When I moved to the city
by Olena Jennings
I went out with a man who wore a purple suit to the burlesque show. I ate fried chicken because he wanted it. I stopped answering my phone. I opened the window to smoke and screamed instead.
I saw Natalie on the sidewalk below. When she moved to 125th Street she became a different person. I only remembered her before then, when she lived on Riverside Drive and had the four-poster bed.
We promised each other we would have babies at the same time. She opened a picture book for which she had drawn a picture of someone that looked like my face. I wore her blouse and the seams came undone.
Natalie convinced me to wear the blouse. She wanted me to be more like her, to wear more velvet. She was obsessed with seeing her reflection in other peoples’ faces. Some people need to know they exist.
We drank wine from plastic bottles while reading Robert Lowell in the park. We had an argument about blurbs. I watched all the episodes of Six Feet Under. I was proposed to in a diner.
Natalie convinced me not to get married for now. She said he was a stranger who proposed to me and that it wasn’t the fate I believed in. I had only really seen him from a distance with sand in his hair at the beach.
I watched the gardener on the hill opposite my apartment. I became homesick even though I was in my room. I carried my clothes from one apartment to the other.
If I were Natalie I would walk the dog.
If I were Natalie I would get new measuring spoons.
If I were Natalie I would rub perfume samples from fashion magazines on my wrists.
If I were Natalie I would collect glass on the sidewalk.
If I were Natalie I would wash the duvet cover.
If I were Natalie I would check behind the TV.
Natalie liked to paint, but she did it clandestinely, in the closets. It was then that I understood that closets could be used for anything. They could be used for sleeping when one gets tired of the world.
I didn’t recognize her when she came from the subway, but I remembered her name so I could call it. She turned her head. I fainted in a nightclub. When Natalie came out, her face seemed blurry.
I wrote a novel when my lover left me. I could stay up all night. Natalie and I could stay up all night together.
Natalie watches the contours of the trees and the bridges. Even the trees close to her are distant. The one closest is fenced in and balanced between two ropes.
I think of myself balancing in ballet class. The instructor thought that I was just being difficult when I couldn’t trace the imaginary line on the floor with the sweep of my toes.
Natalie counts the benches. She is exact. The benches are meant for conversations with nature. Nature is in the color of the sky.
Sometimes I saw the sky at my feet. It happened when I was taking the strange pills for my depression.
Natalie notices a half-eaten florescent lollipop on the ground. It is mixed with strands of grass. She imagines it tastes like the lawn after it has been mowed.
Birthday parties when lollipops would have been handed out were forbidden to me. I would never have friends, dancing around the pool and singing Ring Around the Rosie.
Forbidden are the plants that grow around our feet.
Forbidden are the plants that taste like lavender.
Forbidden are the plants that sting with touch.
Forbidden are the plants that fall under our weight.
Forbidden are the plants that point towards the sky.
Forbidden are the plants that can be boiled into tea.
Natalie watched the contours of the trees and the bridges. The trees sway almost imperceptibly, but the bridges don’t move. They are the pillars of our city.
Outside the city, Natalie has this park. Pigeons pluck at the cement. They sort through brown grass, twigs, and weeds. It makes Natalie think she should clean.
The apartment is tidier since I left. She called me a hoarder. She asked why I needed so many buttons.
I had a collection of buttons left to me by my grandmother. It was my job to never leave the sewing machine, making skirts with French cuffs.
After I lost her, I read the Well of Loneliness because I remembered it as one of Janet Frame’s favorite books. I thought I understood loneliness. Loneliness was letting go.
Natalie and I exchanged Janet Frame books. Before we were roommates, we sent them to one another in the mail. It was exciting to open a package from a friend.
I had to be in a certain frame of mind to read them. I made sentences from disjointed words. I had to merge earth and sky.
Like Janet Frame I ended up in a psych ward. My roommate shouted instructions to someone named Margaret in her sleep and only left the room for occasional meals, drawing her gown close to her.
I was numb as I waited for my release. Others were denied release and the word “forever” was like pick-up sticks in my mouth.
A woman knocked over the board games. Houses and hotels were all over the floor.
Another patient was in awe of the home and garden book I was reading, running her fingers over a neatly decorated living room.
I wanted to play house too. When I moved into a new apartment afterward with him, the man I met in the psych ward, I was attached to the red couch the most.
He and I slept on the balcony on the fake plastic grass because it is that hot inside. We looked up at the stars in a sky where everything was perfect.
His name was Siddhartha and his shirts were always too short, revealing boney wrists. I remember those wrists. I stared at them as he mixed brownie batter.
I drove drunk to buy perfume. Obsession was not even something I needed. Natalie wore it and I remembered borrowing her shirt, breathing it in.
Siddhartha and Natalie didn’t get along. He was quiet around Natalie, but she found him making a necklace by fastening safety pins together. Later, it was around Natalie’s neck.
She was the one I wanted to love me. If she loved me I wouldn’t be drawn to such books.
We sat together
in the circle of the
support group.
I had read all the books
on the shelf,
so it was good to have
something to do.
He put his hand over mine.
It was spidery and his fingers
had been used to light
too many matches.
I still was wearing
my hospital gown. No
one had brought me clothes.
Finally, he lent me
a t-shirt, the cotton soft
and Guns ‘n Roses crumbling.
Even after I came home when we talked on the phone Natalie said she couldn’t picture me anchored by any furniture. I was floating above it and she wondered whether her voice would reach.
When Siddhartha and I broke up he took the Guns ‘n Roses t-shirt and he scrubbed the bathtub as if to remove any traces. He told me we were part of each other’s recovery, but healthy we were too ordinary to turn each other on.
There was an empty space beside me in bed. It was just enough room for a Natalie-shape. She didn’t have to live with her mother anymore, the one for whom Natalie played the grand piano loudly enough to annoy.
I packed her suitcase in my imagination. She didn’t need to bring much. She could share my clothes. She already fit perfectly into the flapper dress. She was the one who stole it from the thrift store.
She told me over coffee that she was thinking of moving somewhere more isolated. I didn’t like coffee before, but started drinking it then as part of my memory, unadulterated by milk and sugar. I asked her where and she shrugged her shoulders.
It was obvious that she was moving away from me. I couldn’t imagine a world without Natalie and I asked her for mementos so I could make my body a museum to her. I could look in the mirror and see her.
It was a stunning break up. I bought a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know how to drink it. I didn’t know that was something one had to learn. It burned down my throat and everything around me felt like glass. The mirror shone and the shot glass sparkled.
“Natalie”: I traced her name with a stick in the sand on the beach. When I looked out into the water there was a vastness that was liked her desired isolation. I thought of swimming, but took one step and it was too cold.
Every event that my body went through was dedicated to Natalie. Every step was hers.
Natalie was the doll.
I worried her eyes would close
and get stuck,
stay that way forever.
Natalie was the doll
I kept on the top shelf
of the closet, hiding
in her orange crepe dress.
Natalie was the doll
that I was forbidden
to play with. Instead, she
was captured in photos.
Natalie was the doll
in the pictures I looked at.
I kept one in my breast
pocket.
Natalie’s mini-photographic
heart
beat against
mine.
I tried new ways of living. I called the man in the purple suit. We went to the beach. I called over the man selling Corona. I called over the man holding the Coney Island rabbit. I called over the man selling cotton candy. I was surrounding myself.
He invited me to a Roma music fest. When I became suffocated in his tent, I couldn’t get a car service to pick me up so far outside the city. There was a lump of earth beneath my back. It started to rain.
In the morning, he slipped off a wet tree and twisted his ankle. I dug in his bag for the car keys, but didn’t find them. He kept his foot elevated on a cooler while we listened to guitars.
The night had been full of tragedy. Someone drowned beneath the pull of the ocean. Her boyfriend was the one singing elegies with the guitar. Someone was downing shots of vodka. The next night was beginning all over again. What if we stayed forever?
When I closed the door to his car, I vowed it would be the last time. But I turned guitar music on and I lay in the vastness of my bed. I pretended the sheets were the plastic bottom of his tent. I moved my limbs with the desire for all that was lost.
I went to the bar on Avenue C called Mama’s by myself that night though I tried to convince myself I was too tired to go. He arrived on a skateboard. Then he wandered behind the bar. I ordered a beer. He convinced me I needed a Bloody Mary.
When it was already morning we watched “True Grit” in his apartment. I sat in the swing that hung from the ceiling. He made me a rare steak. It was the last steak I ate. I became a vegetarian.
I saw him again once gliding down the street on his skateboard. He glanced at me, but didn’t recognize my face. I remembered he told me he had trouble recognizing faces. I was just another patron from the bar.
I heard someone call my name. It was Natalie, but I hardly recognized her. The voice she was using was hoarse, as if she had been smoking a lot. She said she worked in a used bookstore and the dust was getting to her.
We arranged to get together, but her car was stolen an hour before. I waited for her in the donut café. Finally, she called to say she wouldn’t make it. The bus she was going to take didn’t seem to be coming.
The next time we were scheduled to get together, she went to visit her father beforehand. He didn’t recognize her through sickness and that made her so sad that she couldn’t meet. My therapist suggested I pull the words out of her: “I think our relationship has ended.”
I wanted her to say those words in person, but I got her to say them over the phone. Later I imagined meeting her in dive bars and fast-food restaurants. I imagined that we would say “I love you,” only then when it was too late.
Photo cover by Julia Dragan