The Rally

The Rally Molly Dektar (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy Creative Commons. [End Page 86] I’d been living with my boyfriend for a few days, after the cat I was supposed to be catsitting died—“It’s okay if she dies,” the owners had said before they left. She was just a kitten, but her heart was failing. I spent three days inside with her, then went out to see the boyfriend, and when I returned she was dead. I put her body in a Foodtown bag and the Resting Friends woman came and picked her up. I’d been planning to line up my next caretaking job during the month of catsitting, but I didn’t feel like I could ask the owners to stay, now that their cat was dead. The boyfriend said I could stay with him, sure. He was the most attractive person I’d ever met. I watched him do things like spread butter on bread. He had played some of Shakespeare’s young heroes in regional productions, had even been an understudy for one of the Henrys in Shakespeare in the Park, but he wasn’t acting much anymore. [End Page 87] I asked him about it. “The parts stopped resonating,” he said. But I had the sense he had been blacklisted; he wasn’t great to women. I missed running lines with him. Missed that little bit of magnificence in my life. He untwisted the language so well I thought he understood things. He said he’d love me forever, and also that I didn’t know how to take care of myself or other living beings. Shortly after I arrived, I broke his sink somehow, the whole thing came off the wall. I fell onto the ground, hit my head, and started crying. The silver hoses to the taps stayed on, but the plastic drainpipe had snapped. “You have an instinct,” he said. I sent a photo to my friend Dana to show her husband Neil. “Basically they didn’t screw it into the studs,” Neil wrote. The boyfriend brought me my bag and my shoes. “Baby, baby, baby,” he said. “How can I kiss you when I can’t wash my hands?” I didn’t ask if he was breaking up with me. I would conduct myself like he wasn’t. i left then, and Dana called. Once Dana and I had been equal, we were hotel receptionists together, a job about getting yelled at, and then she took the LSAT and went to law school and now she wore gray skirt suits and a diamond station necklace and loved Neil. We’d drifted apart. Maybe she thought I’d drag her down with me, maybe I was too proud, or maybe it was just the way things go when two people have such different schedules. I’d quit the hotel a year ago, planning to upskill or marry someone or move. Meantime, I’d been catsitting, trying to pick up gigs one right after the other, to keep the fewest possible days of sleeping at friends’ or with the boyfriend or, in a pinch, at movie theaters. I never slept at Dana’s. Dana said, “Want to travel before I can never travel again?” “I was just going to try to nap in a movie theater,” I told her. She told me that six months before, the doctors told her to cut caffeine or she might die. She couldn’t even have decaffeinated tea, only caffeine-free. Then they told her that she could not eat gluten. [End Page 88] She could not have dairy. Then they told her that she must adhere to those and also a low-FODMAP diet. Its dividing lines were not intuitive. Oranges were okay, but not orange juice. She could have bananas only if they were green. Her intestines were so weak, she was so intensely sensitive to certain types of food, her condition was so unknown, that she might die if she went off the path, they told her. They couldn’t even tell if she would definitely die, just that she might. She could no longer have the...