CHAPTER 25
An Average Day in the First Month of Living in San Francisco
8:42 a.m.: Leda woke up and still felt tired even though she’d had enough sleep. Is it possible to wake up from things being too quiet? she wondered. She leaned over to her nightstand and grabbed her phone. One text from Anne. One text from Elle. She didn’t bother reading Anne’s. It was long and about Jason. It was too early in the morning to hear her complain about Jason not texting, or Jason forgetting her birthday, or Jason wanting to try anal. These kinds of texts used to palpitate the day, but now it just seemed like she and Anne were living such painfully dissimilar lives. She felt older than Anne and maybe more exhausted. Anne was exhausted too, but her exhaustion was so childish, so rooted in the trivial anxieties of youth. It seemed pointless to go on and on about yet another bad relationship where the greatest concerns were things that would never matter in any relationship that was worth anything. On more than one occasion she wanted to tell Anne what she really thought. She wanted to say, “Anne, the guy is a total piece of shit. Find someone nice,” but of course you couldn’t say those kinds of things to a friend. Friendship was about tolerating someone else’s constructed realities, letting them settle their own neuroses and not intervening. Who was she to tell Anne that Jason was shit? Who was she to tell her that if she found someone decent, she wouldn’t be fighting about anal, she’d be having it?
Elle’s text said: “Sorry! I meant to text back like forever ago. It’s blue. How are you, girly??”
Leda had to reread her last text to Elle, which was from a month before. She’d asked her what color coat she got from this store they both liked. Elle taking a long time to respond was pretty customary in their friendship. Leda tolerated it for the most part without any type of pettiness or passive-aggressive retaliation, but again, now her life seemed so different. She was living in San Francisco with John. He was taking a good job so that they could have a future together. Dealing with paper Elle and her lame texts seemed foolishly juvenile. Why should she desperately write back when she hardly wanted to talk to her in the first place? Fuck off, Elle, she thought.
She grabbed her computer from under her nightstand and checked her e-mail and then Facebook. She read an article Mel posted about toxoplasmosis and how this scientist from Prague believes that toxoplasmosis is so prevalent that it explains why so many people are doing all these extreme sports and all this crazy stuff and aren’t scared, just like how the mice aren’t scared of cats when they become infected. Maybe I have toxoplasmosis, she thought.
10:14 a.m.: She got up to pee after no longer being able to hold it. After peeing she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She lifted her shirt and sucked in her stomach. She pushed down on the pocket of fat above her belly button. If only I could lose this. Her face looked tired and she thought maybe a little bit drawn. She smiled at herself. “It’s not like that,” she said to her reflection, a phrase that she’d remembered from a book and would say to solace herself on occasion.
She ate half a banana with peanut butter for breakfast. Then she turned on the TV and watched a marathon of Say Yes to the Dress for nearly three hours.
1:23 p.m.: She shut off Say Yes to the Dress just as the episode came on with the woman who was dying of some kind of rare kidney disorder. She’d seen it before, and it bothered her. It was sad and hard to watch, but more than anything it was just so atrociously voyeuristic. It was like emotional pornography. You too could be touched by this sick woman in her tenderest moment. In the end the girl did get a nice dress and she looked happy despite dying. Even if you’re dying you’re happy to be marrying. No man is worse than death, Leda thought, and shut off the TV.
The apartment was getting hot. She opened the sliding door to the porch to let the breeze in. Outside a man was cutting weeds in his garden. She watched the way he moved back and forth in the tall grass of the overgrown embankment. She didn’t want him to notice her standing there in her pajamas with her messy hair, but she still stood there and watched for a while longer. How rhythmically he cut those weeds. How neatly he placed them in a pile. After that she made a grilled cheese for lunch and ate it as she flipped though the Oriental Trading Company catalog.
2:39 p.m.: Leda felt resolve in wanting to get started on her novel. She’d had this idea for the longest time about this woman who ends up getting cheated on and ruined by her friends who expose her at her job and her whole life sort of unravels and she loses any real sense of who she is. She’d told the idea to John and he thought it was fantastic. He said: “That sounds fantastic! What are you going to call it?” And she said: “I’m going to call it Eleanor.”
Leda sat down at her green desk. She’d never been successful at writing at a desk, but now in the new place with this new adult lifestyle, and all this new Ikea furniture, she felt motivated to become a desk user.
Her original plan with the novel was to make a complicated outline the way one of her professors had taught her.
“All writers use outlines,” he said. “If they say that they don’t, they’re lying.”
Leda worked on the outline for twenty-two minutes before coming to the conclusion that this advice was misguided at best. She ended up with a Word document that looked as follows:
Chapter 1: Introduce Main Character Eleanor
• Brunette (Possibly a redhead—make this point shown without describing her, looking at her own reflection—friends’ reaction? Or maybe something her mother says—mother’s name: Sheila)
• Smart (Goes to a prestigious school—has fantastic vocabulary)
• Complicated family (Get back to this later but something to do with Sheila)
Chapter 2: Conflict
• Relationship (Things falling apart, cheating)
• Work conflict (Her friends ruining things for her at work)
Chapter 3: Resolve
• Things resolve??
She texted Katrina about it, as the two had taken the class together.
“I just wrote the stupidest outline in the history of outlines. Prof. Brimbley doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Katrina never responded.
Leda tried to write out a bit of the first chapter but gave up. She laid her head down next to the computer and closed and opened each eye one at a time in succession, so that the keyboard looked first here, then there, then here again. Closer but really still farther, she thought.
3:17 p.m.: After abandoning her attempt at writing for the day, she had a sort of vague ambition to organize the bookshelves. Just a few days before, she and John had haphazardly stacked their books onto the new shelves.
“Let’s just get them out of the boxes, and then we can worry about them looking nice,” he said. Leda had agreed at the time, but now seeing her Tolstoy squished between his book on film theory and his book on postmodernist theory she felt a compulsion to fix it. She sat beside the first shelf, a small white bookcase made from fiberboard and epoxy, and started ripping the books off. The fast motion of it and the sound they made hitting the floor gave her a certain satisfaction. She moved faster and faster and allowed the books to fall and hit each other harder and harder as they landed in a pile on the floor. Once the shelf was empty she looked down at the pile of books. The Noam Chomsky was on top, and without thinking much, she picked it up and gave it the honor of being the first book on her shelf. The other bookshelf, which was metal and tall and modern-looking, she’d leave for John’s theory books, but all her lovely books would be together, and when she’d look over at them, she’d know that the Tolstoy stood alone, and there was so much comfort in the thought.
4:42 p.m.: The fog rolled in. The room darkened and out the window she could only see the tops of trees through the rolling gray of haze. She slid her back against the bookshelf that she’d just filled and watched the air looking so opaque and closed in. No longer could she see the city; no longer could she see the bay. The limitation of it was a consolation, as if there wasn’t anything else. As if her day couldn’t have been anything more than it was.
6:35 p.m.: She spent the last few hours before John got home unapologetically watching TV. There wasn’t anything on, but it didn’t matter. When she heard John’s key in the lock, a feeling of anxiety and anger waved over her. John came in smiling. He tossed his keys on the table.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said, and at that moment she wanted to kill him. You’re happy ’cause you aren’t here watching Storage Wars. Well, fuck you for that. She didn’t say hi back.
8:47 p.m.: They went out for dinner, and she felt a little bit better about the day after that. John told her about this guy at work who had sent this desperate Facebook message to this girl he went on a terrible date with.
“He said he loved her in it and that he thought they’d end up together one day.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, we were all telling him not to send it. What can you really say, though? You can’t tell him he’s crazy and that she’s going to think he’s crazy and will probably never speak to him again.”
“I think he’s just a virgin,” Leda said.
“I’m not sure if he is.”
“I am. I’m sure he’s a virgin and just feels completely alone and wishes things were different so he’s ready to do anything.”
“Or maybe he just wants to love somebody,” John said.
“That’s probably what he thinks, but really he just wants to feel like someone wants him.” She took a bite of her falafel. “I feel sorry for him.”
10:46 p.m.: She and John had sex that night. They role-played that she was a cheerleader and he was the coach and that she’d have to blow every guy on the football team in order to get on the squad unless she just had sex with him. It was great. She came really quickly, and they cuddled for a long while afterward.
“Why did you separate all our books on the bookshelves?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
John fell asleep soon after. The fog had rolled back out and she could see the view of the city again. She thought about toxoplasmosis. Maybe I have toxoplasmosis. Maybe that’s why I’m not scared, even though I should be.
11:59 p.m.: She fell asleep.