Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,41

left me, my car had died unexpectedly, and someone named Carlos was stealing my identity and improving my credit in the process. I’d found out the last bit while trying to buy a used car, and had yet to do anything about it because I kind of liked the idea of someone wanting to be me. If I were my parents, I’m not sure Liddie’s the kid I’d worry about, but maybe they’d given up on me.

My mother called three days after Liddie had.

“Terrence,” she said, “you need to talk to your sister.”

“I just talked to my sister,” I said.

“Well, talk to her again. She’s changed her major to some sort of comparative biology nonsense, and she’s not coming home for Thanksgiving this year.”

I thought of last year, when Liddie had come home for Thanksgiving with her white anarchist poet boyfriend and caused my mother to glare at me every time Liddie referred to Thanksgiving as the Day of Native Resistance, as if I were somehow responsible for this. I’d played a drinking game that involved taking a shot of whatever was convenient every time a glare happened, and was utterly shitfaced by the time Liddie drove me home and told me that I ought to watch being drunk around our parents on holidays because it obviously upset them, as if she’d been Marcia Brady all night.

I wasn’t too broken up about scaling back Thanksgiving this year. Liddie and I did better with each other on our own terms. When I talked to her, she said she wasn’t mad or anything, it was just that changing her major from ethnic studies to comparative biology meant switching into a lot of classes late in the semester, and she had some catch-up studying to do. Liddie seemed OK to me, or at least she’d had way more alarming phases. I figured the elephant thing would end, as had the summer she converted to Judaism and the year she stopped eating cooked food.

Difficult phases notwithstanding, Liddie was the most together person in my life, which says maybe more about my life than Liddie’s togetherness. I was a mess before I met Gabi, but it got worse when she left me. We’d had something like a fight the week before she took off, but nothing compared to the worst of them. Fighting with Gabi, I’d thought, was like fighting with Liddie: at the end of the day she wasn’t going anywhere. Gabi, understand, was addicted to bad news. Every morning she read five newspapers in three languages, and if she couldn’t get to a newspaper, she’d start shaking and looking for the nearest television. On really bad days she binged and purged on old microfiche the way bulimic girls I’d known in college did with food, sucking it all in and then hurling it back out into the world at the first opportunity. The worst of the news she thought was appropriate to share in the middle of sex, and when I say worst I mean: dismembered child soldiers, bomb victims burned beyond recognition, elderly women beaten and raped, and when I say middle I mean we’re naked and sweaty and I’m inside her and it’s really not the time. The last time I stopped and said she was fucking weird and perverted.

Without bothering to put clothes on, she’d proceeded to explain to me, not for the first time, that really, all pleasure was perverse, that it was perverse to ever enjoy anything in such an awful world, that any moment of happiness was selfish when infinite horror was always happening somewhere else.

“Tell me,” she’d said. “Tell me, Terrence, how you can ever be happy about something as stupid as sex, in a world where children are beheaded for no reason. Doesn’t that make you really fucking sick?”

“You make me really fucking sick sometimes, Gabi,” I said.

She silently walked into the kitchen, still naked, opened the cabinet, and proceeded to line up my cherry-red drinking glasses and one by one throw them at the living room wall, waiting for the last to shatter before reaching for the next. When she finished she looked up.

“If you’re going to call me crazy, I’m damn well going to act it,” she said.

Technically, I hadn’t called her crazy. I did not, in fact, think she looked so much like a crazy person as a quite rational and calculating person behaving the way she thought a crazy person might—a prospect I found significantly more frightening and not entirely unattractive.