Exorcism

There’s a cyst in my shoulder. I’m lying on the cutting board, and the operation is a success. When the cyst comes out, the doctors show me. A glob of butter and jam in a little jar. I want to ask to keep it, but don’t. I’m sure they get that all the time. It hurts (a bit) but mostly I feel lighter. The stitches are ugly, and they heal wrong so the scar looks like a misplaced belly button for a year. I’ll be that then; a girl with two navels, and plenty of time.

On the drive back from the surgery, mom tries to distract me. We stop at Savers. She shows me a fuchsia shirt I’d rather be naked than wear. We take turns being anxious: her private atmosphere of worry; my anger, a low-pressure system. Sometimes, we spar. She knows I’m lonely, and intends to do something about it. She clips out my horoscope. Saves relevant-seeming quotes from teabags and leaves them on my desk. A copy of The Four Agreements materializes on my bedside table. I know she is trying, but I will never be spiritual. I don’t have the patience. For the week after surgery, I must apply a topical antibiotic. I nurse the wound with postpartum tenderness. I am grateful for the pain, to have had something as dramatic as surgery happen to me.

At home, I choose to lay in bed until summer is over, and the sheets get thick with dead skin. I’m nursing more than the wound. The friends I have are the ones I don’t want, and the rest won’t talk to me. The friends I have are my parents, and they treat me like I’m a bat loose in their kitchen. Mom especially. She tries not to, but she holds me at broom’s length. Besides the tea bag quotes, she suggests therapy. In truth, I don’t think there’s much wrong with me. I should tell her my problem is simple. I should ask if she’s ever been sixteen and a jilted woman, but I know she hasn’t, and I’d rather not get into it today. When you’re alone you get used to being honest. When you’re alone you start to think you might have a third eye. Is no one else seeing this? Is no one else seeing this? God, I could shout.

If my mom was a different kind of spiritual I might be a nun-in-training. I might like it too. I think I’d enjoy the ritual, the sparseness, the fierce attachment to life that comes from owning so few things. In my room I perfect a winged eyeliner. I use mismatched foundation and tweeze my unibrow until the gap is too big. I take a photo where my forehead looks like an egg. I feel hideous and livid.

At the beginning of the summer, my only two friends started dating each other and stopped speaking to me. We got slushies at the Walgreens on Central, and then they handed me a note. The note said they were beginning a relationship, and didn’t feel they could continue a friendship with me while focusing on that. I walked home and suddenly the sun was too bright, there were too many pedestrians and their kickable dogs, too many beetles on wheels. Now, I have a new sickness. Something ripe and breathy. Something a monastery might solve. I talked to my mom about it at first, but stopped when she kept suggesting remedies. I screamed at her in the car and slapped her arm away, and we bawled back and forth like a pair of banshees. Two cornered animals. Since then, she approaches me like I’ll bite. I don’t want a remedy, I want revenge. I have a plan. I will nurse my sorrow until the schoolyear resumes or until I kill myself, whichever comes first.

In the meantime, I’ll improve my makeup skills until I can afford a new face. I’ll sit on the chair across the room instead of on the couch with my parents. I need to assert my independence. I am my parents’ only child which makes us an oblong couple. I think sometimes of a younger brother; someone to tease out anger. I wish I’d had the opportunity to be meaner as a child. Instead, I am the younger, platonic member of the cule, and although not a participant I am privy to every intimacy of conflict. I am saving up a Really Mean Thing to say. I’m waiting to use it strategically, at the optimal moment. It’s the kind of thing you can only say once. My mom and I seem to agree on one thing: getting the cyst removed is a good step. The perfect exorcism. Before the surgery, I channeled every ounce of rage I had into that ball of fat. Probably for the best that I didn’t get to keep it.

In lieu of spiritual practice, I’ve adopted other rituals. At night, I sneak out through the window and survey sleeping houses. It keeps me sane, and helps with that aforementioned independence. Sneaking out the window feels like entering life inside out. I’ve realized most people are exactly like me. A lot of beds with sad-body shapes imprinted on their sheets. People curl up like animals in dens. Certain patches of their clothes smell worse than others. There’s something in everybody’s teeth. I think I’m getting to the bottom of something. There is, perhaps, a chronic human condition. I can access it because I too am abject, and I too smell worse in certain places. Sometimes, I watch my parents through the front window if they’re still awake. They touch bodies in a sisterly way, and take their time with tooth brushing. They change clothes facing apart. I lip read and they say things like: cat the garbanzo fell in the grass or sam pekinpah stole my baby. I know they are probably saying something about me, and I am glad I can’t read lips because I don’t want to know how they worry. I don’t want to know if they suspect me to be the kind of person who sidles the screen off my window to go stare in others. Dad reads a few pages each from a string of nightstand books, then rests one on his face and falls asleep that way. Before flipping her light switch off, mom lifts it and places it back on the nightstand.

In late June, I ask the girl friend to meet me in a parking lot so we can talk. The Sweet Tomatoes on Paseo. She says I don’t know what to say and won’t meet my eyes. She says it in that older-person, inflected wisdom way, and I think about grabbing a handful of rocks and dragging them across her cheek. She uses the words natural drift. The stitches in my shoulder spasm, and I worry the doctor may have forgotten to remove some of the hatred. I imagine the cyst as a water balloon at the end of a hose. At the end of the talk, her mom picks her up. Mine is late. A man drives up in the Sweet Tomatoes parking lot, and he rolls down his window and asks if I’m single. I say I’m fifteen and he says so what, it’s not like you’re married. I think of telling him about the convent in my room. I’m married to solitude, and we are very happy, and we are expecting. I think of telling him I’d like him to drive into traffic, please. I think of showing him my baby, the ball of fat in the jar, that wretched evidence of all the hatred I’ve ever felt. That morning, Mom left a fortune cookie quote on my desk: I am broad-minded and socially active. I think about it as the man stares me down, wondering if this sort of thing counts. I wish the girl friend were still there to see me being desired. I almost feel better. Mom drives up and he drives off. She asks how it went. She doesn’t ask about the man in the truck. She doesn’t ask if the tea bag quote helped, but I know she thinks about it. I am her only child, and she wants me to be good and well. I am her only child: a loser with no friends. I tell her I’d like to go home and not stop anywhere, but we stop at Whole Foods for dad’s fiber supplement and chicken thighs and she gets me a croissant with raspberry filling. I want to spit and toss it out the window, but if I do she will never stop trying to fix me. If I take a bite she might think I’m improving.

The evening after the parking lot, I learn we are going on a family vacation to Cape Cod. In part, it’s because of me and the hatred. They can feel it radiating off me. I can tell they feel they must do something, like teaching your kid about deodorant. They could tell me to take a shower. I need to get over myself. The flight is long but I like planes. Flying feels like sacrilege, and I’m all about that.

In Cape Cod, I sit on the beach on a worn terrycloth sheet, and try to take aesthetic photos of the sea. It’s grainy, and the sky-ocean seam is stark and mean. I will never be an influencer because my phone is always a few generations too old. I miss the houses and unsuspecting inhabitants. I miss watching those suburban bodies stoop to feed the cat, the fingers they’d stick into hard-to-reach places. I miss my convent. On the beach I meet an imaginary boy named Greg. He has an imaginary birthmark on his lower lip, and I give him an imaginary handjob under the covers of my terrycloth towel. After I’ve invented him, I feel a bit guilty. He keeps hanging around, trying to get my attention. Knowing the pleasures of the flesh. I figure he might come in handy if I ever speak to my friends again. I want to prove that their betrayal didn’t stop me from living, from going out and getting mine. But Greg is needy and eventually I have to uninvent him because he won’t leave me alone.

My parents and I go to a seafood restaurant. The bathroom smells like bleach. I spend a lot of time there because halfway through the meal I’m overwhelmed. The restaurant is playing Riptide and it makes me think of my friends. I’ve started to miss them. I miss when we all had a crush on each other. I miss when we’d gather around the boy friend’s piano, the girl friend and I with our cheap ukeleles; his efforts to arpeggiate. Missing is so much harder than anger. I try to get the hatred back, but it runs through my fingers. Kinetic sand. I think about showing them my inside-out neighborhood. The best shrubs for crouching. Maybe they’d think I’m a pervert, but maybe not. They might see the science behind it. The evidence I’m collecting. I’d show them the dog with the bum tongue, the owner who so carefully lifts and places it back in the dog’s mouth, then wipes the fingers on his jeans. I can’t tell my parents these things, so I can’t tell anyone. It makes me feel like I don’t really exist. I shut one nostril and breathe through the other like mom taught me. I collect myself. Back in the dining area, my parents are rattled from whatever conversation was cut short by my return. We peck at our food, and I look down and realize we are eating fried insects. Mucusy shrimp in a case of dough. I want to shout. Are you really not seeing this? Are you REALLY NOT SEEING THIS? The hatred is back.

In the hotel room we watch re-runs of Masterchef Junior, and American Pickers, and when we’re lucky, a CGI movie about a shark going rogue. The hotel room smells the same as the ache I’m feeling. At 11:04 PM, my parents turn off the TV and ask me to sit between them on the bed. My mom moves a strand of hair from my face, like dusting a cobweb. I think how unfair it is that they are afraid of me, just because I am finally old enough to decide if my own life is worth the hassle.

“We just want to check in with you.” My mom says. She says they’re worried, and haven’t known how to bring it up. They ask if I know I can always talk to them about anything. I do know that right? Mom says it’s hard right now, but all of this will feel so small in a few years. She tells me that hurting myself accomplishes nothing. I should do the I Ching. I can ask it for guidance on anything; friend troubles, school, sexuality (god). I do know that right? I feel a surge of hatred, the Really Mean Thing on the tip of my tongue. I think of telling them about all I’ve seen through their window, all the pretending they do to hide the fact that they’re strangers to each other. They’ve always been strangers, holding me hostage in the body they made. Making me born and then expecting me to just deal with it; all the aching, the nausea, the crevices that need cleaning every day and a half. It’s too exhausting. I didn’t sign up for any of it, and I tell them just as much. I tell them to leave me alone, to leave me out of their weird guilt trip about having a kid at the end of the world. It’s their shit, not mine. I realize I am yelling, and my dad tells me to keep my voice down. It doesn’t matter; I’ve had enough, and I just want to go to bed. Mom’s lip shakes; she shares a look with dad that they think I don’t understand. I retreat to my cot and face the wall. I listen to their breaths steady, asynchronous.

When my parents are asleep, I sneak out and walk past the other rooms. Bodies are made cloud-like behind vertical blinds. It’s not the same as watching the sleeping houses. I wonder what it’ll be like to smoke a cigarette one day. A group of college students walk past me to their room, laughing. I’ll probably never get there at this rate. I sit on the motel steps leading down into the parking lot, and think: If I do get there give me a sign. I wait. The air is salty and only cold when it moves, which is rarely. Give me a sign. I think. If I make it, a car will pull in. An auspicious bird. A line of cigarette butts that form a word. I don’t admit that I’m waiting. I watch as three cars pass the turn off for the parking lot. A leaf lands in the pool. No dice.

I pull out my phone and draft a text to the boy friend. I draft: Hey. long time No talk. I erase it and ask how he is. I erase it and tell him I hope his summer is lit. I pause. I tell him that I don’t want him, and I don’t want her either. It’s not about that. I tell him it’s his fault I’m living in this wrong timeline, where I am sleeping on a cot between my parents while he and the girl friend learn how to do hand stuff. I tell him I don’t know how to exist anymore. The only thing I can feel is that embarrassed-sick feeling of being alone with myself. I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life. I tell him they will never see me again. My hands are shaking, the screen blurry. The paragraph is full of typos, and my throbbing thumb sends it. I stand and toss my phone down the steps without thinking. The screen cracks into a croissant shape. Cape Cod is quiet, and upstairs my parents are asleep and not thinking about me. No one is thinking about me. I walk towards the ocean.

I do not bring a swimsuit because I don’t intend to swim. I intend to drown. My scar twitches. I’m not supposed to get my stitches wet. I wonder if it would all be different if I had someone to kick under the table. Someone to curl myself up against, like the spine of a cat coiling around a leg. I guess there’s nowhere else to be. The sand is still warm and the air smells like the sex I’ll never have. I sit for a while on the sand and try to cry, but my throat is heavy and dry. I’m beyond feeling. I look to my left, think of conjuring the imaginary boy again. I think of the man in the truck, who made me feel like turning inside out, but further down, if you cut to the bone, the feeling was pride. It’s sick sure, but there’s nothing like being seen. Seeing, unsuspected.

I cradle my injured arm, pretend I’m a soldier. I wish I had someone to protect, to take me beyond myself for once. I could be good for someone else. I could try. With the force of my earlier desperation, I invent a younger brother. He’s wearing a green sweater, holding my pinky with his whole hand. He has the girl friend’s dry skin. The edge of his thumb brushes my lifeline. I stand, start walking us into the waves.

I decide to try what I did when I put the hatred inside the cyst. This time, I will do it with the missing. I look at little brother, and I fill him with loss. He’s missing anyway, so it shouldn’t matter much. I think of my friends sitting in the trunk of the car splitting one beer three ways. All our knees knocking into each other. I think of us sending messages back and forth in a telephone puzzle, until the words start to resemble a new language. All those phrases decayed into echolalia. I locate the feeling of loving my friends, wrapped in chicken wire under all the hatred. I slice it open carefully, and reach in with the scalpel. I tweeze out the ball of love – still warm and vibrating – and pop it into little brother’s mouth. He chews the fat, swallows. I wait to feel nothing. The water is around my ankles, we walk out further. It’s up to his chest now, right below the face I didn’t bother to invent. I release his hand.

I return to the hotel room and my parents are in fact not asleep. They are pacing and they see my wet ankles immediately. My mom is hiss-screaming and pointing at my dad.

“Look at how tired he is. Sometimes you can be a real selfish brat, you know that?”

Dad’s under eyes are swollen, and I think of the open book resting on his face. I wonder what would happen if I told them where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. It’s luxurious to have a world to yourself. I check my phone and see that the text is green. The screen is still cracked. Mom takes a deep breath. She apologizes for losing her temper, and I realize that the exorcism worked this time. I almost tell her the Really Mean Thing, but decide against it because I have ascended. I have gotten to the bottom. Maybe I’m spiritual after all, maybe I do believe in something. The thing in common between all those houses. I tell my parents: It’s okay. I walked in the sea and I’m better now. I didn’t get my stitches wet. I can put things where I want them to be. I can ride this out and make it small. I don’t need a therapist and I don’t need a book to fix me. In a few months, so help me, I’ll be a C cup with a good attitude.

Mom is not convinced. She tells me there is no better, but she loves me all the same. Her eyes look wet. She says she’s sorry again, sorry for crying. I tell her I’m sorry too. Sorry for swatting her arm in the car, and for snapping when she reaches into my cage. Sorry for being cruel to her. Dad is watching us like we’re two birds wobbling out of a wax nest. She’s got me down from the kitchen ceiling, she’s wrapped me in a warm towel. It’s nice to let myself be swaddled. Mom says that sometimes I get this same look of concentration I had when I was two, and it makes her feel like time is turning around. When I was two I had so little to grieve; so little to concentrate on. I tell them: it’s strange to watch a person who doesn’t know they’re being watched. Mom misses when I only ate applesauce. She wipes her nose and informs us that in the morning we are going to do a family meditation. We will sit isosceles and stare at the backs of our eyelids. We will draw a labyrinth in the sand and walk all the way through, forward, and back. Then, we will go whale watching.