The New Me Read online

  Sometimes I pretend I’m feeling vengeful for the murder of someone I love. I play through the scenario, trying to make myself weep. I try to imagine what it would be like to be in favor of capital punishment, but I can’t. I’m indifferent to punishment.

  I hear the front door of my building open and footsteps coming up the stairs again. I mute my laptop and look for incense, empty my ashtray, and open the window, in case it’s my landlord coming to discuss some kind of problem he has with me.

  I want to take a shower, get nice and clean, but I don’t.

  I remove my disgusting clothing and get into bed, bringing the laptop with me, hoping to fall asleep quickly because I really have nothing good to think about. I’m a little annoyed that I’m thinking about James again, and I blame Sarah for it, somehow. James used to say I was good at being ugly and indiscriminately resentful, and maybe that’s what I’m doing now. And maybe he liked my resentful side, and that’s why he said I was good at it. Who knows!

  I’m glad he’s gone. He had a talent for making me feel mean. We dated for four years, lived together for three of them, happily for two. Sometimes I can still feel him in the other room, judging me, avoiding me. Sometimes I still have the impulse to throw off the sheets and storm out into the living room, grab him by the elbow, and, in a voice even I admit is frightening, say, “I know you’re out here judging me, you dumbass piece of shit.”

  I’m angry now. I get out of bed to go smoke in the kitchen, and I notice that my hand is shaking. It’s embarrassing, mostly, to think of the way I used to behave. I put out my cigarette, brush my teeth, get back in bed, and unpause my episode.

  I’m only half paying attention. Another person with a bad idea about how to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Another attempt at a violent shortcut to a fantasy life. I slip in and out of the narrative until, eventually, sleep overtakes me.

  chapter 9

  Work again, another fucking waking nightmare.

  Karen walks by my desk and glances down at the pile of unshredded paper. I thought this was what she wanted. But of course not, it was, as usual, some kind of a test and I did not pass. She said to take my time. She wanted to think I was incompetent, so wasn’t I giving her what she wanted, and wasn’t that very gracious of me in a way?

  The women around me make phone calls, talk lightly with each other. The older woman walks by my desk and says hello and I say hello and I smile, my spine curved, my organs crushed.

  I laugh a little bit at my desk. The kind of laugh where your eyes water and your chin wrinkles and you feel like you might throw up.

  It’s almost noon. I look over at the shredder. I find the cord and hold it for a minute, staring at it, feeling time move through me.

  I plug it in. I turn it on. I know that if I just complete the task I will feel better.

  I want to go home.

  But not to my apartment home, to my thirteen-years-ago home, to my hug-my-mother home, say I will make her proud, apologize, explain I can do better this time, be in my bed, be in my room, look at a magazine, plan my day, start not from scratch but just a little bit back, make different decisions, try to cultivate confidence, try not to coddle bad thoughts, be better, take the right things seriously, not say the things I said to James, try to hold on to a job, monitor my expectations earlier. Bring them way down.

  I pick up a small stack of papers and shred them and the phone rings. “Good afternoon, Lisa Hopper, how may I direct your call? Sure, one moment.”

  I shred another single sheet of paper, and I can hear a woman in the background comically, angrily raise her voice over the sound of the shredder, like she hates me for shredding. I have a paranoid fantasy in which Karen has chosen shredding for me to further alienate me from the office. I let it pass. Shred another sheet.

  I should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.

  I hear the woman with the pedometer come up behind me and talk about taking a walk break. She has to get a certain amount of steps in per day. She wants to go on a mall-walk through the food court, a real zero-sum, I think, assuming she’ll get some kind of dense wheat bagel from Au Bon Pain, my brain repeating the thought “a real zero-sum” over and over until I’m afraid I might say it out loud.

  The pedometer woman swoops up for a high five with someone else, and I can smell her perfume, floral and acrid but socially correct.

  The woman in the corner cubicle crosses to talk to the Tupperware girl about the new French bulldog she just bought from a breeder in Indiana. She wants to get a dog walker, but she thinks dog walkers are kind of “shady.”

  “It feels kind of creepy to give my keys to a stranger, like I’m going to have to get some kind of a medieval fortress board to put over my door at night so my dog walker doesn’t come in and kill me, haha.”

  I have a series of quick thoughts.

  “Or, like, it’s weird, sometimes my bedroom is kind of messy because I have a lot of clothes, so do I have to get a maid just so I can have a dog walker? It’s, like, if you do one thing, it turns out you have to do, like, ten other things.”

  “Yeah,” says Tupperware.

  I feel very far from this woman and her problems. I feel it as a kind of unfairness.

  “Look, his name’s Dylan,” she says, I assume holding out her phone.

  It feels unfair that even when I imagine that I am also being shown the dog photos, I know I wouldn’t be able to say anything about them. I would just make a stifled, positive-sounding noise, or say something provocative about dog breeders, or laugh nervously. I feel this more, maybe, than the unfairness that I haven’t made a real decision in more than a year—and here she is faced with ten.

  This woman probably will not get a maid or a dog walker. The threat she perceives makes me angry in its frivolousness. I imagine the dog, caged for days on end, peeing in a corner, humping her boyfriend’s leg, barking neurotically, turning her cute space into a nightmare for visitors, and I imagine her eventually giving the dog up to a new owner who will have to learn to deal with its emotional and behavioral issues.

  Whereas in her mind, she breaks down and shells out for the walker and for the maid. She hesitates when handing the walker her keys. He’s nineteen and seems too aloof about the whole thing. In her mind, one night, while she’s asleep in her room, the front door opens. The misfit teen enters, well aware of which floorboards creak, well aware of the location of her iPad, her laptop, her Birkin, and later it’s not so much the financial blow but the feeling of being intruded on that gets her. She tries to brush it off “What a shit guard dog haha!” but with the lawsuit with the dog walking app, her recurring nightmares, the $60,000+ losses, she has to give the dog up because he’s too emblematic of her trauma.

  Both of our fantasies end in the dog being given up. Maybe it will work out, and we’re both jumping to conclusions.

  I listen to more conversations in the office, transfer a call. I try to do more shredding, but my arm feels like it’s made of lead. I read the news, watch some captioned silent videos, and then I go home. I sit at my kitchen table and google suggestions for how to make your living space more functional and how to deal with needy friends who dominate the conversation. I’m preparing myself for the weekend, which is somehow upon us again.

  chapter 10

  The puppy was so cute, so cute, so cute. But she really couldn’t get over how many other things were on her mind regarding the puppy. Elodie named the puppy Dylan b
ecause she thought it was such a cute name, but thought it might be weird if she eventually had kids and named one of them Dylan, but things changed, and maybe by the time she had kids she wouldn’t like that name anymore anyway. It was always better to just go for what you were feeling in the moment.

  Elodie was on her way to get drinks with her girlfriends and was really excited to show them pictures of Dylan, had already planned out how she was going to ask them if they wanted to see a picture of a really hot guy she was dating, and in her mind her friends all buckled over with laughter, saying things like “Fuck you” or “Oh my god, shut up” because that was really just her kind of sense of humor. But of course they would want to see the pictures of Dylan, and she would tell them that they should absolutely come over and see him sometime.

  “We should go dog walking on Sundays!”

  Something like that. Elodie was always prepared for all the different ways a conversation could go. Always an anecdote or a suggestion or an invitation on deck.

  She would bring up the fact that she was looking for a dog walker and then ask about etiquette for that, like how clean does your apartment need to be? Do you need a maid? Please advise, ugh, that was business parlance, so funny. She was such a dork.

  When she entered the bar, black walls, real candles, perfect mix between grungy and classy, she saw her friends at the bar already talking, already laughing, great to see them, slightly nervous, as usual, she went up to them and hugged them, and got out her phone and held it in her hand, and waited for the right moment to bring it all up, waited for the right moment for her fantasy to become a reality.

  “Hey, do you guys want to see a picture of this hot guy I’ve been seeing?” she asked, and they smiled at her, silent, and she showed them the puppy, and they smiled again and said, “Oh he’s so cute, I didn’t know you got a puppy.” And right as she was about to go into her anecdotes about him, about what his name was and what her life with him was like, another friend, Clarissa, always the star, went into a speech about what it was like when she got her first puppy, and then everyone started taking turns telling puppy stories, and when would it be Elodie’s turn to talk about the maid and the dog walker? She was the one who brought it up, so it was unfair that everyone else got to talk about it, and she got angry and blurted out “I think I need a dog walker” and one of them said “Yeah, probably” and that was that, and that was awful. This was not how it was supposed to go. This was not how it was supposed to be. She ordered a drink and tried to think of herself as a piece of bamboo, flexible but strong, but it wasn’t working and nothing was going the way she thought it would.

  * * *

  • • •

  Down the street from the bar where Elodie was having her conniption, Jessica ate the last almond from her Tupperware and went to the fridge for carrots, hummus, and a block of cheese. Her roommate’s cat, Pippi, was lying on top of the fridge in a little box. Pippi stretched out her paw and Jessica put her finger on the soft pad, and Pippi curled her (declawed) fingers around it.

  Jessica’s roommate was in her bedroom watching a movie with her boyfriend. Jessica was doing the same, but on the couch, alone. She set the snacks on the coffee table and went back to the kitchen for an apple, a bag of kettle corn, and the almond milk ice cream. She’d turned down an offer to go out to a bar and was feeling an intense sense of control. She hit the bowl, blew the weed smoke out, and hit play. She was going to eat all the snacks. This was a choice. This was a no-pressure evening. All fucking week she’d been processing invoices and transferring data from the old system to Design Smart, watching tutorials online but fucking it up anyway. She’d told Holly it would take a few weeks, and Holly had given her that managerial look of disappointment, so she said she could have it done by next Wednesday.

  What-fucking-ever, no more work thoughts. She was alternating between popcorn and ice cream. She’d specifically chosen this movie to watch because she’d seen it before. There was no room for new information in her mind. She loved—on the list of things she loved, this would be near the top—being in sweats, under a blanket, mildly stoned with a snack buffet in front of her. When her snippy aunt made anti-drug comments at family functions, she wanted to mind meld the aunt into this feeling to show her how wholesome it was. How marijuana could be a nice, medicinal way to get in touch with yourself, if you set parameters and expectations for the session. She ate an unwashed carrot straight from the bag and didn’t laugh at a joke in the movie, even though she acknowledged that it was conceptually funny.

  Jessica repeated to herself that she didn’t feel guilty for skipping out on her friends to stay home, get high, and eat with abandon. This was a conscious choice she was making, not some weird antisocial reaction to stress and pressure.

  After a while, she stopped thinking, and started watching the movie and feeling the bliss of chewing. She recognized new patterns. Things she hadn’t noticed before. She let all her thoughts go and let herself sink into the present moment, which ultimately would help her engage more deeply in her weekly routine. She thought, briefly, of trying the new Keratin hair treatment tonight but wondered if it would be distracting or uncomfortable to have a plastic bag on her head for an hour.

  chapter 11

  Sarah invites me out to a party, a rare act of graciousness and inclusion and likely one of my three annual social outings. I go with the same intentions as most—to find a person who might realize, through a sympathy of dialogue, that I am the person they’ve been looking for to fulfill what’s been missing in their emotional and intellectual lives.

  As we walk to the party (we had a few drinks beforehand) Sarah tells me more about her job. I ask questions at the appropriate times, hoping she might ask me a question in return.

  It’s cold outside, and Sarah’s coat and outfit, as usual, are better than mine, which at one point would have made me proud, would have meant I wasn’t vain, but I get it better now. It’s another failure of mine.

  I hear myself say, “Jesus, that sucks,” and Sarah seems irritated and says that it’s fine.

  I say, “You shouldn’t have to put up with that, you should have a job where people treat you with respect,” hoping she will respond to the notion of respect, but she doesn’t respond at all, so I become prescriptive, walking the line between camaraderie and aggressive condescension, and say, “You should quit.”

  “I really can’t afford to quit right now.”

  “Can you afford to not quit? I mean, in the long run? It might be good to have some fire under your feet.”

  “Oh, you think that’s a good idea?” she says.

  I think “yeah” but say, “No, I get it.”

  “I’m exhausted when I get home, and I can’t afford to leave this job right now. Not everyone can afford to just do that.”

  This is, I assume, some allusion to her idea of my parents and my financial situation, since I’m able to have such shitty intermittent employment and still live in an apartment on my own.

  * * *

  • • •

  We arrive, and I get a hug when I come in, because the hostess doesn’t know me yet.

  As I’m getting my hug Sarah says, “Millie really hates hugs,” and laughs, and the hostess laughs and apologizes and says, “Yeah, my family wasn’t all that into hugs either, I get you.”

  I hope we’re not about to start talking about my fucking family and I say, “Oh, I don’t mind,” angry for talking about hugs as soon as we get to the party like I’m some child with boundary issues, daring Sarah to say one word about my family—but of course she won’t.

  “No, it’s cool, it’s cool,” says the hostess, and I have no idea how to respond, racking my brain for something to say about hugs, some anecdote, something about science and hugs, almost going in for a second one to prove myself. My mind goes to bonobos, to a time when my estranged, effete cousin kissed me hello on the cheek and I recoiled and was hau
nted by it for months, to my extreme discomfort at having my hair braided by girls in grade school, to how Sarah and I have never hugged, even when she seems distressed, but I stalled too long, and the hostess asks Sarah how she is, and Sarah says things are fucked up at work, and I watch the ease with which the hostess relates with an anecdote about how her coworkers are a drag. She laughs, and I think it must be nice to project such happiness. I look for a crack to see what’s really underneath, and I can’t tell—probably a screeching loneliness, a safe bet. I make a straight line to the kitchen for a beer without excusing myself, and when I come back to the doorway, both are gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  I have to find Sarah, because it feels too threatening to just go randomly up to a small, strange group of people and start talking.

  I find her. She’s reminiscing about a friend she used to have before she had me. There’s a guy there talking to her, a guy she might be interested in sexually, but I don’t know. We don’t talk about those things. I stand there. No one introduces themselves. The assumption must be that I know everyone and everyone knows me, and sure that’s a comfort, a minor one, but I take it, kicking back quite literally on my heels, smiling uselessly.

  “Well, Kelly used to be really unhappy here, so I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, but I think she’s way more active in LA.”