Leaving her advisor’s office, Skylar stopped on the steps of Verner Hall and stared out at the library courtyard. Leaves were spitting out into the air; in her smudgy vision they hung there, flipping gravity the bird, flickering at her some untranslatable message. The trees seemed to dilate and contract as they siphoned stray ripples of carbon dioxide off the current of passing undergrads, appropriate for no kind of weather in their baseball caps over Patagonia jackets over khaki shorts over Ugg boots or sandals. Though she was standing still, Skylar felt the same process occurring behind her eyes and, at larger scale, in the courtyard, across campus: it was all hanging together, but only just, like the unfused fragments of a newborn’s skull. At any moment the very ions of the air around her might rend apart, and everything split into such dizzyingly small chunks that even Dr. Kepler’s stuffy office (“You’re not making great progress in your major”) suddenly carried the grim significance of a life raft.
A blonde dreadlocked boy in a Bob Marley shirt wheeled his bike past her. Her eyes settled on the letters on his shirt, MARLEY, and shuffled through some free association. Marley and Me, a movie she hadn’t liked. Marley Dukes, a girl who’d been with her at either South Panola High or art school, she couldn’t remember which. “Marley was dead,” the first words of A Christmas Carol. She stuck on that, and another line from that book came to her, Scrooge speaking to Marley’s ghost: “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you…” Not real. Gravy. Food. So that was it; she was hungry.
Skylar was sure she didn’t get hungry like other people. Her stomach bypassed the appetite stage and cut straight to a deep, subliminal, mind-clouding ache, so the impulse to eat had to float up through volumes of static to register with her. It took a slurred word or a paintbrush dropping out of her trembling hand to remind her that she hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. The eureka moment–that she wasn’t dying, the world wasn’t sliding apart under her feet, she just needed to eat–was always followed by a good dose of self-flagellation for having failed to recognize the pattern. “Do we really have to go through this every day?” she’d ask herself over an emergency bag of trail mix purchased from the Student Union, a few magic handfuls returning her from the netherworld. On the bus ride to her apartment she invoked her version of the mantra her mother had taught her for nightmares–“It’s just a dream, just a dream.”
“You’re just hungry, you’re just hungry,” she was still whispering to herself as she rooted for her key and staggered inside the apartment, clumsy for the reason she kept reaffirming, and clawed through the freezer for the necessary items.
The appetite problem showed in her small-boned, Dickensian-waif frame that prompted doctors at the campus health clinic to mysteriously waive her flu shot fees and other people’s parents to send her home loaded down with leftovers–“orphan chic,” India called the effect. A sketch from her stint as a nude model for the art department lay tucked away in a sketchbook in her bedroom, on which the artist had brought to bear her skill with shading on Skylar’s assertive clavicles and ribs. Arrowhead cheekbones, thin unindented lips, freckles and small white teeth that could have been her baby teeth lent her an elfin androgyny–she’d been the obvious choice for Peter Pan in a middle-school production. Her nebulous gender was perhaps overcompensated for by a reef of honey-blonde curls into which pencil after pencil could be stuck from a desk behind her without notice. In humidity it bristled to an afro; it often took minutes to suppress it beneath her flat-billed work hat at Lenny’s. With only a tendril or two showing, she was often called “dude” by customers, and she found the hat a useful deterrent for catcalls.
“I don’t think it’s an exclusively female problem,” said her friend Steven, who flat-ironed his hair down to his shoulders. “I get catcalled from behind all the time.”
She started the microwave. The dish was a holdover from her summer living with India; it was the absolute cheapest meal they could devise: frozen chicken strips with frozen mixed vegetables, slathered in tomato sauce and stuck in the microwave for 2-3 minutes. For two months it had been their ambrosia.
India studied philosophy at Berkeley; she’d bought a house in the city and invited Skylar for a visit which the latter silently decided would last all summer. By the end of spring term the university was holding her at arm’s length, with no housing, zero financial aid, her beloved professors and TAs away on fellowships or vacationing in southern Italy (“Buona fortuna,” she’d typed, in tears, to Dr. Kepler). Even Lenny’s seemed to be rejecting her: her manager kept her steel-cleaning and bread-pan-scraping through her rapidly dwindling shifts to justify her being there at all when a lunch rush might consist of five or six orders. “Skylar,” he told her gently after she’d spent ten minutes shining the same steel drawer, “you’ve gotta go home.”
In lieu of asking to live with India–or just telling her she was living with her, the kind of assertive option that occurred to her as something her badass alter-ego might do–she had instead launched an aggressive campaign of pulling her weight. One afternoon India came home from work to find a clearing in the front hall where the waist-high rows of encyclopedias had been. A gray-to-white gradient, like a shift in geological eras, lined the wall in their place. She found the landing cleared as well, and could walk to the bathroom without the loose board in the hallway tilting the Jenga towers of her Prousts and Foucaults. While reorganizing the closet Skylar had happened on two cedar bookcases, unassembled and still in their IKEA packaging, and had spent the afternoon assembling and stocking them according to subject–existentialists on one shelf, Proust in his own VIP section, pulps–India admitted a proud/guilty affection for Hammett and Chandler – stacked on the edges to serve as bookends. She looked up from scrubbing dust and insect wings off her hands in the bathroom and met India’s hesitant grin. She seemed to be waiting for a punchline.
“I got bored,” she said.
“Well I’m glad you did; this place was getting to be a literary graveyard. They should hire you for that show. What’s it called?”
“Hoarders.”
“That’s it.”
To cut the silence that followed, Skylar said, “I made stir-fry with the rest of that chicken. It’s in the fridge.”
The longer she stayed the more guilt she accumulated, and so her methods became more violent. India came in one afternoon to find her kitchen scraped of its previous tenant’s frumpy wallpaper and repapered in paisley. Skylar sat at the kitchen table in a tank top and cargo shorts, quietly smoking a joint.
“Should have done it in yellow, my neurotic bride.”
Her pot dealer offered her a discount on a bag of grout and taught her how to retile the hall bathroom. She bought a large canvas in the Castro and painted scenes of India dialoguing with her favorite philosophers in the School of Athens, with herself styled after Diogenes. When there was nothing left to clean or refinish or paint she would orbit the apartment aimlessly until she ran into the liquor cabinet or the beaded bag in which she and India kept their pot. By the time India came home she would be curled on the newly reupholstered sofa in paint-splattered jeans, half-awake and vaguely resentful.
Despite having lived with India for a year at boarding school, Skylar hadn’t noticed until San Francisco the disparity in their outlooks on money and privilege. She’d funded the trip with excess scholarship money, with enough of her Pell grant left over for pizza and clothes shopping in the Castro. India blinked at her in a consignment shop while Skylar explained the arrangement, slouching into a green denim jacket with gold buttons. “That’s not what school money is for,” she said. “You should have saved it, taken an extra class.”
One afternoon while walking in the Castro they passed a young woman seated on an overturned crate on the sidewalk, strumming through a not-quite-good acoustic rendition of a Phoenix song. Skylar doubled back to drop a dollar in her open guitar case. India quizzed her about it once they were out of earshot.
“Did you think that was good?”
“Not really.” Then, suddenly feeling the need to defend herself: “But it’s cold out. And maybe this is the only way she has to make money.”
“You shouldn’t have given her money unless you thought it was good,” India said. “People shouldn’t be allowed to just sit around collecting money without any discernible merit. I mean, we barely even heard her, we were walking too fast. And so is everybody else; but when they see the guitar case they stop and throw in a dollar. Why? It’s undeserved.”
Skylar didn’t know what to say. Tipping a street musician was just what you did; it was one of those unambiguously positive acts, like buying local produce or giving a blanket to a homeless person. Good or not good, a performer who would willingly play in thirty-five-degree weather, never demanding money, only suggesting with her open guitar case, deserved some recognition. But now she felt an insane impulse to double back yet again and retrieve her dollar. “Sorry, but I can’t in good conscience pay you for a song I didn’t really listen to.”
It struck her that India might have no concept of what it would be like to rely on passersby for money, and with her diplomat parents and regular cash infusions had never experienced poverty, a condition which in Skylar’s mind trumped any arguments about artistic merit. Then again, she reasoned, she didn’t know anything about this woman’s financial situation. She could be a student at Berkeley conducting a sociological study, or a covert right-wing activist who would donate her dollar to a pro-life lobby. Regardless, India’s objection had deflated one of Skylar’s trusted pockets of reassurance, and she spent the rest of the day disoriented.
