I was there in the cheap seats when the man with Boston 
on his back tackled the giant bug. A shaded skyline that enfolded 
 
his shoulders, revealed when he frenzied his shirt over his head 
after Nathan Horton scored in the second—the Ontarian 
 
dispatching the puck so absolutely the net was compelled 
to take it in. As if to make something belong, you hack hard as you can. 
 
From the terrace level I cheered too—not for the goal but to make 
myself known. Displaced New Englanders never stop needing 

to tell you where they’re from. The bug was from Tampa—a woman 
named Kelly in a 10-foot foam exoskeleton who silly-stringed a man 
 
when his team was down and away from home. So fervent for a city 
he needled it under his skin. As security walked him out, he spiked 
 
a finger in her face—not Kelly’s but the bug’s, with the unwatching 
eyes—and snarled as the crowd cheered his ejection. Hockey 
 
gets violent. Players brawl. The refs allow it, the us-and-them-ing, 
and we take it for camaraderie: the refs, and the fans, and even me, 
 
indifferent to the game but not the need. Even Kelly, though it cost her 
the job. Now she lives in Chicago, custom-crafting mascot costumes 

designed to ride light on one's frame, and all machine washable.
Horton eventually got traded to Toronto, never leaving
 
the injured list, but I hope Canada consoled him. The Bruins took 
their loss and headed north, same as we would later that year, 

in a U-Haul heavy with everything. The tattooed man lives forever 
in a video online. In my memory, I’m right across the aisle, close enough 

to hear him scream Stanley Cup into the bug’s meshed mouth. 
But I’ve watched the clip a dozen times and I’m nowhere to be found.

Self-Portrait with Vermont Forge’s Heirloom Weeder

that I bought online one night, unable to sleep
and again intent on wresting order 
from the mess. On uprooting 
clover—even the four-leaf. I don’t believe 

in luck, maybe because I’ve mostly had it. I do 
believe in knuckling down. 
Yesterday, I potted the sprouted pit of a stone 
fruit I pulled from the compost. 

I’ll overwinter it in the basement 
where I can fret about its chances every time
I run on the treadmill. 
Exercise is supposed to be good for sleep. 

And lavender, though I cut mine back 
too hard and it’s not pulling 
through. I wish the garden gave me more
time to make good. Five months if I’m lucky—

not that luck exists. Episcopalians 
have prayers for the Natural Order, 
praising the God who fills all living things 
with plenteousness 

and I consider my plenty and if I’d make a good
Episcopalian and what else might be available
at Vermont Forge, 
what other instruments they make 

that could help me. Because in order
to endure, clover can’t be anything
but persistent—
like the faithful, reciting the words of St. Francis, 

who is said to have left his garden
wild at the edges and who begged of his God: 
Make me an instrument 
of peace.

The post The Fragile Pride of the Displaced New Englander 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.

She is the hairiest girl in North America. This is why he sold all his belongings, hitched five rides on five different vehicles with wheels, and arrived at her doorstep with a speech so polished she couldn’t think of a way to say no. She cleared out the corner of her closet that usually housed her striped scarf collection—a perfectly sized nook for the curled-up body of a full-grown man and his loom. He sleeps there, during the few hours of night when she is stillest, but mostly he stands beside her, his fingers poised for collection. 

In the morning, she rolls out of bed like a tumbleweed. She crouches in front of her floor-length mirror. He crouches behind her. She sprays down all the hair on her body, then begins to lay it back into place. He opens the front pocket of his button-up coat, which he fills with the hairs that fall as she grooms herself. She uses a brush—the kind for horses—to perfect the aerodynamic look that she has been told “suits her figure well.” When she is done, he scrapes and bends the brush until a flat pancake of hair drops onto his lap. Excited, he adds it to his pocket. 

At the coffee shop, he sucks the foam rosetta off the top of her latte. She doesn’t like the texture. He loves the art. She swallows one strand of hair. It curls around her tonsil. Before she can cough it up, he reaches two elegant fingers down her throat, extracts it, shakes off the wetness, and adds it to his pocket. 

All day at work and on the bus and between being at work and being on the bus, she plays with her hair. She stretches and twirls the curls growing from her scalp. Scratches at the fuzz on her kneecaps. Twists the strands hanging from her armpit. All day at her work and on the bus and between her being at work and being on the bus, he catches and collects and then arranges the hairs in his pockets. Long hairs for the inseam, thick ones for the waistband, fine for the hem. 

In the evening, after she showers, he slips his fingers down the drain to dislodge a clump of hair left behind. He has a tool to reach where his fingers cannot, and he operates it deftly, maneuvering it down the pipe, then activating its pincers. The drain belches then swallows the water formerly trapped by the clump. He meticulously rinses the soap from every strand, before sorting them into the piles next to his loom. 

She brushes and blow-dries. He catches. She settles into bed. He collects the hairs that drift into the air as she tosses and turns. When her body finally gives into sleep, he retires to his nook, and takes inventory. Before he rests, he glances up at all the skirts hanging above him. A constellation of inspiration. 

They continue like this for months. 

Three weeks after he has left her and one day after Easter, she walks to CVS for discounted candy. As she is choosing between peanut butter bunnies and marshmallow eggs, she glances down and sees it. She smiles knowingly and repeats to herself the first words he ever spoke to her: “I am going to be the first man to wear a hair skirt on the cover of Vogue, and I need your help.”

Stem of Thorns

At fourteen, my body grew its disagreement from the inside out. When I had finally convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, a stem of thorns lurched from my belly, shivered when it felt the cool air settle around it, then curled its long arm down my leg and rooted there. My father shrieked and wailed and blamed himself and kicked me out of the house. It’s not because I don’t love you, it’s just that, well, you know, your younger siblings . . . he broke off and got real quiet. Then caved: Steve said it could be contagious. Steve was just a man. He was not an expert. 

On Facebook, I found three others, and we all moved into an apartment together. The apartment had big windows that made the whole place smell like warmth. I got a job as a figure model for an artist who sold her drawings to people who were fascinated by my unique look. She made lots of money. I made just enough to pay rent. With the help of my roommates, I learned how to prune myself and photosynthesize and ignore my father’s phone calls. By spring, all of my limbs were in bloom. 

On Sundays, when most of the world took the day off to pray or pretend to pray or watch their children play baseball, we gathered. In what we called The Garden, for obvious reasons, we picked and squished each other’s aphids and exchanged pollen and gossiped about our bosses. 

Most often, we were left alone in The Garden. We had one place, and they had all the others. 

But one week, as I was bending toward the sun, I heard footsteps, then silence, then the sound of air being sucked and compressed through a pair of nostrils. You smell so . . . floral. The torso of the woman behind me was hinged at a ninety-degree angle from the hips, her nose stationed at the entrance of one of my buds, inhibiting my epinasty.

She didn’t say hello. 

I turned to face her, and the wind blew her hair toward me. She smelled like wet denim. I just love the look of it, like, see, she ran her hand down her arm’s smooth skin-casing, We’re so much less interesting. I half nodded, half shook my head, unsure how to respond or otherwise react. She took it as a sign to keep talking. Oh, my mother would just hate you. She opened her fists toward me and then scrunched them back shut, like one would do to make a baby giggle. I let out an uncomfortable grunt-laugh. She’s always going on about your smell and how much of an intrusion it is. She claims it gives her headaches, says that’s the first step to . . . catching it. 

Certain her mother had never been close enough for a smell-induced headache, I made a face that said, That’s crazy, that must be really hard for you, which was the response she wanted. 

She plucked a flower from my arm and tucked it into her hair. 

The flower died by the time she got home, or fell on the way, but the story of her day of experimentation lasted her for years.

The post Hairballs Are My Love Language 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.

The man who’s called me out to pick his lock is lying. He doesn’t live there. I know this, because it’s my apartment.

When I received the message, my first reaction was shock. Not a stomach-churning kind of shock—like when Sarah decided to up and leave after ten years of marriage and told me with nothing but a text—but more a feeling of surprise. That of everyone in this damn city they could steal from, they’d choose me.

I thought about calling the police, but left the number undialed. I guess a part of me was curious. Everything’s already so fucked, I wanted to prod it a bit more just to see what would happen. So now I’m on my way to help a man break into my own home.

When I arrive, he’s sitting on the worn corridor carpet, staring at the ceiling. He’s in his late twenties, wearing tight jeans, a baggy tee featuring a band I’ve never heard of, and an old beanie. He’s a little jittery—understandable, given that he’s about to commit a felony—but all things considered he’s holding it together. It’s a look not so different from that of most of my customers. I used to enjoy watching their concern melt into relief whenever I teased their door open. I’d smile as they stepped over the threshold, arms outstretched as though hugging an old friend. That’s how I used to feel getting home, too. These days, I shuffle Metropolis-like through my front door, past wedding photos, past the jacket that Sarah used to say suited me, past the boomerang from our trip to Australia that we swore we’d learn how to throw. Everything’s preserved, like Pompeii after Vesuvius erupted—except in this case it was Sarah blowing up my life.

The man flashes a fake ID bearing my name. “I appreciate you coming out so quickly,” he says with as much confidence as he can muster.

I stare at him for a moment, pondering my next move. Confronting him’s still an option, of course. There’s no room in those drainpipe jeans of his for a weapon, and I’m sure a combination of old man strength and primal rage would see me through. But the same morbid curiosity that brought me here keeps dragging me along for the ride.

So instead, I sit there, picking the lock with the quiet professionalism I’d give any other customer. After a few minutes, the door springs open.

I wait in the van as he loads his car with my shit: the widescreen TV Sarah and I used to snuggle up in front of; the record player she bought me for my thirtieth; the food processor that’s been collecting dust for a year.

As the man drives away into the night, I step inside. Everything’s gone: not just the expensive stuff, but the small things too. Liquor, coasters, even the damn boomerang. And for the first time in forever, I can breathe a little more easily.

The post Nothing Says Closure Like Being Robbed 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.

You catch your reflection and think: What the fuck? Is that a new bone?

You’d liked it when you were younger—flaunted it, even—the prominent collarbone of a thinner woman. Then came your mother’s fugue summer, when amid all the worry and perplexity and frantic travel, your pulse became visible at the base of your throat.

Maybe something, the doctor said, maybe just underlying structures uncommonly close to the surface. You hadn’t thought of it that way before, but they were, weren’t they? All that visible rigging. Was it grisly? Did it make people squeamish? It struck you as unseemly, indecent, something meant to be private and internal out there for all to see. You became self-conscious. You began to amass a collection of high-necked tops. You began scrutinizing the necks and shoulders of other women during warm months, in exercise classes, in red carpet photos of actresses in strapless gowns. You were trying to understand what’s normal, where you fall in relation.

Next was the emergence of the outer tips of your clavicle and knobs that must be the heads of your humeri. You suspected bone spurs, then looked up “bone spurs” and decided, probably not. No one has been able to explain it. Perhaps it’s premature aging, or another scoliotic disfiguration, a byproduct of your terminally terrible posture, something that might have been stopped had you noticed and course corrected in time. Which is to say: your fault.

It’s hard to know when more tendons in your neck and more mystery bones in your chest and shoulders have emerged, and when you’re just looking too closely, obsessing, growing more and more paranoid. It puts you in mind of that French show where a lake drained to slowly reveal a sunken town.

You imagine being able to wrap your fingers all the way around your clavicle. You imagine rainwater collecting in the hollows, hummingbirds alighting to bathe there. Ha, startle reflex like yours, you’d like to see them try. (A jest! Dear Universe, please do not send birds.)

At night while drifting off to sleep, you begin to observe stirrings. Lying on your belly, arm folded under your chest, you feel a delicate tickle against your palm. You flick on the light, rush to the mirror, and pull aside the collar of your T, but see nothing. This occurs several times before you finally catch a glimpse: something squirming underneath, like your galloping pulse did, but freer, more erratic.

It remains dormant during the day but grows bold at night. Stand still long enough before the mirror and you’ll see tiny bulges probing your skin from inside. You imagine hundreds of feathery legs, like a millipede. You poke your collarbone and it dives away in the other direction, testing the outer limits of your body, or further within, becoming, for once, discreet.

It wants, you think, to be free. Don’t we all. 

To entrap that which would be rid of you, to ensnarl, to imprison, is ethically indefensible, it is morally repugnant. So you go to the kitchen, open the drawer. Your hand hovers: carving knife, paring knife, boning knife. The last of these sounds most appropriate, but you quail before the sharp edge and settle instead for a butter knife. 

What will you become without it? Compressible, you suppose. The way rats can squeeze down their ribs for any point of ingress and octopuses can ooze through any hole not smaller than their eye. This could be the start of a whole new chapter of your life, one featuring cave exploration, wreck diving, and other claustrophobic pursuits.

Before the bathroom mirror, you wedge the butter knife behind your clavicle and begin to pry. At first, it bows and writhes in distress, but you pause to pet it, humming lullabies, and it calms enough to proceed. This hurts more than anticipated. The shaking hands and sobs aren’t helping. Nor is the blood, obscuring everything, making it slick and difficult to gain purchase. No longer able to make out much in the mirror, you might as well stumble into the bathtub, finish this curled up against cool porcelain. 

Twang twang twang snap the tendons. Through the carnage slices something thin, pliable, and coated in gore. A wing! Of course, why didn’t you see it before: it wants to fly. You drop the knife, try to relax, just be open and unresisting. Your part here is done; like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, this struggle may be crucial to its becoming.

It surges, twists. You wonder how much will go, whether just the clavicle or a larger mess of tendon and bone is about to claw free of you. It is so close now.

You try to skip ahead to when the horror will be over, the pain. Not so far in the future, it’s scaling the wall, smearing the white with blood and gristle. You’re tempting it down with a bowl of milk, or sugar water, or raw liver, gently dislodging it from the crown molding with a broom. Assuming you still have control over your arms. Assuming you come out of this as more than abandoned meat, a lonely shell, hollowed and bereft. Be generous, you tell yourself. Be easy and selfless and kind. But when it looses a victorious, breastbone-rattling screech, recognition: this is more than you are willing to give away. 

So you clamp your hands over it and cry, “Don’t leave me, don’t go!” You feel it fighting, as desperate to get away as you are to crush it to yourself. It’s a fierce struggle that carries on for several terrifying, heartbreaking minutes. At last, over your pants of “please, please, please,” you feel it subside, go still once more, and surrender under your bloody, trembling hands.

The post My Skeleton Thinks It’s Better Off Alone 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.

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Chinese-American

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It Is Faster to Get to No Than Yes

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The post I May Be a Snake But I’ll Never Become Your Purse 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. 

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