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The Tums

WHAT DO YOU DO when there’s nothing you can do? What do you do when all your options are bad options and really the best thing you can do is to do nothing, not that that’s going to change anything either? I don’t really expect an answer to this question. The fact is, it’s not a question at all but a statement, a statement that adds up to the fact that there’s something I would give anything to change but cannot change and must therefore find some way to live with. Whatever that means, to live with something.

I was peeing. I had gone to the bathroom to pee, and I was standing in front of the toilet with my zipper down and my penis in my hand, the usual business of peeing, when I happened to look up and see the Tums. They were right there on the shelf above the toilet, right where I was looking, so naturally I saw them. Actually it’s wrong to say that I looked up – I didn’t look up, I looked forward, I looked straight ahead, and in doing so noticed the Tums.

Of course at this point I wasn’t thinking about the Tums one way or another, I wasn’t trying to see them or not see them, or do anything, basically – basically the Tums weren’t on my radar, as it were, because I hadn’t yet understood their significance.

This wasn’t however the first time I’d seen them. On the contrary, I’d seen them countless times before. In fact, when one does the math, multiplying the number of days I’ve lived in this apartment by the number of times per day I tend to pee, one begins to realize that I must have seen the Tums hundreds if not thousands of times before this one particular time. Because I find it hard to believe, given the position of the shelf in relation to the toilet, that a person could manage to pee into that toilet, the one and only toilet in the apartment, without seeing the Tums.

Here of course I mean not a person but a man, a person who pees standing. Which isn’t to say that all men pee standing. But men can pee standing, that’s my point, they can and in most cases they do. A woman on the other hand – well, I can imagine that a woman – or rather a person who pees sitting, because there certainly must be men who choose to pee while seated – could have easily gone some time without seeing the Tums. But as it is, I’m not a woman nor do I tend to pee sitting, so like it not, I would see the Tums every time I peed, it was unavoidable. Not that I actively tried to avoid it. For in truth I never gave the Tums a second thought, they barely made a dent on my consciousness. This is the truth. Although admittedly if anyone had ever asked me if there happened to be any Tums in the apartment, I would have said yes immediately, and would have immediately directed this person to the shelf above the toilet. The point being that I knew about the Tums, I knew that my roommate Vanessa kept a bottle of Tums on the shelf above the toilet, I just didn’t know why. That is, yes, I did have a general sense about it. That sense being that Vanessa used the Tums to alleviate some sort of stomach ailment. That was my sense. Well, there was a bit more to it, my sense, but not much more. One’s roommate tends to keep certain products in the bathroom which one notices without ever really thinking about, the Tums being a case in point.

In any event, I should mention here, because it has some bearing on what is to follow, that I like to read when I pee, that my first inclination, once the pee begins to flow in a more or less steady stream, is to read something. This is not limited to peeing. I read things in the shower as well, shampoo bottles and such, anything with words on it, I find it soothing. Of course I don’t read the entire time that I pee, but only up the point at which the stream of pee begins to slow, whereupon I put down whatever I’m reading because at that point I need to pay more attention to what’s happening with the pee. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter what I read, I’ll read anything, it simply feels good to take in the words, just like it feels good to take in food. Actually for me the two things are pretty similar, reading and eating, in terms of how they feel, although I’m much more selective when it comes food and will only eat what tastes good to me. I suppose the point is that for me words always taste good in a certain sense, on a certain level, regardless of what they mean. So in this respect, I’m just as happy to read the label on a bottle of Tums as I am to read, say, a passage from Shakespeare – Shakespeare being a stand-in here for something that’s actually worth reading – even if I’ve read this particular Tums label hundreds of times before.

I’ve thought about this a lot, I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and it seems to me that there were several key turning points, several crucial moments at which the whole thing could have gone a different way had something happened that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen that did. I think of it like a river. I see this river in my head as it comes to a place where it has a choice in a sense about which way to go. Or not a choice, rivers don’t choose, but different possibilities, different potential directions. It’s a corny way of thinking, I realize that, but it’s really how I think. In any case, the bottle change was key, there’s no arguing that. Had the bottle not changed, I never would noticed what was inside the bottle. So in a sense the makers of Tums changed the course of events by changing the bottle. That said, no one forced Vanessa to buy this particular bottle, no one said that Vanessa had to choose this particular variety of Tums from all the available varieties of Tums on the market, and thus the Tums people can hardly be blamed for what happened as a result of their decision to offer their product in a newfangled bottle. Although this too is debatable. Who is to say what course a thing has? Maybe the entire thing was inevitable, whether via this bottle change or something else, maybe the bottle change was just one of any number of ways of arriving at the same inevitable result. I’ll get to the point now.

Sometime recently the makers of Tums decided to offer their product in a semitransparent bottle. Vanessa purchased such a bottle and placed it, as always, on the shelf above the toilet. About a week ago I was peeing, and while peeing I felt the urge, the characteristic urge, to read something, whereupon I looked up, or rather looked forward, and saw this new bottle. Only this wasn’t the first time I’d seen this particular bottle. That sighting, the first sighting, had taken place the previous day, under similar circumstances. At that time, for whatever reason, I had noted to myself that since the bottle was semitransparent, one could see in a glance roughly how many Tums it contained. The following day, again while peeing, I noticed the bottle a second time. This then brings me to the point. Because without really thinking about it, I noticed that the number of Tums in that bottle had dramatically decreased. In fact, at first I wondered if I was remembering correctly, because it didn’t seem possible that a person, namely my roommate Vanessa, could consume that many Tums in a twenty-four hour period. However the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that the Tums had previously come up to the top of the T in the word Tums, whereas now they barely reached the bottom of that T, the T being approximately three-quarters of an inch in height. It was at this point, after two years of living with Vanessa, that I finally understood what was happening.

However, just to be certain, just to confirm my understanding, I took the bottle from the shelf and read through the ingredients listed on the label. Naturally I had done this hundreds of times before, hundreds of times I had stood in this very spot, reading through the ingredients in a bottle of Tums, and yet in all those times I had failed to retain a single word of what I had read. Thus when I picked up the bottle this particular time, I actually had no idea what I was about to read, I actually had no idea what Tums are made of. Although I did – I do have to admit this – I did have a general sense in the matter, but beyond this general sense, I really didn’t have sense at all.

Evidently there are two very different things called reading, just as there are two very different things called seeing – my experience with the Tums being a perfect example of this. One can read something hundreds of times without ever recognizing the significance of what one has read, just as one can see something hundreds of times without really ever seeing what one is seeing. It doesn’t seem possible and yet it is possible, despite how impossible it seems.

The main ingredients of Tums – this is aside from food coloring and the like – are sucrose, starch, and talc. Which is to say, things that absorb other things. This had been my general sense. My general sense had been, whatever Tums are made of, they must be made of things that do a bang-up job of absorbing other things. Why does this matter? It matters – and this I suppose is the point – because my roommate Vanessa is anorexic.

Of course I knew that Vanessa, my roommate, was anorexic before I discovered how many Tums she’d been eating – anorexia having such an obvious effect on one’s appearance – and yet I had not really understood what that word means. I mean the word anorexic. This is despite the fact that many times I had used this very word in reference to Vanessa. And I wasn’t a total idiot, I knew what the word meant, I knew what Vanessa was doing to herself. In fact, I probably knew this better than anyone else – other than Vanessa, of course – because I knew exactly what food Vanessa kept on her shelf in the pantry.

Here is a list, a comprehensive list of every food item that Vanessa kept on her shelf in the pantry in the two plus years we lived together. Melba toast. That’s it, that’s the entire list – Melba toast. Because I refuse to consider diet root beer a food item. I don’t know what is it, but it is not a food item. It is something, it exists, but it isn’t food. You can’t live on it. No matter how much diet root beer you consume, it will not sustain you. The energy it takes to open a can of diet root beer far exceeds the caloric value of the drink itself. So that leaves just Melba toast.

Try to imagine a shelf stocked with nothing but Melba toast and diet root beer – cans and cans of diet root beer neatly stacked in three-can columns. I knew exactly what Vanessa was doing.

In her corner of the refrigerator, Vanessa kept several tubs each of nonfat cottage cheese and nonfat yogurt, and that as they say was that, aside from her little diet root beer batalion, which took up half a refrigerator shelf. The point being that I already knew the truth, that I didn’t need the Tums to understand what was happening to my roommate Vanessa.

But it’s strange, in a way I did. Because you see, the reason that Vanessa was eating all those Tums – three dozen a day, by my estimate, one and a half Tums every hour of every day – was because there was virtually no food in her stomach. This is what I realized while peeing. I realized that although Vanessa’s stomach was essentially devoid of food, it was still producing acid, no doubt in response to anxiety, and this acid was slowly eating through her insides. Which of course explains Vanessa’s voracious consumption of Tums.

When I grasped this fact, I understood for the first time what my roommate Vanessa was doing, I understood for the first time what I was saying when saying the word anorexic.

Previous to this, I would use the word anorexic and I would think the word anorexic, but I really didn’t have the slightest idea what the word anorexic meant. It took this business with Vanessa’s stomach, this convoluted business with imagining specifically what was happening inside my roommate Vanessa’s stomach, to teach me the meaning of a word I would have sworn I already knew the meaning of.

I’m not very proud of this fact. In fact I’m not very proud of any of this. And it only gets worse. Because what I did next, I mean, after I finally realized what the word anorexic really means, after I finally realized that my roommate Vanessa was well on her way to starving herself to death, was that I decided to pee sitting down.

I decided this, to pee sitting down, because it seemed wrong to me – this is how I thought of it at the time, this is what I told myself – it seemed wrong to me to monitor Vanessa’s consumption of Tums, to violate her privacy in this way. If a person chooses not to eat, that is her business – this is what I told myself, this is me talking to me again – there is no law that says that a person has to eat, no law that mandates a certain minimum daily intake of food.

Actually, to pee sitting down was not the first thing I tried but the second. The first was to simply not look, to pee in the usual way but with my head down the entire time. This failed, of course – it is next to impossible to look down the whole time that you pee. And of course you feel totally idiotic. It is an idiotic feeling to pee with your head down and to never look up at any point, not even when it’s over and you have no reason to look down anymore, except of course for this one reason which is itself a pretty idiotic reason when you think about it. So I would do it for maybe ten or fifteen seconds but then decide that I just couldn’t bear to be doing something so idiotic and so I would look up and see the Tums.

You couldn’t look up, you see, and not see the Tums. The Tums were exactly where you looked when you looked up. It was almost as though Vanessa wanted you to monitor her consumption of Tums. Certainly she couldn’t have picked a better location for that bottle if had she tried. And of course I thought this, while looking down I thought, “She wants me to see. She has put the Tums on that shelf because she wants me to see how many Tums she’s eating and then draw the obvious conclusions. The Tums are a cry for help." I actually thought this – “The Tums are a cry for help" – which simply goes to show how wrong a person can be.

Be that as it may, I soon abandoned this whole looking down thing and switched to Plan B, as it were, peeing while seated. Of course Plan B failed just as miserably as Plan A, and for pretty much the same reason: I felt like an idiot doing it. I mean, the whole idea was to avoid seeing any Tums, and yet each time I sat there peeing, I saw nothing but Tums – in my head, of course – Tum-filled rivers, Tum-spouting fountains, giant Tum snowflakes – until I had no choice but to stand up and look at the bottle of Tums just to stop this weird procession of Tum-related images from marching through my head.

That part was disturbing. It disturbed me. So much so that I resolved to do something I’d putting off doing since the day, two years ago, I met Vanessa. Because you see, Vanessa’s condition is not a new development. She was anorexic when I moved into the apartment. In fact at that time I thought she couldn’t get any thinner, that she had already lost all the weight a person could lose – one of the dumber things I have ever thought. Because two years later Vanessa is even thinner than she was, she has continued to lose weight all this time, so that her thinness today dwarfs, if dwarfs is the right word, her previous thinness. I would have bet money that Vanessa couldn’t have lost any more weight, that there wasn’t any more weight for her to lose, that she had already lost every last morsel of fat, but what I didn’t count on or consider was muscle. Muscle can be lost the same as fat. Fat goes first, then muscle. Or first fat and then both fat and muscle. Horrific as it to imagine, I now believe that Vanessa will continue to lose weight far into the future. It is strange – two years ago I didn’t think she could get any thinner, whereas today I’m convinced that her current thinness is only the beginning, only the launching pad, as it were, for her future thinness. Two years ago I wouldn’t have believed this. In fact two years ago, on the very day I met Vanessa, I was so disturbed by her ultra-thin appearance that I resolved to go to the library right then and there and read up on anorexia, because it seemed crucial to me to try to understand what this woman, my new roommate, was facing. I never went. For whatever reason. And then two years later I saw the Tums, at which I point I decided to try Plan A, looking down while peeing, and then Plan B, peeing while seated, both of which failed, as previously discussed.

In lieu of a Plan C, I finally had no choice but to go to the library, which is what I did, finally, I went to the library, and there I found four books on the subject of anorexia. My first thought on finding these four books was to borrow them all, only this seemed terribly selfish – what if some desperate young woman decided to come the library this very night to read about anorexia, having finally resolved to face this thing that is destroying her life, but then is unable to find a single book on the subject?

In deference to this imaginary young woman, I left a single book on the shelf and came home to begin reading the other three. I didn’t stop reading basically until the following night, when I completed the last book, taking time out along the way only to eat and sleep and of course pee, which I did in my room, peeing into an empty yogurt container.

Although I abhor this sort of thing, I took to writing the letter V in the margins of the three books, in pencil, whenever a passage seemed to relate to Vanessa’s personality or condition. In the end, the three books were littered with these V’s, some of which I underlined or followed with an exclamation point or question mark.

I’m not entirely sure why I did it – I mean, this reading marathon – but once I started, I felt I had to finish. The following day I went to work, the same as always, and when I came home I noticed that I had left the door to my room open, the three books sprawled at the base of my bed.

It is not unusual for me to leave the door to my room open – I would say that I leave the door to my room open about a third of the time – but of course it is unusual for me to be reading books with titles such as The Deadly Diet, Fasting Girls, or Starving for Love. So naturally I was concerned that Vanessa may have noticed one of these titles as she passed my room, without of course meaning to do so. My bed is quite close to my door, and my door defines the boundary of the hall, the very hall through which Vanessa must walk in order to get to her room and also to our shared bathroom. Concerned is an understatement – I was terrified. Although it is interesting, I remember now that while reading I actually fantasized about leaving one of the books on the living room couch, as though I had been reading it there and had simply forgotten to bring it back to my room. However in playing out this little fantasy in my mind, I could not imagine a scenario in which Vanessa didn’t completely flip out, most likely in the privacy of her room, after which she would have no choice but to strike me from her life, expunge all memory of my existence – a difficult thing to do to one’s roommate of two years, and yet I had no doubt that Vanessa would find a way. Given this, it is interesting, to say the least, that I left the door to my room open. It is as though I wanted it to end as it did, which I don’t think I did, although I’m long past the point of claiming any understanding of what goes on inside a person, myself included.

Many years ago, during a particularly difficult period in my life, a period I would frankly prefer to forget, I walked to my neighborhood grocery at that time and purchased an Entemann’s Chocolate Fudge Swirl Cake. I don’t actually remember doing this, but I know that I must have done it because I have this memory of sitting in my bed at the time and eating such a cake. In my memory, the way I remember it, I’m sitting up, I’m under the covers but I’m sitting up, and I’ve got this cake in my lap. The cake is still in the box, I’m eating the cake directly out of the box, and I have a fork in my hand, and I’m methodically working my way across the cake, eating the cake the same way you read, from left to right and top to bottom. The cake sits in this rectangular aluminum tray, and the tray sits in this slightly larger cardboard box, while I sit at the head of my bed with the tray and the box resting across my lap, and all I’m doing is eating the thing, that’s all I’m doing, just sticking cake into my mouth a forkful at a time and eating it. This is my memory – during this particular period of my life, I would eat these particular cakes, Entemann’s Chocolate Fudge Swirl Cakes, and then pretty much pass out.

I’m not sure what made me recall this incident, but in any case yesterday, yesterday being the day following the day that I left the door to my room open, Vanessa knocked on my door and said that she had something she needed to tell me. Before she actually said anything, just judging from the tone of her voice, I knew what she had come to say, and then she said it. What she said was that a cheap and wonderful apartment had become available across town and that she just couldn’t pass up this incredible opportunity. She said that she realized that this was extremely short notice and that of course she would cover the rent until I found a new roommate. She said that she had greatly enjoyed living together and that she considered me a dear friend and hoped we would remain in touch. She said that she had no use for the living room rug or microwave oven and that she would be happy to donate these to the household.

I wanted to say something but could think of nothing to say. What do you say? Do you say, “Look, Vanessa, I know what’s going on here and you know that I know and so you’re afraid that after two years of silence, I’m finally going to say something about it, and that’s why you’re leaving, not because you found a wonderful apartment, lord knows what you found." No, you don’t say this. In fact you don’t say anything. Because the fact is, there’s nothing you can say that’s going to make any difference, that’s going to change anything. So instead you say nothing, or rather you say the sort of things that someone would say if they didn’t know what you know, if they hadn’t seen the Tums. Yes, you basically pretend that you had never seen the Tums, that the Tums had never existed. As does Vanessa. In unspoken collusion, you conduct an entire conversation predicated on the nonexistence of the Tums, every word of which is completely false, every word of which is completely beside the point, because of course it’s the Tums that matter, or rather what the Tums indicate that matters, this and this only, only you can’t say this and probably wouldn’t if you could. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Yes, that’s the truth.

So after a seemingly natural amount of conversation, Vanessa said that she needed to go, because the movers were due in five hours and she hadn’t even begun to pack. The moment she was gone, I closed my door, took one of the anorexia books from under my bed – I had stashed them there when Vanessa knocked – and began to read, beginning at the beginning of course, or actually before the beginning, at the copyright page, although I had actually read the copyright page several times already.

A few hours later I put down the book and went to the bathroom to pee. I peed while standing this time, only instead of standing in front of the toilet, I stood at the side, squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the shower. It was difficult to balance. Perhaps this is why I never looked at the Tums – I was too busy trying to keep my balance while peeing. When I returned to my room, I found a note on the floor as I entered – evidently Vanessa had heard me go to the bathroom and had taken this opportunity to slip a note under my door. In the note she simply asked me to forward her mail to her. The address she gave was a post office box.