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(continued) The water in Cabbit’s fish tank has not been cleaned in weeks. Green shadows emanate from murky depths and sidle across the opposite living room wall. The goldfish inside-- Ingeborg, Hirohito, Matisse 2 and Minnow 3--swim nervously around the squat Buddha-head tank accessory bought on a whim, as were the fish and tank. “No home is complete without a pet,” Cabbit said at the time. She spent over $100 on the artificial light, water filter, blue pebbles and tank-cleaning snails. The goldfish were free. Five have already died. That Cabbit chose to buy such an expensive ecosystem for a type of fish won at county fairs and brought home in Ziploc baggies at first seems like an example of inverse logic. But it isn’t actually. The goldfish are representational; Cabbit does not so much deem their lives worthy as much as the idea behind keeping them alive: responsibility, possible growth, the eventual attainment of adulthood. Cabbit is constantly working toward an ever-shifting set of goals, but the volatility of these future plans never seems to matter to her. The point is not to close the gap between the distant shimmer and the workable present; no, the point is the distant shimmer and the joy is the dreaming and the planning and talking. There are moments when she is driving and has a seizure of happiness. Her hope outstrips wherever she is going and she has a vision of future bliss. Down that road, every light turns tantalizingly green: Medical School in Antigua, getting engaged to Mark, a job she can wear “actual work clothes” to (she currently works as a waitress). Cabbit’s most persistent dream though is to live in a bigger, better apartment. Brochures for St. Moritz Condominiums and The Apartments at City Lights litter her living-room table. She compares and contrasts floor plans and asks every tour guide if their residences have a washer and dryer on the inside. She often retells the story of bickering with Mark over whether their future condo should have a bathroom outside or inside their master bedroom; he opted for the latter: “Mark never thinks about having guests over,” she says. But Cabbit, nestled into the sofa diagonally across the room from the fish tank, cannot afford a larger apartment. Things add up (rent, car payments and insurance and gas, several unpaid speeding tickets, sudden impulse shopping), and credit cards have limits. She has her pajamas on and contact lenses out because she has been feeling sick most of the day. Earlier, she went to the gynecologist to get her last dose of the HPV vaccine. Even though the shot always makes her feel like crap, she still enjoys proselytizing about its health benefits. Most of her friends have been subjected to a rehearsed litany of Gardasil pros. Though sometimes uncomfortable, Cabbit’s concern for the sexual health of her female friends (or passing acquaintances) is her way of showing affection. Sex figures prominently in all of her ways of showing affection. She is quick to point it out that this may be a product of her “addictive-impulsive personality.” Or she could just like sex. When Cabbit was 15, she rigged up an elaborate escape system in order to sneak out the window of her second-story room. Every Sunday for an entire summer she met a 24- year-old man at a neighborhood gym. He respected Cabbit’s high maturity level; she always hated being thought of as a kid. They would rendezvous at the back of the gym, in the dark and airless confines. Cabbit fell in love with him and her newfound sexuality on the gym’s smooth, grooved mats. Summer was over and the Santa Anas were beginning to make noses bleed when this childhood affair ended badly on those same mats. She was not quite mature enough to have sex with him. She panicked. He was not in love with her, in turns out. Cabbit remembers climbing back through her window that night and sobbing until she was exhausted. When she woke up in the morning, the world was on fire. The Santa Anas had fueled a wildfire that set ablaze hills near Cabbit’s house. “These weird black and yellow clouds blotted out the sky and ash was everywhere,” Cabbit remembers. “I knew life was never going to be the same.” Still curled into the sofa, Cabbit’s attention is drawn from the television when Amanda, her oldest friend, walks through the front door. “Oh my God! I friggin’ hate the sound of that fish tank,” she yells first thing. “I couldn’t fall asleep out here the other night because it sounded like a racehorse pissing.” . “Are you ready to go?” asks Cabbit. Cabbit, still in her pajamas, is accompanying Amanda to CVS pharmacy. Amanda did not want to buy the morning-after pill by herself. Too embarrassing. A few nights ago she broke up with her boyfriend because she suspected him of being addicted to online gambling. Amanda’s mother is a recovering alcoholic; she knows the signs. She went out with some friends to forget about him. Purposefully drank too much. Now this “morning-after” issue. “You know someone is truly addicted when the unhealthy relationship they have with something is put in front of the relationships they have with the people they love,” Cabbit says, with all the seriousness of someone who has taken several credits of junior college psychology. Cabbit likes to think of herself as someone who knows something about addiction. She suffered from migraines in high school and was prescribed so many heavy-duty painkillers that, according to her, she was zombied-out most of her Sophomore year. “I was addicted to those painkillers. They numbed everything for me. Nobody knew, but I had a pretty bad withdrawal when I got off them.” Cabbit’s salvation during this period was a poem she discovered in a high school textbook: All day the darkness and the cold/ upon my heart have lain; / like shadows on the winter sky, /like frost upon the pane… That was exactly how she felt at the time. Just totally depressed. Cabbit’s sense of the significant is somewhat jumbled--a faulty transmission of ideas from bad television or misunderstood reading. This sense is currently directing her to tattoo this line of poetry alongside an image of Ganesh on the left side of her ribcage. “So that I’ll never forget the hard times,” she says. |
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| UCI | School of Humanities | Literary Journalism |