her frozen meals. We ignored each other with a feeling of fullness and ferment. Phillip texted (KIRSTEN WANTS YOUR PERMISSION TO DO ORAL. ???! NO PRESSURE. STANDING BY UNTIL YOUR GO-AHEAD) and I felt no animosity. Oh, Kirsten. Maybe she was our cat for the past one hundred thousand lifetimes, always on the bed, pawing around in the covers, watching us. Congratulations, kitty, you’re the girlfriend this time—but I’m still in charge. I felt limber and generous. Phillip was working through something—that’s how I might put it to a close friend, in confidence. I’d permitted him to have an affair with a younger woman.
dying
But a funny thing happened on the way to the front door.
“Yum, yum, yum,” said a voice from the shadows. She swaggered out and put her hand on the small of my back. She was wearing a backward baseball cap.
“Step away!” I barked, and she hung back for exactly one, two, three seconds before lunging. The next five minutes proved that my neighbors didn’t care if I lived or died.