Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
AUGUST 23, 2010
– Diary entry –
S
ummer. Birdies. Sunshine. I spent today shuffling around
Prospect Park, my skin tender, my bones brittle. Misery-
battling. It is an improvement, since I spent the previous
three days in our house in the same crusty pajama set,
marking time until five, when I could have a drink. Trying to
make myself remember the suffering in Darfur. Put things
into perspective. Which, I guess, is just further exploiting the
people of Darfur.
So much has unraveled the past week. I think that’s
what it is, that it’s all happened at once, so I have the
emotional bends. Nick lost his job a month ago. The
recession is supposed to be winding down, but no one
seems to know that. So Nick lost his job. Second round of
layoffs, just like he predicted – just a few weeks after the
first round. 
Oops, we didn’t fire nearly enough people
.
Idiots.
At first I think Nick might be okay. He makes a
massive list of things he’s always meant to do. Some of it’s
tiny stuff: He changes watch batteries and resets clocks, he
replaces a pipe beneath our sink and repaints all the rooms
we painted before and didn’t like. Basically, he does a lot

---

of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs, when
you get so few in life. And then he starts on bigger stuff: He
reads 
War and Peace
. He flirts with taking Arabic lessons.
He spends a lot of time trying to guess what skills will be
marketable over the next few decades. It breaks my heart,
but I pretend it doesn’t for his sake.
I keep asking him: ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
At first I try it seriously, over coffee, eye contact, my
hand on his. Then I try it breezily, lightly, in passing. Then I
try it tenderly, in bed, stroking his hair.
He has the same answer always: ‘I’m fine. I don’t really
want to talk about it.’
I wrote a quiz that was perfect for the times: ‘How Are
You Handling Your Layoff?’
a) I sit in my pajamas and eat a lot of ice cream – sulking is
therapeutic!
b) I write nasty things about my old boss online, everywhere
– venting feels great!
c) Until a new job comes along, I try to find useful things to
do with my newfound time, like learning a marketable
language or finally reading 
War and Peace
.
It was a compliment to Nick – C was the correct
answer – but he just gave a sour smile when I showed it to
him.
A few weeks in, the bustling stopped, the usefulness
stopped, as if he woke up one morning under a decrepit,
dusty sign that read, 
Why Fucking Bother?
He went dull-
eyed. Now he watches TV, surfs porn, watches porn on TV.
He eats a lot of delivery food, the Styrofoam shells propped

---

up near the overflowing trash can. He doesn’t talk to me, he
behaves as if the act of talking physically pains him and I
am a vicious woman to ask it of him.
He barely shrugs when I tell him I was laid off. Last
week.
‘That’s awful, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘At least you have
your money to fall back on.’
‘
We
have the money. I liked my job, though.’
He starts singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You
Want,’ off-key, high-pitched, with a little stumbling dance,
and I realize he is drunk. It is late afternoon, a beautiful blue-
blue day, and our house is dank, thick with the sweet smell
of rotting Chinese food, the curtains all drawn over, and I
begin walking room to room to air it out, pulling back the
drapes, scaring the dust motes, and when I reach the
darkened den, I stumble over a bag on the floor, and then
another and another, like the cartoon cat who walks into a
room full of mousetraps. When I switch on the lights, I see
dozens of shopping bags, and they are from places laid-off
people don’t go. They are the high-end men’s stores, the
places that hand-tailor suits, where salespeople carry ties
individually, draped over an arm, to male shoppers nestled
in leather armchairs. I mean, the shit is 
bespoke
.
‘What is all this, Nick?’
‘For job interviews. If anyone ever starts hiring again.’
‘You needed so much?’
‘We 
do
have the money.’ He smiles at me grimly, his
arms crossed.
‘Do you at least want to hang them up?’ Several of the
plastic coverings have been chewed apart by Bleecker. A
tiny mound of cat vomit lies near one three-thousand-dollar

---

suit; a tailored white shirt is covered in orange fur where the
cat has napped.
‘Not really, nope,’ he says. He grins at me.
I have never been a nag. I have always been rather
proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is
forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount
of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize
that I am more type A than Nick, and I try to be careful not to
inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not
the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out
the fridge. He truly doesn’t 
see
that kind of stuff. Fine.
Really. But I do like a certain standard of living – I think it’s
fair to say the garbage shouldn’t literally overflow, and the
plates shouldn’t sit in the sink for a week with smears of
bean burrito dried on them. That’s just being a good grown-
up roommate. And Nick’s not doing anything anymore, so I
have to nag, and it pisses me off: