Truth Café

It was some years before I got up the courage to go to the truth café. But when finally I did, it took only a few weeks to convince one of the women in my life to join me.

She and I stood outside the café in the midmorning, spring, in a line of other waiting pairs. To protect her privacy, I will not reveal who she was—sister or sister-in-law or friend or cousin or coworker. I wanted to be closer to her, and to others; I wanted to break out of my patterns, those stale tracks. We were nervous, of course, newly shy around each other, avoiding eye contact, like every other pair in the line.

Someone had planted soothing things, long ferns, in low barrels along the front of the café, but I was not soothed.

When the door—green and rounded, fairytale—opened, we found ourselves in a seemingly normal café. Hard-wood floors, coffee-stained magazines, tin ceilings, daisies wilting in old milk jars, menu handwritten in cursive on the large chalkboard behind the bar. Bright-eyed barista, meticulous piercings and tattoos.

My companion ordered exactly what I knew she would order and I ordered exactly what she knew I would order.

The prices were far higher than normal. We paid without complaint, signed our receipts.

Balancing our drinks in their blue cups on their blue saucers (there were no takeout cups at the truth café), we made our way down a narrow hallway to another green door, which opened into a courtyard.

The courtyard was small, fringed with ivy, rickety metal tables-for-two spray-painted sky blue. There was the sound of running water, a fountain in the middle, an owl fountain.Wordlessly, we agreed upon a table. We had hardly exchanged a word since we’d met up in front of the truth café. And we didn’t exchange a word as we placed our drinks on the table, as we settled into our seats.

“So,” I said at last.

“So,” she said.

We were easy with each other, had been for years, but no longer.

She sipped her drink and I sipped mine.

I tried to read her face. I’d once taken a quiz online to see how well I could understand people’s emotions based on their facial expressions, and I’d gotten seven out of ten correct. Thirty percent of the time, I struggled.

I sipped again and imagined, but only imagined, that the drink was having some effect on me, a brightening of my vision, a buzzing in my bloodstream.

We had to begin somewhere, so I asked her if she had seen so-and-so recently.

She returned with a question that required of me only a numerical answer.

I rejoined with a question that could be answered with a monosyllable.

And so on and so on, each of us pretending we weren’t straining to overhear the conversations of the other pairs, wondering what they had penetrated while we floundered.

The angle of the sun shifted above us.

We were talking as we had been, and I was only half-listening, but then suddenly she was telling me something, a secret, and I was no longer bored.

I cannot violate her confidence, so I will hide her somewhere in the below. When her children were young, both under the age of six and having simultaneous tantrums, she’d left them home alone for twenty minutes and gotten a beer at the bar down the street. When she was thirteen and anorexic, the only thing she’d permitted herself to eat were carrots; she’d eaten so many carrots that her skin turned slightly orange; she’d immediately stopped eating carrots, but to this day she still nervously examined her skin for that orange tinge; and, sometimes, she snuck a carrot or two. When she was eleven, her cello teacher had touched her undeveloped chest and butt on two consecutive Tuesdays; she never told anyone but she had stopped playing cello, a fact still bemoaned by her parents, for she had shown great promise with the instrument. She had made up her entire history of addiction to make herself more interesting; all those Narcotics Anonymous nights she was just joy-riding the subway. Her boyfriend had always found me insufferable, at once pretentious and insecure. Her husband had always wanted me, talked about sucking my tits while he was sucking hers, and every time it made her come. She was in love with a woman, a veterinarian, and all her work trips were actually ecstatic getaways with this woman; she wanted to leave her husband but take the dog; she preferred this woman to anyone else on Earth. Sometimes, when her anxiety got bad, she would run back inside the apartment five times in a row to make sure she hadn’t left the burner on before she was able to leave the building. She was well aware that I couldn’t stand her partner—his habit of stroking his hair, and the way he favored jargon he then had to define—and it had hurt her for years that I didn’t find him charming. My husband’s demeanor had always vexed her, that million-mile stare of his and his tendency toward silence, as though he existed on a different plane from everyone else. She was sick of how I only ever served takeout pizza when they came over, as though I didn’t give a fuck. All those times she had complimented my parenting she had in fact been judging it—who pollutes their kindergartener with the truth about death? After her brother died, she found it difficult to express her grief to me because of that cloying way I kept asking about her grief, as though I was eager for it, a companion to my own. She found it challenging to be around my son, his demands and his impatience.

That sort of thing.

Secrets, you know?

And I, yes, reciprocated. I had to.

But this is no place for that.

We finished the last drops of our drinks.

We had done it.

I was somewhat wounded and somewhat underwhelmed.

There was no hint of the transcendence I had anticipated.

Maybe, I thought, as we stepped from the courtyard into the narrow hallway, from the narrow hallway into the café, from the café onto the street, I had waited too many years. Too much build-up.

We parted ways on the sidewalk. A hug? Yes, after the briefest hesitation. When you signed your receipt at the truth café you signed the waiver, too. No hard feelings. Just the beautiful truth. Never mind the irritations and hatreds that I had, probably deservedly, brought forth in her.

“Goodbye,” I said to this woman of my life.

“Goodbye,” she said to me, as though our relationship would continue unchanged, or virtually unchanged.

The feeling of letdown lingered. That her secrets had been hurtful. That her secrets had been run-of-the-mill. That revealing my secrets had not relieved me of them. That I felt no closer to her than I had before, and perhaps less close. That we had somehow failed to make ourselves truly vulnerable to each other.

Some days later, I happened to go to another café with another woman. A regular café. The drinks were not overpriced and there was no courtyard, no owl fountain. We had not seen each other in many months. This woman was speaking to me at great length about a dilemma of hers, tapping a small silver spoon against the metal table, and I was listening as best I could, though I kept finding myself distracted by the movement of her lips, and I would stare at them, the sounds they formed, without troubling myself about the words themselves.

Nothing happened, there was no whooshing sound, no sensation of funneling.

It was just that I was, suddenly, in her. Or, her.

My (her) lips moving as they had been. My (her) fingers on the silver spoon, tapping. My (her) stomach churning with acid.

And across the small table from me (her), the sight of myself. My blank stare landing just above my (her) chin. The three small white bumps on my eyelid that I’d been meaning to have removed for months, that caused me minor distress each morning when I looked in the mirror. My face appeared less kind than I intended it to, and my skin less smooth than it felt from the inside. My posture could have been better, and there was a small red smear of something on my shirt, causing me (her) mild disgust.

I couldn’t resist reaching out from inside her body, with her hand, to remove that red smear, whatever it was.

When I (she) touched me, I didn’t react. I was empty, and I wondered if my friend had taken note, if she’d realized that I had vacated that poor shell and entered her.

But her dilemma, thankfully, continued to command all her care and focus, and if anything she became even more elaborate in her explorations of her problem.

And I, within her, now found her problem more compelling than I had when I was outside her. Now I, too, wished to dissect the exact meaning of this text (her phone on the table, my/her hand pressing it toward the vessel where I had lived all my life), of that email (retrieving the phone, opening her email, placing it again on the table so that I could “see” it). I experienced the tightness in her jaw, the tears held back in her throat (I’d had no idea).

Without warning, I was ejected from her. Returned to my own body. I sat up straighter. I touched the three white bumps on my eyelid. I read the email on her phone. Then I asked to see the text again. I theorized with her. I wondered if her throat was still tight with held-back tears. When we stood to leave, I held her for an extra moment, my fingers splayed too passionately across her back, until she pulled away.

For the next twenty-four hours, I puzzled over this incident. I didn’t understand how it had happened, or even if it had happened. But that tightness in her jaw lingered in mine.

My preoccupation was not lost on my family. My husband tried to get my attention, first through teasing and then through sarcasm. My son sighed with exaggerated exasperation, a gesture he had only recently perfected. Unlike his father, he refused to leave me to my ruminations and begged me to toss an orange ball with him in the living room until I complied.

Again, nothing happened, yet suddenly I was catching the ball with his hands, fumbling it with his hands. I felt inside myself a ferocious desire for Ball, for Mother, the fear that if Ball and Mother were not always aiming their focus in my direction, I might become vague, invisible, lose the lines of myself, tumble off the face of the Earth. I (he) retrieved the orange ball and threw it back to the shell of me, across the coffee table, detesting myself (himself) as the ball left my (his) hand badly, and because my body was vacated, it could not catch any ball, and the ball bounced off the mantelpiece, shattering the vintage Coca-Cola bottle I had filled with dried eucalyptus.

“Mom!” I (he) cried out.

And then I was back inside myself, just in time to seize the ball, tell him to be careful, step away, I would get the broom and I would take care of everything, the lines of him were solid, he wouldn’t tumble off the face of the Earth.

It began to happen with alarming frequency. Inside my son’s body, I lounged on the grass in the park with two friends, both of whom were mocking a song for which I (he) had just declared my (his) love, a sharp shame before I was expelled. Inside my husband’s body, I tried and failed to make my uninhabited self come, experienced my (his) frustration at the impossibility of my orgasm.

I entered the bus driver as she made a sweeping turn onto a busy road, hungry, bothered by someone’s perfume, annoyed about having to stop by Mom’s after work to hang the flag. I entered the dermatologist for a few seconds, crushing boredom and a polite smile as I reached for a sharp tool with which to remove three small white bumps from the eyelid of the woman who lay, anxious and affectless, below me. I entered a child riding a scooter down the sidewalk, pushing hard with the right leg, creating breeze, euphoric, but when I exited the child and returned to my body, something happened, the scooter snagged, overturned, a bloody knee and a shouting father, and I resembled nothing more than a passerby.

I did what I could to prevent my mother from visiting, but she insisted on coming. Within twenty-five minutes of her arrival, we were at odds, sitting across from each other at the table, tea steaming between us; she thought I was failing my son and needed to transform my approach entirely, and she told me so in no uncertain terms, as was her way. Then I was in her.

In me (her), there was despair, excruciating despair, even as I (she) continued to harangue the shell I had abandoned. I was terrified that my grandson’s life would unfold in unspeakable directions unless everything changed immediately. This daughter of mine (a flash of my daughter—myself—two years old, frightened of fireworks, hiding beneath the bed, Make them stop, please make them stop!) would face boundless sorrow unless she laid down the law before it was too late. Never mind that my daughter’s son adored her more than she had ever adored me; I saw (envied) the way he looked at her, that trust, the invisible thread between them; she never judged him. But wasn’t that the heart of the problem? My grandson was headed into such dangerous temptations, such devastation, such storms, such heat, such fires, such floods; only strength of character would give him any chance of enduring the trials that lay ahead on this Earth, and what are you doing, daughter of mine, my most beloved one, to build that strength of character?

“… that strength of character?” she spat at me, back in myself. “You encourage him to be weak! Weak! Weak!”

She seemed to have surprised even herself this time, slapping the table with each weak. She knew what would happen next, as we both did, for this was a ritual we had enacted for decades. I would storm away, casting curses in her direction; when, ashamed, I returned to apologize, she would give me the silent treatment for some hours; eventually, without any further discussion or understanding, we would return to an uneasy equilibrium, our most familiar state.

But I did not storm away. Her hand was still on the table, left there after that final emphatic weak!, and I placed my hand atop hers. She looked at me, shocked, and I saw in her eyes the dread that I now knew suffused her body.

Overcome by nausea, I ran to the bathroom. I hovered over the toilet and my mother hovered over me, offering a washcloth for my forehead, but I swatted her hand away, too ill to speak, acid filling all the passageways of my body.

I considered returning to the truth café. Demanding my money and my stability back, despite the ironclad waiver I had signed.

Instead, I got in the habit of keeping the door of my cubicle closed at work and going on long walks, trying to avoid proximity to others, limiting my interactions with my husband and son, crossing the street as needed, seeking out the inner paths of the park.

I was returning home from one such walk when a pigeon glided from rooftop to sidewalk, I was in the glide halfway down, my wings outspread, my balance off, one eye compromised, then back in myself, trembling on the sidewalk, overwhelmed by the truth of the body I had entered.

At home, an ant made its way across the countertop toward the crumb I had intentionally left there so as to have a reason to ask my husband to clean it when he got home from being out too late (where? I didn’t know; I could have taken him to the café, but there was an extra waiver and fee for couples), the swell of something joy-like in me as I approached that immense crumb, unaware of the now-numb thumb that, seconds ago, had been preparing to blot me from above.

“So,” he says awkwardly at 2:37 in the morning, “you haven’t really been—”

Five words and already I’m already in him, disenchanted with me, hurt by me, confused about the absentmindedness that has always been a trait of mine but has become ever more—present? I offer from within.

“Present,” he says. “Do you know what I mean?”

But my body, abandoned, cannot reply. Uninhabited, my body is a strange and pitiable thing, a corpse of sorts.

“Like this!” he says. “This is exactly what I mean!”

“Please!” he rages. “Please speak to me! I need you! I need you to understand me.”

I am in his rage, I am his rage. He was out late because I frighten him. The blankness that overtakes me more and more.

“You’re like a,” he says, “like a, like a—”

I know the word before he says it, maybe I even gift it to him.

“Zombie.”

Every bit of me alive within him. The sheet on our naked body. Below the rage I feel the loneliness and below the loneliness I feel the longing and below the longing I feel the hope and below the hope I feel the love.

I know, I want to say to him, I want so badly to say to him, but I have no way to unhook myself from him, I am helpless as I float in him.

So he turns away from my empty body, the glazed gaze of my eyes, and, within him, I share his breathtaking ache, the vast disappointment of that form lying limp and uncaring beside us in the bed.

When at last I am freed from him and returned to myself, I stroke his sleeping body from the top of his spine to the bottom of his spine, over and over again.

Then, for a sublime half-second, I straddle two bodies—I stroke and am stroked.

“She doesn’t understand me, she isn’t even trying,” he will say the next day to someone.

At that exact instant I will be in the park with the dog, my small dark furry heart. I haven’t mentioned him yet because I had to save him for the end. He is sniffing the grass, at first I think it’s just because it’s new grass and thick, but when I approach I see that he is sniffing at something, a small body, a small dead body, and I don’t want to know, bird or mouse or squirrel, but then I do know because I am within him, my own big stupid body frozen, looking down on us with horror, and I am smelling 100,000 times better than I have ever smelled before, there is no difference between a good smell and a bad smell, it is an orchestra of smell, I can smell death and dirt and a handful of peanut M&M’s turned to mud and the ovulation of a woman and the cancer of a man and a piece of clover that rotted away in this earth fourteen months ago and the rain that will arrive in nine hours, and I inhale, inhale, inhale.