Page 84 of Counting the Days

“Yes,” Rhea said.

This employee was a teenage burnout with long hair pulled back in a ponytail and a mustache so sparse it could have been a food stain. He was zipped into a dog suit, and Rhea wondered if the cat and the dog were blood related and wearing a family costume like everyone else.

The dog stood by a red octagon and motioned for Rhea to sit down. She walked toward it slowly. Her fear of heights begged her to reconsider, but this was too important. She got in the pod and sat down. As she braced herself for it to swing upward, the dog stepped into the pod and sat across from her.

She gave him a puzzled look as they took off. He ignored her and stared off into the distance. When she’d imagined her triumphant solo ride over the Pacific Ocean, a teenager dressed as a dog was not supposed to be sitting across from her. They rotated in silence. On the plus side, the confusion about the dog’s presence was distracting her from the fear of plummeting to her death.

“So, is this, like, a weight-balance issue or something?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why couldn’t I just ride by myself?”

“Um, no, not a weight issue.” The dog resumed staring at the ocean.

“Well…what is it then?”

“Um, well, it’s so you don’t…”

They were at the top now, and the dog looked down. Rhea took in the one-hundred-thirty-foot drop and realized what he was insinuating. She looked up at him in horror.

“You think…I’m gonna jump off?”

“No, not you specifically, it’s just—that happens to be the main reason someone gets on a Ferris wheel by themselves…so we always accompany…lone riders.”

Rhea and the dog continued slowly circling in silence. In the pod above them, she heard children laughing. The view captured sparkling Santa Monica Bay from every angle, but Rhea could only stare into the void.

—

After the interminable spinning, Rheafelt too vulnerable to get into another stranger’s heavily scented car, so she decided to walk home from the pier. For ten and a half miles, she meditated on all the events in her life that had led up to this particular evening. Four hours later, the sky was glowing with the threat of a new day as she finally trudged up fifty-two steps.

She rewarded her aching feet with the removal of her sneakers and practically crawled to her bed. As she stared at a water stain on her ceiling, a thought solidified in her mind:I am not crazy.It was the first time she had ever considered this possibility. Sure, her feverish need to be a married mother had made her break up with Danny and her friends, and she had not washed her sheets in three months. But none of that was entirely her fault; society had driven her to the brink.

The whole world looked down on single, childless people,very far down,one hundred and thirty feet. She already knew this, and yet that dog on suicide watch finally forced her to fully confront reality: how hard these years had been, how ostracized she felt, how the modern social structure had broken her.

Every American holiday excluded Rhea. Families took all the religious ones, Thanksgiving,andthe Fourth of July. Couples had Valentine’s Day. And Mother’s Day, that unholyabomination, shattered Rhea every year with its screaming reminder: You have neither a mothernora child!

Even Uncle Sam loved married people and children, giving out tax breaks for those who had walked down the aisle or popped out a baby. Rhea could not go on double dates or family vacations. She could not even enter the playground in her neighborhood unless she ignored the scary sign that scolded,No Adults Allowed Unless Accompanied by Children. In her jail cell, she’d have to answer, “What’re you in for?” with “Swing set.”

If she went to a restaurant alone, without fail, the hostess would ask, “Just one?” Yep,justone; sorry to disappoint you. The general population thought single, childless people were so pathetic that a lone woman on an amusement park ride was most assuredlygoing to kill herself.

Rhea let out one long sigh in a futile attempt to release the enormous pressure she was buried under. However, since she was now able to trace her insanity back to the source, she was able to start forgiving herself. And since she was able to start forgiving herself, she was able to wash her sheets…. That is how it began; she slowly got up; stripped her bed; carried her sheets to her shed, where her washer and dryer were gathering dust; and did a load of laundry.

She picked up all the takeout containers and empty chip bags and threw them away. She tossed out the moldy food in her fridge, washed the crusty dishes, and wiped down every surface. She swept, she vacuumed, she scrubbed her toilet…she even folded her towels.

She opened her living room closet and took in the chaos left behind from the earthquake. Danny had fixed her bathroom tile, but she had not let him near her closet. She couldn’t risk him stumbling on her vision board or any other embarrassingskeletons. She needed to pull everything out if she was going to rebuild the shelves. But in order to rebuild the shelves, she needed a ladder, a hammer, nails, and, most important, to learn how to rebuild shelves. She decided it was a little too ambitious on zero hours of sleep and forced the closet door shut.

Then she went grocery shopping like a real adult. She bought the ingredients for a fruit salad; she had developed a craving when she was dressed as one. She went home and chopped fruit with her chef’s knife. She went to her tea garden, pulled some weeds, picked fresh mint leaves, rinsed Steve’s urine off them, and added them to the bowl. She sat on her deck with her green tea and ate her first homemade fruit salad.

When she finished eating, she wrote on the Ada-Tiny-Rhea-Zoe chain:I am so sorry. I feel terrible about everything I said. You were all being so lovely and including me in your Halloween. I was grotesquely selfish and I hope you can forgive me.

She deleted the last sentence and replaced it with:I’m going through a lot and I hope you can forgive me.

She did not want to call herself grotesquely selfish; she was forgiving herself, goddammit.

Seconds later, Tiny:I’ve been drafting a text to you all morning. You beat me to it. I love you so much. I’m so sorry I forced Halloween on you. I promise I will never do that again. I’m an asshole. Ada was right. Boundaries are everything.

Seconds later, Ada:FUCK BOUNDARIES! I’m so thankful Tiny made you come. I wish I had done that. I’m so sorry if I’ve been making you feel left out or like a charity case. I’m sorry this has all been so painful, Ree Kee, but now everything is out in the open and you don’t have to feel alone with your feelings anymore. We are madly in love with you and you are allowed to break up with us, we’ll just disrespect your boundaries and make you take us back.