ISSUE 12

Willa Yonkman

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Hysterical Light from Eugene​​​

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The beginning of the end was the pink baby sock I picked out of the window planter on my first day of work. The window planter was full of dry, gray dirt, and one tiny green weed tipped over on itself. I pinched the sock with the trash grabber and dropped it into a scented trash bag. The first task of opening the bar was picking up trash from the patio — the county jail was across the street, and when prisoners were released for a day, they received their possessions in a sealed, clear plastic bag. I often watched them rip open the bag on the sidewalk from my place behind the bar. They leaned against the picnic tables, scattering little shreds of plastic.

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It was as if I had removed all the layers of clothing from my body, one by one, until I stood naked and unadorned, all the context for who I was voided. I was three thousand miles from home. I told Google to draw a straight line across the country, and I followed it, burning gas and money and time.

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A few days before the move, I tripped and fell on the stone steps to my parents’ house and dislocated my shoulder. My mother drove the whole six days from Vermont to Oregon while I sat in the passenger seat with my right arm propped in a sling. We popped a spark plug somewhere around Morgan, Utah, and stopped at a service station for a temporary fix. We had to drive the rest of the way with the windows cracked so the car wouldn’t fill with fumes. We arrived in Eugene dazed, with dry lips.

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Sam and I dropped her off at the Portland airport the day after we arrived and got back in the car to drive the two hours south on I-5. I felt like a newborn baby, utterly helpless. I suppressed the urge to sob. 

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Everything in Oregon was bigger and shabbier and newer. The streets and highways seemed unplanned. There were no boundaries between city and nature; it was one big sprawl. Families of mallards paddled the gray ditchwater running alongside the paid parking lot behind my apartment building. The college students who lived in the dorm complex next door crouched on the damp banks to vape and drink huge iced coffees. People bundled up in sleeping bags with the glassy eyes of children with fevers camped along the hiking trail that overlooked the I-5 and took apart bicycles under bridges.

 

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I found the West Coast to have an aimless, impersonal hospitality that kept me in bed late without feeling bad about it, twisting out from underneath the comforter at eleven, naked and well-rested. The aimlessness lasted all day. Sam worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Roseburg, commuting over an hour to make spreadsheets and maps about how to remove the trees that had been felled: the options were a helicopter or a machine that dragged them. I spent my time applying to random jobs (art museum security guard, hotel front desk worker, fried chicken prep cook) and lingering in the wellness section at Whole Foods. I wouldn’t buy the magnesium powder, but I’d marvel at all the different flavors of it. They ran an essential oil diffuser in the wellness section so you forgot you were in a grocery store, and everything was lined up where it should be — cleansing oils, under-eye gel patches, soy taper candles.

 

Whole Foods lacked the grimy, farmy quality of the co-ops back in Vermont, the base note of manure that undercoated the shelves of organic yogurts and spinning racks of lunar calendars. It was brutally optimized, while the state at large felt suboptimal, lacking in cohesion. Everyone had their eyes fixed on the dusty horizon of the future, and other people were parallel universes not to be pulled out of their orbit by your presence. People drove their cars with the bumpers falling off and ran their shopping carts over your feet. At the Whole Foods self-checkout, you could pay with the palm of your hand. There were no white church spires and clapboard farmhouses, no heavy plaques commemorating floodwater heights on brick buildings. The state lacked context, its history unsolid beneath my feet. I felt unstuck from time, adrift in endless, divine hours.

 

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In Eugene, there were always clothes on the ground. I remember the twisted-up pair of purple leggings half-drowned in a puddle in the Target parking lot, the cheap orange Styrofoam trucker hat balanced on a curb, canvas hi-tops dangling by their laces from a power line. The appearance of clothes started to feel like a bright omen, the fluorescent colors staining the entire coast — cheery, vacant, and abandoned. The colors in the Pacific Northwest were completely alien to my New England childhood — the grass was Day-Glo green through the winter, the Douglas Firs an inky black, the swans skimming the Willamette in the city park a startling evil white. Most of the buildings in Eugene were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s out of cement and painted a fleshy beige. 

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Every morning from eight o’clock to nine, I sat at my desk by the window of our fifth-floor apartment and wrote. I could see puddles of dirty water collecting on the sagging white roofs across the street. I watched frat brothers chase geese into the stream, and an old woman who always wore peacock-colored knit gloves crouched against the metal bars separating the sidewalk from the water to chain-smoke. Even the new builds looked decaying and dilapidated. Sam said it was because the air was so wet and it rained so much that everything molded faster. Everything goes.

 

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The only people who used the sidewalks in Eugene were college students and the homeless, wearers of rejected clothes. College students on the West Coast seemed younger, fresher, more open, and more eager to please than the ones I encountered back East. Most days, I dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, a uniform for disappearing, letting myself fade into an aggregate of serious young faces.

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I walked tumbleweed-empty East 11th Ave to the library or the movie theater, pretending to be in New York City while the real adults with their children hurtled by in hybrid vehicles, insulated from the fester of a wet and mild northwest winter. One cold October night, I watched drunk sorority girls stumble to a formal, shivering in cowl neck silk slip dresses and heels with their oversized iPhones tucked under their arms. One girl was very short and had her arm linked with a boy in shorts and a hoodie. She was wearing more makeup than the other girls, had visible goosebumps on her thin forearms, and was smoking a cigarette in the natural way of someone who grew up around smokers. I felt an immediate and unexplainable tenderness towards her. She was too glamorous for a place like this. I had the urge to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to run.

 

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I went to the library on election day in search of a book of poetry. I walked past the rows of public computer cubicles. They were almost all in use by adults with clenched jaws and claw-like hands moving the mouses. I caught a glimpse of the screen of an old man in a raincoat and a handmade knit cap. He was typing on a black screen in huge white Arial font:

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Dear Yvonne,

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I am getting too old to use the computer!!

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In January, I decided I was going to move to New York by the end of the year, to be a writer. It was the only thing I thought about. I wrote:

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On the East Coast, things like friendship and jobs come more easily, while the daily stuff — dressing appropriately for the weather, driving to the grocery store, going out to get a coffee — is more difficult and sometimes even perilous or impossible. On the West Coast, all of that  is effortless because coffee drive-thrus are open 24 hours, and there’s self-checkout everywhere, and the weather is so consistent you don’t have to think too much about layering. But everything is so easy, it makes everything else seem hard — you don’t have to work for it.

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I’m still hungry, and I guess that’s good. I still feel like when the time is right, I’m going to create something really good and really smart. I still feel slightly drunk on power, like you can just decide to do things and do them. Even though I have to do it broke, and I have to do it inexperienced, and I have to do it crazy. My life won’t be in a holding pattern forever. By the end of this year, the view out my window will be different, and I will be different. The wine bar will be an anecdote. Eugene will be a place on the map. This apartment will sit empty, and I will sit in my desk chair in New York, still writing and still longing, probably still waiting to be chosen.

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The bleached part of my hair grew out into an indistinct rooty brown. One morning, the auto shop called and said the repairs on my Honda would cost my entire savings account. I cried in the shower, then stood in front of the mirror with limp, sopping-wet, combed-out hair and Amazon Basics scissors and sawed off a couple inches of straggly yellow ends, brittle as American Girl Doll hair. I threw the ponytail in the overfilled trash next to the toilet, then ran my fingers from scalp to ends with no resistance. It grew out thick and light brown and glossy, the way it looked in fourth grade. In the YouTube tutorial I watched beforehand, the girl said that you are supposed to cut your hair only when the moon is growing. I looked it up: waxing crescent. Nothing to lose.

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The middle of the end was waking up to my clock radio and hearing the worst thing that happened the day before delivered in the trustworthy female voice of NPR, summed up in one neat sentence. Each one felt like a snipped thread, like the sheer fabric veil between the comforting reassurance of systems and the everyday peril of bombs falling and money running out was unraveling before my eyes. Planes caught fire on the tarmac, war continued uninterrupted, and people lost their jobs. Sam became one of those people. The bits of thread scattered on the floor and made a mess. I would hit the snooze bar, then wake up again to the droning voice announcing the weather — the same for weeks at a time. What got me to touch my feet to the vinyl floor was the unmistakable ache of a new pimple on my chin and the gnawing knowledge of last night’s dishes in the sink.

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I began to get the feeling that our apartment was a shoebox diorama, and I was a small figure made of clay shuffling from room to room. I had never slept in a bedroom so square and white. The two antique dressers that stood next to each other against the wall were too prim and domestic. The tufts of cat hair, like dirty snow, whispered and gathered in the closet. Forty-five minutes would go by while I stared at the cottage cheese ceiling and moved in and out of sleep.          

 

In the shower, the water rose around my ankles and was flecked with grey soap scum and bits of dirt. I bought an all-natural ginger-and-lemongrass-scented body wash called “Energize” to entice myself into getting out of bed, but the smell reminded me of pad thai in a bad way, and left me feeling scrubbed raw instead of clean.

 

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Nights were spent on our gray Ikea couch, anaesthetized by sitcoms I’d seen to the point of desperation, over-comforted by Whole Foods strawberry shortcake parfaits in plastic cups and sauvignon blanc poured into pickle jars. It would make Sam restless — he would get up and pace behind the couch while I sank deeper into my stupor, chuckling dumbly at the screen while hours passed and my eyes grew tight and blurry with blue light.

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Sometimes I would drag us out to a movie. Sam liked the theater in the abandoned mall in Springfield because the seats went all the way back. The best part was walking out into the damp parking lot afterwards and feeling a glimmer of change hanging in the air, a certain freshness or chill that promised things were going to get better and soon. The best movies I saw were the ones that caused me to forget I had a body and the world around me to drop away. I could look in the bathroom mirror after and touch my face, notice that my eyes were wide and my skin pale and soft.

 

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Eventually, it all became too much to bear. I decided I needed to pray in the bath. I’m not religious, but I had found myself reading books about God, once it had become too painful to read books about New York. I saw myself framed like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, my hair wet and plastered to my face, streams of water running over my knees. I would close my eyes and let the water fill my ears until they whooshed with sound. I would deprive myself of my senses and regain them, feeling clean and pink and calm. I would climb out of the tub reborn.

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Of course, everything went wrong. I bent over with my knees on the cat-litter-studded bathmat to scrub the hair and gray scum out of the tub, and when I was satisfied and started running the tap, the water was flecked with dirt and cat hairs. I used baking soda and vinegar to clean the drain, scrubbed the tub until it gleamed, and then ran the tap again.

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When it was time to pray, the bath was cool, and I couldn’t get comfortable. I closed my eyes and begged for help. I opened them and remembered you’re supposed to say amen at the end. I closed them again and did.

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The end of the end was the acrid smell of rotting supermarket eucalyptus that took over everything. In the bar, I collected all the vases off the tables and poured the brown water down the handwash sink, letting the slimy black leaves slide into the drain. I filled a whole trash bag with the fragile heads of dried carnations and kernels of baby’s breath. The smell made me gag. Everything goes. The flowers from Trader Joe’s die the quickest, even the carnations.

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I stood behind the bar and watched the wet winter turn into a hot, dry spring. The vines snaking along the chain-link fence across the street began to flower. I spent my cash tips on pints of Guinness and on-sale supplements from Whole Foods. I booked a one-way plane ticket to Boston for the morning of my twenty-third birthday and took my alphabetized books off the shelves. I cried a lot, dragging tables and folding chairs across the cement floor at work to set up for a catered board meeting, sitting at my desk in my pajamas, on the couch between episodes of television, in bed at night over the sound of sirens and the Amtrak in the distance, in my car listening to my Bob Dylan CD. I looked at the barbed wire fences around the jail while he sang about the hungry women in Juarez, and someone named Saint Annie, and someone named Sweet Melinda, the goddess of gloom. “I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough,” he sang.

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