LYNDA WILLIAMS // 50
LYNDA WILLIAMS
C W: contains depictions of eating disorders.
THE LEAST INTERESTING THING T
he thing I love most about my sister is the water pressure in her shower. You think I’m joking, but Lindsay and I haven’t been close since we were kids, and I don’t know the person she’s become the way I know the settings on her shower head. She greets me at the door with her standard mix of dismay, judgment, and anxiety. “Finally, you’re here. They misspelled Adele’s name on the cake and I don’t have time to return it to the bakery.” Does she know we’re all going to chew it up into human waste? Does she think my niece’s name will be permanently misspelled inside my colon? Does she think Adele will notice? All these reassuring thoughts bounce inside my head as I peel off my jacket, Dean’s leather jacket to be precise. She hugs me and pulls a face that lets me know I reek of sex, booze, and cigarettes. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek instead of telling her that she smells like Listerine. “You need a shower. There’s clean towels in the basement. You’ve got ten minutes.” That’s what I appreciate about my sister. She really takes an interest in how I’m doing. When I step out of the shower, Adele is waiting for me, perched on the closed toilet seat in a pink tulle skirt, brandishing a star-shaped wand. “I knocked.” “But did I invite you in?” She shrugs and asks if I know she’s five today. I tell her that’s why I’m here. “To watch me turn five?” “Yup, to watch you turn five and eat tons of cake.” Her shoulders slump. “You missed it, Aunt Quinn. It happened in the night, before I woke up.” I ask her if she wants me to sleep over when she turns six. She nods. “I’m sorry you missed it, Auntie Quinn. I’m sorry you’re always late.”
Did I mention how much I love the water pressure here? There’s a moment in your life, if trauma hasn’t already come along and plastered shit over everything, when it’s all new. Love, the apartment, your commute, buying groceries, and paying rent. It’s all precious and delicate, wrapped in tissue paper like a bra from Victoria’s Secret. It’s that moment before you cut the tags off and commit to the underwire, the padding, and the lace that leaves a pattern on your skin (and maybe that’s new for awhile, too, say three washings), and then you notice that love has funky toe nails and makes a shitty roommate. The apartment is the size of a bathroom stall, and your commute is a slow march towards death, culminating with your arrival in hell where you spend eternity waiting in the wrong queue at Safeway, and every day is the first of the month. My life is past three washings. I live with three roommates, I’m sleeping with a married man, and I’m working the front desk at a Motel Super 8 to support myself while I try to make it as a spoken word artist. It’s not a career path I would recommend, unless you enjoy having people stare at your shoes once you tell them what you do. By all standards I am fucking it up. It being life. I’ve won the odd poetry slam, but I have over a hundred manuscript rejections and nothing forthcoming in any journals. I am peak fucking it up in the relationship department. The whole married man thing puts frost on Lindsay’s ass. She doesn’t understand what I see in him, and to be fair, I get it. Dean isn’t a headswivelling phenomenon, but the first glance doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes people are attractive until they open their mouth, and then, once you’ve tasted the lukewarm hot-dog water of their personality, the hotness evaporates. Dean is the opposite.