loose (24 page)

When Toby gets home and into bed, he wraps his arms around me.

“Please don’t leave,” he says.

“I’m sleeping,” I mumble. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I mean it,” he says. “I’d die without you.”

“Don’t be crazy.”

“I wouldn’t survive.”

Long after he starts snoring, I lie awake, unable to get back to sleep.

One morning I wake up, sure I am pregnant. I’ve had pregnancy scares in the past, when I’ve had unprotected sex at random times during my cycle. But this is different. It’s a knowledge. It sits against

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T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l my throat, making me gag when I brush my teeth. A month earlier I tried going off the Pill. While I struggled to own my body emotionally, I thought I could at least try to reclaim it physically in this small way. I wanted to know my body better, to get it back. So I tried tracking my cycles. But I screwed up somewhere. I know that now, looking at myself in the mirror, my eyes wide.

I call Mom and leave her a message. I pace the apartment, wanting the phone to ring. I think about Toby, how I don’t want a baby right now. I don’t want to go through an abortion either. I know too many friends who had them, what a big deal it was. I don’t want any big deals. Big emotions. I don’t want any of that. Another knowledge flashes through my mind—I don’t want a baby with Toby—but I push it away. When the phone rings, I answer it on the first half-ring.

“Where are you in your cycle?” Mom asks when I tell her. She is all business, and right now I appreciate it. I don’t want to talk about anything emotional.

I tell her I’m right at the end.

“Too late for the morning-after pill,” she says.

I press a hand to my forehead, scared.

“There’s something else we can do. A little secret of gynecologists.”

“I’ll do anything,” I say.

She prescribes a special package of pills and gives me the formula: one pill the first night. Two the next. Three the next. And so on until they’re all gone.

The first night is fine. The next, I wake in the middle of the night and puke. The third, I’m so nauseous and exhausted from vomiting, I think I might die.

“I can’t do this,” I tell Mom.

“OK,” she says. “We’ll try something else.”

She prescribes a different pill I’m to take for ten days. On the first night, I cramp so badly I have to crawl to the bathroom, thinking I might throw up again. But the next night nothing happens. And on the seventh day I begin to bleed.

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I sit on the couch, holding a hot water bottle against my belly.

Toby and his friend are in the basement, getting high. After an hour or so I hear him call from the side door.

“I’m going out.”

I throw the bottle toward the door. It falls with a thud to the floor like something dead.

Nine months into the relationship, I drag Toby with me to a couples therapist. We sit on the soft couch in her office and hold hands, afraid. I tell her about Toby’s distance, his pot smoking, his inability to hold a real job. I don’t mention his selling because Toby warned me not to. And I don’t mention what I just found out recently. Toby sometimes has sex with men when he goes to clubs, but he doesn’t know I know. A friend of a friend who does the same thing told me. The therapist, an overweight middle-aged woman, nods and writes in her pad. When she asks Toby to talk, he says he’s tired of me always hounding and judging him and not accepting him for who he is. The therapist wraps up by explaining Toby is an addict and I’m codependent, fitting us into neat compartments.

She tells a story about her own son who is an alcoholic and how eventually she had to make the decision to cut him out of her life.

She tears up, and with the tears wobbling in her eyes, she looks right at me.

“You need to leave him,” she says. “And when you do, you will need me. So let’s schedule a session for just you and me.”

Toby looks down, probably thinking I will agree. “I’ll think about it,” I say, icy.

And I search for another therapist. I don’t want a therapist who clings to the same tired, old narratives about people and their ten-dencies. I want someone who can think beyond the obvious. I want someone brilliant. I want someone who, at the very least, will just listen, let me arrive at my own pace to what I already know.

So I find one for just me. The first time I see her, I immediately like her. Not because she strikes me as extremely competent. Not

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T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l because she doesn’t talk about her own life, though if she had, this would have been a deal breaker after the last one. I like her because she reminds me of Nora. Something about her expressions, and her calculator that is studded with sequins. I feel mothered by her. In our first sessions I talk about my parents and childhood. But by the third session, she wants to know more about Toby.

“You’re a creative, ambitious woman with a future,” she says.

“What are you doing with this guy?”

“He’s not that bad,” I say defensively. “I know he loves me.”

“Really?” she asks. “How?”

I don’t tell her about his midnight confessions, how he’d die without me. Besides, I know, love songs aside, not being able to live without someone is not love. It’s need. “Because he says so,” I say, just to answer her question.

She eyes me doubtfully.

“Relationships are supposed to be hard,” I say. “They take work.”

“True,” she says. “But they aren’t supposed to be this hard.”

Many days, I go to Terri’s apartment and hang out. We drink tea and talk. A different person might get frustrated with my inertia, but Terri enjoys dissecting the problem and helping me find answers. She isn’t looking to fix me, just to help me find my way out.

“He’s your father,” she tells me. “A pot addict and escapist, but also needy.”

I remember the time my father got into bed with me, how it felt too close. I know he wasn’t trying to be sexual. I knew that then, too. But his need was so big and careless, taking up space in my bed.

Just like my mother’s. And Toby’s. Need and sex have always been confused for me.

I sigh and look out the window. Outside a studio apartment in the building across the street I see a for rent sign.

“I’m getting tired of it,” I admit.

K

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t h a t w i n t e r , t o b y and I fly to St. Louis where Tyler and Gill host Christmas. My dad meets us there too. It is the first time I visit Tyler there, and as soon as I step into the house I feel bothered. I can’t tell what it is, whether too many knickknacks and books fill the space too tightly, or the windows don’t let in enough light. Tyler is dampened, deadened. She moves slowly through the room as though being careful not to fall. She’s hard pressed to smile, and when she does it’s slow, measured. It doesn’t reach her eyes. I know she had begun to act like this when we were teenagers, after Mom left, but it’s worse now. A lot worse. It hurts my heart to think of who she was as a child, always jumping and twirling with energy. I used to watch her do the things I was too afraid to do, like swing upside down on the jungle gym or climb the apple tree in our backyard, my heart heavy with admiration and love. I would do anything for her if it meant she would give me just a little of her attention. I don’t show her, but my love for her is still fierce and unconditional, the way it is with all little sisters.

Toby brings weed for my father, and within a few hours of his arrival they step outside to smoke together. Terri’s observation hangs in the air, weighing it down even further, and by the time Toby and I are alone, I’m furious.

“I don’t appreciate you being my father’s drug dealer,” I say as I make the guest bed with the sheets Tyler left out.

“Here we go again.” He stands at the doorway, his arms crossed.

“You don’t get it.” I jam the corners of the sheet under the mat-tress. “This isn’t about you smoking your fucking pot. It’s about your total and utter insensitivity to me. You know how I felt growing up with him, how it felt like he was barely there.”

“Could we not have one of your therapy talks right now?” he says.

“I’m on vacation.”

“Vacation from what?”

His jaw tightens. “Fuck you,” he says, and he walks out of the room.

I sit on the bed, tears in my eyes. I want to be compassionate. I

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T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l really do. Toby told me stories about his childhood. His mother was mentally ill and refused to take medication. Toby came home from school each day afraid of what he’d find. Sometimes he’d find her rocking in her bed, speaking unintelligibly. For weeks at a time he lived on saltine crackers because his mother spent her Social Security checks on clothes or jewelry. Once she held a knife to her wrists and yelled, “You don’t love me!” again and again while he crouched, terrified, in the corner. Toby’s father, who left them when Toby was a baby, didn’t return Toby’s calls. In many ways I understand why he smokes so much. The pain of living can be unbearable for someone like him. My life wasn’t nearly as awful as his, but I know what it’s like to feel you have no parents, no roots to anchor you to the earth.

I feel sorry for Toby, perhaps more so than loving him.

A few days into our visit, Tyler and Gill get sick with the flu.

That heaviness in the air grows even thicker, and I’m desperate to get home. But the day we’re finally supposed to leave, an ice storm hits Portland, and the airport closes. Toby and I watch TV. We take walks in the neighborhood, passing the boxy brick houses that all look the same. Every few hours I call the airline, trying to work out how to get home. I bounce my knee. I can’t keep my hands still. By the time we get to the airport, the flights to Portland jammed with people whose flights were canceled, my anxiety about being trapped is so high that I feel like I’m going to cry.

When we finally get home on New Year’s Eve, five days later than planned, I’m resolute. I can’t stay in this relationship anymore.

Three weeks later, I move my stuff into the apartment across the street from Terri.

My therapist is thrilled.

“This is a good first step,” she says. “Now you can begin to do some real work.”

I nod, but I don’t tell her the whole truth. I still sleep with Toby every couple of weeks. I’ve also been sleeping with another guy, a

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boy from Tennessee who makes me beg to have sex with him and only sometimes acquiesces, who tells me I’m too sexual for him and I should really tone it down. I don’t want her to know the truth. I’m too ashamed by my weakness, my inability to sit with my pain.

One afternoon, Toby and I see Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, and afterward Toby wants to eat. The plan is we’ll walk back to my apartment where I’ll wash my face since the movie made me cry, and then take his car to La Señorita for burritos. But by the time we get to my apartment, Toby says he’s too hungry to wait for me to run in.

“I’ll be two minutes,” I say. “Just let me wash up.”

“Do what you want,” he says, his tone biting and mean. “I’m going.”

Enraged, I get in the car with him.

“I can’t believe what an asshole you are,” I say.

“I have low blood sugar.” He pulls the car into the street and stops with a jerk at the stop sign.

“Then carry peanuts with you,” I say. “What are you, a child? If you know you have low blood sugar, grow up and take care of yourself.”

“I’m not going to have this conversation,” he says.

“Yes, you are.” I yank down the window, letting the cool air in.

“If you can’t wait for two fucking minutes for me to do something for myself, then you’re going to listen to my anger about it this whole car ride.”

“Get the hell out of my car,” he yells as we come to a red light.

And suddenly it hits me. I don’t have to do this anymore. I left.

Months ago. Yet here I am, allowing the same crap I allowed for too long.

“OK,” I say, my voice calm now. “I will.” I open the door and get out of the car. I walk away from Toby for good.

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E N O U G H

K

11

In my small studio, I begin my new life without him. I buy two bookcases for my books and a low-maintenance plant. I paint the bathroom sky blue and the kitchen a rich red. I take a kickboxing class. I teach four writing classes and work on the novel I’ve been meaning to write since I finished my MFA. Four writer friends and I meet regularly to critique one another’s work. Spring comes again.

Cherry blossoms fill the trees, dropping their pink petals to the ground below. The air grows sweet and heady with the scent of flowers. People emerge from their homes, eyes bright, skin pale from the months of rain, and roam the streets. I feel their hunger, their readiness for something new and exciting. Or maybe that’s just me.

My writer friends and I go to bars and to see live music.

And my parade of boys continues.

First, Homeless. A friend names him this for his long, unkempt hair. He sits on my bed talking for hours about the organic farm he plans to run someday while I wait for us to have sex. A week later, when I run into him, he introduces me to his friend as Sarah. Then Eurhythmy, a boy who can sound out words through dance. He practices

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dance moves in a white robe, the official uniform of eurhythmy dancers. During my time with Eurhythmy, one of my friends tells me he tried to order a Big Mac in eurhythmy, but they turned him away.

“I don’t understand,” he had said. “I was wearing the robe and everything.”

Next is Hold the Phone—he says this to me during sex because he doesn’t want to come too soon. Another friend says “hold the phone” every time she makes me wait on the line while she answers her call-waiting.

We laugh and laugh.

When I’m with these boys, I’m still caught up with wanting more, hoping they’ll love me. But I have to admit, I’m beginning to see the humor.