Losing It. Emma Rathbone

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ career, as well as my communications degree, made me a perfect candidate for some kind of vague position in the business world (she mentioned something like “account manager” and “verticals”), and that moving to the East Coast, where I didn’t know anyone save a cousin who bore for me a mutual dislike due to years of forced hanging out at holidays and family reunions, was not a terrible idea.

      My second mistake was not doing more research and finding a good place to live. I was moving to a big city, a place I didn’t know, but I didn’t realize there were neighborhoods where young people were supposed to live. I believed the website of the apartment complex I ended up moving into, called Robins Landing, that said it was a mile from the charming downtown of a sub-city called Arlington. What they didn’t tell you was that it was an unwalkable mile of overpasses and parking garages, part of the never-ending Washington, D.C.–area sprawl.

      Still, when I first started, I liked the job. I liked the rituals of the working business world, all new to me. I took satisfaction in my painstakingly selected svelte new professional clothes, and striding across the rain-soaked walkway and through the glass doors of the building I worked in. And other little things, like shaking a sugar packet in the break room, and then pouring it into a mug of coffee. I saw myself doing that from the outside, efficiently shaking a sugar packet in my pencil skirt and quarter-inch heels. This is what people did, I thought. They got jobs. They went to meetings. They made friends and exchanged knowing and humorous comments in the hallways about all the same TV shows.

      I did hang out with Paula, my cousin, a few times, at her massive house in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’d balance a glass of wine on my lap and sit in the excruciating silence I remembered from our interactions as kids. “Nice bowl,” I’d say, pointing to the one on her coffee table. “Is that— Did you make it? Is it made out of clay?” “No,” she’d say, wiping something off the corner of her mouth, her red hair scraped back into a bun, her old-man’s face as usual just never giving an inch. “It was a gift from Danny.”

      “Danny …”

      “Kinsmith. Your other cousin? If you ever called him he’d tell you he’s taken up ceramics.”

      I got cable and high-speed Internet. I said hi to my neighbor, a Syrian refugee named Joyce, while getting the mail. I inched forward on the parkway every morning in my car. I bought a lot of frozen dinners and microwaved them and dealt with all the packaging—plastic film and cardboard and compartments that needed to be pushed down in the trash. I sorted through credit card offers and bills and junk mail with the meticulousness of someone with too much free time. The complex had a game room with a pool table and a flat-screen television and sofas, and now and then I’d take a book and go sit and spy on the other tenants, the few who ventured in to watch sports. Or I’d idly sketch the fake holly branches coming out of a vase in an alcove in the wall, and then my hand would pause on the page and I’d look up and see myself from the outside and wonder just how I got slung into this padded room on the damp East Coast, and I couldn’t tell if every decision I’d made up to this point, every link that had led me here, had mattered a lot, or hadn’t mattered at all.

      Back up in my apartment I’d lie in the middle of my living room and toss a small pillow up and down, and think about my virginity, and wonder if it subtly shaped everything I did. Was it possible that people could tell on some frequency, like that pitch or tone that only dogs can hear? Were the un-lubed, un-sexed wheels and gears in me making my movements jerky? And would that quality itself ward men off? I could already feel that happening. Out at a bar, when a guy started talking to me (not that this happened very often), all I could think about was where it was going to go. I wouldn’t be able to get into the flow of conversation because I’d imagine the inevitable moment when I’d have to tell him, and how fraught it would then become, and how strange he’d think it was that I’d picked him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to tell him, but was it possible to just play it off? But then my hesitation would read as disinterest and the whole thing would derail from there. I could see what was happening—that the more I obsessed, the more I veered off track. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t relax. And so here I was, twenty-six and bottlenecked in adolescence, having somehow screwed up what came so easily to everyone else, and I couldn’t put my finger on when this had started happening.

      Eleanor Pierce: We’re at another sleepover. We’re sitting in a circle and talking about sex and who’s done it and who hasn’t. It’s about half and half at that point. Blissfully confident in my youth, I tell the truth, which is that I haven’t. “Me neither,” said Eleanor. “But I’ll kill myself if I’m still a virgin when I’m twenty.”

      “There’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you,” said my father over the phone. I was standing in my kitchen, staring out the window at suburban Arlington. Silvery, overcast light came in. In the distance, I watched a man in a blue polo shirt push a dolly of boxes along a path through the storage complex next door. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky. “Climate Control! U Store U Save First Two Months Free!” it read on the side of one of the units.

      After I’d put in my two weeks at Quartz, I’d decided: I was going to move home. I was going to go back to Texas and live with my parents for a little while. I would start over, reassess. At least I knew people there, people who could help me meet other people. I pictured the bright plaza at San Antonio Tech where I used to wait for my mom while she worked on her business degree, the hot benches and spindly trees. Maybe I could take some classes. I thought of the dry, bright air, our sunny kitchen and backyard and the prickly grass, and the smooth, warm stones that lined the walkway up to the shaded porch in the back.

      “Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We’re going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”

      “What?” I said.

      “We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”

      “I don’t understand,” I said.

      “What don’t you understand?”

      “Any of it.”

      My dad was silent.

      “You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”

      “We found a guy, he’s a carpenter.”

      “You said that.”

      “People rent things all the time,” he said. “You’re renting an apartment, are you not?”

      This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad’s calling card.

      “This is different,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

      “No I don’t. If you’re so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”

      “What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”

      “What? I don’t know, Julia, but we’ve signed an agreement and it’s happening.”

      “What the hell?”

      My dad was silent again.

      “There’s no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She’s a psycho.”

      “I didn’t mean Helen.”

      “Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ