37 :: just be yourself :: 4/20/01
Denise is drunk and it's the middle of the night and she has a large chef's knife in her hand. The kitchen reels around her. A cutting board sits on the counter, covered in a helterskelter of half-chopped scallions; she's trying to get the board centered in her field of vision. The board is shaped like the outline of a whale, or a cartoonish simplification of the outline of a whale. A hole is drilled through the board where the whale's eye should be. It seems absurdly funny. It seems to be perpetually receding. She has to put her free hand against the wall for support. The knife waves in the air. Ha ha.
Her roommate Toy is standing at the stove, stirring a steaming pot of Kraft macaroni and boiling water. Other roommate Mark is out somewhere tonight: work? No, no, not work, it's fucking midnight. After midnight. Isn't it? She turns, trying to spot the clock in the chaos of the items on the countertop. Digital numbers leap out red from the darkness: 1:22. Jesus. 1:22 and they're making dinner? She has to be in at the record store at ten tomorrow. Opening on a fucking Saturday, usually their busiest day. How the fuck did I get so drunk? she thinks. Cause you drank too much. Ha ha. She pulls her hand off of the wall, stumbles, presses her hand up to her face to stifle her snorts of laughter.
Toy drains the macaroni into a colander set up in the sink. Oh, she's going to need to finish chopping these scallions. They're supposed to go into the mac and cheese. She plants her hand down on the cutting board to hold it steady and she holds the knife over the scallions. It wobbles in her hand. She tries to figure out how to do this.
She can hear massed violins and cellos and squalling electric guitar. The music sways and surges, oceanic. Denise looks over the counter and through the open space there, looks into the other room, where Toy's girlfriend, Cassie, sits hunched in front of the stereo. There's something weird about the three of them being together, all by themselves. Denise and Toy slept together a few months ago, when he and Cassie were having problems. She wonders if Cassie knows that. She's tempted to just blurt it out, just to see what happens.
She looks down again at the puzzle of scallions and knife. She looks over at Toy. He's squeezing the foil packet that came with the macaroni: a bright orange oyster of processed cheese slowly emerges. The Blob. There's something weird— well, something about the evening seems faintly unnatural. Constructed. She has the feeling, suddenly, that Toy's goal for the evening is to sleep with both of them. The music seems to soundtrack her lack of balance. She stares at the orange glob creeping out of the packet: it takes on something of an erectile quality, vaguely horrible. When she looks up at Toy again she sees that he's looking at her, not at her face but at her body; his face looks dark and strangely tense and his eyes are on her, intense with a singleminded drunken focus.
She wants to make a joke, lighten things up: she lifts the knife, holds it in a mock-defensive pose, a pose learned from a hundred movies, she shouts "Stay back!", attempting to speak in cliché. Ha ha.
Toy's reaction is sudden. He comes in towards her—even this drunk she knows that the knife is now too close to both of them—he reaches around the knife and grabs her wrist, twists hard. Ow, she says—he presses his thumb hard into a tendon in her arm and her hand opens; the knife drops, its unbalanced shape whipping through a series of unpredictable acrobatics on its way down. —Fucking—let me go— she says; she pulls, he holds on, she suddenly becomes conscious of the mass of her body and with that consciousness in mind she finds herself suddenly unable to manage the trick of balancing it all on two thin legs. She falls—he's still holding her wrist and something in her shoulder pulls—
She's in a heap on the floor. He lets go of her wrist finally and her arm falls down to join the rest of her. The knife is by her hand and she has to strangle down an urge to grab it and ram it up into his groin.
—What the fuck were you doing? he shouts. This again. Her whole life seems to generate this response from the people around her. Before things with her mom went to shit (age 13) her mom had probably told her a million times: just be yourself. Just be yourself and people will like you. But when Denise lets that self out, her true self, she finds that the world is angered by it; she finds herself asked to justify it, again and again, in precisely this fashion. Fuck being yourself—it is easier to be no one.
She will let fucking Toy do whatever the fuck he wants with her—
