34. Gam

And she’s late, of course.

It’s been a million years and she kept bugging me to hang out. She sits down with a fancy espresso drink.

“You’re late.” I’m not looking at her.

“Technically, I’m not, because I said I would be here-”

“At four.”

“Check your texts. I said ‘four-ish.’ And it’s eight after four, for crying out loud. Christ, Lydia, are you just determined to have a shitty time all the time? Or is it that you just want everyone else to think so?”

“I’m just being myself.”

“Oh, well, yeah, of course, you are, but, c’mon, no, you’re not.”

“Whatever.”

“Nice. How’s mothering other people’s precious babies going? Are you putting all the 14 year-olds out of business while still managing to not earn enough for rent? This…” – she motions to our drinks – “… is on me, by the way.”

“I already paid for my coffee. How’s being a total bitch these days?”

“I’m sorry. Was I eave’s dropping on a conversation between you and yourself?”

“Good one. I guess.” I take a sip even though my leg is already rattling under the table.

“Hey,” she says, smiling. “Ask me again.”

“What?”

“Ask me about being a bitch again?”

“No. Why? Just so you can deliver a revised zinger?”

“Trust me.”

After a moment, her face tilts, letting me know she’s not going to stop bothering me about it until I ask her again. So I do, saying the words in a cunty monotone. Amy reacts theatrically with a gasp, then settles and says in a hyperbole of a mall-going-teen’s voice, “Oh-my-gawd, like, don’t even start with me until I’ve had my coffee!”

We both laugh. A little. My leg calms, settles. She asks me about babysitting again. I tell her. I ask her about copy editing. She tells me. The sun falls enough to blind us through the window. We move to another table.

“I want a baby,” I say after a refill.

“Obviously. Any luck finding a sperm donor?”

“I haven’t really looked into that yet.”

Amy’s smile creeps into being so, and then she chortles.

“Oh,” I say, annoyed. “I get it.”

“Is Steve still in the picture?”

“No, but I let him fuck me last month.”

“How generous of you. What happened?”

“He texted ‘sup?’ And I-”

“No, the actual relationship part.”

“Oh. Right. He’s an asshole. Or maybe I am. I forget. You? Any penises in your life?

“No.”

The word lowers the temperature in the room, and there’s nothing to say, so I say with a shrug in my voice: “Okay.”

“Okay, so, I was seeing this older guy – late-thirties. He wasn’t very attractive, but he wrote beautiful poetry, poetry that I wished I could write, but…”

“But… his literary voice wasn’t sexually transmitted?”

“But he cheated on me.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Something snaps silently in the air.

“But you aren’t really sorry, are you? Or else you might have graced that apology with an ‘I’m’ before it.”

“Hey, I didn’t cheat on you.”

“But you’ve cheated on people before.”

“So? Do you think that means we’re in a club together? That every Tuesday night we all get together for drinks and talk about how awesome it feels to betray trust? Fuck you.”

We trade overtly audible exhalations for some time. The sun is gone and the coffee shop is turning into a bar. Menus are retrieved and replaced by the waitstaff. Amy orders us drinks that I can’t afford. I reluctantly thank her. She orders us another round. And then another.

“Sometimes… you must trick yourself into concrete belief of something intangible – something illusory – just so the reality doesn’t slit your wrists for you.” Amy says this with wide eyes that evaluate the nothing of the table top while an almost idle hand plays with the straw in her cocktail.

“What?”

“Deception.”

“In what universe is that an acceptable elavoration?”

“Wait, what?”

“What what?”

“What are you even saying, Lydia. Are you talking about elevators or something?

“No, I said… never mind.” Now my leg is gently knocking on the table from below.

“Say it.” She’s fucking grinning.

“I… I just think you are being really mean and weird, and you act like saying the word ‘deception’ is a proper explanation of that stuff you said, which was completely out of the blue, by the way.”

“But explanation is not what you said.”

“Fine. I said, ‘elavoration’. I asked you to elavorate. Happy?”

Amy holds her hand over her mouth, making it seem like she thinks it’s so funny that she should be embarrassed by her response, but really, I think she can’t laugh as hard as she wants to, so now she’s making a bigger deal out of covering it up to compensate. She’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, but…'”

“I’m so sorry, but…”

Close enough.

“…it’s pronounced: elaborate. Buh – with a B.”

I stand up and stomp all the way to the bathroom where I scream and wash my hands. When I’m about to leave, I realize I actually do need to pee, so I go into a stall and slap myself in the face while I pee. I don’t wash my hands a second time. Stomping back to the table, I chug the rest of my drink, slam it down on the table, and say, “Listen. So. God, you drive me insane. And you make me feel like shit. And you’re always correcting me and saying stuff like ‘well, technically’ and it makes me want to flick your eyeballs. It doesn’t make me feel any stupider than I already know I am, but it does make me feel shittier than I already feel. And it makes me hate you. And I think you want me to feel shitty because I refused to clap and praise you for, like, saying obscure, ill-fitting, poetic nonsense that you said like it was a passing thought even though I know that it’s just something you wrote and memorized and want spontaneous, interactive feedback on. Well, here’s my feedback: fuck you, Amy!”

I sit down, folding my arms and looking unnaturally to the left, as far as my neck will swivel. Amy gets up and comes back with two shots of dark liquor. We take them in silence. Minutes later she says, “I hate myself.” She leaves again and returns again with two more shots. I feel sick when she pushes one of them in front of me, close enough to smell. We take them.

“I’m just a bitch,” I say, spitting the words at her, negating any possible interpretation of an apology.

“No,” she says. “I correct you because it’s my job to correct people, you know? People’s writing, I mean. People’s fucking blog posts, mostly. And I need to think that I’m better than everyone, at least while I’m around them, which is probably the worst place and time to need to think that. I want to be in love. And I want to be a poet. And neither is happening. Neither is possible. Telling people they’re wrong in someway is always a possibility if you look hard enough.”

We’re both about to cry. There’s a great warmth in my chest, and it’s spreading, making all my blood comfy, and I didn’t even realize that my leg has relaxed itself.

“I’m the bitch for making you feel like a bitch.” My lips tremble as the words drip out. “I love you. And some hot guy is going to love you, too. I promise.”

“That’s so sweet, but it doesn’t work like that.”

“And you’re poetry’s great.”

“You’ve never read it.”

“I just know it. In my heart.”

We both giggle and cry a little. My phone vibrates twice. She starts to say something about love being a fortune cookie, and I nod while checking my texts.

I interrupt her: “Steve just texted me.”

“No! No-no-no. Girls’ night! Tell that fucker he’s a fuck. Here, let me tell him. Please? What’cha gonna do?”

“I don’t know if I want to see him.”

“You don’t!”

I do.

Amy’s waving her arms in the air, trying to emphasize some aspect of what she’s saying. “He can’t do that to you! You aren’t his whore? Delete his number. Right now! Do it!”

“No. I can’t.”

“Aw!” Amy squeals, a different person. “You’re in love.”

“No! No way.”

“But why? He loves you.”

“No. He doesn’t. He loves orgasms. And I love… I don’t. I don’t love.”

“Nuh-uh! You love kids and babies and that yoga thing and, uh, that actor guy, that “-burp-exits-nose-” Christian Slater. That’s worth a lot, you know.”

“I’m the worst, Amy.” I try to spit into the empty shot glass. I wipe up my spit from the table with a drink napkin. I settle.

“You’re the best, Lydia. You are so strong and pretty.”

“Awful. Horrid. Shitty. The number one worst. I want him for the dumbest reason. I stopped using birth control as a weight control. But I let him cum inside me anyway. And then I hope I miss my period. I have blue-sky dreams about missing my period. It’s not… I don’t want to guilt him into being a father, or anything like that. I’m not trying to fuck his life up. I don’t even, like, want the baby. I do want a baby, but not now. I just want to know I’m pregnant, I guess. So years later, if I never get pregnant again, I can have an abortion in my past, you know? I just want to at least have that regret to hang onto. I don’t know. I don’t… I think it will be easier to put all the blame on myself if there’s one single, clear choice that I made that can anchor it, instead of trying to figure out all the billions of little, foggy choices and fuck-ups and whatevers that spiderweb altogether all the time. The big picture lets you off the hook, and the little one beats the shit out of you. I just don’t ever want to be content with my discontent. Or maybe that… is that what I want? It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh my god. Lydia. Can I… Can you… I mean, will you let me write that? In a poem?”

I stand up and leave, almost dropping my phone when I pull it out to start texting.

 

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