Scituate, Massachusetts is a coastal town south of Boston where abandoned buildings that once processed Irish moss coexist with luxury condominiums built to quench the incessant thirst for water-side realty. It’s a wholesome looking town with quaint colonials, hydrangea bushes galore, and a main street replete with an ice cream shop, hardware store, and a two lane bowling alley. Here, generations of families have lived, worked, and played, most of them oblivious to or undesiring of the big city to their north.
After Steve and I break up, I often barrel down the five lane highway from Cambridge, my home, to Scituate to find solace in the sea air and in the company of my aunt and uncle, two, true practioners of the adage, “Come anytime!” Their marriage is the second for the both of them and their love has a serene beauty that echoes their surroundings. I appear at their doorstep, like the pesky greenheads that ruin July for beachgoers, but my aunt and uncle tolerate me, even welcome me, despite my pesky exterior. When I seek my relatives’ company I am in awe of their active consumption of life. Compared to the dark exile of my shade drawn living room where I smoke cigarette after cigarette, their busy lives dazzle me like the thrill of Technicolor after watching black and white.
One Sunday, I arrive unannounced and find my aunt finishing her morning coffee. “Oh, good,” she greets me without any register of surprise, “you’re just in time for yoga. Grab the mats from the front closet. I have to go to the bathroom and then, we’ll go.” She tosses back the last swallow of her coffee and turns to put her ivory mug in the sink. On our short trip to the yoga center, my aunt chatters away and I let her words wash over me. I swim in sadness, numbingly cold and murky, and just being near my aunt clarifies the water and reminds me there is a surface. In class, I bend and stretch hoping the yogic energy will lift me.
Later that afternoon, my uncle coaxes me out of the house and into their detached garage to admire his recently purchased motorcycle. I listen to him prattle on and try to determine why he is so animated, his lips move rapidly, his hands gesticulate. I hear his voice but my uncle appears otherworldly to me, like a holographic image. I examine his earnest face as he explains the shiny engine and wonder how to acquire his joie de vivre. “Maybe,” I ask myself, “I should get a motorcycle?”
One evening, when the phone isn’t ringing, the dog requiring a walk, or the laundry in need of folding, my aunt sits with me on her yellow, chintz couch in front of the living room fireplace. She takes a noisy slurp of tea, eases back into the flowery pillows, and sighs. “Isn’t this pleasant?” she asks.
I look at her surreptiously; pleasant or any variation of the word is not in my current vocabulary. “Yes,” I say. I am still able to recall the proper way to respond to comments outside my mind. “This is pleasant. What do you think Steve is doing?”
“Sheila,” my aunt responds tersely and puts her mug on the coffee table with a bang, “you’ve got to try and stop thinking of him.”
She speaks in an instructive tone and I sense a lecture follows. “Even if you were to get back together with Steve it’s important that you use this time to think of yourself not just how to get him back. You two fought a tremendous amount,” she reminds me, “and you know I thought he was verbally abusive. Think of how often you were upset.”
“So, you think we’ll get back together?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “The important thing is that you grow. Get on with your life. You cannot live in the past.”
“But he’s dating someone else. How would we get back together?” I say.
“Sheila, this is not what I am talking about,” my aunt snaps. “I’m concerned about you. Your situation is not going to improve if you keep making yourself miserable. How is that going to help?”
“You’re right. You’re right,” I acquiesce. “I am miserable.”
“You need to stop going online and looking at what he is doing,” she says. I think she is encouraged she may have made some headway. “It’s poison and, if you ever want to be in his life again, even as a friend, you need to respect his privacy.”
“They’re not private sites. I’m not tapping into any place that requires a password. They’re online for all to see,” I say.
“Yes, but you don’t need to be looking. He has a right to his privacy and you need to respect that. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to look.” Her suggestion sounds reasonable but at the same time intolerable to my ears. She is unyielding. “And you need to stop writing her.” My aunt refers to Steve’s new girlfriend, Marisol.
I snicker. I had created a fake profile on ‘myspace’ and disguised myself as a 22 year old computer engineering student at Boston University living in a town bordering hers. I was accepted to be her ‘friend’ and Marisol writes me, aka artemobile, multiple times a day asking for advice, flirting, and sending perky messages.
“Yeah, it’s funny,” my aunt allows. She gives me a piercing look. “You need to stop. It’s not right.”
“Do you think they’ll last?” I ask. I know her answer because I have asked her hundreds of times and I love to get her going on this subject.
“Definitely not!" Look at the way they met! On-line,” she says. She practically spits the words. Her disdain and prediction are a salve for my broken heart.
“So, how long do you think they’ll last?” I ask. I am in full obsess mode.
She leans back and considers the question. I can tell I have engaged her. “I don’t know – nine months . . . a year?”
I am as incorrigible as my niece who watches the ending of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ over and over again, “Really, just one year?” I say with glee.
At about 9:30 that night, I sit down at my aunt’s computer expecting to find a note from Marisol on my ruse of a ‘myspace’ page. Her computer activity is constant, not an hour passes that she isn’t online. As soon as I log in, she sends me, aka artemobile, a message. I try to sound 22 years old and male.
What’s up?
I need your help.
Boy problems.
The doctor is in.
No. I really need to talk.
What’s your screenname?
“Crap,” I think. I don’t have an instant messaging account for my fake personality. I stall for time.
ho
I take care of gotta take care of something real quick.
brb
I log in and establish an account with a profile matching artemobile, log back into ‘myspace’, and send a note to Marisol with my new screenname. As I wait for her, I add her name to my ‘alert’ list. She signs on and I hear an electronic blurp. She begins.
hi
hey
me so sad
talk to me
it’s a boy
no. not u. u r hot!
well, it is
what’s going on?
I have been going out with this guy and he’ll only hug me.
is he getting over someone else?
no. his old gf is a baitch and she’s old!
maybe he’s shy
L
have you tried to kiss him?
YES!
what kind of stuff have you done together?
bars, bowling, movies . . .
huh.
I think he really likes me.
why’s that?
his face lights up every time I see him.
well, hang in. some guys just take a while to make the first move.
ok. ty.
no prob. ttyl.
I am overjoyed with the news, he hasn’t even kissed her! I float downstairs, my heart a helium balloon, and join my aunt in the kitchen.
“You seem happy,” she notices.
“I am. I am.” I sing.
“Okay,” she says, “what did you see or hear?”
“Steve hasn’t even kissed her. It could be that he’s not that into her.”
“Could be,” my aunt agrees then rolls her eyes. “Sheila, are your moods going to depend on what’s going on with them?”
I understand her point; “Okay,” I concede and hide my joy.
After sharing a bowl of ice cream with my aunt, I leap upstairs and log into my fake ‘myspace’ account. Marisol has written to artemobile. She attaches a red, sparkling heart to her message.
hurray!
I went over to his house and we kissed!
I asked him to be my bf and he said yes!
congrats! I type in reply, log out, and go out on the front porch for a cigarette.
The cyber tete-a-tetes between artemobile and Marisol transpire daily and, in addition, I communicate with Steve multiple times a day as myself, the jilted ex-girlfriend. Steve always responds and infrequently initiates the communications but he distances himself, weaning his availability to mere emails. I strain to maintain the connection between us with the logic that as long as Marisol knows Steve and I are communicating, she doesn’t like that we are writing, and Steve still writes me, they cannot be serious.
I try to be creative with my emails and search ‘youtube’ for videos that will make him laugh thinking my good humor will lure him back. I send him a link to a spoof of a Microsoft ad showing an attractive couple in an uberchic apartment falling intertwined to the floor, mad with passion, causing their laptop to blink with the words, “SYSYTEM OVERLOAD!”
I even dare to send him footage of a German eyewear commercial in which a couple sits in a parked car. They exchange a smoldering look, her head lowers to his lap, and his face displays a grimace. Slowly, the camera angles downward and reveals the woman sucking the stick shift.
For nine months, I keep up the correspondence with Marisol as artemobile through ‘myspace’ and try to win Steve’s attention with captivating email. In November, I send Steve a note through ‘myspace’ and plead with him to answer a few questions with simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers.
do you love me?
yes.
do you miss me?
yes.
do you want to see me?
yes.
Overjoyed, I rush over to his house and wait by his door until he arrives home from work. When he sees me, he looks away, walks inside his house, and slams the door in my face. My head swirls trying to make sense of his behavior.
In a contemplative state, I sit in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen as they make breakfast. My aunt scoops coffee into the percolator and my uncle press-twists the knob on the gas range to start the process of making French toast. The flame on the range does not appear.
“Oooh, that’s dangerous,” my uncle says. “If that had been left on we all could have been knocked out.”
As if I were a dog, my ears perk up like a stranger is approaching the front door. “That’s right,” I say. My thoughts formulate. “You’re not supposed to breathe that stuff. What happens if you do?”
“Well, you become unconscious,” my uncle says. He uses the spatula to press the bread against the bottom of the pan.
I imagine climbing into Steve’s apartment, turning on his stove, and blowing out the flame. “Yeah, but you smell it.” I say.
My uncle adapts a fatherly stance and uses the opportunity to teach me about home safety and says, “You do because they add an odor to it but if you are sleeping,” he shakes his head to end the sentence. “Luckily, a lot of homes, newer ones, have detectors.”
I picture Steve’s apartment in detail and try to visualize any detectors. I don’t think there are any. “So, if you were exposed to just a little, you’d pass out?” I ask.
“You could,” my uncle says. He continues to shake his head in imagined disaster.
“How much would you need to make someone pass out?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the size of the place, the circulation of the air. The most important thing,” he says, “would be to get the windows and doors open and the air flowing.”
After breakfast, I head home to Cambridge. There is an unusual amount of traffic and the sun gleams off the stream of cars so I squint and lean my head backward to avoid the glare. As I drift northward, I allow my thoughts to explore the morning’s possibilities. I consider the various ways to enter Steve’s apartment . . . “the basement window – no good. The door from his apartment to the basement is usually locked. The side window – it’s high off the ground and would require a ladder but no one would see me from that angle. The bathroom window – high also and closer to the street plus moving the shower curtain would be noisy because I’d enter through the bath. In fact, wouldn’t this all be noisy? They’ll hear the click of the stove especially late at night when the rest of the house is quiet . . . This is a bad idea. . . It won’t work.”
I bring my car to a halt behind a line of traffic and since the weather is nice I open the window to get some fresh air. “That’s it!” I realize and snap my head forward. “Somehow I have to get the gas from the outside in.”
I arrive home and, exhausted from scheming, I submerge in the comfort of my dim living room, smoke, and watch DVDs. I start with an episode of ‘The Sopranos’ in which Carmella, sick of Tony’s philandering, has thrown him out of their house. Tony stops by the wife to give Carmella money and as he peels off hundreds from a pile of bills he complains, “You are the one that wanted us to split.”
Her reply startles me and changes my whole perspective of unfaithfulness. “There’s more than one way to ask for a relationship to end, Tony!” Carmella quips in her signature tangy voice. She is implying he is the one that asked for the relationship to end by being disloyal. I question whether Steve is doing the same thing by staying in touch with me.
The next day my usual malaise sets in and I barely want to move but I set a time, 2 p.m., and gear myself up to leave the house to leave the house at that time. At the allotted hour, I push my front door closed and recoil from the sunshine. I hate the sunny weather; I wish it were gloomy to match my mood. I drive up Route 2 in the direction of Concord where there is an Ace hardware store in the town’s center. I notice the putty colored propane tanks sit by the door of the hardware store, locked and fenced-off.
I pay for the tank and a garden house at the cashier and a store associate, an older man with a fisherman’s grey beard, carries the tank to my car. As I pull away, I thank him and wave trying to act energetic like a suburban housewife, never weary of her errands.
The trip depletes my energy. When I arrive back home, I leave the tank and garden hose in the car and revive myself with cigarettes and DVDs. At midnight, I have the sudden thought that someone might drop by and see the equipment. Looking for my gardening gloves to provide my hands some protection, I descend the steep stairs to my basement I spot my pruning shears in my pile of gardening supplies. I decide I can use them to cut a length of the hose. I only need a portion, a few feet to reach from the tank to Steve’s window.
I carry the gloves and shears to my car and drive to remote road near a trail I often walk. I lean over the seat and snip off a yard of the garden hose. I haul the short piece of hose and the tank out of the car placing both behind a tree stump, out of anyone’s view. I throw the remainder of the hose in a grocery store’s garbage can on my way home.