Longtime readers of this column will be unsurprised to hear that the first quality I look for in a restaurant is not that restaurant’s willingness to accommodate an infant in arms. Such an attribute is not, after all, the marker of elegance, excellence, taste, or invention, all of which my devoted readers will recognize as my areas of primary interest. I believe that food and eating can be artful—indeed, can be art—and it is with this belief in mind that I approach each of my reviews. Families of course deserve helpful criticism of child-friendly establishments, but such readers more fruitfully seek guidance elsewhere. So has it always been.

But my friends, sometimes life finds a critic with no babysitter and a looming deadline, and in such cases the critic is grateful to be able to keep her reservation.

I entered Au Naturel on a night of constant drizzle, ducking in from the wet street to a womb-like space lit only with vintage lamps on an eclectic series of tables. Au Naturel—or Oh No as many have come to call it—uses their scant square footage to maximum advantage, with a variety of seating areas, including an archipelago of two-tops skidding off the bar and a single long table running riverine down the hallway. The atmosphere is meant to be cheeky and fluid, but still I was uncertain whether the other diners would appreciate my unannounced guest: a three-month old baby asleep in his car seat. This being my first assignment since his birth, I was not intending to bring him along, but circumstances conspired to find my husband out of town and my sitter canceling at the last minute, leaving me with no alternative than to pack up my small, slumbering companion. Incidentally, I appreciate the well-wishes we have received and am happy to say we are all in great health.

The host approached the baby’s makeshift cradle with a look of trepidation, and like any new parent, I held back a wince. There was a pause, in which the host regarded Nigel with curiosity and incomprehension, a failure of categorization and context I too well understood. But then he smiled. 

While certain diners will not take it as a positive sign that the restaurant moved so quickly to make space for Nigel, perhaps they’ll rest easier knowing that I was seated at a booth in the very back corner, in a small enclave near the kitchen door. The table afforded me privacy for nursing or distracting the baby, and kept any noise away from the other patrons. Neither the host nor my waiter raised so much as an eyebrow in complaint. Although I never make reservations under my own name, I can’t rule out the idea that they recognized me and acted generously as a result of my position, but no matter the reason, the swift decency with which my needs as a mother were met frankly brought tears to my eyes. It had been a cold, anxious cab ride to the restaurant, and I will not soon forget the warmth that swept me to my high-backed booth. 

Nonetheless, I endeavored not to let this color my views of the food.

Oh No, a joint venture of chef John Scott and the naturalist Laura Ashbury, is an evolving concept. The menu rarely repeats an item from one night to the next, though certain famous dishes appear just frequently enough for eager diners to seek out multiple bookings in pursuit of a specific experience. Both the fluctuation and the repetition are by design. As I scarcely need tell you, my devoted readers, Oh No seeks to replicate, through its food, the experience of existing in the natural world. That doesn’t mean anything so mundane as farm-to-table feasts: for a large stuck pig with an apple in its maw, please look to the numerous quotidian establishments still chugging away in the fashion of the early twenty-tens. 

Here, the natural world has seasons. The natural world has wind whistling across the surface of a pond. The natural world contains predators and prey in balance with one another. All these must be felt when dining at Au Naturel. This is not me being poetic: the preceding sentences are printed on the restaurant’s nightly menus. 

I was prepared for two possibilities. First, that the food would be high-concept esoteric drivel. A John Cage tone poem squeezed into edible drag. 

Second, that the thinking would be sound, but too physical for my tastes. All flavor and no presentation. Brute force cuts of meat. 

The décor did not do much to set my mind at ease in this regard, because though pleasing, there was little subtlety to its warm wood and fireplace, the low lighting that seemed to hint of your grandmother next door in a rocking chair. Whispering hush. But once I pushed Nigel’s car seat up against the wall and burrowed into my booth, there was no chance I would be leaving before eating every dish placed in front of me. The value of heavy sleep is not to be disregarded by any new parent. Nor is the possibility of looking at that tender place where one’s identity used to sit, and watching with held breath to see whether it might be growing back. 

I never thought I would have a child, to be quite honest. I believed I would pursue the passions of my intellect and creativity, define the tastes of a generation and achieve a greater understanding of flavor’s architecture. I thought I would write columns, win awards, garner power. Insofar as my work involved food, my life involved the human body, but it was never food meant to nourish the body alone that held my interest. 

I thought for many years that to have a child would mean to diminish myself, to debase my own existence beneath the necessity of caring for another person. Not that I thought such care was an unworthy pursuit, it just wasn’t mine. 

But I have been surprised by the level of delight I feel in my son. That his needs in fact overwrite my own at times—the lack of sleep necessitated by his nocturnal infancy, the backaches that I don’t even realize are developing when I cradle him against my chest, the agonizingly precise way he holds my attention for hours on end—does not cheapen my wonder at realizing such a complete specimen was born from my own body. I touch his ribcage beneath his soft chest and think, You are whole. You are mine. Readers, yes: I eat for two. And with every mouthful I am newly aware of why we engage our physical senses. 

Enter Oh No. The buzz around this restaurant built during the months of my pregnancy, and for some time I let it slide beneath my attention, because I knew that to do the place justice I would need to eat without restriction. The menus at Oh No are not printed or released in advance, and a pregnant woman can’t risk being served sea urchin, fresh-cut tuna, or frankly the appropriate amount of wine. A restaurant vaunted for its re-creation of untouched landscapes may realistically be assumed to offer raw foods, including meat. And so I continually implied that Oh No had not yet reached the level of acclaim to merit my regard, while also ensuring that my editors didn’t give the assignment to anyone else. This became trickier once Scott and Ashbury won a James Beard award in my eighth month, but I persevered.  

Now, however, I was prepared. Now was my time. The transition of food into breastmilk may be miraculously direct, but there are still more stopgaps between Point A and Point B than when the child is a part of your body. Furthermore I was hungry for what they were serving: the world on a plate. Hungrier, perhaps, than I had ever been.  

I had booked a late seating by design, as the plan was always that my baby would be asleep during the meal, although he was supposed to be home in his crib, where we had lately transitioned him out of the bassinet. I was ready and eager, excited to return to my work and exercise the loose muscle of my mind. In the three months since Nigel was born, I have read the occasional book, and spent enough time on social media that my colleagues still view me as being “in touch.” But I have not given sustained attention to any project of my own. That my son’s birth has increased the power and poignancy of the ideas I want to communicate does not, unfortunately, contradict the fact that I have less time in which to communicate them.  

Thoughts come to me now, and if I don’t jot them down immediately they dissipate. There is difficulty in holding the thread of a complex and evolving idea—the beginning might be gone before I reach the end. There is a way in which this feels like death, when I compare it to my old life. Of course it’s not: it’s just exhaustion and distraction, both of which can be overcome with time, effort, and a judicious helping hand. But still, I feel it. I had no idea how undistracted I used to be. Even pregnant, in a constant hormonal haze, my mind was relatively clear and focused, and time unfurled in a steady fashion, like ribbon unspooling from a roll. Never before had I experienced entire days vanishing with no trace, no content. When we first got home from the hospital I would lie down in the bed and start to shiver uncontrollably as my body chemistry evened erratically out, breasts throbbing from phantom nursing even when the baby was elsewhere. 

For the first time in my life, food was a necessity, and not a pleasure. We ate peanut butter crackers. Take-out burritos. Meals selected less for their flavor profile than for their ability to be hefted in one hand. My greatest culinary joy was the Baby-Eat-Mommy, Mommy-Eat-Baby game, in which I would nibble on Nigel’s face with the softest of lips and he in turn would bite my cheeks, bite my nose, bite my chin, as hard as he could with his pink wet gums. His mouth ever-abundant and perfectly satisfactory.

Or almost perfect. There was, it turned out, still a part of my brain that remembered other kinds of eating. A yearning, gnawing recollection that I had not always been the one on the plate. 

So I pitched a review. This review, in fact. A visit to the natural world, the expansive world beyond my doorstep. My editor asked if I was really ready to go back to work, and I assured him that I was. 

We are here on Earth to celebrate the experience of being here on Earth: a tautology. But also true. When we dance, when we eat, when we crack open an egg or stir cream into coffee, we are alive with our own vitality, our very being-ness. The energy which tells us how to get up in the morning, and why in god’s name we might reproduce. Because it tastes good. Because it feels good. Because it’s fun.

But being reminded that we are alive necessarily means being reminded of the alternative: death, and more than that, whatever comes after death, in our absence. The lack of self, the lack of everything. The fact you can’t uncrack an egg.

Oh No was founded in part because John Scott and Laura Ashbury felt the urgency of this emptiness not only on a personal level but also as a kind of global project. It is their aim to use food to remind us of the rich and varied life on the planet—indeed to let us experience the breadth of that life—even as biodiversity is in a freefall of decay. To bring the death drive and the need for survival together into precarious balance. A laudable idea, but in a restaurant, it has to work on the plate. 

On the night of my visit to Oh No, I ordered the tasting menu, which was organized by location—the first few dishes being oceanic, as befits the cradle of all life. You likely know that I am suspicious of style, and how it so often comes at the expense of substance, but a first course is always a doorway, which must be stepped through before judging the room. So, the ocean. I received a glass sphere in which a jellyfish, pureed and reconstituted, was suspended in a foam of seawater. The presentation could be viewed from any angle so you might approach it with the boundless geometry of a fellow sea creature; the foam and the jelly were then to be swallowed in one mouthful which revealed an undertone of brine shrimp, giving one the sensation of being a baleen whale. Giving the impression of the sea, seething around one’s body, rushing through one’s teeth. I found the flavor refreshing, the textures layered, the surprise of the shrimp just enough to make me wonder what else was rushing towards me in the dark. 

The next dish refined the locational specificity of the ocean, with a penguin liver served on a slab of Antarctic ice. Rare and bloody in appearance, the liver had been marinated in something light and citrus-adjacent: ordinarily I would have guessed yuzu, but no such fruit is to be found on the last continent, and I was informed that the flavor comes from a combination of seaweed and lichen, crushed into a red wine reduction. The thickened wine was also poured over the liver as a sauce, spreading across the ice like a murder victim’s blood in a police procedural. All this was served with chilled Aquavit, taken as a shot before swallowing the liver in order to lower one’s body temperature from within. Does this really give one the feeling of being a dismembered penguin? Or perhaps of being the leopard seal who tore the penguin’s liver free? It certainly gave me a chill, so perhaps the true goal is to share the experience of the ice on which the penguin’s blood will freeze, as it floats above the great aquamarine undersea. Perhaps.

At this point I was amused but unconvinced, a posture so familiar I almost wanted to wrap it around me and run out the door. Finishing off the last of the liver, I began composing a review in my head that was pleasant, encouraging, lukewarm. One that asked what I felt were the important questions—namely whether the food at Oh No was actually expressing a complex understanding of various ecosystems, or if it was just a very clever camouflage, a pretty but meaningless onomatopoeia of the tongue. Perhaps before my baby was born, I would have filed that review, in fact, slapping the restaurant on the wrist for stunt cooking, and then moving on with my life. But despite my best intentions of impartiality, I couldn’t stop thinking about the host. How he leaned so kindly over my child, and with a nod of the head, welcomed him into their version of the world. So I stayed.

And since I did, I should mention that the jellyfish was served with a crisp New Zealand white, which, while a bit insipid, dried the palate sufficiently to bring forth the oceanic purity of the dish.

When Nigel was born, I understood for the first time why fairy tales all claim that magic comes at a cost. In pregnancy and childbirth, the cost is visceral, as is the benefit. You definitely get something, and you definitely trade something. 

In the first few weeks of my son’s life I sat in the same position on the couch for hours out of every day, with my feet propped up on a table laden with blankets: our ersatz ottoman. I had never before considered that we ought to have an ottoman at all, that the angle of my knees would ever be static for long enough that it might matter. I used to sit at my desk, twitching around as I wrote; I used to stand at the kitchen counter mincing garlic and wiping it with one finger off the knife. When I lay on the couch, I would spread across it lengthwise, or perch at the edge for conversation, or—forgive me—nestle inwards far enough to create the possibility of sex. I would watch movies. During which I would get up and go to the bathroom, or pour myself a finger of scotch. Never was I so still as I now needed to be with little, wrinkled Nigel, just seven and a half pounds with eyebrow hair so light that it was invisible. He was in all ways so small he seemed on the edge of disappearing. And yet so forceful, so needful. He could not be ignored. I did not sleep more than four hours a night. I felt milk come into my breasts so they ached at the armpit and tingled behind the areola like needles were being pushed out from within. My knees got sore.

Is this the trade? It isn’t. The pain, the exhaustion, is not the thing. You see, in those early weeks I spent hours scrolling through my phone, looking at and liking pictures of my friends on vacation all over the globe. Eating ceviche in Madrid. Lolling on blankets in front of a fireplace in a Vermont cabin. Popping their heads out of the water at an Australian beach, and dredging themselves onto shore for a cold beer and a bag of exotic chips. Each of them somehow managing to be in a place I’d often wanted to go: Japan, walking through a series of red gates by a temple. The Outer Hebrides of Scotland, wrapped in wool. Standing beneath a blue and orange wall in Mexico City, sipping a raspado thick with mango and cream. I thumbed through these photographs with a pathological furor, but the fact is that I did not want to be where they were. I wanted to be exactly where I was, and to know the wide world was still out there.

Meanwhile Nigel slept with his face pressed against my neck, his cheeks fattening in direct conjunction with the growing adroitness of his mouth on my breast. What I had lost was the desire, so potent at every previous point, that my body should be for my use only. I shed the part of me that only cared about my own forward momentum. Though in fact my life’s trajectory felt clearer than ever. He knew how to eat and I knew how to give. I was happy to be still, for a time, because ahead of me lay every day of my and Nigel’s life together, multiple and various and impossible to predict.

I still looked at the photographs, but in the way we peruse our memories of the dead. With a fondness that almost rises to the level of yearning, but must, by its very nature, be released like a puff of smoke.

After water came air.

This being my first step forward back into my existence as a thinking creature, a living mind, I was easily charmed by the simplicity of the menu’s layout. Water. Air. My brain, so recently scooped out, clung to the clarity of shared concepts, as if I might be served a triangle and a circle, floating in the sky, and then be asked to name them. The delight consisting in the fact that I could. 

Naturally Oh No’s food was more complicated than that, but in another way, it wasn’t. I can easily tell you what I ate. The question is, can I tell you why?

The next course began with tiny grasshoppers flash fried and coated in crushed salt and herbs: sage, parsley, chamomile. These were brought to the table and then tossed in a hot metal bowl to pop like corn, and the effect was one of brushing insects away from one’s face in a grassy field in late summer, stepping on small plants with a careless shoe. Or of being that cloud of insects, one among a throng, pinging off one another’s reckless limbs. I watched Nigel twitch in his sleep while I ate; I licked the salt concoction off my fingers, as the atmosphere at Oh No is not especially decorous, and it fit with the overall picnicking sensation of the dish. Stretching on a blanket. Yawning. The pleasures of the flesh.

Following the grasshoppers was perhaps the silliest dish of the night, a light lemon soup evaporated into the form of a cloud and brought to the table in a glass tube to be huffed through a straw. Besides the obvious unintentional nod to smoking cheap dorm room marijuana, this worked better than it had any right to, hitting my tongue like a droplet of water warmed by a yellow sun. I would have preferred to simply eat the soup, if only to see how the chef might have garnished it, but as molecular gastronomy goes, the cloud was quite effective. And they do mean to have an effect.

There are many ways to prepare a meal with natural ingredients, but that isn’t the project of Au Naturel. They don’t care to teach the uninitiated that nopales are made from prickly pear cactuses, or that a flower can be used in a salad for a pop of color and a bit of surprise. They are looking to convey, through food, the way it feels to exist in certain places, certain forms. Each course and plate is transportive in the manner of art, because it appeals not just to the body or mind but to the spirit, in a kind of synthesis or synesthesia. 

Parenthood is this way too. A project of transformation, ready or not. From the moment you become aware of the child in your body, you are imagining their future life, trying to picture the arrangement of their face and who they’ll take after; what they’ll look and smell like, how they’ll sound. It’s all theoretical, but you make choices—endless choices—trying to produce a happier theory. And in the process, a change occurs, not to the child, but to you. 

My question as I ate was this: can a restaurant truly achieve this trembling precipice, simply by complicating the form of a soup? Wherein freedom is achieved through freedom discarded? Individuality junked in favor of collectivity? Self lost to the other? Ashbury and Scott claim that the premise of Oh No is that self is not lost in the other, but widened. And well. This is not a terrible premise. I’m just not sure that it’s theirs.

At this point you might be hoping I’ll get to the point: is Oh No worth the price of admission, or not? So let’s get this out of the way: for a tasting menu with wine pairings you can anticipate paying at least five hundred dollars per person, though the restaurant does not adhere to a specific price point, given the variability of their food. Expect to pay market price, though I have not heard of a single diner’s bill exceeding six hundred and fifty dollars, which included after-dinner cocktails and a small encore plate. 

I didn’t stay that long. 

By the time we wound to the end of Air, the clock had struck twelve and I was beginning to turn into a pumpkin, which is an idiom almost stupidly suited to Oh No’s concept—food, bodies, transmutation—but never mind. In the time honored tradition of the sleep deprived, I was desperate to stay up later, and also determined to finish my review with the greatest possible command of the establishment. I asked the waiter to bring me a cognac to help settle my stomach before the next plate, and he said that in fact it was strange I should request this, since the next dish was brandied. It was, he said, the coup de grâce of the evening, and in fact one of the staff favorite dishes among those who had been lucky enough to try it. He promised to bring me a cognac of his personal recommendation to accompany the food, and then he disappeared behind the bar.

Are you wondering, as I did at this moment—sitting back in my quiet booth and feeling the beginnings of a comfortably full stomach—how a restaurant like Au Naturel acquired a moniker as dour as Oh No? 

There are multiple theories about this. Some people say it’s because the food is skirting the edge of conservation and exploitation: that to acquire a night’s worth of ice from Antarctica specifically to watch it melt is not the same as mourning the loss of the ice shelf or the attendant rise in sea level. Some say it’s due to an early reviewer’s assertion that there’s nothing naturel about the cooking, and others suggest that when John Scott and Laura Ashbury realized they’d talked themselves into opening a restaurant, Oh no is naturally what they exclaimed. 

Any of these stories might contain the truth, and we can never be sure, but this at least was my experience. The waiter brought my snifter of cognac, a very nice ten-year Planat, and then returned with a tray covered with a linen napkin, which he brandished at me until I took it. Beneath the cloth was a dish which contained a thin layer of liquid and a creature I understood, after some scrutinizing, to be a hummingbird prepared in the manner of an ortolan. 

The waiter indicated with one hand at my head. “The cloth,” he said.

If you aren’t familiar, an ortolan is a songbird that is force-fed with savory grain, and then consumed in its entirety after being drowned in Armagnac. Ah, what a way to go, some diners have been known to say, though those who eat these birds also cover their faces with veils—either to treat their sinuses to an infusion of hot liquored steam, or else to hide their shame from God, depending on your interpretation. 

The hummingbird, my waiter explained, had been fed exclusively from honeysuckle and bleeding heart flowers, and kept for the maximum possible time from flying, as the bird’s rapid wingbeats generally expend its caloric intake almost faster than the bird can consume. The bird is given a final meal of sugar water before being plunged in Armagnac, and then boiled alive. It was served to me, at Oh No, as dessert. 

Can you imagine what I whispered next?

I am not an unadventurous eater. If I was, I would fail at my profession. In fact, I would never have sought this profession at all. It is my pleasure to eat whatever is served to me and judge the meal on its aims and merits, outside any Western ethical system which forbids, for example, the consumption of horse or dog or any other such pet. I have eaten and enjoyed shark’s fin soup, and a thousand year egg, and a slice of my own sauteed placenta, which was served to me by my midwife and was nicely seasoned but too tough and gamey for my personal taste. 

The hummingbird was elegant, minuscule; the notion was that I would pick it up with a spoon. And without hesitation, I did. I draped the cloth over my head and hunched over the bowl, and I put that marvelous small thing in my mouth and I bit through its bones to the sweet pocket of liquid within, which exploded on my tongue the way a berry bursts its skin. 

The steam was heady; it cleared my sinuses and replaced my doubts and fears and regrets with a brief sugary high, and the desire for more. 

If I were to eat this every day, I imagined, I would understand what it felt like to hover in the air suspended on currents of warmth and navigate by the vicissitudes of gravitational waves. All at once the entire evening’s menu washed back over me, with similar effect. If only I were to eat the sea, the ice, the summer, the sky, every hour then I would never lose anything I wanted, and the world would never die. Not as long as I lived. 

I wanted to tell the waiter about my revelation—I wanted to tell everyone. For instance, you. But I pulled back the veil across my face, and immediately saw, not God, but Nigel, who had woken quietly and was sitting in his car seat, chewing on his hands. He smiled at me. An enormous smile of welcome and bliss, with which he now greets me every morning because—or so I tell myself, and assume—he has missed me in the night, almost as much as I miss him. And I realized that in my moment of perfect completion, I had forgotten him. I had left him alone.

Magic, I will remind you, comes at a cost. It always does.

After paying my bill I ordered a car and I took Nigel home. The lights were out, and I only turned on the smallest, lowest lamps as I brought my son to his bedroom and settled in to feed him. There was a bottle in the fridge that I had pumped earlier in the day, knowing I would be drinking too much alcohol to nurse him after I ate, but instead of preparing it I lifted my shirt and brought him to my breast, as we both prefer. His eyes briefly opened and considered me, as his mouth pursed around my areola in a perfect embouchure of hunger.

I gave birth to Nigel via caesarean section, my body splayed out on a table and paralyzed below the breasts. The room, cold. My legs immobile, my arms restrained on either side. A knife moving into my flesh and subcutaneous fat; no pain, but a sensation of rocking, pushing, squelch—for which the surgeons used the catchall term “pressure”—as my uterus was pulled out of my torso so the baby could be removed. Then the organ was shoved back in. In any other place or time, all of this—my bright white awareness, my frigid alarm—would have constituted horror. When in fact, it was one of the most beautiful rooms of my life. One of the great moments.

I remember shaking, laughing with the anesthesiologist who was perched at my shoulder. And I remember a hard crash. The anesthesiologist’s look of shock as the blood drained from my head—to somewhere. The bright room getting brighter, like iridescent milk, all the machine sounds suddenly stopping as I felt a heft and a lift. Something leaving my body, but not the baby; something leaving my body and that thing was me. Hovering up and above for just long enough to see the surgeon peel the uterine scrim away from Nigel’s face before I dropped back in with an intake of breath, to the anesthesiologist’s relieved expression. I came back, but I was different. I will never be who I was before. 

Here is my final thought about Au Naturel, which offers excellent value for the money, and has created an atmosphere of comfort and intimacy that is truly conducive to the culinary exploration offered by its kitchen each night. Five stars for cuisine, and ambience, and service; indeed if I could offer more than five stars for service, I would. I remain grateful to the staff who helped me rest my son quietly in the corner, recognizing perhaps that he too is part of this life and this world, and a worthy guest of their establishment. Or perhaps just being kind.

But having experienced at least one small sliver of Oh No’s menu and their thinking, I cannot help but feel the two are irrevocably at odds. The work of a naturalist like Laura Ashbury is to study the various forms of life outside our own and to believe they can be, through our intervention, understood and sustained; while the work of a chef is to make something to eat. Of course there is nothing ignoble about eating: it nurtures body and mind, and has been my life’s work. But thinking and living, thinking and dying, none of these are quite the same.

I listened to Nigel suck and swallow, listened to his satisfied sounds, and occasionally wiped a bubble of milk off his lower lip when the stream came too fast for him to handle. The milk he consumed was mine, was me: to make it, my body liquifies the calcium from my very bones. Given that he eats such a meal every few hours, there is an argument to be made that I too will never die, as the idea of me will live in him, and we will both be thus sustained. 

The evidence does not support it. But what would? 

The post A New Mother Hungry for the World on Her Plate appeared first on Electric Literature.

We heard about Monica Logue going missing same as everyone else. It was in the Gazette and I’d know the editor, Deirdre, very well since she comes into the shop the odd time buying flowers for her mammy’s grave. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’d think having a world-famous celebrity in town would be the biggest news going, but it turns out her not being in town at all trumps it handy. I reckon she’s taking a bit of time out from the stress of it all and you’d imagine those Hollywood types have their own demons with the drink and drugs although sometimes you see them going into rehab and they’re on some chat show going on about how they were drinking a bottle of wine a night and you think they’ve hardly touched the sides of what we get up to. Sure there’s nuns in Derry drink more than these fluthers and no one bats an eyelid. Most of my teachers were half cut in class, I’d swear it, but I guess it’s different everywhere. Maybe she got a look at Waterloo Street on a Friday night and realised she’d landed in Sodom and Gomorrah and fucked off back to the Hollywood Hills in pure shock.

It’ll all work out in the end. I hope it does because I think she’s marvellous. Me and Paul binged Blackfinch when it was on streaming and I couldn’t believe she was going to be in this thing. You’d almost not mind that it was an American and not someone from here if it’s someone of her talent and stature, and sure it’d mean more eyes on it and Paul was happy about it too because he’s had a glad eye for her since the nineties although he’d never say it but I’ve seen him reading every word printed.

Some of the stories you hear, though. I’ve heard the same as everyone else, that she needed to dry out or she was kidnapped by Provos who’d run out of horses to hold hostage. Some saying she was murdered by Diarmuid himself seeing as he’s the last one saw her alive, and isn’t that always what they say in cop shows before they put the screws on the school caretaker or the weirdo uncle. Few days ago, everyone and their mammy had seen her. Eileen says she was out buying buns in the bakery the day before yesterday which would hardly be the behaviour of someone about to skip town, but I’d trust her as soon as I’d trust an MP, I mean, a greater gossip than Eileen Downey never put her arm through a coat, and I don’t think she means to lie but she gets ideas in her head and lets them run away with her and you wouldn’t say a word to her if you were in your right mind, I mean you wouldn’t tell her the time.

You would get to worrying though all the same. There’s a lot of ways people can go, sure there was a wain on our estate God help us was run over by an ambulance, and another a few years before who fell in the river after a frisbee although they said that wee boy was troubled, never so far to say as he was suicidal only that it was worth mentioning just that about him, that he was “troubled” which seemed to be saying the same thing.

There’s a monument for mental health near where he drowned on the Foyle Road, it’s at the start of the bridge with a few steps reaching out into the river. I always liked it and I don’t often like the monuments but I like that one. They had to cordon it off since people were throwing themselves off it which I said was one way to spread suicide awareness anyway. Next thing there’ll be a wee plinth with a length of rope and a bottle of pills, there yous are, lads, help yourselves.

There’s the other one, the Hands Across the Divide, over by where Tillie’s used to be, it’s two lads reaching out for one another. It’s good because it could be about the Troubles or it could be about mental health or the environment or gays. They’re not touching, the hands, but they’re trying to touch and I reckon that’s the point. It’s all about awareness.

More people have died from suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in all the fighting before it, I hear people saying that a lot. Father McLaughlin used to say it in mass before collection. Now the details of how fixing the church’s roof was going to help teen suicides was never made clear to me but, that aside, everyone would nod at this fact like it was wile wise. I always wondered how it was that everyone’s killing themselves now when things are better, when no one was back in the day. I read a pamphlet that says a thousand more people died by suicide than murder even during the Troubles, so is that better or worse than now? If it’s better, then it seems a weird thing to go on about, and if it’s worse, then maybe the Troubles were better for people’s mental health than everyone lets on, gave them something else to worry about. But you can’t say things like that these days. Everyone just wants to move past it.

The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight and how it’ll give a boost to the economy like Thrones did for Belfast, as if they needed it anyway. In my own personal view it’s a great thing altogether. Very good for getting the story out there—and if there’s jobs in it, all the better.

That’s one thing I think about a lot is jobs, it’s terrible the amount of unemployment that’s around and then you look at some of the people who do have jobs and you wonder how it even happened. Our Patricia’s Turlough minds the cars in the leisure centre up in Pennyburn and I always think how did he even get the job. He’s too good for it, you see, the great struggling actor! And now he’s given Patricia the bug, but sure it’s good to have a passion. It would just be nice to see some passion in the job he actually has, is all I’m saying, face like thunder while he’s raising the barriers and you’d feel bad even parking your car, like you’re taking food from his mouth. Before they started courting, I used to think he must have been born in the centre, swaddled in a kitbag, raised by the lifeguards and handed a work pass. He doesn’t even sweep the floors or hand out swimming caps or anything, I’ve never even seen him indoors, and I always used to joke he probably has a wee pullout bed and a stove to make his tea ’cos he just sits in his wee booth minding the cars all day and the face on him you’d think he was before a firing squad. That to me is a shame to be honest because there’s plenty would do that job and do it with a smile on their face.

But then I suppose my big thing, and as long as I live I will always return to it, is the handicapped, who I think have a terrible time of it already, and could do with a leg-up—or a wheel-up as the case may be. It’s every day I see some eejit collecting trolleys or serving drinks and looking like the world’s not done them any favours and when I see people like that I think: do you know what, that’d be a great job for a wee handicapped person. There are degrees of handicapped but I think it’s something we need to look into if the powers-that-be would give it a moment’s thought. When you do see wee handicaps in jobs they seem happy with it, they’re thankful for the opportunity, and sure if there’s a bit of a fuss learning them the ropes well it can’t be worse than some of the gombeens I see washing cars and doing dishes and not knowing how lucky they are. There was one used to work in Duffy’s making the teas and he was a credit to his disability, always smiling, and if he made a wee mistake he apologised and everything was fine. Except one time I was in there with Eileen Downey and she had a face on her the whole time like she was being served by a chimpanzee and I had to have a word with her and tell her she was being unkind even if he did get a few things wrong. She was put out to put it mildly because he gave her the wrong drink and me the wrong sandwich but I wasn’t complaining and I don’t need Eileen Downey to do that on my behalf, I’m loud enough on my own thank you very much, but the final straw for her was when he touched her biscuit when it nearly fell off her saucer as he was handing it to her and she picked it up with the tiniest tips of her two fingers as if it was polluted, as if he’d pulled it out of his arse in front of her, and what does she do but ask for another one. He was wile confused so I had to step in and tell him, slowly and at loud volume, that everything was fine and I nearly kicked her under the chair, I tell you she went down in my estimation there and then. She said the biscuit was half broke and I said it’ll all end up in the same place once it’s down ye and in any case a kind word never broke anyone’s mouth, Eileen Downey and then she said her Joe was after getting into gambling debts and she wouldn’t have minded if it was the football or the dogs but it was a wee mobile game that had girls with their tits out which I thought was strange that it made the difference to her but I did feel bad then because sometimes people are going through things and you don’t even know and it’s all about having empathy at the end of the day. We got that meal for free anyway because the wee fella forgot to come back with the cheque so it all worked out.

As for the telly, our Patricia thinks she’s hired already. If there’s one good thing about her and Turlough, and I’ll be honest, he’s a nice young man when he smiles a bit, God knows she could do a lot worse, it’s that they raise each other up when it comes to the acting. She’s in with the drama troupe and already sees her name in lights, and with Hollywood coming to town it’s very exciting altogether. Paul says I’m convinced she’s going to get Monica’s part and would I steal the poor woman’s grave as quick, but I paid him no mind because there’s going to be hundreds of parts for young girls even in the crowd scenes, and optimism is a choice, I tell him, why not support your child to the hilt, there’s enough disappointments in life without presuming them in advance. For the big parts I’d find myself a bit more realistic on that score since part of me thinks sure they’ll probably just get wee English girls in and make them do accents like they always do, but I don’t say that except to our Paul and he says the same. I just tell him to make sure he doesn’t say it out loud because then we’d never hear the end of it from Patricia, who’s very sensitive about these things.

Honest to God, you can hardly breathe around her. Twice last week he dropped the ball complimenting her friends, and in fairness he can be useless about these things but she laid the whole trap out for him, you’d forget how devious teenagers are if you didn’t have one under your roof, it’s demons they are. The whole lot of them are convinced they’re made for showbiz, so it was all Kylie wants to be a model and Anna wants to be on TV and he just said yeah they’d be good at it all right and I knew then he’d suffer for that, it was as if he’d scalded her with acid, Jesus Christ, it was like he’d killed her dead. The competition between those girls! Good luck ever working out who’s friends with who and what does be going on with any of them. When they were wains it was all about dance moves and hairstyles and now it’s about who’s got the best arse and the biggest lips and this from girls of seventeen years of age. I pity poor Paul for it because he can’t put a foot right. In my view Patricia is as gorgeous as any of her friends—certainly Kylie, God love the girl but she hasn’t a feature. I said to Paul that Kylie would have better luck as a crash-test dummy than a supermodel and we had a good laugh at that, God forgive us, but then I told him don’t you be saying that to Patricia either, for the love of Jesus, we’d never hear the end of it.

What’s true and I don’t care one jot if I’m biased is that if the casting people are on the lookout for local talent they couldn’t do better than Patricia. She played Aladdin—the boy part—in the panto last year and even without the makeup, which they rightly banned for sensitivity reasons after that whole to-do last year, I swear you’d have thought she was a wee Arab boy. She even got the part over Terri Harkin’s youngest, Alex, who’s a wee they-them, so I was particularly pleased, even though I fully support her visibility and God love them they need awareness too, sure it’s the modern day and you need to be kind, but Patricia just has the goods, and I know I’m her mother but that girl has the goods.

The latest now is they’re casting, and the producers were very pleased with her tape and want to see her for a whole host of parts. The house is elated to say the least and the only sad part, I thought, was that she and Kylie got a look-in but Anna didn’t, but it turns out Patricia has taken against Anna for some reason so it hasn’t made a dent in her happiness, to be honest she might even be happier that Anna didn’t get her dream which is nice for her in a way. I’ve given up worrying about anything else, sure they’ll be thick as thieves again by tomorrow and anything you say, for or against any one of them, can and will be used against you in the court of Patricia McDaid.

Of course, now she’s decided her best bet is to know all about what it was like in the bad old days and particularly how it was for young girls, and all of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants. She talks to me like I’m the last survivor of the Titanic, like she’s only just realised that she was living this whole time with a relic from the Ulster Museum, like anything I’ve ever done has actually mattered. And the things she’s asking, my God do they teach these kids anything at all. I mean this morning she was asking me how we got to school, as if we were dodging bullets the whole trip, and Paul couldn’t help himself then telling her we went to bed on a heap of sandbags and wrapped our Christmas presents with barbed wire and she writing it all down like a thick, we had to laugh. But then she takes me aside and says it’s all about recording history through drama and using art to tell stories and you’d think she was on the couch with Paddy Kielty talking about the struggle of her craft. So there we were in the front room for an hour going over the whole thing and she with the pencil in her hand taking notes, asking me if I’d ever been bombed or shot and me having to tell her my life story stuck without anything to say because I couldn’t believe she was interested in any of it.

And there’s me trying to explain what the army checkpoints looked like or how a bomb site smelled, almost as if I was telling her what the world was like before mobile phones or those times when she was a wain when she and her brother would ask us if we lived around the dinosaurs or when exactly it was that the world stopped being in black and white. And then she’s asking about the killings and what happened to this one and that one and thon, and by the end of it I have her pencil in my hand drawing protest routes and the whole time she’s at me about atrocities and massacres and I don’t know why but the way she’s saying it like she’s someone on the news, or an English person, like she’s a tourist or some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission, and it all had me grabbing the tissues wondering how it could be she didn’t know, how my whole life I’ve tried to stop her from hearing any of it as if I was trying to protect her and not be like some of the other people round here who’d boil the ear off you never giving over about every last thing that happened, as if they and they alone were God’s one true perfect martyr and we didn’t every one of us go through the same thing.

And wouldn’t you know it, eventually she had me talking about Jamie Devenney, both of us blubbering on the couch and me stroking her hair and remembering when she was just a funny bold wee girl fretting about monsters under her bed and now it’s me worrying about the monsters out there she’ll be set free to encounter.

I wouldn’t say I get emotional about any of it at all nowadays, I’d say my philosophy is I leave the past in the past and there were people who had it worse, God knows, but there was something about remembering what happened to Jamie and the way she didn’t even know his name, she read it from her notes like she’s seen it in a book, and she says is he one of the fellas on the wall and I say aye, one of the fellas on the wall and I say but he was a beautiful boy, you know and tell her all about how the whole neighbourhood were mad after him and she says you wouldn’t know it from the picture. I told her sure that was a whole story on its own. Sad as everyone was when he got shot, I said, there was more uproar when that mural came up and everyone saw Jamie who was our wee pop star, our wee dreamboat, looking like a bank manager or a bus driver, not that there’s anything wrong with people in those professions but he was movie-star good-looking so he was.

And I meant all this to be funny because by this point my tears needed drying, but it came out angry and I found the whole thing wrong somehow, like this wasn’t a story or a page in a book or a scene for some innocent child to be play-acting, this was a thing that had happened, these were people. Patricia God love her was studying all this and wondering what to make of her lovesick heart-broke mammy snotting into a bog roll and trying to get my words out, and I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story, but there’s no way the whole story could ever be told, and every film I ever seen about any place or any war was probably filled with stuff the people from there would hate, things they couldn’t stand, and is this what we’re making for ourselves, a rod for our own backs, a great big heap of shite to raise a bit of awareness of what, of my life of my people.

The thought of that boy and that I’d seen him at a dance two nights before and always felt that maybe there was something there to keep an eye on between me and him, not some deep spiritual connection don’t get me wrong but a wee throw of the eye, a sense that we had a story to tell between us sometime if the time ever came, but all that was thrown away and forgotten about because some cunt soldier shot him in the head in front of the whole street, and now I see him up on that wall every day, just another fading mural like that one down the road of Sinead Bradley’s brother and a couple others but I never knew them quite so well, and there’s one wee fella who has one on the far side of the estate whose name I always forget and I feel the worst for him because it’s been too long now and I can hardly go round asking.

The post Our Wee Town’s Violent History Is Having Its Hollywood Moment appeared first on Electric Literature.

Yuchen sat in the back of the taxi as it turned onto Chang’an Avenue. Seventeen years ago, she had biked to high school on this ten-lane boulevard every day. So, so wide, she thought then. It had made her feel small.

She rolled down her window and let the breeze carry her hair into a frenzy. Tiananmen Square dark on the left, Tiananmen Tower lit up on the right. Chairman Mao’s Mona Lisa smile had looked benign to Yuchen as a child, the look of a gentle grandfather, but now the portrait seemed menacing, as if it could, any second, turn into a scowl. There were many situations in which Yuchen couldn’t be sure if or how she had changed, but in this moment, she was confident that neither Tiananmen Square nor Chairman Mao’s painted face had been altered; it was that she was no longer as Chinese as she used to be. But what did she mean by Chinese? It was a categorical adjective one would only use from the outside looking in: This was Chinese, that was not so Chinese. There was no such distinction from the inside. Perhaps that was what Yuchen meant: not less Chinese (how could she be less Chinese if she was, immutably, Chinese?), but outside Chinese.

Spring was Beijing’s shortest season and Yuchen favored it for its transience. The heat and humidity were timid in the air. Something smelled nostalgic. Was it possible that the air was scented with the past because she was headed to see old friends? After two IVF cycles, Yuchen no longer trusted her emotions, but analyzed them in therapy-speak and hormonal mumbo jumbo. She craned her neck out the window, getting a stronger whiff of the fragrance.

Guniang, don’t stick your head out, the taxi driver said into the rearview mirror.

No one had called her guniang in a long time. The gendered form of address was respectful but familiar, not infantilizing, not remotely flirtatious in this context, a state of relating that was missing in English, in which most of her present life unfolded.

She did as she was told. When she was growing up, Beijing taxi drivers were infamous for regarding themselves as all-knowing. Maybe he would know the air’s peculiar ingredients.

Do you smell that, shifu? Something floral?

The taxi driver loved yulan flowers. A Beijing native, he had spent his childhood in hutongs not far from Tiananmen, and when the hutongs were demolished, his family moved to the South Fourth Ring Road, where yulan trees did not grow. He knew that the ones on Chang’an Avenue blossomed first every spring, followed by those in the Summer Palace, then in the Sculpture Park on the west side, and Buddhist temples in the surrounding mountains. He, and most municipal taxi drivers, took pride in their hometown, the great capital of their great country.

See those white flowers by the redbrick walls? the taxi driver said. That’s yulan.

Yulan, of course. Yuchen closed her eyes to focus on the subtle aroma. It swirled in her nose, continued toward her brain—Yuchen did know this smell, this flower, but she couldn’t remember from when or where, her familiarity with it completely strange.

You’re not from Beijing, are you? the taxi driver said, interrupting her reverie.

Sure I am, Yuchen said, defending herself in an exaggerated Beijing accent, opening her eyes eagerly. I just haven’t been back in a few years.

Before she left China at eighteen, Yuchen had thought her Beijing accent equaled standard Mandarin, until she realized that her college friends from southern China couldn’t understand her excessively rhotic vowels and the way she liaised words together like she was speaking French. Over the years, she took care to tone it down, straightening her tongue and enunciating every character. Now Yuchen spoke both her mother tongue, Mandarin, and her second language, English, with no particular geographical association—so blandly she bored herself.

I couldn’t tell from your accent but I hear it now, the taxi driver said with a chuckle. Where do you live these days?

United States.

Where in the US? New York? Los Angeles?

Seattle.

I know Seattle! Sleepless in Seattle! And that Tang Wei movie—Beijing Meets Seattle. What do you do in Seattle?

I’m a photographer.

Like for weddings?

Yuchen debated the answer. She could lie and say yes, or she could throw a rock into the lake and see how it would ripple.

For art. I’m an artist.

You make art!

The taxi driver nodded, glancing into the rearview mirror with a newfound sense of intrigue. He thought his artist passenger looked old enough to be married, or even to be a mother. His own daughter was thirty-one; her son would turn two next month. He knew that artist types might lead unconventional lives, but he thought he could do a good deed for her parents.

You have kids?

No.

Married though?

Yuchen nodded. She averted her eyes from the reflection of the taxi driver’s scrutinizing look and feigned contemplation of whatever was outside the window. They turned off Chang’an Avenue. A brief silence that Yuchen wished would last.

You look my daughter’s age, the taxi driver continued. It’s better for women to have kids while young.

Yuchen offered no response, hoping if she neither agreed nor disagreed, their conversation would end here.

Your husband is us Chinese or a laowai?

He is American, but his parents emigrated from Hangzhou years ago.

So he speaks Chinese?

He can understand some.

That must be difficult for your parents. You are an only child, too, right?

Yuchen told him that she was born in 1987. The taxi driver said, with sincerity, that he would never let his only daughter marry a foreigner, lamenting again how inconvenient it must be for Yuchen’s parents. Yuchen tried a smile.

So which one do you like better: the US or China? the taxi driver asked.

It always came down to the same ultimatum. Yuchen used to attempt an honest answer, which varied depending on current affairs, context, or mood. But by now she had learned that there was only one correct answer.

Has to be our own country, she said. No doubt about it.

Yuchen followed a lanky boy through the KTV’s maze of hallways. He walked ungracefully, as if his limbs were trying to break free from his oddly formal uniform: a white dress shirt, a black waistcoat, and a maroon bow tie. He walked so fast, almost running, and Yuchen imagined that the boy hurried everywhere and still fell behind all the time. She wanted to tell him that he could slow down, she was not in a rush, but she stayed quiet and quickened her steps. Anything she said might make the boy feel worse, adding to the things he already thought he was doing wrong in life.

Before Yuchen realized that they had arrived at Room C10, the boy was already pushing the door open. First the music, a melancholy Faye Wong song, then the collective exclamation from her old friends, whose faces she hadn’t seen in so long that she couldn’t immediately remember their names. Some were standing up, one walking toward her. In an instant, memories of countless karaoke parties during their high school years coalesced into reality, washing over her like an ocean wave crashing onto the shore, unstoppable. She turned around to thank the boy, but he already had his back to her, whispering into his earpiece, hurrying away.

Yuchen—we were just talking about you! Xiaohan, a short woman with a fashionable bob, swung her arm around Yuchen, leading her into the room.

What were you saying behind my back? Yuchen teased.

Without a word, the crowd on the couch parted to make space for her in the center. She looked around the room—he was not here. Thanks to the atmospheric lighting, no one noticed that Yuchen’s eyes had just dimmed. In a way, she was relieved. As much as she wished to see him tonight—who wouldn’t be curious to find out how your first love had turned out?—she had also been nervous about the possibility, at the thought of how she might be reflected in his eyes.

We were saying that you were the class flower! All the boys had a crush on you, Xiaohan said.

Even at thirty-six, Xiaohan could register her body’s involuntary response when Yuchen was in the same room: Her insides twisted and twinged, a tangle of jealousy and admiration. She knew objectively that as an adult, Yuchen no longer stood out, not in any way that mattered: She wasn’t the richest or the most famous, her face was not the fairest or the smoothest, her edges were rounded, her husband was not particularly handsome in her pictures, and she remained the only woman in this room who was not yet a mother. Was Yuchen possibly infertile? She herself was a mother of two and she loved her kids most days. But look at the way everyone shifted places just so Yuchen could sit right in the middle, despite her arriving late—what Yuchen was to the people in this room was never going to change. The same was true for all of them. To be who they had been to each other, even for a few hours, was the essence of these high school reunions.

Someone asked Yuchen whether she wanted whiskey or beer.

I’m not drinking tonight, Yuchen answered. Just tea, please.

Are you preparing for pregnancy? Xiaohan asked.

Yuchen hesitated. She couldn’t manage any follow-up questions if she answered honestly, that yes, she had come home at her mother’s request to undergo a Chinese medicine fertility treatment; and yes, she had had two miscarriages, which made her feel like a failure, even though her husband had been kind and she knew her femininity wasn’t defined by motherhood; and yes, she was trying for pregnancy even though she was not sure if she wanted children at all.

No, Yuchen said. Alcohol gives me headaches. Getting old, you know.

Yuchen is an artist, Xiaohan, not a housewife like you! another classmate said.

In Xiaohan’s opinion, an artist was a glorified housewife anyway; art was not real work. Xiaohan wedged in next to Yuchen, keeping her mouth shut.

Housewife is the hardest job in the world, Yuchen said, giving Xiaohan’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. Xiaohan, thanks for inviting me. I haven’t seen you guys in forever.

Did you come for work this time? Xiaohan asked.

Both her Chinese and American friends often questioned the purpose of her trips to Beijing, as though the logic of an adult life could not accommodate such a sentimental luxury as simply going home.

I haven’t seen my family in a while, Yuchen answered. But maybe I’ll do some work, too, while I’m here.

An artist’s life is so free! Xiaohan exclaimed. When will you show your work in Beijing? Give us an opportunity to show up for you.

I’m working on a project about the idea of borders and border-crossing, not only geographical but in the most expansive sense, even including trespassing, but Chinese galleries are very cautious these days—I’m not sure if they would be interested.

Easier to blame the system for the lack of interest, Xiaohan thought. She’d seen Yuchen’s WeChat posts about her exhibitions abroad. From the name of the venue to her photos, everything seemed intentionally obscure, just like the way she was speaking now, what with the idea of borders and trespassing.

Well, just don’t forget your old classmates when you have a homecoming show, Xiaohan said.

Yuchen felt relieved when the intro to Xiaohan’s song started playing. She knew that Xiaohan’s interest did not lie in her work but in finding a fathomable way to measure its success. The truth was that she hadn’t been able to focus on creating anything in a while. The doubt and frustration from those cold and costly procedures spread surreptitiously inside her like a virus. When she could not contain those feelings any longer, they spilled out of her body, into the air she breathed, infecting everything she touched—her furniture, her camera, her husband.

Once the initial attention to her waned, Yuchen participated in the conversation as much as she could. The women talked about men, children, gossip, and anti-aging skin care, while the men talked about everything else. No one talked about politics. Yuchen used to be interested in how these friends, some of whom had never left China, thought about what she could only watch from across the ocean. She worried that her idea of home was becoming imaginary, skewed by Western media, drifting away from reality. On occasions like tonight, she used to try to find out what was actually going on in China, but she had stopped bothering since a few trips ago. The Chinese news was so censored that most people didn’t even know what she knew. Or if they did, they didn’t care—what was actually going on in China was exactly this: regular people drinking, singing, having a great time, without giving a shit about what the outside world fixated on. In her friends, she saw what her life could have been if she had never left: Though stress-filled and never satisfied, they lived in a comfortable, insulated cocoon where the idea of unadulterated happiness, though small and evanescent, was easily attainable—eating at a favorite restaurant, getting drunk with old friends, or singing that one special song at karaoke. The China she would have lived in and the China she watched from afar existed simultaneously. Only she was outside of both.

Yuchen’s karaoke go to finally came on, her favorite Karen Mok. A friend handed her the mic. She hadn’t heard or even thought of the song for years, but its lyrics poured out of her lips without her looking at the prompter. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the singer’s face in the music video. While Yuchen aged in front of the screen, Karen Mok stayed twenty-seven. It was as if years had gone by in a second, while time also stood still. In 1999, the year the song was released, Karen Mok hadn’t yet known that she would end up marrying her first love, whom she met at seventeen, the age when Yuchen, too, first loved a boy. Unbeknownst to the boy then, Yuchen had already decided to attend an American college, not understanding that she could never truly return again. After the murmuring verse came the melodic chorus, a ballad that everyone swayed their bodies to, joining in to sing, opening and closing their mouths in unison. Yuchen heard her own voice disappearing into the group. For a moment she was seventeen once more, the class flower who safely, effortlessly, belonged.

As she walked back from the bathroom, Yuchen saw the boy who guided her earlier in the hallway, marching around the corner and coming to a stop in front of Room C10. He put his hand on the doorknob and turned around, searching for his lost guest with an impatient frown. His bow tie was now loose and crooked, and Yuchen thought she would help him fix it if she could ever get a word in with him, but she forgot all about his bow tie when she realized who the boy was waiting for.

It was difficult to say if she saw Lichuan first or the other way around. She was already replaying this moment in her head, like Wong Kar-Wai in In the Mood for Love, repeating and varying the sequence of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, pacing to the rhythm of pensive beats and a crying violin, making their way toward each other in cramped alleys and narrow pathways. As Lichuan approached the boy, Yuchen watched herself walking toward Lichuan at the speed of sixty frames per second as if for an eternity. Lichuan’s hand replaced the boy’s and held the door to Room C10 closed. He said something to the boy and the boy turned away in haste, tightening his bow tie as he ran past Yuchen without noticing her.

But this wasn’t a movie, and Yuchen hadn’t rehearsed what to say in this scene. As much as she was curious to see Lichuan tonight, a part of her knew that perhaps it was better not to spoil their memory of each other. She wouldn’t mind if he remembered her always as the confident, careless, colorful seventeen-year-old, and not who she was today, a person she could barely describe. Before she could stop herself, her arms opened, reaching toward him for an embrace. Her head landed on his shoulder, lightly. He smelled faintly like the boy she had loved but also completely unrecognizable. There was a pause before Lichuan put his arms around her, hugging her meekly, like she was a fragile plant. She awkwardly patted him on the back and stepped away, standing just a centimeter closer than her usual friendly remove.

Guess that’s how people greet each other in the US? Lichuan spoke first, amused.

I wasn’t thinking, Yuchen said, laughing at herself. We hug every one, like people you meet for the first time. It’s pretty weird. Well, not we—Americans do. A lot of hugging.

I’m glad you didn’t end up in France—I’m not doing that double-kiss stuff.

They shared another laugh. Lichuan’s features looked individually familiar, but unfamiliar when put together. Yuchen wondered if he was thinking the same about her.

Should we go in? he suggested.

Yuchen didn’t want to.

How do you think everyone will react if we walk in together? she asked.

I only came tonight because Xiaohan said you were coming, Lichuan said.

You think she was trying to set us up?

You’re still married, no?

Yuchen waited a beat too long before answering.

I am. You? Seeing anyone?

Neither of them posted frequently on social media. Without having seen a wedding photo or marriage certificate, Yuchen assumed Lichuan was, at least, not yet legally bound.

Xiaohan did try to set me up with someone, he said. Nice of her.

How did it go?

I’m pretty sure the woman was allergic to me.

What happened to us? Every girl in this room probably had a crush on you in high school. Yuchen counted in her head. Three of them I know for a fact.

Everyone at that age just liked who everyone else did, Lichuan said. Noticing the change in Yuchen’s expression, he revised, You and I were different, I think.

Everyone at that age thought they were different, Yuchen said.

Lichuan was quiet for a moment. Yuchen couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but she liked the way he was looking at her, so she welcomed his gaze, wishing he could read her mind.

How about we ditch this reunion? Lichuan finally proposed.

As if answering a magic spell, the door to Room C10 opened from the inside. Xiaohan materialized within the frame, startling them both.

Here you are, Yuchen! Xiaohan cheered. I was going to look for you but I see that someone else found you first.

She held the door agape, inviting Yuchen and Lichuan to cross the threshold together. As they made their entrance, someone whistled, and Yuchen thought she saw the roots of Lichuan’s ears turning rosy.

The night ended at half past midnight, when half the group was inappropriately hammered, and the other half barely able to chaperone their friends to their respective partners, who would help their spouses into the apartment with complaints but care for them all the same. Ten years ago, these old friends would have continued on to a nightclub on Workers’ Stadium West Road. Even five years ago, they’d feast at a twenty-four-hour barbecue restaurant or clear their heads at a teahouse by discussing matters they could only speak of in the darkest hours of the night. Miserably sober, Yuchen took charge of typing everyone’s addresses into their car service apps. As she shoved slurring friends into back seats, she imagined them, like the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, dispersing in all directions within Beijing’s six thousand square miles.

After a series of long, soul-baring, yet restrained and occasionally maudlin goodbyes, Lichuan and Yuchen were finally left on their own, standing side by side in a warm pool of street light. Beyond meeting the adult Lichuan, Yuchen hadn’t imagined the night any further, how they might spend the slow and mercurial hours between the previous day and the next, a period that was usually expended in dreams and didn’t require any planning. Neither of them was the person the other had once known, nor could they neatly fit into each other’s current life. What she wanted from him she did not know. But having him close made Yuchen smile, which she rarely did these days. The night was permissive, much less unforgiving than the daylight that was, surely and shortly, to come.

Yuchen started walking, and Lichuan followed. The street leading to the Third Ring Road was empty apart from cars occasionally whooshing by, clouds passing over, and trees and buildings quietly standing. They walked without aim but each step felt deliberate. 轧马路 (pressing the road), Yuchen thought of the Chinese idiom that meant walking without a destination in mind, as if the walk’s sole purpose were to iron out the sidewalk’s unevenness, to undo, to press against time. Years ago, pressing the road had been their favorite activity as young lovers, which allowed them privacy at no cost. Now it felt almost unnatural not to hold hands. Yuchen tucked hers into the pockets of her trench coat.

You said that you came to see me tonight. Why? she asked.

I wanted to see who you’ve grown to be.

Here I am. What do you think?

All night I was wondering if you’d be the same person if you’d stayed like the rest of us.

I’ve wondered that, too. But do I really seem that different?

In video games, you have multiple choices at any given juncture. You pick one, follow it through, but you can always go back to the same point and try another path.

Do you always get to a different ending, though?

Not always.

When did you get into game design?

At my first job after college. What does your husband do?

He’s a curator. For a small art museum.

What is a curator?

As Yuchen explained, she kept using English words, mostly nouns, whose Chinese translations, which she added for Lichuan’s sake, sounded nothing like what she meant. The more she talked about the world that she and her husband orbited, the farther away it felt from where she stood in this moment. She had felt the same way when she tried to explain to her husband what her childhood was like: the pressure-cooker school system, the mandatory political education, the forbidden teenage dating scene. She diligently translated herself back and forth, but the truest things about her always fell through the cracks. Lichuan nodded along, apologizing for his ignorance about all this art stuff.

What kind of photos do you take? he asked.

Yuchen trusted that Lichuan, unlike Xiaohan, asked out of genuine curiosity, but it was a question she never knew how to answer and that thus always annoyed her. How does an artist articulate or summarize their art when it is the very creation that fills the void of the inarticulable, the unsummarizable? One’s art is always changing, too, evolving with time, its maker, and the world. She considered telling Lichuan every project she’d ever done since grad school and every one of her inspirations and aspirations for the future. If only they had all the time in the world.

In art school, I chose photography because I found the space between what is objectively perceivable and what is not so fascinating. How one sees and is seen, Yuchen said. I was working on a project about border-crossing and trespassing, but I haven’t been able to make anything since we started IVF.

Isn’t there a lot of border-crossing and trespassing—so to speak—happening during the process of IVF?

Yuchen contemplated Lichuan’s question while he waited patiently, looking ahead at the freeway in the distance.

Right, we have borders within, Yuchen said, finally. And trespassing can happen there, too.

Trespassing can also be visible and invisible, Lichuan said. Like what you were saying.

You’ve always been a very good listener.

Your life must be good, Lichuan said, after a moment. Good enough for you two to want kids.

You don’t?

Did you see that video where a Shanghainese guy said, We are the last generation? It might sound extreme to say we shouldn’t have kids, but I could see his point.

My husband wants kids. I’m more ambivalent, but I think I’d be happy to have his kids. Our kids, Yuchen corrected herself. Is that un-feminist of me?

I think it means that you love him, Lichuan said. And that’s a good thing, no? Feminist or not.

In the American context, the theories and identity labels Yuchen constantly navigated tired and, in many cases, confused her. It was not that she doubted them; it was that she believed in them so firmly that she was unable to admit her own feelings, unable to stop performing for herself and others, unable to reconcile her own life with what she believed to be true. In front of Lichuan, she felt that she could strip off her costume and step out of that theater. To him, her feelings didn’t have to be right or wrong. They were just feelings.

With silence, she answered him in the affirmative. The quiet between them was delicate but comfortable—comforting. They carried it gingerly as they pressed another stretch of the street. At the end of the block sat the freeway bridge, which, as they approached, loomed larger and larger in an extraterrestrial way, and Yuchen felt so wonderfully small, that she was a small human with small problems.

When they reached the intersection, Yuchen followed Lichuan into a convenience store, where Lichuan remembered her favorite ice cream flavor and she picked out his favorite cigarettes. The soda they had both loved had been discontinued, and they spent five minutes comparing and discussing which drink in the fridge would have the most similar taste.

After they exited the convenience store, the cashier, who worked a much more demanding job during the day, roused himself from the sleepiness that shrouded the register. He watched Yuchen and Lichuan sit down on the curb outside, Lichuan smoking Jiaozi, Yuchen scooping rum-flavored Baxy, then swapping. He noticed a shy distance between them and deduced that they were only early in what would soon be an ardent and enduring romance, which had yet to come by in his own twenty-four years of loving and unloving. They shared things that made them happy, glanced at each other when the other wasn’t paying attention, and periodically laughed without being self-conscious of the unflattering shapes their faces contorted into. The young cashier wished to love and be loved as such. He kept observing Yuchen and Lichuan, standing in the loneliness of an empty store, until the next customer came through the automatic door, the chime dinging, startling him as though the light in the cinema had been switched on in the middle of a movie.

The next morning, Yuchen opened her eyes to blinding sunlight. She sat up and caught herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. She didn’t recognize the room or the side of her body. The reflection looked like a painting—yes, that Edward Hopper she first saw at the old Whitney, in which a lady in pink sits in bed, facing a luminous window. She had admired how the bright patches made the shadows appear darker by contrast, which was the case for what she was seeing in Lichuan’s mirror now, the curtains carelessly drawn, leaving an opening of unwavering light on her. She pointed her phone at the mirror and took a photo. Zooming in on the picture, she noticed Lichuan’s sleeping face in the corner of the mirror. Yuchen repositioned herself to crop him out, and took a few more shots.

His bedroom smelled like fabric softener and the dust in Beijing’s air. On the modest bedside couch, a closed-eyed Lichuan turned onto his side, his hands touching in front of his chest as if for a prayer. Yuchen tiptoed away from the bed and crouched down next to him. She pressed the shutter to take close-ups of his stubbled chin, his fingers curling toward his heart, his legs hugging a checkered blanket, and his feet, exposed and pressing into each other for warmth. She hovered her hand above his hair and traced its shape in the air, remembering last night, the embrace they lingered in, neither of them speaking, standing in the middle of this room, which had been dark but was now disquietingly bright, the night on the cusp of seeing a new day. In each other’s arms, a wordless exchange took place. Together they had pondered the many things they could have done, and concluded that they needed none of it to spoil what they already had. Yuchen couldn’t exactly recollect who let go of whom first, who made the bed, and how she ended up sleeping in Lichuan’s faded Abbey Road t-shirt.

She did remember that when she wasn’t able to fall asleep right away, she listened to the silence intently, searching for clues of Lichuan’s breaths growing slower and heavier, rising and falling like ocean waves. The Sound of Waves—the name of a Yukio Mishima novel came to her. Yuchen had read it at the age when she and Lichuan would have done anything to spend a night consumed by their desires. She remembered being baffled by the climactic scene in the book, in which the man and the woman, who were deeply in love, chose not to consummate their relationship despite having the opportunity. Lying in Lichuan’s bed without him, Yuchen felt that, nearly two decades later, she, too, could begin to swim toward that expanse beyond physical union, toward that uncharted territory, uncertain of what waited for her on the other shore.

Her phone rang and she hurried out to the hallway to answer.

Hey, baby, she said in English. It’s fine. I’m up already.

She paused to listen. When she turned around, Lichuan was standing by the bedroom door.

Yeah, my mom is taking me to the acupuncturist today, she said into the phone.

Yuchen looked at Lichuan and looked away, turning her back to him.

Which spicy sauce? she said. Oh, it’s in a ziplock bag, probably somewhere toward the back of the fridge.

She could hear glass jars knocking against each other and imagined her husband at their kitchen counter, attempting to solve the puzzle created by her absence.

I have to go get ready, she said. Okay, love you, too. Bye, Harry.

Yuchen turned around, demure despite not wanting to be. She faced Lichuan like an actor at an audition, awaiting the verdict from the director.

Your husband’s name is Harry, Lichuan said.

Yes. Have I never said his name before?

Love you—Lichuan echoed, and then switched back to Mandarin—is so much easier to say in English. We never say it like that in Chinese.

But there are many more ways to mean it without saying those exact words. Think ancient poetry.

When you talk in English, you sound so . . . He paused to look for words. So grown-up.

They stood opposite each other in the narrow space between the bedroom and the living room, a transitional corridor that was neither here nor there. The light from the bedroom backlit a halo around Lichuan. He was right, Yuchen thought. English was the language of her adulthood, just as the US was the country she had only known as a grown-up. She had left who she used to be where it belonged, in Beijing, in her mother tongue, with her first love, her high school friends. But which one of her was with Lichuan now? Whoever she would become, why couldn’t she carry that old self, whom Lichuan had generously returned to her, forward? In the days and nights that had yet to pass through her, in the words that were yet to be spoken, she was free—free to choose, free to fail, free to no longer be who she was supposed to be.

I saw these yulan flowers on Chang’an Avenue yesterday. Do you remember them from somewhere? she asked.

Yulan . . . there are a lot of them in Beijing.

Lichuan walked to the bedroom window and cracked it open. A gust of air caressed his hair. Yuchen followed him back into the sun. Lichuan faced her suddenly.

Yes, our high school’s little garden had yulan flowers, he said. We used to sit there after a day of classes.

Yuchen’s lost memory resurfaced. Lichuan didn’t know that before they were together, Yuchen had often sat in the garden alone. She had liked it the most in the winter, when she felt that the bare branches and dry soil waited faithfully for Earth to travel closer to the sun again. When she sat there, she felt that she was waiting with them. At that age, she had thought she had endless hours to wait, waste. Every day was endless, time was endless.

I really like the smell of them, Yuchen said. It softens me somehow.

I think you said the exact same thing when we were seventeen.

On the cab ride home, Chang’an Avenue looked different in the cloudless morning. Without the lights that contoured the architecture in the night, Tiananmen Square, formidably huge and meticulously surveilled, displayed the kind of human power that should have only belonged to nature. Landmarks were made to withstand time, an atemporal creation, the opposite of the living. Yuchen opened the window like she had the night before. When the wind grazed her face, she felt a pulsing at the center of her forehead, where Lichuan had kissed her before they said goodbye. As she rubbed the spot with her fingertips, she saw the yulan flowers again, blooming against the redbrick walls. She couldn’t smell them across the sprawling boulevard, only the unpleasant odor of car exhaust.

Shifu, can we stop for a second?

The taxi driver glanced at Yuchen in the rearview mirror, alarmed.

Are you kidding me? Guniang, this is Chang’an Avenue, he said dismissively in his Beijing accent. Can’t park here.

What about the side street? Just around the corner.

The taxi driver sighed, signaling for a right turn.

Just half a minute, I promise, Yuchen said.

Right after making the turn, the taxi driver stepped on the brake. As she bolted out of the car, Yuchen heard the driver scolding her, irritated, telling her to make it quick. She ran in the direction they came from, unmade the turn back onto Chang’an Avenue, and kept running until she reached the edge of the yulan trees.

She stepped under the branches as if before a threshold. The flowers shielded the sun overhead, the white petals trembling like the wings of idling butterflies. She had run here on an impulse, but now that she was so close to the flowers, she didn’t know what else she was to do. Yuchen took a long breath, inhaling a distant memory. For as long as yulan’s fragrance stayed within her, she was seventeen and thirty-six at the same time, her heart spacious enough for both Harry and Lichuan, and she, dissolving like water, in flux between being Chinese and outside Chinese. She exhaled. At the beginning of the next inhale, she started walking.

Halfway back to the taxi, Yuchen made an abrupt U-turn. Despite the taxi driver yelling behind her, she started running again. When she returned to the yulan trees, she first looked around and instantly identified a few plain clothes police officers. She waited until no one was watching. Then Yuchen rose onto the balls of her feet, extended her arms upward as if reaching for a hug, and broke the tip of a branch that split into two flowers. Holding it close to her in one hand and covering it with the other, she hurried back to the taxi.

In the car, she repeated a string of apologetic and grateful expressions.

No need, guniang, the taxi driver said. It’s not like I would leave without being paid first.

Yuchen smiled, appreciating the taxi driver’s candor. She looked at the stolen yulan flowers in her lap, raised them to her nose, sniffed, and put them back down, then looked at them some more, twisting the branch, brushing the petals. When she had done enough looking, she moved her eyes to the outside, her people, her city, beginning another day. Today she was one of them, participating in their cycle of living.

While Yuchen gazed outward, the yulan flowers remained looking at her. Among all the people they had greeted on Chang’an Avenue, Yuchen was the first to claim them, but they had chosen her as much as she them. They had recognized the longing in her eyes when she had bared herself in the shade they created. Knowing that leaving with Yuchen would cut short their already brief lives, and that they would meet their end far from where they were born, they accepted, nonetheless, Yuchen’s intimate invitation to a fleeting union. As they traveled down Chang’an Avenue for the first time, they became her, as she became them, the border between them disintegrating, and, slowly, disappearing.

The post Her Life in Seattle Doesn’t Translate to Beijing appeared first on Electric Literature.

Everybody on my father’s side had assimilated in what I’d call the cultural sense: they’d stopped talking Jewish. My father and his progenitors, they put away their deep borough accents, buried their surety of doom, their wryness and their rye. It wasn’t a rejection of god or the Torah, neither of which held any sway, but about not sounding like the kind of person certain other people don’t like. Only the prepubescent Hasids knew to stop me with their lulav and etrog. I could’ve rebuked them, could’ve told them my face in fact belonged mostly to my Protestant mother. But I secretly loved their knowing. 

My daughter did too. Unlike me, though, it wasn’t a secret. 

Bunny, at seven, dressed every day like she was auditioning for Fiddler on the Roof, mixing orange plaid dresses with woolen tights the color of lichen and the ancient pilling cardigans of a babushka. Bunny sometimes wrapped her hair in one of the old silk scarves I’d inherited from my grandmother, Bunny’s thick dark bangs and both ears sticking out the sides, making her look bedraggled and forlorn, one that was both feral and matronly, a suffering sort of girl from another time. When the boys with their payot asked us if we were Jewish, she didn’t lie the way I did; she said, louder than seemed wise, “Yes!” 

On a Thursday, in the small kitchen of our Park Slope apartment, she produced a first-grade worksheet from the bottom of her backpack.

“Bunny, I can’t read this.” Bunny drew on everything, including her own skin, the tops of her hands, and her homework. She’d obscured the directive and questions with a long potato face, arched eyebrows, flat black line of a mouth, and swirling hypnotized eyes. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the artistry was unremarkable; it didn’t seem to be about that.

“I’m the one who has to read it,” she said, snatching the paper from me and squinting at it. “Interview an elder relative. There are eight questions. Who can I talk to?” 

“Grandma Shelly is an elder relative.” 

Bunny shook her head. “She’s not old.”  

Point taken. Nat’s mother dyed her long hair red and got up and down from the floor faster than I did. 

“There has to be someone better.”

Like a whorl of reflux from a forgotten meal, up rose my great aunt Lillian, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Unassimilated, openly judgmental, Socialist, divorced. As bold in her unpleasantness as my own child was about wanting to have been born in another time.   

“How old is she?” Bunny demanded.  

I calculated. “Over ninety.”  

Bunny stood reverently still. “Have I ever met her?” 

I shook my head. In fact, I hadn’t really talked to Lillian in two decades. As family lore demanded, I remembered Aunt Lillian as monstrous. Until I brought her up to Bunny, I’d forgotten that I also remembered her fondly—during my childhood visits, she always seemed pleased to see me, interested in whatever words I could eke out, and remarked on certain promising things about me (“Sadie, you have the posture of Philippe Petit”)—at which point the Lillian in my mind began to sway between an unfiltered pariah and a wry, intelligent old lady who could see right through me. This amorphous hovering, like one of those haunted Halloween portraits that turn the living into skeletons or zombies when seen from certain angles, was perhaps even more frightening. I suddenly regretted suggesting a visit to someone who probably had every right to loathe me as much as my family did her. 

“Was she in the Holocaust?” 

Bunny had recently become intrigued by the Holocaust, had just last week asked a stooped old man in line at the grocery store if he’d been in it. 

I shook my head. “You know what, though? I think she could be losing it, mentally. Who knows if she could even answer any of your questions?” 

Bunny ignored me. “Is she nice?” 

“No,” I said, scooping crumbs and an apple core from the bowels of Bunny’s backpack and dropping them into the compost. “She’s pretty mean.”  

“That’s OK,” Bunny said quickly. “I can handle it.” 

Already, our hypothetical visit had turned into a dare.

“Don’t we have a birthday party this weekend?” 

“We have to go see her, Mom. 

I should’ve just said no. I wanted to. But arguing with Bunny always depleted me, which was why I mostly did what my husband did, and avoided it. 

Those dark discerning eyes blinked curtly up at me, waiting for my acquiescence. If we were really going to do this, however, to see this woman my parents wouldn’t see, this woman who didn’t really like my parents either, we would need to bring some buffers. 

“And Milt can’t come,” Bunny declared.

I closed my eyes. “Your brother is three. Where’s he going to go?” 

“Just leave him with Daddy,” she pressed.  

Daddy. Everyone liked Nat; he was warm and relaxed and deeply tolerant, for practical reasons (he worked in real estate). My mother would joke that I must’ve had a perfect childhood because I’d married someone so much like my own father. And I would joke that she was right. (In reality, Nat was much harder for me to talk to than my dad, and, yet, much softer with the children, quicker to solve their problems, to break a rule if it meant they’d be happy, a practice that had become the family way.)  

Aunt Lillian might not have censored herself in front of me beginning back when I was Bunny’s age, but she was unlikely to do her worst in front of easy, charming Nat.  

“If we go, Daddy’s coming. And so’s Milt,” I said as I washed my crumby fingers. “But you should know Aunt Lillian isn’t, she isn’t like your grandparents. At all.”  

“OK. How?”  

“Well. She’s not a fan of what Israel is…is doing.” 

Bunny looked at me. “Neither are you.” 

“Right. But I don’t yell about it.” 

“Grandma doesn’t yell about it.” 

“Well, Grandma sent money to the Israeli army. Aunt Lillian would yell at her for that, if Grandma was on my side of the family.” 

I waited for Bunny to say something. “I’m not saying she’s wrong to yell. Maybe I should yell more.” 

Bunny looked absently past me. 

“Mommy,” she said quietly, her soft palm on my arm, “will she like me?”  

I covered her hand with mine. We were on different pages. As usual. “I don’t know.”  

Bunny nodded, her upper lip rising gravely. “I’m a lot.”  

I was the one who’d told her she could be a lot. But I’d done it less in horror than in wonder. Last year, in kindergarten, Bunny insisted on carrying two large tote bags filled with dress-up clothes and her favorite books to school every day. She said she needed them. Her teacher told me she’d rarely open the bags, but if another student so much as peeked at them, Bunny would instantly panic, sobbing quietly but unabatedly. This teacher was the gentle kind and always shuttled Bunny to the quiet corner, along with the bags, to recover from the affront. 

This year, the totes and the meltdowns had been replaced by three separate reports of Bunny calling the same two girls sheep for copying all of each other’s classwork and, at the conclusion of her rants, spitting on the ground next to their shoes. 

“They lie for each other, Mommy! They lie.”  

 Her conviction exasperated me, but I made a point of telling her the opposite. And I wasn’t lying. Exasperated or not, I really was in awe of her.  

“So is she,” I admitted. “Which is maybe why we should just call her instead of visiting—”

“Actually, I don’t care if she likes me,” she announced. “Please let’s go. Before she dies. We have to go before she’s dead!” 

On the drive down the Belt, I explained to everyone about my great aunt Lillian’s estrangement from our family.  

Lillian had delivered an impromptu speech at the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, my cousin Weston, twenty years back, in a sun-drenched Humanistic Northern California synagogue with more windows than walls. In what had sounded to me at the time like jest, she’d called her ex-husband, my Great Uncle Julius—a former union organizer turned highly paid public speaker and consultant—a sellout, a capitalist, a traitor. He’d traded the ethos of her kind of socialism, the kind that required unending struggle, for what she considered an excess of comfort and security. This was how my parents put it to me anyway. She’d called Julius as much before, of course, but never in front of so many non-Jews (Weston’s father was Chinese and an atheist). 

In the ensuing years, I learned from my parents that Lillian’s daughter—my father’s first cousin—had blamed her mother for her father’s headaches, for his ulcerous guilt, but also for the incessant unstitching of her own self-worth. Lillian made her question herself and now she couldn’t stop. After the party that evening, Lillian’s daughter followed in the example of her long-suffering father and went on strike. They stopped speaking to her. My father and the rest of the cousins, company men all, did the same. 

At the Bar Mitzvah, I remember the wobbly buzz—nauseating and electric—that I got in my stomach at Lillian’s performance, her exacting tone, and the way my whole extended family went immediately on edge, some stiff, some stiffly smiling, and others, like sweet, pubescent Weston, dopey next to her in his baggy suit, opening his mouth wide and then quickly covering it in an attempt not to laugh.  

Great Aunt Lillian was so angry. 

But she was also not speaking nonsense. 

I remember her saying, in front of everyone, that she could not abide her own kin taking so much more than their fair share. I remember her looking right at her ex-husband and saying, “What happened to you, honey? What happened?” 

Occasionally, I’d wonder if it would be me who’d bridge the gap, call her up, make a visit, make amends. 

It wasn’t. Well, it hadn’t been.     

Lillian lived in a limestone apartment building in Gravesend. She’d been kind but terse over the phone, suggesting we come any day that suited us, that she had nothing on the calendar anymore. 

“Does she look like Grandma?” Bunny asked. 

“Kind of,” I told her. “She’s little. Always wears red lipstick. Oh my god, why are we doing this?” 

Bunny groaned and Milt shouted, “I don’t know!” 

I felt Nat’s calloused fingers on my earlobe. I bristled at the contact, shaken from my anxious clench, and then relished it. Nat glanced at the speedometer as I barreled past Staten Island’s humble skyline across the water because going faster might make this all be over sooner. 

“You think she’s renovated since you last visited?” mused Nat. “These longtime owners, they die and then they sell for less than they could because nobody’s touched it for forty years. It’s a shame.”  

“She rents, Nat.” 

He looked at me aghast. “A renter? OK. Got it. Forty years renting.” He whistled, seemed to consider the dark flat New York Bay outside his window as he did the math before looking down at his phone. 

“What are you going to ask her, Bun?” I asked. How my aunt could not be even a little charmed by this odd child, I couldn’t imagine. Through the rearview mirror, I watched Bunny’s eyelids drop to keep me out of whatever she was planning. 

“You’ll see.” 

I imagined my own questions: Were you ever in a bread line? Did you go by yourself to the March on Washington and what kind of shoes did you wear? What did you mean when you asked Uncle Julius what happened to him? Do you ever wonder what happened to me? 

There were so many parking spots outside her building, I worried we’d missed a city evacuation. 

“Here we are!” I called out brightly. 

We rode the birdcage elevator up and turned down a dim hallway at whose eerie end stood the object of our visit. 

“And here I am! Ta-da!” Lillian leaned against the doorjamb in a red silk shirt and black slacks.

I’d last seen her, from afar, at my grandmother’s funeral, fifteen years ago. Her skin had been olive then, her bob bottle-dye black, smudged at the hairline. It was a shock to see her now, hair completely white and jaggedly orbiting a face once severe, now mottled as a gratin, her small body bent across the shoulders in a resolute way. She smelled like bottled lily and orange juice. 

I nudged my resistant brood forward. 

“Hello,” I sang, but Milt seemed to recognize something in my tremolo. At three, he was as tiny as Bunny was tall, as silly as she was defiant and stern. Not so silly then, though, as he wrapped himself around my thigh, which itself was wrapped in black tights, his untended fingernails digging in. I felt my pantyhose rip just below my butt. 

Only pausing for a second, I continued on, my flannel dress, tight on top, swung loose over my hips, keeping the tear hidden.

Her eyes were like lights flashing as she blinked up at me. It was impossible to tell, because she’d not yet spoken, not yet smiled, how she felt about us, whether she was pleased we’d at last arrived or dismayed we’d gone through with it.

“Hello, my darling,” she purred at last, that nasal, wizened cat voice tossing itself over me like a fur coat. Three of her teeth were missing, one near the front, the other two, in back, creating airless open tunnels. She reached out to hug me, one of her fat gold earrings cold against my neck. “Sadie.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes going blurry. 

“Take your shoes off, doll,” she said, letting go of me roughly, as though it was I who was holding on too tight. 

The children hurried in behind her, Nat guiding them with a hand on each shoulder. 

“And you must be Nat,” she said to him. 

Nat looked behind him and then at her. “I guess I must. Wonderful to meet you, Lillian. You’re a legend. According to Sadie.” 

Lillian seemed pleased to hear it, her mouth twitching. 

“Well, look at this bootlicker you got here, Sadie.”  

Nat chuckled.  

Lillian took our bland bouquet of coats and carried them down a hallway and out of sight.

Her place was just as I remembered: the bulky gold and brown brocade sofa flanking the wall beside us where I’d been photographed asleep against my mother’s arm, and above it, a window just as wide, its beige doctor’s office blinds half open. On the smooth white horseshoe coffee table were cut glass bowls filled with the peanut M&Ms, pistachios in their shells, and plastic-wrapped sesame candy that’d drawn a molar out of my mouth when I was in fifth grade. Opposite the sofa, to our right, sat the low black lacquered credenza my cousins and I got screamed at for smudging, a bulky television on top, its screen wiped clean. 

A matching black China cabinet swathed the entire far wall, inside of which were all of Lillian’s Hummels. My grandmother had had them too, and though I’d never once touched them, I’d badly wanted to. They weren’t quite dolls to me, but tiny emotive creatures contained in porcelain. Lillian had maidens, mostly, in various states of reverie, and a bespectacled pharmacist, a gaunt rosy-cheeked rabbi, a blonde boy holding a blob of balloons in primary colors. It was the rabbi I’d coveted, so tired had I grown of my blithe yellow-haired dolls with their shiny dresses and empty eyes. Mightn’t he change our games in some deep, unknowable way, say vaguely important things like my great uncle, maybe, or snipe cleverly like Lillian herself, but I didn’t have the guts to ask to hold him in my own hands, was afraid I’d seem weird. This? She’d have wrinkled her nose at me. Him you want?

On the highest shelf, a shelf I’d never been tall enough to see before, was a black and white photograph, the only photo in the cabinet. It was Lillian at Bunny’s age, sitting primly between her father, a narrow-faced bald man, and mother, a somber woman with dark hair piled on the top of her head, a woman who was probably the age I was now. 

When Lillian returned, Bunny pushed her brother aside.

“Hi, Aunt Lillian. I’m Bunny. Your great-great niece.” 

“Me too!” sang Milt. 

“Oh my god, Sadie.” Lillian let her mouth hang open as she stared at Milt.

“The eyelashes! That chin, oh my god. Do you see it? Is it just me? This child is gorgeous. He’s Julius. He’s a tiny Julius.”  

I summoned Julius’s gleaming hairless head, the black hairs wafting out of his ears, the curl of his upper lip. “Oh. Yeah.”  

Lillian looked at me, aghast. “No one’s ever told you that?” 

I stroked the orange paisley scarf wrapped around Bunny’s dark hair. “No,” I said, stupidly. For a moment, we all waited for her to say who Bunny looked like.

Lillian bent at the waist and leaned close to my expectant daughter. “My darling. You know, looks aren’t everything.” 

I gasped. I closed my eyes a second; I didn’t want to look down to see what this had done to Bunny and for good reason; when I opened them, I saw her little chin flat against her chest, eyes on the floor. She was trying very hard not to cry. 

There was a sob. Bunny was crying into her hands. 

“Oh look what I did!” Lillian smacked her lips and shook her head. “Listen, as I’ve always said,” Lillian continued, waving one bony blue-veined finger at me, “never trust anyone with a simple nose.”

She had always said that. And I’d listened. I’d lived it, unable to take seriously every milquetoast idiot with a nose of no consequence. The aphorism had sounded profound to me as a child, as though it were truthful enough to root out the bad from the good, but now that she’d just called Bunny plain to her face, I felt only angry and embarrassed, embarrassed I’d crossed the threshold at all. 

Bunny, recovered but splotchy-cheeked, dropped to her knees beside the coffee table and began pecking at the sweets.  

“Explain this bigotry?” called large-nosed Nat as he stacked the bagels and lox we’d brought onto the dining table. Nat’s parents, like mine, were mixed, but his paternal side was Protestant, and it was his Scottish father’s face he’d inherited. By the time I learned his last name, the day after we met at our mutual friend’s wedding, I’d already made assumptions about his schnoz and how much character it had afforded him. 

“Oh, it’s a joke!” Lillian laughed. “Can you not take one?” 

I ought to have ignored her and announced to the room how beautiful Bunny was. But I waited a moment too long.  

“You can’t trust people who’ve not had to suffer. I’m complimenting you, Nat!” 

Bunny was, of course, listening, her eyes darting between us, her head perfectly still, mouth closed as she whittled a peanut M&M down for parts. 

Lillian stood up, as fast as my mother-in-law. “Well, what’ve you brought me?” Peering at the table, she turned back. “Egg?” 

“Bunny loves an egg bagel,” I said. 

“Sadie, she got your mother’s goyim genes.” 

I got red and deflected. “You know my mother would never touch a carb.”     

When I was around ten and at my urging, my Presbyterian mother told me what we would do if it was ever too dangerous to be Jewish again. She lay beside me in my twin bed and made a list. Though I hadn’t the chutzpah to argue with her, I didn’t want what she was offering: her old last name, a bedroom at my uncle’s house in New Hampshire, church every Sunday. I imagined instead that I’d remain myself, outwitting everybody and surviving. 

Last month, Bunny asked me what we were supposed to do now about the people who were being taken from their homes, the immigrants, the new Jews, as she’d heard me call them once at home. I told her I had no idea, save for phone calls and protests. We had no spare room. I had no brother in New Hampshire. And anyway, they couldn’t hide in plain sight like I could’ve. Like I still can. 

Bunny marched toward the table with her folder. “Can I start?”    

“Just a second, doll,” Lillian said, on her heel. She slid into a seat, her narrow wisp of a body poking out from her chair like a tulip on the verge of a droop.  

Lillian’s round table was set with gold-rimmed melamine plates, pink and green patterned china cups and saucers, and white paper napkins folded into triangles. She’d folded them neatly, in preparation for us. In addition to our goyim bagels, we’d brought cream cheese and whitefish salad and nearly a pound of lox. From her own refrigerator, Lillian had set out three cans of Diet Cel-Ray, a tub of whipped butter, a jar of capers, and a plum tomato. 

Nat had one knee bent into the couch, surveying the street. “It’s interesting, Lillian,” he called to her without turning around. “You’re at the end of the hallway here but you don’t get a corner view. Does anybody? Some people must’ve combined two units, no?” 

She shook her head as she plucked a halved bagel from the bunch and dropped it with a smack on her plate. “Not allowed here. Every unit is the same.” 

I smiled. “That’s wonderful.” 

“Is it?” Lillian cocked her head at me. “I wouldn’t mind a corner view. Nat, maybe you can convince the authorities? Tell them you’re a professional!”  

He seemed to be considering this, even though it was clearly a joke. “You should live as well as you can for as long as you can.” 

This, Lillian ignored, reaching for the cream cheese.  

“Come eat,” I told Nat.  

Milt dropped a handful of M&Ms on his plate. 

“Not before dinner,” I said.   

My son reached to gather the collar of my dress in both hands, one button popping off its thread and plunking against the table with a sound only I heard. “Yes,” he whispered. I smiled, in thrall to his defiance. How could I not?   

“Let’s start with a bagel,” Nat said, sitting down beside him.   

Milt screamed. 

“Quiet!” Bunny commanded. “I’m about to start my interview!”  

Lillian spread her cream cheese slowly, forking the glistening lox and setting it on her bagel like a toupee, and on that, a tomato cap festooned with capers.

“Can she…” I looked at my Aunt Lillian, who nodded as she chewed.  

“What’s your full name?” Bunny held her folder open with one wavering hand. 

“Lillian Hanna Faust.” She pronounced her middle name, a name I’d never known was hers, the Yiddish way: HAH-nuh. 

“What year were you born?” 

“1931.” 

This whole thing could’ve been done over the phone. Why had I bent to Bunny? Why hadn’t we just sent Lillian these questions in a letter? I was sweating. When Bunny got to the last of her questions, we’d still be on the first halves of our bagels and then what would we talk about? 

“Where were you born?” 

“The Brownsville and East New York Hospital.” 

Bunny’s pen stopped moving part of the way through the word brown. 

“And that’s gone now, right?” I was stalling, giving her time to catch up. 

“Do you want me to write it?” Lillian offered Bunny with surprising tenderness, ignoring me. 

“She has to write it,” I said.   

Lillian made a face like I’d slapped her. “It’s not her fault I gave her half the alphabet.” 

“What did Bunny get?” Milt asked. 

“A joke,” Lillian said. 

“I want a joke!” 

“He can’t have a joke. It’s my interview!” Bunny cried. “I’m writing as fast as I can! They say I have to write it so, so, I’m writing it!” 

I watched as she mangled the letters, pressing down so hard, her pencil tip broke.

“I didn’t bring a sharpener,” she mumbled, her chest rising higher and the plates in her face looking like they might unbind themselves. 

I found a pen in my purse and handed it to her. She pushed it away.

“Have you eaten your bagel yet, Bun?” I asked, though I knew she hadn’t. 

“I wouldn’t blame you,” Lillian breathed into Bunny’s ear. “These bagels are absurd.” 

“She’s an absurd girl,” I said, though it didn’t come out in the silly way I wanted; it sounded dismissive. Cruel, even. To make up for my mistake, I placed my hand on Bunny’s and a seam tore below my left arm. 

“I never asked for these bagels,” Bunny said quietly. “You just think I like them because I ate them once.” 

This wasn’t true but I didn’t want to embarrass her (or myself) any more than I already had. 

“When you’re distracted,” I reminded Bunny, “you sometimes forget to eat. And when you don’t eat, you get upset.” 

“When I get a lecture, I get upset,” Lillian said out the side of her mouth. 

“And when you get upset,” I continued, ignoring Lillian, although, in a way, I was speaking to her too, “it’s hard to know…what to do to help.” 

Lillian sized me up from across the table.   

“Not to get off topic here,” Nat said, “but can I ask how well you get along with your neighbors?” 

“You may and we get along fine. I don’t speak to them and they don’t speak to me,” Lillian said. She gestured toward Bunny. “Does she know Jewish?”  

Yiddish, she meant. She meant also for me to perhaps not know what she meant, to have to ask, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to, that I did know, that she couldn’t take me for a fool, or for someone like my mother. 

I finished my glass of water and poured myself a Cel-ray. “Who would teach her?” 

Bunny raised her writing hand, pen tip pointing at the ceiling fan. Her bagel had a bite out of now. I hadn’t even seen her take it.  “How am I related to you?” Bunny asked. 

Lillian stood up and shuffled away from us. She hauled a folding stepladder from the front closet, tucking the whole of it inside, and climbing on. Nat ran over and put his hands out lest she topple. Her slacks made meditative shushing sounds I could hear from the table. 

“Can I do that for you, Lillian?” 

“You cannot!” she said, all but her stockinged calves out of view. 

Bunny waited silently, refusing to look at me, while Milt ducked away, for, I knew, more M&Ms, as Lillian reemerged with a thick red leather-bound album. 

She pushed her plate aside and opened to the first page. “I was married to him.”  

There was young Julius, his sharp chin, full cheeks, those mournful eyes. 

Bunny eyed her brother. “He does look like Milt.” 

Milt beamed and scrambled over to Lillian, who, without so much as a groan, lifted him into her lap. 

“Nice looking guy,” Nat said, peering at the photo from across the table. 

“He was!” Lillian snapped. “Nice, polite. He looked how he was.” 

“Nice people aren’t necessarily easy to be married to,” I said.  

“We’re not?” Nat opened his mouth in mock alarm. 

I rolled my eyes, smiled for my great aunt. “Aren’t I the nice one?” It was a joke and an aspiration. 

Nat patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for his phone, on which I could see a call from a colleague, silenced after some consideration. I felt my face get hot very fast. It wasn’t the tenderness I was responding to but the condescension. We both knew how much everybody liked him and we both knew how hard I worked to be liked. Just yesterday morning, at the park where I’d brought the kids early, Nat showed up a half hour later to cheers from three or four other fathers, and mothers, too, hovering around the play structure. I’d brought donuts, but it was Nat they were most pleased to see. 

Nat noticed all the effort I made to be liked: the times I brought cookies or pizza (or laughed loudly at somebody’s not-so-funny joke), and the times I was easygoing with the kids, letting them stay up late, resolving their arguments without yelling at either one. Nat noticed and he loved it; he told me so. But sometimes I wondered what he would tell me if I didn’t try so hard. Sometimes it was all I thought about. 

Lillian’s eyes flicked from me to Nat for a second, unreadable, then she seemed to drop away, inside herself again.     

“Julius was a doll,” Lillian said. “A hypocrite, but he was easy to come home to, he was an easy man.” 

“So what happened?” I asked. “Nobody got divorced back then, right?” 

“Not nobody! I drove him out of his mind. I questioned him, I doubted him, I told him he wasn’t interesting enough for me and so he said adieu!” 

No one could insult her worse than she could insult herself.  

“Adieu?” Milt peered up at her. “Is that a bad word?”

“It means goodbye,” muttered Bunny as she wrote.  

Lillian afforded Bunny no extra points for her knowledge, instead smoothing Milt’s hair with her manicured fingers, a stillness on her face I couldn’t read.

None of us spoke. 

Our master of ceremonies continued transcribing Lillian’s words, penmanship jagged but clear. Milt had slid off Lillian’s lap and gone under the table. Also under the table were Nat’s hands tapping a message into his phone, too busy with weekend work for another attempt at enticing my aunt to do an impossible apartment upgrade. Milt drifted into the living room, unburdening us. 

“He wanted to take care of me,” Lillian explained in a softer voice. “He wanted to give me things.”  

I nodded. 

“He said when I first met him that I was the smartest girl he’d ever known. Which wasn’t true, no student was I, but I loved hearing it. We’d gone to see The Valley of Decision with Gregory Peck and I think Julius thought of me like the maid, the sweet girl, the loyal girl, the good listener, you understand? I liked that version of me too except she didn’t exist. He wanted me to say it was alright the way he wanted more for himself than the fellows he was negotiating for and I didn’t think it was. He didn’t want to talk about big ideas with me, he wanted to talk logistics, all the time, the plans, the deals, the numbers. He wanted me to be here,” Lillian said, extending a flattened palm out in the air half a foot lower than her shoulder, “his little soldier. Am I making it plain? Every time I opened my mouth, he’d brace himself. At dinner, at breakfast, in bed. He’d flinch! At his own wife! Do you flinch at her, Nat?” 

Nat stuck his phone into his pocket after a moment. He had not heard her, didn’t know if he ought to say yes or no. 

“Sorry,” he mouthed to me. “Closing got delayed and the seller is pissed.” 

Lillian tried again. “Do you mind when she argues with you, Nat?” 

I took a slow breath, and then another, waiting for him to answer. “She doesn’t argue with me. We don’t argue with each other.”   

Nat rubbed his thumb along the webbing between my fingers. With his thumb, he was telling me that we were not like Lillian and Julius. And we weren’t. I didn’t argue with him, not out loud. 

When Milt was six weeks old, I slipped into a frayed, weepy pocket during which it was hard to wash my hair, hard to wear anything but soft pants and a very old pair of dirty sneakers. Nat, without telling me, hired a woman, a night nurse, to stay at our apartment every night for two weeks and get Milt to sleep. It was very generous of him and, I conceded, a relief to put Bunny to bed without Milt in my arms, but it cost more money than we had and it wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want it at all. So, every night, I’d agree with Nat about what a boon Teresa the nurse was, and then I’d roll over and cry quietly until I passed out, waking to a wet nightgown, that violent reminder to pump. Things were better now. Nat thought he’d made them better. And I took medicine for the crying. 

“That’s a shame,” Lillian murmured. 

The air here felt slippery and dangerous, like if we inhaled deeply enough, maybe someone might start arguing. Maybe even me. 

“Tell me about your family growing up,” Bunny read from her paper. 

“I had two little brothers who I loved, the baby especially. My mother was very bright and quiet and then she got sick.” Lillian pointed to her head. “In her brain. My father was not so bright and always angry. He worked for a tailor. My mother should have gone to college, I think. She read the newspaper every day. Start to finish.” 

Bunny wrote all of this down, carefully. Lillian let her and began to eat, relishing one bite, then another, as we sat in silence until I saw Milt dancing in the corner of my eye. 

I nudged Nat with my elbow and he looked up from his phone. “Can you…take him?” 

“Where’s the bathroom?” Nat asked brightly. 

Lillian dropped her bagel and stood up very quickly. “Of course. Let me show you.” Like a cat, she slipped into the hallway, which fed into, ostensibly, the bedrooms and bathroom. “Come, Milt! Come, Nat! I’m going to show you the bathroom!” she sang loudly. 

I patted the parts of my dress that had undone themselves. It was an old dress, one I’d worn before kids, before breastfeeding, before Nat, even. I’d gotten it second-hand and worn it to a holiday party where someone had told me I looked like a character in Mad Men. The dress was finished now. Why I’d worn it today, I wasn’t sure.   

Lillian returned but did not sit. She hovered with two hands on the table and flicked her chin toward her grand-niece. She must’ve felt that her lipstick had been lost on the lox because she pressed her mouth together in an effort to remake it. “Next!” 

“Can you tell me something about our family that I might not know?” Bunny asked.  

From the bathroom came Milt’s screams, Nat’s resonant murmuring. I didn’t want to abandon Nat to the meltdown, but I wanted to know what Lillian was going to say. My longing felt at that moment like a day’s worth of unmet hunger, like that Yom Kippur fast I’d only once done as a teenager to test my devotion, my Jewishness, just in case I might one day need to up the ante, though I was yet to be asked, not by Nat, not by anyone. I stayed in my dining chair, my eyes darting toward the hallway, hovering meekly between my progeny. 

Lillian took a sip of her cold coffee. “Well, did you know that my children won’t speak to me?”

Bunny shook her head. “Why?” 

“They think I’m a monster.” 

Bunny looked up at me then back at her. “You’re not a monster,” she said firmly.

“I might be,” Lillian snapped. “I was a difficult wife, a difficult mother. I’m a difficult person. I wanted everybody in my family to understand things as I did. And they didn’t. They don’t.” Her lips like worms had begun to wriggle across her face with something she seemed to want to contain.  

Her bitterness was not a shock, but the emotion under it was. 

“It’s not so much fun being the bitch,” Aunt Lillian said. We didn’t curse in our house, and I could see Bunny’s eyes widen at the word.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry they shut you out. That we did.”  

Aunt Lillian raised her eyebrows. 

Bunny interrupted again, heroically, speaking over some detritus in her throat. 

“What’s your favorite snack?” she asked. 

Good god. We’d dropped into the miscellaneous portion now. 

Lillian held her hands up and scoffed. “Nuts?” 

Bunny wrote the word slowly, slower than any answer so far.   

“OK. Nuts. Now last question. What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?”  

“That’s your own question too, right?” I asked her. I was impressed, and I wanted them both to know. 

Bunny nodded. “The original was do you have a pet.” 

Lillian snorted. 

“What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?” I asked Bunny.

I knew the answer. She was going to say Milt, her brother Milt, whose screams had at last abated. If I listened through the silence, I could hear water running. It was having a brother, a brother I’d foisted on her, that was hard but that she didn’t really mind. She wished he’d never been born but she couldn’t help loving him a little bit too. 

Bunny lowered her head and spoke to the table.  

“You,” she said.  

I stared at her. What remained of my dress’s seams pressed into my hot skin. I looked down at my hands. 

“Me?” I chirped. “I’m the hard thing about your life?” 

“She doesn’t mind!” Lillian shouted. “That’s good news!”  

I kept my face as unmoving as I could so my cheeks wouldn’t get wet. “Why am I the hard thing?” 

The enveloping softness of the carpet under my feet was not a comfort then, so I pressed harder against it.  

In a small voice, she said, “You’re not brave. But it’s OK.” 

I was woozy, blood gathering across my collarbone, I could feel it tingling, my tongue solidifying, stomach humming and hollowed out. I kept my eyes open even though I didn’t want to.  

“What exactly are you talking about?”  

Bunny would not look at me. She shrugged. “You pretend. Like now, you’re acting like you’re not that mad. But you are.” 

I saw my aunt’s mouth contort. She was pretending, too. 

“So, being brave is, is getting mad?” 

“For you, it is,” Lillian spat quietly.

“Hell of a bathroom you got there! Did that clawfoot tub come with the place?” Milton and Nat returned together in lockstep.  

“I pooped,” Milton declared with grim pride.  

“Not in the tub!” Nat clarified.  

“Shut up!” Bunny bellowed at both of them.  

“You shut up!” I shouted, as angry as I felt, pretending nothing, the outside of me reflecting my insides so exactly, I felt like my skin had fallen off. 

“Sadie,” said Nat.  

“Don’t yell just to prove yourself to her,” Aunt Lillian muttered, peering up at me, her brown eyes catching the light and shining. “Or to me.” 

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m really sorry,” Bunny mumbled, shaking her head wildly. She’d dropped deep down into her throne of a dining seat, her nubby blue smock dress folding in on itself and over her. 

I shook my head, crying breathlessly and stupidly in front of them all. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to say was and to whom. What I usually said, what I usually did, was what neither my aunt nor my daughter wanted from me, so I said what I’d have rather kept to myself. “Yeah. I do pretend. So I don’t hurt people’s feelings. Like…” I gestured at Lillian.      

At this, Lillian made a grunt as loud as a clap, chastening whatever courage I’d just mustered. 

I wiped my nose with my ruined dress. “Thank you so much for having us.”  

Nat had begun clearing the table. “The coffee was wonderful.”  

“It wasn’t.” Lillian gazed at him and then at me. “You’re running away from the fight. Tell her she’s wrong. She’s a kid. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”  

But Bunny did know. She knew more than most kids her age ought to know. Bunny was right. 

I shook my head at my great aunt, watching Nat gather three wobbly Cel-Rays. “You told me not to impress you. Now you tell me to fight. What do you want?”

“Honey, you don’t need to be embarrassed,” said Lillian, without a thread of the tenderness she had used to speak to Bunny. 

I stacked the plates, my sleeve catching in the cream cheese. “Bunny talks like that when she’s tired.” 

“I’m not tired,” Bunny said, her earlier penitence undone. 

“Should we leave the bagels?” Nat asked Lillian. 

“Please don’t.” 

Lillian reached across the table to me and encircled my arm with her cool hand. “You’ll never be like me, Sadie. No matter what you do.” Her consonants were crisp, brutal. She was holding onto me tightly. “You follow the rules. You’re nice. Just like your uncle.” 

Tumescent with shame, I nodded dumbly. Lillian’s eyebrows were arched. She did not look like my grandmother. She looked like Bunny’s drawing. And also, maybe, Bunny. 

“Take it as a compliment,” Aunt Lillian demanded.  

I tucked my hair behind my ear, the busted stitching of my dress exposing my soaked armpits like strings stretched over a guitar’s sound hole, and told Lillian goodnight. 

In the car, Milt had fallen asleep, the porcelain of his stolen Hummel (the rabbi, my rabbi!) like a watchful glowing moon in his arms. 

Bunny remained alert. She’d held my hand all the way to our parking spot and when I wordlessly buckled her into her car seat, she’d said, over and over, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad,” to which I’d shaken my head furiously as Nat thundered, uncharacteristically, “Nobody thinks that, Bunny!” 

Now, in the back, Bunny seemed to have forgiven herself and me as she gazed ahead. 

“Aunt Lillian never answered your last question.” I was picking at a wound that hadn’t even scabbed.  

Red and white orbs of tail lights and highway lights guided us north toward home. Beside Nat shone the blackness of Gravesend Bay and just beyond, the Verrazano, regal in its nighttime banner of electrics. 

“I hate it about me too,” I told Bunny without turning around. “That I’m not brave.” 

“I don’t,” Nat murmured. 

“I know you don’t,” I said sharply. 

“Isn’t it brave to be sorry? You’re always sorry.” He turned his head sideways and smiled at me with no teeth. “She’s not.” 

I didn’t know if he meant Lillian or Bunny, Bunny who listened quietly to us as she gripped her car seat’s armrests, her defiant heart pinned in with five straps to prevent disaster. He meant it as a compliment. But he didn’t know I wasn’t sorry half the times I claimed to be.     

“Maybe,” I said because Bunny was right: I didn’t want to fight. 

“The hard thing in Lillian’s life that she doesn’t really mind is herself,” said Nat. “Your great great-aunt is the hard thing. Write that, Bunny.” 

He sounded so proud of himself. 

How could I tell him he was wrong? I didn’t know what the hard thing was that Lillian didn’t mind, but I knew she could hardly bear herself. I could hardly bear myself sometimes. That was what made us both brave.  

Bunny stared at me in the rearview mirror, as still and silent as the bridge outside our window. 

“I think she’s asleep with her eyes open,” Nat whispered. 

I nodded and stared at the road ahead. She was asleep with her eyes open. She had been for a while. 

It was too hot now and, as Nat drove, I tried to shuck my coat off from below my seatbelt but it was too bulky. I had to unbuckle. As the car’s alarm rang, I shrugged my arms free. Ignoring Nat’s concerned glances, I slipped my fingers under the torn armpit of my tattered dress and wrenched the sleeve clean off. 

“Sadie. You have to buckle.” 

I leaned my bare shoulder against the window. “I know,” I said as the alarm dinged and dinged. “I will.” 

The post A Visit to Our Meanest Relative Can Only End in Tears appeared first on Electric Literature.

I was a small child, my head the height of theirs, when I noticed the black parts of their eyes were shaped like shoeboxes. But I didn’t know then that their rectangular pupils are adaptive. Goats take their meals on savannas or other wide-open spaces that leave them vulnerable to predators and the beating sun. Horizontal pupils let in less light from above and allow a wide field of vision.

Living with five Nubians—four does and a buck—I witness how nimbly they manage difficult terrain and remain vigilant at the same time. Because a misstep can be fatal.

The does greet me this morning by nibbling my flannel shirt, which I imagine tastes of woodsmoke and chicken broth. The barn smells of sweet-sharp hay, of pine dust, a wisp of ammonia that lets me know the straw bedding needs to be changed. It’s the heart of winter, and I pull the girls close.

The does are two months pregnant, so I’ve stopped milking to allow the young mamas to build their strength and keep their vitamins, which they’ll need to give birth to healthy kids come April.

A lot of people choose not to freshen does in their first fall, but I was impatient to grow my herd, to get a revenue stream going to stabilize the farm, and Judy said that as long as the girls were good sized and healthy, they’d be fine to breed. I’m thrilled every time I look at this burgeoning pack of curious females.

Yet it’s my first time as a goat midwife. Can I really manage the upcoming births on my own? We have no money to hire a helper or to call the vet if something goes wrong.

At least I have Judy on speed dial.

Opening the chicken coop, I let the birds loose and empty a bin of kale stems and squash rinds as an enticement to venture farther afield. Few eggs to collect this time of year, when the days are so short. The birds are healthy but they look horrendous, the runts and weaklings’ backs picked clean of feathers. Their bare pimpled skin shames me, even though my father’s hens looked the same, no matter what he did. “Lucy,” he’d tell me, “there you see the meaning of pecking order.”

I’d planned a lot of indoor projects for the winter milking break, but that was before Michael lost our money and we needed immediate income. So today, instead of YouTubing a toilet fix, I’ll be testing the endurance of my gluteal muscles, sitting on my flat butt at the Edin General Store.

I hear Michael calling me as soon as I take my boots off downstairs. He’s perched on the side of the bed, eyes a faded brown, head bald, just a few stray tufts to the side. A birdlike Roman nose that anchors his still-handsome face.

He tells me he wants to go for a ride in the new snow. He gestures out the window at the thick layer smothering the fields. We look together at the boot prints I’ve made between the house and the barn. “You’ve already been out in it,” he says. “Now it’s my turn.”

Not only does he want to see the snow, but there are library books being held for him, and a bacon and egg sandwich at Franco’s with his name on it. “Let’s go out for breakfast, bella. I’ll read you the obituaries. You love the life stories.”

Of course I do, and I love it when he reads to me, but we don’t have enough time for an outing. I offer to run out and pick up the books and the sandwich.

But no. He wants to get out of the house. His voice is both firm and pleading.

Changing his own socks into thicker woolens and wedging shoes onto his swollen feet can stretch to a quarter hour. Then getting his arms into each sleeve of a parka, plus scarf and hat. The driveway has been plowed but there’s still a slick of ice, and I shiver just thinking about leading him across it to reach the passenger door, then holding the full weight of his seventy-nine-year-old, six-foot frame to transfer him into the depths of the car seat.

I don’t want him to feel a burden, and I don’t want to pity him, so I tell him simply that we don’t have time. I’m due soon at the store.

This does not sit well. Michael’s forehead reddens and the corners of his mouth press down. He repeats his desire for an egg sandwich.

In case what he really wants is to be doted on, I say, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen, I’ll fry you eggs and toast, and you can admire the snow from there. See if there are any deer in the back field.”

“You’re just being selfish,” he mutters.

I pause, startled. These short, angry flares are new and I’m not yet used to them. They’ve arrived in the wake of the giant loss Michael incurred, which has thrown me back into the vexed center of my parents’ financial strain. We always had enough, but there was no fat in the budget, and Mom and Dad never once took a vacation longer than a three-day weekend, or pricier than an unelectrified lakeside bungalow. I have, it seems to me today, simply given up city comforts for the quaintly beautiful privations of the country.

I shower quickly, warmed by the hot water if dismayed by the rusting tub. I emerge with a soothing voice and suggest to my husband that I put on a movie. Make popcorn. We have a complete library of Gilbert and Sullivan and he chooses The Pirates of Penzance. “Watch with me, bella,” he says invitingly. He pats the couch cushion next to him. Removes his glasses and rubs his eyes as if to better appreciate me. Smiles. His bad mood has apparently already vanished, as quickly as our savings account dropped to zero. But I cannot stay. I have too much to do.

How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.

Because I’m late—flustered by the regrettable exchange with Michael, then by trying to settle him down in front of the TV and set aside something for his early dinner, labeling the container with masking tape that says eat me—Shruti is behind the counter at Edin General, where I should be, ringing up two Slim Jims, a string of lotto tickets, and three packs of Camel Lights. I’m sweating, my scarf trailing to the floor to the extent that I step on it and nearly choke myself.

“I can see how it’s going,” Shruti says, pointing to my pink face and hair matted across my brow. She takes the scarf, the hat, and my jacket, putting each in its cubby or hook to the side of the counter. As always, she looks immaculate and yet perfectly casual in her jeans and clean sneakers and brown and cream cardigan with coconut shell buttons. The color combination makes me think of Felicia, my favorite doe, and for a moment I long to be back in the barn surrounded by lop ears and so many beating hearts.

“Tough morning?” Shruti asks with concern.

If I say anything about the murky state of my husband’s mind, or the dire straits of our financial situation, I’ll cry myself a river. A nod is all I can manage.

Shruti tries another tack. “Did you see the game last night?” She is a Celtics superfan, having become hooked on the NBA through trying to bond with her son, now an assistant professor at one of the nearby colleges. “If he doesn’t give us grandchildren in five years, we’re going to sue him,” she joked recently. Shruti is dying to attend a Celtics game in person, though when I ask her why she hasn’t looked for tickets, she shrugs sheepishly and says her son is too busy to go with her. Apparently, Hari, her husband, does not share her passion.

“Sorry, hon. Missed it,” I say.

She tells me “our” team lost to Philadelphia 89–80. “Kyrie didn’t play,” which I guess explains everything.

Glumly thinking about her team’s loss, Shruti gives me a last look of concern, then leaves for the back room, where she has calls to make.

I open the cash register to the hand-worn scent of bills and coins and ink from leaky pens. The ding and thrust of the jaw opening and closing has the satisfying feel of childhood toys.

Shruti has given me the exalted title of associate manager to justify paying me ten dollars above minimum wage plus a small bonus at the end of the year. In addition to staffing the register, I help with inventory, checkout, writing and proofreading announcements and advertisements. Shruti and Hari hired me in part for my deep roots in the community, even though I explained that I’d been away so long, my contacts were limited to my parents’ now elderly friends and those from high school who never left. “Those are precisely the people we want to attract,” Shruti assured me.

“How much is this, and how do you eat it?” A lanky, dark-haired boy with bangs in his eyes holds up a package of Shruti’s frozen samosas. They are delicious, as good as Michael and I have eaten in any restaurant. I tell the kid what they are and how to reheat them in the oven so they get nice and crispy. A package of six is ten dollars, but because I want him to try them, I give it to him for five bucks and plan to slip the other five from my wallet into the register once he leaves.

“They go well with beer,” I say. “Try that IPA in the blue can; it’s from a brewery just on the other side of the river.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he says, and shrugs. “Okay.”

I pack everything up and take his card. Then I hold out the chutneys, mint and tamarind, displaying them in the palm of my hand like precious stones. I explain they’re like salsa, a dipping sauce. “Come back and let me know if you like them.”

As much as I love Shruti, I often find the store disquieting, not only because I see people I used to know, or should know, or no longer want to know, but because I can be interrupted at any moment. That’s what makes retail the pits, as my mother used to say. It’s hard to believe that I worked for twenty years in a field where all you do is talk to people. I always found PR spiritually effortful, but I thought that’s just what a real job was. To make real money, you had to escape the provinces and do things you didn’t want to do.

I’m relieved when the doorbell sounds the young man’s exit. My eyes mindlessly follow him to his car waiting on the road’s shoulder, engine running.

Just then, the door to the house across the street opens, and a tall, well-shaped woman in stylish thick-heeled boots rushes down the stairs to the street.

My breath catches. I lean closer and jut my nose into the windowpane.

Then I rush to the back room, where Shruti is on the computer. “The woman across the street in the old Masonic Lodge. Do you know her?”

My friend peers at me over her computer glasses. “Alexandra Stevens? Just a little. I met her on the sidewalk last week. Why?”

“We went to high school together.”

“Were you friends?”

“Very close, for a time. Do you know why she’s here?”

Shruti looks at me curiously, a sly smile playing on her lips. “I guess she couldn’t stay away, like you.”

I shake my head. Back then, Sandy didn’t have a country bone in her body. That was part of what drew me to her.

I want to rush out and hug her. To share the shock of being back in Edin as adults. But I’m also hesitant. I’d always assumed Sandy left the way she did because she couldn’t stand to stick around our dumpy town anymore. And that included dumpy me. I look down at my wrinkled, untucked shirt and my dirty boots. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised at Lucy in the present day.

I return to the counter and watch out the window as Sandy fishes for her keys. I’m crouching. I don’t want her to see me. When I think of it through Sandy’s eyes, I’m embarrassed to be working at the store. More than once, living in New York over the years, I thought, If only Sandy could see me. She never did, and after all our teenaged talk about getting out of this place, it looks as if I’ve never left.

What’s she doing back, and what would she think of me now? I also can’t help but wonder if she’s sorry.

It was, at first, a triumphant return.

I quit Columbia’s PR office, and Michael retired from the university’s Classics Department. We planned to subsist on his 403(b) and our joint savings, while he enjoyed the writing life and I took over my father’s farm.

What a wonderful idea this was!

My husband was seventy-seven, and I was thirty years younger. We thought we had ten good years ahead of us. Michael was healthy, still walked all over the city, and his mother had lived to ninety-five. We still had sex most Saturday mornings. He’d never been self-conscious of our age difference. I wasn’t embarrassed, but I did notice the way people looked at us, wondering if we were a couple or father and daughter.

Five years before our move, during a stretch of intense craving that felt like the kind women describe when they want a baby, I suddenly wanted to keep goats and make my own yogurt and cheese. My father, thrilled, swiftly began a persuasion campaign. He was waiting for his heart to give out, and he told me bluntly that he’d die easier knowing the land would continue as a farm. He lived in fear of our family’s acres morphing into suburban sprawl. I was the only one left to save them. My mother was long dead, and my sister had left Edin at fourteen for boarding school and now lived contentedly in Westchester County.

Dad always said our land was more than a source of income. It was a landmark in town, referred to by our family name, the Richard Farm, and he’d been generous in allowing a local organization to build a section of trail across one corner of the back field that connected to a longer walking route through the conservation area. Dad wanted people to enjoy the farm’s bounty, whether by walking across it or eating what we raised.

Columbia gave me an unpaid leave, and I interned with Judy Martin at Birchbark Dairy in the Berkshires, two hours west of Edin. I’d called her after discovering her ash-covered, aged goat cheese at Murray’s.

Farming, that summer, was an urge I suddenly couldn’t ignore. And having reached my forties, I felt more entitled to follow such urges than I did when I was young.

Judy, who wore her hair in two gray braids, a whimsical daisy or dandelion woven in, would wake us before dawn and carry strong black tea with milk and honey in a thermos to the barn. After three hours of milking, feeding, and making the rounds, we’d return to the kitchen and eat hard-boiled eggs. Judy didn’t talk much until she’d eaten. If she thought I needed to witness something, she’d whistle like a whippoorwill and point. Those largely silent mornings of companionable labor were often my favorite parts of the day. Feeling a part of a natural rhythm and relishing the glowing sunrise on my cheeks.

Michael visited once during my months apprenticing with Judy, but for the most part he fell back into his urban bachelor routine of movies on Tuesdays and chess on Fridays. Cooking for a friend on Saturdays. In truth, that was still his routine after we married, except I didn’t play chess, and his social circle expanded slightly to include friends of mine from college and the office, women who were mystified by the age of my romantic partner but did their best to be supportive.

At Birchbark, I went to bed with earth under my nails and the smell of milk in my nose. I slept like the newly born.

At the end of the summer, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to city life. But I did, stuffing disappointment under my blazer each morning. I tried to imagine a way I could ease Dad’s worries about encroaching development and satisfy my own new craving for space, for the heady scent of summer soil, for raising bleating baby goats. Would my urban husband go for it?

He would. Michael still adored his graduate students and paternally advising them, but he’d grown distant from the undergrads and tired of his own performance in the lecture hall. I’m ready for the next adventure, he told me. A little house in the country in which to write his slim, popular Roman histories.

I took Michael to the farmhouse deck and spread my arms at the vision I had been nurturing for the better part of a decade. Behind us were the house, twenty acres of vegetables, and the country road. In front of us unfurled another twenty acres of relatively flat field, but then the land sloped upward into uneven hills, forested along the top ridge. You could see these hills from the road. Bikers and drivers often paused in the spring to photograph the flowering meadows and, in the fall, the brightly burning leaves.

Michael shook his head in wonder, the look that I was going for. The one that came across his face when he stood inside the Pantheon, no matter how many times he’d peered up into its dome. “Carina come una foto.”

These fields are more than a pretty picture to me, though. They’re a source of profound nourishment.

We decided to move to Edin, provided I agreed to first spend six months in Rome, the city he’d eagerly shared with me over the years.

When I told Dad that I’d take over his farm, I felt like the prodigal daughter. A grin an acre wide spread across his face.

“I never gave up on you,” he said. “No matter all your years away.” Then he cautioned me, “But you really have to do it. Work the land, I mean. That’s the only way to keep the tax breaks. Otherwise the property taxes and the upkeep will eat you out of house and home.” He died a year later, fully at peace, he assured me. My sister Sue was perfectly happy to leave the farm in my eager hands.

Of course I would farm it. I just needed to start small and learn along the way. At that point, Michael and I had plenty of savings to keep us going until the land turned a profit.

Our parallel visions of country cultivation and literary productivity worked according to plan our first year back in Edin, as Michael typed away on his Olivetti and I planted my first garden in thirty years. The harvest went smoothly, and I reopened the farm stand at the corner of the front field. I made a plan for our hundred and one acres. Built a rudimentary milking parlor and cheese room to get my state inspection. I wanted to start out all organic for the dairy, but the price of organic feed shocked me into making that a goal for a few years down the line.

After Judy’s does kidded last spring, I took home two mamas, Nana and Brie, and Nana’s two doelings, Bora-Bora and Felicia. Also a proven buck, Derek Jeter (Judy is a Yankees fan). I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.

Also in April, I deducted the cost of every purchased animal and pound of feed and, in exchange for the near evaporation of my property taxes, swore to the government—as Dad had done—that I would not develop the land for ten years.

Slow and steady, I’d build my dairy, consulting with Judy along the way.

And then six months ago, the whirlwind summer harvest underway, as we were dripping in tomatoes and melons and everything green, something curious occurred. When I went into the bank to apply for a home equity loan to replace our leaking roof and invest in more animals and equipment, I discovered a craterous hole in our savings.

Had we been swindled? I raced home to ask my husband what he knew.

As he explained, his eyes expanded, the pupils widening into larger and larger circles. A look I’d seen before. Sudden, extravagant purchases used to appear in our apartment from time to time: a top-flight Vitamix, tickets for a last-minute flight to San Francisco. Many of these luxuries on the border of affordability I was guilty of enjoying. Neither of us grew up with money, and we relished the finer things. His excuse was always some discount or time-limited window (truffles enjoy such a short harvest season!). In this case, he had “loaned” the money to Alfie Romano, a beloved former grad student, Italian-American like Michael. Alfie had always been special. He’d dined at our apartment nearly every Friday for five years. Michael had been devastated when Alfie quit the program, but I had seen that the young man was not cut out for the slow pace of academia. He was a thrill seeker with great ideas but poor execution. Unfortunately, Michael had never been able to recognize his brilliant student’s flaws. So when Alfie launched his machine translation company and exhausted his first and second rounds of funding, he’d come to Michael as a last-ditch effort. “I couldn’t bear to tell him no,” my generous husband said, his long face pulled down into sadness. “Besides,” he said brightly, “it can’t fail. We’ve gotten in on the ground floor!”

“There’s no ‘we’ here,” I said, still in shock. “What were you thinking, doing this without talking to me?”

“We’ll be fine,” Michael said. “We’ll get it back and then some.”

“When?” I reminded him about the leaking roof, the sagging barn. The dairy enterprise that lay dormant, waiting for funds to expand. My whole reason for moving back to Edin.

“Soon, my dear. Be patient. Genius takes time.”

I was furious. A hole gaped in the pit of my stomach. How would we manage?

But I also saw something terrifying in that moment. The flippancy of his answer told me that Michael had not thought through Alfie’s plan. When I asked him questions, he was evasive when normally he’d have exuberantly dived into the details. Something had clouded his judgment. Had Alfie pulled a fast one? Or was the problem internal to my husband?

Genius might take its sweet time, but I didn’t have to wait long for the results of Alfie’s venture. Michael woke up one morning three months ago, took a phone call in his office (my sister Sue’s old bedroom), and reported that Alfie’s business had failed. “It is no more,” is the way he put it.

There would be no return on investment. Nor a return of our investment. The ground floor had fallen through.

Yet Michael seemed to show no real understanding of the bind this placed us in. “I’m in my last years, I don’t need much. I’ll eat like a bird,” he said. Was that a serene smile on his face? Why did he show no remorse?

I called Judy in a cold panic.

“Good thing you’re freshening the does,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now you’ll have something to sell.”

I heard voices in the background. “You have company?” I asked. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“One of those silly talk shows,” she said in the same even tone.

I was too concerned with my own predicament to ask what she was doing inside at noon on a Saturday at the height of breeding season.

During my internship, I had asked a lot of questions. Usually, they were about the goats. But one morning, standing in the hayfield, Judy about to mount the tractor, the July sun shining down from high above, I asked if she ever got lonely; her closest neighbor lived two miles down a dirt road.

“Sometimes, at Christmas, I wish someone would roast me a goose,” she said, half smiling. “Big, luscious meals are for sharing. Of course, I have Brad, but he likes to travel with his friends and I’m not the hosting kind of mother, so I try not to put pressure on him.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised, wondering if I understood.

I did. Possibly I was so drawn to Judy because my mother died when I was in college; that would be the psychoanalytical interpretation. Except Judy wasn’t maternal in a classically nurturing way. She was about the transfer of information and valuing every living being’s special properties.

“So yes, I do get lonely for conversation. For sharing milestones. But the day to day . . .” She shook her head. “Nah. I have an abundance of life to keep me company.”

God, I admired her in that moment. I never again doubted her solitary contentment. I can do this on my own, I said to myself after hanging up. Just like Judy.

When I arrive home from the store, Michael is already asleep. I change into my barn clothes. A frigid sleet is from the sky.

But the does’ comically droopy ears lift my spirits. As I feed them, I admire Brie’s rich chocolate brown coat. She’s the most aloof of the four. Nana’s face is beige and white, and she’s still protective of her daughters, Felicia and Bora-Bora. Felicia has a wispy black beard and rubs her head against the side of my thigh affectionately. She’s my favorite, for the way she tilts her head when I speak to her, as if ardently listening.

All four paw the floor and bang impatiently against the slats that separate them from the feed trough.“I’m on it,” I tell them. I pour fresh water, noting with satisfaction the success of my low-budget solution to keep the water from freezing: a plastic bottle filled with saltwater floating on the surface, bobbing just enough to break up any ice. Someday I’d like to heat the goats’ drinking water in winter, to lessen the shock to their systems, but right now the extra electricity is beyond our budget.

I haven’t eaten since lunch but it’s been a long day. I chomp a wedge of Judy’s alpine-style cheese, call that supper, and get into bed.

Some hours later I’m awakened by a crash. Followed by a weak cry.

Michael is tipped over the sofa, his white T-shirt gleaming under a sliver of moonlight. Bare legs like plucked drumsticks.

He must have heard me come into the living room because he says, his voice muffled by the cushions, “I can’t move.”

My heart speeds up as I race toward him, nearly tripping on the coffee table. “What happened?”

“Lavatory,” he says. Where he was headed. “Carpet.” The shag that tripped him.

“Does anything hurt?”

Together we bend his knees so his lower legs are flat on the floor and he is able to wrestle his arms underneath him and push his torso up so he’s in a kneeling position. He’s sweating lightly and I feel his heat. Not once in the past few months have we been naked together, touching like we used to. He clasps his hands into a mock prayerful position. “Like the good Catholic I am.”

Please, God, let this not be the first of many. That is my useless supplication.

I get him up on his feet and walk gingerly to the bathroom. I wait while he waits—“Damn prostate”—and then support him as he walks back to bed, a noticeable wobble in his step.

“Do you need anything checked out? Sure nothing hurts?”

“I fell into the sofa, bella,” he says testily. “Not the bookcase. I’m fine.”

Despite his protests, I sit with him while he settles himself and falls back asleep.

And then I get to work. I turn on all the lights and pull on thick gloves, gather a pair of pliers and a large, sharp X-Acto. The first incision is tough, exhilarating work. I cut another strip and another, moving furniture as I go. With pliers I pull up the staples and then tug on the golden shag. Decades-old dust rises and I cough, remember a mask Dad kept in the pantry, and fit that on.

As I yank and pull with all my strength, I think about Sandy, the glimpse of her out the store window. An unnamable emotion rises within me. Am I still mad at her for leaving the way she did?

We were besties for all of high school—as soon as Sandy moved here from suburban Connecticut before the start of our freshman year and we both went out for soccer. We loved each other; I feel sure of that. We were always hanging our arms over each other’s shoulders, wrapping them around waists, sleeping with legs intertwined. This felt natural and normal, but sometimes we were made to think it wasn’t. Some guy would say, “Why don’t you two make out already?” But that didn’t bother us. It was strange that I was closer to Sandy than I was to my sister Sue, and for a while I think my parents felt bad about the contrast, but they liked Sandy so much, she was soon part of the family.

Summer after senior year I was working for Dad on the farm, which Sandy thought a bad idea. “Scoop ice cream with me,” she said. “All you’ve ever done is farm. Employers want to see a diversity of experience.” Something she’d read in the newspaper or heard from our drippy guidance counselor. She’d convinced the owner of the ice cream stand to give her the title of manager because she thought that would help her get better internships in college. But Dad counted on me, and I liked being outside. I didn’t want to sweat inside some tiny shack, even with Sandy by my side.

The plan that final day had been for me to ride my bike to The Big Dipper, then we’d put my bike on the back of her car and drive out to the lake. The previous night had been normal, cozy; we’d gotten tipsy on my father’s beer after swimming in the river all afternoon. Sandy fell asleep in my bed. The next day I rode the fifteen mountainous miles to the shack. But when I got there, her boss said she’d never shown up. Nor did she after I waited for her all afternoon, the boss finally taking pity on me and giving me a milkshake, an order gone wrong.

Too embarrassed to call my parents, and knowing they were busy anyway, I rode all the way back home, up and down the fierce hills, crying most of the way.

I called Sandy’s house, and her mother told me she’d left early for college. “She didn’t tell you?” Mrs. Stevens sounded surprised. “Guess that explains her bitchy mood.”

Sandy wrote one rambling, apologetic letter to me at Barnard once classes had started. I wrote back, holding my anger and pretending I understood that she was just “super anxious to get a job and settle in before Sept.” I asked if she’d be home for Thanksgiving, but I never heard from her again.

“Girls this age,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I know I was one, but I’ll never understand them. I can’t believe Sandy, our Sandy, would be so rude and heartless. Try not to take it too hard, chicken.”

Mom tried her best, but how do you get over such heart- break at eighteen?

I labor, sweating heavily, until the ghostly pre-dawn hours. Tomorrow I’ll call the plumber and fix up the back bathroom so my beloved no longer has to traverse the living room to pee in the middle of the night. Should have done that months ago. But months ago that haunted look didn’t flicker in Michael’s eyes. A look I mistook, at first, for guilt over throwing away our savings, but now I wonder if there isn’t something else going on. Something we both have chosen to ignore.

The post A Goat Farmer Is Only as Vulnerable as Her Goats appeared first on Electric Literature.

The sound in the large room was subdued, kind of muffled. There was a worn gray wall-to-wall carpet, and the ceiling was covered with spongy polystyrene tiles, tiles that absorbed the hundreds of telephone conversations that took place every evening between people who would much rather be doing something else.

I logged on to the computer. The system was old, the text large and pixelated, and the graphics were simple and clumsy, only two colors. I put on my headset, adjusted the microphone and clicked on the first call. It rang out for quite some time before anyone answered.

“Sundström,” said a female voice.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Hanna and I’m calling from VQS, Vision Quest and Survey in Gothenburg. I was hoping to speak to Yvonne Sundström.”

“That’s me,” she said in the slightly wary tone almost everyone adopted when I had introduced myself.

“Great! We’re currently conducting an investigation into consumer habits, and you have been chosen at random to take part. So I was wondering if you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”

A few minutes was a deliberately vague statement, it rarely took less than fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty or more.

“Is it about how I vote?” she asked.

“No, we’re looking into consumer habits and product knowledge. It’s mainly concerned with groceries and household products.”

“Do I get paid?”

“Unfortunately there is no payment for this particular investigation, but your answers are important for the statistical analysis.”

This was a cunning formulation, designed to evoke a sense of obligation and responsibility, and I was slightly ashamed every time I had to come out with it. She sighed with an air of resignation. The power of the telephone was remarkable—older people seemed to feel that they had to answer and then cooperate when someone called them. Presumably things would soon change, when the sought-after consumers came from a younger generation with a more careless attitude toward the telephone.

“Well, I was just about to make a start on dinner, but . . . okay.”

“Perfect. First question: How often do you eat jelly?”

She was silent for a moment, confused perhaps by the contrast between my formal introduction and the banality of the question.

“How often do I eat jelly?” she said suspiciously.

“That’s right.”

“Do you mean ordinary jelly? Like . . . strawberry jelly and . . . lingonberry jelly, that kind of thing?”

“Yes, ordinary jelly.”

She laughed. “I guess . . . a few times a week.”

“Would you say once or twice a week, three to five times a week, or more than five times a week?”

Another silence.

“Well, I mostly have it with my porridge, so that’s maybe three times a week. So I’ll go for three to five times a week.”

“Excellent. So my next question: How often do you buy jelly?”

“I sometimes make it myself, but maybe that doesn’t count?”

“This particular question is about jelly you buy from a store. But I bet your own jelly is delicious!” I added.

She laughed again. “Let’s see . . . I’d say I buy jelly a few times a year.”

“Would you say once or twice a year, three to five times a year, or more than five times a year?”

“I guess that would be three to five times as well. The children eat quite a bit.”

“I understand. Now, what brands of jelly are you familiar with?”

She sighed. “Let me think . . . Bob, I guess.”

I selected Bob from the options on my screen.

“Can you think of any other brands?”

“Er . . . Önos, maybe?”

“Önos, good. Any more?”

“Felix?” she said hesitantly. “Or is that mainly peas and that kind of thing?”

“I’ll add it to the list. Any more?”

Silence. “Coop, I suppose, if they have their own brand? I’m not sure. And ICA too.” She suddenly sounded enthusiastic. “And maybe Willy’s? And Hemköp?”

“Perfect. Can you think of any more?”

She fell silent again. She really was taking this seriously.

“No, that’s it I think.”

“Excellent. Can you tell me what brands of jelly you’ve bought in the last fourteen days?”

“I haven’t bought any jelly lately.” She sounded a little defensive now. “We’ve just been eating the lingonberry jelly we’ve already got.”

“No problem, I’ll make a note of that.” The fact that she hadn’t bought any jelly meant that I didn’t need to ask her what brand she had bought, which would speed things up a little. “Next question: what brands of jelly have you seen advertised during the last fourteen days?”

“Advertised . . . Do you mean like leaflets through the door?”

“We’re thinking of all kinds of advertising. For example, leaflets through the door, ads in newspapers and magazines, on public transport, at the cinema, on TV or the radio.”

She laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard jelly advertised on the radio!”

“No, maybe jelly doesn’t come up too much on the radio,” I said in a friendly tone of voice. “But how about the other types of advertising I mentioned?”

This time the silence went on for quite a while.

“I think I might have seen something on TV.”

“Do you remember what brand it was?”

“These are difficult questions.”

“There’s no hurry.”

“Can you help me out with some brands?”

Her desire to get it right was touching.

“I’m afraid I’m not allowed to do that. This investigation is concerned with what you have seen and what you remember.”

She sighed. This was going to take some time.

“Think about the brands you mentioned just now,” I prompted her. This was actually off-script, but I wanted to move on. “Have you maybe seen an advertisement for one of those?”

“I might have seen Bob advertised,” she said eventually. “On TV4.”

“Fantastic.”

Neither of us said anything while I filled in her responses, then clicked through to the next segment.

“Is that it?” she said optimistically.

“Not quite. The next question is about ready-made and frozen pizza. How often do you eat ready-made or frozen pizza?”

It started raining as I headed toward Korsvägen. According to the display the number five was due in seven minutes, so I went into the newsagent’s and flicked through a few magazines to pass the time. When the tram came rattling along, the rear section was full of young guys in expensive clothes on their way from Örgryte into the city as usual.

I usually tried to avoid walking to the tram stop with anyone from work, I hurried away quickly after the last call of the evening. Sometimes I failed, but if it was someone who talked so much that I didn’t really need to contribute, it wasn’t too taxing: Samir, who usually babbled about some new sci-fi movie, or Tilde, who would tell me all about the party she’d been to over the weekend and the party she was going to next weekend. It was more difficult if I ended up with someone who wasn’t as chatty as them, because a conversation that demanded input from me was almost painful. After five hours on the phone my brain was anesthetized. Sometimes I thought it might have been different if the surveys I was conducting were about politics or social issues, if they were genuine opinion polls where people gave genuine, well-thought-out answers. At the same time, it was quite appealing to do something that didn’t require me to think at all, to sit there almost like a robot typing in witless answers to equally witless questions. Sometimes I really got into it, regarded it as a challenge to lead the interviewees through the conversations, tease out the next product name, make them feel important. Maybe I ought to work in a similar field, I thought occasionally, but for real: become some kind of counselor, listening patiently to people struggling with their bad relationships, nodding and making appropriate comments, giving simple advice that was seen as meaningful, because people who ask for advice on that kind of thing are ready to believe that any opinion on their situation could carry a truth within it.

Vision Quest and Survey was a company where you worked until you found something better, or something you would rather do. Most employees were students just like me, sitting there for several evenings a week to supplement their student loan. Some were middle-aged or older, I felt sorry for them because the reasons why they were there were never positive. Some had lost a better job because of downsizing or disagreements, and hadn’t yet managed to find anything else. One had suffered burnout and was easing himself back into work. One man who must have been in his fifties had worked there for many years, and still believed he would soon get his breakthrough as a composer. Most of this older group worked days, the shifts were longer and presumably quieter, because fewer people would answer the phone. My nightmare was that I would end up like them, that I would be sitting in the same staff kitchen in ten years, waiting for the career as an artist that had never taken off, working long shifts to pay for a studio that led precisely nowhere, but I couldn’t let it go because that would mean the final failure. As long as I had my studio, there was still some hope of success.

The calls were generated at random by the computer, and every time I hoped that a man in Stockholm wouldn’t answer. Men in Stockholm were just the worst—always stressed, often condescending. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” was a frequent question, and it always got to me. Of course I have, I would think, and then: Do I really? And I would get angry, because it felt as if they had won. I pictured their lives as a distant and exotic image of success, a fantastic career and beautifully ironed shirts, a suntan that lasted well into the fall, a big house and a wife and children, maybe a mistress, an impressive golf handicap, overseas vacations, and a rich social life with others who shared the same status in society. And then someone calls from Vision Quest and Survey in Gothenburg, making demands on their time to ask questions about their cell-phone contract, what a joke. “Fifteen minutes?” they would sometimes yell after they’d asked how long it was going to take, and of course I was lying anyway, because if they answered in a particular way there would be more questions, questions that would require them to fetch a pen and paper and write down support words and rate their phone operator. I always hoped they would say no to the survey, because if they said yes I would hear their frustration increasing after only a few minutes. Sometimes we had only gotten halfway through after the promised fifteen minutes and it was already seven thirty, they were having a barbecue, they were going out, they had to put the kids to bed. I would miss out a question or fill in the wrong answer to avoid the need for a follow-up question, always aware that a supervisor could be listening in to our conversation, I might be called in and told in a stern voice that I was endangering the statistics, and that if this happened again I might lose my job.

I was invited to a party at Tilde’s on Saturday. I rarely went out with my coworkers on the weekend, the parties my fellow students organized were always more fun, but she had made it seem as if it were important to her that I went. Her apartment was on a street off Linnégatan, which made no sense at all to me. How could she live there, when she was studying and had a badly paid part-time job, just like me? Then I realized there were parents who could help out financially, that the hundreds of thousands of kronor that made no sense to me obviously didn’t come from her job as a market researcher.

Tilde was studying Education and was going to be a teacher, which sounded stable and well-considered. I found it slightly embarrassing to say that I was doing an art foundation course, it sounded more like a hobby than something you could actually live on. Maybe I should stop thinking that was a possibility, and become a teacher too, an art teacher, it might even be enjoyable. Encouraging a particularly gifted pupil to pursue art, making a difference to another person’s life.

Tilde provided box wine, Franz Ferdinand was playing in the living room, some people were already planning to go on to Pustervik later. Samir was talking to a girl I didn’t recognize, maybe one of Tilde’s fellow students, they were standing close together, closer and closer as the evening progressed.

I sometimes wondered when love would come to me. As if love were a resource that was shared out through the providence of someone else. Like the tax declaration form from the IRS or a summons to the dentist: if it didn’t show up there must have been a hitch at a higher level where these things were dealt with.

I thought that was how it seemed to work, people around me got together in an almost mechanical way that maybe didn’t always have much to do with love, it was more a sense of responsibility or duty, a need to fulfill the task of being part of a nice couple who enjoy long, lazy breakfasts on the weekends, go for a walk in the botanical gardens, measure a wall in order to put up a shelf they’ve driven to IKEA to buy. There was something irritatingly fabulous about this togetherness, and I often wondered to what extent those involved really wanted to be there. They didn’t seem excessively happy, but they weren’t unhappy either, they accepted their relationship with stoical equanimity: This is what you do, this is how you create a grown-up life. After spending several years doing everything to break away from exactly that kind of life, represented by their parents, they suddenly performed a U-turn and accepted that they ought to become exactly like them, accepting their money for the deposit on a place to live, buying their IKEA shelf, having cozy dinners at home instead of going out partying, maybe getting a dog, eventually upgrading to a child.

Personally I half-heartedly went back to someone’s apartment from time to time, without imagining that it would generate anything other than a brief closeness, or lead to anything else. What did I want from life? It stressed me out that I didn’t actually know.

I often dreamed of Erik at night. Sometimes we were children again, lengthy dreams with no clear action or content, when the endless summers of our childhood played out in my mind like idyllic postcards from the past: Erik and I trying to paddle a canoe, Erik and I picking wild strawberries in the cow pasture at Grandpa’s summer cottage, our hearts in our mouths, Erik and I fighting for space on a Lilo in a forest pool, the warm, amber-colored water all around us, gray mountains and tall, straight pine trees lined up against the backdrop of a completely cloudless sky.

Sometimes the dreams were different. In one I was in the forest, on the track leading up to the railway, when a deer suddenly appeared in front of me. It looked straight at me, and I got the feeling that the deer was in fact Erik, that he had come back, in the form of a deer for some reason, but that didn’t matter, the important thing was that he had come back.

“Don’t go,” I said, but when I cautiously took a step closer I trod on a twig that snapped. The deer stiffened for a second, then turned like lightning and fled through the forest.

In another dream I was at Mount Verity searching for him, and as I stood in the cave I saw an opening in one corner, with light pouring from it. How strange that no one has seen this opening before, I thought and stepped inside. I found myself in an enormous hall, like in a fairy-tale palace: columns and crystal chandeliers, gold and jewels, everything sparkled and shone. Erik was sitting at a table. He was wearing brightly colored clothes, he was older, and his hair had grown into a golden pageboy, the same style he had had when he was little. He looked like a handsome prince in a painting by John Bauer.

“Have you been here all the time?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Won’t you come home with me?” I said.

“I have to stay down here,” he replied.

I always woke up with a strange feeling in my body, simultaneously sad and comforted, everything felt kind of woozy, like a slight hangover, and I would try to cure it in the same way: a long shower, coffee, a walk. But however far I walked I couldn’t forget that I was the one who had been allowed to live, that I was walking around, I was alive, while Erik was still missing. I ought to be more grateful, I thought, I ought to take better care of my life, but how do you do that? I felt as if I had been tasked with living in a certain way so that justice would be done, so that this would somehow compensate for the fact that Erik never got to grow up. It was a debilitating thought. Nothing I could do would ever compensate for that.

I ate at work on the evenings when I was there. I had a thirty-minute break, I would heat up a frozen ready meal in the windowless staff kitchen, where lamps hung from the low ceiling and spread their artificial light on the plants that just about survived in there, like we all did. I ate Findus cheese schnitzel with béarnaise sauce and fried potatoes, or rissoles with potato croquettes, herb butter, and cherry tomatoes. Both dishes were salty and greasy, with a few obligatory green beans. I often thought that I ought to make myself a packed dinner to bring in, I ought to start eating better, but it never happened. I also hated the idea of my coworkers taking an interest in what I had, with curious looks and comments. That’s the way they behaved with one another, especially the slightly older colleagues who clearly cooked delicious and nutritious dinners and brought in the leftovers. It felt personal, private: as long as I ate ready meals, I wasn’t responsible for what was in them.

If I was going straight home from my art class I often bought something tasty for dinner, usually from the Chinese restaurant on the way. It was like a throwback to Sweden as it used to be, with old men drinking beer and reading the evening papers in a big restaurant where I had never seen more than a handful of customers. A neglected aquarium stood in one corner, while a TV mounted on the wall was showing the day’s lottery draw.

The man at the till recognized me and was always pleasant. I usually ordered chicken with cashew nuts, or occasionally a chicken dish flavored with ginger, maybe beef in a dark soy sauce with onions or bamboo shoots, it was perfectly ordinary food, delicious in a perfectly ordinary way that I liked. The portions were generous, there was always enough for at least two meals, so even though I was buying takeout pretty often, it wasn’t really expensive.

I would sit at a table and leaf through Expressen while I waited, glancing at one or two album reviews. Then I would collect my bag containing the warm plastic boxes and cut across the square to my apartment. Winter was almost over and you could sense spring in the twilight now, it was cold outside, there were still gritty patches of ice on the ground, but the thin strip of light that clung to the horizon lingered for a little bit longer each day.

Home was a sublet in one of the big blocks on Wieselgrensplatsen. It was close to the tram stop and several large grocery stores, sometimes there was a florist’s stall in the square selling cheap, lovely plants, I filled both the apartment and the glassed-in balcony with them because it wasn’t particularly cozy, it was an impersonal mixture of IKEA and old stuff that seemed to have finished up there by chance, nothing really went together. And yet I was happy there, the location suited me very well: the big building on the modest square that had a small-town feel, it managed to be magnificent and unassuming at the same time, carefully and benevolently designed in the finest tradition of the Swedish welfare state.

Otherwise I wasn’t too fond of Gothenburg, I thought it was oddly planned, a collection of different parts of the city randomly thrown together, a kind of limbo where you waited for life to begin for real, hopefully somewhere that wasn’t Gothenburg. In fact the entire city was like an enlarged version of my workplace: a temporary stop on the way to something else. It didn’t feel as if anything was really real in Gothenburg, I always thought: it’s cool that you have a morning paper, but it isn’t a real morning paper. Cool that you have art schools, but they’re not real art schools. Cool that you have a city, but it’s not a real city.

Hisingen was also a weird place, the suburbs were sort of eating their way into the city center but were hindered by a bridge that could actually be opened; if they wanted to they could stop us from getting into the city, raise the drawbridge and shut us out. Hisingen was city yet not city, it was intersections and suburbs and large grocery stores, a place to catch a bus that would take you even farther away, McDonald’s at Backaplan shopping center that was a fragment of the real world, between old men boozing and parking lots and superstores.

My hallway was small and dark, I picked up the mail: mostly advertising leaflets, a bill, and then a window envelope that looked both formal and fun at the same time. The edges were decorated with a border of balloons.

“Where does the time go? It’s crazy, right?” it said in a cheery typeface on the piece of paper inside. “It’s ten years since you left high school, and to celebrate Reunions R Us are inviting you and everyone else who graduated from your school in 1994 to a party. A party that will go on all night long! With music from back in the day, of course—will you have the nerve to ask the person you had a crush on to join you in a slow dance this time?”

I didn’t want my food to go cold, so I tipped one portion onto a plate and sat down at the table with the invitation in front of me. The party was to be held in the school dining hall, a simple three-course menu would be served, drinks at cost price, please inform the organizers of any food intolerances or allergies.

I was no longer in touch with anyone from Kolmården, not even Marcus. After graduating he had moved to Lund and I had come to Gothenburg, and we had stopped communicating. I googled him occasionally, he had already achieved a doctorate in theology. There was a small picture of him next to the presentation of his research on the university’s home page, and he looked just the same, but older, more serious. He had written essays and articles with titles such as “Imagining the apocalypse—revealing the revelations of Nordic folk tales,” and “Does God live in the forest? Animalistic features in 20th-century Swedish literature.” It all looked very highbrow, it made me feel inferior to him in a way that I found frustrating.

Throughout high school I had thought that I would make something special of my life. It had annoyed me that many of my classmates had such a casual attitude, bordering on indifference, to the future at the age of fifteen. Didn’t they have any dreams? My grades were good, I was going to study, move far away, maybe overseas. I would live in a place where no one knew who I was, where my life was not tainted by my past.

I often thought of the evening when Marcus and I were at The Burger King on Drottninggatan, when it felt as though we had sealed an unspoken pact. “I’m going to leave too,” I had said, it was as if it became possible when I spoke those words. “Of course you are,” he’d said, and we both did it, we left Kolmården, but for what purpose? Those who stayed probably had better lives than me, who couldn’t get into a proper art school and spent the evenings asking people what brands of jelly they were familiar with. Not exactly something to boast about at a school reunion. I could imagine the surprise on their faces, the way they had to bite their tongues to stop themselves from saying what they were thinking: that they had expected me to be doing something considerably more impressive by this stage.

I had started running in the evenings, and as the spring progressed, I ran more and more. Every evening when I wasn’t working, because there was nothing I liked more than spring evenings, and at the same time nothing I liked less. I ran to be absorbed by the atmosphere, the shimmering magic of the blue hour along the quaysides of Eriksberg, then through the residential areas where everything was bursting into life, a suburbia with rhubarb leaves like ears directed at space, perhaps the rustle of a hedgehog moving through last year’s brown leaves, it was like running straight back to my childhood.

Running was a solitary pastime, anonymous in a way that appealed to me. It was one of the few situations where I felt as if I were no one. No one took any notice of a runner who was out when everyone else was out running too, and even though the quaysides and the shopping mall parking lots were busy in the evenings, I could run there without anyone paying attention to me, a body among other bodies, without a specific errand, with no goal other than to keep moving. I particularly liked mild, misty evenings, it was as if I became one with them, dissolved and became part of them, I turned up the volume in my earbuds and increased my speed, felt my heart pounding, felt the blood pumping through my veins, felt that I was alive.

At the same time it was those spring evenings I was trying to run away from, because they were revolting, the misleading hope of the lighter evening, the false promise that everything would return. Sometimes the memory of Erik seemed so distant that I began to doubt whether it had really happened. Whether I had actually had a brother. Maybe it was just something I had dreamed, an intense dream full of details, but a dream nevertheless. I had absorbed the memory, just as a mussel places layer after layer of mother-of-pearl over a grain of sand, I had buried it inside me, turned it into a hard, shimmering sorrow deep, deep inside. It was like an echo from eternity, a myth from ancient times, a whisper from space: Once upon a time I was a part of something else, something bigger. Once upon a time I was whole. Once upon a time I had a brother.

The post I Wish It Wasn’t My Job to Ask You About Jelly appeared first on Electric Literature.

Somehow, in the crowded party, Catherine and Andros were alone together in the living room. Catherine wasn’t sure how the room had emptied out, leaving just the two of them there, angled toward each other, him in an armchair and her on the couch, her legs crossed and a glass of mulled wine in her hand. She wore a crushed velvet cocktail dress and he wore a woolen button-up the color of slate. His hair was white and thick and his face was clean-shaven; his eyes were a light blue, light even in the darkly-lit room.

Catherine knew exactly who he was—she’d recognized him instantly—and he didn’t know her at all.

“You’re not a fan of Stein, then,” Andros said. “Tell me why. I’m very interested.”

“I haven’t read everything,” said Catherine. “I’ve read very little, in fact.”

Catherine couldn’t remember what she’d read exactly, but she knew she’d felt confused by whatever it was, and irritated by what seemed like a willful opacity.

“She’s one of my favorite female writers,” he said. “She changed literature forever. She changed language itself forever. We are all in her debt.” He shifted his weight in the chair, wooden and uncomfortable looking. Andros was old enough to make Catherine wonder if she’d been wrong not to offer him the couch, soft and sinking as it was. “I bet she’d be thrilled that you don’t like her, in fact. What is the opposite of turning over in one’s grave?”

“Giving a thumb’s up?” she tried, then instantly regretted it.

He laughed, and it didn’t seem like the laugh was just to make her feel better about having said something so incredibly stupid.

Catherine smiled and took a drink of her wine. Some of the others had gone out to the balcony to smoke weed and cigarettes, though it was cold and a soft snow was falling over the city. Another small group had gathered in the kitchen to assemble cookies and cake. Andros didn’t appear to smoke. He didn’t appear to drink alcohol, either; he was holding a can of Coke and wasn’t even drinking that. The party was the annual end-of-semester celebration hosted by Lawrence, the director of the NYU MFA program, held at his Park Slope apartment. Catherine had graduated back in the spring and she felt between groups: not student, not faculty, not friend, and certainly not a writer-writer. Lawrence seemed to know every writer in the city, even actually famous ones, though Andros was certainly the most well-known name in attendance that night. The only other person there from Catherine’s cohort was a boy on the balcony she’d never considered more than an acquaintance, despite two years of close proximity. If she’d ever talked to him one on one, she didn’t remember it.

Lawrence had introduced Catherine and Andros soon after Andros arrived. Lawrence told Andros in front of Catherine that she was something special, a compliment so nondescript it couldn’t help but be true. He was a little drunk already. A young Gertrude Stein, he’d said. Catherine had made a face, and Andros noticed. 

Anton was his first name—not Andros—but nobody ever referred to him as Anton, or even as Anton Andros. He was just Andros. 

“So what do you plan on doing with it?” Andros asked her now. “Your writing?”

“Publishing it, hopefully,” she answered. She wanted what every twenty-seven-year-old with a fresh MFA wanted: a book, then another, then another, a career half as successful as Andros’s—more than half, in Catherine’s case. Everyone around her was talented. She wanted her talent, however much she had, to not exist only as potential. 

Soliloquy, Andros’s debut, was the one that made his name. She’d read the first third of it; she could tell it was very good, surely brilliant, about a young man tending to his mentally ill mother in Astoria. She put it down one day and never picked it up again.

What was that like, for your debut to be better than anything else you’d ever write? It was a problem she’d like to have.

“It’s on submission?” Andros asked.

She shook her head. She’d been trying not to look at him like all young writers must look at him, but she knew she was failing. A smile kept escaping her when it didn’t make sense to smile. He smiled back.

“I haven’t finished it yet,” she said.

“Stories?”

“Novel.”

“Ah.”

“It’s nearly done,” she said, crossing her legs, itchy in tights. The dress was a little short, now that she was sitting. She didn’t usually wear dresses. “I’m hoping to have a draft by the spring.”

The novel wasn’t anywhere near done. It had been tormenting her for five years and way too many workshops, and the shape of the story only seemed to be getting further away. The writing was strong, even great in some passages, everyone said so, but the story was missing some essential element that nobody could quite name. It was about her grandmother, Nana, and her long, terrible life—a great story, but the novel wasn’t working. Catherine knew it better than anyone.

“And do you have representation?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

One writer in her cohort had an agent already, Maggie. Catherine had thought she maybe had a crush on Maggie for the first year before realizing that Maggie was both incredibly straight and incredibly self-absorbed. Maggie was also talented, of course, but her stories always felt edgy in a forced way; some of them were audaciously close to episodes from Girls, but never as good. It was no surprise she had an agent before graduation, and she’d probably be quite successful. Catherine wasn’t bothered by that. It had nothing to do with her. 

“So, Catherine Meyer, what do you do,” Andros asked musingly, “when you’re not writing?”

Her name sounded strange when he said it, like he didn’t believe it was her real name. If she was going to use a fake name, she’d choose better than Catherine Meyer. Still, she liked to hear him say it. It made her smile again, and he smiled back.

“I’m a nanny.”

“You like that work?”

“No,” she laughed, feeling the wine. For thirty hours a week she watched two sisters, three and six years old. They were exhausting, but at least they got along mostly and they were allowed to watch some TV on their tablets. “The money isn’t bad, not for now. I won’t do it for long.”

“Soon you’ll sell your book.”

“That’s right,” she said, unsure if he was making fun. Truthfully, shamefully, she had thought that the moment she was out of school, done with workshop deadlines and reading her peers’ work and teaching undergrads about the rhetorical situation and all the reading for her other courses, the novel would practically finish itself. Yet in the last six months she’d hardly written at all. The new time seemed to mock her more than free her—but the ambition persisted, inspiring an agita like unfulfilled lust. 

She didn’t tell Andros that when she wasn’t writing or working, she was browsing social media and dating apps, dispassionately yet persistently. She sometimes went to drinks with those from her cohort who still lived in the city, but they left her in a seeking mood, so she’d go out to a bar or a club on her own after, looking for girls, and there they were, as if waiting for her, so she took them, hungry to get them into her bed. When morning came, she wanted to wake up alone. She’d had a girlfriend in college, but she’d never had any interest in a girlfriend since—she hardly had any interest then. The crush on Maggie was unusual, short-lived, and probably not real to begin with. If Maggie were here tonight and not skiing in Vermont, surely that’s who Andros would be talking to.

What are you looking for? her college girlfriend had asked her when they were breaking up but didn’t know it yet. The girls on the app asked her too. The app itself asked her. What are you looking for?

I’ll know it when I see it. That was the only true answer and the answer nobody wanted.

Now all Catherine wanted was to be right here, drinking this wine, with Andros’s full attention. Maybe he wouldn’t be talking to Maggie, actually. Maybe he would be talking to her no matter who else was here.

“One of my daughters is a writer, you know,” said Andros. “Iris.”

“Novels?”

“Screenplays. She’s in L.A. now, and she’s going to do well there. She’s meeting the right people, and she’s a very bright girl.”

The pride he felt, how it softened his whole face, made her jealous—a ridiculous response, but still, there it was. It wasn’t like Catherine didn’t have a father who surely bragged about her to strangers at parties. Outside, on the balcony, came a surge of laughter.

One of my daughters, he’d said. How many did he have? 

“Will she adapt one of your books?” Catherine asked.

He shook his head. “Oh, absolutely not. She has more sense than that. She’s practical, savvy—more like her mother in that way.”

A wedding band was on his finger. Catherine fought the urge to pull out her phone right there and see what she could find out about his daughters and wife online. Andros wasn’t handsome, exactly, more stately and dignified than pretty, but the women in his life were surely stunning. 

“So, Catherine Meyer,” he said. “When can I read your book?”

Before he left that night, Andros wrote his address on a piece of paper and folded it into her hand.

“Don’t wait until it’s done,” he said. “Send me the first chapter. By post, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand to read on a screen. All writing has more dignity on paper.”

She couldn’t believe he was really serious, but his eyes were unwavering.

“I will,” she said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Catherine left the party soon after he did, seeing no reason to linger. That night she stayed up, retyping the first chapter, trying to make it sharper and fresher. Just imagining Andros reading it made it more smooth and alive. As she wrote, she took breaks to look him up online.

Soliloquy and a few of his other books were on several lists and referenced in many articles, but on Andros himself, there was very little. She kept encountering the same three photos of him, all taken decades ago. The Question of Joseph had also been popular, apparently. From what she could tell, it was a love story between two neighbors, again in Astoria. He didn’t seem to give many interviews, at least none in online magazines, and the sparse Wikipedia page didn’t tell her much she didn’t already know. He’d written eight novels, all told, and he was born in 1952 to Greek parents in New York. He’d won both the National Book Award and the Book Critics Circle Award, but not the Pulitzer. 

Nothing on his wife or children, not even one name.

The pages had to be done in one week, at the most, she told herself. This was an offer with an expiration date, even if he didn’t say so explicitly. By the week’s end, she could hardly understand her own words. She knew it was strong—at least much stronger than it had been—and she aged the voice of the prose, making it more formal and even a little ornate, less simple and spare. She printed it out at the public library, adding her phone number and email address on the front page, and then she bought a long tan envelope with a clasp at CVS. On her way to nanny the next morning, she deposited it at the post office.

When Catherine arrived at the cafe, Andros was already there, sitting by the window. He wore the same shirt he’d worn to the party, or an identical woolen button-up, and a cashmere scarf, gray on gray. Catherine dressed more girly than usual, wearing a silk blouse from the back of her closet and her mother’s small gold earrings, a tinted lip balm. She’d entertained the idea of mascara but decided against it in the end, feeling enough like a doll already. The cocktail dress at the party she’d worn almost ironically, but he wouldn’t know that. 

He didn’t see her right away; he was staring out the window, his expression somewhat vacant.

When she approached him and said his name, his face lit up.

“Catherine Meyer,” he said, smiling. “I took the liberty of ordering you a coffee. You like coffee?”

“Yes,” she said, though she’d already had too much that day. “Thank you.”

She fitted her coat over the back of the seat and set her bag on her lap; the floor was dirty with grime from all the boots before her. She’d never been to this cafe before—he’d emailed her and told her to meet him here, without a hint of how he felt about her chapter—and it was nicer than the places she usually went, with its high ceilings and white walls covered in framed paintings, all originals.

On the table was a thin book with a woman’s face on the cover. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

“How’s your book?” Catherine asked, gesturing to it.

“Oh, it’s brilliant,” he said. “You haven’t read it?”

Catherine shook her head, thinking already of a lie about what she’d been reading in case he asked. She’d found The Hunger Games on the bookshelf while nannying and had started reading it while the girls watched TV. She loved it.

“I’ve heard of it, though,” she said. She poured some cream into the coffee and took a sip; it was already a little cool. Truthfully, she’d been assigned to read Didion in college and didn’t even print the excerpt. One single reading reflection was such a small portion of her grade, she’d done most of the others, and she’d probably had some consequential paper due that week that took precedence.

“It’s a gift for you, then,” he said, pushing it toward her. Catherine took it in her hands; the cover was soft and the spine broken.

“Oh, I can’t take it—”

“Please,” he said. “I brought it with you in mind.”

“I’ll bring it back.”

“Don’t, please. I’m sure I have more than one copy.”

He looked at her the way he did at the party. It was a look she didn’t quite understand—paternal, maybe, avuncular, though not quite; something more mischievous than flirtatious, like they were both in on a joke. He wasn’t looking at her like he wanted to fuck her; she was pretty sure she knew that look at least. Most people seemed to assume she was gay, or at least queer—they picked up on what she was signaling both intentionally and subconsciously —but he might not, especially today, with her little earrings. He was surely an astute study of character, but he was also old. She was all right with him not knowing this about her.

“I loved your book,” she said, because she’d forgotten to say it at the party. “I’m sure people tell you that all the time. Soliloquy is the one I read.”

“Thank you for saying so,” he said. “I can’t say I feel the same.”

He took a sip of his tea and held the mug. An empty plate was next to him with pastry crumbs. How long had he been here before she arrived?

“I’ve written one good book,” he said. “Do you know which one it is?”

She didn’t dare answer.

“It’s a trick question. It hasn’t been published. I’ve given Iris instructions to publish it as soon as I die. They’ll take it then, I’m sure. That’s probably what they’re waiting for. It’ll sell much more once I’m dead.”

“What’s it about?”

“Myself,” he said. “What else?”

She smiled. 

“So,” he said, leaning forward a little. “I read this story of yours.”

Catherine waited, reminding herself not to look too eager. 

“It’s very strong,” he said. “Very strong, for such a young woman. This character, this Ada—I love her. I love the way she talks.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I rewrote it, the whole thing.”

He nodded, as if he could tell. Ada was based on Nana. Catherine had taken the true story and twisted it beyond recognition, knowing, too, that the stories Nana told weren’t entirely true either. The first chapter began with a young Ada leaving Ireland, traveling across the Atlantic by freight with her pregnant mother.

“You do still have some tells of a young writer, however,” said Andros.

He looked outside, gathering his thoughts. The sky was low and gray; there was a storm coming. It was supposed to start in the morning, but there was still no snow.

“You explain what doesn’t need explaining,” he said, his eyes back on her. “You don’t trust your reader, not completely. Your reader is every bit as smart as you are. You must treat him like it.”

This was something she’d heard before. She thought she’d done that, she did trust her reader—especially when Anton Andros was her reader. His book may not have been her favorite, but still, he had all the respect she had to give.

“Yes,” she said, reaching for her notebook in her bag, fishing for a pen. Usually she just wrote emails to herself, but she sensed he wouldn’t like it if she took out her phone as he was talking. Carrying a small notebook around made her feel like a writer and also like Harriet the Spy.

“There are some beautiful sentences in there,” he went on. “Smart sentences. But they were too beautiful; too smart. Do you understand what I mean? A sentence like that, you can tell the writer is proud of it. You can see him sitting back and saying, look at that! There’s ego in it, is what I mean. It points to the writer, away from the story. It’s an interruption—a lovely interruption, sure—but an interruption nonetheless. Didion will help you with that. Listen to her.”

He spoke as though he’d said this before, many times. Surely he had. He used to teach at NYU, a long time ago, and it was easy to imagine him saying all this to a group of adoring undergraduates. Lawrence had been his student. Andros seemed like the type who would have slept with a female student every so often, but only the really exceptional ones, and only in the time when that was still practically expected, even if not exactly respectable. 

“I think I know what you’re referring to,” she said, wishing she had the pages in front of her. She’d found a pen, but she was afraid to write and break his gaze. “The passage when they’re boarding the boat, when Ada’s mother—”

“Write something new for me,” he said, lifting his hand to stop her. “Put this story in a drawer somewhere. This story very well might have a future, but you have to grow a bit more first. It’s been workshopped to death, I imagine?” She confirmed with a nod that it had. “I want to see what else you can do.”

His eyes, with a moment of sunlight coming in through the window, became a glacial blue. They were staring into hers.

It isn’t a story, she wanted to say. It’s a chapter.

“I know how to make it better,” she said. “I was just thinking this morning about—”

“Do you have a drawer?”

He was smiling, so she smiled, too. 

“Yes, I have a drawer.”

“Put it in that drawer.”

“Okay.” 

“Something new.”

“Okay,” she said. “Something new.”

She wrote down trust, drawer, new.

“Let me tell you why,” he said, leaning in, his elbows on the table. “I am not interested in that story, what you can do with it, how much better you can make it. I’m interested in you. You as an instrument.”

It was hard to look at him as he said this. Suddenly, she remembered who was talking to her: Andros. It’d been a long time since she took a breath.

“Thank you,” she said, unsure if it was the right thing to say.

“Some people have a light,” he said. “I can see it right away; it’s right there, right in their eyes. You have that. Your light isn’t hard to see, though, so I can’t give myself too much credit for spotting it. It’s your talent, your intelligence—and something inexplicable, undefinable. Lawrence saw it, too, you know. He told me you blew him away. Simply blew him away.”

She said thank you again, though she’d said thank you already too many times. She knew what light he was talking about; she knew she had it; she always had. She wouldn’t even attempt to write otherwise. But Lawrence had never said anything like that to her—and he always had plenty of critiques to offer her in workshop. Though when he said she was something special at the party, maybe that was a deeper compliment than she understood at the time. She chose now to believe it.

“It’s just the truth,” Andros said.

The cafe had filled up since she’d arrived, and the music was too loud—that’s what was wrong—someone must have turned it up all of a sudden, something indie she almost recognized. Still, no snow was falling.

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” she said, though that was precisely what she wanted: all his time, all his attention. She could hardly feel her body. Just being this close to him, her brain was becoming smarter, stronger, sharper.

“My time is yours,” he said.

“There must be a lot of writers who send you their work,” she said.

“There really aren’t.”

She smiled, unsure if she should believe him.

“Besides,” he said. “I have a lot more time on my hands than you might think. What does a writer do who can’t write?”

“Read?”

He laughed.

“I have a syllabus for you,” he said. “Books that will show you how it’s done. Write this down.”

Catherine had heard of some of the writers on the list, but not all. For those she recognized, the book titles were not their best-known works, and this gave a sense of the great depth of all she didn’t know. She was going to get more of an education from Andros in one hour than two years of her program, and it was making her giddy. On the way back from the cafe she went to the used bookstore nearby, just a little out of the way, and browsed the aisles for a long time, collecting all that she could find on the list. 

That night, her roommate, a soft-spoken social worker, was making something elaborate and smoky in the kitchen, so Catherine closed herself up in her room and read Didion in her bed. Maggie texted a group chain about drinks somewhere but Catherine ignored it. Didion’s writing cut right into her; she’d never read anything quite like it. Catherine was right there with her in California, 1960’s, seeing everything, missing nothing. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume. . . Catherine eagerly turned the pages, then turned them back, to make sure she got every word.

How had she not read Didion before? How had no teacher ever put this book in her hands and said, you must read this immediately, nothing else before this, instead of burying it in a crowded syllabus? It was satisfying to think Andros had given it to her because he saw some likeness between them—could Catherine really be half as brilliant as this? Yes, she thought, she was. She could be.

But even as she loved the writing, she felt uneasy; she was missing Andros’s point in giving it to her. Catherine didn’t have any interest in writing essays, and some of Didon’s sentences seemed smart in the way Andros told her not to be, like I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. Catherine didn’t know exactly what kind of writer she wanted to be, besides a successful one. It definitely wasn’t Stein, but it wasn’t quite Didion, either. 

Catherine put Didion down and read a little bit of The Hunger Games instead—she’d taken it home with her, just to borrow—then she gave up on that, too, in favor of her phone. She was soon searching for Iris Andros and found a private Instagram account with the profile photo of a beach and a few results from indoor track from many years ago. She was about ten years older than Catherine, then, probably, judging by the year of the results, which would still make Andros an old father. Second marriage, perhaps, or third. Iris had run for Horace Mann and hadn’t been very fast, which gave Catherine some pleasure, though she wasn’t much of an athlete either.

Andros still hadn’t mentioned another daughter since Lawrence’s party. Maybe the other daughter was a source of shame—an addict, a criminal—or, perhaps worst of all, a painfully ordinary girl of average intelligence and mild ambition. Catherine felt embarrassed for her, though she felt sympathetic towards her, too. It wouldn’t be easy to have Andros as a father, Iris as a sister.

Andros must talk to Iris on the phone, pressing his ear to the receiver, wanting to know how she is, how she fills her days.

I love you, baby, he’d say to her. I miss you so terribly.

I miss you too, Daddy.

When can you come visit your old man?

I don’t know, Daddy. I’m really busy. I’ll try to come home soon.

You know I’m so proud of you, baby.

I know, Daddy.

On the train to nanny the next day, a new story idea came to her, a story of young love. It seemed like the kind of story Andros might have a soft spot for—a little nostalgic, a little sexy. The thought occurred to her to make it two girls, maybe lightly based on her and her college girlfriend only with more passion between them—but she didn’t know what he’d say to that. Maybe she’d make it a queer relationship after he read it. When it was finished, she mailed it to him. A few days later, he emailed her to meet her at the same cafe. He was early again, sitting in the same seat. This time he’d ordered her an almond croissant.

“You’re trusting the reader,” he said. “I can see that. That’s good, very good. But there’s something missing. Can you tell me what it is?”

She’d just taken a big bite of the croissant, which was perfect. Flakes fell on her lips as she shook her head.

“I can’t find you anywhere,” he said. “I’m looking for you, and I can’t find you. Ned and Sara are adorable, I’m rooting for them, but you—what you care about—it’s not in this story.”

Ned and Sara weren’t adorable; that’s not what she’d intended. The character of Sara had become, kind of and kind of not, her older sister Rose, much more than her college girlfriend. Ned was based on Rose’s ex-boyfriend, a musician who had left Rose heartbroken and short-tempered for weeks. It was a strange surprise how Catherine found herself identifying more with Ned, the artist, the one who wanted nothing to do with anything or anyone but his art, art that didn’t even exist yet.

She was writing herself, she wanted to say. She was Ned.

“Write closer,” said Andros.

She wrote another; he asked for more. She wrote another. They met every few weeks at the same cafe all throughout the winter. He was always there first and stayed after she left, always with the same gray scarf and a different treat waiting for her. He never handed her back any pages. She started to wonder if he had a stack of them at home, or if he used them for kindling. Secretly, shamefully, she harbored the hope he was sending them to his agent or editor, and one day she’d meet him and he’d say, Congratulations, Miss Meyer! You have yourself a book deal.

She bought a new lip tint, this one with a little shine, a navy cardigan and a fair isle sweater at a thrift store. She began to think of certain items as part of her Andros costume. 

One story was about her father, only he wasn’t her father; the father in the story was ill from some horrible but vague degenerative disease, not just living in Atlanta for work and still technically married to her mother in Fort Collins. The daughter in the story loved her strong, kind father, but she was hoping, secretly, that he would die faster, to get it all over with. Catherine found herself writing a scene in which the girl spoke directly to the father’s illness—and the illness spoke back—but it was too weird and didn’t work at all. Andros would think it was ridiculous. 

The story was Andros’s favorite so far. She only wrote stories now, not chapters. The Nana novel was dead, and it felt amazing to give up all her efforts at reviving it. It was dead and had never been alive to begin with.

“There you are,” he said of the father story. “I’m finally starting to see you.”

Before they parted that day, he said, “I’ve read some of your work to Mary Beth, you know. She wanted me to tell you she loves it.”

“Mary Beth?”

“My wife.”

Catherine tried to hide her surprise that Andros would share her work with anyone. He’d say to his wife, Want to hear something from this young woman? She blew me away; simply blew me away. She’s something special. She has this light.

“Does she write?” Catherine asked.

“No,” he said. “She could, if she wanted, I’m sure of that. But no. Mary Beth was a singer, for a time. Her voice was—oh, it was like nothing you’ve ever heard.”

Catherine nodded, unsure what to say. He spoke of his wife like she was dead.

“She said, this is right up Bill’s alley, don’t you think? I told her I agree.”

Catherine tried not to look too delighted, and she had no idea who Bill was, but Andros’s eyes were shining; he knew this would make her happy. Bill sounded like someone big enough to need no last name.

Andros wasn’t offering anything, she knew that, but still, Bill had been mentioned, and Andros was smiling.

Before she left, Andros told her he’d be traveling for the next couple weeks.

“I’ll be in LA,” he said. “Visiting Iris. Would you mail me a story anyway? Mary Beth will be there. I’m sure she’d love to have some reading while I’m gone. I’ll get to it as soon as I get back.”

Catherine enjoyed the assignment, writing a story for his wife, this singer she’d never met. It opened up a new part of her mind, this strange audience. She thought Mary Beth might like a mother story, so she wrote about watching her mother apply makeup in the bathroom with red wallpaper that matched her red lipstick before she went out with a friend—male suitors, Catherine long suspected—and how the girl in the story waited up with her grandmother, playing Scrabble, never winning. When she read it over, she knew it was good.

Bill was Andros’s agent, it wasn’t hard to find. Bill McAndrew. He represented a few famous authors, and many she’d never heard of, but they all seemed to have plenty of big books. She was right up his alley. 

Spring came in a rush after that. In the afternoons, Catherine took the girls outside to the park across the street and they became sweaty in their long pants and jackets. The day she finished the story about her mother, she walked to Andros’s apartment to drop off the pages in his mailbox herself. It was a good day for a long walk, she had the whole day off, and she feared the mail would lose the pages, the best pages, the pages for his wife—maybe even for Bill. 

When she approached the building, she checked the address against the directions on her phone to make sure it was the correct one: a modest but dignified building on W 75th and Columbus. There was his name, Andros, on the door. She wasn’t going to buzz; Catherine wasn’t ready to actually meet Mary Beth yet, not with how she was looking today, scrubby and normal, wearing not even one Andros costume item.

The front door was locked, of course it was, but she tried it anyway. There was a stand inside for a doorman but nobody was there. It didn’t feel right to drop the folder in the mail slot and leave it there on the floor.

For a minute she stood there, unsure what to do.

Then, the door opened, and a young woman about Catherine’s age came out. Their eyes met; there was something familiar about her, but what? She wore a blue bandana on her head, an oversized argyle sweater, and dirty sneakers. A tote bag was slung over her shoulder. She was a little older than Catherine, actually, it was clear with a closer look, just dressed like a college student.

“You’re looking for Anton Andros?” she asked. His name was right there on the folder.

“You know him?”

The girl smiled like she’d just heard a bad joke, but Catherine didn’t get it.

“You can’t leave the mail out here,” said the girl. “Give it to me. I’ll bring it in.”

The girl opened the door with a fob, allowing Catherine to follow her inside. She shifted her giant tote from one arm to the other; it seemed full of clothes. The doorman, an older white man with a navy suit and very pale skin, emerged then from around the corner. He smiled at the young woman in apology.

“Richard, hon, can you take care of this?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss,” he said, sliding it under the counter. He looked at Catherine, without suspicion, but he was looking at her. “Of course, Miss.”

Catherine followed the woman outside and waited until they were on the steps to thank her.

“It’s nothing,” she said, and descended the stairs, on her way out, done with Catherine.

“You’re his daughter,” Catherine called after her. It suddenly became clear. “I’m Catherine Meyer.”

She paused and turned back to eye Catherine. “Jules.”

Jules didn’t look like she’d ever heard the name Catherine Meyer before.

“You’re visiting?” Catherine asked.

“No, not visiting.”

The girl didn’t want to talk to her, but she wasn’t leaving yet, either. The resemblance to her father was striking, now that Catherine knew to look for it: the wide face, light blue eyes, though her coloring was paler. She wore no makeup; her dirty shoes were old Chuck Taylors. 

“I didn’t know he had a new one,” said Jules flatly.

Catherine stood straight, not quite understanding; then she did understand.

“There’s nothing like that,” Catherine said, hating the insinuation. It revolted her, and it was an insult to her and Andros both. He never touched her, not even a hand on her shoulder; she reminded herself of that. He didn’t even give her that look. “Between your father and me—nothing like that at all.”

“He reads your work,” said Jules. “Is that it? He gives you advice, he introduces you to the people he knows?”

He hadn’t introduced her to anyone. The closest he’d ever done was mentioning Bill’s name one time, and that was nothing. Less than nothing.

“I know I don’t know you at all,” said Jules. “I don’t know one thing about you. But I know my father. When he has attention like this—it’s like a drug for him. He’s always looking for a fix.”

Jules stared at her, waiting for Catherine to speak, to offer a defense, but she had none.

“He’s reading my work,” Catherine said instead. “We have coffee, that’s all.”

Jules nodded, not disbelieving her, but she was done talking. She was on her way somewhere, and she’d already been delayed enough.

“I’m sure you’re very talented,” Jules said, as she began to walk away. “You always are.”

For days afterward, Catherine couldn’t stop thinking about Jules. Every time she tried to remember the woman’s face, what she said, how she said it—the image evaded her. Then, when she was finally thinking of something else, it would come to her, clear as anything, the whole interaction—when she tried to pause it, rewind, slow down, Jules’s face again turned to mist. 

Jules didn’t exist online, not at all. Catherine searched and searched, digging deeper, from all angles she could think of—Julia, Julianna, Julie, Juliette. Nothing. 

Catherine didn’t know if she should be grateful for Jules, or resent her, or discredit her—or if she should have any feelings about it whatsoever. Andros might have a good reason for keeping her secret—not secret, really, but quiet, or maybe just not worth his time and attention—though Catherine couldn’t imagine what a good reason might be. 

Had Jules really told her something Catherine didn’t know already? Andros had read the work of other young writers before. Of course he had. Of course she was special and also not special. None of this was news, yet it felt like a revelation, and it made her stomach sour.

She wondered if any of this would have happened if she hadn’t worn that stupid cocktail dress at Lawrence’s party.

A few days later, Andros emailed to say he was back in town and he’d love to talk about her story, if she was free. They chose a date and time. The messages were short, as they always were, and she sounded normal, and so did he.

So Jules hadn’t told him they’d met, she thought, though perhaps she had. Maybe he would’ve emailed her anyway, as usual, and it didn’t change anything at all.

Andros had never lied to her. 

Catherine dressed to see him, this time wearing a cropped shirt and old jeans; the day was barely warm enough. As she walked, she thought of what she might say to him about Jules—nothing, she wouldn’t say anything to him—she’d listen to his thoughts on her story, perhaps Mary Beth had passed some along as well, if she’d even read it. Catherine would take whatever she could from him; this was a transaction, after all, it always had been.

She walked. The day was overcast with a mild wind, the sidewalks eerily quiet, and as she walked she began to head in a different direction.

An idea occurred to her. Andros wouldn’t be home now. He’d be going to meet her at the coffee shop; he was always early. He would’ve left by now.

Catherine walked to his apartment. She stood outside for just a moment, afraid to lose her nerve. She wanted to see Jules.

She buzzed Andros’s number but nobody answered. This time the doorman was at his stand. She knocked and smiled at him. He gave her an inquisitive, not quite suspicious look, and opened the door slightly.

“Richard, is it?” Catherine asked. His face searched her, perhaps he did vaguely remember her. “I’m here to see Jules Andros, I was with her the other day. Is she in?”

“Who should I say is calling, Miss?”

“Catherine. Meyer.”

He took a few steps inside as Catherine moved out of the doorway. He lifted a phone, pressed three buttons and held it to his ear. It seemed to take a very long time. “Catherine Meyer is here to see you,” he said. Catherine could hear another voice on the line, just barely, not enough to make out any words, but it did sound like a woman’s voice.

“Yes, Miss,” he said. “Of course.” He hung up and looked at Catherine. “Miss Andros says you’re welcome to come up. 303F. Elevators are right this way.”

“Thank you.”

Catherine felt nervous, as nervous as she could ever remember. She felt like she was doing something illegal, though of course she wasn’t. There were no laws for things like this.

The building’s interior became a little shabbier in the elevator and down the hall—thin crimson carpets, fluorescent lights, a slight smell of cigarette smoke. She found 303F and stood in front of it, feeling absurd. Jules opened the door before Catherine could knock. She looked as if she just woken up from a nap; her eyes were tired, her hair unkept, her fingers stained blue and black from some kind of ink. She wore black leggings and an oversized tan t-shirt, no bra. Her breasts were large and a little uneven.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” said Jules. 

“I didn’t either.” 

“My father isn’t here. But I think you already know that.”

“He’s probably at the cafe right now. Waiting for me.”

Jules leaned against the doorframe, studying Catherine with a new interest. She had the same gaze as her father, intense and penetrating and a little amused. It was hard to stop looking at her.

“If you’re here to tell me that you never slept with my father, don’t worry about it,” said Jules. “I know you didn’t. And I don’t even care if you did. It’s not my business.”

“I’m not—no,” said Catherine, though she was relieved to hear this. “I just wanted to see you, if that’s okay. Just for a minute.”

Jules smiled a little, changing her whole face, as if she’d won a bet with herself. She had an unexpectedly lovely smile. She moved away from the door.

“Come in.”

Catherine followed her inside, and Jules shut the door slowly, taking care to lock it without making much sound. Behind Jules was a small kitchen; the counter was clear but the sink full of dishes, and a sprawling pothos was on the windowsill. It smelled like burnt eggs. The place was silent in a way that made her certain they were alone. 

“Why do you want to see me?” Jules asked her.

Catherine didn’t have a good answer, she knew that. She hadn’t been honest with herself. She knew was never going to meet Andros today. 

“Why did you let me up?” Catherine asked in return.

Jules shook her head with a smirk, as if still deciding whether or not she wanted Catherine here.

“We can sit in my room,” said Jules.

Jules led her down the small hallway, past a modest living room overrun with books, then two closed doors, one of which was surely Andros’s office, where he read her work. The bathroom door was open, showing a mess; the shelf next to the sink was full of products without lids and a purple towel lay on the floor.

Jules’s room was painted dark green, and it had one large window and several small lamps, Christmas lights and tapestries that gave it a collegiate feel. There were a few piles of books here, too—mostly graphic novels, by the looks of them, and art books. Catherine noted the bright colors of the spines, the funny fonts of the titles. One on the desk looked like a novel about a robot, maybe even Young Adult. Catherine had never even thought to write something like that. It had truly never entered her mind.

The walls were nearly completely covered with unframed art: drawings, sketches, paintings, all tacked up. The wall must be wrecked with holes. Catherine’s mother would have a fit if she did that.

“You made these?” Catherine asked, standing in front of a portrait. It was charcoal, of an old woman. She had dark bags under her eyes and folds in her skin, a sour expression, her features seemed intentionally exaggerated.

“From a long time ago, mostly,” said Jules, sitting crosslegged on her unmade bed. 

“You’re so talented.”

“Who isn’t?” Jules asked, with a shrug. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Suddenly, Catherine felt the exact same way. All her talent, whatever amount she possessed, hadn’t gotten her anywhere but here in this room, with a dead novel and mediocre stories written for an old man and some wife. 

Catherine looked over the other portraits on the wall, some smaller than her hand. The ones with color were bright, green skin with blue lips, long chins and crooked noses. Catherine wondered if any of these portraits were of her sister Iris, but she didn’t want to ask.

“I did give him your story, if you were wondering,” said Jules. “I didn’t destroy it or anything.”

Catherine hadn’t even thought about Jules not delivering it like she said she would.

“Did your mother read it?” Catherine asked. “He told me it was for her.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think she did.”

“Oh,” said Catherine, feeling ridiculous in her disappointment. 

“I read it, though,” said Jules. “He just leaves them on the table. I can’t help myself.”

Her stomach dropped. Catherine swallowed.

“Have you read all of mine?” she asked.

Jules smiled. “I read whatever he leaves around. His other students’ stuff, I’ve read some, but they bore me, I don’t usually get past the first page. Yours didn’t bore me.”

Catherine took it in, imagining her pages here, in this apartment as it was, with the purple towel on the floor and the burnt egg smell. She imagined Jules reading the first page while standing in the kitchen, a slice of cheese in her hand, maybe, turning the page, then bringing it into this room, taking it into her bed. Catherine hadn’t written the stories for someone like Jules. She wanted to ask more about what she thought of them, what she thought was missing—Jules might be the person who could finally tell her—but she didn’t want to think about her writing now. 

She would write again, she knew that. Andros didn’t get to have the power to make her stop. Nobody did. But she might need to not think about her writing for a long time.

Catherine felt strange still standing. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“What do you do? Are you in school?” Catherine wanted to know everything Jules would tell her.

“I got laid off last year,” said Jules, though she didn’t say from where. They sat in silence for a moment, and Catherine tried to sense what kind of silence it was. Jules was still looking at her. Catherine didn’t want to leave her bed.

 “Nobody’s ever drawn a portrait of me before,” said Catherine.

“Are you asking for one?”

Catherine realized that she was. It had never once occurred to her that no portrait of her existed anywhere in the world, and it suddenly seemed like a very sad thing. She discovered she wanted one desperately.

“You have a good face,” said Jules. “I haven’t tried a face like yours. With how your eyes are like that, down at the edges.”

She said it so matter of factly, not a compliment or an insult. Catherine wasn’t sure whether or not she should say thank you, but she liked knowing Jules thought her face was good. Catherine never thought too much about her face; she wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t ugly, it didn’t serve her or hurt her. Catherine closed her eyes. Jules moved closer and touched her hair, angled her chin down. It was more the touch of a mother than a lover, a correcting touch.

Jules reached for a black pencil, a piece of paper and secured it to a clip board. She leaned against the bed and held it in her lap, a posture she’d clearly assumed many times before. Catherine wasn’t sure what to do with herself, with her hands or her gaze.

“Can you look toward the window a little?” Jules asked. Catherine obeyed.

“Now look back at me,” said Jules. Catherine turned but kept her eyes downcast.

Pencil touched the paper; the sound sent a shiver through Catherine.

“He might be home soon,” said Jules.

Catherine nodded once. She had no idea what she would say to him and what he would say to her, but she did want to see the look on his face when he saw her here. She wanted to see the revision of who he thought she was play out over his eyes. He hadn’t seen her at all, of course he hadn’t: she’d shown him someone else. She wanted to watch him realize that.

But that wasn’t why she was here; she wasn’t here to spite him. She didn’t care about him right now. He didn’t exist. 

“This might not look the way you want it to look,” said Jules.

“I don’t know how I want it to look.”

“Shh,” said Jules. “I’m going to do your mouth first.”

Catherine stayed very, very still, and listened to the pencil on the paper. 

The post This Famous Writer Is Ruining Her Writing appeared first on Electric Literature.

At first it had been Uncle Vernon’s ambition, not Stella’s. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. ‘I’ll not chase moonbeams,’ she told him.

Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out ‘How now brown cow’ behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.

She came home and shut herself in her bedroom off the scullery and spouted speeches. She sat at the tea table and dropped her cup to the saucer, spotting the good cloth with tannic acid, wailing that it might be a poison that the Friar Lawrence had administered. When Uncle Vernon shouted at her she said she wasn’t old enough to control either her reflexes or her emotions. She had always had a precise notion of what could be expected of her.

Lily had imagined that the girl was merely learning to speak properly and was dismayed to hear it was called Dramatic Art. She fretted lest Stella build up hopes only to have them dashed.

Then Stella failed her mock school certificate and her teachers decided it wasn’t worth while entering her for the real thing. Uncle Vernon went off to the school prepared to bluster, and returned convinced. They’d agreed she had the brains but not the application.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ he told Lily. ‘We both know it’s useless reasoning with her.’

He made enquiries and pulled strings. After the letter came Stella spent four extra Saturday mornings at Crane Hall being coached by Mrs Ackerley in the telephone scene from A Bill of Divorcement. Mrs Ackerley, dubious about her accent, had thought a Lancashire drama more suitable, preferably a comedy; the girl was something of a clown.

Stella would have none of it. She was a mimic, she said, and sure enough she took off Mrs Ackerley’s own smoky tone of voice to perfection. Admittedly she was a little young for the part, but, as she shrewdly observed, this would only stress her versatility. The audition was fixed for the third Monday in September.

Ten days before, over breakfast, she told Uncle Vernon she was having second thoughts.

‘Get away with you,’ he said. ‘It’s too late to change things now.’ He wrote out a shopping list and gave her a ten-shilling note. Half an hour later when he came up into the dark hall, jingling the loose coppers in his pocket, he found her huddled on the stairs, one plump knee wedged between the banister rails. He was annoyed because she knew she wasn’t supposed to hang about this part of the house, not unless she was in her good school uniform. She was staring at the damp patch that splodged the leaf-patterned wallpaper above the telephone.

He switched on the light and demanded to know what she was playing at. At this rate there’d be nothing left on Paddy’s vegetable barrow but a bunch of mouldy carrots. Did she think this was any way to conduct a business?

She was in one of her moods and pretended to be lost in thought. He could have hit her. There was nothing of her mother in her face, save perhaps for the freckles on her cheekbones.

‘Carry on like this,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘and you’ll end up behind the counter at Woolworth’s.’ It was foolish of him to goad her. It was not beyond her to run towards such employment in order to spite him.

‘You push me too hard,’ she said. ‘You want reflected glory.’

He raised his arm then, but when she pushed past him with swimming eyes his world was drowned in tears.

He telephoned Harcourt and sought reassurance, in a roundabout way. ‘Three bottles of disinfectant,’ he said, reading from the list in front of him. ‘Four pounds of carbolic soap . . . one dozen candles . . . two dozen toilet rolls . . . George Lipman’s put in a word with his sister. On Stella’s behalf.’

‘’Fraid I can only manage a dozen,’ Harcourt said. ‘And they’re shop-soiled.’

‘Am I doing the right thing, I ask myself?’

‘I don’t see what else is open to her,’ said Harcourt. ‘Not if the school won’t have her back.’

‘Not won’t,’ corrected Vernon. ‘It’s more that they don’t feel she’ll gain any benefit from staying on. And you know Stella. Once her mind’s made up . . .’

‘Indeed I do,’ said Harcourt. Although he had never met the girl he often remarked to his wife that he could take an exam on the subject, if pushed. His extensive knowledge of Stella was based on the regular progress reports provided by Vernon when making his monthly order for bathroom and wash-house supplies.

‘She caused an uproar the other week,’ confided Vernon, ‘over the hoteliers’ dinner dance: Lily got her hands on some parachute silk and took her to that dressmaker in Duke Street to be fitted for a frock. Come the night, with the damn thing hanging up on the back door to get rid of the creases, she refused to wear it. She was adamant. In the end none of us went. I expect you all wondered where we were.’

‘We did,’ lied Harcourt.

‘She took exception to the sleeves. According to her they were too puffy. She said she wasn’t going out looking as if her arms belonged to an all-in wrestler. I never saw her in it, but Lily said she was a picture. She’s burgeoning, you know.’

‘Is she?’ Harcourt said, and thought briefly of his own daughter who, in comparison with Stella, often seemed an imitation of the real thing. He had no idea whether his daughter was burgeoning or not; night and day she walked with rounded shoulders, clutching a handbag to her chest. ‘And how’s the cough?’ he asked. He listened to the faint scratching of Vernon’s moustache as it brushed against the mouthpiece.

‘No problem at all,’ Vernon said. ‘Absolutely none. Kind of you to ask. I’m much obliged to you,’ and he ordered a new bucket and a tin of bath scourer before replacing the receiver.

He told Lily that Harcourt believed they were doing the best thing. She was chopping up a rabbit in the scullery. ‘Harcourt thinks she was born for it,’ he said.

Lily was unconvinced. ‘People like us don’t go to plays,’ she said. ‘Let alone act in them.’

‘But she’s not one of us, is she?’ he retorted, and what answer was there to that?

They came down the steps as though walking a tightrope, Stella pointing her toes in borrowed shoes, Uncle Vernon leaning backwards, purple waistcoat bulging above the waistband of his trousers, one hand under her elbow, the other holding aloft a black umbrella against the rain.

It was a terrible waistcoat, made out of pieces of untrimmed felt that Lily had bought at a salvage sale with the purpose of jollying up the cushions in the residents’ lounge. She had meant to sew triangles, squares and stars onto the covers, only she hadn’t got round to it.

‘Leave me alone,’ the girl said, shaking herself free. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

‘So,’ Uncle Vernon said, ‘what’s new?’ But his tone was good-humoured.

The three o’clock aeroplane, the one that climbed from Speke and circled the city on five-minute trips, had just bumped overhead. Alarmed at its passage the pigeons still swam above the cobblestones; all, that is, save the one-legged bird who hopped in the gutter, beak pecking at the rear mudguard of the taxi. It was such a dark day that the neon sign above the lintel of the door had been flashing on and off since breakfast; the puddles winked crimson. Later, after he had visited the house, Meredith said that only brothels went in for red lights.

Spat upon by the rain, Stella covered her head with her hands; she knew she was watched from an upstairs window. Earlier that morning Lily had sat her down at the kitchen table and subjected her to the curling tongs. The tongs, fading in mid-air from rust to dull blue, had snapped at the locks of her hair and furled them up tight against her skull. Then, released in fits and starts, the singed curls, sausage-shaped, flopped upon the tacked-on collar of her velvet frock.

‘In the grave,’ Stella had said, ‘my hair and nails will continue to grow.’

Lily had pulled a face, although later she intended to repeat the remark for the benefit of the commercial traveller with the skin grafts. He, more than most, even if it was a bit close to the bone, would appreciate the observation. To her way of thinking it was yet another indication of the girl’s cleverness, a further example, should one be needed, of her ferocious, if morbid, imagination.

Uncle Vernon paid off the cab right away. The arrangement had been struck the night before after a turbulent discussion in which Stella had declared she’d prefer to die rather than tip the driver. ‘I’ll go on the tram instead,’ she said.

‘It’ll rain,’ Uncle Vernon told her. ‘You’ll arrive messed up.’

She said she didn’t care. There was something inside her, she intimated, that would become irretrievably sullied if she got involved with the business of tipping.

‘You just give him sixpence,’ Uncle Vernon had argued. ‘Ninepence at the most. I can’t see your difficulty.’

To which Stella had retorted that she found the whole transaction degrading. In her opinion it damaged the giver quite as much as the receiver.

‘Well, don’t tip him, you fool,’ Uncle Vernon had countered. ‘Just chuck the exact amount through the window and make a run for it.’

Debating anything with the girl was a lost cause. She constantly played to the gallery. No one was denying she could have had a better start in life, but then she wasn’t unique in that respect and it was no excuse for wringing the last drop of drama out of the smallest incident. Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.

Mostly her behaviour smacked of manipulation, of opportunism. He’d known people like her in the army, people from working-class backgrounds, who’d read a few books and turned soft. If she had been a boy he’d have taken his belt to her, or at least the back of his hand.

All that costly nonsense of keeping the landing light burning into the small hours. Lily said it was because she remembered that business of the night lights—for God’s sake, the child had been nine months old. He put it down to that poetry she was so fond of, all those rhymes and rhythms, those couplets of melancholy and madness that inflamed her imagination. Nor was he altogether sure she was afraid of the dark. Why, during the blackout, when the whole city was drowned in black ink, she had often gone out into the back yard and stood for an hour at a time, keening under the alder bush. And what about the time he had come home on leave and she had somehow slipped out of the shelter and he and the air-raid warden had found her crouched against the railings of the cemetery, clapping her hands together as the sugar warehouses on the Dock Road burst like paper bags and the sparks snapped like fire crackers against the sky?

She had always been perverse, had always, in regard to little things—things which normal people took in their stride—exhibited a degree of opposition that was downright absurd. He hadn’t forgotten her histrionics following the removal of the half-basin on the landing. She had accused him of mutilating her past, of ripping out her memories. He’d had to bite on his tongue to stop himself from blurting out that in her case this was all to the good. There were worse things than the disappearance of basins. It had brought home to him how unreliable history was, in that the story, by definition, was always one-sided.

Nor would he forgive in a hurry the slap-stick scene resulting from the felling of the alder bush in the dismal back yard, when she had run from the basement door like a madwoman and flung herself between axe and bush. Ma Tang from next door, believing he was murdering the girl, had shied seed potatoes at him from the wash-house roof. Ma Tang’s father, who was put out to roost at dawn with his scant hair done up in a pigtail, had sent his grandson for the police.

The basin had been a liability. More than one lodger, returning late at night and caught short, had utilised it for a purpose not intended. As for the alder bush, a poor sick thing with blighted leaves, it was interfering with the drains. On both occasions, and there had been many others, Stella’s face had betrayed an emotion so inappropriate, assumed an expression of such false sensibility, that it was almost comic. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely assumed; there had been moments when he could have sworn she felt something.

For her part, Lily had tried to wheedle Stella into letting Uncle Vernon accompany her to the theatre. She implied it was no more than his due. If he hadn’t known Rose Lipman’s brother when they were boys growing up rough together in Everton, Stella wouldn’t have got a look-in. And it wasn’t as though he would be intrusive. He was a sensitive man; even that butcher in Hardman Street, who had palmed him off with the horsemeat, had recognised as much. He would just slope off up the road and wait for her, meekly, in Brown’s Café.

‘Meekly,’ Stella had repeated, and given one of her laughs. She’d threatened to lock herself in her room if he insisted on going with her. Her door didn’t boast such a thing as a lock, but her resolution was plain enough. She said she would rather pass up her chance altogether than go hand in hand towards it with Uncle Vernon. ‘I’m not play-acting,’ she assured him.

Stung, though she hadn’t allowed him her hand for donkey’s years, not since he had walked her backwards and forwards from the infant school on Mount Pleasant, he had rocked sideways in his wicker chair beside the kitchen range and proclaimed her selfish. A sufferer from the cold, even in summertime, he habitually parked himself so close to the fire that one leg of the chair was charred black. Lily said he had enough diamond patterns on his shins to go without socks. The moment would come, she warned him, when the chair would give up the ghost under his jiggling irritation and pitch him onto the coals.

‘Keep calm,’ she advised, ‘it’s her age.’

‘I’m forced to believe in heredity,’ he fumed. ‘She’s a carbon copy of bloody Renée.’ It wasn’t true; the girl didn’t resemble anyone they knew.

When he shoved Stella into the cab he hesitated before slamming the door. He was dressed in his good clothes and there was still time for her to undergo a change of heart. She stared straight ahead, looking righteous.

All the same, when the taxi, girdled by pigeons, swooshed from the kerb she couldn’t resist peeking out of the rear window to catch a last glimpse of him. He stood there under the mushroom of his gamp, exaggeratedly waving his hand to show he wished her well, and too late she blew him a grudging unseen kiss as the cab turned the corner and skidded across the tramlines into Catherine Street. She had got her own way but she didn’t feel right. There’s a price to pay for everything, she thought.

Uncle Vernon went back indoors and began to hammer a large cup hook into the scullery door. Hearing the racket, Lily came running, demanding to know what he was doing. He was still wearing his tank beret and his best trousers. ‘It’s to hang things from, woman,’ he said, viciously hammering the screw deeper into the wood, careless of the paint he was chipping off the door.

‘Like what?’ she said.

‘Like tea towels,’ he said. ‘What did you think? Would you prefer it if I hung myself?’

Lily told him he needed his head examining.

The journey into town took less than ten minutes; it was a quarter past three by the Oyster Bar clock when Stella arrived in Houghton Street. She jumped out of the taxi and was through the stage door in an instant. If she had given herself time to think, paused to thank the driver or comb her hair, she might have run off in the opposite direction and wasted her moment forever.

‘Stella Bradshaw,’ she told the door-keeper. ‘The producer expects me. My uncle knows Miss Lipman.’

It came out wrong. All she had meant to say was that she had an appointment with Meredith Potter. While she was speaking, a thin man wearing a duffel coat, followed by a stout man in mackintosh and galoshes, came round the bend of the stairs. They would have swept out of the door and left her high and dry if the doorman hadn’t called out, ‘Mr Potter, sir. A young lady to see you.’

‘Ah,’ cried Meredith, and he pivoted on his heel and stood there, the fist of his right hand pressed to his forehead. ‘We’re just off to tea,’ he said, and frowned, as though he’d been kept waiting for hours.

‘I’m exactly on time,’ Stella said. ‘My appointment was for 3:15.’ When she got to know him better she realised he’d been hoping to avoid her.

‘You’d better come through,’ Meredith said, and walked away down the passage into a gloomy room that seemed to be a furniture depository.

The man in the galoshes was introduced as Bunny. He was the stage manager. Stella wasn’t sure whether he was important or not; his mackintosh was filthy. He gave her a brief, sweet smile and after shaking her hand wiped his own on a khaki handkerchief.

In spite of the numerous chairs and the horsehair sofa set at right angles to the nursery fire-guard, there was nowhere to sit. The chairs climbed one upon the other, tipping the ceiling. A man’s bicycle, its spokes warped and splashed with silver paint, lay upturned across the sofa. There was a curious smell in the room, a mixture of distemper, rabbit glue and damp clothing. Stella lounged against a cocktail cabinet whose glass frontage was engraved with the outline of a naked woman. I’m not going to be cowed, she thought. Not by nipples.

The stage manager perched himself on the brass rail of the fire-guard and stared transfixed at his galoshes. Meredith lit a cigarette and, flicking the spent match into a dark corner, closed his eyes. It was plain to Stella that neither man liked the look of her.

‘Miss Lipman told me to come,’ she said. ‘I’ve not had any real experience, but I’ve got a gold medal awarded by the London Academy of Dramatic Art. And I’ve been on the wireless in Children’s Hour. I used to travel by train to Manchester and when the American airmen got on at Burtonwood they unscrewed the lightbulbs in the carriages. Consequently I can do Deep South American and Chicago voices. There’s a difference, you know. And my Irish accent is quite good. If I had a coconut I could imitate the sound of a runaway horse.’

‘Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have one about me,’ said Meredith, and dropped ash onto the floor. Above his head, skew-whiff on a nail, hung the head of some animal with horns.

‘Actually,’ she amended, ‘I’ve only got the certificate in gold lettering. They stopped making the medals on account of the war.’

‘That damned war,’ murmured Bunny.

‘My teacher wanted me to do something from Hobson’s Choice or Love on the Dole, but I’ve prepared the telephone bit from A Bill of Divorcement instead.’

‘It’s not a play that leaps instantly to the mind,’ Meredith said.

‘Hallo . . . hallo,’ began Stella. She picked up a china vase from the shelf of the cocktail cabinet and held it to her ear.

‘Everyone is always out when you most need them,’ observed Bunny.

‘Kindly tell his Lordship I wish to speak to him immediately,’ Stella said. A dead moth fell out of the vase and stuck like a brooch to her collar. Meredith was undoing the toggles of his coat to reveal a bow tie and a pink ribbon from which dangled a monocle. Save for Mr Levy, who kept the philatelist shop in Hackins Hay, Stella had never known anyone who wore an eye-piece.

‘Tell his Lordship . . .’ she repeated, and faltered, for now Meredith had taken his watch from his vest pocket and was showing it to Bunny. ‘It’s tea-time,’ he remarked. ‘You’d better come along,’ and gripping Stella by the elbow he marched her back up the passage and thrust her out into the rain.

It was embarrassing walking the streets three-abreast. The pavements were narrow and choked with people and Meredith often slid away, dodging in an elaborate figure of eight in and out of the crowd. Stella wasn’t used to courtesy and she misunderstood his attempts to shield her from the kerb; she thought he was trying to lose her. Presently she fell behind, stumping doggedly along: up, down, one foot in the gutter. Meredith, the hood of his duffel coat pulled high, pranced like a monk ahead of her. She listened as he conducted an intense and private conversation, sometimes bellowing as he strained to be heard above the noise of the traffic. Someone or something had upset Bunny. He seemed to be in pain, or else despair.

‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’

‘It always comes as a shock,’ agreed Meredith.

‘It hurts. My God, it hurts.’

‘If you remember, I had a similar experience in Windsor.’

‘My God, how it hurts.’

‘You poor fellow,’ shouted Meredith, as a woman trundling a pram, laden with firewood, prised them apart.

On the bomb site beside Reeces Restaurant a man in a sack lay wriggling in the dirt. His accomplice, dressed only in a singlet and a pair of ragged trousers, was binding the sack with chains. When he stood upright the blue tail of a tattooed dragon jumped on his biceps.

‘I shall die under it,’ said Bunny.

They had tea on the second floor of Fuller’s Café. Mounting the stairs, Stella had started to cough, had discreetly wiped her lips on Lily’s handkerchief and studied it, just in case it came away spotted with blood. She had known Meredith was watching. She could tell he was concerned by the urgent manner in which he propelled her through the door.

When Bunny removed his mackintosh the belt swung out and tipped over the milk jug on the table nearest to the hat stand. The pink cloth was so boldly starched the milk wobbled in a tight globule beside the sugar bowl. Bunny didn’t notice. The occupants of the table, three elderly ladies hung with damp fox furs, apologised.

Stella said she needed to keep her coat on.

‘You’re drenched,’ protested Meredith.

‘It’s not important,’ she said. Dressing that morning neither she nor Lily had bargained on her frock being seen. It was her best frock, her party frock, but the velvet attracted the dust. Time enough to buy new clothes, Lily had said, when and if she got the job.

As Meredith advanced between the tables a little shiver of excitement disturbed the room. The women, the afternoon shoppers, recognised him. There was a hitching of veils, a snapping of handbags as they slipped out powder compacts and began to titivate; pretending not to notice, they were all eyes. The manageress made a point of coming over to explain there had been a run on confectioneries. She boasted she was in control of two Eccles cakes. Mr Potter had only to say the word and they were his. ‘How very kind,’ he murmured.

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Stella, and stared into the distance as though she glimpsed things not visible to other people. Almost immediately she adjusted her lips into a half smile; often when she thought she was looking soulful Uncle Vernon accused her of sullenness. She felt ill at ease and put it down to Meredith’s monocle. One eye monstrously enlarged, he was studying the wall beyond her left shoulder. She tried to say something, but her tongue wouldn’t move. It was disconcerting to be struck dumb. Ever since she could remember she had chatted to Lily’s lodgers. Most of them had spoken dully of their homes, of the twin beds with matching valances; the sort of vegetables that grew best on their allotments. They had flourished hazy snapshots of wives with plucked eyebrows, of small children in striped bathing costumes messing about in rock pools. A few, in drink, had overstepped the mark and attempted to kiss her; one had succeeded, in the hall when she was pulling the dead leaves off the aspidistra. Though she had made a face and afterwards scrubbed her mouth on the roller towel, she hadn’t minded. None of them had ignored her.

‘How can I shut my eyes to it?’ moaned Bunny. ‘Disloyalty is unforgivable.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Meredith. ‘There are worse things. Malice, for instance.’ The monocle jumped from the bone of his brow and bounced against his shirt front.

‘I know a man,’ Stella said, ‘who never closes his eyes. He can’t, not even when he’s asleep. His aeroplane crash-landed in Holland and his face caught fire. They peeled skin from his shoulders to fashion new eyelids, but they didn’t work.’ She opened her own eyes wide and stopped blinking.

‘How interesting,’ said Meredith.

‘When his sweetheart came to visit him she threw him over and omitted to return the ring. Afterwards she sent him a letter saying she knew she was a bad lot but she was afraid the eyelids would get passed on to the children. He says the worst thing is people thinking he looks fierce when most days he’s weeping inside.’

‘Oh hell,’ Bunny said. Scales of Eccles cake drifted from his shocked mouth.

Meredith appeared to be listening, but Stella could tell his mind was wandering. She had the curious feeling she reminded him of someone else, someone he couldn’t put a name to. Earlier she had thought him insipid: his complexion too fair, his expression too bland. He had taken so little notice of her that she suspected he was perceptive only about himself. Now, in the slight flaring of his nostrils, the disdainful slant of his head, she saw that he judged her naive. But for the discoloration of those tapering, nicotine-stained fingers drumming the tablecloth, she might have been afraid of him.

For a moment she considered giving way to another fit of coughing; instead she began to tell him about Lily and Uncle Vernon and the Aber House Hotel. She had nothing to lose. It was obvious he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to recite her set piece from A Bill of Divorcement.

She admitted it wasn’t exactly an hotel, more of a boarding-house really, in spite of the new bath Uncle Vernon had installed two years ago. The sign had flickered over the door when Lily bought the house, and as the hotel was already known by that name in the trade it would have been foolish to change it. Lily had painted the window-frames and door cream, but the travellers walked past, bemused at the alteration, and Uncle Vernon reverted to red. Lily thought it looked garish. Originally Lily and her sister Renée had intended to run the business together, only Renée soon put the kibosh on the intention by skedaddling off to London. She wasn’t a great loss to the enterprise. Nobody denied she had style, but who needed style in a back street in Liverpool? The travellers, faced with those pictures in the hall, those taffeta cushions squashed against the bed heads, began to drop away. Several regulars, including the soap man with one arm and the cork salesman with the glass eye, were seen lugging suitcases of samples into Ma Tang’s next door.

‘What sort of pictures?’ enquired Bunny.

‘Engravings,’ Stella said, ‘of damsels in distress with nothing on, tied to trees without any explanation. Besides, her voice got on their nerves. It was too ladylike. She came back once and it was a mistake. After that trouble with the night lights, when the neighbours reported her, her days were numbered.’

‘What did the neighbours report her for?’ asked Bunny. He wasn’t the only one intrigued by the conversation. The women at the next table were sitting bolt upright, heads cocked.

‘Things,’ Stella said. ‘Things I can’t divulge.’ She looked at Meredith and caught him yawning. ‘Later on, Uncle Vernon stepped into the breach. He’s the power behind the throne. He says I’ll do least harm if I’m allowed to go on the stage.’

Bunny professed to like the sound of Uncle Vernon. He said he was evidently a man of hidden depths and it was clear Stella took after him rather than her mother.

‘Oh, but you’re wrong,’ she protested. ‘It must be my mother, for Uncle Vernon’s nothing to me.’

Meredith was still yawning. There was a glint of gold metal in his back teeth as he took a ten-shilling note out of his wallet and waved it at the waitress.

Excusing herself, Stella went to the ladies’ room where she made a show of washing her hands. In the mirror she could see the reflection of the attendant, red curls trapped in a silvery snood, slumped dozing on an upright chair beside the toilet door. There was no more than five pence in the pink saucer on the vanity table. It was not enough to pay for a share in a pot of tea for three, not with a tip and two cakes, and how could she slide it into her pocket without being heard?

Which was better, Meredith taking her for a golddigger, or being arrested for theft? She supposed she could faint. Mrs Ackerley had taught her how to make her muscles go limp, and to act a wardrobe. Meredith was hardly likely to demand a contribution to the bill if she was laid out on the floor. But then she might fall awkwardly, exposing her suspender tops like a streetwalker. I’m my own worst enemy, she thought. Uncle Vernon had offered her money but she had turned up her nose.

She managed to slip three pennies up her sleeve, heart thumping, before she lost her nerve and trailed out into the café to find the two men, coats on, waiting for her by the exit.

In the street Meredith said they would meet again when the season started. Bunny would be in charge of her. ‘But you’ve not seen me act,’ she said, startled; already she had reconciled herself to a career at Woolworth’s. He raised his eyebrows and said he rather thought he had. He told her the theatre secretary would be in touch in due course. She blushed when he shook her hand.

‘I look forward to meeting you again,’ said Bunny gallantly. He kissed her cheek and offered to hail a taxi.

‘I’ve some shopping to do,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick one up later. Uncle Vernon never travels by cab because he finds tipping degrading. Isn’t that foolish? Thank you very much for the tea.’

It was no longer raining, and patches of cold sunlight punctured the clouds. She ran over the road as though she had just spotted someone important to her, and continued to race halfway up Bold Street before stopping to look back. A tram, impeded by a coal cart, blocked her view; yet when it had rattled on she imagined she spied Meredith, hood pulled over his head, striding along Hanover Place in the direction of the river. Deep down she knew it wasn’t him. For the rest of my life, she thought, I shall glimpse you in crowds.

She walked on up the hill towards St Luke’s where she fancied her grandfather had once played the organ. There were purple weeds blowing through the stonework of the smashed tower hanging in giddy steps beneath the sky. Uncle Vernon called it an eyesore; he couldn’t see why the corporation didn’t demolish the whole edifice and finish off what the Luftwaffe had begun. She’d argued that the church was a monument, that the shattered tower was a ladder climbing from the past to the future.

Now she realised the past didn’t count and that her future had nothing to do with broken masonry. Love, she told herself, would be her staircase to the stars and, moved as she was by the grand ring to the sentiment, tears squeezed into her eyes.

At the top of the hill, on the corner by the Commercial Hotel, she telephoned Mother, using the three pennies pinched from the saucer in Fuller’s Café. The sun was already beginning to set, bruising the sky above the Golden Dragon.

‘I don’t feel guilty,’ she confided. ‘There are some actions which are expedient, wouldn’t you agree? Besides, nobody saw me.’

Mother said the usual things.

The post Her Drama Is Tolerable When It’s Performed Onstage appeared first on Electric Literature.

I didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when I chose it, only that it was far. Only that it would take a great deal of work to get there, and more work to be found. When I say I closed my eyes and pointed to a map, I really mean that. I did. Red votive candle dripping over foil in the center of our dining room table, my girlfriend, Trace, sitting across from me, a full moon over north Brooklyn. Safety, we repeated, a Trace manifestation, and I hovered my hand as if feeling for heat—but when we opened our eyes to Elko, Nevada, it wasn’t exactly far enough, so I moved my finger further west to Whidbey.

One month later Trace flew me to Seattle. We bought the one-way ferry ticket online, drove to the Mukilteo terminal. Then, there was my boat pulling in. Huge and white with a green lid over the top deck windows, a monstrous face to it, the gaping garage. Cars thumped from the ramp onto the ferry as I stepped on board, and it was dark in there, between all that machinery. I rolled my suitcase between cars and cinched my shoulders for better posture, wondering if any of the passengers were wondering about me. Who’s that girl with the practical green suitcase? the faces would ask. What about her?

When I had thoughts this self-dramatizing, which was often, I imagined being hurled down a flight of stairs right after thinking them. Sometimes, knocked out by a mail truck, envelopes bursting onto a wet street. On the boat I followed passengers, and one of them—a gaunt freckled woman smeared white with sunscreen—held a door for me at the side of the garage. Thanks, I said, and trailed her and the others up the damp stairwell, like I knew where we were all going. Rather than carrying my suitcase by the handle, I let it clack-clack on each step, the sound echoing awfully. A few of the people looked back at me, just to see who, I guess. I had to commit to the choice now. I clacked all the way up.

The second door brought us to a passenger seating area, and for a moment I was back in Penn Station. For a moment, I’d never left. A white sign read Upper Deck, and windows dotted the whole perimeter, casting a greenish pale light; tables, bolted between pleather booths, collected glossy half-finished puzzles. The room wafted fried fish and cleaning products, and doors led out to a deck. Out there, the day drizzled sloppily over the parking lot and water. Late May, first breezes of summer, but still a cold that crept up shrewd. People walked past me out onto the deck, no umbrellas or anything; they just stood beneath the rain, jackets darkening. They smiled, white caps melting on the mountains behind them, phones clamped onto sticks.

I found a seat inside at the rear of the boat, and with an uneasy quiet, the glass window vibrated, woke to movement. The shoreline of Washington, the trees, Trace waving from our rented Honda Civic, they all grew smaller.

Children chased each other down the aisle between the ferry’s benches. I flinched at their sounds, their little squawks and shrieks, thump of a tripped sneaker. One child aimed a toy slingshot, and powdery glittering balls arced through the air, fell slowly. Laughter, their mouths all laughing, before a man tiptoed beside them, arms up in a playful shield.

Then he sat across from me.

I’m Rich, he said, extending his hand. He gripped mine in that firm too firm single thrust this is a professional handshake way.

He was handsome, for a man, with black seal-like eyes and a tight stern forehead, hair blown back as if in motion. He carried a plastic drugstore bag lumpy with clothes, which he twisted, then let spin around his wrist. He looked around my age, mid-twenties, Middle Eastern—from where I couldn’t tell—and a bright rope of scar ran up his forearm and into his sleeve. I wondered if he was asked about that scar a lot, maybe the reveal was a benchmark in his romantic endeavors.

Finally, I said, I’m Birdie.

I’d introduced myself with pseudonyms off and on for most of my life, names I’d lifted from films, sometimes historical figures. When forced to sign Greenpeace clipboard petitions, I was Judy Barton. My coffee orders and library books belonged to Mary Ann Zielonko. Online, hotel bookings, mail: Wilma Dean Loomis or Jacy Farrow. It’s good, sometimes, to be another person, one therapist had said, long ago. The sound of my own, true name prickled, an ash in my mouth, and already I knew I was getting away with something. Birdie Chang, I told this man.

Rich was holding a paperback copy of Animorphs, a series I’d loved as a kid. On the cover, the boy in a brown jacket transformed into an eagle in vivid, holographic layers.

Haven’t seen one of those in years, I said, pointing.

He bent the book back and forth in his hands, testing its flexibility. It made no sound. One-dollar cart at Elliott Bay, Rich said. Collected these as a kid. Guess I wanted to take a trip back in time. And you know, the story really holds up. He slapped the book with the back of his hand. There’s some serious literary merit here, he said.

I hated men. More precisely, I hated how a man like Rich could carry a book like Animorphs on a boat, unashamed, gleeful. He could slap it. Some serious literary merit—he could say something like that, and it would be considered refreshing, sweet. What a confident man, my mother, Wendy, would say, not trying to prove a thing. Another woman might note his vulnerable masculinity, of course she would, he’d asked for it. But we were all trying, all the time, I reminded myself. That’s how we become the people we are, impressionistically, chiseling lumps of selfhood off the truer, moldering form. There was always the effort to prove, though only certain people got to do so with pleasure. I tried to reel empathy from any part of myself.

I used to like that story, too, I said. Same generation, I guess.

It ends sad, he said.

It had to.

Rich spun the bag of clothes again. The plastic left pale ridges across his wrist. He said, what are you, twenty? Twenty-three?

Twenty-eight, I said.

No shit?

Asian genes.

Same, he said, tilting ear to shoulder.

I must have looked confused. I said nothing. There was nothing I could think of to say. Rich waited for me to go on, then smiled. He said: You Stanford sun-hat Asians always gonna forget brown Asians.

I rolled my suitcase directly in front of me, snapped the handle down. Then I wrapped my legs around the sides of it and squeezed, remembering the book that was inside.

You don’t know anything about me, I said.

I think you’re tired, this man said. Real tired.

I am tired.

What do you have going on on the rock?

The rock?

On Whidbey? he said.

Trace and I had rehearsed several potential responses: I was visiting family (boring, no follow-up questions). I was meeting with researchers to study moss and hydrology (for this I’d googled the absolute basics). Always I could default to I don’t speak English, the quickest way to be left alone, forgotten. But Rich was frank and direct and didn’t regard me with pity; no, he didn’t have that pitying scrunch between the eyebrows, the soft tone—it wasn’t there. He knew my real name, and speaking to him felt like a challenge, one I shamefully, senselessly, wanted to pass. So I told him the truth: I’m hiding from someone. From a lot of people.

Rich fanned the corner of the book with the tip of his thumb. Back and forth, tightly, like a deck of cards. He looked right at me, unmoved, elbows on his knees.

Someone, Rich said. He hurt you, or he wants to? 

He already did, I said. He’s a pedophile.

Rich didn’t budge. His big seal eyes blinked sleepily. Trace would toss me off the boat if she knew I’d shared this much. My mother would say, You have got to be joking, maybe even get uncharacteristically violent. I knew better than to spill; I knew anyone could be a friend of Calvin’s, maybe someone he’d met inside, someone with my photo and information printed and folded in their wallet. But there were so many lessons I’d never learned in my life, so many mistakes I’d continued to make, and some thrill giving up and into that person.

So you’re hiding? he asked. Why now?

Now people know about it, I said. So he’s back. 

I don’t know about it.

Other people know, I said, trust me.

I thought of the book. The photo on the cover. The New York Times Bestseller stickers glinting from her cheeks on the wall display at the airport. Trace had pulled my hand to keep walking. I was supposed to spend the summer on Whidbey to reset and recalibrate unplugged, to find that safety bubble, at last. These were other peoples’ words, but I knew how to use them.

What does this guy say he wants? Rich said.

He says all kinds of stuff. Says he wants to apologize. 

Does he, apologize?

Depends.

On what?

On how you see it. How you think of apologies. 

So what’s your issue? he asked.

A woman pushed inside from the deck, and the wind fluttered Rich’s hair before the door snapped closed. She was yelling into her phone to someone named Joey, and she said his name a lot: Joey, I said what I said. Listen, Joey, I’m not coming to Ballard, Joey, don’t be so stupid.

The issue, I said, is he finds me. He doesn’t go away. He’s out now, and he writes me—

Words aren’t violence, Rich said. He shook his head. 

This is a violent person.

Well, Rich said. You say he’s a pedophile. Why would he care about you now?

I didn’t like somebody else talking about Calvin like he knew him, coolly calling him a pedophile. It was unnerving to hear it so casually with no bulk to it; his tone ground my deliberateness and my fear to dust, the life I’d lived leading to that word of who Calvin was, and the thorned acceptance of what that made me.

You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I said. I looked him in the eyes.

Oh, there it is, Rich said. He smiled again. There, that’s where it lives.

I looked down at my fingers as if something were stuck there, something to be addressed. My fingertips, frayed from picking. Blood dried in horseshoes around the nail beds. I tried to focus it, the swell, the heat rising inside, a crimp in the gullet. Not the crying kind—but the other feeling. There it is. I looked back up at Rich.

It’s ’cause you’re too nice, Rich said. Guys fuck with girls like you because you let them.

I’d kill him, if I could, I said. I’d shoot him in the dick. 

That’s how you’d do it?

The dick, then the head.

Nah, you wouldn’t, he said. Let me guess, you sleep with a gun, right? What kind?

I said nothing. Rich leaned closer. A focused crouch, hands ready, as if dribbling a ball.

Tell me. Smith and Wesson, 38 Special? You sleep with a big boyfriend, too?

I’m a dyke, actually.

Hey, girl, I’m cool with that, he said. Then, a thought behind his face. Slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth before he said it: You’d let him do it again, before shooting him. You don’t have that in you. Guarantee.

You have no idea, I said, and we sat there for a moment, the fluorescent ticking overhead. The boat slowed. I didn’t go to Stanford, I said.

The woman screamed at Joey some more from a nearby bench. She plugged one ear as she listened to what he had to say. I thought Joey had been a boy, but now it sounded as if he had been a lousy lover and owed her money. She hung up and threw the phone into her big purse, said, Unbelievable, to the rest of us.

Where’s the bad guy live? Rich said. 

Florida.

Florida Man.

Don’t shit on Florida, that’s a boring thing to do, I said. 

You still live there?

No.

Exactly. So where’s he in Florida?

Do you know what a pervert park is? I said, trying to prove a lax knowledge of my own life. That’s what they call them in Florida. Where he lives. It’s called Gateway to Grace.

I work East Coast a lot—cargo ships, cruise lines, Rich said. I’m down there next week, staying through summer. I got friends in Opa-locka.

What do you do, exactly?

Rich nodded his head like he was thinking. He said: Boats. Marina stuff.

He slapped the book down next to him, then buried his face in both hands, breathing in hard. He flicked the tip of his nose with a thumb. Sniffed. Outside the glass doors of the ferry, a little girl on the deck threw pieces of bread, or crackers, at some gulls that curved down to them. Behind her, the clouds parted a Magic 8 Ball blue.

Well, Rich said, looking up at me. He looked calm, almost sedated. You want me to kill him for you?

I glared at him. His stubble, his dry knuckles. I imagined him snapping off gloves, a dirtied spade, wiping prints from a revolver with a soft, meshy cloth. Then I imagined Calvin—bound and blood battered—screaming for his life in a ditch near the Everglades. A gator would finish him. It was all ridiculous.

I can do it for you, Rich said. It’d be my honor. Even the score in this small way. For the sun-hat nice girls.

He leaned back and crossed one foot over a knee. I crossed mine too. The children in the aisle were gathered by their parents. Backpacks and strollers. Arms flung around necks.

No one would ever connect us—who could connect us? I’d have no reason to kill this guy. But I could. Easy, without a hitch, trust me I could.

What are those people eating? I said. Rich looked outside, where I pointed. The birds multiplied and the little girl screamed. Orange life buoys clung to the deck gates, quivered brightly and weakly as the boat moved.

Probably chowder bowls, he said. 

They love chowder here.

It’d be fun actually, Rich said. Taking your guy away.

I liked that he wouldn’t drop it. That he was asking something of me. A permission. He needed me to play along, to assuage some want. I knew what that looked like.

I told you, I was going to kill him, I said.

You don’t have it.

I can be scary, I said. Ask anyone who knows me.

I don’t know anyone who knows you. Then, after a pause, he said, You couldn’t scare anything.

I scare.

Scare me now, Rich said. Come on. Gimme your best. Scare me good.

I looked out the window to the water, the deep blue mat studded with white. An identical ferry passing by. Mount Rainier glowing like a postcard. I once went on a date with a woman who said she’d never get serious with someone who rolled a suitcase. That it was a lazy, humiliating thing to do—to not hold a suitcase by the handle, a proper handsome Samsonite from long ago, luggage with dignity. I didn’t know how to scare this man. I never would.

Are you lying? he said.

I’m not.

You seem like a liar. I just need his name. Gateway to Grace. Give the name. After this we never met. You’ll never hear from me again.

Give me your name, I said.

Rich Amani, he said. Do you trust that I’m a good person? 

Absolutely not.

I respect that, he said. That’s fair.

Do you think I’m a good person? I asked. Out of the ferry’s loudspeaker, words clanged, indecipherable. The boat slowed even more. The island: closer.

Good and nice aren’t the same, he shrugged. Does he deserve to die?

He doesn’t deserve to live. 

That’s the same thing, Rich said. 

I don’t think it is, actually.

Say it, Rich said. Just say it out loud. It’s good for you.

Passengers opened the doors to exit. Cold air trailed through the room, and I pulled my jacket tighter to my chest. The ride was ending, a ramp ahead lowering to the boat, bridging to the rest of my life.

I said, Every day, when I wake up, it’s the first thing I wish for. Him gone.

Well, give the name, then. If you want me to.

I stared at Rich and he stared back. A dare with our eyes, who’d break first. That Disney villain scar, his twisting bag of clothes—I smiled, caught myself, straightened back up, serious now. Scary. Something mirrored between us, but he still didn’t think I could.

Calvin Boyer, I said, and Rich stood as soon as I said it. 

Well, that was easy, he said. Birdie, good for you.

He slipped the book in his back pocket and walked away toward the deck.

The post This Cocky Stranger Is Offering to Kill for Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

My sister raises her glass of sangria and clutches her heart, sequined top and cleavage trembling with her gratitude. “You guys are the sweetest,” she says.

It’s her birthday and the three of us—Valda; her best friend, Harriet; and me—are splitting a carafe of prickly pear sangria on the rooftop bar at El Nido. It’s been impossible to get into this place since it opened. I had to book our reservations a month ago and couldn’t get anything earlier than 9pm. Not ideal for a Monday night, but Valda loves exclusive things and I’ve insisted on treating.

Granted, a month ago I thought I’d have a job by now and would be paying for our dinner with real money. I’ve been trying not to use my TOT card unless absolutely necessary, but seeing as I’ve been staying on Valda’s couch for three months, this probably qualifies.

Our server appears and asks if we’re ready to order food. Valda and Harriet nod and work their way down the list of tapas we decided on—Padrón peppers, jerk mussels, dates, mushrooms, calamari, beet salad, lobster thermidor, and sea bass, which are all somehow priced like mains. I try not to do the math in my head, so instead I admire our server’s balayage and wonder if she paid for it with money. It looks expensive. Which I guess is another way of saying it looks good.

When I step inside to find the bathroom, I catch sight of a lanky man hunched in a familiar way over his cocktail. My face goes numb. He throws his head back too far in laughter and I know it’s him.

Years ago, Sam worked at the textbook publisher with me. Just a blip before moving on to the bigger things that had always been waiting for him. Data was a beautiful thing in his hands. Complicated sets poured themselves effortlessly into visuals. The one time we slept together, back when I was harboring delusions of us moving to the Hills and presiding over the city as some kind of power couple, I pictured a time-lapse video he made of phonemes in languages over time—dots migrating across a map of the world that swelled my tongue with longing.

Sam’s work runs on the front page of the Chronicle now. I know his stuff before I even get to the byline. It pulls my eye out of the stories and sets off a hunger in my chest. It’s always the most elegant thing on the screen, a dancing, interactive chart that lights with color as you move your mouse.

I emailed him last year to ask about any job openings at the Chronicle. I’d taken three pay cuts at the textbook publisher by then and knew I wouldn’t outrun the layoffs forever. It was a humiliating email to send and even more humiliating to receive his reply: Audrey, hey! Good to hear from you. Unfortunately nothing that I know of. You’re still at AdAstra, huh? Can’t believe you’ve stuck it out all this time. Good for you. S

1) My name is Aubrey, not Audrey. 2) Obviously I’d memorize this email and the word good would forever lose its meaning.

It’s true that I’m probably not qualified to work at the Chronicle. I’m a good designer, but I can be clumsy with code. I’ve been trying to remedy this, sitting on Valda’s couch all day fiddling with Python and R, trying to animate my static charts and plot in 3D.

I haven’t emailed Sam since I lost the job at AdAstra because the only thing more humiliating than telling him I still work there is telling him I work nowhere.

I force my shoulders back and approach his table. The woman across from him is glamorous and poised. High red ponytail. Gold cuff wrapped around one bicep like something Cleopatra might wear. It makes me think of the interview tip I read, to Wear a fashion statement to spark conversation. I’m wearing a plain gray dress and a silver necklace with a tiny A that hangs below my collarbone. If my outfit is making a statement, it’s whispering.

He sees me and his eyebrows go up. “Audrey, hi!” He asks how I am and introduces the redhead as simply Genevieve, which means they are on a date.

I tell him about the layoff in the brightest tone I can manage, one that indicates it’s no big deal, an opportunity for better things. I smile and remember to Look your interviewer in the eye. “The Chronicle doesn’t need anyone, do they?” I ask, as though this has only just occurred to me. Demonstrate that you’ve familiarized yourself with the company’s work. “I saw your piece about cell phone usage policies and car accidents last week—it was amazing.” I don’t mention that I locked myself in Valda and Dave’s bathroom with it and masturbated on the fuzzy bathmat. Car accidents are not sexy, but the chart was so streamlined and clean and I kept thinking of his fingers moving across the keyboard, punching enter in the same gentle, decisive way he’d curled them into me.

“Oh gosh, thanks,” he says, as though he barely remembers this chart. “But damn, yeah, I don’t think we’re looking for anybody right now.”

“Well,” I shrug, “if anything comes up, I’ve been fleshing out my portfolio. Working on animating a multivariable set right now.” These are probably second nature to Sam, so not a great brag.

“Oh, well, cool.” He nods. “If you want any help, I’d be happy to look it over for you.”

“Wow,” I say. “Yeah, I mean, that’d be great.”

I wonder if Genevieve will feel threatened by his offer, but she smiles brightly.

“Sure,” Sam says. “Send it over. I’ll take a look.”

I think of Valda and her friends, how casually they thank one another for favors with lavish spa days and expensive wine. If I had real money, I could send a fancy fountain pen to Sam’s office later, with a note that says, Thank you for your genius eye! Instead, I take out my phone and say, “I actually won the TOT lottery after the layoff. I’ll send you some TOTs right now.”

They’ve been running a pilot lottery system since the bill passed two years ago. Only ten percent of applicants get approved; it was such a relief when mine went through.

“Oh, cool,” he says. “I mean, you don’t have to.”

People say this, but as with real money, it’s just the cue to say, “I insist.” Which I do.

Between courses—glistening bowls of peppers and mussels, cheese-crusted lobster, all of it outrageously delicious—Harriet asks if I’ve heard anything more from Freeman & Freeman. A week ago, I had a preliminary interview at the finance company she works for after she referred me to HR. It went about as well as it could, given that no part of me wants the job. Or, I should say, only the part of me that wants an apartment of my own again and money for food.

When Harriet told me they were hiring a data visualist at Freeman & Freeman, I’d been staying with Valda and her husband Dave for two months already, listening to Dave every day on his headset through the thin office wall. “Oh, great,” I said, trying to believe it could be great. When she forwarded my resume to HR, I sent her a hundred TOTs from my phone and the caption !

I tell her I’m still waiting to hear back about the performance task I sent in. The datasets they gave me to visualize were complicated and deeply uninteresting. Risk assessment, revenue trends. Analyzing them felt like dragging my brain over gravel. At AdAstra, I made charts of whale migration patterns and human lifespans throughout history. “They said I should hear back tomorrow if I’ve made it to the next stage.”

“Well, I have a good feeling about it,” she says. Harriet is the kind of person who has a good feeling about a lot of things.

When the server with the balayage drops off our check, I lay my TOT card on the tray and slide the A on my neck back and forth on its chain. Like all TOT cards, mine is bright yellow—a horrendous, almost chartreuse that calls as much attention to itself as possible. I’m sure everyone on the rooftop with us can see it. It’s awkward enough using it at the grocery store or on the bus, but here, where churros are thirty-five dollars, I feel like I’m committing a crime. Valda and Harriet generously ignore it.

I remember standing at the voting booth two years ago, clicking Yes on Prop 10: Alternative Banking, and feeling magnanimous. What were a few of my tax dollars to help “redistribute access to those in need”? The FOR column in the ballot booklet listed endorsements from every major state politician and researchers at prominent universities citing the psychological benefits of gratitude. Take your thanks to the banks! The AGAINST column was blank. Now I imagine filling the space with the word “humiliating.”

Still, of course, I’m grateful for it.

When our server comes back, she lifts the check tray and makes only the subtlest of glances around the table, as if wondering which of us is responsible.

A minute later, she returns with a strange look on her face. “Um, I’m sorry,” she says to the table. “This card has been declined.”

“Really?” There’s no way I could’ve maxed it out already. I’ve only had the thing since I lost my job and have used it as sparingly as possible.

She nods. “Do you have, um, a debit card? Or a credit card maybe?”

“Shit.” My spine curls. I dig through my purse, even though I have neither of those things with me and no money in the accounts anyway. In a zippered pocket, I find two yellow tokens worth approximately 3% of this meal. I can’t decide if it’s worse to procure them.

Valda interrupts. “I’ll get it.”

Harriet puts out a hand. “Absolutely not.” She looks up at our server. “It’s her birthday.”

“Happy birthday,” our server says uncomfortably.

Harriet opens her purse. “I’ll get it.” And as easily as one might hand over a napkin, she deposits her blue credit card on the tray.

I check my account from my phone and it reads Uh oh! No remaining Tokens of Thanks . 

I scroll back through my payments looking for the error, but the math, somehow, adds up. The payment I sent Sam an hour ago maxed it out.

I don’t know how it happened so quickly. The amount I was approved for seemed astronomical at the time. Plenty to tide me over for a brief stint of unemployment. The woman who approved me recommended I pay it off in increments every month. “Some users like to select a recurring date to come in. We can book you for every month on the 1^st? The 15^th?”

I was in the middle of a fight with my landlord at the time, a woman who’d been terrorizing me ever since she’d found out her rent might be arriving in TOTs. She’d turn the water off at random intervals, “in case someone needed to fix the plumbing.” She’d taken two of my windows from their frames and put them in storage, claiming “new ones were on the way.” Flies and bees wandered in freely, and every time I left the apartment I worried my things would be stolen. During my approval call, a squirrel let itself in and knocked over a plant.

I swished at it with a flyswatter and told the woman on the phone I’d have to figure out my payment plan later. “Your limit is on the higher end,” she said. After I’d been selected, I filled out a long questionnaire intended to determine my gratitude capacity. Thankfully, gratitude has always come naturally to me. “I don’t recommend paying it off all at once. Some users find this experience taxing.”

I’d heard grumblings to this effect—a couple of people at AdAstra had accounts—which is maybe why I’ve been putting it off. Also, the Alternative Banking Office is all the way across town and I don’t have a car. I wonder if the tokens in my bag—the remainder of a bonus from when I opened the account—are enough for a ride there tomorrow.

The server returns with Harriet’s card and smiles brightly at her. “Thanks so much.” She turns to Valda. “And happy birthday.”

Valda has a meeting up the 101 the next morning, the wrong direction from the ABO, and Dave has a consultation with a big prospective client, so I tell them I can get myself there. Dave never lets me drive his precious Audi, and the tokens in my bag are only enough to borrow his bike anyway. This is the sort of thing I once imagined would be free—a single ride on a bike that belongs to my brother-in-law. But I hand over the tokens and try not to feel rage as Dave pokes at them in his palm. Nothing is free here.

“Height okay?” he asks, headset already fitted behind his ears, doorknob in hand. He can see that it’s not, and I can see that the answer he needs is yes.

I give a thumbs up and he closes the door to the garage behind him.

The seat must be too high by six inches. I pray it’s one of those easy-adjuster posts, but it’s not. No toolbox or wrench in sight. I hoist myself onto the bike and wobble my way across town, overlarge helmet shifting on my head. It feels like someone is taking a potato peeler to my calves. At red lights, I fall gracelessly, bruise my pelvis on the bar. When I get to the ABO an hour later, I’m so tired I can barely lift my arms to lock the bike.

Entering the lobby is like stepping into a child’s birthday party. Blinding yellow walls. The words Give thanks! and You’re very welcome! in person-sized letters across them. Smiley faces in the exclamation marks.

I tell the woman at the front desk I’m here to pay off my charges. “Wonderful.” She smiles. “Do you have an appointment?”

I explain that my card maxed out last night and I came right away.

“Oh, hmm. Maxed out?”

I nod.

“That may be a slight problem.” She types something into her computer. “There’s a surcharge for walk-ins, so you’d need to have some cushion in your account.”

Shit.

“We have an appointment. . .,” she scrolls, clicks, types, “. . .next week if you want to come back then?”

I imagine biking back across town. A week without spending. I need TOTs for everything.

“I. . . can’t.” I look around the room, at the few people filling out forms or waiting with a clipboard in hand. “Can I wait here, maybe, until there’s a cancelation?”

She offers a sympathetic frown. “That would still be a walk-in, I’m afraid.” She must see the distress in my eyes, because she reaches out a hand and lays it gently on mine. The nerves in my fingers throb, skin rubbed raw from gripping the handlebars too tightly. “Let me see what I can do.” She gets up and disappears behind a yellow door.

When she returns, she’s smiling like the exclamation marks on the walls. “Great news. I spoke with my manager and he says he’ll waive your surcharge if you clear the account.”

“Clear the account?”

“Just, pay the whole balance today.”

“Oh.” I exhale. “Sure, I can do that, sure.”

“Perfect.” She hands me a form to fill out and a yellow pen. “Oh good,” she says. “You brought a helmet.”

When my name is called, a man with a retractable keycard swipes us through a heavy door into a yellow hallway. We pass door after door, behind which I hear muffled music or silence. As we turn the corner, a door marked Room 7 opens and the sound of weeping escapes. The words “I am” pierce the hall. A man in a yellow lab coat locks the door behind him. He makes a quick Yikes or Woops face at the man I’m following.

“Is that person okay?” I ask the man with the keycard.

“He’ll be fine.”

We turn down another hallway. “He didn’t really sound fine.”

“Have you been here before?” he asks over his shoulder.

I shake my head.

“It’s all non-invasive. Completely safe, medically-speaking.”

“Medically-speaking. . .” I read all the paperwork when I was setting up the account—my mother taught me to never sign anything without reading every word—but the section about the repayment process was just a long, scientifically dense description of a brain scan.

He waves his hand dismissively. “The rooms back there are for small debt. Some people just bring the dramatics.”

I want to ask how my own debt ranks, but the man stops and unlocks a door. I feel a little woozy, but I follow him into another wing, then into a small room, covered floor-to-ceiling in yellow padding. 

I stash my belongings in a cubby by the door, and the man gestures to a barber chair in the middle of the room. The chair faces a big-screen television and what appears to be a giant thermometer. A long, white wire dangles above the open seat.

“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable. You’ll have a few minutes to clear your mind, then one of our adjusters will be here to help you with the process. Any questions?”

I think about asking if it hurts, but he says, “Okay then,” and slips out the door.

My tailbone stings as I lower myself into the chair.

Eventually, a knock.

“Yep,” I say.

Another man in a yellow lab coat enters, introduces himself as Cameron. I focus on my gratitude that it’s not the man who made the Yikes or Woops face. He settles onto a stool beside a panel of controls and a computer.

“So, Aubrey. How’re we doing today?”

It doesn’t escape my attention that Cameron is extremely attractive, though I’m not sure if this is objectively true or if he just got my name right. I tell him I’m good.

“Great.” He smiles. “I’m told this is your first time.” I nod and he identifies the wire dangling in front of me as the sensor, shows me how to separate the end into two buds that fit in my ears. “Comfortable?” I imagine he’s holding me from behind, moving the hair off my neck. I say yes. 

“Okay, so I’m going to read through your payments, and I want you to think back to the moment of exchange. When you visualize it, a clip from your memory will appear on the Memovision,” he gestures at the TV, “to help you reenter the experience. Then this big guy over here,” he points to the thermometer like they’re old friends, “will take a read on your gratitude levels. When you’ve filled the gauge all the way up, we can move on to the next payment and do it again. Sound good?”

I nod.

“Great. I’m just going to read the company statement before we get started.” He flips a page on his clipboard. “Financial distress has been shown to impact physical and psychological health, leading to higher rates of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and suicide.” His voice is strangely chipper. “Fostering and acknowledging gratitude, on the other hand, decreases stress hormones and feelings of anxiety. Regularly practicing gratitude may lead to lasting changes in brain chemistry that promote happiness and wellbeing.” Cameron looks up, smiles. “Today, we’re collecting the necessary receipts to maintain public support and keep this program alive. Incidentally, we’re also providing the client—Aubrey Cline—an important opportunity to spend time with the gratitude they’ve been cultivating since their Alternative Banking account was established. We’re honored to be working with you toward this mutual goal of improving your health and wellbeing!” He turns the clipboard around, hands me a yellow pen. “I just need your signature here, acknowledging the purpose of today’s visit.”

I read the page, like my mother taught me, and sign.

“Okay, we generally start with the smaller payments to ease you in. Work our way up to the big stuff.” I imagine one of his fingers slipping inside me, then another. My chest thrums, pelvis aches. “Ready?”

“Um, yeah.”

He begins with a day in the grocery store when I toppled a corner display of limes. The Sprouts interior appears on the Memovision in soft-focus. It’s the same day my last paycheck from AdAstra came in and those limes felt like my whole life scattering across the produce aisle. A woman weighing grapes stops, bends to pick up the limes between us. “Limes on the run,” she says, like we’re playing a game. Later, when she wound up behind me in line with only a handful of items, I told the cashier to add them to my bill. 

It’s immediate, the feeling that washes through me for this woman. A digital simulation of mercury flies to the top of the gauge. A soft ding sounds.

“Wow,” Cameron says. “That was fast.”

A loud part of my brain wonders if he finds my gratitude attractive.

Cameron reads a series of payments to strangers or people I barely know—bus drivers, cashiers, baristas. Every time red fills the thermometer in a matter of seconds. Red, ding, red, ding, red, ding. A heaviness sags in my chest, but for once I feel powerful, capable. “Whaddaya know,” Cameron says. “No assistance needed.” He laughs, and I think I detect a flush in his cheeks.

Next is a payment to my mother who lives across the country. The Memovision lights up with the soft green of my old living room. Looking at it again makes me sad. My hands appear onscreen, taping up a box, writing KITCHEN on the side of it in Sharpie. My mom comes through the door carrying two pizza boxes and a bottle of wine. “Guess who does To Go food if you ask nicely?” She opens the boxes to reveal sourdough pizza from the fancy restaurant up the block. “Mom,” I hear myself say. “I thought you were gonna get sandwiches from the deli.” “Well,” she says, “I thought this would be a nice treat. No reason.”

Of course, there was a reason. It was my last week in the apartment because my landlord had flat-out refused my TOTs when her harassment campaign hadn’t done the trick. I’m pretty sure this is illegal, but she threatened a lawsuit and I didn’t have the money to gamble on it. It had been ten years since I moved into that rent-controlled studio and my landlord had been itching to get me out ever since rents had skyrocketed. I knew it distressed my mother that she couldn’t help—Valda and Dave had bought their house with a down payment from Dave’s parents—and shame burrowed into me for causing her that. “Let me get it,” my old self says, tapping out the payment on my phone. “You came all the way here to help me move.”

I look over at the gauge and the red wobbles around the mid-point, rising and dipping a few times. Embarrassed, I glance at Cameron, who gives a breathy, sympathetic laugh. “Moms,” he says. “Always tricky.”

But my mother is not tricky and I was grateful. I remember it. Onscreen, my past self slips into the bathroom, sits on the closed toilet. I hear myself start to cry through the speaker and wish Cameron would look away. The gauge dips again. No, I think, no. I close my eyes and imagine digging through a sandbox of my shame, excavating handfuls until I knock against something buried there. I open my eyes. The red climbs in the gauge. My neck cramps, shoulders tense. Ding. 

“Doin’ alright?” Cameron asks.

I nod.

“That’s right, you’re a pro.” He smiles coyly and reads my payment to Harriet. Already, nausea twists behind my eyes. On the Memovision, Harriet sits beside me on Valda’s couch, looking over my resume, assuring me brevity is fine. Freeman & Freeman will love that I’ve been at the same company for so long. “Okay,” she says, “I’m doing it.” She attaches my resume to the email she’s written, clicks send. Her computer makes a whoosh.

Current-me has the impulse to check my phone. It’s possible there’s already an email in my inbox, inviting me to a second interview or beginning, Unfortunately. . . Both possibilities make me feel ill.

I glance at the gauge and am dismayed to see it’s mostly empty, the red hovering at the one-third mark. I was grateful to Harriet—of course I was—and it feels unfair that I should have to prove it. The red dips lower.

Onscreen, Harriet closes the laptop and pours us glasses of white wine. She pours another for Valda and the three of us cheers. “To a bright future for little sis,” Harriet says. I’m older than Valda by two years but her friends always forget this because I’m single and broke.

Valda smiles, features blurrier than Harriet’s. “To movin’ on up.”

When I saw the starting salary at Freeman & Freeman, I thought it was a mistake. It was three times what I’d made at AdAstra. Harriet grimaced when she saw the listing. “I guess our charts people don’t make a ton,” she said and I wondered, for the first time, what her life was like, what it meant for numbers like this to look small.

The red in the gauge drops to the one-fourth mark. I grasp the leather armrests, palms beginning to sweat.

“Would you like some assistance?” Cameron asks.

My heart beats loudly in my ears. I want to say no, but the red drops further. “Um, okay.”

Cameron scoots his chair in and twists a few dials. He types, clicks. “Alrighty. So. It looks like this position is quite a lucrative one, given your employment history.” Cameron can see my employment history? I tell him I’m grateful for the opportunity. But the red drops again.

He looks back at the computer. “Okay. Well. It appears this recipient—Harriet—hasn’t referred anyone to the company in,” he scrolls, “three years.” He looks at me and my heart knocks against the center of my collarbone. I wish Cameron were less attractive so I could focus.

“Her last referral was fired after some account mishandling. Lots of internal drama. . .” His eyes move back and forth across the screen. “Wow, a whole restructuring of the department ensued. She’s been reluctant to attach her name to applications since then.”

The red wobbles and I close my eyes. I didn’t know any of that. I feel a tenderness for her, a growing warmth. She must believe in me, or really love my sister, or both. I open my eyes and the red is rising steadily, slowly. My arms grow heavy. Chest tightens. Ding. I exhale.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Great.” He clicks the mouse and asks if I need a break. I can’t leave the room until the session is over, he explains, but I could stand up, stretch my legs. I shake my head, wanting this to be over and still wondering if I can impress him.

It seems to work, because he says, “Dream client.” He blushes. “Just, sometimes people take these long breaks. Like, totally, move around a bit. It’s when they start staring into space for an hour that I’m like, that can’t be helping? Definitely not with my commission. If you request me,” he says, “I can work your account every time.”

I’m starting to feel like I might throw up, but I say, “Yeah. Definitely.”

Then he reads my weekly payments to Valda, which he decides to lump into one large payment with a keystroke. My hand appears on the Memovision, carrying suitcases into Valda’s apartment, stacking them in the corner of Dave’s office beside the pull-out.

I’m scared to look at the gauge. I’m grateful, so grateful, but I’m aware of other feelings closer to the surface. Shame, annoyance. A general sense of inadequacy for mooching off my little sister. The loathing that surges whenever Dave is around. 

When I do look at the gauge, the red is all over the place. Quivering, jumping, falling. Cameron says, “This happens with recurring payments. It’s aggregating data over time, so it may take a minute to settle.”

When I first mentioned rent to Valda, she made a face. “Rent?” But Dave interjected that they’d probably have more expenses with a third resident. “Might as well take some help from the government.” I’d been happy to—wanted to—send her a TOT payment until he said that. It felt good to know I could offer something. But Dave saw it as the government’s money anyway, as rightfully his. Suddenly I wanted Valda to put her foot down. To say, Aubrey doesn’t owe us anything. Aubrey’s family. Aubrey has worked her ass off and we only have this house because someone else put down the money for it. Instead, she shrugged. Said, “If you really want to.” 

I watch breathlessly as the fluctuations slow and the red teeters in the middle. Not terrible, I think. Then the red spikes once more and drains almost entirely from the gauge. Shit.

“Okay, well, no worries,” Cameron says. “That’s what I’m here for.” He toggles some buttons, types. “So.” Bounces his head as he reads. “This payment is significantly lower than the rent in your prior apartment.”

I try to focus on the amount I’m saving, but the Memovision displays a bleary image of Dave’s office as my alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. He works for a travel agency headquartered on the other coast, so I need to be out of the room by 5:30. Like every other morning, I strip the sheets from the pull-out, fold it back up, drag the marble coffee table back in front of the couch so it all looks untouched. Dave knocks on the door at 5:29, says, “Okie doke,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe.

The sliver of red that was visible at the bottom of the gauge disappears and a sound like a car alarm comes through the speaker. I startle and Cameron shouts over the noise. “It’s okay!” He twists a dial. “Let’s do a counterfactual, okay? You’ll have a little more control there.”

I don’t know what that means, but I nod.

“I’m initiating a park sequence!” he shouts. Clicks, types. A dimly lit park appears on the screen. Chain-link fence, dead grass, a single bench surrounded by broken glass. It looks like no park I’ve seen in town, but Cameron tells me to envision myself there.

It’s hard to imagine anything with the alarm still blaring, but sure enough, my body appears onscreen like a character in a video game. I’m wearing grimy sweatpants and a sweatshirt I do not own.

“The sun has set,” Cameron shouts over the alarm, “it’s getting cold.” My avatar shivers and I feel it too. “You lie down on the bench and try to sleep.”

My avatar approaches the bench. It’s covered in bird shit. I look at Cameron and he nods, encouraging. Surely this is not actually the alternative to staying with Valda and Dave? Couldn’t I have flown home and stayed with my mother? Built out my portfolio from her bedroom while her book club drank margaritas down the hall?

The park onscreen begins to melt and Cameron says over the alarm, “Ope, ope. Gotta focus. We’ll have to reboot if you wipe this scene.”

I inhale and feel the night chill again. When my avatar lies on the bench, the metal is hard and I feel it in my hip. Or maybe that’s from this morning when I fell off Dave’s bike.

I think about how this is the reality for so many people, people who are not me, and I recall the give of the pull-out couch in Dave’s office, the goose down duvet Valda pulled from storage. The alarm goes quiet and I try not to think about the ethics of using other people’s misfortune to pay off my debt. A tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. The park fades from the Memovision and Valda’s living room replaces it, my legs folded into the sectional, computer open on my lap to a screenful of code. The red climbs incrementally as I focus on the warmth, the WiFi, the fridge full of food. Dave’s voice comes through the walls. “. . .fewer of our deliverables. . .” His work-laugh is a stone skipping water. “. . .absolutely position this to your liking. . .” Their Pomeranian, Randy, whines to go outside. It’s my job to walk him now, to feed him and pick up after him, since I’m “free all day.”

The red dips again. My throat tightens. Something scrapes in my lungs.

“If I may,” Cameron says. “This payment was made to—,” he checks his screen, “—Valda Cline?” I nod. “She hasn’t made many appearances.”

I see far more of Dave than I do of Valda, but it’s true the payment goes to her. I breathe and remember the day I moved in. On the Memovision, she FaceTimes our mother and says, “Guess who gets a permanent sleepover!” When she was little, she used to beg to sleep in my room. She’s thirty-two now and works eighty hours a week, but insisted this arrangement would be fun, would be just like when we were kids. The red totters in the gauge, climbs slowly.

It hasn’t, of course, been just like when we were kids. 

When we were kids, there was no Dave, asking every day when I think I’ll have a job. No Dave, planning extravagant outings every weekend—wine country, hot springs, trips to Hawaii—because he knows I can’t afford to come. I keep expecting Valda to notice, to suggest we stay in and play board games one weekend. Valda and I grew up with the same lack of money, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she pouts and calls me a party pooper for never wanting to use my TOT card on fun things. “You have free money right now!” she says. “Live a little!”

The red in the gauge is erratic again—down, up, back down. All of these things have unfolded on the Memovision.

“Hmm,” Cameron says. “How about another counterfactual? We can do something a little more targeted.”

“Um. I don’t know.”

Cameron nods. “They can be uncomfortable, but they’re a very efficient way of extracting gratitude.”

The word extracting makes me shiver.

“Let’s just try it out, see how you do.”

I say nothing and he taps the keyboard. My avatar appears onscreen again, this time in a yellow sundress I’ve never seen before. A living room materializes around me that looks like a set from a play. Bland hotel art surrounds a giant wall mirror. “This is your home,” Cameron says, and I think, Mine, okay, I could be grateful for that.

A man walks through the door in a blue business suit, sets a briefcase on the ground. He looks not unlike like Sam. “Honey,” he calls to me, “I’m home,” even though I’m standing right there. My avatar walks to greet him and I decide to indulge this hypothetical with a long kiss, a bit of tongue. The character onscreen doesn’t seem to expect this. He freezes momentarily, says, “Thank you, my wife.” Then something changes in his demeanor. He lifts his nose, sniffs. “Where is dinner?” he says angrily. “I have worked all day and am hungry.”

I stifle a laugh. I, too, have been cooking dinners for Valda and Dave. Because they have worked, because I am “free.” It’s not exactly the same tired plot here, but it’s not so far off.

I imagine my avatar saying, “I’ve been busy today too,” and she does. “With the baby,” I add, for maximum defensibility. A crib pops onto the screen. Cool. Just like that, a baby.

“Our baby does nothing all day!” my husband shouts. “Just like you!”

Jesus, I think, and my avatar repeats this. “Jesus.”

“What did you say?” he screams. I don’t know who wrote this script, but we’ve gone from zero to a hundred. My husband grabs my avatar by her dress collar and throws her to the ground. My jaw drops. What the fuck, I think. My avatar says, “What the fuck.”

“You are useless,” he screams. Veins pop in his neck as he lifts my avatar by her waist and throws her directly into the mirror on the wall. The mirror shatters and rains down around her.

“What the fuck,” I scream.

“What the fuck,” my avatar screams.

My head throbs like it has hit something. I close my eyes to block out the scene. No fucking way am I doing this. Getting gratitude this way. Extracting. My mother has alluded to the three years of her marriage to our father, before she left him, before he lost parental rights. I know it involved yelling, broken things. But I open my eyes and the red climbs in the gauge. My stomach turns.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

I feel nauseous, heavy-limbed. I focus as hard as I can on Valda. Guess who gets a permanent sleepover! Finally, her face overtakes this horrible scene on the Memovision. I’m so relieved I could cry—Valda hugging me from behind when she gets home from work; Valda listening to me talk about the new chart I finished, even though she still doesn’t understand scrollytelling; Valda loaning me a dress for the Freeman & Freeman interview. The red passes the halfway mark, the two-thirds, higher. I feel all the bones in my ribcage when I breathe.

I’ve been trying to make myself small at their house—never leaving a dish unwashed or a crumb on the table, keeping my belongings folded and stashed in suitcases. Last week, I was curled into a blanket in the corner of the couch and Valda accidentally sat on me. “Oh my God!” she said. “I thought you were a blanket.” I felt strangely proud. She sat back down on me intentionally. “Best blanket.” Now, in the barber chair, the memory of her weight in my lap grows, expands. Crushes something in my tailbone. I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?

“Stop, stop,” I gasp. I want to tear the sensors from my ears, but for some reason, I can’t. My arms won’t move. “What’s happening?”

Cameron hits a button. The Memovision pauses on a close-up of Valda’s face. “You okay?”

I tell him my arms won’t move and he says, “Shoot, okay. We’ll take a break.” He retrieves the clipboard. Flips several pages, scans. “Are your fingers tingling?”

Yes, I realize, nodding.

“No problem. We can work that out.” He scribbles something on the clipboard and rolls his stool over to mine, asks if I consent to a massage.

“Um, okay.” I feel myself blushing.

He lifts my left arm and, to my horror, I feel nothing. I ask if I should be worried about that and he says, “Nah. The feeling will come back in a second.” As he massages my arm, he says, “I know this can be a little—unsettling. But the research on gratitude shows tons of benefits. Reduced stress, stronger immune system. You’ll even sleep better.”

I’m having trouble listening, because the feeling is returning to my left arm and Cameron’s touch is soft and gentle. He rolls to my other side, works his way down my right arm. My palms begins to sweat. I realize I’ve been sweating for a while. My left hand comes away slick from my temples. A faint odor’s coming off me. “Could I, maybe, have a towel?”

I once read that a post-workout flush is attractive to potential mates—something about replicating the exertion of sex—but I’ve never sweat sexily. Valda calls me a lollipop when I get home from a run, my face bright red. When I can lift both arms to his satisfaction, Cameron digs through a drawer and tosses a hand towel into my lap.

“Okay.” He marks something on his clipboard and looks at the gauge, which seems to have emptied again during the massage. “We can finish this payment now if you want, but I’d suggest we move on and loop back at the end. Clear out what you can first. Bigger doesn’t always mean harder.”

I flush and feel crazy for hearing innuendo in everything he says. “Okay. Sure.”

He taps the keyboard. “Alrighty then. Only one other payment.” He sounds delighted, but I know which one it must be. I don’t understand how it could be bigger than my weekly rent, but Cameron adds, “This one does come with an overdraft fee. Pretty hefty, I’m afraid. That’ll get ya.” I take the opportunity to bury my face in the hand towel and soak up the sweat that drips from my hairline. The fibers are rough against my skin.

“Ready?”

I breathe in the scent of lemon detergent and something plastic and wonder what will happen if I don’t move or respond.

“You’re so close, Aubrey.”

My neck seizes. I can feel the hollow in my chest where something has been wrested from me. There is, I imagine, an inverse correlation between gratitude and the amount of gratitude demanded of you. I see the scatter plot in my head and the dots dropping sharply off, stray limes rolling down a hill.

“Not to rush you, but my lunch break is coming up in a few minutes here.”

Behind the hand towel, I imagine finishing this session in time for Cameron’s break, joining him at the seafood restaurant on the pier. We share a prawn cocktail and he confides in me that the inverse correlation is real, that he’s never seen anyone muscle through every payment so quickly. I inhale, sit up, set the towel on my knee. “Okay.”

Cameron smiles, reads the payment, and the screen displays the inside of El Nido. My chest constricts as Sam offers to look over my portfolio.

Even before the overdraft fee, I sent such a big payment because I thought he might not do it otherwise. Also, I wanted him to know I didn’t expect anything because of our history, that night on his rooftop in the fog.

Before I can stop it, the restaurant fades from the Memovision and Sam’s rooftop comes into focus. I hear myself moan through the speaker in the ceiling. Sam’s bare chest appears, his thin muscled arms reaching up to me, patchy chest hair gold under the string lights. I’ve masturbated to this memory for years but it’s a shock to see it onscreen.

Cameron hums uncomfortably.

I look over at him. “Sorry. How do I turn it off?”

“Just—” My voice moans louder through the speaker. “Ah, really concentrate on the moment of exchange.” This, too, is a moment of exchange. But Cameron reads the payment again and the Memovision cuts back to El Nido.

Sam says, “I mean, you don’t have to,” waving a hand that’s been inside me, fingers I’ve sucked on.

I look over at the gauge, but before a reading can appear, my moans siphon back through the ceiling. Sam’s rooftop is back. Fog closing in on us. So low it obscures all the neighboring buildings and creates the impression we’re alone up there, fucking inside of a cloud.

“Um, let’s—yeah, let’s back up.” Cameron rereads the payment. El Nido rematerializes.

Sam says, “I mean, you—,” but the frame freezes and the audio of us breathing and moaning plays behind it.

“Fuck me, Audrey,” Sam says, somewhere off-screen, and just like that I want to die, because even Cameron knows my name is not Audrey.

Apparently the frozen picture of El Nido is enough for the gauge to take a reading, because a moment later, the alarm is back. WAH WAH WAH. “Yes,” Sam cries, “fuck yes.”

Cameron shouts the payment again, but the alarm and the moaning carry on. He clicks frantically at the computer. Grabs a phone from the wall. “. . .screen is frozen. . . what do I do. . .” When he hangs up, he types, shouts, “We’re gonna try some music, okay? Sometimes music,” he taps his chest, “gets deeper.”

He pulls a lever under the desk and the lights dim. A disco ball descends from a hole in the ceiling. “Really try to focus on the payment,” he shouts, as Celine Dion competes with the breathing and shouting and moaning and alarm. Dots of light spin over us and Cameron cranks the volume until Celine’s is the loudest voice in the room. I’m thankful to be here, she sings, thankful to feel clear. . .

I don’t know how I’m meant to focus on anything right now, but I try to get the picture of El Nido on the screen to move. Sam’s face is frozen with his lips puckered. It’s basically impossible not to think about kissing him. Not to remember how, at one point, he wanted that.

As though someone has turned up the volume on our sex track, my voice climbs over Celine’s. “Tell me how you’d chart this,” I say, panting. Sam, distracted: “Chart what?” “This,” I say. “How good I’m making you feel.”

I only vaguely remember saying this, but hearing it pumped through the sound system at full volume, my stomach turns, face heats. I don’t know how to make it stop.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “So good.” I remember being frustrated by that, because it wasn’t what I’d asked. I’d wanted axes, plot points, code. Now I want to vanish. The memory of Sam’s rooftop is spoiling. Cameron, Celine, the disco ball—they’re all ruining it.

I pull the wire sensors from my ears, but this just skips the audio on our sex track so the last few seconds play on repeat. How good I’m making you feel, my voice says. Sam’s Oh yeah. So good.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

Celine and the alarm carry on in the background.

I turn to Cameron. “Can you turn it off?”

He lifts his palms. Shouts, “It’s stuck.” 

It feels like I’m cracking down the center, listening to this terrible remix, Sam’s frozen lips puckered at me onscreen. I push myself out of the barber chair and feel my legs protest. I’m not sure they’re going to hold me. “Can you let me out?”

Cameron grimaces. “Safety regulations. We can’t.”

Whose safety?, I wonder. “Please, I need a break.”

He shakes his head at the door. “No can do. But. . .” Flips through the pages on his clipboard.

A whole chorus backs up Celine. Thankful to be here.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

When he finds the information he’s looking for, he digs through the desk drawers and tosses me a pair of noise-canceling headphones. “See if these help,” he shouts. “Maybe we went the wrong direction with the music.”

I turn them on, fit them over my ears, but all they really do is dampen the lower register, muddying Sam and Celine. The alarm comes through unhindered. So does my voice. How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel.

I stumble toward the back wall, as far from the speaker as possible. When I get there, my legs buckle under me. I slide down the yellow padding. My head spins with the pinpricks of light.

I think of the voting booth, my ballot booklet open to Prop 10. I imagine adding my gratitude scatter plot to the AGAINST column, the caption Mathematical impossibility. Nowhere did it say you’d feel like a person turned inside out. Nowhere did it say your nose would try to split your face open.

I realize I’ve been banging an open palm against my nose when a trickle of blood makes it into my mouth. I wish I could throw up or pass out. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. I knock my head against the wall and suddenly I understand why it’s padded. An impulse I’m unfamiliar with takes over as I bang my head harder and harder. Cameron’s on the phone again, gesturing agitatedly at his screen. My head bounces off the cushioning. I can almost feel the vomit creeping up my esophagus.

When I got the stomach flu growing up, my mother would sit on the bathroom floor with me and rub my feet. Valda, who never seemed to catch anything, would lie beside me, feet in the air. “Me too! I’m sick!” she’d cry. She always wanted to be where I was.

Last weekend, when Dave surprised her with a romantic birthday getaway, her voice hitched. “I wanted to celebrate with Aubrey, too.” Dave told her she’d love the hotel he’d booked, plus it wasn’t refundable. “I guess we have our girls dinner on Monday. . .” At the time, I thought she was looking for excuses to go, but now I wonder if she was buckling under pressure. If she misses our old dynamic as much as I do. “You know Dave,” she said to me once. “Loves to get his way.” A protective tenderness rises in me.

I try to push myself up, but my legs are too weak. I tip onto all fours and drag myself toward the barber chair, knees burning on the glowing carpet.

How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. Celine must’ve changed keys, because the words thankful and alive seep in through the headphones.

The chair seems impossibly high when I get to it. I slump onto the metal footrest, try to still my vertigo. I wish the disco lights would stop moving.

Suddenly Cameron’s crouching beside me, asking if I want help up. I nod and he grabs me under the arms, lifts clumsily. I feel like a baby being hoisted by someone who doesn’t like babies. I’m achingly aware of the sweat dripping from me, the odor clinging to my shirt. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. He sits me in the chair. I feel the nausea rising. I lean forward and the headphones slip from my ears, clatter onto the floor. All the sounds barrel back at me. WAH WAH. Oh yeah. So good. How good I’m making you feel. I vomit onto my knees. It’s mostly stomach bile because I didn’t have breakfast.

“Oh boy,” Cameron says.

“Sorry,” I groan. I’ve splattered his pants and shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

Cameron picks up the phone again, asks for help in Room 14. I’m no longer a dream client. Celine’s back to singing about butterflies. My ears clog. Brain blisters. I dig my fingers into the leather armrest and one of them sinks into a hole there, finds rough-edged metal beneath. I rip at the hole until the metal edge is exposed and wonder if I could use it to crack my head open and make this all stop. Safety regulations. 

Cameron must see me fiddling with it because suddenly he’s retrieving Dave’s helmet from the cubby. “This is probably a good idea.” He sits me up and sets the helmet on my head, snaps the straps—too loosely, I think—under my chin. His hand comes away flecked with blood and vomit. He wrinkles his nose, wipes it on his yellow lab coat.

“Sorry,” I repeat. Somehow the helmet makes the possibility of death via armrest real and I feel a little afraid of myself.

Cameron proffers the dangling sensor like a rhetorical question. I can feel his desire to be done, gone, eating lunch in a fresh pair of pants.

I wonder what it would take to get me out of here, to never do this again. Suddenly, I want the Freeman & Freeman job. I can see that life now—bored out of my mind every day but going to wine country with Valda on the weekends, living in my own apartment. I’d be the one people sent TOTs to: Thank you so much for letting us crash in your spare bedroom! I’d get to say: There’s no need. Or, It’s really okay. Maybe I’d even have a rooftop that occasionally flooded with fog. I take the sensors from him.

“The control room is working on a full reboot,” he shouts over the noise, “but it’ll mean starting over.” I can hear the annoyance in his voice, so I try not to gawk at him. “If you can get this thing filled up before then, that’d be—you know, great.” The thermometer is still at zero, the alarm blaring alongside every other sound.

I fit the sensors into my ears and wonder if this will actually kill me. There’s no way I’ll be able to start over. I feel myself beginning to resent even, for some reason, the lime lady from Sprouts. The Memovision’s still frozen on Sam’s face at El Nido—eyes half-open, lips protruding. Stupid of me to have sent so much. I try to focus on the generosity of his offer—the measly half an hour it’ll take from his life. No, not that. The kindness of helping an old friend. The alarm falls away as a tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. I feel faint. Celine and the sex sounds carry on. A slow-burning rage grows in me—that I can’t just thank Sam with money, the way Valda and her friends do. Gift cards and bottles of wine they deliver and never think about again. Sam’s giant puckered lips taunt me, incense me, and his face begins to fade.

I’m doing it. Rage must be the trick. But then a new, blurry face replaces Sam’s. Eyes half-open, lips protruding in almost exactly the same way. Dave. He’s too close to the camera—to me—and I know what this memory is, even with the voices of Sam and Celine playing over it. It’s 5:31 a.m. I’ve overslept. Dave makes awful, kissing noises like he’s coaxing their dog out of bed. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Am I gonna get this minute back?” Even now, I can feel the pressure of his thumb on my mouth, wiping at my drool. The revulsion washing through me. The horror of the seconds I lay there, wondering what exactly I owed him.

I wait for my past self to scramble out of bed. Tell him not to touch me. Instead, a yellow haze takes over the screen. No, not the screen. My vision is yellowing out, the way it does when I stand up too fast. “I—can’t see,” I say, breath catching. I’m not sure the words have made it past my lips. There’s solid yellow everywhere.

Thankful to be here, thankful to feel clear.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

I hear myself crying and it must be my current self because something salty drips into my mouth. My lungs are hollow. Fingertips tingling. I need Cameron to hear me, to get me out. I remove a foot from the footrest and feel for the carpet. Push myself up, take a step.

Everything goes black.

Suddenly, I’m sitting on a rocky outcropping at the beach with Valda and our mother, feet dangling into the sand. It’s eight years ago. Valda’s about to start law school and our mother has come to help move her in. Valda never even visited the other schools she got into. She wanted to be here, where I live, to drink cheap wine with me by the ocean, as the three of us are doing now.

We sip from compostable cups and discuss all the things we’ll do together now that she lives here. Hiking, farmers markets, five-dollar Tuesdays at the cinema. Our mother sets her cup at her feet, grabs one of our knees in each hand. “My girls.” She tears up. “My girls.”

Then, disco lights spinning. Celine Dion crooning about paper dolls. How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good. It takes me a moment to understand where I am. Dave’s face is frozen on the wall, at a strange angle. I must be on my back, facing the ceiling. Something trickles into my eye and I lift a heavy hand to wipe it away. Blood. My forehead is throbbing. I feel around my head and find a helmet there, Dave’s helmet. It has slipped so far back as to be useless. Did I hit my forehead on the way down? Death via armrest.

A ding sounds and I think, deliriously, I’ve done it. Filled the gauge. Finally, finally. But the gauge, even from this angle, shows the same tiny sliver of red. No, it turns out, I’m not sufficiently grateful. Not to Sam, not to Valda. Certainly not to Dave. This is the ding, I realize, of my phone in the cubby. An incoming email. We are pleased. . . We are sorry. . .

I close my eyes again, hoping this will return me to the beach. But the music and the voices loop faithfully—Oh yeah. So good. Soon fingers are prodding into my neck, feeling for a pulse. I open my eyes. Someone—not Cameron—bends over me. She looks familiar. She takes my hand in hers and I realize it’s the woman from the front desk. She doesn’t look fazed by the sex noises or the too-loud music. “Aubrey,” she says, and the sound of my name is like a caress in my hair. “Are you still with us? Can you keep your eyes open?”

I try to do what she’s asked, but my vision begins to yellow again. The woman goes in and out of focus, yellow smoke I try desperately to clear. “Is the man in Room 7 okay?” I croak. She glances away from me, perhaps at Cameron, whom I can no longer see. “Room 7,” she says uncertainly.

My eyelids grow heavy, close. A far-off voice that sounds like my own says, Let’s do a counterfactual.

Valda and my mother and I dangle our feet into the sand at the beach. Valda laments that her sublet has fallen through at the last minute.

“Just stay with me, Val.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “I know you’re tight on space.”

I wave my hand. “Of course. As long as you need.”

A distant voice says, This is not an appropriate counterfactual. The voice sounds like mine, siphoning through a speaker in my ear canal. Another voice pipes in: Aubrey? Are you with us? Can you stay with us?

“Okay!” Valda leans over our mother to cheers her cup of wine to mine. “Permanent sleepover!”

My mother taps her cup to ours and we laugh.

“Not permanent,” Valda promises.

“Temporarily permanent,” I say.

A woman appears beside us on the sand then, forehead bleeding profusely. Blood dried under her nose. Vomit stains on her t-shirt, pants. She looks like me. She gestures at the three of us, addresses someone I can’t see. “You’re not getting this,” she says. “You’re not measuring it.”

Measuring what?, I wonder.

“There’s something you can use here.” She begins to cry. “I know there is.” Her voice cracks, her edges blur. “Please,” she turns a hazy yellow. “Please.” She flashes a blinding chartreuse and is gone. 

Someone down the beach turns on a portable speaker and Celine Dion comes through, singing about butterflies and heaven. From somewhere far-off, voices I dimly recognize.

How good I’m making you feel.

Oh yeah.

So good.

The post I’m Broke But I Swear I’m Grateful appeared first on Electric Literature.