long roll downwards

RachelLeave a comment

“We should spend more of our lives on staircases.”

– Georges Perec

Hannah is already a little drunk by the time she gets to the Eagle’s Nest, navigating carefully along the sparsely-lit streets as she stumbles from Nina’s parents’ house to the bar. It’s a local dive, neighborhood-friendly, tucked away on the inside of a plaza dominated by a grocery store, a florist, and a terrible Chinese restaurant; Nina likes to go there on hockey nights. Hannah is mostly indifferent to it, tagging along with friends who want to stop in on the weekends, but this is the first time she has ever gone by herself; a fact made worse by the unfortunate truth that it’s the closest – the only – place she can think of going without putting herself behind the wheel of a car. It’s almost three in the morning by the time Hannah reaches it, having tripped somehow on a cracked patch of sidewalk and lost her boot halfway, but there’s still a few people lingering outside: an older couple arguing quietly in the shadow of the plaza awning, a handful of college kids smoking and talking around the wire table in front of the big picture window. She doesn’t recognize any of them.

Continue reading “long roll downwards” →

falling in, falling out

RachelLeave a comment

(the pros and cons of being without you)

 

in

 

  • There’s a part of me that feels like I’m suffering from the emotional equivalent of minor brain damage: I’m dizzy, I can’t concentrate, I’m getting dehydrated. I’m relearning how to do all sorts of small things over again that I’d never thought twice about before – making phone calls, dining at restaurants, going to the movies alone – but I can still add and subtract and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m managing to tie my shoes just fine. 
  • I met your mother in the grocery store and even if her words were polite and pleasant I still felt like I was chewing on glass throughout the whole conversation, walking in bare feet over nine yards of glowing coals without any end in sight. I was like her daughter, she told me once, the hidden favorite, the lost child she raised in the basement; I could always turn to her for help if I needed it. So much for that. 
  • Austin was supposed to be cowboy boots and whiskey, horror movies and indie bookstores and a tiny apartment in the middle of the city, close to a new favorite restaurant, the library, my school. Austin was supposed to be a fresh start and trips to the Gulf, driving backcountry roads under an enormous starlit sky. I shouldn’t miss what never was, but there you are. 
  • Last night there was a Deadly Women marathon on one channel and three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in a row on another and I hate that I made it six digits into your phone number before I even realized what I was doing. 
  • I know that love is not an accountant’s ledger of favors and promises, but it’s hard to not look back and tally up our profits, sort through the files and split our history between the neatness of numbers, even columns adding up to zero. I put more in than I ever received and it’s hard not to be bitter, pushing through the paperwork to find this was just a Ponzi scheme, a two-bit scam run by an experienced crook. Like a fool I signed over my life’s savings without reading the fine print, ignored the suspicious feeling in my gut and let myself be blinded by a white-toothed smile, the promise of a solid future. It is hard, knowing the truth: that this was all a long con, that I am just another mark, crying over an emptied account.

 

out

 

  • I don’t have to pretend to like modern art anymore – you might think a fifteen-minute video of a man staring at a camera, covered in bees, is “a visionary approach to the genre,” but I certainly don’t. The same for plain white canvases the size of houses, spider-prints on woodblocks, the poor man’s Andy Warhol etching dented soup cans with Orwell quotes and nautical stars. Have fun trolling through endless rooms of ridiculous industrial light installations without me – I’ll be at the bar. 
  • There is a moment where my aunt asks me how you are doing and it feels nice, not having to lie and say that you are thinking of going back to school, that you are working on a novel, that you are looking to leave your dead-end job and find another with better pay, reasonable hours. It feels good not having to make excuses. 
  • Our mutual friends like me better. It’s petty, but it’s true. 
  • If I want to go to bars alone and kiss attractive strangers without guilt, I can. If I want to spend my evening hours writing and doing laundry instead of sleeping, I can. If I want to ugly cry while watching The Goodbye Girl after a long day at work, I can. If I want to play Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City” on a continuous two-hour loop, you can roll your eyes and fake-strangle yourself all you want but I will never have to justify my inexplicable love of this terrible song – my love of anything – to you again. 
  • My love is not afraid of fire, your sad rustic rabble gathering in the town square. My love snaps and sparks like a livewire, my love is a hissing, screaming monster rising from a laboratory slab and one day I will find someone who will appreciate the black-and-white beehive of my hair, my fragile, electrified heart. I will find someone with a square jaw, maybe, bolts screwed into his neck, a limited vocabulary, I will find someone who will love me in all my fanged glory, whose scars of creation will rightly match mine. My love will burn villages, peasant. You’d best find a priest, or a pitchfork.

ten honest thoughts

RachelLeave a comment

1.

The first thing I ever shoplift is lipstick. I do not know how old I am, only that I am old enough to walk to the Rite Aid at the corner unattended, flanked on either side of the wide blacktop shoulder by Alicia and Jeila – fifth grade, I think. Fourth at the earliest. Alicia is tall and athletic and Jeila is red-haired and skinny; both of my hands could completely circle her waist if she let me, and I feel like a small hippopotamus walking between them, two sets of hands on my coat collar like fingers wrapped around the hook of a leash. Alicia likes to steal and Jeila likes to egg her on and I am caught in the middle, torn between wanting to be good and wanting to join in, and Jeila watches the register while Alicia nudges me closer to the rack, looming high up before me like a wall ready to be scaled.

I take the one closest to me: deep red, dark red. Revlon, I think. $9.95 in a gold and black tube.

We go home. We do not get caught, not that day. My mother drives me to my grandmother’s afterward, and I play with the lipstick in the pocket of my coat the whole drive over, sequester myself away in the downstairs bathroom once I’m left alone. I’ve never put on makeup before: it’s been warmed by my pocket and smears across my face like thick, waxy paint, sticks to my teeth like bloody meat. Women in the movies have red lips, perfect hair, they have hearts that turn either black or bleeding depending on the music swell and this is the first moment where I see myself reflected in them: there, in the tiny, wood-paneled bathroom with the oil portrait of my aunt on the wall, I can see myself years ahead in a desert, in a laboratory, in a film noir bar with my hair loose and legs for days, smoky eyes and lips like spades split in half while I tell some gun-toting scoundrel where he could find the diamonds, the kidnapped ambassador’s daughter. I am not a girl, here, but a woman: a woman with weight, a woman with power.

I stare in the mirror for what feels like hours imagining an impossible future, fraught with danger, intrigue, romance. My grandmother finds me there and sighs, her whole body sagging with the weight of unshed disappointment as she breaks the spell the mirror has set over me, sets to cleaning the whole mess off; she swipes dry tissues over my mouth and my face is pink from nose to chin, the nails of her free hand dig into my jaw as she turns my head this way and that, looking for traces she might have missed. My throat is dry. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

“I wanted –” I start, unsure of how to finish, “I wanted to look like –”

My grandmother shakes her head. “Oh, honey, don’t,” she says, “Men don’t want girls who look like this.”

 

Continue reading “ten honest thoughts” →

Exit Strategies for the Perpetually Lost and Lonely:

RachelLeave a comment

Move to Boston. Date a Patriots fan and work in a Chilean restaurant. Don’t be offended when the wait staff speaks to you in Spanish; they’re teasing, and don’t know you wasted four years of high school doodling in your French notebook. Pretend you’re a med student and wander the Harvard campus, find anatomy books left behind on study tables and try to find the place for pain, the impossible cracks that hurt can fill. Your Pats fan will break up with you when they lose to the Bills, and you will laugh and toast to him as he storms out, the dumb fuck.

Move to San Francisco. Become a flight attendant and live in the Tenderloin. Have a boyfriend who writes freelance and buys cheap wine on Thursdays from your neighbor, who gets it off a truck from a friend of a friend near a vineyard. Your calves will look great, but the steep constant walk won’t get rid of that muffin top, or the loneliness. When your boyfriend leaves you for a drag queen, throw his laptop off the roof and relish in the sound it makes when it finally hits the ground.

Move to Miami. Swim with dolphins and make fun of the tourists and flirt openly with the waiters in the Greek restaurant you go to with your grandmother every Monday afternoon. She will want you to take diet pills, the hag, and you will lie face-down on the shag carpet afterwards with a mimosa hangover, tongue sticking to your teeth and wishing for death to just come and claim you, already. Get up and shower. Go to Disney World. I hear that in all the Magic Kingdom, Captain Hook gives out the best hugs.

Move to Austin. Wear cowboy boots unironically and hide in the public library, the movie house with a bar in the lobby. Listen to Dolly Parton and let your heart break all over again. Drive to the Gulf and wade in the water – let this be your belated baptism, your last-ditch strike at holiness. Sink. It is too shallow to drown you, and you won’t die in Texas.

Keep losing yourself in distance, in lines on maps – there are thousands of roads, here, and your story has no fixed end point.

Remember: if all else fails, you could always try to swallow yourself whole.

my mother, she killed me; my father, he ate me

RachelLeave a comment

Everything started because Dad loved his brother.

Aunt Helen ran off with the gardener and Uncle M went off the deep end, just a little bit, because it turned out Paris Whatshisface wasn’t just a gardener, but some long-lost son of Troy Industries, old Priam’s kid slumming it in a post-college haze of indecision and adultery. Paris was young, younger than Uncle M, and he had money and looks and Aunt Helen didn’t need the family anymore, just left Hermione with her dad and packed up the Jag and didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Uncle M drank a lot, after that. Dad helped.

Mom stayed in the background during all of this, helping with this charity and that auxiliary function and generally ignoring Dad’s drunken call for war in the kitchen, sitting at the center island with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows while they drank whiskey out of heavy-bottomed glasses. They were going to steal Troy Industries’ best people, their best clients, all as payback for what Paris did to my uncle. “Sparta won’t take this shit,” Dad slurred, “Sparta – Sparta’s made of fucking warriors. Troy won’t even see it coming.”

Mom brushed past him on her way out the door and didn’t object when he rested his hand on her hip. She was wearing lipstick again, dressing nice, wearing heels. We thought our parents were working things out; we didn’t know that our father’s ridiculous plans for a hostile takeover would actually be put to use, we didn’t know how our mother would react to any of what was to come. We didn’t know she was already drifting away.

 

Continue reading “my mother, she killed me; my father, he ate me” →

somebody loves you, rosie schulman

RachelLeave a comment

It’s Day 98 and Rosie wakes up to the sound of her phone buzzing on her nightstand. She rolls over, pulling at the covers, and buries her head beneath her pillow, trying to block out the noise. She shifts her hips and her shoulders at opposite angles so that her spine cracks, letting the popping of her stiff joints join in with the ceaseless vibration against the tabletop, and doesn’t move to shut off the alarm, letting it turn off by itself a minute later.

She stretches and dreads the inevitable moment where she will have to get up and shower, get up and eat breakfast, get up and drive to school. It’s a Friday: she has two classes in the morning and needs to buy groceries, she has to duck into work to pick up her schedule and at some point she needs to stop by the post office. Molly’s birthday thing is tonight and she’s meeting her for lunch around one. Sean is going to come by while she’s gone and pick up the rest of his stuff: the last of his books, the clothes he forgot to take with him, the stupid Bob Marley poster he insisted on hanging over the TV. Everything he left behind is packed and waiting for him in the living room, the last bits of his life with Rosie crammed up in cardboard boxes she got from the liquor store down the block.

Rosie takes a deep breath and emerges from her warm blanket cocoon like a dazed, blinking moth, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress. The bed feels so much bigger when she’s the only one in it.

Continue reading “somebody loves you, rosie schulman” →