Merris’s hip was bruised but not fractured. She would need rest and a few months of rehabilitative exercises, and to avoid falling again. When she finally emerged from the hospital’s interior it was almost five a.m. and she was using a walker. Despite pounding back-to-back Dasanis for several hours, my hangover had set in properly, and I felt as if the waiting room’s fluorescent lights had somehow seeped inside my body.
“You didn’t have to wait,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was touched or aggravated.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “I’ll get us a car.”
Our Uber pulled up, and I folded the walker into the trunk and helped Merris into the front seat. I asked the driver to be careful, to do his best to avoid bumps and potholes. He said, “Sure,” and did no such thing. We jangled along Dundas in the wintry predawn fog, the street populated by the odd shift worker and a few guys sitting outside an encampment. A couple walked past us at a stoplight, apparently having an argument. (The girlfriend was employing that peerless rhetorical tactic, “speed walking a foot or two ahead of your opponent, in heels.”) I decided I would speak only if I had something good to say. I tried to think what that might be and came up with nothing. Wind basically whistled through my empty skull.
I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with a snort as we pulled into the driveway.
I wiped the corners of my mouth and said, “We’re here,” to Merris, who said, “Yes,” and opened her door with great effort. I ran around to the trunk and pulled out the walker, thanking the driver and guiding Merris toward the front steps with a transparently guilty abundance of care.
Inside, we worked our way slowly up still more steps. I said, “Are you alright?” and Merris said, “You have to stop asking me that.” I helped her to her room, promised to cook for her and clean things, assist with appointments and medications and errands and classes . . . whatever she needed. “You’re working yourself into a frenzy,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
I got her into bed with an ice pack and a big bottle of water and some painkillers. I bunched pillows behind her and arranged the duvet just so. She smiled and squeezed my hand. Leaning forward made her wince. I told her I was going to move out.
“Well,” said Merris, and for a second I thought she might stop me. “Take your time finding the right place.”
As I crept downstairs, I could hear Inessa and Betty at the breakfast bar. It was quarter to six, but they were always up obscenely early, puttering around, folding things, making weak coffee from an immense plastic tub. I stood on the landing, wondering if maybe they would leave once the kettle boiled. Whether they did or didn’t, I could not face them. I would have to wait.
“I never wanted her here,” Inessa said. “I was on the record, opposed, from day one.”
I heard a cupboard open, the clinking of two mugs brought out by the handles. It seemed like they were settling in.
“Ness, please,” said Betty. “She can probably hear you.”
“I know she can, she’s out there on the stairs.”
I weighed my options: stay silent where I was and hope they didn’t check the hall; run out the front door and never look back; walk confidently into the kitchen, taking out imaginary earbuds and pretending I had heard nothing; sneak back upstairs and hide under Merris’s bed. Instead, I stuttered, “Oh, hello, I, well,” speed walked into the room, and started drinking from the sink like a gerbil.
“Sorry,” I said, coming up for air. “Thirsty.”
I was thirsty. My mouth was dry and tasted terrible. My whole body was sore from spending the night on hospital floors and benches, my nostrils felt thick, my head hurt. I did not want to think about what I looked like. The women considered me briefly, then turned back to each other and carried on.
“She’s clearly ashamed of herself,” said Betty, addressing Inessa only. “And that works for me, she should be, but we don’t need to lay it on.”
“Maybe we do,” said Inessa. “Taking advantage of Mer’s guilt like that.”
Unsure what to do with my jittery hands, I grabbed an apple from the counter and started slicing it finely on a cutting board. The women continued to ignore me. I felt an impulse to tell them about my monthly donations to charity, my commitment to voting Green.
“I’ve always said, if she’d just call the girl, they could sort it out in an hour,” said Betty. “Daughters can’t stay mad at their mothers, it’s not natural.”
I turned away from the counter and toward the two women. Inessa’s eyes darted in my direction, then back at Betty. She gave a little cough, but her roommate seemed not to notice. I averted my eyes, pretending to be engrossed in the decorative molding that hugged the perimeter of the kitchen ceiling.
“I thought when Gene died it might move things along for them, but they barely looked at each other at the funeral,” Betty said. “. . . What’s the matter with you?”
I had abandoned my pretend disinterest and was now standing directly beside the two women, staring stupidly and holding out a plate of wafer-thin apple slices, hundreds of questions bouncing in my brain. I set the apple slices in front of Inessa, who looked at me like I’d plated a human turd.
“Merris has a daughter?” I asked.
Inessa scoffed and rolled her eyes, though Betty gave me a few facts: the daughter was about a decade older than me; she worked at a bank; she had Merris’s features with her father’s coloring; the relationship had always been strained, but several years ago there had been a proper falling out; Merris did not like to talk about her; she lived in Spain. Eventually, Inessa stood up and said, “Enough now,” walking over to the counter with the plate of apple slices. She fished a Ziploc bag out of a drawer, slid the apple slices into it, and handed it to me, indicating that our time together was over and they would not be revealing any more of Merris’s family secrets.
I went back to my room and stayed there for the rest of the month. I left only for work or food or apartment viewings, and to take Merris to physiotherapy on Thursdays. I’d help her into the car, drive to a little gray building north of the city, and wait in the foyer under a diagram of foot fascia, as an overfamiliar Australian man helped her stretch and wriggle in healing ways. Then I’d drive her home. Merris made polite small talk sometimes. If she started, I’d carry on, but I preferred to listen to the radio, look straight ahead, and let shame fill my head like static.
At home I took baths and drank a lot of CBD beverages, hoping they did something but feeling like they probably didn’t. I threw a stick around for Lydia and stayed “California sober.” I tried to read—novels, magazines, student essays, anything—but always ended up back on my phone. My main activity was reading one page of a book, then putting it down and looking at a screen for twelve to forty-seven minutes. There was always something tragic on the screen: details of someone’s workplace sexual harassment, beloved pets dying suddenly, a brand using slang. Simon seemed to be soft-launching a new Woman of Significance in his Instagram Stories. There had been a feminine-looking jacket on his couch in a photo of some new beers he’d acquired, and I heard a woman laughing in the background of a video he posted of himself bowling a strike. She sounded pretty.
Sometimes I would get an email—a home goods store alerting me to exciting new offers, or updates on a friend of a friend’s cousin’s brain surgery. I’d discovered a fundraising page for this man one night after taking several melatonin and donated fifty dollars with the note get better pLEASE. Now I got emails what felt like once an hour about how things were going (as a Real Housewife once drunkenly yelled at another: not well, bitch!) and asking for further money. I didn’t feel like I could unsubscribe and still consider myself a good person, but I also did not have another fifty dollars lying around, at least not for this.
The only emails I returned were from prospective landlords or my students, toward whom I had been trying to be more professional. In an effort to butter them up, I had also removed the class participation component of their final grades. I met with Sara in a coffee shop and answered her questions about graduate programs and let her outline her dream of one day studying in London. Her enthusiasm made me feel like a fraud. I recouped some sense of myself as an authority figure by paying for her matcha latte while she was in the bathroom.
The group chat picked up and carried on without me, a flurry of links and screenshots and questions about what the fuck old classmates, the government, or our bodies were up to. I did my best to give everyone some space without crossing over into the silent treatment, dropping in a supportive haha or sending a heart emoji when one felt needed. After a week or so of “space,” I sent Amirah and Tom an Edible Arrangement to say congratulations. Amirah texted a photo of the ridiculous, brightly colored basket with the message tom’s allergic to strawberries . . . saboteur, then jk thank you they’re delicious. I wrote back, could we get a drink soon? just like green tea and 45-50 mins groveling, max. Amirah left it for two full hours before replying, sounds good, will see if aritzia’s selling hair shirts. Buoyed by this success, I sent an Edible Arrangement to Amy too. I wrote, “I’m very sorry, please call me,” on the card. She didn’t.
I drank three liters of water a day, which meant, give or take a few half hours here and there, I spent the rest of my time on the toilet. I figured this was life: I’d spend the next twenty years alternatingly hydrating and pissing, then all the water on earth would dry up and I would know it was time to die. The apartments I viewed were dilapidated and out of my price range. I started looking at places in Kingston.
One day after physio, the Australian chased Merris into the parking lot.
“M-dawg!” he said, horribly. “Forgot your resistance bands, my girl!”
“What a shame,” said Merris. “They’re such fun.”
The Australian did not return her smile. He rested both hands on the roof of the car and spoke to her like she was a child refusing to wear her coat outdoors in winter. “It’s so important that you do your exercises,” he said. “At this stage in life, if you don’t guard your mobility, you really can lose it for good.”
Merris took the bands from him but didn’t say anything else. In the car she was quiet too.
“What does he know?” I said, turning up the radio. “He probably has that strain of super-chlamydia koalas invented.”
Merris didn’t respond.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Really, I’m—”
“Enough, Maggie, please,” she said. “I am tired and sore. I feel about a million years old, and I don’t want to go over it all again. It’s not your fault.”
“It is kind of my fault.”
“Well, it’s not only your fault,” she said. “Maybe I’m being punished.”
I asked her what she thought she was being punished for.
She flipped down the sun visor and examined her face in the mirror. She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Idleness, pettiness, vanity . . . pick one.” Merris ran her hands over her neck, pulling the skin taut. “Do you know how much money I spend each year on creams?”
We drove past a Lenten celebration, a cluster of old people lifting the Virgin Mary high over their heads. I realized I’d left my indicator on, that it was still clicking away to warn others about a right turn I had no intention of making. I switched it off. On the radio, a man who owned a furniture warehouse screamed about unbeatable deals.
“Betty told me you have a daughter,” I said. I kept my eyes on the road and tried to radiate a noninvasive empathy. Merris flipped the visor back up.
“Well, there it is, isn’t it?” she said. “Late-onset maternal instinct, misapplied, with unpleasant consequences.”
I snuck a look at her, and someone honked at me for drifting too close to the next lane. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“You didn’t ask.”
She was right, which made it worse. I had probably asked her fewer than three questions about herself this entire year, maybe our entire relationship. We pulled into the driveway and sat there with the car idling, the heated seat warming the backs of my already hot legs.
“That’s terrible,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Merris. “I’m sure that was part of the appeal. Relationships with young people are very straightforward, they basically just want to talk about themselves. Lazy of me, really, to accept intimacy without any risk.”
“What happened with . . . ?”
“Danielle?” Merris sighed again. “I don’t know. I think I couldn’t be what she needed, and she couldn’t forgive me for it. Her whole childhood, she was reaching out for something that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t or didn’t want to give. And then her father got sick, and we handled it in completely opposing ways—it’s all a bit miserable. Let’s not get into it.”
Merris pulled on her gloves and readjusted her scarf, acting out the beginning of an exit. I wanted to tell her I’d listen to her talk about anything, to march inside right now, make a pot of tea, and ask her to start from the beginning. I told her she’d listened to more than enough of my miserable tales, and if she ever did want to get into it—
“I don’t,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You’ve been so generous,” I told her. “I wish I’d been a better friend to you.”
“Oh, Maggie,” she said. “We’re not friends. We’re just two people having a hard time.”
I turned the key and the soft hum of the motor went quiet. It was raining a little, and I could see Inessa peering out her bedroom window on the second floor. When she noticed me looking up at her, she snapped the curtain shut.
“I’d like, if you wanted, to try to be friends,” I said. “I know my living here was probably a step too far, but I wasn’t just hanging out with you because I was having a breakdown. I think you’re kind of amazing.”
Merris laughed lightly, and I clenched every muscle in my body.
“There’s a joke in there about which of us really took the step too far, but I don’t have time to think of it,” she said. “Anyway, must get inside and mess around with these bands. I could lose my mobility, you know.”
She opened the car door and unbuckled her seat belt, slowly pulling one leg and then the other out onto the ground. I helped her into the house, as I did every week. We stood in the foyer and she said, “Thank you, dear,” and I went down into the basement and lay flat on the floor.
I moved out a few days later, very early in the morning, mostly to avoid Inessa. I left a thank-you card and a box of fancy dried fruit. I had stayed up late the night before, dusting and scrubbing every surface, trying to reset the place to how it had been. As I finished a final round on the bathroom fixtures, Lydia came wheezing down the stairs, jumped on my bed, and stayed there. The next morning I kissed her goodbye, letting her huge tongue go a little bit in my mouth, something I usually fought against, but which she seemed perpetually desperate to make happen. I opened the door to upstairs and she scrambled off, to eat and drool on things and sleep in the sun. I left my keys on the kitchen counter with my gift and took a bus to Kingston, where my dad picked me up.
A week later I used what would have been my rent money to book four sessions with Helen. In the lead-up to our first, I started a note on my phone identifying potential topics for discussion, which seemed like a smart move, until I opened the document in her warm beige office and it read “legs,” “is inner peace real,” and “having a skull is actually insane.” I abandoned the list and we talked about Merris (relationship to), my body (negative feelings toward), and doorframes.
“I learned recently,” I said, “that straight men have this compulsion where it’s important to reach up and slap the top of the doorframes they pass under. Did you know about this?”
“Vaguely,” said Helen. She adjusted the knot in her silk scarf and took a sip of herbal tea. Her mug was covered in smiling painted bees.
“Well,” I said, “I had no idea this was happening. I can’t believe all men, or even some men, have been doing this my whole life. Do they not have anything better to do?”
Helen wrote something down. “And what about this behavior bothers you in particular?” When she turned the mug to access its handle, I saw it had the words bee calm on it in block letters dripping with honey.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “I just think it’s weird.”
“Seems to me that it bothers you a great deal.”
There followed one of those long and bothersome therapy silences.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I wonder: Is that what it’s like to have a brain not filled with questions about whether you’re too old or fat or dumb or smart or in immediate danger of some kind? Fucking . . . doorframes?”
I realized I did sound quite angry. I apologized to Helen; I’d been reading too many threads about street harassment.
“I shouldn’t really be mad about anything,” I said. “Statistically speaking, I’m one of the luckiest people that has ever been born.”
Helen told me that although that was true from a historical perspective, I was still allowed to have feelings, even difficult or ungrateful ones. Those feelings were, apparently, an unavoidable part of life, and it was better to notice and name them than pretend they didn’t exist.
“Alright,” I said. “I’m angry that my threshold for discomfort is so low. Like, I can function totally normally as long as there is no uncertainty in my life, but if I’m waiting to learn the outcome of something, the entire day is fucked.”
I looked at Helen. She was doing “placid” as a charades clue.
“Unfortunately,” I continued, “my threshold for what counts as ‘something’ is very low, so we’re talking, like, responses to emails, likes on a tweet, results of a routine pap smear . . . This year has been like having a rash, continuously, for months. And also? I’m angry about glamping.”
“Okay . . .”
“It’s not as nice as being indoors. No matter what. And I hate renter-friendly apartment hacks and all these other cutesy ways we’ve repackaged the conditions we live in. It’s not romantic to pay hotel room prices for a camper van in a wealthy older person’s backyard, even if there is a fire pit out there. I have thirty-seven thousand dollars in student debt. Why do we have to be the generation that accepts—on top of all the actual indignities—those sliding barn doors on bathrooms?”
“Right,” said Helen. “Interesting. What emotions are coming up for you right now?”
“I feel embarrassed,” I said. “I know these are the wrong things to be thinking about. I should be thinking about, like, inequality. And I do think about that stuff. Some days I’ll completely forget about how much I dislike my body and toggle around on those maps that show you how underwater everything will be in thirty years. Other days it’s exclusively my body, all day, which I know is awful.”
“What you think about is one thing,” said Helen. “But what do you care about?”
I told her I cared about doing the right thing in a very general, almost abstract sense, but I did not have any meaningful ideas about next steps. “I just feel like, why would I know what to care about, or even what to do? I don’t know anything. I didn’t choose the right person, and I have no idea what late capitalism actually is.”
The session carried on, me explaining my little theories and dumb preoccupations, Helen nodding and affirming and sometimes writing things down. Although I sounded like a not-impressive issue of Adbusters, it felt amazing to say these ridiculous half-thoughts out loud, even better not to have them presentation-ready. It was a thrill to express poorly and inelegantly my small and petty and unuseful ideas. I would not achieve anything by expressing them to someone else, but it was nice to think about them here, the personal as personal. Yes, all the big bad stuff was happening, but so was all the little bad stuff (and as Helen was quick to point out, a fair amount of little good stuff, though that was unlikely to be the focus of our sessions).
I told her my theory that intimacy was a scam. I told her I wasn’t sure I liked my job. I told her how satisfying it felt to tweet MEN and have someone I didn’t know respond that they knew, yes, they knew exactly. I told her about the yogurt and the tracking app and the peanut powder. I told her I could not believe I had been brought to my knees by something as quotidian as heartbreak. I told her I was sick of feeling like the biggest woman Emilio Zara could imagine.
“Emilio . . . ?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s what my friends and I call the head designer at Zara. I don’t think that’s his real name, but we needed somewhere to direct our rage.”
I explained that we envisioned him as a kind of sadistic mastermind, like the puppet from Saw, except his twisted endgame was to bring otherwise sane women to tears in flimsy dressing rooms. “Every time I go in there,” I said, “I feel I’m the worst-shaped person on earth. Honestly, being divorced feels the same.”
“How do you mean?”
I told her getting divorced was like getting stuck in a blouse at Zara: I was struggling, and it was clearly the wrong fit, but maybe it would be more embarrassing to try to take it off, to come out of the dressing room and have to admit, I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe it would have been easier not to attempt extraction. Maybe I should have flung open the curtain and proclaimed it my favorite, insisted on wearing it out of the store and every day thereafter, laughing as it cut off the circulation to my arms.
“Has this happened to you before?” Helen asked. “Getting stuck in a blouse?”
“Oh, tons of times,” I said. “You usually realize somewhere around the shoulders that it’s not going to fit, but it’s so tempting to mash it on and see.”
“And how does that go?”
“Badly,” I said. “Every time. And you end up sweaty and panicking and desperate, struggling but refusing to call anyone in to help you, and usually the thing gets ripped on the way off.”
Helen squinted slightly and made some more notes on her pad. I leaned forward.
“Look,” I said. “I know this may not be up to me, but if at all possible, I would love to avoid labeling any of this ‘trauma.’”
Helen shifted in her chair, an amused expression on her face. I wondered if this meant she liked me or if she looked at all her clients this way. I realized I wanted her to like me very badly. She tapped her pen against the side of her face and crossed her legs.
“Do you want to talk about what happened last time you were here?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Alright,” said Helen. “Maybe a better question is, can you?”