I Regret Everything by Seth Greenland

Author:Seth Greenland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2015-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

SPAULDING

Drunk, Maybe, But Not Numb

The flowers were a miscalculation considering Mr. Best had barely looked at me since my drunken lunge in the taxi. It seemed like an excellent idea to back off. When some office errand brought me past his open door it was eyes straight ahead. At night I rode the train to Connecticut and tried to not think of ways to complicate my life. My encounter with the hobo had freaked me out so it wasn’t like I could go for walks. Instead, I wrote or baked or helped Marshall in his garden. I still wasn’t sure if Edward P was convinced that psycho steeplechase had happened but I knew Marshall believed me. He didn’t want to go out either so we spent a lot of time together watching movies or writing in our journals. When Katrina wasn’t around I let him try on my clothes.

The summer workshop at Barnard was a solid anchor and forced me to get some work done. I even managed to write a few poems that weren’t awful. I brought a tray of homemade cookies to the class to help further erase any memories of my appalling debut. That was the positive. The negative was that in late July I was eating dinner with my mother and her boyfriend. Dodd was fervently vegan and had persuaded Harlee to embrace veganism so we were dining at Zen Yeah! (Yes, there was an exclamation point in the name of the restaurant) on Amsterdam Avenue. In the wake of my move to Connecticut I had suggested that the two of us have dinner one night a week. This was the second time Dodd had joined us. He was around my mother’s age and had thinning gray hair he liked to run his fingers through. There was a little soul patch under his lower lip and he wore gold wire-rimmed glasses. He had the baggy look of someone who used to weigh a lot more. Going from the world of finance to the world of massage was more than just a career change. He altered his diet, started exercising, shed the pounds, began meditating, and in every way became a role model for my mother. Dodd was her guru. At our previous dinner he had delivered an entire speech about colon health. I’m still not sure what a colon does but my mother listened rapturously. When I had asked why we couldn’t make these meals a mother/daughter experience, she said,

—Dodd’s in my life now, Spaulding, so he’s in yours, too.

How do you respond to that? Why was I meant to have a relationship with whomever it was she happened to be having sex with? Seriously. It’s hard to say whether it was guilt, or habit, or residual affection for my mother that put me at the table for three in the corner of Zen Yeah! but there I was picking at something orange made from tempeh. To steel myself for the dinner I’d had several drinks. It was the first time I had touched alcohol since that night with Mr.

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