Spillage

I sweep my hand across the table to reach for my phone and instead hit a glass of ice water, sending it spinning on its axis. It turns and turns and the ice clinks and the water swishes and as I stare at the turning glass and my mind fast forwards to the immediate future, where the glass stops spinning and falls on its side, spilling water and ice all over the table and onto the floor. The waitress runs over with some too thin paper towels and I grab the napkins off the table while stuttering an embarrassed apology to her and my embarrassed husband as a seemingly impossible amount of water cascades off the table, seeps into the rug and rises into the waitress’s Reeboks.

I am back in grade school and I spill a glass of Hi-C during a classroom Halloween party and my face goes hot and red underneath my plastic witch mask. My teacher runs over with paper towels and a couple of my classmates laugh and point and call me a clumsy witch and I take the mask off and run out of the classroom, red Hi-C soaking through my costume.

It’s the early 80s and I am in a night club. New Order’s “Temptation” is playing. I dance and drink and clumsily drop my beer bottle on the floor. I’m drunk enough to lean down to clean it up with the edge of my shirt and now there’s glass in my hand and I’m bleeding and everyone’s singing “up down turn around” when I run into the bathroom with blood dripping from my hand and beer dripping from my shirt.

I’m married with kids and I’ve spilled a measuring cup of milk on the floor and the yelling and the name calling is loud and clear. I cry even though crying is clearly what you’re not supposed to do in this situation. I swipe left and right using a dirty, wet rag and I only succeed in dragging the milk across the floor. Idiot. Jackass. I hear but don’t acknowledge the words coming at me, sharp and precisely aimed. I don’t even duck.

I see the waitress out of the corner of my eye and I know she’ll be there in a flash, looking to clean it up before everyone in the restaurant turns to look at the scene. Whether she will be kind about it or irritated is her choice; it is my choice to assume the latter.

In a flash, all the spills of my life turn like pages of a flip-book in my head. It’s not just the spills, it’s the consequences. The laughter, the yelling, the shame I feel for being so clumsy, so uncoordinated. Every glass of water that empties onto the floor symbolizes greater failings. A spilled cup of fingerpaint-tainted water means I’m an inept mother. I knock the small cup of pills off the tray on my hospital bed and the nurse thinks I’m a bad patient. I strive not to be these things, but to be good and careful and balanced and composed. And here I go, spilling again, showing off my unskilled hands, putting on a display of incompetence, this time in a public setting where I can embarrass not just myself, but my husband.

I’m at work and my coworker has put his bottle of iced tea, uncapped, on the small shelf of our shared cubicle. I stand up too quickly, glance the bottle with my elbow, and the cold tea goes everywhere, on papers, on the keyboard, on my coworker’s pants. I look dutifully horrified, apologize with stumbled words, but my boss comes over and admonishes me. Then there’s a no-more-drinks-in-the-office rule and all the clerks and secretaries and pencil pushers in the office remain mad at me for weeks, chastising me for my helpless awkwardness.

In my dreams I am always spilling and dropping and knocking over. My ineptitude at keeping things steady haunts me, but it’s not just my actions that play over and over in my head, it’s the reactions of everyone around me. It’s just spilt water, I tell them. I can clean it up. It’s not a big deal. But it is to everyone but me. I’m made to feel lesser than, and I can sort of take it from strangers and my coworkers but when it’s someone I love, someone who is supposed to love me unconditionally, I feel hurt and shamed and abandoned as they turn from me, walk away from the scene as if they don’t know me, as if my very presence embarrasses them.

The champagne on my wedding day. The mulled wine on Christmas. The tall glass of beer on our first date. I’ve been spilling things my whole life. I bring it up in therapy, and an ever changing roulette of kind, if exasperated, therapists tell me that surely the spills are a symptom of something else; I must have ADHD, I must be manifesting the spills for attention, I must have some childhood trauma that causes me to do this. I stop therapist shopping and make peace with the fact that I am just inattentive and clumsy. I vow to work on these things. I never do.

My husband's voice brings me back. He sounds irritated. I stop cataloging all the spills of my life and reach out, trying to grab the glass before it stops spinning, before it can spill and bring to life my vision of the waitress drowning in my spillage. I imagine things like this often, how my clumsiness will catch up with me and cause harm to everyone around me. But the cup clatters to the ground, water erupts from it, and the otherwise friendly waitress comes over and scowls at me while she tries to wipe up the spill with a cloth napkin. An irritated busboy comes around with a mop, sighing the entire time he’s swishing away.

I laugh.

My husband stares incredulously, calls me clumsy, and asks what’s so funny.

I tell him nothing. Then I tell him everything. I spill my words and I don’t worry about cleaning them up. That will be his job.