She cannot be a real woman
This was a personal essay I wrote originally for my food blog over the summer and was re-worked for a memoir workshop last fall.
I take inventory of my life in the apartment: A second-floor space in an A-frame that was beautiful but beginning to sag from the inside. A rent of almost a thousand dollars per month, supposed to be split between two people, but my roommate left to live in California with my brother, and months later I got a postcard saying she’d married him. I let the bare light bulbs burn out one by one, sleep on a mattress in the front room that I’ve dragged to the floor, where I can see the door. Occasionally, I invite Mickey over, and he makes love to me unabashedly in the middle of the day and then leaves. I think about crying and then make lunch, wondering at the feeling I get—like a woman noticeably disheveled in public, only no one knows I’m here. I decide it is almost worse to be left alone with your body, once someone else has seen it. I move out in the last crush of summer, get out from the ceiling bloated with water from the shower in the apartment above me. I look at it swelling and shut the door and think that I made it out just in time, before everything fell down to me. Mickey and I stop sleeping together.
To live with seven people after living alone, first I forget fright. I forget sleeping with the lights on in the hallway, avoiding scary movies, avoiding eating at home across the table from no one. I have different worries now. I must remember how people eat together, that people eat together. I keep silent for an entire thirty minutes once while my roommates rail against a musician who I like. I have always been this way: More likely to conceal things than be thought out of some loop, forged before I was born and seemingly impossible to break into. No matter what I say, it will always be the most stilted comment made, the least organic, the least applicable. Afterwards, I will disown whatever part of me was foolish enough to make such a comment, disengage from it so that I can chastise it from across the room of my head.
Maybe it’s this instinct that drives me to cook pot after pot of soup since I moved in. Even in the first weeks, on the hottest days of early August, soup feeds people. Lentils monastery style—with carrots, diced tomatoes and onions, a splash of cheap red wine which Sal, Amanda and I drink the remainder of. Amanda empties out her “food bag,” and we eat a plate of hors d’oeuvre: cheese, tomatoes, green grapes, apple slices. The soup is eaten as people filter in, in spite of the heat. Then vegetable soup in cumin-seasoned stock which I give to Dave to soothe a hangover so bad that he can’t make it to work by four o’clock in the afternoon.
“How is it?” he asks, as I sip a taste over the stove.
“I hossed it,” I say, my mouth pinched in disappointment. “I should have let it cook slowly.” We eat it anyway, our faces sweating and red over bowls in the fifth-story apartment. I am grateful to be able to feed people; that they let me, every time someone eats a bowl of my soup I feel a little more set in place, a little more like I’ve done something that everyone can walk away with. It’s this feeling that makes me suspect I would give out my fingers, if it would sway people to think fondly of me.
Chili with cinnamon and coriander in addition to all the usual spices, that in spite of its ornate flavor, takes only a half an hour to make, from start to finish. Egg-drop soup in “no-chicken” stock that Dave swears is standard-issue Campbell’s—kale, pink beans, parmesan.
Val comes over with her canvas bags of produce and we go to Justin’s house and cook bean soup with kale in home-jarred chicken stock. He works in the other room while we cook and won’t admit he’s Val’s boyfriend but is boyish and flirty and draws Val cartoons. Raised in the heart of Little Italy. Val lets a ham hock fall off the bone in the center of the pot, I add a lot of oregano, she is better than I am at ignoring men until they want her. She tells me that sometimes she tells them she’s busy, even if she’s just sitting on the couch watching TV. We listen to the A-side of a Fats Domino album and are both too afraid we’ll break Justin’s fancy turntable if we tried to flip the record. So we wait for him to do it and the soup is delicious and it’s too hot outside for any of us to eat, so we drink gin instead.
Later we walk around the neighborhood, which reminds me of exploring Little Italy in New York with Eric and Aladdin five years ago, not sure which of them I loved, in the same slight darkness and slight drunkenness. Cities breed uncertainty in everything except the self, if you can hold onto it, and I think, New York was too big, but maybe I can manage it here. In New York it is a given that you are trying to make something of yourself, but in Baltimore I have the freedom to look at myself like the talisman of something I am trying to remember, something to which I’m trying to return.
If I go back far enough, I have had a house like this already: Where the men cook alongside their women, where my father imitated his grandmother’s Abruzzi accent, my mother’s hair was long and she was graceful enough to let it grey instead of trying to hide it. I think of myself as a child—reading at the enamel table-top, my orange eyes set in a face that was always jacked with curiosity, eating chicken cacciatore—and realize that was the last time I felt sure that my insides matched my behavior. I never noticed then that they were the same, but I feel certain now, because I never thought to see any disparity, either. I felt allowed to be an explorer, and not slough things off as tacky or uninteresting or old news. I was perpetually interested—in musical instruments, architecture, origami, bread-baking, whatever came through my transom. It didn’t occur to me to fear any of these things because I wasn’t a born expert with them.
This didn’t carry over in many ways as I grew older, but some remnants remain. One way is people. I allow myself to touch as many people as I can, understand the texture of their skin, the innards of their books, their guts. When Val and I are both quite certain that the men we want will not work out; are in fact, willing themselves not to work out, we get drunk and walk to the only movie theater where we can openly keep drinking. We put our feet up on the seats in front of us and drink bourbon and watch a movie about casual sex with people whose personalities you like. In the end, the movie is not really about casual sex but about love, and so we leave happy but unappeased in the place we most wanted appeasement. Like kids who ask where their father has gone and instead of an answer; get a surprise puppy dog from their mother. We wanted to hear that women survive even after the golden moment for their love to manifest itself comes, and passes by unused. Instead, we saw the usual magic, the sun hit their faces just as they were about to pass out of the frame, and startled their men into action.
After I see Mickey unexpectedly at a dance performance that leaves us both feeling sedentary, we go running together in the evening. This is part of our plan to stay friends after I wanted him and he begged off on account of his neuroses, his unavailability, his ex-girlfriend who has become less of a person and more of an archetype. In the end, it isn’t really about casual sex, but it isn’t about love, either. We run in his neighborhood, not mine, along the route he always runs, which in a way is how all things went between us. Afterward, as the sweat cools in my cleavage, we eat slices of pizza across from each other in our running clothes and talk about things that make us anxious. This is the only way I know how to relate to him with his clothes on, and I remind him frequently that I prefer the other way, that I’m willing to absorb the emotional damage if he’ll only come back to bed with me, that I’ve used up four double-A batteries in my vibrator during the two weeks since we stopped sleeping together.
“Wow,” he says. “You should get rechargeable batteries.”
Breakfast as always with Dave. In six or seven years of dating-cum-friendship, walks in the park, fine dining in our cheap clothes, free drinks, free rides, and now being roommates, we have always eaten breakfast. I’ve caught his obsession with eggs in the morning, though “morning” is a term that means something different to the two of us. Eggs, though, are a way of reclaiming power; I want to feel like I woke up running. Things have been good but hard; I want a lot of energy reserves and then I want to use them all. “Every time I’ve ever been really heartbroken,” I tell Val, “I’ve started running. It’s happened three times.” I remember Noah saying something about tiring oneself out as a method of self-preservation. Your weary body keeps your head intact.
Dave and I talk about sex the way some people talk about sports, and love the way some people talk about sex. Our mutual promiscuity was the reason we were able to remain friends after dating, and the reason we can live together now. If I see a woman leaving his room in the morning, her high heels sounding off like wooden bells against the gallery floors, I think, Dave is as insatiable as I am. And (always remember) who’s to say where I was the night before. Reminding myself like this absorbs most of the jealousy that springs forth without my permission, and the rest is banished by the knowledge that we need each other. Out of necessity, we confess things to each other; because we understand that we both have to not only have sex but do so with profane regularity. Dave discusses sex in terms of, “hogs and squids,” instead of birds and bees, and uses these terms to explain why neither of us flinch as we follow our genitals wherever they lead us. (The danger in the back of both our minds, I suppose, is that lemmings follow, too.) “Hog’s gonna flop,” he philosophizes. “It’s just a matter of where.”
We both know that if you’re not careful, you can give something to everyone and keep nothing for yourself. That you have to have to work to maintain an identity that won’t drown in all of your lovers.
An identity: For these purposes is less of a person and more of a physical place. Where you go to recharge and come back out able to stand up against the waves and prods of the rest of the world. I am careful not to leave a scrap of clothing in anyone’s house. I am careful not to assume what they feel for me unless they’ve spelled it out explicitly, and even then to doubt them until their bodies prove it. I am a dogged Taurus and when I become interested in someone new, I forget every other interest I’ve ever had, and can remember nothing to talk about. I talk to a friend on the phone and refer to this as “dissolving,” which I view as devotion when I can, and unattractive martyrdom when I’m being realistic. No one wants you to close your books for them. No one wants all your work-week nights. So I dissolve and it fails and they leave what I offered like leftovers at the end of a meal. And I see what I was doing the whole time, I climb back to myself across some desert, carry what I can, and let everything else spoil. I always come away with one new band or writer or casserole that I will take from them, and add to my own collection. It will be a reminder of them, but I also know that it must be about me, if I still want it, knowing that it reeks of them.
But perhaps Dave and I’s most naïve, darling similarity, is the discreet hope we both harbor that someone will float to the top of the sea of beds and make us stay. By demand or by charm, we want to be kept, only neither of us know how. So we do the best we can, and in the meantime, talk about our orgasms first thing in the morning.
As soon as the first cold night of any year nestles itself between two hot days, I get sick. This year, I eat pad thai and drink coconut-tofu soup, fishing out huge chunks of broccoli with my fingers. My father insists that I can’t eat at home, he wants to buy me dinner since I just started classes today. I joke that this is my tenth year of college, and he says, “That doesn’t matter,” and can’t help but tell the man at the Thai carry-out that it’s his daughter’s first day of school. We sit in the park by the Washington Monument and as I eat I think about how Donna’s restaurant burned down and once I got hot chocolate there and watched them light the monument at Christmas.
While I’m thinking, I tell my father that everyone’s heartbreak is their own responsibility. “To hell with that,” he said. “I’ll break his legs,” which I know, after so many years of guesswork, is the Italian man’s version of sympathy. My father is the sort of man who gets angry when I cry, and I learned early on that this meant he wants to help and is enraged when he can’t keep the jagged world away from me. And it might have taught me not to cry, if I could help myself, but instead I absorb as much as I can until I can’t help it and the whole bloated ceiling falls.
We walk back slowly, he gives me a half-full bottle of wine, I go home and don’t drink it but instead make twig tea and fall asleep while it’s still mostly too hot to have. I reheat it on the stove at three AM and Dave walks into the kitchen, offers me some whiskey in much the same way my father offered to break legs. I remember reading Stacie’s “Cures for Love,” and think, cures for a cold are not so different. Think, everyone has their remedies, like how I knew a girl once who dotted her friends’ wrists with peppermint oil to ensure good they had good dreams. Everyone gets fixed somehow, thank god for cold nights and for colds. They give people a chance to care for each other, pause, say, I really hope you aren’t getting sick, would you like some, get some sleep.
*Title is from M.F.K. Fisher’s quote, “She likes it, she likes good food!” he said, wonderingly, to Al. “She cannot be a real woman!”
