Canvasser
BY ARIA REES
The shave-and-a-haircut-shampoo knock at the door pulled Zoey out of her crossword puzzle reverie. She was mired in a six down,
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E
Fiddle. Faddle. She solved crossword puzzles without looking at the clues. The clues were cheating. She was already twenty minutes late for her barista shift. It wasn’t skipping the shift if she still intended to go, right?
The woman on the doorstep brushed hair from between her lips. She seemed older. But her initial intrusion was with all the disorganized optimism of a twenty-two year old college grad:
“Uh… hi. I’m canvassing with Californians for Health? Do you have a few minutes…to help… low-income Californians?” Her voice, raspy, a rake dragged across concrete, hardly audible. How had she gotten a job as a canvasser with a voice that sputtered out like that?
Fickle. Zoey was shaken out of her doorstep manners.
“What, you need a cough drop?”
“At Californians for Health?” The canvasser plowed forward. “We lobby senators to pass legislation based on the Canada model for universal healthcare? Can you help us out with a donation?”
Fuddle. “Well, Canada still uses the facile theory of healthcare as an individual consumer good.” Zoey fumbled in her purse.
The canvasser smiled as she neared a monetary, if not ideological victory. Zoey stared at her lips which—wow, maybe fulsome? —curved in perfect landscapes, her bottom lip a moon half-full, her top lip divoted neatly. A pair of mountains rooted in the waxing moon. A stunning façade.
The celestial, impossible lips opened as she motioned to the gigantic rainbow flag Zoey’s fiancé had pushpinned to the door. The sight of her hand outstretched brought Zoey’s crosswording to a near halt. The straightness of her fingers—the certainty! The self-containment! The finale of each finger, crowned with a trimmed fingernail and its chipped fuchsia polish. Orderly proportions between finger segments, an open palm, tasteful distance between digits that recalled a primordial hand—the first ever hand sculpted in a womb, the hand holding within it another hand from whose union radiated infinite potential: what could this hand not do? This hand that, quite reasonably, was compelling her to give over herself. It waited, still unfurled, all those fingers dripping with desire to express the canvasser’s unfinished question.
“Are you….?”
“Oh yeah. Very much so.”
The lips stretched and lifted, then went limp. A horrible silence spilled out between them. Zoey had to remind herself to say something, anything to stop staring at those lips and their crucial silent language.
“Look, I don’t have cash.”
Zoey did care about low-income Californians’ healthcare, but she was almost one herself—just barely-not-quite qualifying for Medi-Cal. But probably she did have $5. She popped open Paypal on her phone, which was pure performance.
“I’ll try one more time,” Zoey said cheerfully as she punched in the same unsuccessful password for the fifth time. What was the right combination of numbers and letters? Zoey heard Selene knocking around in the kitchen and wished she’d call her over to help with a very urgent task. Yeah right. Zoey could count on one hand the number of times Selene, one of the most muscular women she had ever met, had asked for help.
“Come on, you got it!” The canvasser paused when Zoey looked up from her phone. “Sorry. Don’t take that as condescending.” She switched to I language, which Zoey had learned about in the dregs of her last relationship by reading articles on dealingwithdifficultpeople.org. “Sometimes when I get password pressure, I just lack the confidence to access my full memory.”
“You know what, at this point, I’ll just reset the password.” The canvasser’s eyes were nice. Almond shaped, fringed with sparse but long, spindly lashes. A bit insect-like but sexy nonetheless. While she waited for the password reset email she tried to keep herself from getting sucked up by the canvasser’s gaze. She’d definitely miss her whole shift if that happened. If that happened, she might suddenly open mobile banking and start sending wire transfers. A lot—too much—was possible under that gaze. Freeze. Future. Fringe. Foible. Feasible. It was possible that some of these words escaped Zoey’s mind and materialized into breath passed between them.
Was Zoey being weird right now? She had lost track of herself. She was at least thirty-five minutes late to work. But what was time but an age, a number, a mistake?
So when the canvasser finished reciting her script about how to get more involved with the organization, Zoey filled out the “hot contact” list, which she imbued with as much sexual energy as she could muster with the tip of a Bic pen. To keep her engagement ring in view—both for herself and for the canvasser—she wrote with her left hand. She wrote quickly to convey self-confidence, a tip she’d learned from Sheryl Sandberg, quoted on become-a-manager.net. Big sexy loops of language. At least that’s what she was going for. Everything intended to be round came out painfully jointed. The last letter of her name she pressed so hard into the paper that it tore a little bit. It wouldn’t be long before she changed her name to match Selene’s anyway.
She’d get an email in a couple hours with the message— “Complete your transaction?” And by then she could freely decline, liberated as she’d be from the influence of this woman’s limbs and eyes and mouth which was once again speaking, this time going for a casual tone:
“Oh by the way, my friend organizes these lesbian parties if you’re interested.”
Zoey and Selene were more the type to have contemplative reading dates around their fire pit.
“O-M-G!” seemed like the correct response. The difference between mid-thirties and mid-twenties felt vaster the older she got.
“Yeah, but tickets go fast. Check us out on instagram.”
Zoey nodded in assent to make an instagram.
“700+ dykes. If you’ve never seen that before, it’s pretty special.”
“Wow, yeah, that’s a lot of dykes.”
The canvasser stepped off the porch with “Have a healthy day!” which struck Zoey as overzealous.
“Who was that?” Selene emerged from the kitchen holding a stack of nesting mixing bowls. She must be rearranging the kitchen again. Her coping mechanism when one too many of her high school English students submitted a paper about school gun control, written with a terrifying degree of ambivalence.
Zoey had already taken solace in her crossword puzzle and didn’t notice until Selene’s interruption that she had opened it up to a different page, a different puzzle. What was sometimes a soothing grid of finite possibilities looked an impossible mess of open boxes that couldn’t be filled. Questions with no answers. She found a six down and continued her running list of F _ _ _ _ E possibilities. Footie. Fuc Me.
“Just some lady asking for money.”
“Like a fundraiser? And don’t you have a shift today?”
“Fundraiser? No. Well, sort of. And yes, I do, I mean no, I quit. I guess. I’m going to quit.”
“What?”
“A canvasser came to the door, convinced me to quit the commercial coffee industry and told me about this costume party she’s hosting for lesbians.” Zoey struggled to distill the energetic saturation of the exchange with the canvasser into an appropriate summary.
“What?”
“An entitled Gen Zer materialized on our doorstep and held me hostage until I joined her MLM which is having a launch party on the next full moon.” Should she shoot for the emotional truth or the literal truth?
“What?!”
“Look it’s fine, Selene. I’ll figure everything out.” She got up to find her phone and tried to remember when she’d last called out with food poisoning.
Zoey brought up the party again later that morning while they stretched the last of their monthly grocery budget by whipping up a brunch of corn mush with “butter” flavored syrup and tea bags pirated from motel refreshment lobbies. Selene had wanted to order delivery but Zoey kept the receipts taped to the fridge. The grocery budget was the same budget as the takeout budget and it was shot. She explained this to Selene at least once a month (always at the end of the month). Though they maintained separate bank accounts for now, they’d merge their savings upon marrying and by then Zoey hoped to train Selene into doing math. Today, they would have to forage. There was no more budgetary fat to flense. Zoey had still not solved the crossword puzzle, though she had made decisions about what words went in the rest of the blanks.
Selene pouted by becoming brisk and finding small faults in Zoey’s domestic existence. Zoey had left a pile of her coat pocket contents on the kitchen counter instead of in the vide poche which was expressly for this purpose, Zoey’s long dark hairs were everywhere on the floor, even though Selene’s were too, though they were less visible because she bleached her hair into oblivion. When Selene got this way Zoey went for acquiescence and often she found Selene was right—she did leave her keys out, yes her hair was a little gross on the floor like that, sure. Selene’s confidence and accuracy in pointing out how Zoey could improve herself even gave Zoey a small amount of satisfaction. These were all mistakes that could be corrected. A marriage was a compromise and here she was, valiantly committed to the art of becoming an us. Not me, we. Selene was the one for Zoey and Zoey the one for Selene. When Selene had proposed, Zoey had cried at the prospect of finally escaping her family history of toxic shotgun relationships that ended in spectacular divorce.
“Should we go? Tickets are $40 each, a bit steep,” Zoey said.
“You want to spend $80 on tickets to a party but you didn’t want to order me brunch?” Letting things go had never been Selene’s strong suit.
Zoey thought of all the things that were $40 times two. Selene’s amateur soccer club membership. Brunch delivery. Her skipped barista shift.
The ticket price was to justify the renting out of a villa in the Hollywood Hills, Zoey explained as she read the event description: We will NOT give our money to venues that relegate lesbian events to Wednesday nights.
What a feeble gesture!
“700 dykes for $80 comes out to $8.75 per head, which seems like a steal.” Zoey didn’t realize until she found herself defending the ticket price that she actually wanted to go. Gay friends were hard to come by in the natural world. 700 of them all at once seemed like a statistical guarantee of walking away in at least one new group chat.
Selene stretched a leg and unfurled her tongue in a cat’s yawn. She suggested that Zoey sit on her shoulders and they wear a long trench coat, two for the price of one. Zoey laughed and fondled Selene’s defined quad muscle, which bulbed out over her knee.
“My face your legs?” Zoey imagined the hybrid version of them, seven feet tall, nude, with a very long torso. The image sent a shiver, or should she say, a freeze through her spine. Maybe pleasure, maybe repulsion? Things would be easier if they were fused. Selene could have everything the way she wanted from the hips down and Zoey’s hands could handle the finances.
“And whose ID?”
“We can say we’re in the WNBA and don’t want to be spotted.”
“I’ll say that.” Zoey corrected. “We are I now. I am in the WNBA.”
Selene let out a long sigh.
*
Here is what happened:
The crossword puzzle had been finished. Fixate had been the word for that feisty six letter space. Fixate.
Two weeks after the canvasser’s invitation, Zoey faced the open maw of the villa with something like trepidation. She couldn’t help but take a cool appraising approach to the party for which she had paid good money. Never in her life had she been in such a large group of queer women—no more than, say, 100, excepting the Indigo Girls concert she’d attended in high school. Certainly she had never been one of 700 in a villa of such taste. She caught herself fixated on the line that stretched around the villa, scanning for the canvasser. She just wanted her to see that she could be regular person, her own kind of person, outside the confines of drab domesticity. With a shake of her head she corrected her fixation. She closed her eyes and blinked them open. She was her own person. She was her own person. Then Selene closed the trenchcoat around Zoey’s face. They’d tested a system of navigational heel nudges but how hard could it be for Zoey’s feet to slowly shuffle forward in step with all the other slowly shuffling feet? Alone in her dark, private chamber, Zoey could finally think in peace. The canvasser was not necessary to prove herself to herself. The crossword puzzle had demonstrated her proficiency, she had found and felled it, the fixation, and now complete, she could proceed with business as usual, she could transcend into the traceless multitude.
Under Selene’s strong legs, Zoey blinked and tried to energetically sense the molecular infrastructure of this bodymass she had allegedly already joined. 700 dykes and counting. 699 dykes and 1 canvasser. 698 dykes and 1 canvasser and 1 her.
&
Here is what happened:
Frieze had to be the crossword solution, Zoey realized, as she tried to mask her evaluative scan of the line she was waiting in (harder to hide her calculating stares without Selene) and spotted a mishmash of midriffs, supported by a small forest of legs, each body part run together with so many others, of self and non-self, this molding of the soft body into traceable lines. She might as well be in the Getty Villa. Was she, in fact, at the Getty Villa? She’d pregamed and stuck her head out the window as Selene had chauffeured her to the party. Turn RIGHT is all she remembered. Turn RIGHT. And Selene had slowly turned left. There were so many recombinatory potentials for arrangements of limbs, an infinitude of angles and open spaces. Space, a substance; time, a fluid.
So, okay, the frieze was encouraging. The frieze was a correct answer, a filling of a hole, a right word, a nod from the universe to indicate affirmation for her being where she needed to be, here. The right place and right time, her body the right size and shape to fit into an urgent Earthly slot. The music was pleasingly jumbled—reggaetón careening into Beyoncé—indication of multiple sound systems on the roof and bottom floor. She stepped toward the ground floor’s thumping beat that felt like tactile applause: hands that reached out and touched, touched, touched her. She felt good. 700 dykes had been promised. She was one of them.
&
Here is what happened:
No, it really had to be fixate.
Zoey faced the open maw of the villa with something like trepidation. She sat atop Selene’s shoulders. Selene on bottom because she had the lower body strength to support the two of them and then some. Despite herself, Zoey couldn’t help but fixate on people’s lips. The faces around her congealed into a sweaty mush of features. In the flashing lights, lips were easily confusable for closed eyes, for fingers pressed together, for folds in a twisted neck. Where were the half-moon lips? Where the fucke were they?
“Ouch, baby, stop shifting your weight around,” Selene snapped at her. Zoey pulled the waist of the trench coat around her fiance’s face in response. She then put on sunglasses, to bolster her boldness. At the door, the bouncer gazed skeptically.
“Can you remove your sunglasses miss? What’s your date of birth?”
Zoey blew all her air out like a horse and tried to recall the right numbers. 699 dykes and 1 canvasser. 698 dykes and 1 canvasser and 1 her. And 1 her.
Zoey felt Selene yank on her leg. “Baby, tell him the password!”
“Oh right! Right. Of course.” Zoey said rounding her shoulders and crossing her arms around her new stomach which was also Selene’s mouth. She leaned closer to the bouncer and nearly fell off Selene’s shoulders. “fingerjoint.”
“I’ll let you by this time, but next time get a better fake.”
“It’s not a fake!” said Zoey, secretly delighted to be mistaken for early 20s, but Selene’s legs were already marching them past the bouncer.
&
Here is what happened:
Faerie must be the word to finish the puzzle, given that she’d spotted several girls wearing wings and complicated jewelry.
Inside, the promised dykes sprawled. Women everywhere. Some chatted cooly by the walls, some danced beneath the chandelier in the airy entryway. Selene and Zoey disentangled themselves from one another, though this took some doing, as somehow the trench coat buttons had snarled in both their hair. Despite the ticket price, the organizers had not sprung for a DJ, instead crowdsourcing a playlist on the fly. This was a crowd of equals, was the idea.
Two more gin and tonics in, a third in her hand, determined to put the open bar to work after bumping into three of her exes— Oh my god, how are you, let’s catch up! Zoey spotted the canvasser across the dance floor. All the sound, sensation, and vision in Zoey’s body fused into a single wet sense. Her. It was her. Zoey twisted her shirt up into a bikini to let her belly breathe. The canvasser had cat ears nestled in her hair even though the theme was flower power. Subversive. She liked that. The solution to the crossword puzzle may as well have been feline. As a matter of fact, it probably was feline. Zoey watched the canvasser move in space, the way she seemed comfortable with everyone, dancing with someone new every five minutes, mouthing lyrics that Zoey knew would be entirely inaudible, the canvasser’s limbs creating their own counter rhythm to the music that poured out in constellations of beats, this immaculate shrine architecting their shared bodies. Body. The music stirred this corporeal stew into waves of movement that rose and fell in something approaching unison. Something more interesting than unison. Variations of the human form blared individual dance moves and women kept pouring in, the space warming by the song, until soon Zoey had to invent a new groove to keep the canvasser in view, a groove that didn’t omit throwing hard elbows. Her hands so captivating—Zoey watched the tips of her fingers gently curl when she threw her hands up, and she watched them extend out toward the speakers when the beat dropped.
&
Here is what happened:
Fierce had been the word. Fierce had to be the solution.
Zoey, lightly buzzed, closed her eyes and opened them. People had dressed up. One girl strutted by in pole heels and a hot dress. Another was wearing just a thong and sequined pasties adorned with dangling, oh god could it be, fringe? Positively fierce. She blinked and blinked and her vision splintered into 700 visions of the villa, 700 bodies of every shape and stature, 700 perspectives of the airy entryway and the hot tub, frothing with activity, 700 lights and 700 faces that shone them back like precious metals. 700 possibilities for words that started with F and ended in E. Blue lights sourced and reflected. Red lights on the floor and ceiling, all at once. Women—radiant light beams—refracted through one another. Was that a mirror or another woman there across the way? The crowd’s chatter was about an octave higher than average. She could see, at most, 75 people milling around the ground floor but she was certain that she had not been lied to. Another 625 lesbians could be lurking, famously, in the closets and villa nooks. Even 1,400 dykes were possible if others had the same cost cutting idea as her and Selene. Zoey ordered a gin and tonic, took off her shirt, and flung it into the crowd for good measure. Her purple sports bra would say all that needed saying. Zoey as a matter of fact understood herself only as the color purple, and how could that be included in the headcount? She looked around the party, she looked within the party in 700 dimensions. How did all these sights exist in one? She looked. There were spaces and grids and sinews that created a network—interstices that held all 700 together. Like a fully completed crossword, each face around her filling a blank space. Thank god Selene had left early. Here she could be in touch with duality, yes, she could just rest in the infinitude of the flow. Like a puzzle completed, clues-free, on the first try, with pen. No scratch outs. 700 confident words scrawled around one another. She closed her eyes and counted to 700 to feel a little bit of everyone.
&
Here is what happened:
Involuntarily, Zoey moaned. A mouthful of gin and tonic spilled onto her shirt. She stumbled toward the canvasser, leaden-footed, possessed by the canvasser’s hands that she knew were so capable. Her strong grip around the clipboard that day. How had she just let her walk away? 698 dykes but really only one. It had to be. Right now. Yes. She was one. With the universe. No point struggling against the pathway of the present. One dyke and one word that fit in the blank which was fissile. The source of her life’s misery was this—her fissility, her splittableness. 1 is what she wanted, what she craved.
She positioned herself within spitting distance, and hearing the phrase in her head, welled up a loogie in her throat. She blew all her air out like a horse and the lubricant she was saving for the canvasser dribbled down her chin. Goddamn. She was drunk. Her shirt now splotched in several places, at least three different shades of liquid. Two girls making out, absorbed in one another, kept bumping up against her. She grabbed one of their drinks and dumped it down her shirt to hide the other stains. Like that, she felt invisible, anonymous. “Oops!” She made a shrugging motion at the couple. These two, alongside the hundreds of others, were merely walls, walls that moved and changed but made certain promises involving heat and smells.
Off with the shirt then. She stuffed it in her back pocket. This was fine. This was better. Her sports bra was a uniform shade of sweated-through purple. Her intention set, her plan in motion, she waited for the crowd to do the lord’s work of pressing her into the canvasser in a way that would appear to be incidental.
&
Here is what happened:
Figure was the word. Figure as in the canvasser’s. Visible in strobe and then invisible and then visible again.
A low-key mosh pit was forming. Zoey put herself between the canvasser and a heavily-booted person with windmilling arms.
When Zoey and the canvasser finally collided, it basically flung off Zoey’s shirt. Zoey forgot her pickup lines, or that she’d ever harbored intent to flirt. Yet here she was, half-nude, the canvasser’s bare skin just one thrifted polyester layer away from hers.
“Ouch!” Said Zoey upon contact, which was less chill than she’d been hoping for. It had hurt more than she expected. She was mid-thirties now, so what did she expect. Less pliability in the joints.
The canvasser, in all her beneficent glory, rubbed her arm. Zoey claimed responsibility.
“Oh my god how are you?” Zoey meant both post-arm-bump and in general. “Let’s catch up!”
“Have a healthy day, bitch!” Is what Zoey heard or at least interpreted from the canvasser’s inaudible whisper-voice. Oh, her sexy wheeze. The canvasser did three chest pops on beats unique to the music, spun in a half-spin, and grooved her way back into the crowd. Zoey raged. This bitch did not just. How could she blow her off so easily, after all they’d been through?
&
Here is what happened:
Fumble was the word and that was truly unfortunate. Nothing to be done with that.
Zoey had fallen for the canvasser because of her strong moral code, her commitment to ethics, her ease in determining what was right and what was wrong. It was hot, the black and white thinking, until she found herself in the wrong. Zoey needed to change the canvasser’s outright disregard into something more malleable. But the drinks turned on Zoey. Her rage at the canvasser’s rejection manifested as a persistent line of snot. She’d been here before, unrequited desires and all of that. Pre-tears, still, but the anger already choosing a humiliating course of action. Pathetic. She was an adult, she had agency, she could find another connection here, among 698 dykes. 695 dykes and three exes and one canvasser and one her. There was glitter on her nipples that chafed against her bra. She shimmied her shoulders to sexily scratch the itch, which did not work. The tension in her body felt unbearably individual. Another body atop hers would help her forget. Or maybe help her remember.
Selene suddenly flashed back into her awareness—was she still here?— Zoey grabbed a wounded soldier from the bar and downed it to re-establish plausible deniability. After all, she was her own person. Selene really, truly loved her, all of her, she knew this, she was always saying so, and this is who Zoey was, in this moment. This one moment wanting one canvasser. Jonseing for the one. She was Zoey and Zoey desired the canvasser. Zoey loved Selene and she felt a special connection with the canvasser. Selene loved Zoey who currently loved the canvasser. And also Selene. Zoey knew herself to be a person of integrity. The truth was too vast for any individual human mind to understand. It would only be through a holy trifecta SeleneZoeyCanvasser that truth would be realized. 1+1+1=1. The canvasser, a walking paradox. She had a shit voice and still she’d gotten paid to speak to people. How did that make sense? In a way Zoey was doing both herself and Selene a favor by letting the laws of attraction flow through her—flow through her to bring the canvasser back into her body. Which would bring Zoey back to her body which would then return her to Selene’s body, liberated. Overcoming the canvasser’s ignorant rejection was ultimately necessary for collective liberation. Really, it just felt right.
She looked past the bartender to herself in the mirror and pointed at her reflection. You are NOT two women stacked up beneath a trench coat. You are a normal person. 699. 698. 697…
&
Here is what happened:
Zoey and the canvasser circled one another around the dancefloor. The canvasser had been hitting on her all night, practically dousing her in meaningful eye contact. Zoey’d had to mostly look skyward to keep herself honest. Future could certainly not be the word, because the future, as any enlightened person knew, never arrived, and therefore it didn’t matter. Zoey would align herself with the present, with this woman across from her—they had so much in common, how had she given her up? Her whole body boiled over, so much care for the present that simply by the laws of physics she had no care left for the future. The unreality of the future had been the main reason Zoey had refused to acknowledge the canvasser as her ex when she’d appeared on her doorstep. After all, when they’d separated Zoey’d been so distraught about the end of their future together that she’d been straight up, she’d said I’m going to forget you, I’m really going to do it, if I see you again I won’t even be able to say that I know you. Once you’re in the future you’re dead to me. That’s what she’d said. So that was that. Future was an empty word, a row of sounds without referents. “Let’s catch up!” The canvasser commanded in the present, the drinks cutting through her careful professional aloofness, and here and now it was so, their bodies drifting together, it felt so natural, her hips against hers. They kissed. She screamed.
&
Here is what happened:
Furore would be one way to describe the frenzy that Zoey and her ex became when “catching up” in the pool shed. Here their voices could be heard by one another. Selene always complained she couldn’t hear Zoey’s soft voice. The canvasser, her voice even quieter than Zoey’s, would never say anything so dismissive. So here, quiet. A safe place, this secret. They paused their furious pawing at one another and pulled away. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” said Zoey, and considered putting an end to it, but the ex had a sexy, deranged look on her face and Zoey realized that something in her had long since overflowed. The canvassed ripped a gaping hole in Zoey’s shirt in her hurry to get it off. She seemed disappointed to learn of Zoey’s investment in fast fashion.
“I miss us,” the ex began, her voice recalling asphyxiation. I language, Zoey recognized. She leaned in.
&
Here is what happened:
The solution was frorne which was not a word that Zoey had ever seen used in a crossword before, or any recent text of any kind, but the word stuck with her from Selene’s lesson plan for a Spenser poem. That would have to work: time was not a straight line, anything was possible.
Selene and Zoey were electrons bouncing around the room, talking to people, flirting with others and one another. Zoey had been dancing with a girl, someone vaguely familiar, for three songs, their bodies bumping and grinding. Selene, after a final fruitless lap around the room’s perimeter, joined in and the three of them stumbled toward a wall, in need of surfaces.
“Let’s find a room,” Selene said—was it Selene? Must have been, but what was the necessity of keeping track of names in this space of holy disintegration—in any case, everyone agreed.
They found an unoccupied bedroom behind the DJ stage. Selene-or-someone shut and locked the door.
&
Here is what happened:
The solution had to be fondue, it occurred to Zoey, when Tyga came on with frequent imperatives to “dip.” Could she make it dip yes she could, she’d comply—moving her hips in a way that suggested dipping something in something else, though it was unclear to her where her ass ended and where the sauce began. She was being dipped, fondued, in the vat of collective sexuality that permeated the dancefloor. Though the walls of the dancefloor had rearranged, narrowed to include just three girls. Two plus her. The music thudding through the bedroom walls, and now it was Zoey’s turn up to bat. Selene and the canvasser laying before her, both in dead bug position. Zoey the fonduer, the other two delicious fondue pots. 98 dips per minute. 1-1-1-1. Until Rihanna took over, 91 dips per minute. 1-1-1-1-1-1-1. Zoey hadn’t decided to let this happen. She was just melting into it, letting the fondue fountain flow, allowing herself to dip and be dipped into when the universe commanded so.
&
Here is what happened:
Foodie had to have been the word. She’d just need to redo some of the other words for all those vowels to work out.
Lips, her’s. Her tongue pressed into her to the beat of Rihanna’s voice. The tongue merged the sound the song beat the song tongued. She moved and she clawed at her shoulders. Involuntarily, she moaned. She screamed.
Rihanna screamed. The same word. 1-1-1-1-1-1.
Their voices inside drowned out the voices outside, a chorus of sounds harmonized with the shouts from beyond the door. A shave-and-a-haircut-shampoo knock on the door. A spurt of even beats kept by someone’s fist on the door.
“Open the fuck up!” The DJs voice. Had there been a DJ? She sounded like Selene. The sound of someone’s shoulder slamming into the door. The sound of two bodies taking turns slamming shoulders into the door.
&
Here is what happened:
The crossword puzzle would just have to wait.
Zoey straddled the canvasser’s face whose perfect lips mouthed Rihanna’s voice which was booming through the walls, over and into their skins. The canvasser’s words, less audible. Zoey screamed.
&
Here is what happened:
Certainly there would have been a fridge, so let’s go with that. A fridge out of which she had likely pulled a beer to slow her roll with the hard alcohol. Fridge into which she stuck her head to cool off. The sweat on her bare stomach began to chill. Here, hard clarity. Cold air beshirting her. Was it about time to head home? That’s something Selene would say. Was she still here? Or had she gone home at 10:30 as usual to get a good night’s rest? Something about the cheese dip in the fridge was very funny. Haha. Hahaha. When someone called Zoey’s name, she was briefly confused to see her ex wearing Zoey’s shirt wrapped around her hair like a post-shower towel. Well, actually, she did look fresh faced.
&
Here is what happened:
The canvasser stood in the airy entryway, searching for people who looked vaguely familiar. She had two goals tonight. Max out or even surpass her commission-based donation goal and make her ex beg for mercy. It was the only full moon party of the summer. She was certain to make an appearance.
When she finally spotted her ex towering over the room, the canvasser scoffed. Really, a fucking trench coat? The theme was feline friends, for fuck’s sake. And was the silly bitch wearing stilts?
“Zoey, you Sherlock Holmes ass bitch!” She called out in greeting.
&
Here is what happened:
We spread out unevenly across the floor—in clumps on the walls, by the speakers, and in the hot tub, which has gone seismic due to the number and trajectory of limbs. We are in all the rooms of the house. We are entwined on top of the house and on the lawns even though, yes, by now the sprinklers have kicked on and while we touch each other, we are drenched by recycled grey water. We punctuate the space, segment it into grids with our bodies and our words. We breathe and we sing and we scream. 1-1-1-1-1-1! 700 and counting. Our pores open to our sweat and senses. Our mouths open. Our liquids mix.
&
Here is what happened:
&
Here is what happened:
Selene, still stone cold sober—this, both a cumulative daily success and an hourly travesty—gripped the steering wheel as she opposed Uber drivers carrying a sudden influx of new arrivals. After double-checking she had the trench coat folded in the backseat, her wallet safe in its inner pocket, she careened around the switchbacks and hairpin turns and once safely beyond LA’s vegetated neighborhoods, once again drifting past bare medians in stop and go traffic (inexplicable at midnight, but time was surely not a straight line), she checked her makeup in the rearview, and found spinach confetti strung among her front teeth. Fuck. Why hadn’t Zoey mentioned it? Not all that surprising, she had to continuously remind herself, given that Zoey was not, to put it generously, the most present person on the planet. Zoey’s fly, for example, chronically down. For example, her habit of looking skyward when speaking, as if finding the words visually in her prefrontal cortex. Selene knew this and kept choosing it, every morning she said yes to the shroud of privacy Zoey’s inattention created, yet it was true, Selene was lonely on nights like these, surrounded by hundreds of others in parallel tracks of the freeway, everyone in their own boxes of music and scent, these moments of solitude when she drove Zoey to a bar or party and then left early, alone, before which Zoey would equivocate for a minute as Selene made her departure, saying she wanted both to go home with Selene and to stay at the party since it was just getting good. Selene held only a slight envy for Zoey’s ability to drink lightly, enough to decompress without passing out in the toilet. Remember that? Maybe she would swing by McDonalds and get herself a celebratory hot apple pie for her two-thousand and somethingth’d sober night. Turn signal, activated. Here she was, doing self-care. Exhilarating. Empowering. As she pulled out of the McDonald’s drive-through, pie burning a frown on her thigh, Selene worried a piece of her inner cheek, guilt and shame approaching like the gleeful speeding of the midnight traffic, the almost ecstasy of them, one car, then the other, careening toward the intersection. Should she lighten up and just try out having a drink now and then? She didn’t want to be dreary. Compromises with Zoey felt minor while she agreed to the conditions of their making, then resulted in moments of slanting regret, in which she found herself alone, exhausted, and sober in every sense of the word. The dashboard clock read 1am. Involuntarily, she moaned. She inched the car forward into the last intersection of the route home while waiting for the left turn. Was this worth it? All the work and effort to go out with Zoey and grit her teeth through everyone else’s growing drunkenness, trying her hardest to have fun. The light turned yellow. It was worth it. Zoey was worth it. And so sometimes there would be spinach in her teeth. By now, light red, she was stuck in the middle of the intersection, getting honked at from all directions. She’d already made too many decisions to reverse.
*
No matter what happened it would always end up the same way, three days later, the two of them, puffy-faced and stiffly seated across one another at a diner. The waitress, wisely skipping their table on her coffee refill rounds, deterred by the piles of snotty napkins and their twinned expressions of devastation. They were both concerned about the steep costs of moving into separate apartments, but it was Zoey’s idea to split the bottomless pancake stack special, though sharing was technically not allowed, the limit of bottomless being a singular stomach, so Selene took it upon herself to swiftly slide the plate to and fro so it was unambiguously in the ownership of one or the other.
“Honey,” Selene’s brow crinkled in concern. “This can’t go on.” She switched to I language. “I really can’t do this anymore. I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“Oh my god what a terrible line!” Zoey spat. Zoey’s rage manifested as a steady stream of snot that thickened down her throat. She didn’t want to break up. At the very least, she wanted a friendship with Selene. A promise of continued presence in one another’s lives. Something porous and ill-defined, some grey area that was perhaps not engaged and perhaps not over but something in between. In between is where life was to be lived! Yet here was Selene acting like some cop laying down the law. She was saying no to life, no to all the nuance of love—and what even was the difference between being in love and just plain old loving? Zoey knew without a doubt she loved Selene. And she also loved the canvasser! Hey, she also loved this waitress who’d spotted a moment of stony silence at their table and dodged in to fill their cups, asked if they wanted, did she have this right, a sixth pancake stack, keeping her gaze locked on the stained laminate.
She still hadn’t solved the crossword puzzle and so there was no word to describe to Selene who she was, and who she was was, presently, pure sensation that poured through her as she watched Selene’s mouth shape further variations of can’t do this anymore. Being “broken up with.” No, that sounded too fragile. Discarded maybe better. Finite perhaps? The word “dumped” had the correct sensory reverberations but didn’t capture the appropriate magnitude. Each word felt too used, too tainted by others’ use of it. She needed a different language. She tried to reorient among matrices of new possibilities. She tried to position herself toward pure meaning. 1 or 2 or 1 and 1 or 700 or just 1?
Just 1. Just 1 I language. 1 I 1 I.
Selene was now talking about how the clues had been everywhere and she was partially to blame for refusing to see them.
Clues to what? What, was Selene suggesting that their breakup was inevitable, even if Zoey hadn’t made regrettable mistakes? “Clues are synonymous with cheating,” Zoey said, around mouthfuls of pancake.
“You’re the cheater. You’re the fucking cheater!”
“Selene, don’t do this. I need you. I think I’m an alcoholic. I think I’m polyamorous.”
“Why would you say that to me right now? Why do you think this is all about you?” Selene’s voice had risen to a shout. She stood, something in her face that had once felt so familiar now entirely foreign. “Fuck you.” And she poured her full cup of hot coffee over Zoey’s plate, which was also Selene’s plate.
This summoned a sob from Zoey’s chest. A sound determined by the seizing of lungs. Zoey felt the dissolution rising again and looked to anything stable on which to glom. Selene was her whole life.
She had lost track of herself. Just 1.
She repeated the last line that hung in her memory before the rift, before she had suddenly split into less than half of herself, a self made of small pieces, something with closer borders. Let’s catch up.
There was nothing meaningful in the whole last breaths of that future. But there was something important that happened when she repeated them to herself.
Herself is all she was now. Words were just mutually agreed upon litanies of sounds and movements of the lips. Lip sounds blown out in a flubber. When she looked up Selene was gone. Though maybe just in the bathroom?
Zoey pulled out the puzzle book she’d brought along for moral support, the one from which her ex had torn out all the clue pages, and looked at her pencil erasures before she’d boldly switched to pen and then forced “fusile” to fit, though the sacrifice had been that a 6 across had become sssume.
It had all been a facade. She no longer had a fiance. Go figure. Their love had been finite. She still couldn’t find the right word.