Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,55
“Full-body embarrassed, exhausted, and sick of doing my best.” This burnout was overdue.
“Do your worst for a while,” I said.
She looked at me with panicked, genuine helplessness and said, “I can’t do anything,” which for Mishti was the equivalent of “I don’t exist.” She lifted her head off my leg a little and said, “I give up, I really do, Nell, I give it up, the work, the striving, the unrequited love, the gold stars, the failure, the bullshit, the hurt feelings, the only thing I feel is sick, I feel lazy in a . . . total way. Like to exert myself in any way would be to insult the very clear message I am getting from the world or whoever it is shouting: goodbye. Really, Nell, enough, it’s a great word: goodbye. Goodbye to this way of being. I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying way too hard, I’ve been fucking any guy I could get, to punish myself for wanting somebody I couldn’t have,” she said, “and now my body feels punished. Just let me disintegrate. I’ll do it quietly, you won’t even hear.”
Mishti closed her eyes. I wanted to tell her that she could have had Tom, even while he was ostensibly mine, because hearts are always up for grabs. But grabbing puts a dent in your dignity, and dignity is Mishti’s bag.
She rolled onto her side, her ear up toward my face, and I bent down to it and said, “Don’t you goodbye me.” She had sung me the overachiever’s aria and I didn’t know how to make her un-sing it. It had been histrionic but so was Mishti, and within the register of Mishti’s drama this outburst seemed to come from somewhere eerily deep in her. I felt her shoulder trembling against my thigh, as if she were crying, or freezing. If meeting requirements had always kept Mishti on course, and if she no longer felt compelled to meet them, I no longer knew what would check her energy, what would keep her, in all her cosmic flair, on our modest earthly radar. She covered her head with a pillow. Overachievers who stopped achieving were just . . . over? I looked up.
“I was hoping to ask you a chemical question,” I told Anjali but she was walking away. Mishti coiled tighter such that her knees pressed the side of my knees. She didn’t say, “Ask me,” which her non-dog-self would have said. I rested my hands on her knees and told her what I was thinking, which was, “The blessing over the haftorah is nice and melodious.”
Mishti didn’t pretend to need to respond. I looked up over the back of the sofa and through the transparent curtains which nobody had yet lifted. The G train ride from Carroll Gardens to Queens had been bumpy, as if it wanted to burp me. Under the updated LED subway lighting you can admire people in their least flattering state, which reveals where they’re incontestably mighty. I removed the pillow from over Mishti’s face and searched for her mightiness.
The stove gas hissed from the kitchen. Anjali hummed a distressed, exultant tune. Between notes she slapped the spatula against her palm. The house smelled like oil. Winter could be wintered this way, with spatulas, with knees, with smoke.
My deflated friend opened her eyes and finally wanted to talk about Tom. I hadn’t heard from him since Christmas, and could still picture the pull of his lips as he lifted his face from Joan’s and pronounced the single word “Barry.” I had nothing to tell her about where he’d gone, or where Joan had taken him. I suggested she seek him out herself. She told me that she’d never seen Tom hold anything as dear as he’d held Joan in the library that night, and she didn’t have the strength for a chase.
Without strength, Mishti’s love for Tom still carried within it a stubborn conviction that she was right, the way she might have been right about sodium’s neutron count. Right to love him, right that she loved him, right about her choice and her choice to stick to it. She loved Tom, and to love Tom was the right thing for her to do. I admired Mishti’s certainty about this love much more than I admired my own love of certainty.
To distract her from her longing I told her I’d kissed Joan. She asked when, where, I told her, she wasn’t for one second surprised and bore into me