blindsided. We have no idea what hit us. We think we’re diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium. It takes us until thirty to figure out what it was that sucked the joy from our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even while our exteriors made us seem as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness.
The message on my answering machine the next morning was from The Dwarf To Whom I Report. His name is Liam.
I hope your surgery went okay, Liz. You didn’t miss too much here at the office. I’m having Donna courier you over a few files for you to pick away at over the next week while you recover. Sorry I missed you. Call any time.
What? I didn’t miss anything? Heaven forbid anything even quasi-dramatic might occur in the cubicle farm of Landover Communication Systems …
Liz, there was a fire …
Liz, we all got naked at lunch hour and interfered with each other …
Liz, those voices in my head? They’re real.
Well, the thing about Liam is that he actually enjoys his work. This is inconceivable to me. On a few occasions I’ve tried to mimic his cheer, but no go. To me a job is a job is a job, and before you know it, poof! it’s all over and they’re throwing your ashes off Lions Gate Bridge.
Liam feels many things I don’t, for example a sense of mission as well as indifference to the emotional lives of others, including me. This is possibly to be expected, as I’m plain, unsalvageably plain. When I was born, the doctor took one look as he held me, bloodied and squalling, and asked the nurse if there was anything good on TV that night. My parents looked at me, said, “Well, whatever,” and then discussed what colour to reupholster the living-room sofa. I’m only half joking.
People look at me and forget I’m here. To be honest, I don’t even have to try to make myself invisible, it just happens. But evidently I’m not invisible enough to Liam, especially if he thought I might like to “pick away at a few files” while I get over these teeth.
One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass—that I’ll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I’ve wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure.
I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I’ve kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn’t totally depress me.
If I could go back in time two decades and give just one piece of advice to a younger me, it would be, “Don’t worry so damn much.” But because young people never believe old people, I’d most likely ignore my own advice.
If there’s a future Liz Dunn out there in, say, 2034, may I respectfully ask you to time travel back to right now and give me the advice I need? I promise you, I’ll listen, and I’ll give you a piece of my philodendron to take back with you so you can grow your own plant there.
I ended up sleeping until the next afternoon—surgery can really take a whack out of you. My verklempt-o-thon was well in progress when my older sister Leslie dropped by, intruding upon one of the most wrenching of my verklempt-o-thon’s moments, the end of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis when the family realizes they’re doomed to the gas chambers. I was slightly looped on Percocets, and my eyes were hound-dog red.
“You look like hell, Liz. Like you have mumps.”
“Thank you, Leslie, but I can’t say the same for you.”
“It’s this jacket—it’s new. What do you think?” Leslie twirled on the carpet. Leslie’s beauty truly makes me a genetic punchline. When we were young, no amount of documentation could convince us we were biological sisters.
“It’s very you.” Cripes. Leslie vomits and pieces of undigested Vanity Fair articles come up—but she’s never fooled me for a moment with her fashion slave persona. I see through it, which is why she relaxes around me.
“Look at this place, Liz. Open the curtains.”
“No.”
“Okay then, I think I’ll smoke.”
“Sure.” I like cigarette smoke in a room. At least then the room doesn’t look or feel dead.
We lit up, and Leslie surveyed the condo with her real estate agent’s eye for upsellability. Sparkling Norgate Park fixer-upper/1bdr/1bth/character kitchen/one owner. “Did Mother torture you yesterday?”
I paused the video. “She had to cancel lunch with Sylvia.”
“Cancelling lunch with Sylvia? That’s a baddy. Did it inch up the guilt a notch or two?”
“I… Don’t get me started.”
“I’d have driven you if it weren’t for the kids’ recital.”
Leslie kept shrugging her shoulders in a hunched way I’d never before seen. “Leslie, you look fidgety, and what’s with the shoulders?”
“My tits are killing me.”
“Still?”
I thought she’d inhale the whole cigarette in one drag. “Good God, yes.” The exhaled smoke resembled the Challenger explosion. “Oh, to be flat like you, Liz. You’re so lucky.”
“Thank you. Can’t you just have the … bags or whatever they are removed?”
“Too late. Mike’s bonded with them.” She cast her eyes toward my kitchen. “Any food around here?”
“Chocolate pudding, some Jell-O—some chicken-with-rice soup.”
She snooped around my kitchen area: butcher block counters and steel appliances—the sole luxurious addition the contractor made to the place. “Liz, you eat like you’re on welfare. There’s not one fresh anything in your whole kitchen.” She opened and closed the fridge door. “And not even one magnet or photo on your fridge. Where’s the Valentine’s Day card Brianna made you? Are you trying to clinically depress your visitors?”
“I don’t have visitors. You. Mother. William.”
“Liz, everyone has visitors.”
“Not me.”
She changed tack and removed the Pyrex bowl filled with Jell-O. “I’m going to eat your Jell-O. It’s red. What flavour is it?”
“Red Jell-O is red Jell-O.”
Her gold wrist jewellery clattered as she spooned down the goo I’d been saving for Terms of Endearment. She asked me, “Have you seen my bus stop yet?”
“Your what?”
“I have my own bus stop bench ad now, with a big black-and-white
