I knocked on the door again because I could hear her in there, I could hear her music and her feet bouncing on the floor.
“I need to pee.” I announced. The money saved by renting a one bathroom apartment had undoubtedly gone into groceries, specifically, the cranberry juice which was aggravating the current situation. Olivia would appreciate the irony.
“Pee in the sink” she warbled through the particle board of the bathroom door, and I briefly considered following her advice.
“Your dishes are in the sink. Let me in.”
“I’m shaving my legs” she replied. Woman things. I had strict rules against the mention of woman things, especially bathroom woman things, in my presence. Propriety should be foremost amongst roommates, and the tubes and bottles lining the bathtub were bad enough. Olivia, I have to admit, is better than most, and in return I keep my unsightly hair clippings and male hygiene products to myself. Olivia and I have been living in an Odd Couple’s bliss these past few months, a bliss somewhat impeded upon by the current pressure on my bladder.
“Can I please just come in?” If she really wanted her privacy, she would turn up the radio or mention one of the dreaded woman words that would have sent me scurrying to the nearest public bathrooms. I was fighting a winning battle, and we both knew it. I put my hand on the doorknob. “I’m coming in.”
She was in her underwear and a grey t-shirt, and had her foot up on the sink, her leg streaked with a few lines of lather. Her other leg, bent to support her, was jiggling up and down in time to the rock music from the tooth-paste spattered radio, and her unpolished toes fiercely curled against the damp carpet. I wondered at one point in life the human condition would become beautiful, at what age we became dignified.
“I’m not looking” she said, and I pretended she wasn’t there as I peed. Olivia and I have been friends for five years, and if we’re coexisting this disgustingly I wonder if it’s been too long. When does this sort of closeness become acceptable? If we renewed our lease in the fall, what might we become?
She hopped over to make room for me at the sink, and I looked at her smoothed leg as I rinsed my hands.
“What’s the occasion?”
“Does a girl need an occasion to shave her legs?”
“Yes.”
She snorted disapprovingly. I was using her own words against her, but Olivia has a great propensity for inconveniently misremembering past arguments.
“Well, I’m going swimming, anyway.”
“Why?” This was a new development, as Olivia generally abhors water sports. I suspected peer pressure.
“Swimming is good exercise. And it’s something I should be good at. So I can, I don’t know, learn to sail.”
“Are you planning on learning to sail?”
“I might be. Either way, you of all people should not be one to criticize attempts to better oneself.” Five years. Too long indeed.
“Fine. Thank you for your gracious accommodations in the bathroom.”
“Just one more service we offer at Chateau Olivia!” she proclaimed, holding her pink plastic razor above her head, with an accent reminiscent of her inspiration, the Statue of Liberty. Resisting the urge for further sarcasm, I instead decided to wash the dishes while Olivia pattered about, humming and gathering swimming accoutrements. If she was on an aggressive campaign of self-improvement, I might find myself out of a bathroom more often, and in need of the additional options.
When Olivia had left, come back in to grab something she had forgotten and left again, after I had watched her ride away on her bicycle, I returned to the bathroom. Standing in her empty, still damp spot, I shut off the radio and opened the medicine cabinet. I looked at the pill bottles on the top shelf and then lined them on the sink. I filled a glass of water, stared at the white flecks in the bottom, and poured it down the sink. I filled another glass and looked at the pill bottles. Celexa, ibuprofen, old prescriptions. The lethal doses all carefully tabulated in my head. Orange and white plastic that for Olivia had probably long since blended into the background of things she couldn’t reach.
I thought of Olivia coming home, exhausted and cheerful, and finding me on the bathroom floor. She’d smell the vomit I’d drowned in, drop her sopping suit and scream. She’d never go swimming again. Swimming is good exercise, and she would like to learn to sail. Maybe exercise is the answer. I thought about going swimming. About walking in and never coming out, like Odysseus’ mother. The newspaper obituary, if there was one, wouldn’t make the connection. I thought about taking a walk. About stepping in front of a car. Too messy, that might hurt someone else. I emptied the glass of water. I put all the pill bottles back onto the shelf and went into the kitchen for more cranberry juice.
“Fuck Hemingway.” I said it out loud and slammed the cup down onto the kitchen counter, but it was plastic and only hurt my hand. Suddenly it was very quiet in the kitchen. The clock tocked and the refrigerator shuddered off. Olivia’s ugly houseplant seemed sympathetic, leaning precariously in the corner. Perhaps it, too, wanted to die.
“Fuck you, Hemingway.” I threw the cup across the room, looked at it, and picked it up. I wiped four droplets of juice from the wall with my finger.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”.
Jackie told me that, right after I started writing my senior paper about Hemingway. Most days, I wish she hadn’t ever shared with me her extensive collection of quotes. I thought about calling Jackie, trying to be casual about it. She’d tell me what she told me when we broke up, that, among other things, I wasn’t happy enough. Enough. As if it was quantifiable, acceptable only at certain standard levels, or as if she managed to be any happier at any given time. She should have said I wasn’t happy enough for her, I know that’s what she meant but I wish she’d have said it that way. Her relationship with words was so beautifully potent, I envied it and trusted it, so of course it hurt me. But she can’t be blamed for this, she can’t be blamed for anything but putting that stupid fucking quote into my head. My senior paper was shit, anyway, but I still passed. Of course I did. Olivia doesn’t let me talk about Hemingway anymore. She says it makes her sad. Really she just doesn’t like anger, it’s too different, it’s frightening. She’s used to my sadness.
I need to get a job. A better one than my last appointment, which was so monotonous I quit before I could be fired for poor job performance. Olivia’s happy because I stole a label-maker from the office, which is at the bottom of her closet now, out of tape after she labeled everything in our friend Riley’s apartment. I thought about calling Riley, going over there and staring at the label on his ceiling that says “ceiling”, but he’d be at work, 2:30 in the afternoon on a Monday. Everyone is at work, except Olivia, who has Mondays off and is swimming. Why didn’t I just go swimming with her?
I got in my car and cranked up the radio, drowning my sorrows with the music of the 1990’s, which in itself is deeply depressing but always makes me feel better. It’s familiar, if nothing else, but the repetitive nonsensical lyrics, the grim drugged-up despair in the vocals, it means something; not like today’s sad music, which is self-consciously intricate and far too specific. Nineties music doesn’t make much sense, it just points to the painful core at my center, nods, and wipes its sweaty brow with a tattered flannel shirt.
There are a few bookstores in the area, some corporate and some locally owned. I’m a regular at those, but none of them are hiring, so I bitterly looked for applications at the big business bookstores. I hated the poshness of them, the hipster coffeehouses and over-decorated seasonal cheer. At least they’d pay the rent, the cell phone bill. Employee discount and old biscotti for Olivia. I went to the grocery store and got lettuce, soup, yogurt. Red grapes were on sale, the good crispy ones, as my enthusiastic roommate calls them, and I bought a bag for her. She’d be hungry from the exercise.
I was just sort of lying in my room when she called, but I didn’t pick up the phone. She called again almost exactly a minute later, so I answered it. Her voice on the other end was quiet, I could hear activity in the background.
“Can you come and get me?” she said.
“Don’t you have your bike?”
“Yes,” she said after a pause that suddenly sent a wave of adrenaline up my spine, “but could you come get me?”
“Yeah. I’ll be right there.” I couldn’t remember the last time I heard Olivia being that quiet on the phone. Not even when she called while she was off playing hide-and-seek and had gotten bored, not even for the sake of the game had she been quiet.
I pulled up by the pool, and she was waiting outside on a concrete bench, her bike and backpack beside her. She looked very small. I got her bike and she got into the front seat, but she didn’t look back as I tried to maneuver the clumsy machine into my back seat without impaling her or getting grease on the seats. We drove home in silence, the radio mostly chipper commercials.
Upstairs, Olivia dropped her stuff in her room and went into the kitchen, filled a saucepan with water and turned the burner on high. She got a chair to reach her tin of tea rather than asking me for help though I was leaning in the doorway watching her. Opening the fridge, she stared at the new bag of grapes with vague surprise, instead took out four pieces of bread and spread peanut butter over two of them, moving calmly, like she wasn’t there at all. Then she spooned strawberry jam onto one sandwich and apricot jelly on the second. She doesn’t eat apricot. Without thinking or asking, she had made a sandwich for me, too. The silence in the kitchen made me glance nervously at the wall, checking for spattered juice stains. The clock ticked and I found my courage, finally asking,
“What’s up?”
“I drowned” she said, staring at the sandwiches.
“You what?”
“I drowned. When I was swimming, I was tired and when I turned my head to the side to breathe, I breathed in some water, and started coughing, and I guess I stopped kicking, and I went under the water. It was in the deep end. I kind of came back up but I didn’t have any air because I had been coughing, and I couldn’t tell when I was at the surface, and I breathed in more water and went under again. I couldn’t tell. Which way was up. Or anything.”
I didn’t know what to say. What can you ever say?
“The lifeguard pulled me up. She saw me go under. She was really nice about it, too. She was like, sixteen.”
“How long were you underwater?”
“I don’t know!” Anger flashed in her eyes as she looked at me, but it faded again, and she just looked tired.
“I’m sorry.” I almost laughed at myself. “But you’re ok now, right? You should get some sleep.”
“I’d rather stay awake for a while, you know?”
She sat in the kitchen and made her tea. I looked at our movie collection for something that did not involve death, near-death experiences, or water. I was faced with a handful of Disney (except the one about the mermaid) and the few romantic comedies that had been gathering dust on a back shelf. Woman stuff. Even Olivia disdained them.
“Do you care what we watch?”
“No.”
I put in one of the movies, hoping for something that would leave my IQ and belief in humanity intact 107 minutes later, and flopped onto the couch. Olivia settled next to me, tucking her legs in under her. We are our sandwiches in silence, unwilling to provide a laugh track for the film. When the pop song rolled with the credits, I got up to stretch but she stayed put and asked me to put in another one, maybe a better one. Grabbing the first one from the stack, I threw it in the machine and settled back down. As if I had anything better to do than watch crappy movies. It wasn’t until halfway through until Olivia spoke again.
“You know how they say drowning is like going to sleep?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“It kinda hurts.”
“Yeah.” I slid over and grabbed her shoulders, pulled her to me in the hug I finally realized she needed. Her hair smelled like chlorine.
“You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I saw?”
“What?”
“Nothing. My own arm. Blue pool water, then nothing. I didn’t have any air, and I didn’t have anything.” She abruptly broke off her sentence, unwilling to say that she had that she had taken water into her lungs and surrendered to that oblivion.
“No childhood memories or anything. And I’ve got some good ones.” She pushed in closer to me, and I pulled a blanket up around us. By the time the movie was over she was asleep on my lap. I thought about moving her, such a few short steps to her room, but by then my legs were asleep and I was halfway to joining them. She was breathing evenly, without thinking, as she had been in the pool earlier. I nearly shuddered, looking at her closed eyes, her pale skin. Her mouth was hanging open. The moment drool appeared, I swore to the grimly glowing VCR clock, I was done. I was moving out. No drool appeared as I stared at the blank blue television screen, buzzing blue rays into my tired eyes. Blue pool, then nothing. Olivia had seen the worst thing she could imagine. She had clawed at the air and the water and tried to pull herself back up, but then she had relented. Odysseus’s mother regretting her decision as she saw the sand swirling around her feet. Blue water, orange and white plastic, darkness. Slowly I shifted so we were lying down, Olivia only smacking her lips and sloppily tugging at the fleece blanket. I’d never be able to sleep, I can never sleep sardined with someone else, but Olivia was just there, needing something better than nothing.
She punched me in the shoulder to wake me, told me loudly that I was a pervert and threw the blanket over my head as she got up. I listened to her pouring cereal into a bowl in the kitchen, humming an obnoxious jingle. Cured, seemingly. Reborn and undefeatable each day, while I, so unlike a phoenix, had slept with my keys and cell phone gouging into my leg. Better than nothing. I got up and leaned on the doorframe of the kitchen, where Olivia was eating dry granola with a fork.
“I’m going to be late for work” she observed, smiling her beautiful child’s smile at me. “You’ve got pillow lines.”
I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I opened the medicine cabinet and looked at the neat line of pill bottles on the top shelf. I closed the medicine cabinet. I filled a glass of water and, without looking at the hard water flecks swirling at the bottom, drank the whole thing straight down.
