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Doing Without
Jessica Manack | | | | | |
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When I found my old copy of The Metamorphosis underneath my pillow two
weeks ago, I knew it was all over.
I was one of those people who drowned themselves in poetry all through
college even while my parents begged, "Please study something more
practical: you can always write on the side." I kicked and screamed
and threw temper tantrums daily, whining about wage slavery, the
bourgeoisie. Then I graduated and got a job as a copy editor. I'm a
pushover. I always knew that my schooling was too expensive and I felt
guilty. So I accepted writing on the side. I've published two books of
poetry, though. Mom says I've got the best of both worlds, I took her
advice and see how well it's all turned out? Well I might be doing all
right but I'd never admit it. Taking her advice was draining enough.
Besides, copy editing is hardly what I'd call a fulfilling vocation.
Most days I'm so sick of it the only way I can get through the day is by
fantasizing about sleep. That day two weeks ago was one of those. I
was a clockwatcher under normal circumstances but that day was
interminable. And my boss was babbling about her chiropractor again. I
just wanted to sleep. When I got home, I ate some Kraft dinner and
watched Jeopardy! before taking a shower and heading to the bedroom.
What should have been a relief soon crumbled into despair. I shut off
the lamp and wrapped the blankets around me only to feel something
pointed and hard under my pillow. I turned on the light and put on my
glasses to see what it was. When I recognized the book I felt ill.
I had loaned the book to my girlfriend Siobhan. She obviously planted
it there while I was at work so I'd find it when I went to sleep. I
thought of her coming in my house to return it when I was working,
chastized my bad habit of forgetting to lock the doors. But I got her
meaning, giving back this book while I was out, so we wouldn't have to
see each other. She was done with me.
Siobhan was a painter and never read most of the books I had loved
since high school. I regretted that she hadn't discovered quality
literature as early as I had, but it was just as well because I had a
large collection and was happy to be the one to bestow my favorite
volumes on an eager pupil. I get very attached to books. I often buy
them used and piece together the small clues that the former owner left
behind, wondering. Books with inscriptions are always fun, like my copy
of Crime and Punishment with its shaky "To remeber me by, Dobie 1973."
Books trap our detritus, our hair, nails, eyebrows and eyelashes, if
you look closely, and things we cannot see like cells upon cells, the
skin we are forever dropping in invisible trails behind us. As I
willingly gave her books each time we saw each other, I couldn't help
but think of how she was really taking with her pieces of me.
I should never have assumed I could be a match for a girl named
Siobhan, I thought as I lay holding the book. She was a portable party;
wherever she went was always where I wanted to be. Her outfits never
matched but she got away with it. She showed me her closet once. On
one rack were shirts and on the other were pants and skirts. Every day
she picked the first top and the first bottom on the racks and wore them
no matter what they were, whether they clashed or not. She was wearing
a particularly loud ensemble when I first met her, in the park. She was
dancing like butter dances in a hot pan, to the music of a dawdling
ice-cream truck. Siobhan could make two apples we found on a park walk
a cause for celebration, treating them like a prize, as though they were
made of gold, and improvising a song and dance before we ate them in our
favorite clearing to consecrate the spot. I never knew anyone who could
do so much with so little. It was the foundation of her work. Her best
paintings often used only two or three colors, and they rarely exceeded
a square foot, but she was quite good at what she did, one of the few
people I ever met who could make a living from art alone. She was
resourceful and fun, the classic book lover-someone who was intelligent
enough to make an afternoon out of a novel, imaginative enough to get
wrapped up in a thrilling story and not feel the urge to flick on the TV
halfway through, or paint her nails.
She would always tell me how most people bored her, how it took a real
character to keep her intrigued. She told me that when someone bored
her beyond reproach, she wanted to be done with them as quickly and
easily as she could. In order to waste as little of her time as
possible, she dropped them without the courtesy of a formal goodbye.
She told me that she usually just stopped talking to the offender,
stopped returning their calls, and so on, while I listened eagerly to
her methods. "Marvelous!" I gushed. "Perfect! That must really get
the message across!" Most people would call it rude and cowardly, I
realize, but I reveled in the fact that this girl, so cleverly cruel,
was mine. She told me how once a sorry fellow, an accountant, sent her
two dozen roses, it was her birthday, and she had the delivery boy take
them back. I had never considered that I might be the next victim on
her anti-hit-list.
Metamorphosis, indeed. Knowing only that it wasn't what I had, but what
I hadn't done, I wondered how long she had been growing dissatisfied
with me while I suspected nothing. I sat there holding the book knowing
only that I wasn't going to let her forget me so easily. Her tactics
worked only if the slighted one let her forget them. I wasn't about to.
That night I planned my actions. It seemed best to work as she did,
like a snake in tall grass, unseen and determined.
I did what I could to keep her tied to me as long as possible. I
reasoned that if I kept giving her books, I would always be linked to
her. She'd have to return them. She may not have cared about the way
she treated other people, but she went to great lengths to maintain her
own image. She always returned things borrowed. I took stacks of books
from my numerous shelves and kept some in my car at all times, always
ready to plant them on her property: in the mailbox, in the middle of
the walk. It was no use. They all made their way back-Love's Labours
Lost, The Passion, Winter Trees...she returned them with as little
effort as possible, usually putting them in my mailbox while I was at
work. I made piles on the dining-room table as she returned them. We
had been together for over a year and it seemed too final to retire them
to my sorry shelves once more. I picked up the one on the top. Shaw's
Pygmalion. She and I had spent a cozy evening reading it aloud, taking
turns playing the different characters...the words I read on the page I
opened it to taunted me now: "So you are a motor bus: all bounce and
go, and no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: don't
think I can't...You'll have to do without me." I heard her voice
speaking the words as clearly as if she were saying them now, in front
of me. I buried my face in the book and inhaled.
I tried everything. I picked books with titles that said what I had to
say, titles that meant something to me, that might make her reconsider
when they stared her in the face. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Tea and Sympathy, with a mug of steaming tea
on top upon her stoop. She was unreachable. They all came back, the
last exactly as I had dropped it off with the untouched tea on top. By
that point, I was too humiliated to confront her, so I kept up with the
book campaign. One night, around two or three in the morning, I planted
twenty-ninevolumes at various places around her yard. I parked the car
down the street and walked up a block to her place so she wouldn't hear.
Having called off work that day, I stayed up all night waiting to see
her when she inevitably brought them back. I sat on a blanket against
the front door, where I could see the road on which any visitor to my
house would have to drive. I gave up around six p.m. and retreated to
the inside, where I tripped on the books as I stumbled in, my eyes not
yet adjusted to the indoor lighting. She must have parked her car
somewhere far off and walked through the woods to the back door, I
realized, defeated again.
Eventually, after ten or eleven days, I realized I was playing her
absurd game. She broke it off with me and had me running around,
wearing myself out, trying to win her back. I was taking her cue. But
at the same time I thought how uncharacteristic her behavior was. If it
wasn't her style to waste time on those who bored her, why was she still
carrying on this game? No one forced her to bring the books back. She
wanted to. I hoped our relationship wasn't really over, that I still
had a chance with her if I kept up my involvement. All I could say for
sure was that she wasn't done with me yet. But, with Siobhan, I had no
idea what that meant I was in for. I kept up with my half of the show
and she did also. I dropped books off, she brought them back. I held
out hope that she might return to me. How foolish, to think I could
read her. Wasn't unpredictability that virtue I had once celebrated? I
came home from work yesterday and noticed it immediately, the void. One
entire wall of my living room consisted of ceiling-to-floor bookshelves.
They were empty.
The piles I had been hoarding on the dining-room table were gone. The
books in my room, the ones in every room. She had taken every last book
in the house. And she didn't stop at the novels, the poetry, the plays.
She took the cookbooks, the phone books, the manual to my stereo. I
felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I sat down in the living
room facing the empty shelves. They were staring at me, betrayed, I
think. You went too far this time, they scolded. But it wasn't the loss
of the books I mourned. I knew that I had nothing more to hold on to
her with. Had I been here when she did it, I would have helped her; I
would have gotten the books down for her, carried them to her car,
loaded in my couch and coffee table too, if that's what she wanted.
Whatever she wanted. Just to be able to see her a few minutes more,
just to be able to say "Goodbye, Siobhan," and wave, maybe, as she
drove away for the last time. But closure was what she denied me.
So I guess this means we do it on her terms. She handles the goodbyes
in her life, who gets to give them, what words or actions they consist
of. And on her terms I'll remain forever. I can't deny that anymore.
But I can still content myself with words, recall the pages I
bookmarked, rubberbanded, folded over. "Never loving ourselves, hating
even our shoes and our hats, we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle. Our eyes are full of terrible
confessions." And every time I look at the empty shelves, I think, I
know where those books are, and I know that I am there now too, in the
books, in her house. I know that when she reads Pygmalion, reads "I
shall miss you, Eliza. I have learnt something from your idiotic
notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown
accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather," she
will hear my voice speaking the words. I will be in that room with her,
no matter how much distance she has tried to put between us, how many
miles she has driven trying to get away from the pieces of me that cling
to her slender fingers, the particles that float around her night and
day, getting lost in her curves the way I thought I would always be able
to.
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