Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Dear Deborah,

Do you go by Deborah? It sounds so uptight. I bet you hate Debbie. I hate Debbie, too.

Jack calls you Deb.

This is a letter about Jack.

I began sleeping with your husband last June. We were together for seven months, almost as long as I’ve known him.

We did it in my apartment. Or I went to his studio, a lot. One time at the Comfort Inn in midtown, last August. He used his Visa. Look it up. I know about Kay, her getting bullied at school, and I know about when Simon got caught shoplifting at the Best Buy. I never asked to know about your family. It’s just that sometimes, he needed me.

In movies, when the woman is dumped, one thing to do is to take all the love letters and pictures from photo booths and old T-shirts, and to set them on fire. This is to help the woman move on.

I don’t have any pictures from photo booths. What I have is email, and a little blue folder on my hard drive called “Chats.” So, look what I did. I printed them, at a FedEx on Houston Street. $87.62. I haven’t had my own printer since college. The hours and hours made pages and pages, none of it so romantic, a lot dirtier than I remembered. I bought a handle of Georgi at the liquor store so it would really burn — the Jamaican behind the register gave me extra bags because it was hard to keep the pages together — and I carried everything back, the sum of my love rolled in black-and-gold plastic, and dumped it all out into the bathtub.

But it didn’t seem fair, that I should be left with the mess, when I use this tub, when I stand in it almost every day. So I got this box together, to give to him.

And then just now I was looking at it, and I realized whom I should be giving it to. You.

Falling in love is just an excuse for bad behavior. If you’re fucking someone in a way that you mean it, the rest of you is fucked also. Did I care about you, your children? Did I care about my work? Ask me if I cared. If I care, even.

The thing that kills me, that I can’t get over, is I didn’t do anything to make him stop wanting me. I didn’t change. I held very still on purpose. I weighed myself the other day for the first time in a long time. I thought for sure I’d gained weight, like twenty pounds. Twenty pounds is maybe enough to change the way someone feels about you. But no.

You get migraines, right? He told me you do. I get them too, Deb. Do you think maybe it’s him? That the migraines are coming from him? Like if we drank the same dirty water and got cancer, or if we both lived a block from 9/11 and got cancer, or if we did anything the same and got cancer, then we’d trace it to the source, right, and expect a settlement, wouldn’t we. What are you settling for, Deb? How much did you get?

There were things you learned early, growing up in the city, and there were things you learned late, or not at all. Bicycles were one of the things Kay had missed, along with tree swings and car pools, dishwashers and game rooms in the basement. The only style of swimming Kay knew was the style of not drowning, any direction but down. Instead of a dog, they had a cat, and before that a cockatiel and a cockatoo, sea monkeys, lizards, gerbils that made more gerbils, one regrettable guinea pig.

She made up for what she’d missed with things New York had taught her. Like how long you had to walk after the DON’T WALK started to blink. The way to hail a cab (hand out but still, fingers together). She knew where to stand in an elevator depending on how many people were on it already, when to hold the poles on the subway and when it was okay just to let go and glide. She knew how to be surrounded by people and not meet anybody’s eye.

“If you push harder, you won’t shake so much.” That was what the other girls all said. They kept a few yards away, pigeon-toed, with hands on their hips or as visors over their foreheads. It was the Sunday morning after a sleepover. Their eyes worked at pinching out the sun.

“Just bike to here, Kay.” Racky, on the only other bike, made figure eights around the rest of them, Chelsea and the Haber twins with their twin braids. It had become a group project at these New Rochelle playdates, teaching Kay to ride. She could never get past the wobbly, the fear of falling. That jelly feeling would hit after the first pump, and her foot would come down like a gag reflex, like the time she smacked the wooden stick out of Dr. Frankel’s hand when he tried to depress her tongue with it, her foot would hit the pavement and drag her to a stop. Cycle, stop. Cycle, stop. Twenty minutes of this, most weekends, and finally the others would get bored, would propose trips to the multiplex, to TCBY, to the kitchen for facials with an issue of Allure and someone’s mother’s old avocado.

“I can’t.” It was a hot day and probably there was something good on TV, in the air-conditioning. Central air seemed the greatest of suburban luxuries. It was like living inside a Duane Reade. They had AC units at home, wheezy ones that dripped puddles under the windowsills.

“If Kay bikes to here,” Racky said, “she can choose what movie we watch.”

“I don’t want to choose what movie.”

The girls whispered, negotiating behind long strings of blonde that they tucked behind their ears as they came up with new terms.

“If Kay bikes to here,” said one of the twins, “she can choose the movie and if we get pizza or Chinese.”

“I don’t care what we eat.”

“Lo mein, Kay.”

“I can’t.”

Racky rang the bell on her handlebar. “If she bikes to here,” she said, counting off on her fingers, “she gets the movie, Chinese, and twenty bucks.”

The Haber twins laughed. Kay understood that no one expected her to make it, that they were already telling the story on Monday in the cafeteria, the great lengths they had gone to teach Kay, how hopeless she was.

She pushed off the pavement with the girls still laughing and forced herself to pedal a second time, through the uneasiness. For once, she wasn’t afraid to fall. If she fell, then at least this all would be over; they’d stop laughing, maybe even feel bad.

She rode right past them — past them! — went another eight or nine yards before sailing into a curb. But still, she had done it. Been bullied into it, but still.

She chose Harry Potter and beef lo mein. She never did get the twenty dollars from Racky, but then she never asked.

—

It was half past nine by the time Racky’s mom’s minivan pulled up in front of Kay’s apartment building. “Your mother’s going to have me arrested for kidnapping.”

“She won’t care.” Sometimes Kay caught herself making her mother sound neglectful for no reason. She said thanks, for the ride or the weekend generally, to the whole of the car and worked the handle to slide herself out. She could feel the minivan waiting for her to reach the lobby before it lurched away.

Kay’s favorite doorman was on. She never called him by his name, although she knew it, had heard other people address him this way. She was afraid that in her mouth it would come out wrong, that she’d been mishearing it all this time — what everyone else was saying sounded like Angel, but no one was named Angel.