Other Girls Who Were Me

I just couldn’t be left alone.

Alyssa Greenberger was a strange case. As first she was just risible, sending dippy notes to my boyfriend Misha in the History class they shared – she was hungry, said one of the notes Misha showed me. She wanted pizza. She drew a piece of pizza and above it wrote the word “PIZZA.”

We made fun of this for weeks. It was almost cute, the way she went after him; I wasn’t threatened by it, because it was so obvious that Misha and I were together, and that both of us were way out of her league. Publicly I pretended she didn’t exist.

When Misha and I wrote notes, they went way above “PIZZA.” He had recently emigrated with his single mother from what was then Czechoslovakia. He was very political, very into punk rock, for the music but mostly for the screaming optimism that lay behind it. He had huge goals, humanitarian, artistic: he wanted to help reframe society. He felt it was possible.

I was very happy to discuss with him how much better things could be than they were now, to comb through all the existential and moral conundrums, all the frustrations with the limits society continued to force on people. He always signed his notes with a peace sign, the anarchy symbol, and the words I love you.

I too liked to forecast a better future. I was working at Balducci’s on Sixth Avenue after school and on weekends, which meant I couldn’t go with Misha to the Sunday afternoon all-ages hardcore shows at CBGBs, but it also meant that I was earning money, and for that I loved my job.

I wasn’t good at it. I never got promoted to cashier. Instead, I was given shifts in the bread or coffee department. Coffee was the best, because we didn’t serve it, I just had to measure and grind it, and most of the time, because it was in the back of the store, I could just stand around and pick the almond slivers out of the almond roast blend.

Coffee was also near Meats, and throughout the day, the meat guys would slip me wisps of some kind of cured ham, or prosciutto, just to be nice. Every department had its experts – the fish guys (young, roughneck), the meat guys (middle-aged, portly), the cakes and pastries guys (old, Italian) – and then a bunch of high school kids bagging rolls and running the registers.

The bookkeeper was a senior from Stuyvesant who was notoriously beautiful and very sweet. She was the girlfriend of someone important or popular, and I only went back to the office to see her once or twice, but I’m picturing a demure young woman with a heartbreaking face, a face straight from the fifties, and an ivory-colored mohair cardigan. There was a system of pneumatic tubes that ran from every register to her office, and a few times a day, you’d bundle the money and the accounting slip into a canvas bag, put it in a cylindrical case, and stuff the case into the tube, which would whisk it away. I loved this thing. It was the only thing that made working a register seem worthwhile.

Point is, I had a job, and I got a paycheck, and my mother had helped me to set up a bank account at Manufacturers Hanover Trust (or “Manny Hanny,” as she called it – they were one of her biggest clients), where I was building my war chest.

Many times as I was coming home from work, walking down Eastern Parkway towards my mother’s apartment, I imagined that I was walking to my own apartment, where I would find Misha with his forehead in his hand, poring over several books in the lamplight; he’d be so caught up in what he was doing that he wouldn’t even realize I’d come in until I embraced him from behind, smelling like a ham and cheese croissant.

I just couldn’t be left alone. Whatever there was of love, there was never enough of it for me. I tried to get him to skip basketball practice, because I wanted him to spend time with me.

“I can’t skip practice,” he said, incredulous. I sulked, and he looked at me like he was having trouble seeing me, like he couldn’t believe his eyes that I would act like this.

What! We hadn’t been spending time together! This was important! We needed to have a Talk! Basketball was something he loved, something he was good at, something that was good for him. This must have been why I had to try to wreck it.

I walked away from that discussion, leaving him in the hallway saying, “Come on, don’t…” I thought this gave me the power. I’d made him feel discomfort, and only I could remove that discomfort. He removed it himself.

I heard it in the sixth floor bathroom, between the cafeteria and the girls’ locker room. Kim said, Alyssa says Misha gave her a hickey. He was very hickeyish, I don’t know why. We all were. Sucking on each other’s necks too hard.

I said that was bullshit, confident that she was just trying to make trouble around the margins. But she did have a hickey. So what? I knew from being a liar that you could obtain a hickey if you needed one and claim anyone you wanted as its author.

I really couldn’t imagine it being true, but then I realized it could be. It could actually be true. I still hadn’t confronted her for writing him notes; I felt that acknowledging her, even to assert my dominance, would be seen as a show of weakness. Little girls like Alyssa Greenberger didn’t scare me.

I was so much smarter than her. I was so much cooler than her. I was a year older than her. I had a much better body than she did. I had more style. I took him to Danceteria and we got drunk on vodka-and-cranberrys. One of the first things that had attracted Misha was the stylized skull and crossbones I drew on my temple with liquid eyeliner. Michelle wore Keds.

In short: I was brilliant, fascinating, talented, and very sexy. For him to leave me for someone so objectively less good than me – he didn’t leave because she was so appealing. He left because I sucked so much.

(2014)