When I got home yesterday, my clothes were scattered across the bedroom. They were congregating on the floor of my closet and piled up in a large heap on my bed. I was certain I saw the pile move. Marsden was supposed to be at Elliot’s, but for reasons I can’t now conceive of, I was absolutely certain he was hiding under the pile of clothes that I had left behind, and thinking about him being there, waiting for me, missing me so much that he had to fortress himself under my clothing, sent a mad rush of maternal love through me. I sat down on the bed and put my hand on top of the pile and started talking. I told this heaping pile of clothing about my trip to New York and asked how its college essay was coming along. The pile didn’t respond. But since Marsden is a boy of few words, I continued talking. It was a lovely chat until I of course discovered that he wasn’t hiding under the pile ruminating on the meaning of life while awaiting my return.
I picked up a pair of pants and asked them, “Why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t here? Why are you always so withholding?”
For as long as I can remember I’ve anthropomorphized my clothing. My socks compete with each other. The plain gray pair feels intimidated by the socks with patterns. I try to reassure them, “Don’t worry, I’ll wear you tomorrow,” but they usually can’t be appeased. They are prone to sulking and scheming. Occasionally I move them out of the closet and put them in a bureau, but they aren’t the instigators to the dramas, they’re the foot soldiers and they maintain strong alliances with some of the more unsavory characters in my closet—I’m talking about you, teal silk shirt with the tiny stain. My closet is steeped in passion and fury, betrayals, secrets, affairs, and murder.
“I’m leaving you for a pair of skinnier legs, bitch.”
Missing jacket. Hasn’t been seen in weeks. Might have run off with a pocket full of coins.
My sole Dior dress has long felt threatened by the Anthropologie upstarts that began colonizing in 2008.
What I saw of my wardrobe when I got back from New York didn’t look like a rift between two overpriced frocks—there had been a brawl.
How is it that I love doing laundry, but hate folding my clothes? Are we all just a series of contradictions in terms that we then qualify as complications?
I was putting my pants back in the closet when Maya called.
“You must be hungry. Stu’s at a business meeting. Let’s get dinner at Blue Ginger.”
We met at the restaurant and after we got to our table, Maya said she had a gift for me. I’m not comfortable getting a gift unless I have a gift to give back, and I was relieved when I opened her gift and saw that it was a hand-bound notebook that I had once given to her.
When I told her, she looked embarrassed. It’s not like Maya to screw up a regift.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tried to console her. “I was regifting it when I gave it to you. My agent had given it to me.” We laughed over our first round of drinks and established a set of rules and regulations for regifting, which included the unwritten rule, which I am now writing, to never regift the crappy gifts that should never have been gifts in the first place. No one wants the regift shit. After a second round of drinks, we decided to open a store and call it REGIFT. It will be stocked with gifts to give again and again. It’s a very contemporary, environmentally conscious, sustainable idea, although I suppose we will probably go out of business after a while, a byproduct of our success, because the market will be saturated with regifts, eliminating the need to buy a brand new regift.
After the third round I tried to talk her out of throwing the surprise party for Stu. “He’s going to hate it,” I kept telling her.
“I’ve already rented T.T. the Bear’s for the night,” she informed me. “And the boys in the band are all coming.”
“The boys in what band?” I asked.
Until last night, neither Stu nor Maya had mentioned that Stu was a drummer in a band while at Macalester. Never once mentioned it! Stu doesn’t seem like the college rock band type. He’s the cute guy that was always in the library. The guy who took his girlfriend camping in the mountains for the weekend. The guy who graduated with a job lined up. Not a drummer in a hard-ass heavy metal punk-infused explosive noise machine band. And he played the drums like he was possessed? Hard to imagine Stu being intense about anything—other than Maya. He worships her, but I haven’t seen evidence that he cares about much else. The kids and the dogs get some residual Maya worship showered down on them, but I doubt they generate any worship on their own.
Maya said the band broke up after graduation and Stu had fallen out of touch with his former bandmates, but she managed to track all three of them down. They were reluctant because they remembered how much Stu hated anyone mentioning his birthday, but she had convinced them to come play at the party.
“What band? How come I never knew Stu was in a band?” I remember that I kept asking her. Even after she answered I kept asking.
She’s so Maya. Withholding but revealing. How does she do that? “I can’t tell you everything. How boring would that be?”
It never occurred to me to not tell Maya everything. She is my everything person.
We ordered another round of drinks.
“But I want to know everything about you.”
Why did I say that? I sounded more like a possessive lover than a curious friend. Even I admit it’s a little creepy, but I actually do want to know everything about her—all her secrets. At least Stu is her husband. I’m just a friend with boundary issues.
Our fourth round of drinks arrived, and this is the one that I blame for my throbbing head. The topic changed to my precious divorce virginity. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”
I keep having to explain this to her. It’s not what, it’s who. I’m not going to sleep with someone because Maya thinks having sex will get me over my writer’s block. I will do almost anything for Maya, but I won’t have sex with someone as a creative experiment. I’m not that blocked.
She persisted. “You need a divorce virginity deadline. I’ll give you two weeks.”
Maya was talking loudly and the people at the table next to ours turned their heads to look at us. The men turned back quickly, but the women lingered a moment longer, maybe in sympathy, maybe in judgment, we’ll never know. Maybe they were drunk too. I think Maya was talking loudly on purpose, she wanted our conversation to be worthy of eavesdroppers. She does things like this. I attribute it to the publicist in her.
So with a rapt audience one table over, she told me about John, a new biker friend of Stu’s. John is a civil engineer. Maya says he’s funny.
But who isn’t funny these days?
He rode his bike across the country after his wife left him. I do like that.
“Call him. Email him. Wait, I’ll do it right now,” she said, taking out her phone and shooting off an email.
“Stop, Maya, please.” But nothing stops Maya.
Then she said, “You’re divorced. He’s divorced. You’re both regifts.”
The idea of us both being regifts sets us off in hysterics. I pointed out that we both crossed our legs at the exact same time to hold in the pee, which set us off again. And that was yesterday, Morning Pages.
This morning I woke up spooning the pile of clothes on my bed and my head feels like someone stuffed a wad of crinkled newspaper into it.