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2006-02-12 || 3:17 p.m. || friends and neighbors. || their apartment is the most perfectly decorated i've ever seen. there is a taxidermied boar head hanging above the nonfunctioning fireplace, framed by two electric lights topped with gauzy pink shades. there are no modern books, only old paperbacks of cowboy stories and first-person tell-alls of naughty nurses. their porn is from the seventies, the rosy nipples of the airbrushed ladies matching the vintage couch purchased from an upscale resell shop for an obscene whispered amount of money. her shoes with their toes lined up along the baseboard by the front door are aligned in style and color of the living room: brown, rust red, grey. black. when you open the cupboard in the kitchen the cups match. there are no orphan mugs bearing brand names brought carelessly from past apartments. no modern convenient plastic. they only buy raw sugar. they don't own a television. she comes over, resigned, to watch certain shows at my house when they're on. the first time she came over, the first time we had been alone together as tentative friends, i smoked too much pot and couldn't talk. we sat on my couch, second- or third-hand, splitting at the seams where past cats clawed at it, and watched a show that features girls vying for the spot of top model. my eyes were dry from not blinking enough. i drank my wine too fast. i worried about michael's dollar-store tennis shoes splayed near the front door, how they didn't fit with the ramshackle nautical theme of our living room. i worried about how i had served wine to her in my prized and beloved "big al" country bear jamboree glass, a parting gift from brian when we moved out of our house in berkeley. the show ended and she had homework to do. she left and i picked the glass up from the floor beside the couch. it was still full. we sit in their dining room eating dinner they've spent all day preparing: geoduck clams and salad. bread bought fresh from the bakery down the street. there is a fifty-year-old radio on the table playing fifty-year-old music on an AM station. above us is a group photo of a large church group taken on july 4, 1918. we eat on matching plates. there are tiny rosebuds etched on the end of my fork. geoduck clams are the most disgusting thing i have ever eaten. they are unnervingly phallic and i imagine their texture to be like something unnervingly phallic. i chew on the same piece, unable to get it down, until there are tears in my eyes and i have to stare at the church group to keep myself from heaving. there are at least fifty people posing in rows in the picture, all of them facing the camera with that marble-eye clarity you only see in old photos of wild west heroes and confederate soldiers. the kitsch and irony of the apartment is lost on them. the amount of money spent on the old canvas circus advertisement which takes up an entire wall in the living room would feed their families for a month in 1918. i swallow the bite of geoduck and hide the rest under my organic farmer's market salad. we retire to the parlor. we are now very drunk and some of us are very stoned, and when she tries to teach me how to play backgammon she gets very confused. i don't say anything the first three times she uses a black chip, my color, instead of her own white to travel around the board. when she realizes how messed up it's gotten she ceremoniously closes the case, knocking over her wine to bloom on the oriental rug. it matches the couch and her sweater. he opens the case up and somehow uses the pieces to fit in to a truth or dare game. i answer three truths. they keep choosing dares. he takes his clothes off. she goes into detail about the last time she masturbated. he admits he never wants children. she starts to cry. i put my wine glass in the kitchen sink. i turn on the water and wash the dishes that have accumulated from all the cooking: pink and blue pyrex mixing bowls, tea saucers frosted with gold, glasses so delicate i am afraid my drunken fingers will break them. i leave the geoducks on the stove in a pan congealing with grease. my boyfriend announces he needs to go home now and we put on our coats, say goodbye, walk out to the car. we get home so that he can throw up. i try sleeping on the pull-out couch in the living room so he can have his space on the bed whose frame he made, on the mismatched pillowcases he stole from his mother's house. guestbook || notes || archives || profile || photos || d-land |