Nevada (5 page)

Dude, he says.

He’s wearing an old, worn out and misshapen white t-shirt, suspenders, and baggy corduroy old man pants with a tie loose around his neck. They are clown clothes, but they look frustratingly good on him.

Dude, she says.

Come smoke a cigarette with me?

I quit, she says.

Okay, he says, When’s your lunch break?

Jesus, she thinks. He is going to make sure that we have a talk.

I’m going at two, she says, do you want to come with me?

Yeah, he says, I do.

It’s nice that she’s all rushing on drugs, getting like a buzz from productivity, because she actually does kind of feel like working this out.

She shelves books for a while. Kind of. Mostly she looks through the carts of books to be shelved and mostly she just flips through the stuff by writers she already knows she likes: Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, a first edition of a Joe Meno book nobody else seems to have cared about. She keeps getting sucked in and has to force herself not to just lay around reading.

She’s furtively flipping through an Ali Smith book and getting kind of sad when Kieran does that thing where he taps her twice on the back of one shoulder but he’s standing on the other side, so she spins around the long way looking for him. He is annoying.

Are you ready to go?

Okay, she says.

They clock out, go outside, start walking. She realizes they’re walking toward the burrito place where they did that thing. Awkward, she thinks, and then, no, just really bad taste.

Steph said you talked to her, he says.

Kind of, yeah.

She said she told you that she and I are doing it, he says.

Yeah, Maria says. She’s not looking at him or inflecting any words.

She said you weren’t really talking to her at all about anything and that—

How much have you been talking to my girlfriend, she asks, interrupting him. I didn’t even know you all knew each other.

Yeah, he says, It’s kind of awkward. He does a little jump step. Maria is still high on Adderall. Where does this guy get all this energy?

Goddam right it’s awkward, she mutters.

Hey y’know MySpace? he asks.

Yeah, I know MySpace, she says, You and I are MySpace friends.

There’s a beat.

Wait, she says, isn’t Facebook the thing now? Isn’t MySpace kind of passé?

Nah, MySpace is cool again, he says. Facebook redesigned their thing and it’s all weird.

Oh.

Anyway, listen, he says, Steph and I became MySpace friends because I saw her on your top friends, thought she was hot, and totally friended her.

Jesus Christ, really? She’s thinking: is this what my life really looks like? Obviously everybody’s life looks like this, when little kids have flickr accounts and old men are on match.com and if you’re not online anywhere then you are making a statement, but for fuck’s sake. He saw her on MySpace? Surreal. Kind of embarrassing for everyone.

Yeah so, he says, but she cuts him off again.

Look, I don’t care, she says.

You don’t care, he repeats.

Kieran, I took an Adderall this morning before coming to work, and I am coming down from it. I postponed a hangover with it, kind of, although not really, because I have been feeling hyper and shitty all morning. I really don’t want to talk to you about the ins and outs of me and Steph and I really don’t want to talk to you about the ins and outs of you and Steph. I think probably I should talk to her about this, instead of to you,
mais oui non
?

She said you won’t talk to her, he says.

They’re outside the restaurant and Kieran stops, but Maria keeps walking. Whatever. Is this a theme in her life now? Poking around the city, going places she doesn’t care about and doesn’t have time to go to? Obviously on some level she’s trying to give herself room to figure out what to do about herself and Steph—but on another level, obviously she’s figured out what to do. It’s time to leave her. Obviously, right? We’ve been here before.

The sky is grey in this perfect New York Way and Maria is walking downtown, down Second toward where probably Lower East Side used to be but now it’s just a bunch of, like, Subway franchises. And Moby’s restaurant. She’s thinking about Kieran, sitting in the burrito store, bouncing and munching all unperturbed. That motherfucker does not sit still.

She realizes that she’s intentionally trying not to think about Steph, so she tries intentionally to think about her. How she feels about her now, how she used to feel about her. When they met, Steph was this pretty, fat femme who made fun of people affectionately and called people lezzies and faggots as terms of endearment. Now her bright red hair is black. Her bright red clothes have become black. She grew up. Her job exhausts her and her girlfriend exasperates her.

Maria is like, what the fuck does that have to do with me, though? I didn’t do anything. Like I guess I got comfortable and when I’m comfortable, all I want to do is read. I get quiet. It’s not like she and I go out to bars or anything these days, but it’s not like we ever did.

The more she tries to think about it, whittle it down to how she feels about their relationship, the slipperier it gets. Thinking about Steph is like trying to squeeze a fish. She’s getting confused and lost and then she’s, like, way the hell downtown, in Chinatown, and she really should go back to work. Opportunity number two for an odyssey of city exploration as a metaphor for self-exploration: poof, down the tube. Whatever. She does have this feeling for a moment though of what it would be like not to be tied to Steph, to their apartment, to her job, but then she thinks, that’s some straight dude bullshit, the self-sufficient loner. She felt liberated for a second, though.

9.

On the train on the way back she thinks about how she could, actually, just ride uptown, like go to Central Park or something. Her hands are already kind of numb, and all her shit is back at work, but people leave for lunch and don’t come back sometimes. A few years ago, Maria worked with this boy who was probably okay, but they would have these intense, fucked up arguments. She’d provoke him with something like, Dude. You don’t like Hole? Is it because you are a misogynist?

He’d get all pissed, flip out, and try to explain that he wasn’t, in fact, a misogynist, and actually what he liked was hip-hop.

But dude, Maria would say, You already admitted that you don’t like Sylvia Plath, and now you think Courtney Love is a shitty guitarist.

Stuff like that. Who knows. The point is, when Maria argues, she gets more and more laid back, especially when the other person is getting loud and flustered. So he’d be getting upset, she’d be poking and poking, and eventually he would whip a copy of The Da Vinci Code at her head and storm out, never to return, at least until tomorrow. All afternoon everybody was like, what the fuck Maria. And like, Man, I wonder if he’ll come back today! He didn’t.

The next day she’d be like, Sorry, and he’d be like, Yeah, me too, and then they’d never really talk about it again.

She’s thinking, I could just do that, but then the train pulls into the station by the bookstore and she gets out. Nice romantic fantasy but she’s already about to get written up for tardiness and to be real who knows how possible it is to find a job with a transition in your background. She tries not to think about whether that means she’ll be here untill she dies.

10.

Steph is waiting at the bookstore.

Jesus, Maria says. I can’t talk to you right now, Steph.

You don’t have to talk to me right now, Steph says. I just wanted you to know that I’m staying with a friend, who so you know is not Kieran, for a couple nights. I want you to figure out what you want from Us, whether you want anything from Us.

The Adderall’s leaving her head, which has started pounding, and Maria doesn’t want to have a loud argument with her girlfriend in the store, even though she’s union, so she says fine, whatever, sure. Steph stomps off and Maria is like, thank god. The apartment to myself tonight. I am going to take such a fucking nap.

The rest of the day is brutal, the kind where you’re so tired you’re past tired, time just drags, and if you can come up with a project to occupy yourself it’ll pass but you’re too tired to think of a project that doesn’t require too much energy? She sneaks out the side door but she doesn’t feel like walking around. She hides in the bathroom with an old Rebecca Solnit book, but she keeps falling asleep. She thinks about taking another Adderall but then she wouldn’t be able to sleep when she gets home.

The other career path that people have at this store is that they work here for six months or a year and then leave for an entry-level position at Harper Collins, but it’s always been clear that that wasn’t Maria. She’s thinking about that, rearranging books on a cart and not looking at anyone, when a thing falls into place. She’s like, everybody I like ends up leaving this shitty job, why do I stick around? She’s like, I’m the sort of person who has too much self-regard to stay at this job, too, except I guess I’m all damaged.

Meaning: trans. Not in, like, an I should not have transitioned sense. More like, okay, I have been trans since I was a tiny little baby. Whether it was something in my brain from before I was born, like people argue sometimes, or it was something I picked up developmentally after I was born, like other people argue sometimes, or whether somebody sexually abused me and then I repressed the shit out of it and then that repression transmogrified into transsexuality, as some other folks will argue, who fucking cares. Maybe there is a gene, maybe it’ll turn out Freud wasn’t a crackpot who liked logic games more than human beings, maybe my mom was overbearing and my father was distant. I don’t care, whatever, I’m trans. I have been trans since I was little. There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all. Meaning hormones. It is stupid and there are these hoops you have to jump through, boxes you need to check: I have only ever been attracted to men, I have never fetishized women’s clothes or done anything remotely kinky, I have never been sexual with the junk I was born with. Pretty much you have to prove that you’re totally normal and straight and not queer at all, so that if they let you transition you will be a normal het woman who doesn’t freak anybody out, and so we often, as individuals, internalize these things, and then we, as a community, often reinforce them. All of which is relevant specifically because you are supposed to have known you were trans since you were a tiny little baby.

Maria didn’t though.

She felt weird when she was little, but she assumed everybody else did too. She didn’t figure out what kind of weird until she was like twenty. She’d known something was messed up, that she was distant from everything. She’d known that Those Kinds of People were out there somewhere, but it felt like there was nothing but us normal people in here. This is what everybody thinks. When she was twenty she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized. If you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

She’s thinking about bottom surgery, wondering if other trans women who have been transitioning or transitioned or whatever for as long as she has still think about this stuff, or whether it’s just all up in her face every time on the rare occasion that she takes her pants down so she can’t get past it, when Kieran is all bouncing like six inches from her face.

Jesus, Kieran, she says.

Deep in thought, right? he asks.

I guess so.

Do you want to get a beer? I seriously want to talk to you.

No, Maria says, I’m going home.

Gross, he says.

Gross, she says back.

Okay, but I really do want to talk to you, pretty soon, he says.

Okay, she says.

Then her shift is over and she can go home.

11.

What she should do is pick up some vegetables, go home, make a stir-fry, and then munch on that for the rest of the night, either with a notebook or in front of the computer. Relax, but also, instead of watching movies or going on romantic, lonely adventures, stay at home and get centered—lezzie—and figure out exactly what she needs from Steph, where both of them stand in relation to each other. Not get a bottle of wine.

Soon, though, that idea has eroded. A bottle of wine helps you get past your mental inhibitions to figure out how you really feel. It brings down your automatic defenses. There is a Trader Joe’s on the way home from work, which is totally weird in New York City, and they probably have cheap not-awful bottles of wine there, but if you developed an arbitrary punk rock system of morals about chain stores when you were sixteen, that’s a hard choice to make. She buys one at the corner store on her own block. The corner store is reassuring because it’s dusty and feels like Old New York and also because when you go to the corner store you’re not putting money into the pocket of Trader Joe’s Hawaiian shorts. Proud of herself, she hauls her bike up the steps, locks it up outside the door, goes inside and pours herself a glass of wine and turns on her computer.

Then she has another glass of wine. Then she’s asleep.

She wakes up and looks at the clock. It’s ten thirty and she’s still exhausted. It occurs to her, half-asleep and bleary, that she might actually sleep through this night. It doesn’t occur to her to slap herself awake, put on an album and get to work solving her life. She’s so grateful at the possibility of actual
REM
sleep that she rolls over so no light can diffuse through her eyelids.