Cost of Living

“I leave the lights on now, every room. Smoke signal: I’m still here.”

The constantly blazing lights in Eddie’s apartment are his own way of avoiding gloom. Eddie is afraid of disappearing because he feels completely alone; he tries to avoid laying on too much emotional weight and driving away the stranger in the bar. Eddie is afraid to trust that anyone who sees him completely will want him to stay.

“But everyone what’s married there’s, y’know, the fuuuuuck days. Like, fuuuuuck what did I do. What did I actually fuckin do here. Cuz, y’know, you married a person. And a person’s gonna be a person even if they’re married. That’s a lesson. That’s a lesson for yer LIFE right there.”

When talking about his wife, Eddie avoids the main conflicts that drive their past—their separation and her accident. Whether he is editing for the stranger or for his own sake, he boils their issues down to forgetting that Ani’s feelings and dreams were as real and important as his own.

“We’re all of us, in motels, on the road to somewhere we ain’t at yet and that makes us feel feelings. Roads are dark and America’s long.”

Eddie describes the isolation he feels when he’s on the road. He acknowledges that everyone finds themselves alone and isolated along the journey that is life. This proves to be true for the other characters in the play. For Eddie, he felt isolated even when he was married; he searched for something that made him feel less alone and couldn’t find it.

“If yer surprised I’d be applyin for a job like this, while workin a buncha jobs like those […], after goin to a place like this […], then sorry, bro—[…] If you don’t understand why where I went to school, that I went to school, doesn’t mean shit for some people—then I dunno what yer payin for in there.” 

John, who has put a lot of stock in his own education, can’t understand how Jess could be struggling for work and taking low-wage jobs when she has a degree from Princeton. Jess knows that no degree, even John’s graduate degrees, can guarantee stability and financial success, particularly when someone is marginalized.

“The way the therapist explained it […] is when music plays, the body goes lookin for the things it’s missing. The broken things. The shit that’s disconnected. And it tries to bring everything back together. Like it used to be. Back in order. Order like… music.”

Ani describes both the disconnect in her physical body and the disconnect that she and Eddie feel from each other. Eddie keeps trying to play music, and Ani initially resists. Like Ani’s body, their relationship will never go back to the way it was.

“You’re about to see a lot of me. To know a lot of me. You will take off my clothes and I will have nowhere to hide. I don’t really have a choice in that. […] It would be nice to know who is taking off my clothes.”

John acknowledges his own vulnerability and tells Jess that he wants her to be vulnerable as well. He doesn’t want just another impersonal nurse. In a sense, John is trying to disrupt the power dynamic between the caregiver and the cared for, although he also bares more of himself to Jess than his skin.

“My body—if you get too close, too fast—my body over-protects itself. Any time I reach beyond myself, it’s violence. You reach and you shake and it always feels beyond you. So you have to throw yourself—your arms, your hands—at what you want.”

John’s describes how his cerebral palsy works, which is not dissimilar to the way Jess protects herself. She hides herself and reaching out is terrifying and violent. She reaches beyond herself to John, but John isn’t interested in her. For both, these experiences are uncomfortable, like violence, as John says.

“Yer not doin penance on me.”

Ani doesn’t trust Eddie’s motives for coming back to help her, especially after he abandoned her for six months. She has a long, intense history with Eddie after twenty years of marriage; allowing him to help her out of pity or atonement is too much of a hit to her pride and dignity.

“It is sometimes real nice to just think about someone’s weather. To feel bad fer their snow. To forget I used to live a different way. To forget what people gotta do for me that I can’t anymore. That I did this to myself.”

Ani is learning to renegotiate the world with quadriplegia. It’s painful to remember the way her body was and will never be again. By realigning her focus to other people’s mundane problems, Ani finds it easier to forget.

“We got too many trumps on each other. Decades of em. I can see why you’da gone to her. It’s nice to talk about other things… the weather… sometimes.”

Ani doesn’t want Eddie as a caregiver because they have too much history and know each other too well. They have too many ways to dig at each other, and they can’t just be superficial anymore. Ani doesn’t want hands that used to touch her out of love and desire to touch her out of necessity.

“Who’s got the money, he says, and who the fuck are you?”

Jess recalls a particularly rude bar patron, who insulted her for not allowing him to give more alcohol to a very drunk woman. Although Jess was doing the moral and legal thing by protecting the woman, the patron saw Jess as nobody, asserting that money gave him the right to do what he wanted. Jess uses this to explain why her education wasn’t enough to give her a more auspicious start in life, or to offer the advantage that John thinks it ought to have given her.

“People have to judge you by something.”

John is very invested in the idea of judgment. He judges Jess when he meets her and makes assumptions about her based on limited knowledge. Jess points out that judging is unnecessary. Ultimately, John will show that his judgment of Jess doesn’t go away, even when he learns more about her as a person.

“You coulda done this when it mattered.”

When Eddie is bathing her for the first time, Ani is initially angry and resistant, insulting Eddie until she tires herself out. Ani doesn’t want to accept his kindness and give him the impression that she has forgiven him. She is trying to drive him away so she can know whether or not to trust that he will stay.

“I feel that… kind of feeling. It’s just not on that part of the body. […] I imagine things. It’s all imagining now. I imagine things. […] That’s what I do these days. My mind is a great lover.”

Ani lives primarily in her head when she is alone. While her body is numb, she can feel in her mind. She claims that she has adapted to the comfort her imagination brings as a surrogate for living her life.

“Papers were trees.”

Eddie mentions the divorce papers while he and Ani talk about seeing the trees in Maine. Ani deflects by saying that their divorce papers used to be trees. The divorce papers are something ugly that has been processed out of what was once naturally beautiful. Like their relationship, the papers can’t ever be unprocessed and restored.

“If everything was perfect in yer life, no holes you had to fill, you wouldn’t be here.”

Ani doesn’t feel like she can trust Eddie, and she is searching for his ulterior motive. His presence in her life opens the wounds of their separation; Ani is afraid that Eddie will get what he needs from their interaction and then move on. She is therefore reluctant to allow him to start meeting her needs.

“That’s not how people work. People don’t go after people unless they fuckin need em. And everyone fuckin—needs em, someone. That’s what life is, what yer life, my life… is. Okay? That’s how people work. In life.”

Eddie argues with Ani. He says that humans need each other. Eddie needs the connection he felt with Ani, and he knows that Ani needs kindness and help. At the end of the play, Jess goes with Eddie to his apartment out of a basic need for shelter and food, and Eddie invites her out of a need for company and to feel useful in the world.

“But if we don’t talk about how far we’ve come, Jess, not doing certain things, how will anyone know how far we’ve come?”

John judges others as well as himself. He tells Jess that he considered paying a sex worker, and she suggests that he might not want to mention that. John sees Jess as someone who can listen and validate him; he isn’t concerned about her judgment because she is there as his employee.

“I just want one night. I just want something that’s mine fer one night.”

Though Jess has admitted that her life is devoted to working and earning money, she doesn’t reveal that she’s living in her car until Scene Nine. Most of the time, Jess avoids fantasy. She doesn’t allow herself to want things that she doesn’t think that she can have. After John has crushed her by inadvertently leading her to believe that he was interested in her romantically, Jess just wants to feel, even for a few hours, that she is home.

“I know you took, which—it’s fine. It’s just soap—but—I would rather be here whenever you are. […] Why’d you take it? […] Could we just let’s just shave and a shower. And I’ll pay you overtime, since you’re over time.”

John trusts Jess to hold a straight razor to his face and shave him, and to hold his naked weight in the shower. Yet he reveals that he still sees her as fundamentally different from himself. John has demonstrated that he doesn’t understand poverty. He doesn’t understand that soap is a necessity, and that stealing it means that Jess is likely poor, not an untrustworthy thief.

“See, this is why people don’t help people.”

Eddie doesn’t want Jess to freeze to death in her car, but he is also a little afraid of the stranger he has brought into his house. He thinks that he caught her looking at the money in his wallet, and doesn’t get how much he is insulting her with the accusation.

“I knew a lady, not far from here, she died in her car doin what yer doin. She’d keep her car runnin while she was sleepin in it and a gas can in the back in case she ran outta—And one night it tipped over. A lady. Young. 32 or something, 33. They found her in the morning. Suffocated. The fumes. A stupid thing. Small, stupid things. A gas can. And then she—wasn’t.”

After Ani’s death, Eddie is aware of how a healthy young person can lose their life over something small and unpredictable. Eddie has been devastated lately by the small and unlikely things—a blood clot, a DUI when driving near home, dashed hopes because of a text from his wife’s randomly reassigned number.

“It’s the little breaks, y’know? Car. The car. Health stuff, some problems—that cleans you out fast. Bad luck. Mistakes. Some mistakes. Was couch hoppin on couches fer a while but that gets old quick—bein the one that always needs something. I got old.”

Jess says what John, with his financial privilege, didn’t want to understand. When a person doesn’t have much and lacks a safety net, it takes only a few small errors or instances of bad luck to land them on the street. Jess is proud and protects her autonomy, which makes it nearly impossible for her to ask for help.