Really Good, Actually(90)
Amy got me a necklace that said joy, and Clive promised to cook me an enormous meal at his house on a date of my choosing. Emotional Lauren gave me a gift voucher for a pedicure. “The employees are extremely rude, and they go so hard on your foot calluses it’s genuinely painful,” she said. “I love it there.”
We ate second servings of cake with our hands, and Hannah and Ed FaceTimed at a moment of extreme commotion: Amy was outsourcing witty responses to the dozens of men clamoring for her attention on dating apps, and Lauren had convinced her to message hot toilet to a man whose profile comprised four identical images of him in the bathroom.
“You guys are the worst!” she screamed, smiling wide to show us that she didn’t mean it.
The man replied moments later with haha, absolutely, and they planned to meet up next week.
Clive told us his sister was pregnant and threatening to call the baby “Khaleesi,” Lauren announced she was considering going back to school, Amirah told us we could wear whatever we wanted as her bridesmaids, and Emotional Lauren admitted she had already started a Pinterest to brainstorm outfits for all our future weddings. Stuff was happening, and I was glad to be there for it.
Amirah left at midnight, to catch Tom at the end of a work thing. The rest left an hour or so later, when the candles had burned to their wicks and the bedsheet on the table was covered in crumbs and wine stains and the remains of an aborted group effort to roll a joint. Billie Holiday crooned from the kitchen, where Amy sang along as she clanked away at the dishes. I picked at a piece of wax on the table and tried to avoid what I knew was coming: the Sudden Turn. When I realized there was no fighting it, I put on my shoes and told Amy I needed to grab something from the twenty-four-hour drugstore.
“Ah,” she said. “Tummy troubles? I’ve noticed you and dairy have a tumultuous relationship.”
I told her no, it was a gynecological thing—annoying.
“Ugh, so annoying,” she replied, empathizing incredibly hard without any specifics to hand. I thought, not for the first time, how lucky I was to live with someone so invested in my emotional, digestive, and sexual health.
“Thank you so much for tonight,” I said. “The food, the table . . . everything was amazing. I’m glad I gave you my number too.”
“Oh god, my pleasure!” Amy said, smiling. “Now go fix your pussy.”
Chapter 22
I did not need pussy medication. I needed to have a big, unpleasant cry. Not a cute, tender one like I’d done with my friends—a cry I could only do alone, in a specific place I had designated for precisely this type of tears. I had discovered this spot shortly after moving in with Amy, when it became clear she could hear everything I said or did in my room, even if I hid under the duvet to do it.
“I’m not a doctor, but your vibrator is on its last legs,” she’d said on our first Sunday afternoon together, when I’d finally emerged from a long morning alone with a series of videos where two women wrestled and the winner fucked the loser. I didn’t mind Amy knowing about this; I had heard her and Sam’s entire protracted negotiation regarding whether he meant it when he asked her to sit on his face. It was fine, people had sex. But Amy was too sweet to know about the Sudden Big Cries—she would come in with mint tea and an awful, thoughtful expression, ready to tell me how Jennifer Lawrence coped with the “Sunday Scaries”—and they were happening too regularly for me not to have a place for them.
Embarrassingly, this place was a graveyard. Well, a churchyard with a few graves in it. There was a certain spooky appeal to the headstones, sure, but mostly it fit my purposes because the church and grassy lawn around it were surrounded by a high stone wall and next to a busy road, so a person—any normal, mature person in need of a bit of privacy and emotional catharsis—could enter the yard, duck behind the barrier, and let ’er rip. Passing traffic drowned out any sounds, the wall was cool to the touch and hid you from sight of anyone walking past, and I did not have to risk anyone coming into the church, because as a society we had just about fully lost God.
I had been going to the churchyard a lot, despite being sick to death of crying. How was there more of it to do? I was feeling better and better! This actually seemed to be the issue. Lately, whenever I perceived something beautiful or felt pleasure or experienced joy, I was hit with an instant, aching sadness. My throat would constrict and my face would flush, and I would need to go somewhere private very quickly, to be alone and bawl.
I walked down Dundas and the bars were emptying out: clusters of people showing off conspicuously new outfits bought in anticipation of summer; pairs deciding shyly, finally, to kiss; a group of women trailing behind one shoeless, sprinting friend, all yelling, “Tiff, come ON!” and agreeing they hate it, they hate when she does this; men slapping each other’s backs as though they’d triumphed at a difficult challenge instead of sat together drinking beer for six hours; beleaguered bartenders kicking people out as they lit post-shift cigarettes. Inside a bakery that sold nine-dollar cookies and nothing else, an old man wiped down racks of trays. He caught me looking, and his jokey little wave made me jump, startled, and run off.
I turned left, heading down a curved and quiet residential street. It was leafy and dark and deserted, and my big, weird sandals slapped the sidewalk too loudly. A raccoon skittered across the road and dove into a garbage can, tipping it over. Farther ahead a car passed, an incredibly popular song about tonight being the most important party of our lives blaring from its windows. Eventually the church loomed in front of me. Seeing it quickened my breath and tightened my chest, Pavlov’s dumbest baby. I passed under the churchyard’s stone archway, trying to remember if it was in through the nose and out through the mouth or out through the nose and in through the mouth. Whichever it was, I seemed to be doing the opposite.