Sink

It’s surprisingly easy to let something stay broken. It takes no effort. There is a period of adjustment, but after that, if you do nothing, the brokenness starts to seem normal. A chair becomes wobbly and it’s just that one wobbly chair you have. A ceiling fan gets stuck on low and that’s just how high it goes now. You smoke cigarettes all night on your front porch because that’s the only thing that seems to make any sense these days, so you spend every morning coughing. It was the same way with my kitchen sink. One day I was making coffee, standing in my underwear, tattered, because my wife used to by me underwear and shopping for clothes just didn’t seem like something I could ever do alone. And I was running the previous day’s grounds down the disposal when the water started to rise ominously in both sink basins. A dingy soup of coffee grounds with something see-through and viscous riding on top. Over the next few days I tried the sink a few times—after the water had abated and the sting of failure had dulled—but each time I would have a breath-stopping moment of hope, and then the water would rise from the drains again. Until I just stopped using the sink altogether.

You can get by just fine. You can make your coffee in the bathroom sink and wash your dishes in the tub and after a few times laughing at yourself—kneeling down on the little fuzzy orange rug as if you were washing your wife’s hair—eventually you stop laughing and it just becomes how you wash your dishes. You keep the lemon-scented dish soap and a drying rack under the sink and you don’t let it stop you from cooking for yourself—you’re not that far gone—you just switch your narrative. You no longer have a working kitchen sink. Your no longer have any underwear without holes. You no longer own a copy of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted or Fear of a Black Planet or Thriller and you should stop looking for them because they don’t live here anymore and what’s done is done.

My job is that I’m the manager of the biking and camping departments at REI. It’s stupid that I have that job because I haven’t been on a bike in years and the only time I went camping a black bear attacked our food packs and my dad ran away leaving me and my brother to defend ourselves and that pretty much ruined both camping and my belief in my father forever. But I’m pretty good at figuring out how best to display our bikes and sleeping bags and backpacks as to seem like you just couldn’t have any more fun in this life than you could biking or camping. The tents are the best. I like to crawl inside them with my customers and sit with them while they make up their mind. I might drop a few facts about the tent, like how this one has hinged doors that are really convenient for kids or how great factory-taped fly-pole seams are for easy set-up, but mostly I like to just watch their faces as they try to envision a perfect future inside the tent. A sad-eyed mom conjuring her family in their utopian ideal: quiet, loving, without panic. Or you can see in a young man’s eyes how the tent might create the perfect space for a kinky outdoor sex weekend with his girlfriend and maybe he will no longer have to fear losing her to the guy at the video store who forgives her late fees and gives her free candy, the guy with the nose ring and the pecs and the hair so thick you want to run your hands through it. Or the middle-aged businessman sitting cross-legged in his wrinkled suit, wondering if maybe once they’re inside the tent his teenage children will stop hating him for being bewildered and out of touch. They will look up from their MP3 players and say, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m your daughter again. I will shriek and run in the sprinklers and stop smoking pot with the bad kids behind the science building.” Everybody knows a tent can’t actually change that much, but there is the possibility, and sometimes that’s enough.

On a smoke break one rainy Friday afternoon—decidedly not the kind of weather that makes people rush out to buy mountain bikes or kayaks—Renee from up front told me she was quitting REI to move to Suriname to be with her boyfriend. He was in grad school for plastic surgery and was going to fix cleft palates for Doctors Without Borders. When she told me this, it upset me deeply; I would never be capable of any degree of goodness or self-sacrifice even approaching that guy. No matter if he would spend the rest of his life stuffing silicone into leathery women and generally hating anyone weak or poor or ugly, he’d always be better than me because he’d done that thing to alleviate suffering when he was young and fresh from school and his girlfriend was devoted enough to move to a place called Suriname. Renee invited me to come along to Fremont’s for good-bye drinks after work. I would have said no automatically as I don’t really like Renee and Fremont’s plays a lot of music I hate—bands like Coldplay and Dave Matthews—and has wimpy, overpriced drinks all served in the wrong glasses. But I couldn’t take another night of sitting on the porch smoking, staring at the doughy families in khakis walking by with their Collies and their little kids on bikes with helmets protecting their eggshell heads, all the while trying to peer into the demolition zone of the previous eighteen months and figure out exactly went wrong. So I said yes.

Fremont’s was filled with the type of crowd that seems like a universe wholly apart from mine. One full of golf dates and earnings reports and bright, shining futures. It was easy to look down on them as unhip and tight-assed but that just covered up the truth, that they were in possession of the tools to happiness—they horded those tools like water in the desert—and my class of people would forever be bringing them menus or fixing their transmissions or recommending a loft wedge on the eighth. I sat in the booth and silently resented everybody, the besweatered masses around me with futures planned and savings 401k’ed, as my coworkers discussed the latest advances in crampons. I cannonballed into my third Bushmills and my mood was really starting to spiral downward. I slid out of the booth with my fists and toes clenched tight and drifted around the joint until I eventually found salvation at the jukebox. Even though it was an untrustworthy little device that downloaded your selections from the Internet instead of playing physical CDs, I knew exactly what I wanted to hear. It was only when the last shitty Everclear song was done and the crackhead howlings of Flavor Flav suddenly insinuated themselves on the starchy crowd at Fremont’s, did I start to breathe right again.

I can’t do nuttin’ for ya, man!

I can’t do nuttin’ for ya, man!

My wife had never understood Public Enemy. I used to think that was the worst of her failings. She couldn’t understand how the insistent aggression of Chuck D’s voice and and the sonic fried rice of Terminator X’s scratching could calm me down after a difficult day. But they did. They made me feel like the possibilities for a bright and shining future were going to open any second now. The strength and assuredness of Chuck’s baritone made me believe I would soon discover the grand purpose of my life and it would be within reach and it would be spectacular. I once admitted this to my wife while I lay in the bath, “Bring The Noise” playing on my little boombox, beer sweating on the lip of the tub. By telling her my secret feelings for the band, I was pulling back a piece of my skin and exposing the tender flesh within, She stopped lazily stroking me under the water and stood up, wiping her hands on her jeans. She tightened her face and asked if I didn’t think it was sort of childish to look for career advice from a ten year old rap album? I told her that It Takes A Nation of Million to Hold Us Back was released in 1988 and so it was actually closer to twenty years old. I don’t think she ever touched my dick again after that.

It’s unclear exactly when most of my coworkers left or exactly what I told them to get them to leave me there or even if I bothered to make up an excuse, but somewhere around my thirtieth song the bartender told me he was cutting me off. I still had three more credits on the machine but that surprisingly did not soften his heart and I was seconds away from giving him major shit when I looked into his eyes and realized he was a worker, not an owner, and I left without incident, as they say. I was standing out on the street, the chilly air sobering me up a bit, when I noticed a girl smoking a cigarette. She was someone I remembered from inside, a girl with dirty blonde hair and a flat chest and a strand of pearls over her black blouse. I’d stared at her entire table of girls during a set of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I remembered leaning against the pillar near the jukebox, having graceless thoughts these girls—about when they had lost their virginity and had they ever orgasmed while riding a horse. The brutality of my thoughts embarrassed me suddenly and I shoved my hands in my pocket and made to leave. But I wasn’t sure which way I was supposed to start walking and before I could figure it out, the girl exhaled a cloud of smoke in my direction.

I liked the music you played. Most of it.

Oh. Thanks. I was just trying to get away from some people.

I wished I could have gotten away from some people, too.

The girls you were with? I noticed the girls.

You noticed the girls. I was one of the girls.

I know you were!

I’m not a very intuitive person but sometimes when a train is moving towards you it’s pretty hard not to notice it. Or maybe not a train. When your phone rings in the middle of the night. Or someone on television has the same last name as you. Or when your wife has finally moved the last of her stuff out of the house and she’s really gone and even her bedside table only now shows the dust outline of her book, her alarm clock, her drinking glass. She followed me back to my house and I showed her around. It’s a ridiculously spacious house, bought with family money—hers. I still live there because she no longer wants to have anything to do with it. Also, I sort of refused to leave. The girl with the pearls told me her name was Tia. As I showed her the different rooms, Tia would lean against the doorway and make little recommendations about what I could do to the place—which was by all accounts pretty cavernous and barren. The house was decorated years ago. Then seventy-five percent of the stuff was removed, leaving giant holes everywhere. That’s what the house was like now. Thing, giant hole, giant hole, thing, giant hole, giant hole, giant hole, thing. Nevertheless, though I tried to pretend Tia making suggestions didn’t annoy me, secretly it did. But I’m pretty sure I hid it by remarking, “Hm,” and “Great idea!” and “That would look good.” You can hide your true feelings in many situations by nodding and offering little affirmative verbal tidbits at irregular intervals like this. It’s true. I’ve gone entire weekends without actually enjoying a single thing I did, but without anyone knowing. I let Tia make suggestions and I have no doubt in my mind that they would be totally sweet and make this place look more like a home and less like a ruin. But of course, I would never follow through on any of them.

I was glad I’d put away the clean dishes that morning so that when I showed her the main bathroom it just looked like a normal bathroom and not a place where I scrubbed my pots and pans. She peed as I went into the kitchen and got us beers and for some reason popped popcorn. We took our little feast out onto the porch swing and sat side by side, chomping popcorn and sipping our beers and waiting for something to happen. She told me that she was a graduate student in Sociology at the University and had been out with other girls from her program that night when I found her. I told her that I hadn’t realized there was a university in town, which was not true but I couldn’t really think of anything to say. I asked her a few more questions about herself and her family and friends back in Canada where she was from. What is your favorite food? Who do you relate to the most in your family? What are your wishes for this night? She laughed and said that she didn’t know, she was just trying this new thing where she opened herself to the universe and saying yes to experiences.

How is that working out for you?

I met you, didn’t I?

She put her hand on my hand and for some reason that made me really angry because that was something my wife would never do. She had never enjoyed what she called “PDA”—public displays of affection—but my feeling was what better place to show affection than in the public? Where it was not only a touch but so much more: a declaration, an affirmation. Also you couldn’t take it back or say it hadn’t happened because there were witnesses. With her other hand, Tia started trying to dig a popcorn kernel from her tooth.

When did she leave?

Who?

Your wife.

Months ago. Wow, nearly a year now.

A long time.

Yeah. How did you know?

I’m a sociologist. I saw the photos. A closet was empty. The shape of things. It’s not hard to see.

I was starting to grow hot and I tried to get up but Tia wouldn’t let go of my hand. It felt like she was holding my wrist deeper than possible. All the way down to my leg. Like she’d melted straight through my flesh to my leg. I didn’t mind talking about it, like I could get through it without crying or going into panic mode. But I’d been discussing and explaining, dissecting and commiserating for so long I was afraid the whole thing was going to slip into the realm of the abstract. That was my greatest fear. That it was going to stop hurting. Because while she’s clearly over it, that would mean I was getting over it as well. And then it was real and done. And that would mean it was forever. It was all spinning around me. This hand on my hand and this night and the alcohol in my blood and what I was doing with my life, completely unmoored. A balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade loose from its ropes, crashing into Rockefeller Center, making children cry. So I stood and walked to the front railing. There was a couple walking down the quiet street. An old couple dressed in long sleeves and visors, both carrying flashlights to make themselves visible to any passing car. I see this couple walking past my house all the time, no dog, no kids, just their brittle bones and grey hair and the love or at least the companionship holding them together, driving them out to get their exercise, go home, slowly hang up their windbreakers, fix some tea, maybe watch Leno, read, fall asleep. I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for that. That seemed suddenly horribly boring to me. Like death.

And so I did it, I sat back down and stared into the empty space created by the absence of my supposed partner, and breathed in to see if it still hurt. And I breathed again and Tia sat next to me. And I felt nothing.

She must have sensed something was happening because Tia just sat silently watching the slow approach of the airplanes in the distance, lined up for the airport, and eventually fell asleep, snoring lightly. I got up as gently as possible and draped my shirt over her and went inside. I took off the rest of my clothes and got into the shower. My eyes were closed because I hate getting water in them when I heard the curtain slide back and felt someone get into the shower with me. I forced my eyes open. She was naked. Her tiny nipples. She was shivering from the cold. I moved aside so she could get under the water. As I maneuvered to wash my feet, I noticed on the shallow part of the tub, bits of oatmeal. And before she could discover them and think they came from off my body, I told her that my kitchen sink was broken so I had to wash dishes in the bathtub.

That’s not good.

No, it’s actually okay.

I reached for her but she stopped me.

Wait. Take me out for a proper date, okay? Let’s at least do that.

I told her okay and she pulled back the shower curtain. “You stay in there until that horrible thing is gone,” she said, gesturing down towards my boner.

When you stand in the shower there is a little window. The window faces the backyard where there are some chairs under a tree by a little fountain. The fountain is now broken because I let the water evaporate but never turned off the motor, so it broke. It used to be my wife’s favorite place to read. I would be in the shower and would open the window and talk to her outside. She’d sigh and put her book face down on her lap and we would talk. I can’t imagine what we used to talk about, but we did. I sometimes have these conversations now. I ask her little things about her day or have her tell me about her book. I know it sounds crazy to talk to nobody and maybe that’s how it starts, but it sometimes helps. It used to.

Why did you go?

You’re imprecise and unfocused. You have no faith.

Faith in what?

In yourself. In your ability to do anything.

And then what happened?

And then I lost faith in you too.

But why him?

I don’t know. He was nice to me.

He works at a video store.

He’s in a band. They’re very promising.

We’re not just dating. We’re married.

I know. I’m sorry. I made a mistake.

Which one?

I turned off the water and put a towel around my waist. There was a strange clicking sound followed by a thump coming from the kitchen and I turned the corner to find Tia standing at the sink, holding a large piece of plastic pipe in her hand, the cabinet open below. She was pulling something clear and slimy from the pipe and putting it into the garbage can.

Did you peel potatoes into the garbage disposal?

I had. One night a month ago I’d felt like making au gratin potatoes. I made too many because I am very imprecise and unfocused. I bought a giant sack of potatoes and I didn’t know how many to make, so I scraped the peels off every one and put the peelings down the garbage disposal. I had to use three pots and two casserole dishes. The potatoes tasted terrible. I must have left out an ingredient. I still have some in the freezer. When you attempt something like that and it takes that much effort and still comes out soupy and tasteless, it makes you never want to try again.

Tia was trying to show me something.

You should never put potato peels in the disposal. They can’t make it up this bend here. There are too many of them and then they get stuck.

She bent back down and after a few minutes of twisting and screwing, she stood up and turned on the water. With the back of her hand she brushed her hair from where it had fallen over her eye and she smiled at me.

I think you’re all clear.