Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

—

Our first Halloween together, Jared and I dressed up as Sid and Nancy. He scrawled “God Save the Queen” across a ripped T-shirt and squeezed into a pair of my jeans. I rented a platinum wig and wore a see-through black dress with red stilettos so high I couldn’t walk. Jared had to carry me on his back from my apartment to the bar, and then, once inside, walk me to a chair and plant me there while he ordered drinks. We ran into some friends of his, and they started a game of pool. I couldn’t even hit the white ball. I crossed my legs on my corner stool. “She’s like Kate Moss, Jared,” one of the girls said, motioning to me with her cue. “Supermodel thin.” She glowered at me as she enunciated each syllable of the dumb thing girls were supposed to want to be. But I felt better to be sitting alone in my fishnets and silver bra now that I was supermodel thin. A stupid feeling. It was a relief to be comforted by stupidity.

After the bar closed, we piled into a stupid graffiti-covered van and drove back to Jared’s, where his roommate was throwing a party. I wanted Jared to come to bed and fuck me in my red stilettos, but it was impossible. He was belting out Sex Pistols songs and making everyone laugh with his perfect British accent. I took off my shoes and had a vodka tonic. Then I went in his bedroom and puked out his window. Sometime later, he was pulling me to a sitting position. “Come here, beautiful girl. I drew us a bath.” I could tell right away that he was high on blow, as he taught me to call it. His navy comforter was mottled with early-morning light falling through the pines outside his window. I let him lead me to the mildewy bathtub, my eyes trained on my shuffling feet. I was mad not because he’d left me alone to vomit in his bedroom but because he let me sleep through sunrise instead of sharing his drugs with me. We faced each other in the lukewarm water.

“You look melancholy,” he said. “I’m sorry I make you melancholy.” He turned away and slapped his palm on the surface of the water. “Stop being sad! Why can’t you be fucking happy?”

Brian used to ask me the same thing. It killed me. I think of myself as someone with an unusually high capacity for happiness, just not from the right things. I feel it here, inside these days of sitting and eating with such singleness of purpose — parsing the garlic from the cumin from the cinnamon, watching earth-size clouds dissolve into hot white space — that I feel sure sitting and eating in this village is as worthwhile an activity as any. But when I’m bloated and sleepy after the noonday meal and doze off facedown on the bed, my filthy feet dangling off the end, terror jerks me awake a few minutes later: What have I been doing all this time? Shouldn’t I be doing something else? Like jogging or knitting or finding a husband or going back to school? Instead, I’m wiping my ass with my left hand and eating fried vegetables smeared in chili paste with my right. Which makes me much happier than it should.

To try to assuage the should-feeling one afternoon, I ask Suriya if she ever goes running. She looks at me strangely. “I must. If I am late.”

“That makes sense.” I settle back in my lawn chair to watch the evening’s first pink-tinged clouds take shape.

Until I met Brian, I’d been averse to the gym — all those people exerting all that effort for nothing. They didn’t need their flat stomachs and bulging biceps to carry well water or dig ditches or climb coconut trees. But when I grew quiet and sedentary in the middle of our second winter together, Brian got us a joint membership and insisted I try it. I went to a class called Total Surrender. An inverted triangle with a human head made me surrender to a series of sit-ups, push-ups, squats, and leg lifts while hip-hop music blared and he shouted, “Six, five, four — let’s go! Higher! Three, two — aaaand new count! Ten, nine, eight…” Across the street, a fast-food restaurant advertised a free soda with any weekday lunch special. The storefront was decorated with paper hearts for Valentine’s Day. When a chubby woman tried to leave, the instructor bounded to the door. One arm shot out from his body like the limb on a Lego policeman. “Back on your mat! No one is leaving!”

“You’re an animal,” the woman groaned. She sounded idolatrous.

During the last set of crunches, I grunted at the same time as the woman next to me. Our eyes locked and we smiled at our misery reflected in the other’s face. It feels productive to suffer. Without desperation, what momentum would there be to my days? If I were to tell my life as a story, surely the listener would be more interested in my sordid shenanigans with Jared than in my eventless days in this foreign village. Yet I feel good here. What does that say about goodness? Or about the human brain — mine in particular? All those concerned parties in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women pity the unmarried thirty-year-old, who reads and goes to church and has lots of friends, because she does not have a “full life in the accepted sense.” The part of me that believes in that kind of fullness is comforted by drama. With Jared, my life felt full. Too full to worry over whether I was eating or sleeping or meditating. Even from here, the memory of that chaos doesn’t seem all bad: the crying and the sex and the ostensible meaning in every street sign and song lyric. It felt like I was doing something important — feeling all that.

What I have now — swimming in the lake, eating rice and curry out of lotus leaves, sleeping nine hours a night, waking to Pali chants at dawn, sipping sweet tea, chatting with Suriya until I fall asleep — is joy, not tiny, bleating, toy-human fun. But part of me still wants the toy-human fun. I have to fight upsurges of resentment against Suriya’s family for their groundedness, their lack of ambitions and judgments, their ignorance of the giddiness I felt when I downed cans of beer while trying on clothes and dancing alone to fast, bright songs that everyone knows before heading out to a bar, stupidly hoping that this night of all nights would be worth it. “Abandon hope”: something a Buddhist nun said at a talk in Carpinteria, which I taped over my desk at home. But it feels good to be stupid.

—

In the afternoons, Suriya sits in the yard with a giant binder filled with vocabulary lists, verb conjugations, and summaries of books and plays, studying for the first round of exams to become an English teacher. I test her on vocabulary and ask her to repeat sentences in various tenses. I’m surprised when we get to the literature section: She is expected to be familiar with writers like Dickens and Shakespeare. “You’ve read Shakespeare?” I ask.

“Just some small parts. The play is about Romeo and Juliet. Until my teacher explains, I did not understand one word.”

“Well, that’s all right. Most American students can’t understand it without help, either. So,” I say, reading a question from her binder, “what is one of the main themes in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet ?”

Suriya bites the tip of her index finger. “The theme of karma?”

I ask how she would explain that on an exam. “The families of Romeo and Juliet,” she says, “they create bad karma by their fighting and their anger. And then the children suffer for the bad karma of the parents.”

“In English we would say this is fate or destiny. Do you know those words?”

“Yes! My teacher has said the word fate. But I do not understand.”

“It’s that Romeo and Juliet’s love is doomed to fail. There’s nothing anyone can do to save it. It’s what the stars want.”

“I do not understand. Why do the stars want that children suffer?” Suriya’s cousin comes out of the house with the baby, feeding him sips of tea out of a glass cup.