And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould

Author:Emily Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

6

Off-Leash

Lee is the first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning, a heavy warmth in the bed next to me, almost like a person. Since I’ve been sleeping next to a person for the last few years, her presence isn’t uncomfortable, except at the moment when I realize she is a dog, not a person. Then it’s like I’m feeling around for the place where pain will be—poking at a blister and finding that the stretched skin is a little bit sore but mostly just tautly menacing, full of the threat of popping.

Lee observes the change in my breathing and immediately gets that I’m awake and starts barking and whining and wagging her tail, begging to be taken to the park. She is a beautiful, endearingly stupid pit bull mix with a brown spot on her yellow back that’s like a button you can press to make her happy. She likes to have the spot gently thumped. I roll out of bed and thump her for a while and then I get dressed. It’s summer, so I don’t have to do much in the way of getting dressed: flip-flops, gym shorts, ponytail. I feel butch and athletic. It’s crazy to think that a few months ago I felt so weak and tired. A few months ago, I had sat on the edge of my bed on weekends, when there was no real reason to get out of bed, and cried, feeling the weakness radiating from the center of my chest all along my limbs. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?” Joseph had asked me. Later, he told me that this had been my chance to break up with him the right way, the clean, good way: “I asked!”

In the next room, my mom is asleep on the foldout couch. I invited her to the apartment where I’m dogsitting while I wait to move into a new apartment—an apartment where, for the first time, I’ll live alone. My friend Daria lives nominally alone in this apartment with Lee, but a tie rack in the closet is a sign that the arrangement isn’t going to last much longer: Daria’s boyfriend will move in, it’s only a matter of time. Every girl lives with her boyfriend in New York; all of my friends do, at least, because living with your boyfriend means paying hundreds of dollars less per month in rent than you otherwise would. Sharing a one-bedroom is hundreds of dollars a month less expensive than living with a roommate and up to a thousand dollars a month less expensive than living alone, and in a city where a decently livable one-bedroom in anything like an okay neighborhood rents for a minimum of $1,600, you don’t have to be a cheapskate or a cynic to make this calculation. This calculation makes it seem like it’s a good idea to always be in love, or at least looking for love, or pretending to be looking or pretending to be in love.

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