Thirty Dirty Fish Tanks, Part 2: Recalculating…

I woke the next morning to sunlight fighting its way through the grimy window. The green zombie was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me, posture tense, typing furiously into his phone.

“Good morning,” I said, still marinating in dreams of being discovered.

“Hey,” he said, an edge in his voice. He didn’t look up, and I sensed trouble in our extremely low-budget paradise.

I kept quiet. I was no stranger to walking on eggshells.

“The two other girls bailed.”

“Hmm.”

“I have a new script,” he said. “Remember the little girl I did that commercial with? She and her dad are going to be in it instead.”

I had to give him credit: the man could pivot. Within hours, his remake of Super Troopers starring three women in their thirties had become a remake of Super Troopers starring one woman in her thirties, a grown man, and an eleven-year-old girl.

“What does the day look like?” I asked.

“We have to stop at my folks’ place to get supplies, then pick up breakfast sandwiches for the talent, then meet everyone at the filming location.”

“Where are we filming?”

“It’s about forty-five minutes from here.”

As it turned out, this meant forty-five minutes farther away from my home.

“Can we take your car?” he asked in the grammatical form of a question but the spiritual form of a statement. “Mine’s in the shop.”

“I guess.” I was beginning to feel slightly less like an empowered divorcée embarking on her unexpected screen debut and slightly more like a woman who had accidentally signed up to be an unpaid production assistant with a vehicle.

After showering in a bathroom that somehow left me feeling less clean than when I entered it, I got dressed and headed for the door. Then I looked at my overnight bag. Take it. The thought arrived immediately. I wanted it with me. I hadn’t consciously decided to leave, exactly; I just wanted the option. My own belongings, my own car, my own way home. Then another thought arrived. Don't be rude. I'd told him I was staying another night. Taking the bag might look dramatic. It might hurt his feelings. It might make him think something was wrong.

Something was wrong. But I wasn't yet prepared to inconvenience another person with that information. I left the bag beside the algae moat.

“I’ll drive,” he said as we reached my car.

“No.” The word came out before I had time to soften it.

He looked at me.

“I’d feel more comfortable driving my own car.”

He inhaled deeply. “Okay.”

I climbed into the driver's seat feeling disproportionately proud of myself for retaining custody of my own steering wheel.

“Where are we going?” I asked, opening the navigation app on my phone.

“My mom and stepdad live close. I’ll just tell you when to turn.”

Now, I should explain something about me and GPS. I use GPS everywhere. I use it to drive to work, which is ten minutes from my house and a route I have taken hundreds of times. I use it to go to the pharmacy. I use it to pick up pizza. If I could program the route from my bedroom to the refrigerator, there are days when I probably would. GPS is less a navigational tool for me than a comfort object, a little electronic friend who sits beside me saying: You're doing great. In 800 feet, turn right.

At a period in my life when I had absolutely no idea where I was going, it was comforting to have one small voice that seemed certain we would eventually arrive somewhere.

“Could you just give me the address?” I asked.

“No, it's right over there. I swear.”

I looked at him, then I looked at my phone. I wasn't asking to choose where we were going; I was just asking to know where it was.

 “Fine.” I didn't want to make it a thing.

Seven minutes later, we arrived at his parents’ house. We loaded my trunk with a director’s chair and several boxes of snacks. I closed the trunk and climbed back behind the wheel. One stop down. Breakfast sandwiches next. And surely, I thought, this time he would give me the address.

“Where is the place?” I asked, opening my GPS again.

“I’ll tell you when to get off the highway.”

“How do I get on the highway?”

He laughed while my inner temperature rose several degrees. I didn't find this funny. I also didn't want to spend my acting debut having a fight about Google Maps. I could be easygoing, flexible. I could be the kind of woman who simply drove onto highways with no idea where she was going and trusted a man in the passenger seat to eventually announce an exit. This was apparently the role I would be playing first.

Eventually, through a combination of his directions and divine intervention, we arrived at the breakfast place.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Oh, am I worthy of a breakfast sandwich?” I'd intended this to sound playful. It did not.

“Yeah. All the actors get one. What do you want?”

“Oh.” I considered this. Apparently I was no longer Snack Wench. I was Talent. This was an extraordinary promotion. “Bacon, egg, and cheese, please.”

As I waited in the car, I thought about the other people giving up their Saturday to make his movie—the camera operators, the parents, whoever else was hauling things around suburban New England for no discernible financial gain. Were they not talent? I kept this thought to myself. I was trying very hard to be pleasant. Also, I wanted my sandwich.

Back in the car, we began the final leg of our journey to the filming location. “Okay,” I said, giving optimism one more chance. “What's the address?”

“I'll tell you where to go.”

Of course he would. Then we got lost. Once. Then twice. Then three times. There is a particular kind of rage that comes from being lost while holding a fully functioning GPS in your hand.

Eventually, we pulled into a suburban neighborhood and stopped in front of a house.

I looked around. “This is where we're filming the police chase?”

There were houses on every side, cars drove past, children played in yards. It did not strike me as the natural habitat of a streaker. Still, I'd never worked in film before. Maybe this was cinema.

We pulled into the driveway, and began unloading my car. As we worked, I started noticing something strange. Whenever I approached him, he seemed to find somewhere else to be. I'd walk toward the snack table, and he'd return to the car. I'd head toward the car, and suddenly the snack table required his immediate attention. At first I thought I was imagining it, but then I began conducting small experiments. Approach zombie. Zombie retreats. Retreat from zombie. Zombie returns.

A familiar little ache surfaced. Maybe he didn't want these people to know we were dating. Then another thought: Emily. You drove him here. In your car. After sleeping at his apartment. You've spent the morning transporting his director's chair and wholesale quantities of snack food across the state. They know.

Still, I understood the message. I could make myself smaller; I knew how to do that. So I gave him his space, and then something wonderful happened. I started meeting everyone else.

There were about ten people there, all giving up a perfect New England fall Saturday to make something that, as far as I could tell, none of them was being paid to make.

Then I met the cop. She was eleven. She stood in front of me wearing aviator sunglasses, a police hat just slightly too big for her head, and a fake mustache that should have made her look ridiculous but didn’t.

I held out my hand. “Hi, I'm Emily.”

She took it firmly and looked me straight in the eye. The second she looked at me, I felt the full force of her attention. This kid was something special.

Her father beamed beside her. “She told us a couple years ago that she wanted to try acting,” he said. “We weren't sure about it at first, but she was so committed that we finally let her give it a shot.” He pulled out his phone to show me videos from her recent projects, scrolling until he paused at a commercial she'd filmed with the green zombie. “He's been a big help to her,” her dad said.

I looked across the yard at him preparing for the shoot. I let that information settle. He had been good to this kid. Whatever else I was beginning to notice about him, that was true too.

The little girl’s dad and I climbed into the camera operator’s car, which he had generously volunteered for artistic destruction. Within minutes, the console was covered in gummy worms, hot-fry dust, and whatever other debris the green zombie believed accurately conveyed the lifestyle of recreational drug users.

I looked at my scene partner—a middle-aged dad in a tie-dye shirt—then at the eleven-year-old police officer waiting outside. That morning I had been Snack Wench. Then Talent. Now I was a thirty-something stoner about to be arrested by a sixth grader.

“Action!” the green zombie called.

My scene partner and I looked at each other.

“Do you know your lines?” I whispered.

“Eh. Sort of.”

I appreciated his honesty.

“I think I’m going to need a minute.”

Somehow, amid the algae, the breakfast sandwiches, the director’s chair, the Great Interstate Navigation Standoff, and my promotion from Snack Wench to Talent, I had neglected to memorize the screenplay.

“Do you have a copy?” I asked the green zombie.

“No. I emailed it to you last night.”

“Okay.”

I began fumbling for my phone.

“Here.” My scene partner handed me his paper copy.

At last, a collaborator. How refreshing.

I scanned the pages, repeating my lines silently and trying to identify my cues. Part of my brain said: Don't let him see you down. Another part said: Babe. You have never had a stellar memory. Perhaps acting was an ambitious choice.

“Okay,” I said finally. “I’m ready.”

“Back to firsts!” the green zombie called.

I had no idea what that meant. Everyone else started moving, so I followed. This, I would discover, was approximately eighty percent of acting.

We took our places again, and the camera rolled. My scene partner and I began arguing about the proper serving size of THC gummies.

“One gummy.”

“One bag of gummies.”

“One gummy.”

“Why would they put them all in the same bag, then?”

Okay, this was fun. We tried it again. And again.

But over the next several takes, I began noticing a pattern. I don’t remember who made the first suggestion. “What if we tried—”

“No.”

The idea barely had time to become an idea.

Someone else offered a change.

“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”

Eventually, I suggested something too. I don’t remember what it was anymore. I only remember the strange sensation of watching my idea get rejected before it had fully left my mouth. It wasn’t that he disagreed with us. Creative collaboration requires disagreement. There just didn’t seem to be any curiosity between suggestion and refusal.

Eventually, we stopped offering.

Then I started watching the little girl. Take after take, she worked. She adjusted her timing, her expression, her stance. After each attempt, she looked toward him, waiting.

“Again.”

She reset.

“No, you’re doing it wrong.”

She tried again.

“Too slow.”

What I never heard was That’s it or Good job or even Here’s what I want you to try instead. He could tell her where she was going wrong. What he couldn’t seem to do was give her an address for where he wanted her to go.

Then it was my turn. We finished another take.

“No,” he called. “You’re trying too hard.”

I stared at him. Trying too hard. Interesting feedback for a woman who had woken up in an algae museum, chauffeured her director across the state, transported his chair, navigated without navigation, memorized a screenplay in a stranger’s driveway, and was currently pretending to be high in a car filled with gummy worms.

I looked at my scene partner. He looked at me. Then he rolled his eyes, just slightly, and smiled. There it was. I wasn’t imagining it. Our director was being a pain in the ass.

Something inside me became very still. Oh. I'm done. There was no dramatic surge of anger, no internal closing argument. I simply knew: Tonight, I would go home. Sure, I would finish the movie; there were earnest people standing around this suburban yard trying to make something together, and I wanted to be part of that. But after today, the green zombie would never direct me again. Not in another movie, not in another creative project, and certainly not in my life.

“Back to firsts!” he called.

This time, I knew what it meant.

“Action!”

My scene partner and I launched back into our argument about THC gummies. We screwed up, we laughed, we tried again. An eleven-year-old in a fake mustache was preparing to arrest us. A grown man in a tie-dye shirt was spitting chewed-up gummy worms and corn snacks into a cup. For the rest of the afternoon, I stopped trying to make the green zombie happy and started making a movie with everyone else, and it was fun. Really fun.

By the time we wrapped, I was consumed by the delicious thought: Tonight, I am going home. My car, my music, my GPS, my dog, my bed. No guessing, no eggshells, no algae. Just three hours of highway opening up in front of me.

Freedom.

I helped pack the equipment and load the remaining snacks into my trunk while trying not to look like a woman preparing to flee the country. Soon, I thought. Very soon.

The green zombie closed the trunk.

“We have to return this stool to my friend before we head back.”

I stared at him. Of course we did.

“Yeah. It's only twenty minutes from here.”

I had learned enough about green zombie geography by this point to ask the important follow-up question. “Is it on the way back?”

“No.”

I looked up at the sky. Somewhere, surely, a god was laughing. “Okay,” I said. Freedom, apparently, was forty minutes further away.

In the car, he revisited every scene, every joke, every directorial decision. He was pleased with himself.

I listened. I responded in the appropriate places. I kept my voice warm enough to avoid turning the now eighty-five-minute drive into a prison sentence for both of us instead of just for me.

“You were really good,” he said at one point. “Is this really your first time acting?”

I considered the question. The irony was not lost on me that I was acting at that very moment. I was playing a woman who was fine with the man sitting next to her when every fiber of my being was screaming for release. I knew this role. In fact, I had considerably more experience with it than I did playing a stoner.

I thought about my marriage. I had acted like I could put my own needs aside to make his dream of becoming a father come true. I had acted like I could shrink my vision of happiness to fit inside someone else’s. I acted until I couldn’t anymore.

“First time on camera,” I said.

He put his hand on my thigh. “I can’t wait to get you into bed, baby.”

There it was.

I had been willing to act interested for the sake of surviving the car ride. I was not willing to act that interested. Whatever else I was still struggling to say, I knew this much: my brain might be silently nodding along to the guest who had worn out his welcome, but my body was ready for a hostile eviction.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm not going to stay the night.”

“Why not?”

“I'm just kind of tired, and I'd like to get home to my dog.”

“Well, if you're tired, you shouldn't drive three hours home.”

Annoyingly reasonable.

“I would just like to go home tonight.”

I wasn't ready to say I'm ending this. We still had eighty-five minutes in a car together, and I didn't know how he would respond. I wasn't interested in discovering the answer while hurtling down a highway at seventy miles per hour.

“Okay,” he said.

After we dropped off the stool, I programmed his address into my GPS and smiled to myself. Finally.

“Remember, we have to stop at my parents' to drop all that stuff back off,” he said.

I winced. Right, the stuff. For one glorious moment, I considered dropping him at his parents' house and continuing directly to New Hampshire. Then I remembered my overnight bag. Could I abandon it? I began taking inventory.

My beautiful leather bag that made me feel like Mary Poppins.

My black lace top that made me look like a sexy vampire.

My beloved tarot deck.

My thirty-dollar lipstick that I had just replaced.

I pictured all of it slowly being absorbed into the algal ecosystem.

No.

Apparently, my journey toward liberation had a baggage claim.

What followed was a sequence of events so exquisitely designed to prevent me from going home that I began to suspect divine intervention. After we drove twenty minutes out of our way to return the stool, we had to return to the filming location because he couldn't find his wallet. By then it was dark, so we wandered around the yard using the flashlights on our phones, searching the grass for it. Eventually, he found the wallet. In his pocket. Then we drove to his parents' house to return the snacks and director's chair. Then, finally, blessedly, we arrived back at his apartment.

He got out of the car, reached for his keys, stopped. “Oh shoot.”

I looked at him.

“I left my keys with my folks.”

I stared straight ahead. There are moments in life when you begin to wonder whether you are being punished for sins committed in a previous incarnation. Apparently mine had been significant. We got back into the car. Again.

As I drove down the road toward his parents' house, I started thinking about the last time I'd tried this hard to leave a man. When I left my marriage, I'd packed this same car while my husband was at work. I'd moved through the house in a kind of dissociative haze, gathering everything important enough to take with me and loading it into the trunk. When he came home that night, I told him I was leaving. He wanted me to stay. He asked me why. And I couldn't say it, not all of it.

“You want kids and I don't,” I told him. “I don't want to hold you back anymore.”

That was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. I couldn’t tell him I no longer felt wanted or loved as the person I was becoming. I couldn’t explain how I had gradually shrunk my vision of happiness to fit inside his, or how tired I was of acting like everything was fine.

So I gave him the part of the truth I knew how to say, and I left.

Now I was driving the same car through the dark, preparing to leave another man, and once again, the words were lagging behind. I knew I wanted to go. I just couldn’t yet explain why.

Eventually, keys retrieved, we made it back to his apartment. I gathered my things, loaded them into my trunk, and stood at his door looking in at him.

“This is going to be it for us,” I said. “We're not each other's person.”

“What are you talking about?” There was genuine surprise in his voice.

When I left my marriage, I had cut the rope and free-fallen. This time, apparently, the Universe wanted an explanation. Unfortunately, I still didn’t have one.

“You live in a different state,” I said.

“I’m not asking you to move.”

Right.

“Well... we barely get to see each other.”

“I'm down your way all the time for acting.”

Shit.

“We just live really different lives.”

“What does that mean?”

This was going poorly. For every weak argument I lobbed toward him, he returned a perfectly serviceable counterargument. And the maddening thing was that I knew why: I wasn't telling him the truth.

The truth was harder to explain. I didn’t like how much of the day had been spent trying to figure out what he wanted while my own needs felt like inconveniences. I didn’t like how quickly he dismissed other people’s ideas, including mine. I had spent weeks being curious about him—his acting, his directing, his son, his grief, his screenplay, his thirty dirty fish tanks—and I was beginning to understand how lonely it felt not to be met with the same curiosity in return. Most of all, I didn’t want to keep letting someone else navigate and hope they would eventually take me somewhere I wanted to be.

But I couldn’t say any of that. Not then. I suppose this is both the gift and the curse of being a writer. I rarely seem to have the right words when another human being is standing directly in front of me waiting for them. Give me six months and a laptop, however, and boy, do I have notes.

“You brought magick into my life,” he said, emotion in his voice. “Usually I’m the one who does that for other people.”

And then, I didn’t want to argue anymore. I believed him, and I still wasn’t going to stay.

 “You’ll find it again,” I said.

Then I walked away.

I drove home that night feeling like a coward. Once again, I had known I needed to leave but couldn't find the words to explain why. I thought that meant I'd failed.

A year later, I understand it differently. I had spent so much of my life believing I needed a reason another person would accept before I was allowed to change direction. I thought knowing wasn't enough, wanting wasn't enough. I needed evidence, an argument, an address everyone could agree was worth driving toward.

But all weekend, some quiet part of me had been giving me directions. Take the bag. Let go. Go home.

I didn't follow every direction, but I was finally beginning to recognize the voice giving them.