Free Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

not for everything. Everyone knew what it was like to be in a bad place, which was not here, or now. Everyone liked looking at things that were pretty. I can still make things that are pretty, but I don’t now, and, as for the things I made in the past, I don’t even like to look at them anymore.

    You made yourself small on top of me, and I held myself still while you told me about the lovers you’d had while we were together. I held myself carefully because if I showed any reaction you would stop telling me. And then I would know no more than before.
    I know you will buy me a drink.
    I know you will take me out to dinner.
    I do not know if you will tell me the truth again.
    I can’t exchange this trinket for any of the others.
    Because you are practical, you will put me away into some part of your memory that is folded. You will put me into the past tense. You will not be concerned to resolve your thoughts about me. You will not want to know what I think of you. Your skin has many folds. You can put many memories away in them, one for each woman. You will live with me there all your life: a little canker that does no real harm, folded into your skin. You have even not put me away yet, as, here I am, back beside you. You snore and it sounds like a shower of change dropped on the pavement. Your snore interrupted my dream in which I had unsatisfactory sex with S’s wife. It made her spill coins from her pockets, and then it woke me.

RELATIVITY
    I am sitting here on the bus when I begin to wonder how it is my clothes have grown neater than my daughter’s.
    We are sitting at the front of the bus. My daughter did not want to, but I wanted to see out. The bus is driving toward the sunset. The driver pulls down a black plastic sunshade across the whole front window in which there is an open frame. The road ahead passes like a movie.
    My pose is informal, legs folded under me on the seat, but I remain neat. However I try to shake this neatness, I cannot. I realize it is the neatness of my mother, who we are traveling to see.
    My daughter, who has just become a teenager, sleeps on my shoulder. What I had she has now. Maybe.
    I wear tight clothes, but tight clothes make me neater. If I wear loose clothes, my body flows out and pushes against them.
    My daughter wears tight clothes too, but they do not contain her. She has not learned yet how they can. Does she already feel the discomfort of her thighs spreading in her sausage jeans? Doesn’t she already know it’s wrong to have legs that look like this?
    I lift mine and cross them.
    They look better. But, still, I look neat.
    Among other middle-aged women I don’t look too neat, and this pleases me.
    I am dressed for, what? For anything that might happen to me: keep it coming! I’ve learned that it does. I am dressed for things that are not. I am not too sexy, not too casual, not too unassumingly unassuming. I do not look like I have made an effort, but I do look like I might have made an effort to look like I have not made an effort, which is only polite. And I will not fall over if required to run in my shoes.
    My daughter is dressed for one of the many occasions she imagines could happen to her in tight jeans, bangles, a lace scarf, and a t-shirt with a picture of a fashion model that says, WE GOT THE LOOK. I dressed like that once: hoop earrings, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, leggings.
    I cannot drive so we must take the bus between cities. The bus takes us through the outsides of cities, through yellow new estates of family-shaped houses. The people there have jobs you could put in a children’s book. I’d always hoped to end up in one of these places where no one has ever been old.
    The bus takes us through the market towns where the old people live, and where the property is prettier and less expensive than in the city we have left, or the city we are traveling to. Once I would have wanted to explore each shop on each high street, to discover local features even in