Do You Need a Water Filter?

    

            Your best girlfriend is the one who doesn’t mind if you pee in her shower. When you confess it, she says ‘whatever’ and continues the conversation –– a patchwork of subjects from how locker rooms make you grateful you don’t have children to what life would have been like had you stayed with your high school boyfriends to, as always, your fathers.

            “He’s selling water filters,” says my best girlfriend as the next thing after my ‘shower peeing confession.’ I’m visiting her in Great Falls, Montana at a coffee shop where even the bookshelf in the corner looks meth-addled –– its large gaps like missing teeth. More spaces than books, which include The Crucible, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Passion of Jesus Christ, and a few romance novels I’m certain would make the handful people in the world who will read them wish for their time back.

            Sitting at the only table in the place, I have to wonder about the other books that once filled the gaps. In this town, I haven’t seen anybody reading anywhere in public unless it’s a bus schedule or People magazine. The most notable features of Great Falls are that it has the world’s shortest river, an Air Force Base, and a school for the Deaf and Blind.

            “Water filters?” I shift my eyes from the bookshelf to my friend, who’s braiding her dark blonde hair over her shoulder.

            “Ya. Network marketing.” Now unbraiding and re-braiding  –– one of her more unique nervous habits. “I guess he’s trying to be useful again, ya know? Since the suicide attempt and stroke . . .”

            Resting my elbow on the table and chin in my left palm, I steep my Earl Gray tea with the other hand. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? ”

            “Sure, but he’s trying to sell a filter to literally everyone he sees. He tried with the mailman yesterday! It’s kind of funny actually . . .”

            “Has he sold any yet?”

            On the small wooden stool at the table, my friend wiggles to center her booty, which people have always told her is way too big for a white girl. Never taking offense, she claims she’s a Latin woman abducted by a Christian cult and forced into white skin (and ‘sin’) at birth.  A former pastor, her father’s inevitable disillusionment after relying too much on God to filter life’s grit is, she believes, what destroyed him. Only twenty-six, she financially supports her parents and lives with them to help care for her disabled father. Once centered on the stool, my friend resumes: “Sold one to my brother-in-law, who’s sitting on a bunch of cash from Vegas.”

            “Well who really wants a water filter I guess, right?”

            “Some people do. But, it’s like, just shut up and drink the damn water. You’ll be fine. It’s Great Falls –– not Ecuador.” She laughs, biting her nails –– never having coated them with toxic, quick-drying glue to quit like her mother advised.

            “Yeah, I drank the water in Quito once and kind of regretted it . . .”

            “Plus,” she continues, “You can spend your whole life filtering shit out of shit –– trying to be pure and perfect –– and the end result is the same. You love, you lose and you die. So shouldn’t we just drink our tea, place our faith in friendship, climb mountains, never watch the news, and bite our nails if we want to? Yeah, so I’m fucking nervous knowing that I have no control over anything but my own happiness, but at least I’m working on accepting it.”

             I nod a few times. “Maybe happiness lies in acceptance?”

            We raise our teacups and cheers.

            But, unlike my friend who doesn’t care that I pee in her shower, I am tormented by my lack of control over an ever–shifting, external environment. I experience others around me as rummaging through a giant costume chest –– trying on different words and actions and then leaving a mess on the floor when they walk away. And I experience myself as an article of that mess. My first date with my high school boyfriend was under a giant oak tree in a graveyard –– triggering my enduring fear of ‘no control’ installed in first grade by the death of our class pet. (I’m the girl who holds her breath driving past graveyards). Mrs. Mintz, my teacher, had said that the hamster’s death was natural as death is for all living creatures. We buried it in the schoolyard. While the other children returned to coloring, I’d sobbed under my desk. This meant my parents and everybody I’d ever love would die, didn’t it? And there had to be something I could do to prevent this from happening, wasn’t there? At recess, to deconstruct Death, I’d tried digging up the class pet to no avail. The intangibility and unruliness of attachment and loss have since terrified me even more than the idea of the long-fingered alien E.T. lurking in my closet. At fourteen, I developed OCD and started arranging and re-arranging objects in my parents’ bathroom.

            In the graveyard, I’d tugged the sleeve of my boyfriend’s black sweatshirt: “Let’s go.” Later, he kissed me on the fire escape. I didn’t let him take off my shirt, but he was nice about it.  He was, in fact, the nicest boyfriend I’ve ever had. Until we broke up when I left for college, he let me choose the Coldplay songs we listened to while driving around town at night. He picked me wildflowers and, after we split, cried over finding a strand of my hair in a telescope box. “I may never get over you,” he’d said on the phone. Still bookmarking the pages of a novel I never finished is one of the first poems he wrote me: Dark is the night that comes, easy this flight together we’ll take, on to brighter tomorrows, away from darkened todays.

            “Hey, what are you thinking about?”

            I’d been staring again at the bookshelf.  I shift my eyes back to my friend, who is again braiding and unbraiding her hair over her shoulder. “My first boyfriend,” I say.

            “The melancholy one? What about him?”

            “I saw on facebook last night that he’s engaged to a girl whose last name is Tupperware.” I take the last sip of my tea –– now cold. “I guess he got over me. You know, I wonder how things would be for me now had we stayed together. Would I be happier?”

            “No.” She takes her last sip of tea. “But I guess it’s better to wonder about that than still be with him wondering about many other things. Such as what it would be like to date a homeless man, a bread-delivery man, an illiterate, an ex-convict, a soldier and all the other men you’ve dated.”

            I smile. “And how fabulous would it feel if they all still loved me?”

            She smiles big, flashing gums bruised by braces when she was a teenager. A very pretty girl though with dark-blonde hair, high cheekbones and ‘rapturous emerald eyes’ –– a description my first boyfriend used in one of his love poems.  “Let’s get out of here,” she says. 

            “Back to the bungalow with your parents?”

            “I have to feed the dog. Thank goodness for my dog.” As we stand and link arms: “Oh, by the way, do you need a water filter?  

            “If the Apocalypse comes like the bible says it will, then yes. Please.”

             Laughing, we march out of the coffee shop into a tin-cold February day that the weatherman said might get colder.