Post-traumatic Page 2

  Suddenly an affable-looking Black guy shelving cat food inserted himself into her life, saying she looked like a model. The only things more oppressive than the eyes of an insecure woman were the eyes of an undesired man. She smiled through malice, thinking she had an ugly face and would have to be at least ten pounds lighter for it to be even remotely true that she looked like a model.

  “Ha. Yeah right.”

  “You okay, though, sis?”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped.

  “I never seen anyone take thirty minutes to pick a snack, though,” he said, laughing lightheartedly.

  Had it been thirty minutes?

  Embarrassed, she quickly grabbed a bag of roasted reduced-salt cashews, a low-carb high-protein venison bar, a twenty-ounce bottle of lemonade-flavored Vitaminwater Zero, and an unsweetened iced green tea containing epigallocatechin gallate (an antioxidant associated with weight loss) and got in the line, which snaked back toward the photo center and was not moving.

  There was a problem with one of the credit card machines that required managerial assistance. To her left, an obnoxious row of Thanksgiving décor: decorative plastic gourds, fake cornstalks, paper plates covered in turkeys and fall foliage. Her throat tightened as she remembered an unanswered text from her brother, so she tried to focus on the song playing distantly over the sound system: “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News.

  There had been other times in Vivian’s life when she had reluctantly walked into a drugstore to buy toilet paper after days of not leaving the house and wiping herself carefully with paper towels, days lost, days where it was as if her attention had been picked up by malevolent fingers and dropped somewhere she didn’t want it to be, days where she was unable to stay in the room she was in, unable to focus on the task at hand, either having dark thoughts—the darkest thoughts in the history of humankind—or replaying, in minute detail, certain past events that were sources of intense irritation, anger, sadness, or general pain, and then she found herself wandering through the aisles listening to a yacht rock song, its relentless vacuity spotlighting her own. There was something about shallow clichéd lyrics combined with a sweeping sonic landscape in the sterile setting of a CVS, Duane Reade, or Rite Aid that always moved her in a Don DeLillo way.

  As Vivian listened, she empathized with the singer’s entreaty, vaguely recalling her own attempts to get a man to end a relationship honestly rather than slowly fade away or gaslight her into thinking her insecurities were unfounded.

  Ambiguity, though central to aesthetic greatness, was horrifying in real life. When a man inflicted it upon you in a romantic context, it highlighted his cowardice and your abjection. They did it casually, like flinging a toddler into a body of water and walking away, insisting calmly that it will swim. Huey Lewis was right, man—if loss of interest is inevitable, just get it over with and leave me, already.

  A couple of years ago, when she’d become newly single, Vivian had been excited about using her goal-oriented mind-set to find a super-hot creative soul mate. Dating would be strenuous, dopaminergic. It would give her an excuse to strive and to be appraised.

  But she soon learned that dating as a Black woman in your thirties was like running a marathon through a swamp wearing steel-toed boots. It was the topic of a dozen think pieces: Black Women Are the Least Desirable. While her white peers complained about dating app message overflow, Vivian got a trickle of lazy openers (Hey, what’s up), unsolicited inductions into the monarchy (Hello my queen), and food-related adjectives describing her skin tone.

  And the ones she actually went out with? The cinematographer ghosted her after a solid first date. The lit professor claimed to be separated, but when she asked to go back to his place, he admitted to still living with his wife. The painter told her, after a night of passionate sex, that there was “no spark.” Veering away from men in the arts, she dated a tax analyst, thinking his rationality would predispose him to see her as a great catch and to treat her well. He had a panic attack while he was inside her and began muttering about his ex-girlfriend, who had recently reappeared in his life and with whom, he said, he was more simpatico, “because she wants kids, you know,” unlike Vivian, who had cheekily announced her intention to remain child-free on their first date.

  She inched forward in line and tried to ignore the paper turkey’s beady stare. Not even the fact that she had a date the next day with Matthew, a musician she had met online, could soothe her now. The sense of doom she felt, the sense that she would Never Be Loved Again, spread out to envelop the entire human condition as manifested by all of the customers and employees in the store. Vivian’s eyes lost focus and she swayed back and forth to the song, feeling a sort of staged emotion which, though exaggerated, was founded on a real bit of sadness. By the time the cashier finally rang up her purchase, she had brought tears to her own eyes again, with her maudlin thinking.

  * * *

  Back outside there was a brilliant sun and a cloudless sky. Vivian crossed her arms and waited at the intersection for the light to change. To her immediate right, a man straddled his parked motorcycle, breathing heavily into his phone. She took two steps back and reached into her tote bag, gripping her phone as if it were a weapon.

  “You fuckin’ bitch!” he yelled into the phone but also beyond it, louder and angrier than an agitated client at the hospital. He revved his engine loudly then, the gray exhaust blowing in Vivian’s direction, and for a millisecond she believed the smoke to be the physical manifestation of the man’s rage, that it was spreading out, like her sadness had in the store, that she was going to be enveloped by it. When the light changed, she quickly jogged across the street.

  On her way to the train, her attention shifted. Now she looked over her left shoulder every half a block. She used store windows also, to see who was behind her. It seemed that almost every man eyed her now, deciding on the purpose she would serve. The bolder ones said things.

  “Sexy.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Princess.”

  On good days, these encounters could be shrugged off as the cost of living in the city. But most days were not good. It was unfair, what they were doing. They made you feel simultaneously alone and not by yourself.

  Vivian eyeballed a tall white man striding toward her who gave off bad vibes. He had on a dirty gray tank top and gray fleece sweatpants—heavy and out of season. When Vivian looked at him she believed he said, “You have a nice body but you need to work on your face,” before walking quickly toward someone on the other side of the street. Eventually, Vivian’s eyes focused and saw that he had singled out an Asian tourist and was now following her, yelling incomprehensible things at her. Vivian gripped her phone and imagined the man spontaneously combusting. The tourist looked around for help. No one else reacted or even slowed down. After a minute the man stopped yelling and walked away, aiming his frustration at the ground. Vivian exhaled, released her phone, and put on her sunglasses.

  Underground, Vivian kept the sunglasses on to avoid eye contact, to hide her strabismus, and so that no one could see her microexpressions. She was anxious as she watched a piece of aluminum foil get picked up and tossed by the arriving train. She entered the train harried, scanning the car instinctively for lovers from the recent past until, not seeing any, she opened her bag. She stood in front of the doors in the middle of the train car so that she could scan the space around her, assess the makeup of the car, and reconstitute herself.

  Slowly, Vivian reached for her earbuds, unwinding and then untangling them, also slowly, while intermittently looking up to see if she was being watched, before finding the piece of music that matched her current state of sad pensiveness, Bach’s “E-Flat Minor Prelude” from The Well-Tempered Clavier, as performed by Friedrich Gulda.

  It took a couple of stops for Vivian to notice the bank of empty seats in the middle of the subway car. She chose the seat closest to the railing on the left and regretted it immediately (for though it would allow her a quick exit it would also encourage hovering nearby) but she didn’t have the energy to move.

  At the next stop, a man got on and stood directly in front of her and started to bang—violently and arrhythmically—on the handrail above her. It became impossible to concentrate on Bach, and she felt the need to be aware of her surroundings, so she muted her earbuds but kept them in to maintain the appearance of listening. Vivian so resented men in these moments, lacking in spatial empathy, never having had to learn to lessen themselves, like the male commuters who would hover over you while holding an open tumbler full of coffee on the one day you weren’t wearing black, having decided to “step out of your comfort zone” with a pale pink sheath dress from Club Monaco.

  A young Black mom and her two daughters boarded. The mom was short, weighed about 150 pounds, and her thighs were spilling out of the top, back, and sides of her shorts. Though the fat made Vivian uncomfortable, there was something beautiful in the mom’s shamelessness. She wore fake pearl earrings, and her toenails were painted bright pink. She had a gap between her front teeth. Her hair was short and relaxed and her sideswept bangs marvelously flattered her face.

  The older daughter, about eight years old, was chubby like her mom. She wore her hair in a high bun. Her nails were painted the same bright pink as her mom’s. The younger daughter’s hair was in an adorable teeny-weeny Afro. She was bouncing, smiling, laughing.

  Soon, the mom got angry with the older girl, who for some reason had been put in charge of directing their commute and had confused the express train with the local. Realizing this, the mom exploded, and began to berate her daughter, calling her stupid loudly enough for everyone to hear. Vivian twitched, reflexively raising her hand to her neck, scratching it.

  She studied the dejected older girl, who, out of embarrassment or to hide her tears or both, looked out of the subway car into the darkness. Vivian knew there was nothing to see out there. Then, after a few minutes, the older girl dug around her sister’s stroller while looking back at her mom to see if she’d be scolded. She took out a handheld video game and looked intently down on it before starting to play. The little sister then stood up and bopped from her mom’s lap to the empty seat next to her sister and started tapping playfully, repeatedly, on her sister’s shoulder. Vivian’s breath quickened. She knew this wasn’t going to end well.

  Sure enough, the big sister grew irritated. Unable to express her feelings to her mom, she began hitting at the little one’s hands, telling her to stop. Mom, who had been absorbed in her phone, refocused on her daughters now, and sharply told the older girl that she was the one who needed to stop, looking at her with scorn before smiling lovingly at the younger one.

  Aside from a brief Black Nationalist phase when she’d considered populating the Black middle class to be a political issue, Vivian had never really wanted kids. But they were vulnerable humans, to be protected from harm, and rescued if they were in trouble. So Vivian kept looking over there, smiling at the older girl whenever she could, trying to provide an affective counterpoint. But this only made things worse, for whenever the mother saw Vivian looking at her daughters, she would cast the older girl a censorious look or grab hold of the young one, trying to control her random squirming.

  Eventually the big sister took the little one onto her lap and started bouncing her around roughly. Again, Vivian felt a sense of foreboding that was incongruous with the innocent behavior being displayed; the little girl liked it. But Vivian never could tolerate roughhousing. She always anticipated broken bones or lost teeth. Her stomach muscles clenched, she reminded herself that these people were not her family.

  A teenage junk food vendor roamed through the car now, offering sweet and salty carbohydrates. The mother purchased two bags of Cheez-Its from the teenager and silently handed one to the older daughter, a wordless apology. Disappearing into their snacks, they looked almost happy now, which helped ease Vivian’s rising cortisol levels.

  Still, she frowned, worrying about each of them, including the mother, though she noted that it is easier to have compassion for people when you aren’t the one subject to their volatility. Vivian saw how over time the older girl would internalize her mother’s contempt, treating herself with brutality whenever any needs surfaced. But by then, the memory of her mother’s loathing having receded, she would be unable to locate its source. It would just seem as if she were “like that.” The fate of the younger daughter, meanwhile, was unclear. She might remain the favorite, leading to a rivalry between the two girls, or the mother could turn on the little one once she evolved into more than a prop and began to have her own personality and desires. Perhaps then the sisters would develop a trauma bond that would enable them to gain perspective on their mother and disrupt their warped dynamic.

  As the trio left the subway car, Vivian thought of the second thing that Paula, the psychologist from the panel, had done that night.

  By the end of the evening, Paula could barely stand, but she didn’t want to leave the bar. Vivian had insisted they head out together (“Too many dudes here”) and they’d shared a cigarette while waiting outside for their respective cars.

  “I don’t want to go back there tomorrow,” Paula said. She worked at another public hospital in the city. “Every day it’s the same. Poor, neglected, abused; poor, neglected, abused.” She looked at Vivian as if weighing the risk of what she wanted to say. “You know what? Sometimes I wish I had at least one of those ‘adverse childhood experiences.’”

  This is why you can’t hang out with white women, Vivian thought. She liked to bait them, though. “Why would you want that?”

  Paula took her final drag, tossed it, and said, “For the story.”

  It was the kind of comment that could make Vivian hate someone for all of eternity.

  As Vivian recalled the incident, she dwelled on the remark. It seemed emblematic of white opportunism and theft. They even want to colonize our experiences! she thought. But before she could map the contours of Paula’s offense to her satisfaction, she was jolted back to the present by the feeling of eyes on her. It was the handrail-tapping man.

  She made eye contact with him and decided he had been looking at her all along, and with sexual intent. She opened her mouth and grimaced a little; then, feeling disappointed in herself for reacting at all, she looked around blithely to show the man how insignificant he was. It was comforting to see so many commuters reading books on this car, scattered among all the people scrolling up and down and swiping left and right on their phones.

  A man across from Vivian was reading the book where an older man sleeps with a young woman, it is unclear who seduced whom, and there are lots of puns. The teenage girl in the corner, meanwhile, read the chatty book of poetry that seemed as if it had been composed by the internet. The older, cerebral-looking bird-woman held the book where a woman’s mysterious illness is never cured, though her presence does have a curative effect on others. An inarticulable desire surged within Vivian. She clamped it down.

  At the next stop, a faceless man got on and as he walked through the train, Vivian imagined him slitting her throat and then casually continuing on through the car while she gasped and writhed on the floor, spraying the rest of the passengers with her blood. Vivian would likely dominate any argument about the feminist ethics of care and yet, in the next moment, she felt herself refuse to give up her seat to the old woman with severe spinal curvature who had just entered the train because she couldn’t bear to do anything that would attract attention right now, so that it was the young white woman whose meticulous French braid was almost certainly the product of a YouTube tutorial who immediately got up and offered the woman her seat.

  Vivian looked up at the handrail-tapping man again. He finally sat down in a seat directly across from her. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she could still feel him looking at her from over there. She pulled a book out of her bag, deciding to use it to cover her face. Vivian had all kinds of feints like this. When she was standing up on the subway, for instance, she liked to position her handrail-holding arm directly in front of her face to hide from a creep sitting below. But her book was not helping now. The sense of being watched made reading difficult and Vivian’s eyes crossed, glazed over. She felt like she was about to be disemboweled. Stop fucking looking at me. She wanted to say it through her teeth.

  The demeanor of men who objectified her often dictated her response. Some men looked like they were capable of swift and brutal aggression. Vivian would never sneer at a man like that. She’d read a news story about a woman who had rebuffed an antisocial man’s advances; he had attacked her with an axe. Not only was the violence surprising, but so was the mechanism, because who walks around with an axe in urban life? With these men, Vivian tended toward obsequiousness. If they said things to her she would sweetly thank them.

  Leering men were often unattractive. She hadn’t quite grasped the psychology of it. Maybe being ugly meant they had nothing to lose. Or maybe the ugly man compensates for his ugliness by being a brute, a counterphobic reaction. In any case, such lewd behavior offended Vivian not only as a feminist but also as a shallow person who believed that although she was no model, she was at least more attractive than the man in question. How dare he address her at all?

  Now another man, a man with a hat, was sitting next to the handrail-tapping man.

  Suddenly the man with the hat pulled out his right earbud.

  He touched the arm of the handrail-tapping man, to get his attention.

  Quickly the outlines of a predatory conspiracy formed in a corner of Vivian’s mind.

  They would isolate and trap her. It would be brutal.

  Vivian looked down at her book again, heat radiating over her back, shoulders, trapezius, and neck. Red splotches bloomed up out of her V-neck dress toward her face. The cramps in her abdomen worsened, and it was unclear whether they were of gastrointestinal or uterine origin. She read the same line over and over for two minutes before she realized she was reading the same line over and over.