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{the quitter} elinor abbott There were tornado sirens going off when I got out of the car today. They made me want to smoke. They made me want to follow them like the clarion call of apocalypse heralding angels. Such a strange noise. For a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then, I remembered, I remembered Nick telling me it was tornado safety week at school. I also remembered my Uncle Randy telling me that when he was a kid, when those sirens went off, they didn’t know if it was because a tornado was coming or if it was because the commies were dropping the A-bomb. What a world. I lug my groceries up the stairs to the apartment. It’s been 15 months since I’ve had a cigarette. Nick is in the living room when I open the door, playing with the baby. The baby isn’t ours, it’s a loner from his sister. We watch her every Friday, she’s also fifteen months. She goes by Shelly. Nick and Shelly are both sitting with their heads cocked listening to the sound of the sirens. I put the groceries down. “They’re just the tornado sirens,” Nick says, “It’s tornado safety week, remember?” “I’m surprised she isn’t scared by it.” I put my keys into the key bowl. “Were you scared by it?” “A little. I remembered, though, what you said about having to drill the kids at school.” The sirens stop. “That’s right.” “It did scare me at first. It made me want to smoke.” I eye Shelly suspiciously who, in the wake of the sirens, has begun to hobble over to the building blocks, unfazed. “You’re doing so good, buddy. I’m so proud of you.” I sit down in the kitchen, close my eyes for a moment. “I know.” “I know it’s hard.” “You’ve never smoked a cigarette in your life.” “You’re doing really good.” I lay my head down on the kitchen table and gaze out to watch him and Shelly. “Why don’t you come play with us?” Nick asks waving one of Shelly’s little arms at me, “Shelly wants to say hello to her Auntie Billie!” “Tell Shelly Auntie Billie is tired from working all day.” Nick pretends like I said nothing and continues to make puppet faces at the smiling, chubby baby who claps her thick hands. I hate him like this, I find it pathetic. Where has Nick gone? Sarcastic, ass grabbing Nick who likes to fuck in the kitchen and talk social revolution? On Fridays he can’t be found. He’s with the baby. He’s on pause. He makes Shelly wave at me again, bounces her on his knee. I know he’s ready for me to embrace this puppet face making version him. This Daddy, this lover of tiny creatures. I am repelled by the thought. If I give him a tiny creature of his own would he ever come back? Or would he simply retire from being sarcastic, from fucking in the kitchen, would he trade in little red notebooks for diapers and pacifiers? Pacifiers. Pacifiers are cigarettes. They calm and create quiet solidarity. They turn words into smoke. They are insolent youth, tiny comrades you light with matches. Nick used to love my smoky mouth. Now as age descends like napalm into my life, cigarettes become cancer and wrinkles and work clothes that can’t smell like you’ve been out all night at a bar. It’s no longer acceptable. I have been trying to move on. I have been trying to grow up. But I can’t watch Nick and the baby. I excuse myself to go take a shower. Watching the two of them is like looking into the face of my own death. My cigarette-less, sex-less, diaper filled death. Later, in the mirror, in the dusk, I suck my belly in and count all the ribs that I can see. They are like piano keys under my tapping fingers, I want them to play the song of when I didn’t have to search for them, when I ate anything I wanted and never thought twice, when I bent my lithe, naked body indifferently before salacious mouths. Everything was taut, everything was fresh. I make a list of all the things I have quit in the past few years: *Carbs *Processed sugar *Meat *Dairy *Caffeine *Alcohol *Cigarettes *Trashy magazines *Not wearing sunscreen before I go out *Going to sleep with my make-up on *Anything fried *Anything that would make me look a mock version of a person I once was. I don’t want anyone to know how afraid I am. I don’t want anyone to know how much I miss these things I have tried to leave behind. I don’t want anyone to know how badly I want to control my own decay. How I want to slow down the transition into the great abyss of adulthood so that it feels graceful and natural instead of shit fucking terrifying. And how badly all of it, all of it, makes me want to rip open a pack of Camels and stick them in my mouth and nose and ears and lay in the sun breathing these precious toxins, roasting like a turkey. Sometimes I can barley stand it. Nick comes in. “Brenda’s come and picked up Shelly. You can come out of hiding now.” “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” I put my hands on my hips and watch him exit the room without paying notice to my bra and thong clad body. I poke my head out the bedroom door and watch him saunter down the hallway. He does still saunter. In his white t-shirt, in the dusty remains of sunlight he looks a little like smoke. At work all the ex-smokers huddle together like survivors of some terrible battle. We have a strange look in our eyes when someone passes the store on a sunny day with a cigarette in their hand. Then we look at each other. I know, I know. We’ve quit for different reasons, fear of cancer garnered from an Oprah special, the approaching doom of turning 30, still working in retail and spending a large chunk of your change on coffin nails, Loren’s trying to conceive a child, Jeremy was tired of getting winded from walking up and down the stairs. Whatever. There’s a host of breezy college kids among us who flit around, idealism and stupidity gleaming from their eyes, stressing about writing papers and the implications of casual sex. We usually ignore their stories because we’ve already lived them, but every once in a while one of them will produce a gem of youth so shiny and juicy we huddle around them like vampires. “So, then, I went out back to have a cigarette because Renee would not shut up about this guy or whatever—“ Loren holds up her hand to stop Kat from going any further and we all stumble to a halt and cast our gaze upon little Kat. “You smoke?” Loren asks. Kat shrugs, frustrated, this is obviously not the most important part of her story, but it’s the part we all want to hear about. “Sometimes. Only on weekends.” “For how long? How long have you been smoking?” “A few months? A year? What, I don’t know?” “It’s really bad for you,” Loren, who is our manager, says, “I should call your mother.” “Ah!” Cries Kat, “You can’t do that, you can’t call my mother.” “Maybe I should.” Loren’s eyes are malevolent. “Hey, what do you smoke?” I ask. “Camel Turkish Golds.” Kat pouts. I lean on the counter and pull my hair off my neck. “I used to smoke Silvers.” I say, “Loren?” “Marlboro lights.” Jeremy has leaned in and Loren and I turn to look at him. “Reds,” He coughs a little with the thought of them. “You’re hardcore.” I state. He shrugs and rolls his eyes. “So anyways,” Kat continues. But she’s lost us now. We’ve removed the hook of her sweet foolhardiness from our cheeks and are now swimming away back to the memories of our own fool hearts and what became of them. Nick and I go out to dinner. It’s a beautiful restaurant, dark and atmospheric. It reminds me of when we went to Europe. I tell him that and he smiles romantically and offers me a sip of his wine. I refuse because I don’t drink anymore. “Not even a sip?” he says, “It’s a Riesling, it’s your favorite.” I shake my head. I watch the lovely light liquid dance around in his glass as he slides it back across the table and up to his own lips. I examine the menu for anything I can actually eat. “There’s a salmon thing on the other page.” Nick says. I turn to look at it. I occasionally allow myself fish because sometimes my protein starved body demands a sacrifice of flesh, and fish is all I can choke down. But it usually isn’t worth it. I’m haunted by nightmares where I am choking up piles of fish skeletons and apologizing to them for my hand in their death. I don’t like anything that reminds me of death, so I order a salad. “How would you feel if I started smoking again?” I toss out after the waiter leaves. “What? C’mon, you’re doing great. Really great. It’s been fifteen months!” “I know. But what if I just did it for a little while.” “We know how addiction works, babe, and that’s part of it.” I run my hand along my brow, “Would you hate me?” “Of course not, of course I wouldn’t hate you,” He sighs and puts his hands behind his head, “But what’s the point of all this great stuff you’ve been doing for yourself if you’re just going to start smoking again?” As if God is cheering for Nick, a bus drives by outside with an advertisement slapped to its side of dead rats, proclaiming ‘The same poison used to kill rats is in second hand smoke. Are you OK with that?’ Nick goes for the jugular. “I mean, you look great, you look so great. You’ve lost all that weight you were worried about and you did it post quitting smoking. I mean, most smokers gain weight when they quit, right? But not you, Bill, you didn’t need cigarettes to get thin.” I touch my collar bones lightly and then my shoulder. My bones are starting to press out of my skin, like how they were when Nick and I first met and I was just a wisp of a thing. I would’ve blown away in a strong wind. This thinness is, of course, a victory. But I used to feel more comfort from my sharp bones. Now they remind me of last Christmas. When I went to hug my fifty six year old mother, she was all bones, suddenly frail. “Besides,” Nick continues, “You know, it’s not good for your girl stuff.” I cock an eyebrow, “My ‘girl stuff’?” “Yeah, like Loren at your work. She stopped smoking because she wants to have a baby. And smoking is bad for the girl stuff, the baby stuff.” I give him a repugnant stare as if he’s just slapped me. “I’m not trying to have a baby—“ “But one day—“ “You’re the one who just complimented me on how great I look. Do you know what having a baby does to your body, Nick? Do you know what it would do to my body? It wouldn’t be the same anymore. It would belong to the baby, it would be the baby body. I’m not your sister, pal. I’m not Brenda. I’m not twenty-two, I won’t just snap back to a size four in six months. I’m not going to have some little alien fuck up what I’ve worked so hard to make pretty for you.” “Oh, here we go again. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. And you know what, if that’s your big argument then fine, smoke ‘em up.” We eat dinner in complete silence. This doesn’t stop Nick from ordering a second glass of Riesling at the end of the meal and a large piece of decedent white cake. I can’t have any of it. My salad sits like a cold, unloved lump in my shivering stomach. I watch him eat and drink with such jealous passion I nearly burst into tears. It’s all I can do to keep myself from licking the frosting off his plate. I feel like he’s taunting me. “Good for you,” I say bitterly, leaning back in my chair, “Good for you.” “Christ, Billie.” He says with his mouth half full of chewed cake, “You’re the one that does it to yourself. I never asked you. The only thing that matters to me is the smoking.” “Please.” I spit out. He eats his cake and we sit there with the knowledge hanging over us that I will start smoking again, that we’ve always known I was going to start smoking again, and that we’ve always known what exactly that says about me. When I was a teenage Goth kid who often scribbled Sylvia Plath-esque poems in my notebooks, that these days would surely have had me on some potential school shooter list, I used to say that I enjoyed smoking cigarettes because it was like sucking minutes off my life. When I quit smoking, I imagined, rather blithely, that I was adding those minutes back on. I imagined my lungs turning back to a healthy pink. I stared running around the lakes again, my breath felt easy. I didn’t cough at night. But I’ve realized nothing turns the clock back. I am still approaching my next birthday with the unease of a first time skinny dipper. I have a sign in my bathroom cabinet that reads ‘WRINKELS’ hanging above a myriad of fancy skin products promising to freeze my face in time. Kurt Vonnegut was a smoker until he died, at eighty four, as a result of an injury from falling. My friend Beth was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver at twenty five when she still thought she had a good twenty five years of hard drinking ahead of her. Life is full of little surprises. You never know what will do it. This is what I think about as I have my daily existential crisis walking past the corner grocery towards my bus stop. The neon ads for cigarettes hum cheerfully in the windows. Camel No.9?, I think, What the hell are those? They didn’t used to have those. Do they taste good? The ad is an alluring pink. I think about what will happen if I actually have a cigarette. If I have a cigarette will everything else come crashing down? Will I start to eat steak and read Jane magazine? Will I drink copious amounts of booze and act in an unsavory manner? Will I start to wrinkle in the sun like a raisin because I will no longer care about face masks and eye creams? Will I eat cupcakes? Will I get fat? Is the non-smoking will, the Billie who does not smoke, is that what keeps the rest of it glued together? I don’t want Nick to end up being right about me; if you’re going to smoke you might as well eat cake and so on and so forth. I don’t want to prove him right. But I don’t want to prove him wrong either. Proving him wrong might encourage him. It might make him think that I’m not nervous about losing my past but instead nervous about losing my future. It might make him think I want the things he wants, the grown up things, things that married adults do. Have Babies. Buy a House. Get a Career. He might think that I am ready to fully extinguish my silly youthful ways. But I don’t like to extinguish. I like to light up. Loren is carrying a box up the stairs when she stops cold and turns to look at me, hanging my bag up in the break room. “I know, I’m late, I’m really sorry.” I say. She walks down the stairs and puts her box on the table. She cocks her head, “No, no. It’s not that,” She pauses again for a long time, looking at me, “You had a cigarette, didn’t you?” “Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I did. Fuck, I’m sorry, do I smell all gross? I just washed my hands.” She sits down and shakes her head, “No, you’re fine. You just…you had a cigarette.” I stuff my hands in my pockets, “I did. I know. I’m sorry. I know we both kinda…quit at the same time.” She looks at me, crosses her legs. “What was it like?” I think about this for a while. “Strange. Equal amounts of relief and shame.” She looks so sad that I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve let you down.” She shakes her head, “No, you haven’t. I just…I wanted one so bad this morning. So bad—“, She starts but then Jeremy comes down the stairs. “Oh, hey Billie, you’re here, good, the guy from I.T is on line one for you.” Loren waves her hand dismissively, “Oh, Ed can wait. Get down here, Jeremy.” Jeremy lumbers the rest of the way down, concern spreading across his face. “Is everything okay?” “Billie started smoking again.” “What?” He looks shocked. “Hey,” I point at Loren, “I had one cigarette this morning.” “Jesus, Billie, really?” Jeremy says. They both stare at me, blankly, like children. I don’t know what to do, what to say. “You can both have one if you want. I won’t tell anyone. I’m sorry. I don’t know.” I turn my hands up, a confession of guilt. “It’s okay, Bill,” Jeremy says, “It’s okay. I’ve got a pack in my coat pocket.” “What? No? Really?” My eyes turn into saucers. He nods his head, a little amused. “Yeah.” He shrugs, “It’s hard when I go out to the bars.” “I’ve got a pack hidden under the sink in the guest bathroom.” Loren confesses, “I think Larry knows but we just don’t say anything. Does Nick know?” “Well, I mean, it just happened this morning. Under the sink, Loren? Christ, do you live in a sitcom?” I cover my mouth and start to laugh. “Yeah, I know, right? Under the sink. It’s ridiculous.” We all start to laugh in an embarrassed, relieved way. A way that makes us all companeros. I look around at the three of us. Degenerates. Liars. Punks. |
