I sold my novel and bought a kimono bathrobe. I thought, looking in the mirror at my voluminous sleeves, I’m a writer now. Only, my bills need a day job. Only, my ovaries are pulpy. Only, I’m a carefully built skyscraper, and my boyfriend is a demolitions expert with an itchy trigger finger.
Inside a near-empty gay bar in Illinois, I wait for my cousin whom I’ve never met—my uncle’s wife’s mother’s sister’s daughter’s son. My cousin who lives in Darwin, Australia, and I have ended up working for John Deere at the company’s world headquarters three hours outside of Chicago. Necessary, logical work, for which they pay us handsomely.
On the weekends, I throw parties for my writer friends. I call them salons. I dim the lights in my apartment, push all the furniture to the edges of the room, and let thirty writers bump off each other like coins in a dryer. For a night I can pretend to be Gertrude Stein with my beer and pipe, and for a night I find it easy to love. Everyone is pretty in shadow.
Behind me, a young butch lesbian and her friend are gossiping over someone’s ex girlfriend dating someone else’s ex girlfriend.
The cyst on my ovary is the size of a golf ball. I saw it light up on the screen even though the ultrasound technician tried to angle it so I couldn’t look. Standard procedure, perhaps, for a patient as young as I look. Only, I’m almost thirty, and my mother reminds me every day that I’ve failed her.
My cousin is late. And handsome. And very late. And, technically, not my cousin. But sex would be complicated, and he’s probably a virgin, and his English is not so good, so I let it go. He watches the clientele with sharp eyes. The place is dark except for neon beer signs and a jukebox in the corner that doesn’t work. A truck driver sitting at the bar has been shooting me looks, and earlier he tried to tell me a joke in Spanish, but all I could do was force a laugh and take the shitty beer he offered.
“What are your hobbies?” I ask my cousin.
“Hobbies?” He thinks about it, jutting out his too-proud chin.
“Is that too American of me to ask?”
“Very American,” he says. He adjusts the collar of his shirt.
I get the feeling he changed after work, or else that collar wouldn’t be so crisp. I wish I’d thought to shower.
He insists on paying for my meal, though I make more than he does. We run out of things to talk about by the time we get rice balls for dessert. Rolling around on the plate, looking like the picture of swollen eggs on the wall of my gynecologist’s office. At any moment, the cyst on my ovary can burst. I have a party to throw this weekend. I have a beer to drink when I get back to my room. I have a shower to take, clothes to lay out for the morning, clients to meet, hands to shake, smiles and lunches and computer code and respectable paychecks, and, I think, maybe I should return the kimono bathrobe.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two hybrid chapbooks (I Once Met You But You Were Dead, which won the Split Lip Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest; and Dominant Genes, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Contest), two forthcoming graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one forthcoming collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram.
Photo by Free Stocks