My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
I become a huge bitch. For much of your visit, I spend the hot July days out on my balcony, refusing to speak, while you paint at the dining room table in your blue-splattered boxers. You say you want to understand my bipolar disorder, but you are lying: you seem to be confusing “want to understand” with “want me to understand that I can will it away with some positive thinking.” When we fuck, it hurts so much that my abdomen sobs, while my eyes betray nothing. Even my vagina has had enough of you. I don’t know which is more terrifying: being loved or being asked to love.
We agree that we can’t make it long-distance, an amicable split that keeps my smoky moods from smashing into your kaleidoscopic crayon-box brain. We’ve been out of touch for months when your mother calls to tell me she had you committed. She gives me the number for the mental health ward and the best hours to call. Over the phone, you tell me you don’t believe the doctor when he says you’re bipolar, like me; and you don’t see why everyone is so upset that you’ve been expressing yourself by throwing books; and you just want everyone to let you be homeless. I tell you to take your meds and I realize how hard it must be to love me. The painting you made that week we sweated our skins off remains hidden in my closet. You’re too broken with reality to want to talk about anything but the fact that all of this is perfectly normal, and even though I want to cradle your crazy brain in my arms and try to heal you with all the everyday magic I’ve conjured up since my own diagnosis, I must remind myself that you’re far away, you’re in good hands, and because I regularly exhaust my powers keeping myself on the outside of the institutional wall, I have to let myself off the hook.
#10. On your couch, you lean in close, take my hand, and pull my fingers so hard they might come out of their sockets. One by one, my knuckles crack. Your friend is lying on the floor; he cracks my toes, and then passes out.
In your bed, we’re surrounded by your high school wrestling trophies. You haven’t been competitive since you were eighteen and skinny. After a ten-minute rest, you want to go again, from behind. I bury my face in the pillow and do not have to look at you while I wonder how we got from friendship to this. I tell you it hurts and you say, just one more minute, almost there. You are wrong. After we finish you crack my knuckles again, and I tell you to stop it, there are no cracks left.
You agree to dose me with an Ambien. I graduated two weeks ago, and have nearly nothing to do with my time until I move, so I am prepared to sleep all day and hope you don’t decide in the middle of the night that you’re ready for more of me.
Weeks later, you want to take me out on a real date. Fancy Chinese dinner, French film, cocktails, strip club. The place is called “Good Guys” and one of the women looks like a racing dog, all ribs, but the others have a little fat on them. I tell you I could strip here and you say I am probably wrong. You give me dollars to wave at them and I already know I have to put out. On the way to my apartment, you order me to stuff my cold Chinese leftovers into your mouth. You lick my fingers clean. In bed, even though I don’t believe in blue-balls, I don’t challenge you.
You talk too much. I put on heavy metal and scratch your back with my fingernails. I attempt some gymnastics and stand over your prostrate body—once the compact form of a wrestler, now fleshy and weak—and my feet pin your elbows to the bed. “How do other guys handle this?” you ask. “How do they handle you?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, then amend it: “They don’t, really.”
#9. You eat me out on the dining room floor of your parents’ house in the Baltimore suburbs while my best friend sleeps on the couch in the next room. You push your tongue into my mouth and say, “This is how you taste,” as though you are the first to teach me this. In the morning, your parents ask you for your sleeping friends’ full names. I am too afraid of them to walk past them to the bathroom, so I hold in my morning piss all the way home. Until I heard your voice cramp as your father gave you the third degree, you had seemed so adult, being a year out of college and much more self-assured than the rest of us, but like your sandy-eyed passengers, you’re somebody’s kid, tethered to the nest.
Early on, you make it clear that we are wrong for each other. You are looking for something, and I am not that thing.
Every time I sleep over, before bed, you fill two shot glasses with saline solution and label them left and right for my contact lenses, a gesture that I keep telling myself is just friendly, not boyfriendly, so that I won’t start growing on you like mold. The nightly ritual is the best thing you ever do for me. The worst comes after you ask, “Wanna try something new?”
#8. I should have known you were bad news when you rolled out of bed, opened your top drawer, and showed off your handgun before you even took the condom off. The gun is in your glove box the night you come to my apartment, crush up my anxiety pills, and snort the powder. When my ex-boyfriend knocks on the window, you get jealous and pull a knife on me. After I throw you out, my friends lament the fact that I will never again ride in that BMW. Only one points out that I shouldn’t have left my fingerprints on that gun.
#7. You finish in less than thirty seconds every time. I count. Afterward, you run to the bathroom and leave me alone for ten times the length of our fucking. You never admit I de-virginized you. You end it after a few weeks. I will miss your visits, our awkward questions about each other’s days and goings-on posed from opposing armchairs before we would stand and work on an embrace. The problem with this, you say, is that I am not Jewish and you cannot marry me. I wonder whether it was the Virgin Mary nightlight and archangel candles in the bathroom that sent you packing. I want to tell you that I didn’t mean it—not the countertop devotion, not the beneath-sheets detachment. I know you don’t get a do-over of your first fuck. All I can do is let you go.
#6. I skip my psychiatrist appointment to go sneaker shopping with you. For weeks we sit on your porch, smoking, and you tell me you can feel your lungs dying. At my apartment, you finger me with a precision I have never known while you talk on the phone. Your best friend wants to know why we aren’t at Starbucks yet, and you tell him, ten minutes. You get a few good thrusts in before you go soft, saying, “I guess I’m not really into girls.” Because you keep your shirt on the whole time, I never really get to know your skin. For months, in my apartment, I see visions of you in the blueness of cloudy days. I see you across the table again, see you in the bathroom rolling off a condom. You stop talking to me; I try hard to stop loving you. The task is so difficult. You are the one who will tell me, “Girl, you need a fucking bottle of Xanax,” who will hang up on my manic calls, and who will say you can’t truly give two fucks because you have no soul. But you do have a soul, and when I look at you from just the right angle, I can see it sweat.
#5. You keep a gallon of lotion next to your bed and need me to keep hand cream next to mine. You insist that I have problems and need to get professional help. From where I’m lying, worn out and hurting, fucked raw, I see all kinds of problems that you don’t. The problem is that I was devastated by someone else; the problem is that I refuse to walk down the block to get a smoothie without changing into a dress and high heels.
When I know we’re nearing the end, I tell you in tears that I’m close to making myself lovable, and could maybe even start loving you, too, but you say I’m so far off. I wish I could tell you that I have even grown fond of the man-tits you’ve always tried to hide and exercise away, an aberration on your skinny frame, and the way your palms fly to your chest when you feel insecure, but now, I see only certainty in your face as you tell me that you’ve had enough.
After you ditch me and tell my secrets to the next girl, I tell everyone about your lotion-hungry dick; you tell the Internet I never get wet.
#4. Your fencing weapon is foil, mine is épée, so we never bout. I collect medals while you fail classes. I mark the number of times we fuck on an envelope full of our condom wrappers, which I keep in an unplugged mini-fridge. We get up to nine—nine nights that I watch for you to walk into my courtyard, nine nights you refuse to sleep beside me—before you drop out of school and leave me to go home to New York. I will wait for you to come back to your studies. You play around with the idea of re-enrolling, but never do.