Eat the Damn Cake

I guess I’m not often really happy. I am satisfied and glad and stuff, but occasionally I get this burst of happiness, like a whale erupting through the water’s surface, and it’s sort of shocking and I wonder what I did to deserve it and why I can’t feel it all the time and if I’m depressive most of the time and if I should be on anxiety medication and if I’m actually totally fine and I’m just being a crybaby and since I can feel this happiness I can probably feel more of it, more often.

Anyway, I was really happy the other day. I had all this sudden energy, maybe in part because I’ve been walking every day, like a champ. (To the guy who commented arrogantly under one of my old posts that I have the wrong attitude about health, IN YOUR FACE, I’m totally exercising and you don’t know anything about me!) I was bouncing around, being all thankful for stuff. We’d gone out with another couple and everyone got along really well and it’s so damn hard to find other couples to hang out with. I got some work done ahead of time, even though it was the weekend, and next week was going to be awesome because my friend Brenda was coming to visit and we were going to have the best time ever.

I went to bed early, because my sleep schedule has been better recently and I feel deliciously tired in the evening, instead of vaguely bored and confused about what I should be doing and thrown off by the fact that it’s dark so early.

And then, in a haze of sleep, Bear was standing by the side of the bed, trying to tell me things in an urgent, miserable voice. Something about the freezer and the front door. My brain pushed his image away, trying to burrow back into dreams. But he wouldn’t go away. Disoriented and foggy, I half-thought, “No, but today was so happy…”

And then I was mostly awake and he was telling me, “I think I killed Minute.” (My tiny orange cat.)

It started with the meat freezer.

We have one now. It’s new. We have it because we bought an eighth of a cow.

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Sure, this counts as a Little Victory!

I got this text on Thanksgiving from a woman I haven’t really talked to in at least a year: Friend, today I am thankful for you. Hope your day is filled with gratitude and warmed by people who love you. 

She’s busy, in a writing program down south. I’m busy, here in NYC. We never really got the chance to get really close, but I’ve always liked her.

I thought there was some mistake. She’d probably meant the message for someone else. Or she’d sent it to a lot of people, and I was accidentally included. I felt awkward, responding, because what if I was too personal in return, and she was embarrassed for me and it was weird?

I am always waiting for women to leave me. Like the guy who doesn’t call back after what seemed like a perfect second date, like the breakup that never makes sense even though the other person seems to be trying to explain, I am never sure of the reasons, even though I dig through my memories, unearthing things that look like they might be clues. Things that have been broken a long time and are probably better off left there, underground.

(sorry, that was morbid. source)

I have fought passionately with boyfriends. I’ve yelled and stormed and stomped out and slammed the door and disappeared into the night for a while until I realize I’m just wandering around a parking lot and someone is probably going to rape and murder me and the fantastically successful dramatic exit is probably not worth all that. I have a flair for the dramatic with men. But with women, I am gentle. Since I was twelve or even sooner, I had best friends—girls I dressed up with in endless rounds of play acting, and had sleepovers with and wrote letters to and illustrated the envelopes. And they have tended to get mysteriously hurt or bored or something else and leave over the years, without telling me why. Or they’ve abruptly betrayed me in some teenaged, heartbreaking manner. The girl who I worshipped who was abruptly dating my boyfriend, just after I’d broken up with him. But she didn’t tell me—instead she showed up with him one day, just like that, and then she left the room while he berated me from his towering height of six foot four inches, telling me that I was stupid, ridiculous, pathetic– a little girl– that I didn’t know anything about the world. He was obviously in love with me, furious at me, and she was obviously letting him loom over me and tell me what a little fool I was. I couldn’t believe she’d chosen him over the stories I’d written with her about our shared future, where we had little farm houses down the road from each other in New Hampshire, and I came over for Christmas even though I am Jewish, and our kids played together and eventually married each other.

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There was a motorcycle lying on its side in the street, but we went out anyway, which I know, I know, is stupid. But Bear was like, “I’ll go, you wait here,” and I was basically like, “I’ll die with you!” and then I just ran into the street, with the stop sign slapping frantically and the wispy potted trees next to our building bending all the way over, like they were doing yoga. The wind hit me so hard, I dove into the nook of a boarded-up building, where there’s usually a bar, dragging Bear after me.

The East River had washed up the street, all the way up past the coffee shop with the exotic roasts.

Everything was eerie and glistening wet and dark. It was supposed to be somewhere around high tide, 7:30 pm. Two dolls on a string whipped back and forth overhead, where someone had tossed them over a power line, mocking the shoe tradition or playing with it. I tried to get a picture and Bear yanked me out of the street.

A shop door was flung open by the wind, the glass shattered.

“Can you shut it?” a guy yelled from a window, and Bear stopped it with a cement block.

“You’re a good man!” the guy yelled.

“Take care!” I yelled inanely back.

“This isn’t safe,” I said to Bear.

“Should I take you back?” he said.

“Let’s just go to the bridge.”

There were other people there, hoodies pulled up, like mine. We were all lumpy shapes in the dark, with the river washing right up around our ankles. It had swallowed the park and it coursed down the road. No one said anything to each other. We just watched it. It surrounded a sign and a phone booth. Someone was smoking. An ambulance sloshed around the corner and then paused for a long time, like it was waiting for a tragedy. We were asking for it.

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I’ve been doing a bar or bat mitzvah service every weekend, and a lot of my nice outfits don’t fit that well anymore. I bought them years ago, when I was skinny. My mom and I were going through my closet, and I was tugging on pencil skirts. I have three, and all of them were too small.

“I don’t think you’re a pencil anymore,” said my mom mischievously. “You’re more of a pen now, or a marker.”

(source)

We laughed a lot, but it’s true. My silk buttondown blouses look like they’re about to burst open. I feel like I’ve just gone through puberty, now that I’ve gained weight and learned to wear a heavily padded bra.

Luckily, Macy’s was having a sale on Saturday, so my mom and I went in the evening. I was already tired. I’d done a bat mitzvah that day (an amazing girl with a gorgeous singing voice who has Tourette’s Syndrome and speaks at schools to raise awareness about the condition), and I’d stayed up half the night before, reading Game of Thrones and feeling restless, existentially confused, and mildly disturbed. But I thought I could probably handle Macy’s.

Nope.

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My therapist said people who are high on the hope scale (I didn’t know about it, but I think it’s a scale that measures how good you are at being a person) succeed more. There was this study.

I said, “Shit. I’m screwed.”

“No, no,” she said, laughing. “Your hope will just look different. It will be subtle.” I think that’s what she said.

But seriously, it is lame to be a champion worrier, and to wait and wait to check my goals off the list that runs my life. Especially because goals change so fluidly, without you even noticing. It makes it hard to trust yourself. It makes it hard to figure out what’s actually important.

For example, when I was twelve or so, my dad took me to Carnegie Hall to see Oscar Peterson play. My dad is a jazz pianist, and he loves Oscar, and so I loved Oscar, too. I played classical, then, and I took it very seriously, like I take absolutely everything because I am probably a robot. At intermission, I went up to the stage and I touched it. It was golden brown wood, maple? I don’t know my wood colors very well, and deeply scratched, which I hadn’t expected. I’d thought it would be shinier. I whispered, “Someday I will walk across this stage.” It was a vow.

(eep. source)

And I kept it, but not really. I sang in a choir once at Carnegie Hall, in college, but that didn’t count. I’d meant that I would walk across the stage to a grand piano, and then I’d sit down alone and play, like the fifteen-year-old girl I’d heard of who was already doing that and who I hated passionately for it. I am not good at keeping my vows, apparently.

But the thing is, by the time I sang with the choir, I didn’t even care who was sitting on the piano bench. I didn’t want that anymore. Not even a little. Instead, I wanted to get into grad school. More than anything, I wanted to prove that I was smart enough for Harvard (spoiler alert: I wasn’t). Recently, it occurred to me that I’m not so concerned with being that kind of smart anymore. And now I want to be this famous writer. It’s always something, isn’t it?

It all seems a little silly when I think about it for a second. Being this kind of person. The kind of person who is always rushing towards something, who is always scrabbling for a handhold, trying to pull herself up a little higher, towards something she can’t quite see.

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I am bad at the afterward.

A couple years ago, I went to pick up my Master’s diploma in the basement of one of the stately old buildings on Columbia’s main campus. I was graduating mid-year to save money. I had worked my ass off.  This is a crime against culture, and I know people will hate me for it, but it’s the truth: I had been in New York City for a year and I had only been to the Village once, in the pouring rain, to interview someone for thesis research. It seemed like a different city down there, and I had to go right back uptown and transcribe the interview and read three hundred pages and learn a different language so that I could prove that I was cultured.  I tremblingly defended my thesis and proficiently translated academic texts in the new language and then finally I stood in the basement of the elegant building and this guy with sparse reddish hair dug through stacks of diplomas as high as fortress walls, looking for mine. He gave me a cynical little smile when he handed it to me. I walked outside, took the cobblestone path to the memorial library steps and sat down for a minute to think about my accomplishment. But all I could think was, “Shit.” And then I thought, “Shit, what do I do now?”

(this is all i need, right? source)

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My mom is really social. She’s probably a “connector,” or whatever. She started all these local groups when I was a kid. She started like ten book clubs and a science club and even a magic club, for kids to do magic tricks. Not even kidding. I could do one magic trick, and it took me WEEKS to learn it. It involved magically tying a rope in a knot, just by moving it around a little in a non-rope-tying-looking fashion. Yeah, I was talented. I did that trick at every meeting of the magic club.

My mom loves to throw parties. My brothers and I always had three birthday parties each, just because she liked them so much. She would bake these enormous, elaborate cakes. Alligators and Darth Vaders and turtles; for me, a cream and lavender castle, with actual spires and tiny windows. I think if she asked me now, though, I’d want Darth Vader, too. I didn’t understand how coolness worked back then.

I never really liked the parties my mom threw for my birthday. When I was a little kid, I was infamous in the family for crying every time people sang happy birthday to me. I think I was just overwhelmed. Like, why are they all singing at me?! What do they want? What am I, some pony that’s supposed to perform a trick now, for their amusement? If there was any compassion in the world, they would just give me my cake and leave me in peace!

My mom was a good sport about my whole, you know, personality. And later I became outgoing and good at my pony tricks and fancied for a brief time that I was hysterically funny and felt that I was on the verge of composing the world’s most hilarious joke, which I then intended to submit to Boy’s Life, since my brothers got that magazine and it had great jokes in it. The joke was going to involve a kid making fun of his dad for being old (it was a boy, because of the target audience). He was going to point out something about his dad’s age by suggesting that the dad had gone for rides on dinosaurs. And then the dad was going to have a witty comeback that would take it home and leave all of the Boy’s Life readers chuckling helplessly on the toilet.

(definitely one of these)

It never really came together.

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