The Caty Costume

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “The Caty Costume” by Whitney Washington. Whitney is a writer and advocate living in Huntsville, Alabama. She graduated from the University of Montevallo and recently attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She writes personal essays that focus on identity and pop culture.

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I. June

Before the fire, before I moved to the city, I lived in a small college town in the center of Alabama in a house with two roommates, two dogs, two cats, lots of books, and a big front porch. I went to a public liberal arts college full of hippies, burnouts, hipsters, graduates who never left, and professors who would drink into the daylight with students. I was the only Black face and the only fat body in a maw of thin, white women. I was an outsider in a town of outsiders. I stood out there, but so did most people, so it felt very much like home. And then home was gone. The two roommates, one dog, and both cats were not there the day of the fire and they were spared, though made homeless by my recklessness – a candle left to burn out while I went to pick up lunch. My dog, my books, and the front porch I could open my bedroom window to were gone – of course the bedroom was as well. I lost more than just a physical space and material things. I also lost a feeling of safety.

The fire blazed through the house I shared with Elsa and Josephine on June 2, 2009. The fact that it was just one day off from the cursed “sleepy, dusty Delta day” in “Ode to Billie Joe” will forever frustrate me. And if my need to tell the truth could only succumb to my ambitions as a storyteller, I would surely lie and say the fire burned on June 3.  I already had an internship lined up for the summer semester in the city, so I couldn’t move back in with my parents who lived two hours north. Caty had certainly heard all the pitiful details, because although the two of us weren’t especially close, the story of the fire ripped around central Alabama with even more fervor that the fire itself had ripped through my bedroom. She called me while I sulked at my parents’ house, wearing my high school clothes I hadn’t wanted to bring to college, and held out hope that the clothes in my house could be saved from smoke damage. She told me that she barely spent any time at her apartment in Birmingham anymore. I was welcome to stay there as long as I needed.

Even at 21, the idea of just living in someone else’s place, with their things, their memories, their germs would never have felt right to me. But being without a home of one’s own – or any possessions, really – opens a person up to all sorts of and possibilities. In June of 2009, I was a person without things, memories, even germs of my own, so I borrowed someone else’s for a while.

Caty was a fun hipster with strawberry blonde hair that didn’t need to be straightened with chemicals, who drank and slept around with men who hadn’t slept with her friends first and read cool books about cool women, not Agatha Christie, and wore short dresses from boutiques and not Target. If she could have that life, why couldn’t I?

So it must have been in the middle of June, maybe the second week, when I first squeezed into the Caty costume. After a dismal job at parallel parking, I grabbed the few bags I had and walked down the street to a beautiful 1950s, four-story apartment building that sat on a corner lot. I climbed up the front stairs outside and huffed and puffed up two more flights of stairs inside where Caty let me in the apartment. I’d never laid eyes on it until then.

It looked like a Caty place. Caty was cool and always lived in cool places. Before she left Montevallo, she lived in a charming Spanish-style villa catty-corner from the library. When she first moved to Birmingham, she lived in the attic of an older house-turned-apartment complex that was down the street from a BBQ joint that would have a line out the door before it was turned into a chain across Alabama. And this place was in one of the coolest neighborhoods in Birmingham at the time, The Highlands, just a block away from restaurants that had been reviewed in national magazines under headlines like “You Won’t Believe What Birmingham Has to Offer” and public parks and coffee shops with cute baristas.

As to be expected of any former art student in 2009, her furniture was a mix of thrift store tables, heirlooms, and new pieces from Urban Outfitters. My friends and I rarely discussed money explicitly. In some ways, we were all broke. We were either attending or had recently left a public liberal arts school during the most brutal days of the Great Recession. While the official reports said the recession was over, those of us trying to start our careers could still feel it infiltrating every aspect of American life. Our relationships with money were still heavily tied to our parents, and we created a spectrum of income and class, ranging from single dads in trailers to still-married parents with acres of property. Caty’s family had some money, but we never knew how much. For some reason, the fact that she’d always managed to have apartments in envied neighborhoods without any roommates didn’t make it immediately clear that she came from money. The rent on my first apartment was $575 split three ways. At the house I burned down, I paid one-third of $900. Caty was paying $600 for this apartment, which seemed like a fortune to me. If my mind hadn’t still been filled with smoke, I would have more forcefully offered to pay her something.

I’d interviewed for the internship at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute the day before the fire. The woman who interviewed me (a Montevallo alum I’d met when she spoke to my history class) told me in hushed tones that the girl she’d talk to before me seemed bright but overly concerned that the internship would take away too much time from her new husband. Her only worry with me was if I’d be okay making the forty-five minute commute from Montevallo to Birmingham three days a week all summer. By the time I came in for my first day, I let her know that the commute wouldn’t be a problem.

The night that Grant came back with Kirstie and me, the three of us laid in Caty’s bed; he said he felt awkward because he and Caty used to date, but Kirstie was close with Caty and said it was okay. I had never been one to invite people into my home, no matter how close they were. The houses I’d shared with roommates were always filled with other twenty-somethings, but they were usually invited by my roommates. Living on my own for the first time, I found myself begging my friends to stay with me so I wouldn’t be alone. I was sullen and trying to drink away my grief, so even if I couldn’t offer good company, I could offer a cool apartment.

Caty no longer had wifi at that apartment, if she ever did, because that was not a huge priority then to bookish girls who hung out at Alabama dive bars. I had lost my extensive DVD and book collections in the fire. So I spent the time I wasn’t interning, drinking, or sleeping, watching Netflix DVDs I had delivered and reruns of Doctor Who I’d downloaded on iTunes at my parents’ house.

I was sweating out a hangover on the loveseat in my underwear when Amber texted me that Michael Jackson had died. I knew then I’d have to go out that night. Since I didn’t have wifi or a smartphone, all the information I got was from texts and calls. That night I danced to  “The Way You Make Me Feel” with Elsa in a basement bar. We cheersed to MJ with full pitchers of beer. Isaac gave us a ride home and slept on the loveseat, all 6’4” of him. We all knew how much I loved him, me, Elsa, Isaac, even the spiders in the bathroom knew; we all knew how much I wanted him. We all politely ignored the fog of my desire that filled the apartment instead of central air. He took us out to breakfast at IHOP.

II. July

Early on, it became clear that Caty’s apartment was the meet-up spot, but I guess that was always inevitable. Less than it belonged to Caty or to me, it belonged to all of my friends: Kirstie or Amber or Veronica or Elsa or Lynn and whatever other broken white woman with a dependency on PBR I had pulled into my orbit. No one else had their own place in Birmingham, post-college (whether that was via graduation or dropping out). They’d scattered across Central Alabama in a constellation of towns with British namesakes like Leeds, Bessemer, and Inverness. Elsa was in Birmingham too, staying with her friend Brenda and Brenda’s mom, since I’d made her homeless. For the first time in my life, I was living completely on my own. I hadn’t grown up in a house full of siblings, but since graduating high school, I lived in dorm halls or in shared houses with heaps of other young women. Over the course of the summer, I invited nearly a dozen different people to sleep in Caty’s bed or on her orange Urban Outfitters loveseat. It was almost never sexual. I didn’t have possessions to absorb the menace of my thoughts, so I used people.

When I was 21, I surrounded myself with a cavalcade of beautiful and wild white women. In pictures, my short and chubby frame, dark skin, and relaxed hair stick out like a sore thumb amongst blonde ringlets, bright red messy buns, and raven bobs.

I drove back down to Montevallo and Kirstie, Josephine (who I’d made homeless but had found her own studio in Montevallo), and I went tubing down the Cahaba. Kirstie toted a mini-cooler of PBR behind her innertube. I had to buy a new swimsuit that morning from Old Navy; all they had that fit me was a brown tankini. Me, the swimsuit, and the river all blended together in a brown blur. Since the fire, I’d been recreating my wardrobe with $10 dresses from Forever 21 that barely covered my thighs. In revealing dresses, I couldn’t necessarily hide that I was fat, but I could distract from it: putting my cleavage and legs on display. But in an unflattering swimsuit, all my skin gave away the secret. That evening, back in the city, I met Veronica and Lynn and Caty at an artsy bar where national indie acts would play. There was no band that night, just a DJ that Veronica had once hooked up with. We drank bottled beer and sang along to “It’s Tricky.” My hair felt river-soft, and I ran into my boss from the archives who bought me a beer.

A few of my books that had been at my parents’ house had escaped the fire because they weren’t my favorites, so I brought them to Caty’s apartment. I finally got around to reading “In Cold Blood” that way. In Caty’s bed, laying in my underwear with the windows open, I read about the massacre of the Clutter family in 1959. It was the first book that ever truly scared me like a movie could. In the stillness of my solitude, I could feel the harsh winds of a Kansas autumn in July in Alabama. The sadness of the small town of Holcomb, Kansas reflected mine: not only of loss, but the deep grief that comes from knowing your peace will never truly resurrect itself.

Everyone called it Caty’s apartment: me, my parents, my friends. There was never any question that it was still Caty’s apartment, and I was just cosplaying as her.

III. August

I don’t remember a lot because I drank a lot that summer. I don’t remember a lot because I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to remember the house that burned down or my dog or how I’d made my roommates homeless.

The evening Kirstie let herself in, I was already in bed, napping in my underwear until it was dark. She got into the bed with me, just like she did when we lived together in Montevallo. She brought beer, and we lay in the bed and talked about our days. Eventually Sara (without an h) texted to ask what was going on. We told her to come over and bring as many items from McDonald’s dollar menu as she could afford. She let herself in too, then joined us in the bed for a feast before another night spent drinking beer out of pitchers in dark bars.

I finished watching The Wire via pairs of DVDs delivered twice a week. I would watch the episodes in quick succession, then go back and watch them with the commentary. I’d held on to the last DVD for a week, wanting to savor the final moments. In the finale of my mind, Omar goes back to that island, Dukie graduates, then Michael takes him and his little brother somewhere far away. If they could get out of the brutal streets of Baltimore, then surely I could get out of whatever kind of rut of drinking, crying, and avoiding my problems I kept digging myself into.

The morning that Amber woke me up by knocking on the door, Isaac was still asleep on the loveseat, all 6’4” of him. I’d lost Amber in the night, but she’d found her way back to Caty’s apartment. She was supposed to go to work, but she didn’t make it. She’d somehow got through the drive-thru at McDonald’s before she realized she was too drunk and just came to the apartment. I told Isaac it was okay to get in the bed with us. I wanted him and he wanted her, so we laid in a bed of deflated desire, just talking until someone found a reason to leave.

Lynn told me that Caty was disappointed in how I kept the apartment. A lot of people were disappointed in me. I did not grieve how people expected, and maybe I didn’t grieve at all. I had lost so many pieces of myself, and what I’d assembled in the aftermath looked similar to me from a distance but was unrecognizable up close.

IV. September

The week after my 22nd birthday, I fucked Grant for the first time. A mob of us had assembled at the apartment and gone out that night, but Grant was the only one who came back with me. He started on the loveseat, but I said it’d be okay if he got in the bed, the first time just the two of us. And then he kissed me. He fumbled to undo the garter I was wearing before I stopped him and did it myself. And then we had sex. It was good just like Caty and Sarah (with an ‘h’) and Veronica had said it was with him. He was only the fourth man I’d ever slept with, but he was somehow my second ginger. He sheepishly left in the morning and I shyly waved goodbye like he was not a person I’d known for two years or a person I’d just had sex with, but someone I’d just been introduced to over appetizers at a mixer. I wanted to be like Caty – collecting lovers and with them, the confirmation that I was desirable. Having casual sex with a friend seemed like a necessary step to building my confidence.

The second time I fucked Grant was exactly a week later. And we’d hung out again just like we’d done numerous times since I’d seen him wearing a Sid & Nancy t-shirt on Halloween two years before. We got back to Caty’s apartment and sat on the loveseat for a while. And then I asked if he was ready and he said “sure.” It was even better that night. After the shock of nudity had evaporated, we could be friends again. He was boyish and fun like the person I’d always known. The satisfaction that came from good sex and familiarity allowed me to talk to him like normal. After the first time, we continued to drink beer and talked about The Wire, since I’d finally finished it.

The second time I fucked Grant that second night, he asked me to get on top, which I normally didn’t like, but even that was better with him. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it that much. Like writing or drawing or singing, some people are naturally good at being physically intimate with another person. Grant was naturally good at sex, regardless of the person or relationship. When we ran out of condoms, I gave him some cash and he walked down the street to the gas station and back and we did it a third time. And then in the morning, we made out for a little bit. More than drinking or shopping or rewatching Doctor Who, sex with Grant let me get out of my head. My guilt had been inescapable until I could lose myself in good sex.

In the hazy brilliance of underemployed 20-somethings, Grant wanted my best friend and I wanted his best friend who wanted my other best friend, but was sleeping with the best friend that Grant wanted. No one wanted me. I don’t remember who wanted Grant, but I don’t remember anyone not wanting him. The next time I saw him at the bar he barely spoke to me. I was hanging out with his (other) ex-girlfriend and perhaps it was more due to her presence than mine that he seemed in a bad mood.

V. October

The night Isaac and I finally had sex was a reward for patiently waiting my turn all summer. He drove me home at dawn from a sticky dive bar with graffiti on the walls and staples covering the ceilings. Outside of Caty’s apartment we kissed, and he asked if I wanted him to come up, for “you know, sex?” And I did, but I didn’t. I told him I felt bad that I’d just slept with his friend in that bed, because I’d hate to be impolite, so I asked if we could go to his place. We did and it was not good like it was with Grant, but it was good because I’d never wanted a man that badly in my life.  I certainly never thought I could have a man I’d wanted that badly. My desires had almost always died unrequited. But the confidence I acquired by living a life that was not my own pushed me seek out the things and the man I wanted. I finally made it back to Caty’s apartment sometime that afternoon.

I texted with Isaac that day while he was at work at the restaurant, because of course the 6’4” man that I wanted more than anything in the world was a line cook. When he stopped texting me back, I figured he just got busy at work. When he hadn’t responded by nightfall, I knew he wasn’t ever going to, at least never in the way I wanted. Our plans to hang out that night were gone. Vanished. And the next day, Elsa told me that he had a girlfriend at work.

The first cold night came a week later. Veronica invited some tall boy over. I think his name was Bobby and he was younger than us. The three of us huddled under a quilt on the loveseat. I knew then the party was over, that I had to take off the Caty costume and become Whitney again. I was heartbroken and could no longer manage a facade. The costume had gotten me what I thought I wanted: fun, sex, freedom. But it also brought debt, heartache, and delayed grief.

I didn’t have much to move. I found an apartment not two miles away with Buffy, another Montevallo white girl who I didn’t know very well except that she was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen up close. I barely had any clothes, and the furniture wasn’t mine. My parents had to bring me hand-me-downs from dead relatives: a bed from my great-uncle, my grandmother’s TV.

No one knew those habits that are reserved for the home, like how I would stay in the bathroom and read a magazine cover to cover or how Kirstie would listen to Van Morrison while she cleaned up. Caty never had roommates, so she was always able to maintain some mystery. One day, in a wave of boredom, I looked at a piece of mail that came to her apartment. As long as we’d known her, Caty had always spelled her name Caty (on Facebook, in art shows) but in black and white, I saw that it was actually just plain Katie. Maybe even more than me, she knew what the Caty costume entailed: mystery, carefully applied quirkiness, and the ability to change at a moment’s notice. She wore it beautifully.