The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [67]
You know what to do. You floor it. Laughing that maniacal laugh of a 37 year old divorced woman who should be dead but isn’t.
A little soggy voice in your head goes take the next exit ramp and get your drunk ass home which you see as if you are looking through water up ahead you take it and you let go of the steering wheel like your hands are floating away from things until BAM you drive head-on into another car and your airbags deploy like two enormous fatty sagging breasts and the police come and you are sauced beyond belief and everything smells a little like gunpowder and scotch and it’s ma’am get out of the car and ma’am stand on one foot and count backwards from 100 with your eyes closed and with this stick up your ass and balancing an egg on your left tit and what else?
You are cuffed and breathalyzed. You blow a number out of orbit. Don’t even try. You are so beyond the legal limit you could power a car. Gimme a D to the U to the I. Oh and in case you were feeling any shred of hotness left in your bones, when you look pleadingly into the young male cop’s rearview on the car ride to the facility and say, couldn’t you just take me home? With what you think are pout lips and bed blond hair, he looks back at you with - you guessed it - woman, you are old as shit pity in his eyes.
Inside the jail the rerun begins. The first thing that happens that has already happened is that you are inside. You have been in jail before. You have a record. Not very many people know that since you look exactly like a Visiting Writer and anyhow you have always been a snappy dresser.
The second thing that happens that has already happened is there is another woman in the holding cell who is going through heroin withdrawal. She’s drooling and she’s in a tight ball arms choking knees and she’s banging her head back against the wall and spitting about every eight seconds. Your left arm aches. Your feet go numb. You go sit next to her. You look a little bit like a martyr-ish crappy-ass too white benevolent Visiting Writer on the outside but what’s not visible to the naked eye is that you haven’t been clean all that many years, which suddenly has shrunken to the size of a human head. Weren’t you getting a little cocky about it too, your beautiful recovery, your distancing yourself from yourselfstory.
Which takes you to the third thing that happens over again which is how quickly you become the Universal Caretaker when YOU are the sorry ass loser who needs the HELP, giving your socks to the black woman on welfare and holding the hand of the lumpy 50-year old woman who is actually maybe 28. You find yourself dialing the number of the boyfriend of the crack queen with the Alice Cooper mascara drool face. No really, you are on the payphone calling for her even though she has choke bruises around her neck, she begs you to call him so you do, you intervene, you become an objective outside resource, you tell him to call and drop the charges so she can get out since it is so obvious that he has abused her and later in life she will have one helluvuh case, one in which you will be a witness of course, watch out guy, you teach Women’s Studies, and he proceeds to describe to you what she did to his living room and his cat and his motorcycle with a baseball bat and the house on fire before he calls you a fucking cunt whore ignorant bitch and hangs up.
Undeterred, you find yourself calling the guard to get the fat woman some Tylenol as you listen to the Christian chick with a silk scarf and a screw loose self-narrating her experience with the guy from the hotel bar who she believed was there for the Jesus on Ice convention. All of this activity suddenly takes its psychosomatic toll on you and your morning after green puke bellied nasty kicks in and you realize with a kind of brick to the lower spine feeling