Chicago in winter is one thing.
She never believed me, but there is a difference, between this and say Wisconsin. When I lived in Wisconsin, I lived on Lake Michigan and to get home had to drive through miles of cabbage farms; the houses on the farms made more of shadow and shape than mortar and brick and beside certain decrepit structures fields stretched out like screams.
In the spring – and here is what I mean, my point – the fish the lake had swept ashore before freezing began to thaw along with the dead heads of cabbage farmers pitched into ditches before the first frost and the smell was impressive and there was no spring fever, no ides of March, just spring: the rot of everything that had once lived.
When I told her I sometimes missed Wisconsin, she said she couldn’t see what there was to miss. “You need to get out of the Midwest,” she told me. “Have you ever noticed every highway runs straight to another state?”
She told me I couldn’t be from the Midwest. “People from the Midwest don’t talk the way you talk,” she said.
I told her a story about my parents’ dog, how I came to visit one day and he was hyperactive, tried to “instigate play.”
She raised her eyebrows, “Instigate play?”
“Yes,” I said. “Instigate play.”
“I like the way you talk,” she said. “You must have been rich in a past life.” She believed in past lives, described chandeliers and spiral staircases and long gilded cigarette holders.
That night we were walking back to her apartment in a considerable rainstorm. She offered to share her umbrella, but that never works, and I declined her offer, shoved my hands into my pockets, let the rain darken my clothes. “We Midwesterners are too tough for umbrellas.”
The summer she moved back to the west coast, we sat on the stoop outside her Chicago apartment. Inside she was half-packed, uncommitted, a disarray of cardboard boxes, hooks in the walls for pictures un-hung, the kind of disorder that would make it impossible for an outsider to know whether the occupant was coming or going.
In the evening, she flicked water at fireflies, said she would like to electrocute one – “What if it was possible?”
I asked her if she used to catch them as a kid, and she said she couldn’t remember.
“You would remember,” I told her. “They leave a certain smell on your hands – sharp, kind of musky.” And she lifted her own hands to her face, imaging the smell of bugs.
The first time summer ended in Chicago, she was horrified; dragged her plants back inside the apartment, “Oh, God. Everything is dying.”
I told her how my mother survived winter by planning her spring garden; told her about the small shovels, and gloves in the shed still clinging to last year’s dirt; told her about the garden in July, plants gasping, blooming on fire.
“Sounds nice. What does she grow?”
But I never remember, never can name them. I call them “the red one,” “the green one,” “the one all purple and blue, a clutch of dead thumbs,” “the kind that overcomes.”
For all my insisting that spring would come back, the first winter scared her for good and this spring she is gone, returned to a climate she is better suited to contend with.
I am still here. Always still here. For dinner, I drink beer and eat Spanish olives, throw windows open and shut until my whole apartment makes a kind of small talk. I plan to take walks, clean closets . . . Spring’s predictable hopefulness blunts the imagination, speaks endlessly of itself, and flatters, and flatters.
When she calls, it is past eleven and I am in bed, lying under all the covers, watching the ceiling fan spin, thinking of dusting. At night I traverse banal continents lightly, lest some fissure rip through the ice in my head and let me in.
I presume she is calling to tell me she is not pregnant, though she wants to be. Last month, she called to ask if I myself was “bleeding yet.” When I said I wasn’t, she joked bitterly, “Perhaps you are the pregnant one.”
“Not possible, mon ami.” I didn’t need to tell her that. “If I’m pregnant it’s an immaculate conception, the baby Jesus himself. And at the rate I’ve been going, the poor baby Jesus is going to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.”
I reminded her that I don’t want any children – ever. Told her if I was pregnant, she could have Christ when He was born.
She replied quick and serious, “You can keep Fetal Alcohol Jesus.”
The winter she lived here, she came to love the Depressionhurts.com commercial: the series of quiet vignettes illustrating various depressive scenarios – an old man in a track suit wordlessly eating dinner with his wife, the young woman staring blankly out a rain drizzled window while her dog waits by the front door, leash in mouth. Where does depression hurt? Everywhere.
She watched more television than anyone I’d ever met. Said she wasn’t like this when she lived on the coast, said the Midwest made her this way. She watched awful television, television no one should ever watch “America’s Next Top Model,” and “American Idol” and sometimes, if there wasn’t anything truly horrible on, “American Experience.” The latter was not awful in and of itself, but awful because it had a way of making her aware of all she was not doing with her life.
A voicemail: “Oh God. Eleanor Roosevelt is depressing the fuck out of me. Where are you?”
I suggested she stop watching television. Suggested she do something else, go out, leave the apartment, leave the couch, and she’d say it was too cold to do anything else. “Besides, I have Sad – Seasonal Affect Disorder.” And went on to explain that “Sad” was a disease a person could only catch in the Midwest, like Malaria in Africa. Montezuma’s Revenge in Mexico. Sad in Chicago.
“You are being ridiculous. I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never had SAD,” I lied.
But she believed me. “You’re immune to it,” she said. “You can drink the water, as it were.”
Her winter-sad got so she couldn’t manage simple tasks, couldn’t do dishes or fold and iron clothing and so on occasion I offered to do these things for her and she’d let me, asking, “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
Again I lied. Told her I did some of my most brilliant thinking smoothing creases in cotton, elbow deep in dishwater.
My grandmother always scrubbed her floors on her hands and knees with a bucket and a soapy rag and called it “a labor of love,” insisting that if a person really cared, “this is the only way.”
On the rare occasions she went out in winter, she went out without me, went to bars alone to meet men she would tell me about later. I knew the size and shape of their cocks, the taste of their breath, their ratio of body hair to skin and took the information casually, smoked my cigarettes, nodded or laughed as the stories warranted. I believe this is called composure.
Once, she insisted I stay with her, sleep beside her, and I laid above the covers in all my clothes.
She handed me an Ambien, took one herself, said “Let’s play a game to see who falls asleep first.” I didn’t take the pill, and so she won, leaving me alone in wakefulness. When the studies came out about how Ambien caused sleep eating, she stopped taking them, said, “I don’t want to wake up some morning with a mouthful of peanut butter and chicken.”
Last week, she called to tell me about a note she confiscated from one of her eighth-grade students. The note was from a boy, said, “Why you no let me give you sex?” The grammar, not the content was what shocked her. “They are fourteen; they should know how to formulate a coherent sentence.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It should be, ‘Why won’t you have sex with me?’”
Her voice on the machine in the other room is like the appearance of earthworms after a hard rain, and I turn into my pillow so I can’t hear what she’s saying.
When people go away, I want them to go away. I used to be obsequious and servile. I am different now.
But when we do speak, she says she is happy, happy to be somewhere winter never visits. “If there’s one thing I don’t miss, it’s the goddamn winter.”
But without winter, we can only be alive to the sensation of being comfortable.
I defend the brutality, and believe she is a liar, believe she’s a masochist just like me and misses winter terribly.
Image: back_garage / katherine raz via Flickr
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