The Girl He Used to Know(58)
It’s not that I didn’t know what to do, it was that I didn’t know how to make it happen, and I was too paralyzed to ask someone. Janice had always taken care of these things. Once, when she’d gone home for the weekend, she discovered upon her return that the heat had stopped working. She found me under the blankets in my bed wearing three sweaters, my wool stocking cap, and a pair of fingerless gloves. My fingertips were icy, but I’d found it difficult to turn the pages of my book with mittens on, so I’d had no choice.
“It is fifty-two degrees in our apartment!”
“Why are you shouting at me?”
“Because it’s fifty-two degrees in our apartment.”
“You already said that.”
“I’ll be right back,” she said. When she returned, she told me that the maintenance man had put in a call to the furnace repair company, and by the time we woke up the next morning the apartment was a toasty seventy-two. I had never asked her what she’d done to make that happen, because as soon as it was taken care of, I forgot all about it.
I took several deep breaths and walked down the stairs to the manager’s office near the entrance of the building. What if I couldn’t explain the problem properly? What if they told me there was nothing wrong with the lock, and I was just too dense to know how to turn a key?
There was a tenant ahead of me in line, a young woman I’d seen in the hallway a few times. “I need to put in a work order,” she said. “The faucet in the kitchen is leaking.”
“Sure,” the man said. “Just fill this out.” He handed her a form and she scribbled something on it and gave it back. He glanced at it and said someone would be there later that day to take a look.
“I need to put in a work order too,” I said, the words tumbling out in a barely coherent rush when I stepped up to the desk.
He handed me the same form he’d handed the young woman, and I wrote down my name and apartment number. “There’s something wrong with the lock on my door.”
“Just note it on the work order and we’ll get it taken care of immediately. Security issues always take priority.”
I wrote down “broken front door lock” and handed him the form. A few hours later, I had a fully functioning lock and a whole lot of peace. That wasn’t hard at all, I thought, chastising myself for acting so helpless instead of tackling the problem head-on.
The next morning, I opened all the curtains and let the sun fill the apartment with light.
* * *
The epiphany that the world was full of people I could emulate the way I had with Janice and Jonathan gave me renewed hope. Once I opened my eyes, I realized it was all laid out right in front of me: Watch the person in line ahead of me buying their coffee. Pay attention to the way people were dressed, so that I’d never be caught off guard by changes in the weather. Listen to how other people responded before mimicking their answers and speech patterns, body language and behavior. The constant vigilance and my heightened anxiety that I’d screw it up anyway exhausted me, but I persevered.
Because I was always looking, always observing, I saw things I didn’t want to see. The female students laughing and chatting on their way to class or sharing a meal in a restaurant the way Janice and I used to. The couples walking hand in hand, stopping to share a kiss before going their separate ways. The young man carrying a girl piggyback through the grass as she laughed and nuzzled her face in his neck. The guy in one of my classes who always dropped a tender kiss on his girlfriend’s forehead before they parted. I used to have that, I’d think. The hollow ache I felt due to Jonathan’s absence made my lip quiver and I’d blink back tears.
I made endless lists to remind me what I needed to do every day. They were the things Janice used to do, in the order she’d always done them, and when we lived together, I followed her example. But Janice wasn’t there anymore, so I checked off each item on my list: Drop rent check into the slot on the metal box mounted outside the rental office. Pay utilities. Buy groceries. Take out the trash. On Sunday nights, I lined up a week’s worth of mugs containing a single tea bag. I put spoons in cereal bowls and stacked them seven high, taking one off the top every morning before pouring in the cereal and adding milk. Monday was for laundry. Wednesday was for cleaning. Eventually, I learned to love living alone. It was always quiet. My routines were solidly in place, and nothing ever interrupted them.
Though I had things mostly under control, the lack of companionship wore on me. Janice, I could speak to by phone, but Jonathan’s calls were a different story. I always called him back, but now I found myself returning his calls when I knew he wouldn’t be there and eventually, we communicated more with our answering machines than we did with each other. At the time, I told myself I didn’t want to interfere with his life and was doing it for him, but that was another lie. It wasn’t that I was still afraid of holding Jonathan back; it was what I needed in order to soar.
* * *
The milk I’d taken from the refrigerator to pour on the cereal I’d decided to have for dinner one evening smelled sour, because even though “buy milk” was clearly listed on the grocery list I’d brought to the store with me the day before, sometimes I still forgot to buy it. The sun had set and I didn’t want to go out, but the cereal was already in the bowl, so I shrugged into my coat and left.