the rent was due last week
Monday 22 January 2007 | I like a cookie
And in profound avoidance of this fact, I hid all weekend at the Brujo’s house. It worked out in one way, because his car was in the shop all weekend; but in another, it didn’t, in that now it’s Monday and has been Monday for hours; I need a shower like you wouldn’t believe; no really, I mean it; I am scribbled and beweevilled to an impressive degree; and, I still don’t have rent.
On the up side, the Physicist sent an email averring that he would pony up the remaining “alimony” but it would take him a few days. So in continuation of recent brilliant financial planning strategies, I withdrew rent money as a cash advance on my credit card. This took about forty minutes; as in, I sat in my car and stared at my credit card for forty minutes, wondering how it had all come to this. The weevils howled what the fuck is your damage and the good faeries were silent, politely averting their eyes. The weevils reminded me how flush I used to be as a dutiful workaholic college administrator, how brimful of good credit and college loans paid off years early; the good faeries coughed and hummed. Emboldened, the weevils suggested various unhelpful activities involving the car’s exhaust system, whereupon the good faeries finally sighed, shook themselves, and placed my credit card firmly in my quaking hand. By then the bank had closed and it was too late to deposit the ill-gotten gains. I suppose I can give them to my landlady as cash tonight, but that’ll just freak her out—for La Reina is easily freaked, and in fact I’ve often wondered if she’s not the old maid of her large family because she’s Nervous, as we say where I come from. Perhaps agoraphobic? an anxiety disorder? Alternatively, I can slither back home after dark, once she and her old-maid brother have locked their gate (a paranoid happening that takes place nightly at sundown), take a shower, go to bed, and give her a check first thing in the morning. Right before I see the DBT. To whom I owe an equal amount of money.
I clearly remember living like this in 1990 or 1991, but the big idea was that once I had an education, this wouldn’t happen again. That I was only depressed and poor because I was so culturally downtrodden; that the achievements of college and grad school would lift my mood and keep me gainfully employed. [Insert profligate number of Lorrie Moore “Ha ha!”s.]
I moved from the Mojave to DC in 1991 with one suitcase and a Yamaha guitar. I rented a compact room in Chevy Chase for $320, which was a fortune at the time. I slept on a discarded mattress in a loaned sleeping bag; I kept my clothes tidily folded in a cardboard box, except for a few nicer things on wire hangers on the back of the door. I had a Walkman and a few broken candles from the florist’s where I worked. I didn’t have curtains, bedclothes or a coat. Naive Southerner that I was, I only had Keds and thin jeans to wear, no long underwear. That first shrill wind cut right through my clothes and brought tears to my eyes; I felt, believed, that the winter wanted to hurt me. In November I lucked into the bookstore job (my predecessor walking out, Guy angrily yanking my résumé off the top of the stack where Deena had put it the night before), and sometime next spring my parents sent me the quilt from my bed at home. Clare Wolfowitz felt sorry for me one night when I was sick and broke, and she brought me some tangerines, slices of bread and some milk, those little cartons that were probably for her kids’ lunches. When he heard about it over the phone, the Republican (back in California) was mortified. You can’t ask them for help again, he told me; it’s embarrassing.
By the time I went to Mount Holyoke in the fall of ‘92, I had one suitcase, an Ovation guitar, and my grandmother’s steamer trunk. I remember laboriously dragging all three from the bus stop to my dormitory, all the way across campus, ten or fifteen feet at a time, so that I never let anything out of my sight. The dorm room was tiled in black rubber and the mattress was made out of straw. (This is true.) But at least I had my grandmother’s quilt, and, from my friends at the bookstore, posters of Shawn Colvin and Melissa Etheridge. That night I went to the library; it was open until midnight! I went straight to the women’s studies section and took out three dozen books.
Et voilà. With the final installment of the Physicist’s hard-earned pseudo-science wages (the interminable business trips to Houston; the PowerPoint displays of complexity theory in action; the slick-talking white guys in chinos), I can conceivably finish the book. I just have to quit beating myself up about not doing it long enough to actually do it. By then I’ll have heard from grad programs and can possibly even give my notice to La Reina, thus saving more money. If it’s warm enough, I can camp for the rest of the summer. This may reduce the number of blogposts, but that’ll be better for my back and wrists anyway, and I can live a truly romanticized existence in nature, writing poetry and cursing no-see-ums. Or schlepp with whomever will let me—the Brujo, the Professor, Mandarin, mes parents, Gail, the Priest from Maine—all of the above for a week apiece, maybe. At the dignified age of 38!
Sometimes I feel like I’m holding my breath to see if I’ll make it, as Woolf describes craning urgently toward the lady novelist’s prose, widening her eyes to take it in like a steeplechase, will she clear this jump—
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