II.
This is how it ends.
That's what I thought when I woke up, strapped to a bed with an IV connected to my left arm. This is how it goes, this is my life now: strapped to a bed when there's no place I'd even try to go.
What a way to go. Not the best of views, no: sterile white walls, sterile white ceilings, sterile white sheets, sterile white machines. As though the road to mental health recovery allows no color. I looked down at my flabby white arms, my veiny hands, my colorless nails. I didn't recognize any of it. So much for knowing something like the back of your hand. I couldn't pick mine out of a lineup.
Still, I thought I'd be more surprised to wake up in a hospital. I'm not sure how people can claim to be confused when they wake up in a hospital. The smell alone gives it away. And it isn't like I woke up thinking I was in a swanky hotel on a tropical vacation. A mental hospital, though—well, that was a little more surprising. But then, it wasn't really.
Anyway, back to the end. I thought it was mine. I didn't think I'd died, nothing melodramatic like that. But I looked up at the IV drip and thought: yeah, ok. I'll spend the rest of my life in the hospital.
It's surprisingly hard to care about your life when you have so little going on in it.
I don't want pity. I don't want platitudes. I want…well, that's the problem, isn't it? I have no idea. But I'm fairly certain I don't want any of my life prior to the hospital stay.
Well, that isn't entirely true. But when you weigh the parts of my life I like against the parts I don't…
I've never led the fullest life or the most fulfilling life but there were things I had: a good job, a nice figure, a cute dog, a few friends, an annoying butler. But all of those things started slipping away, alarmingly fast but so effortlessly, and I began to wonder if I'd ever had them in the first place.
Let's start at the end again, shall we? The butler. Did it all start with his heart attack? Yes and no. Something happened that day, something terrible and terrifying and terri-everything. I realized something that I'd never once considered before—and that isn't the type of hyperbole we voice in the face of tragedies: I never saw this coming! I had no idea! She was always so quiet! No, I truly had never, ever thought it before—that I could lose him.
Sure, maybe a few times I'd given thought to what would happen if he met a maid and had servant babies in one of the outer boroughs. But that was a different kind of losing him—that way seemed far less likely and so distant that I never needed to worry about it.
But this way of losing him…it was permanent. It was real. And I had absolutely no control over it. (As if I could ever lose ground to a maid and the outer boroughs. Please.) The scariest moment of my life was when I set him up not once but twice for an easy insult and I got nothing. The silence that hung in the air opened up my mind to a host of scenarios in which I'd never hear that voice insulting me again. Maybe it says something about me that that was the scariest moment and not the actual heart attack. Who knows.
Either way, there it was. I could lose him. Let's cut past the CC Babcock cares for a domestic? faux shock and move on to the meatier matters: I'd seen Niles almost every day for the past 15 years. He was dependable and sturdy, if irritatingly so, and the possibility of losing that rent some small but very real tear in my psyche. I couldn't comprehend it but I couldn't stop thinking about it, either. I didn't sleep for two days. It became an obsession. Instead of using it as an opportunity to perhaps appreciate the fact that he hadn't died, I couldn't stop imagining that he had. I couldn't get past it.
Not even when he was finally released from the hospital. I talked to him in the irritating way people talked to my grandfather: hushed and soft, as though the slight breeze from your words could be enough to knock them over for good. I saw how much it bothered him but even though I saw it, I didn't really know it.
So then Niles did what Niles does: he perceived rejection so he rejected me first. I didn't care. I couldn't stop thinking about what his funeral would have been like.
What was next on my list? Right: a few friends. My entire world became encapsulated in that house, so I'll just focus on the people in it. No, Nanny Fine was never a close friend to me, but we occasionally bonded. With the emergence of her relationship with Maxwell (and likely my behavior in response to that), she pulled away. Maxwell, always a flight risk, showed even less interest in my life than usual. Did I care? It's hard to tell. All I could think about was how a woman only a year my junior could have so many of the things I was never even sure I wanted: a man who loved her, children who adored her, a relationship, an engagement. Marriage and more children soon to follow, almost certainly.
What had I done wrong? No, precisely, I need someone to tell me. I'd gotten an education, I made a name for myself on Broadway (Bitch of Broadway is a name, right? Secretly I'm quite proud of it), I dressed how I was supposed to dress and acted the way I was supposed to act. I molded my personality to be who I thought others wanted—I don't know what Chandler's problem was, I know he wanted me to be a doting, desperate woman—and yet I was never quite successful in the way that Nanny Fine was successful. She had no shortage of friends. Her parents loved her "unconditionally" (who knew unconditional love was actually a thing?). She was just as desperate and clingy with Maxwell as I was with Chandler…and yet.
So that's where I'd been: every time I looked at Niles, I thought of his death; every time I looked at Fran, I saw her winning a race I should have lapped her in by miles.
Then there was Chester. No surprises there: he, too, likes Fran more than he likes me. And it's almost poetic, or maybe like a Greek tragedy, or something else from literature: a dog I never wanted prefers everyone else over me. Not a big deal, no, but when you put it with everything else, it's rather miserable, don't you think?
A nice figure. It wasn't every man's preference but I liked it. Hourglass, shapely, curvy, however you want to put it: I liked it. I'd heard horror stories about what happens to a woman's body when she crosses the 30-year threshold, but I passed the first half of that decade smoothly. Then something happened, I don't know what, and I disappeared under mounds of flesh. As I languished in the hospital bed for weeks, my muscles atrophying even more, I imagined all of the misery I'd pushed outward onto other people had suddenly become bound up in me until I ballooned from the heft of it. I don't even know if Niles noticed.
Which leaves my job. Maybe I could have been successful elsewhere, but I enjoyed working with Maxwell (most of the time). But he flat-out stopped listening to my suggestions—sure, Maxwell, Broadway is ready for a hip-hop musical produced by the whitest man of all time—and I think what really did it, what made me see how far I'd sunk in his professional estimation, was when Nanny Fine (a woman with no academic credentials, no producing experience, and no business acumen) found our lead and they slammed the door in my face.
I don't remember much after that.
I heard the play flopped. Good.
Between my obsessions, I didn't have time for many other thoughts, but I suppose I was pretty angry that no one in the house seemed to notice or care that I wasn't quite myself.
So. Back to the end. That's what I thought this was. That was my first thought.
My second thought wasn't a thought as much as an observation: Oh. Niles is here. That didn't surprise me, either.
What did surprise me was how he looked at me so, so sadly.
My third thought was: Maybe he did notice me.