Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(40)

   Rhonda was waiting at Soho, the shitty twenty-four-hour coffee shop where they hung shitty artwork and sold Costco pastries at a 300 percent markup. I only wanted a coffee and a ride over to Nation. It would be open until six a.m., at least. She wanted to take me home, so I got in her car. I wonder sometimes, if I’ve ever been kidnapped, would I have even noticed.

She played Ani DiFranco the entire way. There are two Ani songs I like, and they’re not the songs anyone else likes—her tempo makes me bite my teeth. But I thought we’d all moved on from Ani by then. I’d taken a pill because I thought I was going to Nation, not home with someone who kept talking about her car and how hard it was to find that model Jetta with a black interior. She talked like she was from the prairie—lots of “anyhow” and “gal.” I tried to tune her out. The streetlights were dancing. She backed into the parking spot, pulled out, tried again. Three fucking times. When we got to her bedroom, she fiddled with her computer until Sarah McLachlan came on.

If you’ve never tried to fuck someone while on ecstasy, it’s only fun if there’s chemistry or they’re on ecstasy too. Otherwise it’s like trying to put makeup on a cat. Everything’s hilarious—your terrible technique, the ridiculous sounds, the fact the cat might kill you.

When the sun came up, I slipped out of bed and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Everything was too bright. Every sound sharp. A family of Koreans were loading the kids into a minivan, dressed for church. A salon-tanned woman in leggings walked by with a purebred beagle. A fat guy in a Colts jersey was washing his car, beer in hand. I was standing mid-row in a patch of identical town houses, behind identical cubed hedges, behind identical green mini-lawns, behind power-washed sidewalks. I was in the fucking suburbs—Virginia, if I could believe the license plates. My nerves were still bare from the ecstasy. I felt my jaw clench like my body was readying for a fight. Down the road, someone cranked up a leaf blower and I reacted like a bomb had gone off.

   I leaned against the inside of the door until only my hands were shaking. I had to find something with an address, a roommate with directions to the metro, anything. The suburbs weren’t safe. The city was safe. I might get mugged, sure. But the mugger wouldn’t give a shit that I was a dyke. I had to calm down. Breathe.

I saw a bookshelf and thought, okay, I can read something. Just read something and focus on that and wait it out. Maybe make some coffee. Have a relaxing Sunday morning, in a complete stranger’s house. But every goddamn book on the shelf was a manual for something—VW repair, Linux, Unix, sex, marathon training, hikers’ guides. And The Secret.

When she dropped me off at home, I told Jay I’d fucked a Republican. All he said was, “Honey, next time, you better get the money first.”

I told myself there wouldn’t be a next time. She told me she’d buy me dinner. It was her birthday. She’d gotten a hotel in the city. And I thought, well, at least in the city, I can get to the metro, easier to escape.

   After dinner, we ended up at a club where someone in the bathroom offered me a bump of coke, and thinking I was among gays, I accepted. Rhonda said something about a security clearance and declined free drugs. I wasn’t going to hold a security clearance against her. Then she told me I only needed drugs because my mind was weak. And asked me to score ecstasy for her friends.

Back at the hotel, she told me I wouldn’t be in this mess if I didn’t waste money on drugs. I’d never paid for drugs. She told me I wasn’t even trying to dig out of this hole. I should go to school. I should apply for better jobs.

I stole a twenty out of her wallet once she was asleep and took a cab home. I’d like to say I needed the money, and I did. But what I needed more was to make sure she wouldn’t call me again.

She called. I didn’t answer the phone, so she showed up at the club. Every night. So I went to dinner again.

She kept buying dinner. Always in the suburbs, Alexandria or Tysons. She’d been stationed there in the Army and liked chain restaurants. I kept my guard up like a mob of evangelical suburbanites with pitchforks might be waiting in the bathroom. But chains serve massive portions and I’d bring leftovers home to Jay. Every goddamn time, I’d tell him, “This is the last fucking time, though. I’m serious. She went off last night about flag burning. How you should be shot.”

Jay called me a communist and said, “It is weird. Like, the first time I saw her, she looked like a power lesbian. But girl, she’s butcher than you are.” It was true. She wanted to take me to a salon to get my hair cut. I said I cut my own. She insisted. I hated feeling like I owed her. So I said, I just go to barbers. So she came with me. And came out looking exactly like me. High fade, leave the front longer. I swore I wouldn’t see her again.

   I was living off three-dollar gyro platters from the shop near Badlands. The air was getting colder and I needed new shoes. The drag queen who ran the coat check found a good peacoat for me, but no one was checking shoes my size.

Rhonda bought me shoes. I didn’t ask. She just showed up one day with a pair of Doc Martens that matched the pair she was now wearing and said we should go eat. She was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off like a lesbian punch line in a sitcom. A few weeks before, she’d been wearing makeup.

In the car, Ani DiFranco again. I forgot how to breathe on the 14th Street bridge into Virginia. In daylight, the border into enemy territory seemed as forbidding as the Berlin Wall. I shut Ani off like the radio was leaking gas. The staccato guitar and screaming were making me want to stick my head out the window and hope for a truck. Rhonda turned the radio back on, said, “My car, my rules.” I tried to light a cigarette, but my hand was shaking and I couldn’t let her see. We’d had this fight already. Look at us. Our first couple fight. I didn’t want to leave the city. She said I was being unreasonable. Just because they vote Republican doesn’t mean they hate gay people, she said.