Surfacing
November 10, 2022“I peed into a cup today.”
The words fell out of Marnie’s mouth. Nobody was there to pick them off the ground, thoughts not yet fully formed meant to be digested and not regurgitated into the open air. She could taste them, the compulsivity and randomness of her inner monologues, their acidity. Suddenly she felt sick. How funny. She was just at the clinic earlier that day.
She traversed a sidewalk soaked in wet leaves, the texture so meat-like she thought she was making her way down an unfurled umbilical cord, air as thick as placenta. She stepped onto an empty transit bus, her head full of the bus’s big tires on the road, black against black. She lurched either way as the bus rolled forward and felt two opposing forces yanking her apart. The first was the long shrieks of the bus’s breaks as it barely managed to stop at each intersection, and the second was the long blades of orange light that slid through the windows, a mixture made from the brown of wet leaves and red from the setting sun. The scratches of sound and color filled the crevices of her brain like cold water finding its way through fractal cracks in ice. She was going to shatter. Thank God her stop was near.
Marnie got to Webber’s grill ten minutes late. She had left her room a mess, clothes spilling out of drawers like limp bodies, her red scarf had been spread out on her bed like a river of blood. All this carnage, thought Marnie faced with the plain wooden doors of the restaurant, just to listen to a man talk about himself for two hours. At least he’ll get the bill.
George was tall. That was Marnie’s first impression. He had on a checkered green sweater which went well with his grey, unremarkable face. The way he spoke was self-congratulatory, with no real intention of listening to the person he was talking to. He reminded Marnie of the foxes used in Aesop’s fables used to tell lessons about people who thought they were all that.
“When can I see you again?” he asked by the end of their meal. Steaks had been devoured, wine consumed, the check gotten and paid for.
Marnie laughed, reflexively covering her mouth. “I’ll have to check my calendar, thanks for dinner.”
Marnie walked George to his car, where he offered her a ride, but she declined. He drove off while she looked on, his red convertible getting smaller and smaller on the dimming horizon until it was just a two-dimensional speck in the distance. She turned away from the road and walked towards the downtown, crossing a bridge. Grey clouds crossed over a deep purple sky and Marnie thought it looked like a giant blueberry strudel. She reached her hands out from her pockets, stretching her tendons in the cold. Her hands were painted the same color as the sky, blisters and bruises from a week of dish duty.
Her phone rang. She checked; it was her mother. She let it run its course, but when it finally stopped it was only replaced by a call from her sister. Marnie let out a small groan, relented, and picked up.
“Marnie, she’s going crazy. Can you call her?” Emma fumed into the phone.
“I can’t, I don’t know how to talk to her.” Marnie scratched the bottom edge of the bridge railing with the tip of her boot. She hoped that she sounded logical, maybe even hurtful.
“You’re going to have to face her eventually, it’s not safe for you, leaving home like that. Do you have money? I can pay for the bus.” Emma offered.
Marnie shrugged at no one in particular. She kept toying with the bridge railing, its sharp rust digging into the faux leather of her shoes. Then two words fluttered out of her so fast she heard herself say them without saying them herself.
“I’m pregnant.”
For the first time, Emma paused. Phone static immediately swallowed up the hundred or so miles between the two sisters. A bird flew across the canal and Marnie followed its path with her eyes. She knew that the sun had sunken completely by then because the bird’s feathers had lost all their color. Marnie found it poetic — a silhouette making its way home in the dark.
“Marnie, I don’t know what to say,” said Emma. Marnie silently laughed at this confession. “Are you taking care of yourself? Have you eaten today?”
“Don’t worry about me, I had steak tonight,” Marnie smiled into the phone. Her head was still pounding from the wine.
“Is it Nick’s?”
“Well, it’s mine,” replied Marnie.
Emma let out a tired sigh. She was in her softened state now, and Marnie liked this version of her sister, when she redirected her energy from sounding smart to defending against a common threat. Emma had won every fight she has gotten in; she always got her way.
“Marnie, listen to me. Are you listening? I don’t think you are. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s Nick’s or whoever’s, I’ll convince Mom, she’ll come around.”
There was another pause. The static came in again with its distant prickling. No birds flew across the canal this time.
“Please, come home.”
Oh Emma, thought Marnie. I’m never going back, but I can’t bear to say it to your stupid, perfect face. She hung up.
Marnie sank into herself. To Emma it was all a vague memory. To Marnie it was a nightmare she woke up from and could never forget. The slaps dealt, the words fired from a shotgun tongue, the lines drawn with pointed fingers as her own mother compared her two daughters, one her angel, the other one the devil herself.
She was just a girl walking in the opposite direction that the earth was spinning, wading through ghosts, her knees determined to get her back to that home-like place. Marnie had resisted the urge to think about him for the entire day, but now the memories escaped like fireflies, coming in and out of illumination as her old teenage synapses fired, replaying the best summer that ruined her life. She let them fling towards her, and she caught the buzzing visions one by one, crushing each between her fingers.
The first time she saw Nick was behind the bleachers. The light came in slanted and lit up half of his face. His brown eyes were at odds with each other, one demure chocolate, the other brazen gold. He liked philosophy and poetry, things that Marnie stood on the periphery of but never dared to dive into. He took her pages of half-hazard stories and read them with serious brows and pursed lips. He would look up, smile, and reveal his tongue purpled by his favorite grape candy.
She hated that the words from his mouth were the kind of thing that could save her. Words so ripe like they were derived from nature itself, their odd combination of granularity and chance, something she could not reproduce no matter how hard she tried. She loved the look of him, that swirl of his brown hair, the odd tapping he did with his pinky at the edge of a counter or desk, his deep green hoodie, that walk full of schoolboy coolness.
So she couldn’t even blame herself. That pivotal night when she snuck out of the house, evading her mother and sister’s careful gaze, sprinting to his car obscured by some bushes. They went to a nearby park and strolled under grinning, silver stars, gagging at the smell of lake water and then giggling at their exaggerated disgust.
A stroll led to a kiss, and that led to them in the back of his car, his denim jacket hanging out the window, Marnie’s pajamas on the dashboard. Marnie shook her head, shaking away the summer warmth that crept into her cheeks, replacing it with the stinging cold. In the end, cold was all she got from Nick. Here she was, walking up to a boarding house three months later, still thinking about him, left with his uneven eyes, her own dissatisfaction.
The door shut behind her. It was like Marnie’s past in its entirety was locked away, left in the blasts of cold October air. She was now confronted by her room’s stifling warmth, she refused it — this moment. A wave of nausea took over and Marnie bolted for the toilet bowl.
When all the organic matter that was not each of her clamoring cells were in the toilet, an emptiness settled into all corners of her body. Her clammy skin stuck to the white tiling of the bathroom, and the yellowing grout imprinted its gridwork onto her palms and the outside of her legs. Blue from the porthole window above washed over her skin, and when she leaned to examine her own throw up, it looked green and alive.
Like words that bubbled out of her without her permission, this feeling that she was all she had came pouring out, melting her vision, and causing her to shake. She slid from her knelt position over the basin and rested her arm on the ridge of the bathtub, the energy gone from her body. Her back curved forward like a willow tree, a sour ache wrapped around her throat, and she felt her head droop from her neck. She brought a hand up to her face and buried her eyes.
There was always something she was gripping, clawing at, fighting with clenched fists. Maybe that thing was the silence in response to her question “What am I without them?” whispered into a gulf as wide as the Pacific Ocean. Maybe that thing was the fact her sister loved her so much yet so incorrectly. Maybe it was because she could not remember her mother saying something nice to her in the past two years. Maybe that thing was how she had finally been held so tight that she melted out of existence completely, but now her existence felt so piercing, and that existence was merging in on the existence of another thing inside her. She didn’t know then, but she was just on the brink of what her life was going to be. Not yet though. All she knew now was that letting go was not an option. It hurt, this tightly wound posture she maintained, hands of her past pulling at her shoulders, her head cycling between looking back and facing life’s momentum. She had yet to stand up, but in due time she would — grab the wrists of the past and yank them forward with her.
And from the bathroom floor, her grip unyielding, she cried, droplets and droplets of I want I want I want.