LIMINAL SPACE

by T. Abeyta

Nick didn’t let me pay for my part of our trip to New York.
“You’re a student,” he justified as he took out his credit card. And I was. And he was a professor. Just not my professor. Technically he was my boss because of our ranking where we worked together. He said ‘student’ instead of my age because he didn’t want to say twenty-one out loud. And I really was a student--the youngest person in my grad program in literature. He also chose the word ‘student’ to avoid pointing out that I didn’t even own a credit card to secure anything with. I was insecure.
“Are you guys dating?” Mary had asked me that week in the learning lab, where all of us worked.
“No,” I lied.
“Oh, okay-- because I saw you two walk out together yesterday” and she covered her mouth with an exaggerated giggle. “You are so much taller than him.”
When I told Nick that Mary was asking about us, he made a remark about how she grew up with alligators in Florida. His words were his weapons which my brother said was a byproduct of Nick’s Napoleon Complex. I was way taller even in the flats I searched around for at Ross, shortly after we started dating. He had a halo of blond curly hair with a donut hole of sunburned flesh and cobalt blue eyes. I had super long, dark curly hair that I parted down the middle like a cardigan draped over my olive-toned arms. We had a twelve-year age difference and he’d often walk well ahead of me and look back while we talked. Sometimes he would even walk backwards but still way out in front of me. I practiced walking backwards in my tiny kitchen and fell back onto the stove. I didn’t understand how he managed to do this in a way that came off very naturally, as if that’s how every couple walked together. Was he embarrassed about our age difference or our height, or both? Pretty soon, it felt perfectly normal raising my voice for him to hear me while he kept a few feet of space between us.
The fast footsteps only got faster once we landed in New York. In my graduate program, students wore scarves and drank coffee and liked to use the term ‘liminal space’ as much as possible. I began to wonder about the space he kept between us. I lived in his world while we worked together at the school--that is, the white world of academia, where parents with a full English vocabulary send you to a four-year university as if there is no alternative. New York City was the grandfather of this kind of world, where art and writing mattered and people spent their whole day ‘jerking off,’ a term my brother co-opted for what I was doing in grad school. I wanted to visit New York my entire life, and there I was in Chelsea: grossed out by a weird sticky plastic object that made its way into my flat, afraid to stop and shake out my shoe because Nick sped ahead of me so fast. I thought about what we saw in the Whitney that day and how an artist could take a picture of this object in my shoe and it would probably be considered high art.
That night, we checked into the hostel he had booked for us. The bathroom was shared, and in the hall. The object in my shoe ripped apart the bottom of my foot until it fell out somewhere along the way. I limped into our dark, dank room and heard a weird moan. It was winter and the radiators were turned on and I wasn’t familiar with their haunting sound. I saw humidity on the one window and started worrying about my relaxed hair. I could feel it rise. We got in the twin size bed and Nick fell right to sleep and started snoring. I laid there, looking across the room to the blue night shining through the fogged-up window.
We had been together long enough that I knew it wasn’t working between us. But did he? Anytime I brought up my worries, I learned that the real problem was me. Everything I did and everything I thought was always wrong according to Nick. He’d prompt me for my opinion on something, an article we both read in the New Yorker or a situation at work. He’d listen intently to what I was saying and I’d get scared, knowing there was a detail he could pounce all over or use to prove me wrong. I heard he did this a lot to his own students, harshly marking up their papers and challenging what they would say in class. Yet, I had visited his class once to talk about the learning lab services, and he was clever and entertaining and engaged students in a way I hadn’t seen in the community college classes I had taken years before. That class observation alone might have been what propelled me to finally agree to see him alone, off campus. But his living room, dining room, and bedroom quickly turned into classrooms where I always earned a failing grade. I started smoking weed before coming over, both to relax and to annoy him. He smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon, but he didn’t approve of my ‘marijuana’ smoking. He always used an exaggerated Spanish accent to describe weed, suggesting it belonged to my side of the space between us. I even started worrying about my grammar. Was it ‘lit’ a joint or ‘lighted’ a joint?
What attracted me to him was the kind of attention he paid to my life and my work. It was something I had never experienced before. At first I thought it might be because I was so young that I had not yet produced life or work worthy of scrutiny. But in the stories he told about his parents and his life growing up, I began to realize his existence began the moment he was born. His parents helped him through phases, just like the family sitcoms I’d watch in amusement and disbelief. I’d listen to his stories in the same way I was drawn to studying literature. In my head, I underlined the beautiful scene he described when they played Scrabble in their Tahoe log cabin while it snowed outside.
Meanwhile, right before winter break, I was about to flunk out of graduate school. I took a Shakespeare class that I loved but my usual procrastination took hold of me so hard that the Christmas tree was already up in Nick’s house when I started panicking on the semester-long paper. It was the day before it was due. Only I wasn’t working on it. I don’t know exactly what I was doing other than staring at the wall. I came over Nick’s to use his laptop because campus computing labs were already closed and I didn’t have a computer. When the lights of the Christmas tree blinked in the dark, I was on the floor crying. I kept my face down so he wouldn’t see. He came over to check on me and he could see my anguish.
“Cacahuète? Are you okay?” When he called me peanut in French, I nearly lost it.
I couldn’t do it. I had spiral notebooks of ideas and notes but I couldn’t type and organize them. It was as if my hands refused to translate what was in my head. This I didn’t have to say to him. He took my computer and my notes.
“Let’s see what you have so far,” he said in a gentle tone.
He started asking questions from what I had written down. At first I was so upset that I could hardly understand what I said back to him. Then I heard little keyboard clicks. He sat there crafting topic sentences for the body paragraphs, so that within a short amount of time, there was a paper skeleton.
“Voilà,” he said and handed me the computer. All I needed to do was fill in the rest. This professor was willing to let me plagiarize from him, if that’s what it was. I stayed up all night on the paper and he strummed his guitar in the adjacent dining room, playing Hawaiian songs and chain-smoking cigarettes until his eyes turned red. I thought about my parents in the rooms of the small house I grew up in. My Dad, turning up the TV while I parsed out a difficult Chopin piece on the piano, trying to pad the keys as lightly as possible. When I told my family I got into U.C. Berkeley, they told people that’s where I had “signed up.” They didn’t know what I was doing at almost any point in my life and they left it at that. I read hundreds of books in that house and had written papers on an old typewriter all through college. My community college English teacher was impressed with this as if I were quirky and retro. I didn’t tell her about how my only option was visiting the thrift store after she announced that all work had to be typed to receive credit.
As I typed up my paper on Nick’s fancy MacBook, I thought about how far I had come. Then I looked over at his Christmas tree and saw the ridiculous hot pink flamingo ornament I glue-gunned together using a massive clump of feathers. He hung it right in front. When he did that, I never felt more seen in my life. At the same time, I wondered, what was I being seen as? I looked around his house and saw his collection of vintage furniture, his exotic map of Brazil that covered a whole wall. I thought about how he always played the Manu Chao CD when I was in his car. How he spoke multiple languages and had travelled the world, to places like Mongolia and Morocco. He loved pointing out our differences almost more than our similarities. When he first took my top off, he didn’t say I was beautiful. He said I was exotic. When he pulled his own shirt over his head, I realized I had never seen Caucasian nipples before. I looked at his little pink nipples touching my brown ones and thought about how they looked like little chewed up pieces of gum stuck to his chest.
The radiators sighed and I sat up in bed, braiding my hair so it wouldn’t be a frizzy mess. New York was my Christmas gift from him and it was January and we were finally in the Big Apple, living the gift. Only why wasn’t I researching activities in the little book he brought along, making notes and ear-marking the margins, like he was? And why didn’t I get adventurous enough with the sandwich I ordered in Little Italy?
“Turkey?” he turned to me.
“Turkey,” I said. My stomach was funny from the plane.
“Get the parm,” he said in a soothing voice.
I didn’t want to tell him that my people are lactose-intolerant. He’d probably find that very interesting. Either that, or he’d disagree with me. “No, that applies to people of Asian descent,” he’d counter, forgetting that I’m also Native American. It didn’t look easy to find a bathroom walking around the city.
“Okay then,” I agreed.
During lunch he wanted to know why I didn't ask him questions. Why wasn’t I curious about his life? I thought about our red eye flight and counted how many hours I had been up. The number didn’t sound possible. My hands were shaking from the lack of sleep as I held onto my sandwich that held what felt like pounds of cheese. What could I ask him?
“How do you like your sandwich?” I finally asked.
He turned to the window in response.
I sat up in bed thinking about all this until I was interrupted by a rolling noise near the door. I kept looking until I could make out what looked like a bottle with something moving on top. My eyes widened. A large rat was power walking on top of a sideways Snapple bottle I had left by the door as an avid California recycler. The rat rolled the bottle across the room and then turned around and rolled all the way back to the door. It was just about the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen, yet I couldn’t figure out if I was horrified or entertained. Why would the rat keep going back and forth across the room? It could just jump off. Why didn’t it just jump off? It was such a futile exercise. I felt sorry for it. Where did the rat come from? I started to feel disgust. Was it in here the whole time, here where it clearly didn’t belong? My eyes adjusted to the animal more and more until I saw how much it tried to stay on the bottle. Its little black eyes and ugly brown body clung to the glass object. The sides of the stomach showed how hard it was breathing. It clearly wasn’t enjoying itself. I began to hate how hard it was trying and anger rose in my chest until my stomach was going in and out in the dark, too. I kept watching and thinking that the rat had to stop this at some point, yet there it went, back and forth and back and forth.
Nick was snoring next to me and I tried to imagine what he would say or do if I woke him up. He said I didn’t take initiative as we looked for the Frick that day. With a pounding heart, I stood up to open the door, but I had bare feet and I was scared the rat would come at me. I went back to bed and stayed upright, tracking the rat with my eyes until finally I saw it jump off the bottle and go to the door. It folded impossibly flat, like a piece of paper, and squeezed under the door and out to the space beyond.
The next day, irritable and puffy-faced, I told Nick about what had happened. He laughed it off saying, “Welcome to New York” and pulled out his New York City guidebook to begin planning for the day. He said he was going to drop me off at a special place around one o’clock and wouldn’t tell me more. I was nervous all morning and couldn’t eat.
Once he told me that his friend asked if I had an eating disorder. I was thin and had a fast metabolism but it’s true that I found it difficult to eat around his friends that were his age. One night he took me to a dinner at an English pub where they only served fish and chips. We were meeting four guy friends of his. I had all these weird allergies growing up and my mother insisted that I was allergic to fish. I remembered my allergy to mayonnaise--the rash I got all over my hands and arms--but no memories of a fish allergy actually taking place. At some point in my teen years, after my mother disappeared, I realized I was eating mayo in a burger and I was fine. But at 21, I was still scared of seafood because I heard that kind of allergy is the deadly kind. I tried to order just the fries and Nick was annoyed.
“How are you ever going to know if you have an allergy unless you try it?”
This caught everyone’s attention around the table.
“Tonight might not be the night,” I whispered back to him.
Since everyone at the table was male, it was already as if I had encroached on a guy’s night or was being shown off. I didn’t understand why he insisted I go in the first place. It almost felt staged, as if this was the “fish night” in his mind. He was always disappointed that I couldn’t enjoy sushi with him, that I ordered the chicken teriyaki, or even worse, tempura.
“Look,” the French guy said like ‘Luke.” “You try the fish. An ‘ospital is around the corner.”
He had already received his order and took a steaming piece of fried fish with his fork and knife and laid it on a little white plate and slid it over to me. It smelled like death, my last night on this earth. But I didn’t care. I just wanted all of it to be over, at all costs. I took my fork and see-sawed off an end and even with my impending demise in mind, I still focused on how it was probably annoying Nick that I wasn’t using my knife. I hardly used a knife unless I was cutting meat. I was raised by wolves and therefore I was a wolf and he was trying to make me into a French poodle.
I put it to my mouth and the smell was of the sea. I bit off the end and it was crunchy and greasy and the fish part slid into the back of my throat like it was alive. I wanted to gag. But they were all looking at me closely and I just swallowed everything whole. The French guy clapped with annoyance and they all went back to talking about Spanish films.
Nick turned toward me with a smile. “All that and it was nothing! See? I’ll order you a plate.”
I felt so tired and dizzy from the stress that I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. Around his friends, I was always too quiet, struggling to find something witty or intelligent to say. It looked like I wasn’t involved though I tried harder than I ever did in my seminar classes in grad school. They weren’t my peers, and I usually didn’t understand their pop culture references. After a while, they pretended I wasn’t there and so I made myself invisible, as if a ghost were at the table behind a full plate of food.
Around noon, we were in Times square, walking toward the theater district. When we got to a theater with a large crowd, he stopped me and pulled a single ticket from his jacket pocket. It was for Les Misérables in the theater in front of us. I was learning French and when I was a girl, I had played all the Les songs on the piano. I don’t remember ever having told him about the piano part.
“I could only get one ticket. I’m sorry. I love this play and wish I could sit next to you,” he said. I felt so guilty and because he looked so genuinely excited for me I wanted to cry.
“Get,” he shooed me into the crowd moving in through the doors.
I sat in between hundreds of people in the beautiful red and gold theater. It was the first professional play I had ever attended, but I knew the story. This allowed me to watch and enjoy the play but stress over my relationship just like I did in bed the night before. At first, I was Jean Veljean, the prisoner who only stole a loaf of bread because he was so poor. Nick was Javert, the prison guard. As the play went on, I was Cosette, the little girl being raised by innkeepers and Nick was Fantine, the single working mother, laboring far away in the city, wanting the best for her daughter. But then Epinone, the daughter of the poor innkeepers sang ‘On My Own,’ and I finally understood who we really were together:

I love him
But every day I’m learning
All my life
I’ve only been pretending
Without me
His world will go on turning
A world that’s full of happiness
That I have never known

I held my tears until the end of the play and then rushed down the street past the crowd taking their time, figuring out their next move. It was cold and still. I felt like I was frozen in a portrait even while I was walking. I took out a cigarette and it looked shockingly white. I looked up and everything seemed to be in black and white, even the cabs. Then I realized it was snowing. I had only seen snow a handful of times in my life, but it was always the wet kind. It may have been the first snow of the season and this thought made me finally burst into tears, tears I had been holding through the play, tears I had been holding through the trip, through the relationship, through my life. Through my blurry eyes, I saw the delicate architecture of a single snowflake, twist and drift a few inches in front of my face. It was the first snowflake I had ever seen. Before that, I knew they existed, but how could I know they really existed without seeing one for myself?

Pandemic 45
mixed media
Barry Ebner