Drink
For all these years I’ve been drinking everything that isn’t water. The act of drinking supersedes the body doing the drinking. Give it to me, whatever it is, and I will drink it.
Once I drank a rope. It wasn’t so much drunk as it was lowered down, hand over hand. It was a thick rope and my mouth stretched out around it. I thought, Just a few more fathoms. The rope’s nylon tickled my throat. It was coiled in my stomach, itching. The itch could only be scratched with another rope.
Recently I drank a line of silver needles. It was awkward at a party. I thought no one noticed but everyone noticed. Can I get you some water? the host asked. What he meant was Can I get you something that isn’t needles? I said, No thank you! My tongue kept shedding needles. They went plink-plink and then rolled under the table, where the fondue pot was burbling in its yellow way. I really didn’t want to be that person, with the needles. One of the needles got stuck in my teeth. I grinned as it wagged up and down.
In my 20s I drank matches. This was when I lived in an apartment with Rebecca. The charred nubs rubbed against each other. Stritch, stritch went the matches. The more I drank the more there was to say. I meant to say Fuck him but I opened my mouth and went Stritch, stritch. I burped out sulfur. Of course the matches were not lit. We were best friends, Rebecca and I. We snuffed the matches with a quick flick of the wrist. Here you go, we said. Everything in our apartment was wrong-angled: ankle-break pie-wedge stairs, trash-picked trashcans with off-kilter lids. We dragged a drum set into the attic, and we hung a real punching bag from the rafters, and we bashed our sticks arhythmically without apology, and we flailed at the bag when it swung toward us. Punch, punch, we went. Each of us was always breaking up with a man, even when we weren’t breaking up with a man. A man had hit one of us but maybe he was sorry. A man had found someone better, someone hotter. We were drinking, not talking about him. Stritch, stritch, we said, and it had the rhythm of fuck him.
Some people, when they say a drink, mean apple juice or ginger ale or tea. Or water, after all, because we can’t live without it. Other people, when they say a drink, mean always exclusively not those things.
I drank dirt. A thousand granules churned against my vocal chords. Drinking dirt made sense because I was feeling buried anyway. I was fighting with my husband but it wasn’t exactly fighting, more like digging. I tried to speak but my syllables rolled out silted. Ponderous clots stuck on my hard palate. What I’m trying to say is. When it started out we were having the fight, but as it continued, it—the fight—was having us. Why are you drinking more? My husband asked. The answer was, I didn’t want to be there. The answer was, I wanted the dirt to pour out through my ribs. I wanted to cough dirt and hold my hand out to him. What I’m trying to say is. Mud sprayed between my teeth. Because drinking makes me feel better, I said.
When I started college, I lived in the substance-free dorms, on purpose. I was a college student in New York so who needed alcohol, the theory went? I took the subway home from an all-ages show at the Knitting Factory. The grit of sober sat in my eye. I went to a women’s college, so the substance-free dorms were like a hedge within a hedge. Then in my junior year I studied abroad at Oxford. I learned how to drink like a man. I’m impressed, said the guy who went to Eton, said my Scottish friend on Burns night, said my high-school friend Ed who was inexplicably also studying abroad at Oxford. If I couldn’t be hot then at least I could be tough. I could one-up the guys in everything they drank. When I left the pub I carried a compact man-like raging, in my body, through the ancient alleyways. Or maybe it was more like this: if I could drink like a man I would not be hurt by men. It worked about as well as any other charm against being hurt by men, which is to say intermittently at best.
In the years directly following college I drank a dozen eggs in their shells; they slid oblong and cool, right down my gullet. I drank lightbulbs and listened as their filaments snapped in my intestine. I drank a feather boa. I drank a handful of ATM receipts and didn't even feel them. I grew calluses all the way to my stomach, and I called this the opposite of weakness.
All of these, I considered more valuable than water. Water was for suckers. Once a bartender said that I was very good at drinking. We were at Harvest Grill, the back-lit bottles shining topaz, garnet, sapphire above the bar. She trained at Oxford, said my friend Andrew. This was in the hardened nub of night, when time gets black as a bullet. Andrew and I had been talking for hours, solving all our problems. I was not drinking water, not even a little bit. I’m impressed, said the bartender. I put all of my teeth into the act of smiling at her. That’s the nicest thing, I thought. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me. There was a red trapdoor in my throat. It welcomed, it welcomed, it welcomed.
Teeth
My periodontist says socket preservation is the way to go. Move your sinus up a little bit, she says. The gurgle of saliva, encased in plastic, is unlike the gurgle of a mountain stream. We have to take these three teeth out, my periodontist says. But don’t worry, we’ll do socket preservation.
What is socket preservation? Or: What is, socket preservation?!?... is a thing you would yell if you were an attractive student dentist drinking Coronas, playing a game of Student Dentist Jeopardy! on a Friday night. I go to the Ohio State student dental clinic. Speaking empirically, 87% of the male dentists could be mistaken for Jake Gyllenhaal. I’m not the husband-hunting sort, given my condition—the condition of already having a husband. I once urged my friend Jackie, single and willowy, to spend more time at the student dental clinic. I don’t have any dental problems, Jackie said. Except that I’m an inveterate tea drinker. Who was I kidding? Jackie, eligible and Princeton-educated, inveterate tea drinker, was also not the husband-hunting sort. She led a life clean and contained, wine on the wine-rack, opened on special occasions. And she also had a lovely apartment, split-level A-frame, lofted and uprising. Like me, Jackie needed a lot of alone time; unlike me, she had a lot of alone time.
My periodontist calls me Dear and Rachel Dear and My Dear with a clipped professional tone—the tone that results in femme professors getting low scores on course evaluations, described as inflexible or impatient or unsupportive. Sometimes I think my periodontist is inflexible or impatient or unsupportive. Then I remember her packed schedule, I remember that of course she should be speaking like this, her sentences ending like the click of a lock.
I would’ve been mortified if it were one of those male dentists fixing me in his wry gaze, as he said Someone your age, with your general health and education level, should not be losing teeth. But it was only my round-faced woman periodontist saying it. My teeth—in my mouth but so near my ear canal—could hear her saying it, and they creaked in response. We’re right here, they seemed to say. My periodontist wears scrubs that are fuchsia, that are mint-green or coral—unlike the Gyllenhaals, who muscle through the antiseptic halls in blue or grey, speaking their fluent Spanish. My periodontist’s pretty face is blameless and dewy as a peony. On her filing cabinet rests a mold of her own teeth, chalky grin, not a chink in the bone, not a single pocket in the gums.
Before the periodontist can preserve the socket she must create the socket, levering out my tooth. Something thinly metal will prise into the space under my tooth; my teeth, you see, are not hermetic things. Bone should dovetail into bone, but instead there is only fissure—only gape and suck of air. At least a socket will be preserved: ragged little home, den of flesh remodeled. What is, socket preservation?!? It’s no big deal, my periodontist said, sounding like every contractor I’ve ever called up. We move sinuses all the time.
It’s a crimson little room, that socket, but I’d live inside it. I’d draw my knees up to my chest, let the reddened light wash over me. Maybe there’d be just enough room for my cat Francis, if I were to curl around her just exactly right. I’d rest my cheek against the cellular membrane, imagine it as a terra cotta accent wall, the sort you’d see on HGTV--look at how the whole space has opened up, such an innovative socket preservation, the light is amazing, the original socket is practically unrecognizable! And I would be quite the quiet tooth, so very self-contained. True, it’s not ideal: but a girl needs to have her own space, and she must take it—however it comes, however she can.
Self-Care
When I first heard about self-care I resented it because it reminded me of LuLu Lemon or ocean scented candles or Skinnygirl alcohol or panty liners: something marketed to women.
Really I resented self-care because it felt like cheating. It was unfair, that other women out there were allowed to feel good about themselves, but without bodily suffering. Without cauterizing the throat with whiskey. Without falling off the porch and fracturing a wrist. Without taking a drag of a cigarette and exhaling into the here and yet not-here—into the air, where the spirits of men reside, watching.
Or maybe my problem with self-care is this: it posits that there must be a self, located in space, cared for, making room for care, worthy of the caring-for.
Dave’s
I have old hands and I sit on a couch that I have come to call my couch. This couch is my friend Dave’s couch. There’s a name for this and the name is sublet. On this subletted Tuesday in dead summer I have nowhere to be. I eat foods that stain me, foods that hurt my throat: Skittles, Doritos, Sour Patch Kids. Dave’s house is all open-window white, claw-foot tub, dubious plumbing. Every door in the house swings open. My husband and I place shoes in front of them and it feels like Paris.
Dave’s house is where a writer would live; I might be a writer but I’ve never lived in a house like this. Dave’s house is already the Dave’s House Museum. I’ve been writing 20,000 words a day, Dave told me before he left for Lithuania. Auto-fiction, Dave said. I would like to sit in the armchair fust of Dave’s study. I would like to write about trips I’ve taken and relationships I’ve had, calling it fiction when really it’s about me. I’m not writing auto-fiction, I’m writing a memoir. Memoirs have pastel covers; memoirs are small in their scope.
I eat all of Dave’s perishables. My waistline gets smaller and I cannot think of a single word that’s worthy of this house. When I eat Dave’s blueberries and nice cheese I am being responsible, keeping them from going bad. When Dave’s food is gone I subsist on coffee and lemon drops. My piss is radioactive, my poop caustic. I do not have a problem with eating but I sometimes have a problem figuring out what to eat. This house is crooked but we don’t own it; Dave doesn’t even own it, so the crooked is a line from a writer’s biography: during those years he lived in a crooked but charming house.
My darling girl-cat Francis thinks nothing about writers and she doesn’t care for this house at all. This house could’ve been written by E.M. Forster, but my little skeptical kitty has limited interest in aesthetics. Dave’s boy-cat, Whitman, has been shuttled off to his cat-sitter for the duration of our stay. But Francis knows the ghosting of an absent boy-cat. Whitman’s neon-green scent hovers everywhere: over Dave’s record collection, beneath the spider plant, in the sun-good kitchen window. The whole house is a pervasive pounce. Francie installs herself beneath Dave’s bed; she barely comes downstairs, not even to eat.
I should be writing but I’m standing in front of Dave’s bathroom mirror. My tongue feels wrong and so I stick it out. On the side of that tongue there’s a tiny white mouth, and on the side of that mouth there’s another mouth. I stopped smoking cigarettes years ago. Out on the porch Dave’s ashtray hovers like a UFO. I would like to run my fingers across the grey sediment, get the grit into the runnels of my fingerprints. I would like to lift up, inhale, exhale. If it feels like a small moment of death it also feels a little like not being here and then, in the moment of inhale, suddenly knowing that yes, I am here, writing my words, which will remain after I’m gone.
At Dave’s house the light is like the light in a Mediterranean hotel and we are happier than we’ve ever been. Out the bedroom window we see terraces and gardens: trumpet vines and arbors and fountains. By August we’ve lived there almost two months and the lunar eclipse is pending and I feel some measure of words uprising in me. But then the unsettling in my gut, which I’d thought was inspiration, is actually a stomach bacteria called Campylobacter. Dave’s ceiling thrums with the pulse of my 103-degree fever. The worst thing about the stomach bacteria is having to store my shit on a shelf in Dave’s fridge. The doctor gives me a red solo cup to catch my shit. The doctor also gives me a brown bag and three vials. The good news is my shit, there in the fridge, looks like a smoothie: Green Machine particularly. But it comes out in little spurts so in one sitting I can’t quite make enough. I drink Gatorade, morph into an electrolyte monster. I shit out algae and more algae. Dave’s ceiling fan murmurs; my fever breaks suddenly, completely.
The day we move out of Dave’s I stand outside the public library, watching the eclipse. I’m still on something called the BRAT diet. Bananas, rice, applesauce, toast: binding foods, they’re called. The BRAT is monochrome, beige, and I love it because it is the opposite of choice. The cat mewls in her carrier. I would like to be a subletter for the rest of my life, but Dave’s house cannot be my house, and anyway I have my own auto-fiction to write, only when I write it, it’ll be called memoir. Really the room I’d like to live in is sort of like the BRAT diet: functional and minimal and binding. Francis could live there with me, in an antiseptic room un-musked by boy-cat glands. We could watch the eclipse together: one object sliding, clear and contained, into another object.
Apartment
As I will be having those three molars taken from me, I am currently looking for a place where my extracted teeth could live. When I ask my teeth where they’d most like to live, they say A place like Eliza’s. Or maybe Danika’s.
My teeth would approve of my friend Danika’s apartment, my friend Eliza’s apartment. My teeth would enter those apartments and feel sustained by the lighting, its lampshade quietude. My teeth would be returned to certain words—words like here, words like me. Over Danika’s tub, a snug teakwood tray. Three soapstone foxes, sitting on Eliza’s bookshelf. Eliza’s calico cat, paw swooned over her muzzle, asleep on the velvet couch. And shoes nuzzling in their closet spots, the pasta boxes slotted in their cabinet, the pewter mirror by the door.
Neither Eliza nor Danika is looking for another body in their apartment, but maybe they’d make an exception for my teeth: poor things, rattling around like hopeless dice. My teeth just need a place to crash; they’re not demanding duvets, they’re not demanding marmalade or French press in the mornings. Danika has a record player and a small collection of vinyl. I visit her apartment and she provides the wine, provides the glasses, little globes with their full Merlot bellies. I just keep thinking the same bad ideas are good ideas, she says. Like dating men. Eliza has ironic feminist needlepoint framed on her wall. She has small arid uncommitted plants. Her building is tiled and reminds me of Brooklyn. I bike over to her place and bring the red because she has wine but, she warns me, it’s rut-gut white. I had to explain things to him and I just got tired of explaining, she says of the guy she just broke up with. This was my last try, she says.
Mostly, those ladies are done. Done, over it, no more. My teeth are sympathetic. My teeth—in Danika’s heather-colored armchair, wrapped in Eliza’s rainbow afghan—put their wineglasses on coasters. Pour me another glass, they say. And I’ll tell you all about it. After all, they’ve had to live with me for thirty-eight years. In fact, my teeth are being evicted just twelve days before my thirty-ninth birthday. My periodontist has a packed schedule so I just took whatever date she gave me. In that moment I’d forgotten that I had a birthday because some days, honestly, I forget that I’ve ever been born. Done, over it, no more, my teeth say, putting the wineglass down on the coaster. Couldn’t even make it to forty, my teeth say. Pathetic.
I love your place so much, I say to Danika, I say to Eliza. I wish I lived here, I’ve said to both of them, more than once, and my teeth, loose in my mouth, were nodding along with me.
Room
My office is a room of my own, a thousand different rooms of my own. It sits behind the door, a fixer-upper, fixing itself up as one sort of room, and then another. When I say my office I mean the room I call my office. When I say my own I don’t know what I mean. When I say it’s a room I mean it’s slowly turning into the wall.
We toured the house and saw it was entirely not-nice. There were more walls in this house than in the other houses we’d looked at buying, and the heat was on, and those were two points in its favor. The heat was sort of furred, however. Of all the rooms the office was the least not-nice, snug as a treehouse above the sere of the backyard, windows on three sides. The office was a lifting-up, out of the house’s dark and filth. We thought it at the same time, my husband and I. This would be my room to write. The rest of the house was what my husband needed: a project. What I needed was just a place that made me think the words you, here. My desk would be under the window. I would be unspilling and bounded, there in the office, with the door shut.
Now, nearly a year later, the office has become the tool room: empty Crisco cans crusted with plaster, paint rollers pilled with bits of paint. Rusty screws nesting like insects. A constant leak in the corner, the walls black and poxed with mold, itching at my lungs.
So the door becomes a wall, and the office no longer exists.
Except it exists in a million iterations, this room of my own. Behind the door the office is rustic and comfy, like a room in Maine not a room in Ohio. This version of the office is less an office, more a study; studies are like offices except more manly. In my study the rafters are exposed. The woman in that study is the sort of woman who frames her three diplomas, hangs them on the wall. The wall is a deep green, a color that could be called Study. The rug is hand-hooked and natty. In that study the woman looks out, writes her auto-fiction, appreciates the view.
Behind the door the office is all white and ergonomic. In that office I am clear and crisp as gin. The lamp inclines toward my laptop. Francis makes a sleek black knot on my lap. In this office every inch measures control. What isn’t white is metal, delicately hinged. A Roomba zooms around that office, not just on the floors but on the walls and ceiling too. Where there’s color it’s an accent: light blue paperclips, hot-pink rubber bands, tiny yellow scissors. I leave them out as part of the look, cultivating it because I can.
Sometimes the entire office slides off the side off the house. These things can happen. I let it go. When I’m in the backyard taking out the recycling I raise my eyes, check that the office is still affixed. After all the office is technically an addition. If it was added it can also be subtracted.
In lieu of the office, I try to imagine my body as a room of my own. I think this as I lie down in bed, not to sleep, just to lie down. My body is a room with the door shut, and only I can walk into it. I can keep it how I want it. There are five glasses of water, lined up on the windowsill. It’s so clean, and so empty.
Therapy
My therapist wears lime-green Crocs and says that quitting cold turkey isn’t necessary, that just being aware is enough. In general I am aware until I’m unaware which is sort of the problem. Like, no more than four drinks, I say even though she hasn’t asked for specific numbers.
So far this month? she asks.
No, I say. I mean, in one sitting.
My therapist wears chunky wooden necklaces that have been called funky, particularly by women like my therapist. I imagine the backsplash in my therapist’s kitchen, tiles glistening like fish scales. I imagine my therapist’s stainless steel fridge, her privacy fence. She asks If you could live by yourself, what would your space be like?
The therapy room is beige-walled and each item holds exactly what it was assembled to hold: the side table holds one box of tissues, the planter holds a rubber plant, the beige couch holds me. A picture frame holds a periwinkle sheet of paper and the periwinkle sheet of paper holds the word Gratitude, rendered in the font called Lucida Calligraphy, identical to Peace on rows of Target mugs and Joy screen-printed onto Target throw pillows. It’s exactly the kind of place my husband would hate, the kind of place he’d call corny or corporate. It’s bland, but I find that blandness binding. Like this, I say. I’d like to live in a room that’s just like this.
Cat
Francis the girl-cat sits on the modem, uploading herself. Hello Internet, she says.
My beloved girl-cat is eighteen years old, black pelt darted with silver chevrons. She tries to jump onto the couch, shoulders going twist and jut. She misses the couch, can’t get her claws out, and falls. She hits the floor, a boneless cloth.
Afterwards, Francis hunkers her aching haunches on the flat black modem. Her eyes go hooded and she’s concentrating, she’s lifting, she’s not here anymore. When Francis uploads herself she floats in cyberspace, turning somersaults, her paws splayed—all that dark, all those cross-hatched lasers. What’s she doing out there? Getting rich on bit-coins, fabricating cat memes, trolling all the boy-cats of the world.
Recently I’ve started wearing just one outfit: jeans that make kindly negotiation with my hips, a baggy hot-pink Eddie Bauer thrift-store sweater. Wearing just one outfit makes not leaving the house easier. Maybe some people wear just one outfit in order to become more of themselves, but I’m interested in becoming more the outfit, less myself.
It’s not the kidney failure that kills them in the end, the vet says. It’s the fact that they feel so yucky, they eventually stop eating. Francis’ kidneys are contracting. They rattle like desiccated seeds inside her. The blood-work has come in and Francis’ potassium measures are off the charts. I don’t know what charts or what a cat’s potassium should be. At the vet’s office Francis jumps out of her carrier and flattens herself. She wants a hiding spot but there are no hiding spots. The vet says I can hold Francis. I pick her up; I’d like for her to hide in my body. She tucks her skull into the crook of my arm, every joint and ligament oozing magic—the magic of turning herself into a cat that is not here.
It’s not too late for Francis so I become a person who will pay for things that do not fall within the realm of reasonable. You have to understand, the vet says. The fluids—they’re really only palliative. I buy the subcutaneous fluids, which I must inject at home. To do the injections I press Francis down, clamping her neck. I hold the plastic sac aloft. I fold the skin at the top of her spine. The needle entering is somehow not entirely awful, and Francis submits without a nip or flinch. The vet warned me about the hump. And there it is: a rounded bulb, swelling at the site. But the vet hadn’t told me that the hump could move, sliding from her neck down to her shoulder as she walks. Eventually the engorgement moves to her ribs and it says something to me, about our bodies in this world.
Francis is shiny-black and the internet modem—property of Spectrum, formerly Time Warner Cable—is also shiny-black. Sometimes I walk into the living room and panic because I can’t see Francis. She is petite and compact, her head lowered, her breath coming in hitches. On my computer the miniature wi-fi fan greys out. Searching for service, my computer tells me. I click the icon: turn wi-fi off. Then I click turn wi-fi on. The icon fills up like a pulsing well.
What I mean is. Sometimes I am the wi-fi signal: greying out, pulsing, searching-searching, expanding like breath, looking for all available networks. Sometimes I am going meow-meow because I am dehydrated, but I cannot name the pain as thirst. Sometimes I am falling off the couch, my mouth agape. Sometimes I fall asleep and girl-cat is sleeping next to me, and I dream that we’re trading fluids, that she’s my ancillary kidney or I’m hers, that our bodies are porous, black fur and hot-pink Eddie Bauer thrift-store sweater, the gaps in its knit that open and open, and the cells that are traveling, oh how they travel through.
Water
January comes with light torqued against cold. The new year feels like water running under snow. My resolution is small; it takes the shape of a porcelain mug. In the Ohio streets, all the ice is the opposite of melting. I think the words self-care but do not purchase them myself.
I cannot think of self-care, which seems to come packed in a sachet. Self-care lives in an apartment, or it at least it has an office. Self-care makes its own space, even if that space is just a black warm rectangle. Self-care closes its mouth, knows when enough is just too much—but the lives we live are the lives we have.
Since the life I live is the life I have, I do not resolve to stop drinking. A movement-away is not the direction that my body can take, and so instead I try a movement-toward, poured out and measured, clarion-clear. Five glasses of water, per day.
Water with no ice, I say at a restaurant, because my teeth cannot withstand the chill. The waiter brings me water with ice and so I send it back. I say I said no ice, please and my voice sounds inflexible and impatient and unsupportive. But: I am impatient for my water, and I did ask already for no ice. I am tempted to apologize for being that woman—that woman who makes a whole thing when really what’s the difference, ice or not—but I am only at glass three so far today, and I know that if my water comes with ice I will not drink it.
And really such a strange thing starts to happen. The water takes up a certain space, marks out my day with its clear ribbon, pouring. The water pools and spreads, studies the disciplines of gravity, the motion of a thing drawn to its lowest depths. The rope and needles and matches all float on its surface, useless little boats. The dirt swirls and dissolves. The movement of water is a movement of displacement. Its measure is small and circumscribed, a room made of white porcelain.
Streams, I realize, never ask to take up space. They flow and then when blocked they find another way to flow. There are certain things that maybe I’m too old to change. There are certain things that, if I listen very slowly, I could possibly still learn.
For all these years I’ve been drinking everything that isn’t water. The act of drinking supersedes the body doing the drinking. Give it to me, whatever it is, and I will drink it.
Once I drank a rope. It wasn’t so much drunk as it was lowered down, hand over hand. It was a thick rope and my mouth stretched out around it. I thought, Just a few more fathoms. The rope’s nylon tickled my throat. It was coiled in my stomach, itching. The itch could only be scratched with another rope.
Recently I drank a line of silver needles. It was awkward at a party. I thought no one noticed but everyone noticed. Can I get you some water? the host asked. What he meant was Can I get you something that isn’t needles? I said, No thank you! My tongue kept shedding needles. They went plink-plink and then rolled under the table, where the fondue pot was burbling in its yellow way. I really didn’t want to be that person, with the needles. One of the needles got stuck in my teeth. I grinned as it wagged up and down.
In my 20s I drank matches. This was when I lived in an apartment with Rebecca. The charred nubs rubbed against each other. Stritch, stritch went the matches. The more I drank the more there was to say. I meant to say Fuck him but I opened my mouth and went Stritch, stritch. I burped out sulfur. Of course the matches were not lit. We were best friends, Rebecca and I. We snuffed the matches with a quick flick of the wrist. Here you go, we said. Everything in our apartment was wrong-angled: ankle-break pie-wedge stairs, trash-picked trashcans with off-kilter lids. We dragged a drum set into the attic, and we hung a real punching bag from the rafters, and we bashed our sticks arhythmically without apology, and we flailed at the bag when it swung toward us. Punch, punch, we went. Each of us was always breaking up with a man, even when we weren’t breaking up with a man. A man had hit one of us but maybe he was sorry. A man had found someone better, someone hotter. We were drinking, not talking about him. Stritch, stritch, we said, and it had the rhythm of fuck him.
Some people, when they say a drink, mean apple juice or ginger ale or tea. Or water, after all, because we can’t live without it. Other people, when they say a drink, mean always exclusively not those things.
I drank dirt. A thousand granules churned against my vocal chords. Drinking dirt made sense because I was feeling buried anyway. I was fighting with my husband but it wasn’t exactly fighting, more like digging. I tried to speak but my syllables rolled out silted. Ponderous clots stuck on my hard palate. What I’m trying to say is. When it started out we were having the fight, but as it continued, it—the fight—was having us. Why are you drinking more? My husband asked. The answer was, I didn’t want to be there. The answer was, I wanted the dirt to pour out through my ribs. I wanted to cough dirt and hold my hand out to him. What I’m trying to say is. Mud sprayed between my teeth. Because drinking makes me feel better, I said.
When I started college, I lived in the substance-free dorms, on purpose. I was a college student in New York so who needed alcohol, the theory went? I took the subway home from an all-ages show at the Knitting Factory. The grit of sober sat in my eye. I went to a women’s college, so the substance-free dorms were like a hedge within a hedge. Then in my junior year I studied abroad at Oxford. I learned how to drink like a man. I’m impressed, said the guy who went to Eton, said my Scottish friend on Burns night, said my high-school friend Ed who was inexplicably also studying abroad at Oxford. If I couldn’t be hot then at least I could be tough. I could one-up the guys in everything they drank. When I left the pub I carried a compact man-like raging, in my body, through the ancient alleyways. Or maybe it was more like this: if I could drink like a man I would not be hurt by men. It worked about as well as any other charm against being hurt by men, which is to say intermittently at best.
In the years directly following college I drank a dozen eggs in their shells; they slid oblong and cool, right down my gullet. I drank lightbulbs and listened as their filaments snapped in my intestine. I drank a feather boa. I drank a handful of ATM receipts and didn't even feel them. I grew calluses all the way to my stomach, and I called this the opposite of weakness.
All of these, I considered more valuable than water. Water was for suckers. Once a bartender said that I was very good at drinking. We were at Harvest Grill, the back-lit bottles shining topaz, garnet, sapphire above the bar. She trained at Oxford, said my friend Andrew. This was in the hardened nub of night, when time gets black as a bullet. Andrew and I had been talking for hours, solving all our problems. I was not drinking water, not even a little bit. I’m impressed, said the bartender. I put all of my teeth into the act of smiling at her. That’s the nicest thing, I thought. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me. There was a red trapdoor in my throat. It welcomed, it welcomed, it welcomed.
Teeth
My periodontist says socket preservation is the way to go. Move your sinus up a little bit, she says. The gurgle of saliva, encased in plastic, is unlike the gurgle of a mountain stream. We have to take these three teeth out, my periodontist says. But don’t worry, we’ll do socket preservation.
What is socket preservation? Or: What is, socket preservation?!?... is a thing you would yell if you were an attractive student dentist drinking Coronas, playing a game of Student Dentist Jeopardy! on a Friday night. I go to the Ohio State student dental clinic. Speaking empirically, 87% of the male dentists could be mistaken for Jake Gyllenhaal. I’m not the husband-hunting sort, given my condition—the condition of already having a husband. I once urged my friend Jackie, single and willowy, to spend more time at the student dental clinic. I don’t have any dental problems, Jackie said. Except that I’m an inveterate tea drinker. Who was I kidding? Jackie, eligible and Princeton-educated, inveterate tea drinker, was also not the husband-hunting sort. She led a life clean and contained, wine on the wine-rack, opened on special occasions. And she also had a lovely apartment, split-level A-frame, lofted and uprising. Like me, Jackie needed a lot of alone time; unlike me, she had a lot of alone time.
My periodontist calls me Dear and Rachel Dear and My Dear with a clipped professional tone—the tone that results in femme professors getting low scores on course evaluations, described as inflexible or impatient or unsupportive. Sometimes I think my periodontist is inflexible or impatient or unsupportive. Then I remember her packed schedule, I remember that of course she should be speaking like this, her sentences ending like the click of a lock.
I would’ve been mortified if it were one of those male dentists fixing me in his wry gaze, as he said Someone your age, with your general health and education level, should not be losing teeth. But it was only my round-faced woman periodontist saying it. My teeth—in my mouth but so near my ear canal—could hear her saying it, and they creaked in response. We’re right here, they seemed to say. My periodontist wears scrubs that are fuchsia, that are mint-green or coral—unlike the Gyllenhaals, who muscle through the antiseptic halls in blue or grey, speaking their fluent Spanish. My periodontist’s pretty face is blameless and dewy as a peony. On her filing cabinet rests a mold of her own teeth, chalky grin, not a chink in the bone, not a single pocket in the gums.
Before the periodontist can preserve the socket she must create the socket, levering out my tooth. Something thinly metal will prise into the space under my tooth; my teeth, you see, are not hermetic things. Bone should dovetail into bone, but instead there is only fissure—only gape and suck of air. At least a socket will be preserved: ragged little home, den of flesh remodeled. What is, socket preservation?!? It’s no big deal, my periodontist said, sounding like every contractor I’ve ever called up. We move sinuses all the time.
It’s a crimson little room, that socket, but I’d live inside it. I’d draw my knees up to my chest, let the reddened light wash over me. Maybe there’d be just enough room for my cat Francis, if I were to curl around her just exactly right. I’d rest my cheek against the cellular membrane, imagine it as a terra cotta accent wall, the sort you’d see on HGTV--look at how the whole space has opened up, such an innovative socket preservation, the light is amazing, the original socket is practically unrecognizable! And I would be quite the quiet tooth, so very self-contained. True, it’s not ideal: but a girl needs to have her own space, and she must take it—however it comes, however she can.
Self-Care
When I first heard about self-care I resented it because it reminded me of LuLu Lemon or ocean scented candles or Skinnygirl alcohol or panty liners: something marketed to women.
Really I resented self-care because it felt like cheating. It was unfair, that other women out there were allowed to feel good about themselves, but without bodily suffering. Without cauterizing the throat with whiskey. Without falling off the porch and fracturing a wrist. Without taking a drag of a cigarette and exhaling into the here and yet not-here—into the air, where the spirits of men reside, watching.
Or maybe my problem with self-care is this: it posits that there must be a self, located in space, cared for, making room for care, worthy of the caring-for.
Dave’s
I have old hands and I sit on a couch that I have come to call my couch. This couch is my friend Dave’s couch. There’s a name for this and the name is sublet. On this subletted Tuesday in dead summer I have nowhere to be. I eat foods that stain me, foods that hurt my throat: Skittles, Doritos, Sour Patch Kids. Dave’s house is all open-window white, claw-foot tub, dubious plumbing. Every door in the house swings open. My husband and I place shoes in front of them and it feels like Paris.
Dave’s house is where a writer would live; I might be a writer but I’ve never lived in a house like this. Dave’s house is already the Dave’s House Museum. I’ve been writing 20,000 words a day, Dave told me before he left for Lithuania. Auto-fiction, Dave said. I would like to sit in the armchair fust of Dave’s study. I would like to write about trips I’ve taken and relationships I’ve had, calling it fiction when really it’s about me. I’m not writing auto-fiction, I’m writing a memoir. Memoirs have pastel covers; memoirs are small in their scope.
I eat all of Dave’s perishables. My waistline gets smaller and I cannot think of a single word that’s worthy of this house. When I eat Dave’s blueberries and nice cheese I am being responsible, keeping them from going bad. When Dave’s food is gone I subsist on coffee and lemon drops. My piss is radioactive, my poop caustic. I do not have a problem with eating but I sometimes have a problem figuring out what to eat. This house is crooked but we don’t own it; Dave doesn’t even own it, so the crooked is a line from a writer’s biography: during those years he lived in a crooked but charming house.
My darling girl-cat Francis thinks nothing about writers and she doesn’t care for this house at all. This house could’ve been written by E.M. Forster, but my little skeptical kitty has limited interest in aesthetics. Dave’s boy-cat, Whitman, has been shuttled off to his cat-sitter for the duration of our stay. But Francis knows the ghosting of an absent boy-cat. Whitman’s neon-green scent hovers everywhere: over Dave’s record collection, beneath the spider plant, in the sun-good kitchen window. The whole house is a pervasive pounce. Francie installs herself beneath Dave’s bed; she barely comes downstairs, not even to eat.
I should be writing but I’m standing in front of Dave’s bathroom mirror. My tongue feels wrong and so I stick it out. On the side of that tongue there’s a tiny white mouth, and on the side of that mouth there’s another mouth. I stopped smoking cigarettes years ago. Out on the porch Dave’s ashtray hovers like a UFO. I would like to run my fingers across the grey sediment, get the grit into the runnels of my fingerprints. I would like to lift up, inhale, exhale. If it feels like a small moment of death it also feels a little like not being here and then, in the moment of inhale, suddenly knowing that yes, I am here, writing my words, which will remain after I’m gone.
At Dave’s house the light is like the light in a Mediterranean hotel and we are happier than we’ve ever been. Out the bedroom window we see terraces and gardens: trumpet vines and arbors and fountains. By August we’ve lived there almost two months and the lunar eclipse is pending and I feel some measure of words uprising in me. But then the unsettling in my gut, which I’d thought was inspiration, is actually a stomach bacteria called Campylobacter. Dave’s ceiling thrums with the pulse of my 103-degree fever. The worst thing about the stomach bacteria is having to store my shit on a shelf in Dave’s fridge. The doctor gives me a red solo cup to catch my shit. The doctor also gives me a brown bag and three vials. The good news is my shit, there in the fridge, looks like a smoothie: Green Machine particularly. But it comes out in little spurts so in one sitting I can’t quite make enough. I drink Gatorade, morph into an electrolyte monster. I shit out algae and more algae. Dave’s ceiling fan murmurs; my fever breaks suddenly, completely.
The day we move out of Dave’s I stand outside the public library, watching the eclipse. I’m still on something called the BRAT diet. Bananas, rice, applesauce, toast: binding foods, they’re called. The BRAT is monochrome, beige, and I love it because it is the opposite of choice. The cat mewls in her carrier. I would like to be a subletter for the rest of my life, but Dave’s house cannot be my house, and anyway I have my own auto-fiction to write, only when I write it, it’ll be called memoir. Really the room I’d like to live in is sort of like the BRAT diet: functional and minimal and binding. Francis could live there with me, in an antiseptic room un-musked by boy-cat glands. We could watch the eclipse together: one object sliding, clear and contained, into another object.
Apartment
As I will be having those three molars taken from me, I am currently looking for a place where my extracted teeth could live. When I ask my teeth where they’d most like to live, they say A place like Eliza’s. Or maybe Danika’s.
My teeth would approve of my friend Danika’s apartment, my friend Eliza’s apartment. My teeth would enter those apartments and feel sustained by the lighting, its lampshade quietude. My teeth would be returned to certain words—words like here, words like me. Over Danika’s tub, a snug teakwood tray. Three soapstone foxes, sitting on Eliza’s bookshelf. Eliza’s calico cat, paw swooned over her muzzle, asleep on the velvet couch. And shoes nuzzling in their closet spots, the pasta boxes slotted in their cabinet, the pewter mirror by the door.
Neither Eliza nor Danika is looking for another body in their apartment, but maybe they’d make an exception for my teeth: poor things, rattling around like hopeless dice. My teeth just need a place to crash; they’re not demanding duvets, they’re not demanding marmalade or French press in the mornings. Danika has a record player and a small collection of vinyl. I visit her apartment and she provides the wine, provides the glasses, little globes with their full Merlot bellies. I just keep thinking the same bad ideas are good ideas, she says. Like dating men. Eliza has ironic feminist needlepoint framed on her wall. She has small arid uncommitted plants. Her building is tiled and reminds me of Brooklyn. I bike over to her place and bring the red because she has wine but, she warns me, it’s rut-gut white. I had to explain things to him and I just got tired of explaining, she says of the guy she just broke up with. This was my last try, she says.
Mostly, those ladies are done. Done, over it, no more. My teeth are sympathetic. My teeth—in Danika’s heather-colored armchair, wrapped in Eliza’s rainbow afghan—put their wineglasses on coasters. Pour me another glass, they say. And I’ll tell you all about it. After all, they’ve had to live with me for thirty-eight years. In fact, my teeth are being evicted just twelve days before my thirty-ninth birthday. My periodontist has a packed schedule so I just took whatever date she gave me. In that moment I’d forgotten that I had a birthday because some days, honestly, I forget that I’ve ever been born. Done, over it, no more, my teeth say, putting the wineglass down on the coaster. Couldn’t even make it to forty, my teeth say. Pathetic.
I love your place so much, I say to Danika, I say to Eliza. I wish I lived here, I’ve said to both of them, more than once, and my teeth, loose in my mouth, were nodding along with me.
Room
My office is a room of my own, a thousand different rooms of my own. It sits behind the door, a fixer-upper, fixing itself up as one sort of room, and then another. When I say my office I mean the room I call my office. When I say my own I don’t know what I mean. When I say it’s a room I mean it’s slowly turning into the wall.
We toured the house and saw it was entirely not-nice. There were more walls in this house than in the other houses we’d looked at buying, and the heat was on, and those were two points in its favor. The heat was sort of furred, however. Of all the rooms the office was the least not-nice, snug as a treehouse above the sere of the backyard, windows on three sides. The office was a lifting-up, out of the house’s dark and filth. We thought it at the same time, my husband and I. This would be my room to write. The rest of the house was what my husband needed: a project. What I needed was just a place that made me think the words you, here. My desk would be under the window. I would be unspilling and bounded, there in the office, with the door shut.
Now, nearly a year later, the office has become the tool room: empty Crisco cans crusted with plaster, paint rollers pilled with bits of paint. Rusty screws nesting like insects. A constant leak in the corner, the walls black and poxed with mold, itching at my lungs.
So the door becomes a wall, and the office no longer exists.
Except it exists in a million iterations, this room of my own. Behind the door the office is rustic and comfy, like a room in Maine not a room in Ohio. This version of the office is less an office, more a study; studies are like offices except more manly. In my study the rafters are exposed. The woman in that study is the sort of woman who frames her three diplomas, hangs them on the wall. The wall is a deep green, a color that could be called Study. The rug is hand-hooked and natty. In that study the woman looks out, writes her auto-fiction, appreciates the view.
Behind the door the office is all white and ergonomic. In that office I am clear and crisp as gin. The lamp inclines toward my laptop. Francis makes a sleek black knot on my lap. In this office every inch measures control. What isn’t white is metal, delicately hinged. A Roomba zooms around that office, not just on the floors but on the walls and ceiling too. Where there’s color it’s an accent: light blue paperclips, hot-pink rubber bands, tiny yellow scissors. I leave them out as part of the look, cultivating it because I can.
Sometimes the entire office slides off the side off the house. These things can happen. I let it go. When I’m in the backyard taking out the recycling I raise my eyes, check that the office is still affixed. After all the office is technically an addition. If it was added it can also be subtracted.
In lieu of the office, I try to imagine my body as a room of my own. I think this as I lie down in bed, not to sleep, just to lie down. My body is a room with the door shut, and only I can walk into it. I can keep it how I want it. There are five glasses of water, lined up on the windowsill. It’s so clean, and so empty.
Therapy
My therapist wears lime-green Crocs and says that quitting cold turkey isn’t necessary, that just being aware is enough. In general I am aware until I’m unaware which is sort of the problem. Like, no more than four drinks, I say even though she hasn’t asked for specific numbers.
So far this month? she asks.
No, I say. I mean, in one sitting.
My therapist wears chunky wooden necklaces that have been called funky, particularly by women like my therapist. I imagine the backsplash in my therapist’s kitchen, tiles glistening like fish scales. I imagine my therapist’s stainless steel fridge, her privacy fence. She asks If you could live by yourself, what would your space be like?
The therapy room is beige-walled and each item holds exactly what it was assembled to hold: the side table holds one box of tissues, the planter holds a rubber plant, the beige couch holds me. A picture frame holds a periwinkle sheet of paper and the periwinkle sheet of paper holds the word Gratitude, rendered in the font called Lucida Calligraphy, identical to Peace on rows of Target mugs and Joy screen-printed onto Target throw pillows. It’s exactly the kind of place my husband would hate, the kind of place he’d call corny or corporate. It’s bland, but I find that blandness binding. Like this, I say. I’d like to live in a room that’s just like this.
Cat
Francis the girl-cat sits on the modem, uploading herself. Hello Internet, she says.
My beloved girl-cat is eighteen years old, black pelt darted with silver chevrons. She tries to jump onto the couch, shoulders going twist and jut. She misses the couch, can’t get her claws out, and falls. She hits the floor, a boneless cloth.
Afterwards, Francis hunkers her aching haunches on the flat black modem. Her eyes go hooded and she’s concentrating, she’s lifting, she’s not here anymore. When Francis uploads herself she floats in cyberspace, turning somersaults, her paws splayed—all that dark, all those cross-hatched lasers. What’s she doing out there? Getting rich on bit-coins, fabricating cat memes, trolling all the boy-cats of the world.
Recently I’ve started wearing just one outfit: jeans that make kindly negotiation with my hips, a baggy hot-pink Eddie Bauer thrift-store sweater. Wearing just one outfit makes not leaving the house easier. Maybe some people wear just one outfit in order to become more of themselves, but I’m interested in becoming more the outfit, less myself.
It’s not the kidney failure that kills them in the end, the vet says. It’s the fact that they feel so yucky, they eventually stop eating. Francis’ kidneys are contracting. They rattle like desiccated seeds inside her. The blood-work has come in and Francis’ potassium measures are off the charts. I don’t know what charts or what a cat’s potassium should be. At the vet’s office Francis jumps out of her carrier and flattens herself. She wants a hiding spot but there are no hiding spots. The vet says I can hold Francis. I pick her up; I’d like for her to hide in my body. She tucks her skull into the crook of my arm, every joint and ligament oozing magic—the magic of turning herself into a cat that is not here.
It’s not too late for Francis so I become a person who will pay for things that do not fall within the realm of reasonable. You have to understand, the vet says. The fluids—they’re really only palliative. I buy the subcutaneous fluids, which I must inject at home. To do the injections I press Francis down, clamping her neck. I hold the plastic sac aloft. I fold the skin at the top of her spine. The needle entering is somehow not entirely awful, and Francis submits without a nip or flinch. The vet warned me about the hump. And there it is: a rounded bulb, swelling at the site. But the vet hadn’t told me that the hump could move, sliding from her neck down to her shoulder as she walks. Eventually the engorgement moves to her ribs and it says something to me, about our bodies in this world.
Francis is shiny-black and the internet modem—property of Spectrum, formerly Time Warner Cable—is also shiny-black. Sometimes I walk into the living room and panic because I can’t see Francis. She is petite and compact, her head lowered, her breath coming in hitches. On my computer the miniature wi-fi fan greys out. Searching for service, my computer tells me. I click the icon: turn wi-fi off. Then I click turn wi-fi on. The icon fills up like a pulsing well.
What I mean is. Sometimes I am the wi-fi signal: greying out, pulsing, searching-searching, expanding like breath, looking for all available networks. Sometimes I am going meow-meow because I am dehydrated, but I cannot name the pain as thirst. Sometimes I am falling off the couch, my mouth agape. Sometimes I fall asleep and girl-cat is sleeping next to me, and I dream that we’re trading fluids, that she’s my ancillary kidney or I’m hers, that our bodies are porous, black fur and hot-pink Eddie Bauer thrift-store sweater, the gaps in its knit that open and open, and the cells that are traveling, oh how they travel through.
Water
January comes with light torqued against cold. The new year feels like water running under snow. My resolution is small; it takes the shape of a porcelain mug. In the Ohio streets, all the ice is the opposite of melting. I think the words self-care but do not purchase them myself.
I cannot think of self-care, which seems to come packed in a sachet. Self-care lives in an apartment, or it at least it has an office. Self-care makes its own space, even if that space is just a black warm rectangle. Self-care closes its mouth, knows when enough is just too much—but the lives we live are the lives we have.
Since the life I live is the life I have, I do not resolve to stop drinking. A movement-away is not the direction that my body can take, and so instead I try a movement-toward, poured out and measured, clarion-clear. Five glasses of water, per day.
Water with no ice, I say at a restaurant, because my teeth cannot withstand the chill. The waiter brings me water with ice and so I send it back. I say I said no ice, please and my voice sounds inflexible and impatient and unsupportive. But: I am impatient for my water, and I did ask already for no ice. I am tempted to apologize for being that woman—that woman who makes a whole thing when really what’s the difference, ice or not—but I am only at glass three so far today, and I know that if my water comes with ice I will not drink it.
And really such a strange thing starts to happen. The water takes up a certain space, marks out my day with its clear ribbon, pouring. The water pools and spreads, studies the disciplines of gravity, the motion of a thing drawn to its lowest depths. The rope and needles and matches all float on its surface, useless little boats. The dirt swirls and dissolves. The movement of water is a movement of displacement. Its measure is small and circumscribed, a room made of white porcelain.
Streams, I realize, never ask to take up space. They flow and then when blocked they find another way to flow. There are certain things that maybe I’m too old to change. There are certain things that, if I listen very slowly, I could possibly still learn.