Absolutely Not An Autobiographical Account
by Kat Lewis
Lynne Harlow, Healer (Orange, Blue, Silver), gouache and acrylic on paper, 4 x 10.5 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
ABSOLUTELY NOT AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT
KAT LEWIS / APRIL 2021 / ISSUE 7
Masha will shit her pants in three hours. She does not know this yet. Right now, she is sitting at the breakfast bar in her boyfriend’s house, the boyfriend she has been dating since high school, the boyfriend she doesn’t know how to break up with. At the bar, she opens her second personal cup of Blue Bell Ice Cream.
Mrs. Harris—the boyfriend’s mother—says from the sink, “That is so unlike you, Masha.”
“What is?”
“Eating two ice creams. You know you usually eat like a bird.”
For the last three years, every time Masha has eaten with her boyfriend’s family, Mrs. Harris has always commented on how little Masha eats, using that same inane phrase and often adding that her son, Masha’s boyfriend, could take a page from Masha’s book. Masha isn’t sure what she resents more, Mrs. Harris body shaming the boyfriend or that woman’s inability to speak in anything other than clichés. Just kidding. Of course it’s the body shaming. That comes second to the resentment Masha holds for Mrs. Harris’s racism. When the boyfriend first brought Masha home during their last year of high school for Gasparilla—the festival in which Tampa Bay residents celebrate a fake pirate by drinking themselves into oblivion—Mrs. Harris said to Masha’s face, “I don’t get it. I thought you people didn’t mix with others.”
Even though Masha can eat enough to put a Golden Corral out of business, there are two reasons why she doesn’t eat around her boyfriend’s family: (1) Mrs. Harris can’t cook for shit and (2) her microaggressions make Masha lose her appetite anyway.
Masha lumps a huge chunk of ice cream onto the shitty, square spoon that comes with the cup and puts it in her mouth in—what she thinks is—an act of defiance. The boyfriend watches this longingly. Mrs. Harris put him on Weight Watchers at the beginning of the summer. It’s August now, and he’s been miserable ever since.
The main thing that helped Mrs. Harris get past the fact that her child is dating a Black girl was the fact that this Black girl was actually a good influence on her otherwise deadbeat son. In high school, the boyfriend’s grades went up when they started dating, because Masha couldn’t stand to be with someone who had a GPA that could be the total cost of a dollar menu order. When Masha got into a university up north that’s prestige made helicopter parents salivate and the boyfriend got into the music school in Minnesota, Masha spent the summer teaching him music theory because he had perfect pitch, but couldn’t read anything on a grand staff for shit. And when he failed out of said music school after his first semester, Masha was the one who edited (okay, wrote, if we’re being honest) his application to the best community college in the Tampa Bay area. All these things that excused Masha’s Blackness for Mrs. Harris were now only a few of many reasons for Masha and the boyfriend to break up.
Now, Mrs. Harris obviously believes that if she can get Masha on board, weight loss is something else that Masha can snap her fingers and magically usher into the boyfriend’s life. But Masha’s summer break is almost over, and she imagines that Mrs. Harris feels a sense of urgency to convince Masha to bully her son before Masha leaves Florida for another three months. Masha is of a different mind about it all—it’s his choice. He has to want it for himself, if he even wants it at all.
Before Mrs. Harris can try once again to recruit Masha to the weight loss crusade, Masha checks the time on her phone and shows it to the boyfriend. “We should head out,” she says. It is their friend’s birthday, and they are meeting their whole high school gang at a Japanese steakhouse in Brandon. The boyfriend slides off the stool, and Masha follows him out of the kitchen.
In the dark, heavy heat of the garage, Masha watches the boyfriend’s broad shoulders as he opens the car door. She attempts to remember being seventeen to remind herself of what she had once seen in him. They were seniors in high school, and he was the only guy who saw her Slipknot t-shirt and didn’t question if she was a “real fan.” He was the only guy who didn’t gate-keep the violent video games she loved. And most importantly, he was the only guy who never once said that she was pretty for a Black girl. Then, at seventeen, that was enough.
They climb into his Honda Element. The green of Lithia, Florida passes with comforting yet annoying predictability: pastures with paintball-splattered cows, Spanish moss waterfalling from trees, the ten-foot wooden cross the Harris’s neighbor had put up on the side of the road. Every time Masha passes that fucking cross, she’s surprised he hasn’t set it on fire yet.
The boyfriend is trying hard to get her to talk. She senses that he senses what is to come. All Masha wants is a quiet, peaceful break up. She wants it in person. She wants to do it in front of his house before she drives the hour back to Zephyrhills for the last time ever. She originally wanted to end things over spring break, but her parents had planned a trip to Cancún, and she got to put off dismantling the last piece of home she had outside of the family she rarely spoke with. But now it is August. She goes back to school in three days, and she has to break up with him tonight because this is her last opportunity until Thanksgiving. For the last several weeks, he’s done everything in his power to make sure they were not alone together, and Masha believes he believes she won’t break up with him in the car.
At a stop light, he puts on Bayside’s album, Killing Time, and a guitar riff rips through the speakers with an energy that has Masha head-bobbing despite her sour, pre-breakup mood. When the first verse starts, they both sing along—the boyfriend’s voice mimicking Anthony Raneri’s angst and tonal precision and Masha sounding mildly better than a dying cat. Masha has played piano since she was four years old and won countless competitions performing Chopin, but she can’t carry a tune in a bucket with a gun to her head.
“You’re down here,” the boyfriend sings her off key note back to her. “You need to be up here.” He holds out the correct note. Masha looks him in the eye and tries to find the pitch. He sings the note again and points up to the roof of the car. “Higher. Raise your eyebrows.”
Masha does as she’s told, and the right note fills the car, their voices ringing like toasted glasses, as if they themselves were not two but one. The light changes. He flicks her under the chin in the way she pretends to hate and says, “That’s my girl.”
He takes the turn, and the thicket of rural Florida falls away, replaced by the strip malls of State Road 60. They belt the song just like they did on car rides when they were seventeen, and Masha wonders—not for the first time—if this is salvageable, if this is worth saving.
—
The Japanese steakhouse is empty. When they arrive, Emmett—the birthday boy—his girlfriend, Julia, and the two Michaels are already seated around a grill in the center of the restaurant. None of them have changed a bit since high school. Each of them is wearing a metalcore band tee with distorted alien graphics and band names written in grotesque, melting fonts. All of their singed-straight hair is long and cut to cover half of their faces, and Julia’s eyeliner is as thick and smudged as ever.
Masha and the boyfriend take their seats next to Emmett. Under the light above the iron griddle, Masha can see Julia’s pretty, light purple lipstick. Masha doesn’t wear makeup—she always looks like a clown whenever she tries—so she has deep admiration for the people who do it well. “I like your lipstick, Jules,” she says. “It’s a pretty mauve.”
Emmett pretends to choke on his Coke. “Mauve? Are you kidding me, Mash? That is the most pretentious thing I’ve ever heard. Just say purple.”
The Michaels and the boyfriend all laugh along at this, and they start misquoting everything Masha says to sound like Shakespeare. Dost thou criticize me? I will not stand this mockery whilst eating. Methinks thine college education has made thee a nerd. They do this to make Masha feel small so that they might not feel so small themselves. All of them have dropped out of school. They are the type of people who breed pitbulls in their backyards and still eat at the same Jimmy John’s and Bloomingdale Pizza tables that they had been since the tenth grade. Even though they ridicule Masha for using SAT words and allusions to Greek mythology in everyday conversation, she can’t quite bring herself to leave everything she knows behind. Home puts its teeth in you like a bear trap. Most of the time, she can shrug off the feeling of foreignness, resolute to be happy at home and have something she doesn’t have at school—companionship. But today, that foreign feeling sticks to her soul like tape—something that’ll hurt to peel off.
She feels this isolation, this separation from everything familiar deep in her body as her stomach turns over. A sour gurgle growls within her. Wait, maybe this is something else. She probably just needs to fart, but she has enough social anxiety to stop her from trying now. Her stomach folds in on itself. She looks at the bathroom sign across the restaurant. That same social anxiety also prevents her from shitting in a public restroom. And she can’t leave the table now; the boys will think their mean-spirited fun has gotten to her and blame her for it.
The chef comes to cook and put on his show. Masha sits and sits and sits until she cannot sit any longer. When she stands, all of her organs shift and sink lower inside her. She walks as fast as she can to the restroom without running, slams the stall door shut, and unbuttons her shorts. Just when she gets her shorts down, but before she can sit on the toilet seat, it comes out in a rush. By the grace of some shit god, it all lands perfectly in her underwear. Trying to remove panties filled with liquid shit jiggling like gelatin requires the flexibility of a gymnast. But Masha does so with aplomb. She removes said shit-filled panties all to stuff them into the tiniest wall-mounted trash can she has ever seen. Oh, god. The smell. She must leave this restaurant before anyone discovers her shame.
Commando, she walks into the dining room and whispers into the boyfriend’s ear, “I just shat my pants. We have to leave. Now.”
He looks at her with sheer delight and asks for the check.
In the parking lot, the boyfriend says a long good-bye to their friends while Masha waits in the car both thankful he didn’t tell anyone and impatient to go the fuck home. The boyfriend finally gets into the car and lowers his window for Emmett to lean in and say, “You guys wanna come over and watch a movie or something?”
Feeling the seam of her denim shorts wedged in her bare ass crack, Masha says through her teeth to the boyfriend, “Let’s go. Now.”
Emmett pouts. “Why dost m’lady make haste?” Masha has had it now. Anger must have been simmering on her face because Emmett frowns and says, “Seriously, Mash, why you acting like you gotta take a shit?”
“Because I did! I shat my pants, okay?!” The boyfriend bites back laughter, his face red. “We have to go back to his house so I can change and finally break up with him and never have to sit through another fucking dinner of ‘thou art’ and ‘methinks.’”
The car’s A/C is a loud breath between them. It does nothing to cool the heat of pent-up rage and embarrassment on Masha’s face, the heat of Florida, of home emanating through the open window. In this moment, she knows what awaits them: a thirty-minute drive back to Lithia in pin-drop silence, that quiet punctuated by the wet smack of his lips parting to speak but having nothing to say, the sight of his neighborhood’s white wooden fence hopeful like a gate to something—not heaven—but a place where she could find small-boned peace in her impending loneliness. The flush on the boyfriend’s face deepens, and Masha can hear the click of the blinker he had forgotten to turn off, the wounded tenor of his breath, the hushed, human noise of hurt.
Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, PANK Magazine, and The Rumpus. She is currently an MFA student at the University of South Florida.
Lynne Harlow is a reductive artist who has exhibited her work internationally for the past 20 years. Gallery exhibitions include shows at MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY and Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas, TX. Museum exhibitions include the 2013 deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, as well as shows at MoMA PS1 (NY, NY); Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT); and Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico). Her work has been reviewed by Artforum and The New York Times, among others. She is a 2020 grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2011 she was awarded the McColl Johnson Fellowship of the Rhode Island Foundation, and in 2002 she was a visiting artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Harlow’s work is included in public collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and The RISD Museum of Art.