Her day usually went like this… She heaved herself out of bed, heavily sliding first one leg, then the other over the side, stifling a groan, then pushing herself up with her hands. She walked to the bathroom, scuffing her heels on the worn, but smooth, wooden floorboards. She brushed her teeth. She considered flossing. For a long time. But instead, she padded to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. For breakfast, she ate oatmeal and scrambled eggs, her cat nuzzling the bottoms of her cotton pajamas, too short from being dried on high heat. By then she would have the energy to check her e-mail. She obsessed over e-mail. No, she obsessed over the possibility of certain acquaintances e-mailing her. She dressed. She fed the cat. She stared at the box by the door, filled with odds and ends Matt had yet to pick up, a month after he’d moved out. Then she left for work, tugging the rain-swollen door behind her like an action movie heroine, with casual violence, then shrugging her shoulders into her coat more comfortably, flipping her dark hair out behind her. She took BART into the city, getting off at New Montgomery, steadfastly ignoring the bum who never pulled his pants up, holding her breath as she went by, wondering what he had looked like as a child.
At work she steadfastly ignored her colleagues, and concentrated on transcribing reporters’ stories, then working them into unimaginative, dull briefs she then posted on the radio station’s website. She spoke to no one, save the woman next to her, who periodically poked her head over the short cubical wall and asked in a fake lisp: “Do ya wanna thsee thsomethin’ cute?” She always agreed, forcing her lips into as genuine a smile as she could muster. She rolled her chair sideways so she could see over the divider and surrendered to the fact that she was the victim of a seemingly endless slide show of fuzzy kittens, baby chicks, muddy elephant infants, and human babies with electrified hairstyles. “Oh, ho, ho, ho,” she chuckled, on cue. “That one is really cute.”
She lunched by herself, picking up a sandwich from Safeway and eating it quickly on a fancy metal bench outside a bank, so no one at work would know she bought and ate sandwiches from Safeway. They all flipped money out of their wallets with abandon come lunchtime, and ordered in a group: Chinese, or Thai or elaborate sandwich and soup combinations from all corners of the city. But she was not full time. Two hours short. And besides, she had no motivation to spend money anymore.
After drowning herself in words for another four hours, she trudged the ten blocks back to BART, hating her decision to look more professional by wearing heeled shoes. She gave a wan smile to the guitarist at the bottom of the stairs, who nodded at her, his voice rising and falling in powerful jazzy tones, in rhythm with his strumming. Every time she saw him, she remembered how last year, for Christmas, she had made him a necklace of delicate beads and rocks strung on fishing wire, wrapped it, and dropped it in his open case on her way home from work. Every time she saw him, she grew curious if he remembered, if he knew the necklace had been from her.
At home, she cooked pasta under the harsh, blue-white fluorescents in her apartment’s kitchen. Almost always pasta. Extra thin spaghetti. Sometimes rice. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even have the energy to put sauce on the pasta. Instead, a bit of butter, a small mountain of fake parmesan cheese. Corn or peas from the freezer. It tasted like bland, warm comfort.
Then, back in the soft cocoon of her bed, she would watch television shows she had no interest in; comedies that did not make her laugh, dramas that did not rend her heart, crime shows that failed to make her cringe. Her cat, Xena, foraged in the covers for something she always wondered about. Why all that sniffing and nibbling? Why the kneading, her claws clenching and unclenching, searching for, grasping at… what?
Then she would click the television off, roll onto her side, disrupting a dozing Xena, and invent melodramatic stories, of which she was the star, until the stories faded into absurdity, and then nothing. At some point during the night her teeth would feel strange. So strange she felt an overpowering urge to touch them—tug on them, push the points of her incisors into the pads of her thumbs. Every tooth she touched fell out, and then the rest crumbled, like saltine crackers crushed between her fingers, the sound of grinding growing louder and louder, filling her head, vibrating in her toothless gums until she woke gasping, groped her way to the bathroom, fumbled with the light switch and stood in front of the mirror, making a ghastly smile. She pulled back the edges of her mouth, running frantic fingertips over her teeth, shivering as the light breeze from the cracked window ran over her naked body, chilling the sheen of sweat on her back, her breasts, her thighs.
But today, was different. Today was her day off. So Kendra didn’t drag herself out of bed. She stayed there until noon, amazed at how she could probably doze a few hours more, in pure gluttony. In the kitchen, still naked, she made a banana-strawberry-ice-cream smoothy for breakfast, leaving the pink-stained blender in the sink without even rinsing it out. She sauntered into the living room. She flopped onto her pale yellow couch and let the sun from her tall windows warm her skin.
A knock on the door startled her. She looked for a place to set her glass amid the jumble of papers, magazines, spaghetti sauce encrusted plates, and cat toys on her living room table. She settled on the floor, and skittered into the bathroom. She threw on her terrycloth robe, checked herself in the mirror, regretted her unbrushed teeth, and strode to the door. It must be Matt.
But no, it was her sister, Isobel.
“Did you just get up?” Izzy accused, eyebrows raised.
Kendra choked back an unexpected urge to cry. She shook her head at Izzy, shrugging her shoulders as her stomach tensed, as a hot nausea crept up her throat, flushing her face. She half giggled, half sobbed, “Yes. I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”
“Jesus!” Izzy pushed in the door and wrapped her arms around Kendra, smoothing her hair away from her face. “Did something happen to Xena? Is it Matt?”
“No, no,” insisted Kendra, rubbing her tears away with a sleeve. “I just… Maybe it’s P.M.S.”
“Have you been taking the
“Yes,” she sighed more than said. “Why are you here? Did we have plans?”
“No, I was in the neighborhood and decided I was going to haul that box of Matt’s junk to the Good Will. I’m dropping some of my own stuff off anyway.”
“You can’t do that! You can’t just give his stuff away!”
“He’s left it here a month, it’s not like he’s coming back for it.”
“He is,” insisted Kendra tightly. “Imagine how pissed you would be if someone just tossed your stuff without asking.”
“Fine. I’ve got to run. See you at Mom’s next weekend?”
“Yeah.”
“You should open some windows. It smells stale in here.” Isobel yanked the door shut after her.
Kendra listened to her sister descend the stairs outside in that stomping way of hers. She stared at Matt’s box, her teeth starting to ache. Terrified, she slowly lifted her fingers to her mouth, feeling her teeth. She swore one wiggled. In the bathroom, she pulled down her bottom lip, then pushed up her top lip. They were all there. Intact. And she was awake. She guessed the dreams were from grinding her teeth during the night. She really had to stop that, she told herself. She really had to stop a lot of things.
And that was all it took to motivate her to clean her disastrous apartment. Because Kendra was the type of person who let things get to a drastic state, and then flung herself into a project wholeheartedly. She did it because minor changes didn’t impress her. There was no challenge, no sense of accomplishment at the end. So even though she’d planned to not do much of anything, she threw on a pair of paint splattered, ratty jeans and a disintegrating T-shirt and got to work. She blared R.E.M. as she tackled the kitchen, switched to Third Eye Blind for the living room, then Toad the Wet Sprocket for her bedroom and the bathroom. The entryway she saved for last, avoiding Matt’s box as long as she could. Looking down at the top, the flaps tucked under themselves perfectly, she wondered what was inside.
Bending down, she wrenched the thick, stiff flaps apart. A beanie. An old frying pan. Gas canisters for his camping stove. Worn hiking boots. Chopsticks. The scarf she’d knitted him for his birthday. Shoving down the familiar searing sensation of loss in the pit of her stomach, she calmly walked to the living room and tore a page from a notebook. In fat black marker she wrote FREE and taped the sign to the side of the box. She hefted it and awkwardly opened the door. Going down the stairs, the corners of the box gouged into her arms, rubbing and making them itch. She hoped they left a mark. Some tiny hint of evidence of what she’d been feeling inside.
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