Trash (20 page)

 

Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray.

“It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.”

I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing.

“Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both.

“Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass.

“Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.”

I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?”

“How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed.

“I should have known better, I really should have, you know?” She poured beer down her throat with a quick dramatic gesture, a Bette Davis move from a great thirties movie. So quick and sudden she moved, it seemed as if the beer never even touched her tongue, as if her thirst were all for the feel of it hitting her stomach, and not to ease the bitterness in her mouth.

“I an’t no kid. I got two kids of my own, after all. And hell, I went through all this with Richard, thinking that we were different, that we were special.” There were tears in her eyes, I saw, waiting there, not falling but shining. She kept moving her head, shaking her hair and pushing it up again. “Only special thing in the world is the lies we tell ourselves, make ourselves believe. Stupid, stupid bitches always thinking this time it’s different.”

Too much for me, I thought, sighed and tilted my glass to match the speed with which she threw back hers. I drank with her one for one, until dizziness made my hands loose on the glass, and I knew I had to slow it down. Liz didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were turned in on herself and her sudden laughs never altered her expression. Liz knew things about me no one else did, and because of that had a right to call me up in the night and ask for help. We had never been lovers, but we had always been friends. She had known me when I was in college, when I was the only lesbian she’d ever met. She had given me enough help when I had needed it, even cleaned me up and asked no questions one night when I showed up on her doorstep, my nose running blood and my clothes all torn. I had introduced her to Jackie and helped her move when she decided to leave her husband, but I couldn’t think of what to say to her now.

“Everybody fights, lovers more than anyone else,” I tried to tell her. “It’s part of wanting so much from each other. Sometimes you crawl all over each other’s nerves without intending to. . . .” She didn’t seem to hear me. She was watching the men around us, and not looking at me at all.

“Richard says if I come back, we’ll move out to the land co-op and have our own house up by next spring,” she said finally. The wine in my mouth went sour with the thought of Richard, with his smug little smile and those copies of the
Militant
he always had tucked under one arm. The man was fatuous and self-congratulatory in a way that ate at my insides, going on and on about the laboring classes while living off the income of an apartment building his daddy had turned over to him after graduation.

“Pond scum” I’d called him once, a line Jackie had repeated to him with great relish. I stared at the foam in Liz’s glass as it went flat. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her about Richard.

“I could put in a garden out there,” Liz told me, keeping her eyes on her glass, “be with Mikey and Janine all the time, not have to go back to that damn office every damned day.”

I’d thumped my glass against hers, forcing her to look up at me. “Yeah, and Richard could tell all his buddies how patience had been the secret—you know that line—how all he had to do was wait for you to get it out of your system. You and Jackie . . .”

“JACKIE!” Her wet glass slapped the table. “Hell, I never even see her anymore. She’s always at work, or the Women’s Center, or I’m at work, or Mikey’s sick, or Janine’s crying and Jackie has to go off for a walk to clear her head, or Jackie’s goddamned aunt is there going on about how hard she used to work. . . .” Liz stopped, wiped her eyes and her mouth and then looked directly into my face. “It’s not what I wanted, not anything near what I thought it would be. It’s just not.”

“It’s no worse than anybody else has.”

“It’s worse. It’s me.” She looked sideways at the men at the bar. “If I was living out at the co-op, Jackie and I could still see each other now and then. Richard wouldn’t have to know, and I wouldn’t be so tired, so damned tired all the time. You know, you know how it is, I hate being poor. I never intended to be poor again, and Christ! We’re just above starving.” Her face was too fierce for argument. The wine rose up in my throat, bitter and embarrassing. I didn’t know what to say. I just didn’t know what to say.

 

Waking up at dawn, I push myself out of bed, head for the bathroom, piss, rinse my mouth, and pull on shorts and a sweat-shirt. It’s seven steps down to the sidewalk from the side porch, and I take them at a run, pushing myself to get the momentum for running all the way up the hill to the campus. My head pounds and my throat hurts, and I have to grit my teeth to make myself run. I hate waking up after drinking wine, with that sick taste in my mouth. Cass says that wine is worse than whiskey, that it stays in your body longer and is harder on your kidneys. Cass talks a lot about her kidneys. She rolled her truck a few years ago—“bounced off that steering wheel, till I wished I’d’ve died”—and did herself some serious damage. Her kidneys are the worst of it, so that sometimes when she leans over to take a shot at the pool hall, her face will screw up and she’ll stand back quickly, and curse.

“Hurts like a motherfucker,” she says. But she won’t stop drinking. “Got to drink to ease the pain,” she laughs. I don’t argue with her, not about her drinking anyway. We got enough to argue about without that.

“You been seeing Cass awhile,” Anna said to me the other night.

“Must be time she got fed up with me, then.” I kept my face turned away, picked up Ghost Dance and hugged her to my neck.

“Well, if you going to go on the way you been, I expect it is.” Anna’s voice was low and sad. I watched her eyes track over to the pictures on her wall—old lovers and lost friends, she’d called it one night, her wall of grief. “I expect it is.”

 

On the hill above the science building, the dogwood trees are in bloom. My legs shake when I stop and bend over. I hold my balance and stretch out slowly, feeling the sweat running down my back. My thighs tremble and my throat still aches. When I look over at the science building’s huge mirrored front, I can see myself reflected in the glass, my hair swinging in the sunlight, the wet grass shining under my shoes. I look tiny and hard, like a nail sticking up out of the ground.

“Tena-kata-sho,” I say out loud and face punch up into my reflected image. The adrenaline comes even though all I have to trigger it is my own frustration. The sensei at the school I’ve been going to these past few months is a returned vet and a part-time cop who keeps switching back and forth, talking now in fortune-cookie Confucianism and then with macho insistence. Once every few weeks he loses control and really pops one of the boys. He doesn’t know how to deal with the women at all, and we all know he’d be happier if we weren’t in the class. The six of us who have remained ignore everything except the skills he has to teach us. For all of us, it is the discipline that matters, making ourselves over into what we most want to be, becoming strong for ourselves. We strip off our sex with our jewelry, sometimes so thoroughly that he forgets to treat us like the fragile incompetents he believes us to be. Last week he lost patience with me the way he does with the boys, grabbed me by the arm and shook me.

“You’re behaving like a passenger here, going through the motions. You’re not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re not in control. Come on. Get into your body. Feel it, feel what you’re doing. Push those muscles, feel ’em.”

The muscles of the mind, I’d thought. I’m just a passenger in here. I got to do something about the muscles of the mind.

I watch myself in the wall of glass above me, watch my back as I turn and lift my arms. I make my trembling muscles coil and reach, hoping desperately that the magic will come, that the kata will become sex for me the way it sometimes does. I slip into stance, determinedly loose, trying to thoughtlessly snap out the tension, to turn and jerk crisply, sharply, my shadow under me a pinpoint like the light in the pupils of Liz’s eyes. I push and sweat but my mind won’t let go. My feet keep slipping in the grass. The sun slanting up through the dogwood trees stabs my eyes. I lose my place in the kata and can’t remember the next sequence of moves.

“Goddamn it!” I shout, and my voice echoes back to me off the building. I see myself again, my mouth open like any screaming woman, the dizzy images of window after window reflecting figure after figure. I watch myself, the way I saw myself last night in the bathroom at the Overpass, reflected in the ammonia-stained tiles in the bathroom, my wrists coming up to face-punch the mirror. The morning sunlight was brighter than the fluorescent lights in the bathroom had been. I had been wavy and indistinct in the tiles. Now I was crisp and sharp in the mirrored windows. There were dozens of me up there, all open-mouthed and sunlit, bleached nails in the ground, not rising up, being hammered down. I lean over, seeing myself lean over, and remember Roxanne at the concert, the way she kept dropping her head so her hair fell across her face, the same posture I have in every picture I’ve got from high school.

“Maybe you an’t so bad,” Roxanne had told me when we’d gone off to the bathroom together at the concert. “But you really ought to think about using a little makeup. Cass is known for taking up with good-looking women—women who know how to present themselves, you know?” I’d just nodded and said nothing. I could touch Roxanne’s shoulder, share a sip of whiskey with her, but I didn’t know how to begin to talk to her, how to say I wasn’t looking to hold on to Cass the way she wanted to cling to Billy. But then I hadn’t known how to talk to Liz last night either, to tell her what to do. I don’t want to be poor myself. At bottom maybe it’s all about what you can stand and what you can’t. Certainly I wouldn’t be able to stand living with Richard any more than I could Billy, but I can imagine things that might help Liz—starting with a decent income, day care for Mikey and Janine, work that wouldn’t leave her exhausted and crazy—all the things none of us can give her. What would help Billy and Cass, or Roxanne, or even me?

I stretch up again, start the kata over, watching my form in the mirrored windows, the pattern of my body twisting, rising, kicking, and coming back around to start again. I start again, finish the form, and start a third time. Sweat runs into my eyes, and my muscles go loose and fluid. The magic starts in my belly, and the kata becomes smooth, the feel of it more like sex than anything else. My fear goes out of me, my grief. What did I imagine was wrong with me anyway? The first night I’d slept with Cass, I’d rolled over and laughed out loud when we’d finished making love.

“Goddamn!” I’d yelled. “I love my life.” Cass had laughed back into my face, pulling me down to start all over again.

“Goddamn,” I whisper now, and start the kata over a fourth time. Liquid and gold, my knees come up and my fists punch out. The kata, the dance, takes me up, makes me over. I let go of Liz and Judy and all of them. I come back into stance, with my hair loose and damp on my neck, the smell of my own body like wine in the morning sun.

“Goddamn!” I hiss the word between my teeth and look up to see myself standing with my head back and face glowing in the reflected windows. The whisper carries distinctly in the morning quiet. I can almost see the ripple of it in the grass.

“Goddamn.”

 

 

 

 

P
aula swears that if I joined her yoga class, I would never need another chiropractor in my life. She may be right. Margaret says it’s sex.

“Everything is about sex, but a bad back? That’s the worst. It’s the congestion, all that compression and tension. You know, tighter and tighter. You got to have a release, and sex is the thing that’ll do it for you.”

I nod and light another Marlboro. Last week, my boss finally told me they were going to have to lay me off the first of next month. I’ve been swinging back and forth from exhilaration to a kind of mad dread since then. God knows I hate that job, but thinking about looking for another one makes my stomach ache and my throat go dry. It makes me want to drink lots of beer and smoke endless cigarettes. What I’ve actually been doing is staying up late baking coffee-fudge cookies, eating them till I puke, and then going to bed to cry myself to sleep. I get to work late, barely able to sit at my keyboard. If they weren’t already going to lay me off, they’d fire me.