A Year Straight (6 page)

It started with the twinge of a vaguely familiar feeling, down there. I couldn't nip it in the bud, and I couldn't help but take it as a sign that I shouldn't be sleeping with men. I nearly crawled over to the Duane Reade drugstore across from my house and purchased God's Greatest Invention: those little orange pills that turn your pee a numb neon orange. They were prescription only back when I'd last needed them in the early nineties, so the triumph of finding them over the counter, next to the Monistat, rivaled the time I stumbled upon a six-foot-tall Swatch watch on a family trip to Switzerland. With that hanging on my bedroom wall, I was the coolest girl at school. For a week.

“We haven't seen you around in awhile,” said one of my friends. “What have you been up to?” I hugged each of them in their lofty retro down vests, a sure sign that fall was under way. Where had I been, they wanted to know? I honestly couldn't say.

“Oh, I've been working a ton. Start-ups,” I said, nodding my head as if in agreement with them. I overzealously petted their newly adopted, blind, three-legged dog while they eyed me inquisitively. I'd never been known to stay at work a minute past six, which was one hour past the time I would have liked to leave. Many of my coworkers would stay until eight or nine, but they were the computer programmers and salespeople. As the bookkeeper, I kept banking hours (I'd decided). And since no one had ever protested, that's the way it was. Besides, I was the eccentric artist at work, so other rules applied to me. Like, I was allowed to take up half the kitchen counter for my rice cooker and stink up the office with steamed broccoli. So when I had to run to the bathroom to pee every twenty minutes on the first day of my UTI, no one batted an eye. They probably assumed I was on the Master Cleanse again.

“Who's this?” I asked, picking up their ragged, milky-eyed Chihuahua.

“That's Chico,” they replied in unison, beaming. “We rescued him from a kill shelter. Hey, you should come over for wine tonight. We redid the kitchen.”

“Yeah, we did it all ourselves,” my other friend chimed in. “Rented a power sander and everything.”

I would have liked going over to their house to hang out. But I was nervous. They'd be sure to ask probing questions, and I'd never been good at lying. My mom always said,
almost pitying me, “Oh, Elena, you can't get away with anything.” From hoarding the forbidden Garbage Pail Kids cards to skipping out on assembly at school, I always got caught. And although something huge had shifted, some things never change.

I left the drugstore with only a magazine. At home I sat down at my table for four and browsed an empty article about the feud between Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. For the first time in a while, I felt alone. The loneliness was accompanied by a wave of nausea, which reinforced my pregnancy fear. To stave off the panic, I searched online for common symptoms:

Falling farther into the chasm, I clicked on a link for a due-date calculator. Based on my last period, my maybe baby would be a Gemini.
Nooo!
I called TJ.

“Dumbass, I thought you were dead,” she said, sounding extra husky.

“Don't get your hopes up. Let's go get some tea.”

“Tea? Make it Bloody Marys. I think I'm still drunk from the Cock Block Party last night. Hey, where were you? Brianna
was deejaying. I was sure you'd be up on stage putting on your S&M show.” I cringed. One benefit of not going out to lesbian parties was that I was drinking less. Knowing all the bartenders on a personal basis always (and usually unfortunately) meant free unlimited drinks. The last time I'd gone out, my friend Brianna and I were chatting (yelling, rather) over the deafening music during our long wait for the ladies' room. I blame whiskey and the charged atmosphere for the incident that followed. When Brianna enthusiastically told me she'd recently seen Madonna in concert, I screamed, “No way!” and slapped her square across the face. To this day I have no idea why, and I have not had any more whiskey. I apologized profusely and excused myself to the pizza place up the street, where I soaked up the alcohol with a slice of cheese twice the size of my head.

“I told you never to remind me of that, asswhole.” (This was how TJ both pronounced and spelled it, so I did too, for I was not about to correct her.) She also thought Stonehenge was Stone Hedge, as I discovered on a cross-country trip we made together once. She was sure she was right, arguing that it made more linguistic sense, the site being somewhat of a hedge and all. When I won the bet, she was the one pumping gas for the rest of the three-thousand-mile trip—sun, rain, or snow, all three often appearing within the same state.

“Listen,” I said, in between sips of my virgin Bloody Mary (with extra pickles, please), “I have to tell you something. I've barely told a soul, and I want to keep it that way.”

“Well, you can tell me. I have no soul,” TJ said, trying to spear an olive with her straw. I could always count on TJ. She listened attentively as I confessed my yoga teacher obsession and then, the graver felony, sleeping with the lawyer and my potential pregnancy predicament.

“Wow,” TJ said, sitting back in her chair, disturbingly pleased with herself. “If I've ever wanted blackmail material, this trumps anything I could have thought up on my own, Miss Lez.”

“Trump? That's a big word for you.””

“I think I heard it on TV yesterday. Anyway, when were you, you know?” TJ tilted her head as if this were supposed to imply what she was asking, but I wasn't catching on.

“When was I what? Doing it?”

“Duh, jackass, yes, but when you were doing it, where were you—”

“Oh, his house, my house, this one time almost at his office, but then he met me at a bar instead, and from there we—”

“Ack! TMI! No, idiot, when were you, ugh, I can't believe you're making me say it. Where were you in your
cy-cle
?”

I let out one of my famous guffaws, turning the heads of the other patrons.

“I hate you,” TJ said, and got up to head to the men's restroom.

I motioned for the waiter and ordered a piece of the Brooklyn Blackout cake I'd seen on my way in.

“And two forks, please.”

The blackout kicked in back at my house, where TJ and I lay comatose on the couch, her feet on my lap, me refusing to massage them.

“Stupid, you're not pregnant. Just go get a goddam test and get it over with. Remember when you just knew you had Lyme disease because you were tired all the time, but it turned out you're just lazy?”

“Are you insane? I can't go back in there.”

“Do you want me to go get the fucking thing for you?”

“You would do that for me?”

“No, jackass, not to save your life. Mine, maybe. But not yours.”

“Thanks.”

“Now tell me. What exactly brought this whole thing on? Are you bored with women? You wanna have a baby ? A lot of chicks suddenly decide they want a baby the ‘easy way' and end up with a dude. Usually happens around age thirty or so. If that's the case, you're past due. Tick tock, tick tock.”

“No, no, that's not it.”

“Then what ? You miss the ‘real thing'? Come on, just tell me. Every butch on the planet wants to know if we're second rate.”

“Honestly, that's not it at all, and for the record, the ‘real thing' is overrated.”

“I like that answer.”

“The thing is, I don't know, but I do know you won't be the only person to ask me. It's the questions I dread the most. If other people find out about this, I'm in no place to give answers. God knows, I'm asking myself the same thing every day.”

“Alright. Well I think you're insane, and I strongly advise against it, but if for whatever reason you insist upon chasing down guys, then you're going to have to toughen up. If they're anything like me, they're dogs.”

“I've already discovered that, thank you very much. I definitely don't want a relationship with a guy. I just kind of want to experiment some more.”

“Oh. Well if it's just sex you're after, that should simplify things. You just have to get your heart out of the way.”

“And how exactly do I do that, Tin Man? Press eject and place it on my nightstand for safekeeping?”

“It's more like control-alt-delete. Have you not been observing me all this time?”

“In fact, I have, which is why we're not together.”

“Exactly. Now listen carefully, because it's complicated and can't always be taught. Ready ? My top-secret recipe for dating survival is: Just Don't Care. I can say it slower. Just. Don't. Care. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” I said, shifting in my seat, recalling when I was in love with TJ many years prior and how I'd pursued her in vain.

“If you find yourself starting to feel anything—anything at all—stop. Walk out. Put your boots on and run. Don't return calls. Sleep with someone else. Go for a drink. Knit if you have to... but just don't care.”

“I don't knit.”

“It doesn't mean you gotta be a raging asshole. You can have fun. That's what it's about. But you just got to keep your guard up. Got it, lesbo ? You need them to know up front that they cannot count on you, that you are inconsistent, selfish, untrustworthy, and a whole lot of fun. Are you up for this?”

“Honestly, I don't think so. It sounds like a lot is involved to stay uninvolved,” I replied, weary of TJ's strategy.

“There are tricks to it. For instance, keep vampire hours. Don't ever see them in the daylight. No long walks, no meeting their friends, don't take out your freaking photo albums and go through your life history. All you do is send a text, tell them to meet you at a bar, and that's it. It's actually quite simple. Don't give me that look. I know I'm not a good person. And neither are you. You hide it better, but I can see right through your little hippie save-the-whales routine. You make them tea and tabbouleh, and you get away with your satanic hypoglycemic episodes. You're halfway there already. If you want to survive this little experiment you got going, you need to listen to me. I suggest you start by putting your heart in one of your annoying little herb jars you
got on your windowsill; yeah, the ones right next to your prayer stones and Joni Mitchell albums. Now, ready to give it a shot?”

“Totally,” I said, and put the kettle on for some tea.

 

 

WHOLE FOODS WAS always packed unless you got there at the precise moment they opened. The long lines provided for way too much time to peruse the impulse items: Beek-man Boys goat milk soap, Luna Bars, vitamins, and the most high-risk of temptations, the magazines. In spite of myself, I reached past my usual reads,
O, Dwell,
and
Bust: For Women with Something to Get Off Their Chests,
and opted instead for
Fit Yoga
(For Women Suddenly Wanting to Get Off with Their Yoga Teacher). The cover was graced by another Elena, a famous yoga instructor, for whom students formed a line around the block. I bet Dante would have overlooked the whole lesbian thing for
that
Elena. With her expertise in heart-opening anusara, I doubted she was chasing people down the street. Did she feel fully centered and whole all the time ? I opened to the table of contents. How could I feel grounded, too?

Perhaps the answer was in the feature article, “Grow Your Love.” Better yet, maybe it was tucked away in the very bottom right corner, in a little sea-foam-green box: “The Dante Earthdance Playlist.” Before I could get a glance at the track titles, it was my turn in line. I tossed the magazine into
my basket, careful not to crush my organic lavender dark chocolate bars (plural).

On the walk back to the office, I was nearly plowed over by a hoard of tourists in Union Square. I retrieved my new magazine from my bag. Maybe I had been brainwashed during yoga class by all those songs Dante played at the barely audible level. Who knows what messages they were sending? However, according to his list of favorites, the messages followed a consistent theme: mother earth, embrace the divine, goddess bless. If anything, a playlist like that should turn a straight girl gay.

At work, I spent the afternoon formulating the first of many theories I would come to mull over. I was six years old the summer I learned to swim. My parents had shipped me off to Italy to spend some time with my relatives. A summer when you're six feels like a lifetime. My first time flying alone, the way my independence surged inside, I must have grown two inches along my stroll through the gate. I was big. Little did I know, there were six pairs of eyes on me, not to mention my own personally assigned flight attendant. She hung a giant name tag around my neck and handed me a book of stickers. They came with a foldout scene of a blank landscape, laminated so that I had a plethora of options for the placement of the various images: animals, people, cars, planes, clouds. I could place a person here and a tree there and then move the person to sit on top of the tree. If I wanted
it to, a cow could swim in the sea. We flew over New York City, the whitecapped Atlantic Ocean, farmland reminiscent of jigsaw puzzles, and finally the Swiss Alps. For all I knew from my window seat and sticker set, the world was vast and malleable.

Being half Italian, I'd grown up knowing there was always an alternate way of doing things, and at the very least, two ways of describing them. That summer I learned I could wade my way through the shallow end or, as my cousin Marco taught me, dive into the deep end of
la piscina
and swim. It's a blessing and a curse, a mind that's wide open. It seems I've tried to live ten lifetimes in one. From my first career choice of gift wrapper after a Christmas shopping trip to Sears with my mom, to photographer, to marine biologist, the list is endless. That last one actually almost stuck when I started my freshman year of college in the School of Fisheries Science. But by my second semester I had switched to women's studies, impassioned by an imaginary scenario my professor threw out for the class to debate: “If a black man and a white woman were running for president, who would win?” The conversation was heated and I grieved the fact that I'd never see such a thing in my lifetime. Fifteen years later, that question is no longer hypothetical. That's the thing about change. It happens.