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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you smell that, shifu? Something floral?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

United States.

Where in the US? New York? Los Angeles?

Seattle.

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

I’m a photographer.

Like for weddings?

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

For art. I’m an artist.

You make art!

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

You have kids?

No.

Married though?

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

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

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

Your husband is us Chinese or a laowai?

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

So he speaks Chinese?

He can understand some.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were you saying behind my back? Yuchen teased.

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

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

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

Someone asked Yuchen whether she wanted whiskey or beer.

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

Are you preparing for pregnancy? Xiaohan asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Did you come for work this time? Xiaohan asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should we go in? he suggested.

Yuchen didn’t want to.

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

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

You think she was trying to set us up?

You’re still married, no?

Yuchen waited a beat too long before answering.

I am. You? Seeing anyone?

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

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

How did it go?

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

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

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

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

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

How about we ditch this reunion? Lichuan finally proposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I am. What do you think?

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

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

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

Do you always get to a different ending, though?

Not always.

When did you get into game design?

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

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

What is a curator?

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

What kind of photos do you take? he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve always been a very good listener.

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

You don’t?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your husband’s name is Harry, Lichuan said.

Yes. Have I never said his name before?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifu, can we stop for a second?

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

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

What about the side street? Just around the corner.

The taxi driver sighed, signaling for a right turn.

Just half a minute, I promise, Yuchen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grandma Shelly is an elder relative.” 

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

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

“There has to be someone better.”

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

“How old is she?” Bunny demanded.  

I calculated. “Over ninety.”  

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

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

“Was she in the Holocaust?” 

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

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

Bunny ignored me. “Is she nice?” 

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

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

Already, our hypothetical visit had turned into a dare.

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

“We have to go see her, Mom. 

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

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

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

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

“Just leave him with Daddy,” she pressed.  

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

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

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

“OK. How?”  

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

Bunny looked at me. “Neither are you.” 

“Right. But I don’t yell about it.” 

“Grandma doesn’t yell about it.” 

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

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

Bunny looked absently past me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Aunt Lillian was so angry. 

But she was also not speaking nonsense. 

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

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

It wasn’t. Well, it hadn’t been.     

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

“Does she look like Grandma?” Bunny asked. 

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

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

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

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

“She rents, Nat.” 

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

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

“You’ll see.” 

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

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

“Here we are!” I called out brightly. 

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

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

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

I nudged my resistant brood forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lillian seemed pleased to hear it, her mouth twitching. 

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

Nat chuckled.  

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

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

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

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

When Lillian returned, Bunny pushed her brother aside.

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

“Me too!” sang Milt. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bunny loves an egg bagel,” I said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I smiled. “That’s wonderful.” 

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

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

This, Lillian ignored, reaching for the cream cheese.  

“Come eat,” I told Nat.  

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

“Not before dinner,” I said.   

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

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

Milt screamed. 

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

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

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

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

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

“What year were you born?” 

“1931.” 

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

“Where were you born?” 

“The Brownsville and East New York Hospital.” 

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

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

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

“She has to write it,” I said.   

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

“What did Bunny get?” Milt asked. 

“A joke,” Lillian said. 

“I want a joke!” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lillian sized me up from across the table.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I do that for you, Lillian?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of us spoke. 

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

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

I nodded. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a shame,” Lillian murmured. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bunny shook her head. “Why?” 

“They think I’m a monster.” 

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

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

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

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

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

Aunt Lillian raised her eyebrows. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lillian snorted. 

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

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

Bunny lowered her head and spoke to the table.  

“You,” she said.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What exactly are you talking about?”  

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

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

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

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

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

“I pooped,” Milton declared with grim pride.  

“Not in the tub!” Nat clarified.  

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

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

“Sadie,” said Nat.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please don’t.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t,” Nat murmured. 

“I know you don’t,” I said sharply. 

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

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

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

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

He sounded so proud of himself. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Sadie. You have to buckle.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least I have Judy on speed dial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tough morning?” Shruti asks with concern.

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

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

“Sorry, hon. Missed it,” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We went to high school together.”

“Were you friends?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was, at first, a triumphant return.

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

What a wonderful idea this was!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I called Judy in a cold panic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does anything hurt?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sundström,” said a female voice.

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

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

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

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

“Is it about how I vote?” she asked.

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

“Do I get paid?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

“Yes, ordinary jelly.”

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

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

Another silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I selected Bob from the options on my screen.

“Can you think of any other brands?”

“Er . . . Önos, maybe?”

“Önos, good. Any more?”

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

“I’ll add it to the list. Any more?”

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

“Perfect. Can you think of any more?”

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

“No, that’s it I think.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time the silence went on for quite a while.

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

“Do you remember what brand it was?”

“These are difficult questions.”

“There’s no hurry.”

“Can you help me out with some brands?”

Her desire to get it right was touching.

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

She sighed. This was going to take some time.

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

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

“Fantastic.”

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

“Is that it?” she said optimistically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s on submission?” Andros asked.

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

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

“Stories?”

“Novel.”

“Ah.”

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

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

“And do you have representation?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

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

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

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

“I’m a nanny.”

“You like that work?”

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

“Soon you’ll sell your book.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Novels?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will,” she said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I can’t take it—”

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

“I’ll bring it back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t dare answer.

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

“What’s it about?”

“Myself,” he said. “What else?”

She smiled. 

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

Catherine waited, reminding herself not to look too eager. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you have a drawer?”

He was smiling, so she smiled, too. 

“Yes, I have a drawer.”

“Put it in that drawer.”

“Okay.” 

“Something new.”

“Okay,” she said. “Something new.”

She wrote down trust, drawer, new.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s just the truth,” Andros said.

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

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

“My time is yours,” he said.

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

“There really aren’t.”

She smiled, unsure if she should believe him.

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

“Read?”

He laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss you too, Daddy.

When can you come visit your old man?

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

You know I’m so proud of you, baby.

I know, Daddy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Write closer,” said Andros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mary Beth?”

“My wife.”

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

“Does she write?” Catherine asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re visiting?” Catherine asked.

“No, not visiting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andros had never lied to her. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who should I say is calling, Miss?”

“Catherine. Meyer.”

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

“I didn’t either.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come in.”

Catherine followed her inside, and Jules shut the door slowly, taking care to lock it without making much sound. Behind Jules was a small kitchen; the counter was clear but the sink full of dishes, and a sprawling pothos was on the windowsill. It smelled like burnt eggs. The place was silent in a way that made her certain they were alone. 

“Why do you want to see me?” Jules asked her.

Catherine didn’t have a good answer, she knew that. She hadn’t been honest with herself. She knew was never going to meet Andros today. 

“Why did you let me up?” Catherine asked in return.

Jules shook her head with a smirk, as if still deciding whether or not she wanted Catherine here.

“We can sit in my room,” said Jules.

Jules led her down the small hallway, past a modest living room overrun with books, then two closed doors, one of which was surely Andros’s office, where he read her work. The bathroom door was open, showing a mess; the shelf next to the sink was full of products without lids and a purple towel lay on the floor.

Jules’s room was painted dark green, and it had one large window and several small lamps, Christmas lights and tapestries that gave it a collegiate feel. There were a few piles of books here, too—mostly graphic novels, by the looks of them, and art books. Catherine noted the bright colors of the spines, the funny fonts of the titles. One on the desk looked like a novel about a robot, maybe even Young Adult. Catherine had never even thought to write something like that. It had truly never entered her mind.

The walls were nearly completely covered with unframed art: drawings, sketches, paintings, all tacked up. The wall must be wrecked with holes. Catherine’s mother would have a fit if she did that.

“You made these?” Catherine asked, standing in front of a portrait. It was charcoal, of an old woman. She had dark bags under her eyes and folds in her skin, a sour expression, her features seemed intentionally exaggerated.

“From a long time ago, mostly,” said Jules, sitting crosslegged on her unmade bed. 

“You’re so talented.”

“Who isn’t?” Jules asked, with a shrug. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Suddenly, Catherine felt the exact same way. All her talent, whatever amount she possessed, hadn’t gotten her anywhere but here in this room, with a dead novel and mediocre stories written for an old man and some wife. 

Catherine looked over the other portraits on the wall, some smaller than her hand. The ones with color were bright, green skin with blue lips, long chins and crooked noses. Catherine wondered if any of these portraits were of her sister Iris, but she didn’t want to ask.

“I did give him your story, if you were wondering,” said Jules. “I didn’t destroy it or anything.”

Catherine hadn’t even thought about Jules not delivering it like she said she would.

“Did your mother read it?” Catherine asked. “He told me it was for her.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think she did.”

“Oh,” said Catherine, feeling ridiculous in her disappointment. 

“I read it, though,” said Jules. “He just leaves them on the table. I can’t help myself.”

Her stomach dropped. Catherine swallowed.

“Have you read all of mine?” she asked.

Jules smiled. “I read whatever he leaves around. His other students’ stuff, I’ve read some, but they bore me, I don’t usually get past the first page. Yours didn’t bore me.”

Catherine took it in, imagining her pages here, in this apartment as it was, with the purple towel on the floor and the burnt egg smell. She imagined Jules reading the first page while standing in the kitchen, a slice of cheese in her hand, maybe, turning the page, then bringing it into this room, taking it into her bed. Catherine hadn’t written the stories for someone like Jules. She wanted to ask more about what she thought of them, what she thought was missing—Jules might be the person who could finally tell her—but she didn’t want to think about her writing now. 

She would write again, she knew that. Andros didn’t get to have the power to make her stop. Nobody did. But she might need to not think about her writing for a long time.

Catherine felt strange still standing. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“What do you do? Are you in school?” Catherine wanted to know everything Jules would tell her.

“I got laid off last year,” said Jules, though she didn’t say from where. They sat in silence for a moment, and Catherine tried to sense what kind of silence it was. Jules was still looking at her. Catherine didn’t want to leave her bed.

 “Nobody’s ever drawn a portrait of me before,” said Catherine.

“Are you asking for one?”

Catherine realized that she was. It had never once occurred to her that no portrait of her existed anywhere in the world, and it suddenly seemed like a very sad thing. She discovered she wanted one desperately.

“You have a good face,” said Jules. “I haven’t tried a face like yours. With how your eyes are like that, down at the edges.”

She said it so matter of factly, not a compliment or an insult. Catherine wasn’t sure whether or not she should say thank you, but she liked knowing Jules thought her face was good. Catherine never thought too much about her face; she wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t ugly, it didn’t serve her or hurt her. Catherine closed her eyes. Jules moved closer and touched her hair, angled her chin down. It was more the touch of a mother than a lover, a correcting touch.

Jules reached for a black pencil, a piece of paper and secured it to a clip board. She leaned against the bed and held it in her lap, a posture she’d clearly assumed many times before. Catherine wasn’t sure what to do with herself, with her hands or her gaze.

“Can you look toward the window a little?” Jules asked. Catherine obeyed.

“Now look back at me,” said Jules. Catherine turned but kept her eyes downcast.

Pencil touched the paper; the sound sent a shiver through Catherine.

“He might be home soon,” said Jules.

Catherine nodded once. She had no idea what she would say to him and what he would say to her, but she did want to see the look on his face when he saw her here. She wanted to see the revision of who he thought she was play out over his eyes. He hadn’t seen her at all, of course he hadn’t: she’d shown him someone else. She wanted to watch him realize that.

But that wasn’t why she was here; she wasn’t here to spite him. She didn’t care about him right now. He didn’t exist. 

“This might not look the way you want it to look,” said Jules.

“I don’t know how I want it to look.”

“Shh,” said Jules. “I’m going to do your mouth first.”

Catherine stayed very, very still, and listened to the pencil on the paper. 

The post This Famous Writer Is Ruining Her Writing appeared first on Electric Literature.

At first it had been Uncle Vernon’s ambition, not Stella’s. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. ‘I’ll not chase moonbeams,’ she told him.

Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out ‘How now brown cow’ behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.

She came home and shut herself in her bedroom off the scullery and spouted speeches. She sat at the tea table and dropped her cup to the saucer, spotting the good cloth with tannic acid, wailing that it might be a poison that the Friar Lawrence had administered. When Uncle Vernon shouted at her she said she wasn’t old enough to control either her reflexes or her emotions. She had always had a precise notion of what could be expected of her.

Lily had imagined that the girl was merely learning to speak properly and was dismayed to hear it was called Dramatic Art. She fretted lest Stella build up hopes only to have them dashed.

Then Stella failed her mock school certificate and her teachers decided it wasn’t worth while entering her for the real thing. Uncle Vernon went off to the school prepared to bluster, and returned convinced. They’d agreed she had the brains but not the application.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ he told Lily. ‘We both know it’s useless reasoning with her.’

He made enquiries and pulled strings. After the letter came Stella spent four extra Saturday mornings at Crane Hall being coached by Mrs Ackerley in the telephone scene from A Bill of Divorcement. Mrs Ackerley, dubious about her accent, had thought a Lancashire drama more suitable, preferably a comedy; the girl was something of a clown.

Stella would have none of it. She was a mimic, she said, and sure enough she took off Mrs Ackerley’s own smoky tone of voice to perfection. Admittedly she was a little young for the part, but, as she shrewdly observed, this would only stress her versatility. The audition was fixed for the third Monday in September.

Ten days before, over breakfast, she told Uncle Vernon she was having second thoughts.

‘Get away with you,’ he said. ‘It’s too late to change things now.’ He wrote out a shopping list and gave her a ten-shilling note. Half an hour later when he came up into the dark hall, jingling the loose coppers in his pocket, he found her huddled on the stairs, one plump knee wedged between the banister rails. He was annoyed because she knew she wasn’t supposed to hang about this part of the house, not unless she was in her good school uniform. She was staring at the damp patch that splodged the leaf-patterned wallpaper above the telephone.

He switched on the light and demanded to know what she was playing at. At this rate there’d be nothing left on Paddy’s vegetable barrow but a bunch of mouldy carrots. Did she think this was any way to conduct a business?

She was in one of her moods and pretended to be lost in thought. He could have hit her. There was nothing of her mother in her face, save perhaps for the freckles on her cheekbones.

‘Carry on like this,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘and you’ll end up behind the counter at Woolworth’s.’ It was foolish of him to goad her. It was not beyond her to run towards such employment in order to spite him.

‘You push me too hard,’ she said. ‘You want reflected glory.’

He raised his arm then, but when she pushed past him with swimming eyes his world was drowned in tears.

He telephoned Harcourt and sought reassurance, in a roundabout way. ‘Three bottles of disinfectant,’ he said, reading from the list in front of him. ‘Four pounds of carbolic soap . . . one dozen candles . . . two dozen toilet rolls . . . George Lipman’s put in a word with his sister. On Stella’s behalf.’

‘’Fraid I can only manage a dozen,’ Harcourt said. ‘And they’re shop-soiled.’

‘Am I doing the right thing, I ask myself?’

‘I don’t see what else is open to her,’ said Harcourt. ‘Not if the school won’t have her back.’

‘Not won’t,’ corrected Vernon. ‘It’s more that they don’t feel she’ll gain any benefit from staying on. And you know Stella. Once her mind’s made up . . .’

‘Indeed I do,’ said Harcourt. Although he had never met the girl he often remarked to his wife that he could take an exam on the subject, if pushed. His extensive knowledge of Stella was based on the regular progress reports provided by Vernon when making his monthly order for bathroom and wash-house supplies.

‘She caused an uproar the other week,’ confided Vernon, ‘over the hoteliers’ dinner dance: Lily got her hands on some parachute silk and took her to that dressmaker in Duke Street to be fitted for a frock. Come the night, with the damn thing hanging up on the back door to get rid of the creases, she refused to wear it. She was adamant. In the end none of us went. I expect you all wondered where we were.’

‘We did,’ lied Harcourt.

‘She took exception to the sleeves. According to her they were too puffy. She said she wasn’t going out looking as if her arms belonged to an all-in wrestler. I never saw her in it, but Lily said she was a picture. She’s burgeoning, you know.’

‘Is she?’ Harcourt said, and thought briefly of his own daughter who, in comparison with Stella, often seemed an imitation of the real thing. He had no idea whether his daughter was burgeoning or not; night and day she walked with rounded shoulders, clutching a handbag to her chest. ‘And how’s the cough?’ he asked. He listened to the faint scratching of Vernon’s moustache as it brushed against the mouthpiece.

‘No problem at all,’ Vernon said. ‘Absolutely none. Kind of you to ask. I’m much obliged to you,’ and he ordered a new bucket and a tin of bath scourer before replacing the receiver.

He told Lily that Harcourt believed they were doing the best thing. She was chopping up a rabbit in the scullery. ‘Harcourt thinks she was born for it,’ he said.

Lily was unconvinced. ‘People like us don’t go to plays,’ she said. ‘Let alone act in them.’

‘But she’s not one of us, is she?’ he retorted, and what answer was there to that?

They came down the steps as though walking a tightrope, Stella pointing her toes in borrowed shoes, Uncle Vernon leaning backwards, purple waistcoat bulging above the waistband of his trousers, one hand under her elbow, the other holding aloft a black umbrella against the rain.

It was a terrible waistcoat, made out of pieces of untrimmed felt that Lily had bought at a salvage sale with the purpose of jollying up the cushions in the residents’ lounge. She had meant to sew triangles, squares and stars onto the covers, only she hadn’t got round to it.

‘Leave me alone,’ the girl said, shaking herself free. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

‘So,’ Uncle Vernon said, ‘what’s new?’ But his tone was good-humoured.

The three o’clock aeroplane, the one that climbed from Speke and circled the city on five-minute trips, had just bumped overhead. Alarmed at its passage the pigeons still swam above the cobblestones; all, that is, save the one-legged bird who hopped in the gutter, beak pecking at the rear mudguard of the taxi. It was such a dark day that the neon sign above the lintel of the door had been flashing on and off since breakfast; the puddles winked crimson. Later, after he had visited the house, Meredith said that only brothels went in for red lights.

Spat upon by the rain, Stella covered her head with her hands; she knew she was watched from an upstairs window. Earlier that morning Lily had sat her down at the kitchen table and subjected her to the curling tongs. The tongs, fading in mid-air from rust to dull blue, had snapped at the locks of her hair and furled them up tight against her skull. Then, released in fits and starts, the singed curls, sausage-shaped, flopped upon the tacked-on collar of her velvet frock.

‘In the grave,’ Stella had said, ‘my hair and nails will continue to grow.’

Lily had pulled a face, although later she intended to repeat the remark for the benefit of the commercial traveller with the skin grafts. He, more than most, even if it was a bit close to the bone, would appreciate the observation. To her way of thinking it was yet another indication of the girl’s cleverness, a further example, should one be needed, of her ferocious, if morbid, imagination.

Uncle Vernon paid off the cab right away. The arrangement had been struck the night before after a turbulent discussion in which Stella had declared she’d prefer to die rather than tip the driver. ‘I’ll go on the tram instead,’ she said.

‘It’ll rain,’ Uncle Vernon told her. ‘You’ll arrive messed up.’

She said she didn’t care. There was something inside her, she intimated, that would become irretrievably sullied if she got involved with the business of tipping.

‘You just give him sixpence,’ Uncle Vernon had argued. ‘Ninepence at the most. I can’t see your difficulty.’

To which Stella had retorted that she found the whole transaction degrading. In her opinion it damaged the giver quite as much as the receiver.

‘Well, don’t tip him, you fool,’ Uncle Vernon had countered. ‘Just chuck the exact amount through the window and make a run for it.’

Debating anything with the girl was a lost cause. She constantly played to the gallery. No one was denying she could have had a better start in life, but then she wasn’t unique in that respect and it was no excuse for wringing the last drop of drama out of the smallest incident. Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.

Mostly her behaviour smacked of manipulation, of opportunism. He’d known people like her in the army, people from working-class backgrounds, who’d read a few books and turned soft. If she had been a boy he’d have taken his belt to her, or at least the back of his hand.

All that costly nonsense of keeping the landing light burning into the small hours. Lily said it was because she remembered that business of the night lights—for God’s sake, the child had been nine months old. He put it down to that poetry she was so fond of, all those rhymes and rhythms, those couplets of melancholy and madness that inflamed her imagination. Nor was he altogether sure she was afraid of the dark. Why, during the blackout, when the whole city was drowned in black ink, she had often gone out into the back yard and stood for an hour at a time, keening under the alder bush. And what about the time he had come home on leave and she had somehow slipped out of the shelter and he and the air-raid warden had found her crouched against the railings of the cemetery, clapping her hands together as the sugar warehouses on the Dock Road burst like paper bags and the sparks snapped like fire crackers against the sky?

She had always been perverse, had always, in regard to little things—things which normal people took in their stride—exhibited a degree of opposition that was downright absurd. He hadn’t forgotten her histrionics following the removal of the half-basin on the landing. She had accused him of mutilating her past, of ripping out her memories. He’d had to bite on his tongue to stop himself from blurting out that in her case this was all to the good. There were worse things than the disappearance of basins. It had brought home to him how unreliable history was, in that the story, by definition, was always one-sided.

Nor would he forgive in a hurry the slap-stick scene resulting from the felling of the alder bush in the dismal back yard, when she had run from the basement door like a madwoman and flung herself between axe and bush. Ma Tang from next door, believing he was murdering the girl, had shied seed potatoes at him from the wash-house roof. Ma Tang’s father, who was put out to roost at dawn with his scant hair done up in a pigtail, had sent his grandson for the police.

The basin had been a liability. More than one lodger, returning late at night and caught short, had utilised it for a purpose not intended. As for the alder bush, a poor sick thing with blighted leaves, it was interfering with the drains. On both occasions, and there had been many others, Stella’s face had betrayed an emotion so inappropriate, assumed an expression of such false sensibility, that it was almost comic. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely assumed; there had been moments when he could have sworn she felt something.

For her part, Lily had tried to wheedle Stella into letting Uncle Vernon accompany her to the theatre. She implied it was no more than his due. If he hadn’t known Rose Lipman’s brother when they were boys growing up rough together in Everton, Stella wouldn’t have got a look-in. And it wasn’t as though he would be intrusive. He was a sensitive man; even that butcher in Hardman Street, who had palmed him off with the horsemeat, had recognised as much. He would just slope off up the road and wait for her, meekly, in Brown’s Café.

‘Meekly,’ Stella had repeated, and given one of her laughs. She’d threatened to lock herself in her room if he insisted on going with her. Her door didn’t boast such a thing as a lock, but her resolution was plain enough. She said she would rather pass up her chance altogether than go hand in hand towards it with Uncle Vernon. ‘I’m not play-acting,’ she assured him.

Stung, though she hadn’t allowed him her hand for donkey’s years, not since he had walked her backwards and forwards from the infant school on Mount Pleasant, he had rocked sideways in his wicker chair beside the kitchen range and proclaimed her selfish. A sufferer from the cold, even in summertime, he habitually parked himself so close to the fire that one leg of the chair was charred black. Lily said he had enough diamond patterns on his shins to go without socks. The moment would come, she warned him, when the chair would give up the ghost under his jiggling irritation and pitch him onto the coals.

‘Keep calm,’ she advised, ‘it’s her age.’

‘I’m forced to believe in heredity,’ he fumed. ‘She’s a carbon copy of bloody Renée.’ It wasn’t true; the girl didn’t resemble anyone they knew.

When he shoved Stella into the cab he hesitated before slamming the door. He was dressed in his good clothes and there was still time for her to undergo a change of heart. She stared straight ahead, looking righteous.

All the same, when the taxi, girdled by pigeons, swooshed from the kerb she couldn’t resist peeking out of the rear window to catch a last glimpse of him. He stood there under the mushroom of his gamp, exaggeratedly waving his hand to show he wished her well, and too late she blew him a grudging unseen kiss as the cab turned the corner and skidded across the tramlines into Catherine Street. She had got her own way but she didn’t feel right. There’s a price to pay for everything, she thought.

Uncle Vernon went back indoors and began to hammer a large cup hook into the scullery door. Hearing the racket, Lily came running, demanding to know what he was doing. He was still wearing his tank beret and his best trousers. ‘It’s to hang things from, woman,’ he said, viciously hammering the screw deeper into the wood, careless of the paint he was chipping off the door.

‘Like what?’ she said.

‘Like tea towels,’ he said. ‘What did you think? Would you prefer it if I hung myself?’

Lily told him he needed his head examining.

The journey into town took less than ten minutes; it was a quarter past three by the Oyster Bar clock when Stella arrived in Houghton Street. She jumped out of the taxi and was through the stage door in an instant. If she had given herself time to think, paused to thank the driver or comb her hair, she might have run off in the opposite direction and wasted her moment forever.

‘Stella Bradshaw,’ she told the door-keeper. ‘The producer expects me. My uncle knows Miss Lipman.’

It came out wrong. All she had meant to say was that she had an appointment with Meredith Potter. While she was speaking, a thin man wearing a duffel coat, followed by a stout man in mackintosh and galoshes, came round the bend of the stairs. They would have swept out of the door and left her high and dry if the doorman hadn’t called out, ‘Mr Potter, sir. A young lady to see you.’

‘Ah,’ cried Meredith, and he pivoted on his heel and stood there, the fist of his right hand pressed to his forehead. ‘We’re just off to tea,’ he said, and frowned, as though he’d been kept waiting for hours.

‘I’m exactly on time,’ Stella said. ‘My appointment was for 3:15.’ When she got to know him better she realised he’d been hoping to avoid her.

‘You’d better come through,’ Meredith said, and walked away down the passage into a gloomy room that seemed to be a furniture depository.

The man in the galoshes was introduced as Bunny. He was the stage manager. Stella wasn’t sure whether he was important or not; his mackintosh was filthy. He gave her a brief, sweet smile and after shaking her hand wiped his own on a khaki handkerchief.

In spite of the numerous chairs and the horsehair sofa set at right angles to the nursery fire-guard, there was nowhere to sit. The chairs climbed one upon the other, tipping the ceiling. A man’s bicycle, its spokes warped and splashed with silver paint, lay upturned across the sofa. There was a curious smell in the room, a mixture of distemper, rabbit glue and damp clothing. Stella lounged against a cocktail cabinet whose glass frontage was engraved with the outline of a naked woman. I’m not going to be cowed, she thought. Not by nipples.

The stage manager perched himself on the brass rail of the fire-guard and stared transfixed at his galoshes. Meredith lit a cigarette and, flicking the spent match into a dark corner, closed his eyes. It was plain to Stella that neither man liked the look of her.

‘Miss Lipman told me to come,’ she said. ‘I’ve not had any real experience, but I’ve got a gold medal awarded by the London Academy of Dramatic Art. And I’ve been on the wireless in Children’s Hour. I used to travel by train to Manchester and when the American airmen got on at Burtonwood they unscrewed the lightbulbs in the carriages. Consequently I can do Deep South American and Chicago voices. There’s a difference, you know. And my Irish accent is quite good. If I had a coconut I could imitate the sound of a runaway horse.’

‘Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have one about me,’ said Meredith, and dropped ash onto the floor. Above his head, skew-whiff on a nail, hung the head of some animal with horns.

‘Actually,’ she amended, ‘I’ve only got the certificate in gold lettering. They stopped making the medals on account of the war.’

‘That damned war,’ murmured Bunny.

‘My teacher wanted me to do something from Hobson’s Choice or Love on the Dole, but I’ve prepared the telephone bit from A Bill of Divorcement instead.’

‘It’s not a play that leaps instantly to the mind,’ Meredith said.

‘Hallo . . . hallo,’ began Stella. She picked up a china vase from the shelf of the cocktail cabinet and held it to her ear.

‘Everyone is always out when you most need them,’ observed Bunny.

‘Kindly tell his Lordship I wish to speak to him immediately,’ Stella said. A dead moth fell out of the vase and stuck like a brooch to her collar. Meredith was undoing the toggles of his coat to reveal a bow tie and a pink ribbon from which dangled a monocle. Save for Mr Levy, who kept the philatelist shop in Hackins Hay, Stella had never known anyone who wore an eye-piece.

‘Tell his Lordship . . .’ she repeated, and faltered, for now Meredith had taken his watch from his vest pocket and was showing it to Bunny. ‘It’s tea-time,’ he remarked. ‘You’d better come along,’ and gripping Stella by the elbow he marched her back up the passage and thrust her out into the rain.

It was embarrassing walking the streets three-abreast. The pavements were narrow and choked with people and Meredith often slid away, dodging in an elaborate figure of eight in and out of the crowd. Stella wasn’t used to courtesy and she misunderstood his attempts to shield her from the kerb; she thought he was trying to lose her. Presently she fell behind, stumping doggedly along: up, down, one foot in the gutter. Meredith, the hood of his duffel coat pulled high, pranced like a monk ahead of her. She listened as he conducted an intense and private conversation, sometimes bellowing as he strained to be heard above the noise of the traffic. Someone or something had upset Bunny. He seemed to be in pain, or else despair.

‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’

‘It always comes as a shock,’ agreed Meredith.

‘It hurts. My God, it hurts.’

‘If you remember, I had a similar experience in Windsor.’

‘My God, how it hurts.’

‘You poor fellow,’ shouted Meredith, as a woman trundling a pram, laden with firewood, prised them apart.

On the bomb site beside Reeces Restaurant a man in a sack lay wriggling in the dirt. His accomplice, dressed only in a singlet and a pair of ragged trousers, was binding the sack with chains. When he stood upright the blue tail of a tattooed dragon jumped on his biceps.

‘I shall die under it,’ said Bunny.

They had tea on the second floor of Fuller’s Café. Mounting the stairs, Stella had started to cough, had discreetly wiped her lips on Lily’s handkerchief and studied it, just in case it came away spotted with blood. She had known Meredith was watching. She could tell he was concerned by the urgent manner in which he propelled her through the door.

When Bunny removed his mackintosh the belt swung out and tipped over the milk jug on the table nearest to the hat stand. The pink cloth was so boldly starched the milk wobbled in a tight globule beside the sugar bowl. Bunny didn’t notice. The occupants of the table, three elderly ladies hung with damp fox furs, apologised.

Stella said she needed to keep her coat on.

‘You’re drenched,’ protested Meredith.

‘It’s not important,’ she said. Dressing that morning neither she nor Lily had bargained on her frock being seen. It was her best frock, her party frock, but the velvet attracted the dust. Time enough to buy new clothes, Lily had said, when and if she got the job.

As Meredith advanced between the tables a little shiver of excitement disturbed the room. The women, the afternoon shoppers, recognised him. There was a hitching of veils, a snapping of handbags as they slipped out powder compacts and began to titivate; pretending not to notice, they were all eyes. The manageress made a point of coming over to explain there had been a run on confectioneries. She boasted she was in control of two Eccles cakes. Mr Potter had only to say the word and they were his. ‘How very kind,’ he murmured.

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Stella, and stared into the distance as though she glimpsed things not visible to other people. Almost immediately she adjusted her lips into a half smile; often when she thought she was looking soulful Uncle Vernon accused her of sullenness. She felt ill at ease and put it down to Meredith’s monocle. One eye monstrously enlarged, he was studying the wall beyond her left shoulder. She tried to say something, but her tongue wouldn’t move. It was disconcerting to be struck dumb. Ever since she could remember she had chatted to Lily’s lodgers. Most of them had spoken dully of their homes, of the twin beds with matching valances; the sort of vegetables that grew best on their allotments. They had flourished hazy snapshots of wives with plucked eyebrows, of small children in striped bathing costumes messing about in rock pools. A few, in drink, had overstepped the mark and attempted to kiss her; one had succeeded, in the hall when she was pulling the dead leaves off the aspidistra. Though she had made a face and afterwards scrubbed her mouth on the roller towel, she hadn’t minded. None of them had ignored her.

‘How can I shut my eyes to it?’ moaned Bunny. ‘Disloyalty is unforgivable.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Meredith. ‘There are worse things. Malice, for instance.’ The monocle jumped from the bone of his brow and bounced against his shirt front.

‘I know a man,’ Stella said, ‘who never closes his eyes. He can’t, not even when he’s asleep. His aeroplane crash-landed in Holland and his face caught fire. They peeled skin from his shoulders to fashion new eyelids, but they didn’t work.’ She opened her own eyes wide and stopped blinking.

‘How interesting,’ said Meredith.

‘When his sweetheart came to visit him she threw him over and omitted to return the ring. Afterwards she sent him a letter saying she knew she was a bad lot but she was afraid the eyelids would get passed on to the children. He says the worst thing is people thinking he looks fierce when most days he’s weeping inside.’

‘Oh hell,’ Bunny said. Scales of Eccles cake drifted from his shocked mouth.

Meredith appeared to be listening, but Stella could tell his mind was wandering. She had the curious feeling she reminded him of someone else, someone he couldn’t put a name to. Earlier she had thought him insipid: his complexion too fair, his expression too bland. He had taken so little notice of her that she suspected he was perceptive only about himself. Now, in the slight flaring of his nostrils, the disdainful slant of his head, she saw that he judged her naive. But for the discoloration of those tapering, nicotine-stained fingers drumming the tablecloth, she might have been afraid of him.

For a moment she considered giving way to another fit of coughing; instead she began to tell him about Lily and Uncle Vernon and the Aber House Hotel. She had nothing to lose. It was obvious he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to recite her set piece from A Bill of Divorcement.

She admitted it wasn’t exactly an hotel, more of a boarding-house really, in spite of the new bath Uncle Vernon had installed two years ago. The sign had flickered over the door when Lily bought the house, and as the hotel was already known by that name in the trade it would have been foolish to change it. Lily had painted the window-frames and door cream, but the travellers walked past, bemused at the alteration, and Uncle Vernon reverted to red. Lily thought it looked garish. Originally Lily and her sister Renée had intended to run the business together, only Renée soon put the kibosh on the intention by skedaddling off to London. She wasn’t a great loss to the enterprise. Nobody denied she had style, but who needed style in a back street in Liverpool? The travellers, faced with those pictures in the hall, those taffeta cushions squashed against the bed heads, began to drop away. Several regulars, including the soap man with one arm and the cork salesman with the glass eye, were seen lugging suitcases of samples into Ma Tang’s next door.

‘What sort of pictures?’ enquired Bunny.

‘Engravings,’ Stella said, ‘of damsels in distress with nothing on, tied to trees without any explanation. Besides, her voice got on their nerves. It was too ladylike. She came back once and it was a mistake. After that trouble with the night lights, when the neighbours reported her, her days were numbered.’

‘What did the neighbours report her for?’ asked Bunny. He wasn’t the only one intrigued by the conversation. The women at the next table were sitting bolt upright, heads cocked.

‘Things,’ Stella said. ‘Things I can’t divulge.’ She looked at Meredith and caught him yawning. ‘Later on, Uncle Vernon stepped into the breach. He’s the power behind the throne. He says I’ll do least harm if I’m allowed to go on the stage.’

Bunny professed to like the sound of Uncle Vernon. He said he was evidently a man of hidden depths and it was clear Stella took after him rather than her mother.

‘Oh, but you’re wrong,’ she protested. ‘It must be my mother, for Uncle Vernon’s nothing to me.’

Meredith was still yawning. There was a glint of gold metal in his back teeth as he took a ten-shilling note out of his wallet and waved it at the waitress.

Excusing herself, Stella went to the ladies’ room where she made a show of washing her hands. In the mirror she could see the reflection of the attendant, red curls trapped in a silvery snood, slumped dozing on an upright chair beside the toilet door. There was no more than five pence in the pink saucer on the vanity table. It was not enough to pay for a share in a pot of tea for three, not with a tip and two cakes, and how could she slide it into her pocket without being heard?

Which was better, Meredith taking her for a golddigger, or being arrested for theft? She supposed she could faint. Mrs Ackerley had taught her how to make her muscles go limp, and to act a wardrobe. Meredith was hardly likely to demand a contribution to the bill if she was laid out on the floor. But then she might fall awkwardly, exposing her suspender tops like a streetwalker. I’m my own worst enemy, she thought. Uncle Vernon had offered her money but she had turned up her nose.

She managed to slip three pennies up her sleeve, heart thumping, before she lost her nerve and trailed out into the café to find the two men, coats on, waiting for her by the exit.

In the street Meredith said they would meet again when the season started. Bunny would be in charge of her. ‘But you’ve not seen me act,’ she said, startled; already she had reconciled herself to a career at Woolworth’s. He raised his eyebrows and said he rather thought he had. He told her the theatre secretary would be in touch in due course. She blushed when he shook her hand.

‘I look forward to meeting you again,’ said Bunny gallantly. He kissed her cheek and offered to hail a taxi.

‘I’ve some shopping to do,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick one up later. Uncle Vernon never travels by cab because he finds tipping degrading. Isn’t that foolish? Thank you very much for the tea.’

It was no longer raining, and patches of cold sunlight punctured the clouds. She ran over the road as though she had just spotted someone important to her, and continued to race halfway up Bold Street before stopping to look back. A tram, impeded by a coal cart, blocked her view; yet when it had rattled on she imagined she spied Meredith, hood pulled over his head, striding along Hanover Place in the direction of the river. Deep down she knew it wasn’t him. For the rest of my life, she thought, I shall glimpse you in crowds.

She walked on up the hill towards St Luke’s where she fancied her grandfather had once played the organ. There were purple weeds blowing through the stonework of the smashed tower hanging in giddy steps beneath the sky. Uncle Vernon called it an eyesore; he couldn’t see why the corporation didn’t demolish the whole edifice and finish off what the Luftwaffe had begun. She’d argued that the church was a monument, that the shattered tower was a ladder climbing from the past to the future.

Now she realised the past didn’t count and that her future had nothing to do with broken masonry. Love, she told herself, would be her staircase to the stars and, moved as she was by the grand ring to the sentiment, tears squeezed into her eyes.

At the top of the hill, on the corner by the Commercial Hotel, she telephoned Mother, using the three pennies pinched from the saucer in Fuller’s Café. The sun was already beginning to set, bruising the sky above the Golden Dragon.

‘I don’t feel guilty,’ she confided. ‘There are some actions which are expedient, wouldn’t you agree? Besides, nobody saw me.’

Mother said the usual things.

The post Her Drama Is Tolerable When It’s Performed Onstage appeared first on Electric Literature.

I didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when I chose it, only that it was far. Only that it would take a great deal of work to get there, and more work to be found. When I say I closed my eyes and pointed to a map, I really mean that. I did. Red votive candle dripping over foil in the center of our dining room table, my girlfriend, Trace, sitting across from me, a full moon over north Brooklyn. Safety, we repeated, a Trace manifestation, and I hovered my hand as if feeling for heat—but when we opened our eyes to Elko, Nevada, it wasn’t exactly far enough, so I moved my finger further west to Whidbey.

One month later Trace flew me to Seattle. We bought the one-way ferry ticket online, drove to the Mukilteo terminal. Then, there was my boat pulling in. Huge and white with a green lid over the top deck windows, a monstrous face to it, the gaping garage. Cars thumped from the ramp onto the ferry as I stepped on board, and it was dark in there, between all that machinery. I rolled my suitcase between cars and cinched my shoulders for better posture, wondering if any of the passengers were wondering about me. Who’s that girl with the practical green suitcase? the faces would ask. What about her?

When I had thoughts this self-dramatizing, which was often, I imagined being hurled down a flight of stairs right after thinking them. Sometimes, knocked out by a mail truck, envelopes bursting onto a wet street. On the boat I followed passengers, and one of them—a gaunt freckled woman smeared white with sunscreen—held a door for me at the side of the garage. Thanks, I said, and trailed her and the others up the damp stairwell, like I knew where we were all going. Rather than carrying my suitcase by the handle, I let it clack-clack on each step, the sound echoing awfully. A few of the people looked back at me, just to see who, I guess. I had to commit to the choice now. I clacked all the way up.

The second door brought us to a passenger seating area, and for a moment I was back in Penn Station. For a moment, I’d never left. A white sign read Upper Deck, and windows dotted the whole perimeter, casting a greenish pale light; tables, bolted between pleather booths, collected glossy half-finished puzzles. The room wafted fried fish and cleaning products, and doors led out to a deck. Out there, the day drizzled sloppily over the parking lot and water. Late May, first breezes of summer, but still a cold that crept up shrewd. People walked past me out onto the deck, no umbrellas or anything; they just stood beneath the rain, jackets darkening. They smiled, white caps melting on the mountains behind them, phones clamped onto sticks.

I found a seat inside at the rear of the boat, and with an uneasy quiet, the glass window vibrated, woke to movement. The shoreline of Washington, the trees, Trace waving from our rented Honda Civic, they all grew smaller.

Children chased each other down the aisle between the ferry’s benches. I flinched at their sounds, their little squawks and shrieks, thump of a tripped sneaker. One child aimed a toy slingshot, and powdery glittering balls arced through the air, fell slowly. Laughter, their mouths all laughing, before a man tiptoed beside them, arms up in a playful shield.

Then he sat across from me.

I’m Rich, he said, extending his hand. He gripped mine in that firm too firm single thrust this is a professional handshake way.

He was handsome, for a man, with black seal-like eyes and a tight stern forehead, hair blown back as if in motion. He carried a plastic drugstore bag lumpy with clothes, which he twisted, then let spin around his wrist. He looked around my age, mid-twenties, Middle Eastern—from where I couldn’t tell—and a bright rope of scar ran up his forearm and into his sleeve. I wondered if he was asked about that scar a lot, maybe the reveal was a benchmark in his romantic endeavors.

Finally, I said, I’m Birdie.

I’d introduced myself with pseudonyms off and on for most of my life, names I’d lifted from films, sometimes historical figures. When forced to sign Greenpeace clipboard petitions, I was Judy Barton. My coffee orders and library books belonged to Mary Ann Zielonko. Online, hotel bookings, mail: Wilma Dean Loomis or Jacy Farrow. It’s good, sometimes, to be another person, one therapist had said, long ago. The sound of my own, true name prickled, an ash in my mouth, and already I knew I was getting away with something. Birdie Chang, I told this man.

Rich was holding a paperback copy of Animorphs, a series I’d loved as a kid. On the cover, the boy in a brown jacket transformed into an eagle in vivid, holographic layers.

Haven’t seen one of those in years, I said, pointing.

He bent the book back and forth in his hands, testing its flexibility. It made no sound. One-dollar cart at Elliott Bay, Rich said. Collected these as a kid. Guess I wanted to take a trip back in time. And you know, the story really holds up. He slapped the book with the back of his hand. There’s some serious literary merit here, he said.

I hated men. More precisely, I hated how a man like Rich could carry a book like Animorphs on a boat, unashamed, gleeful. He could slap it. Some serious literary merit—he could say something like that, and it would be considered refreshing, sweet. What a confident man, my mother, Wendy, would say, not trying to prove a thing. Another woman might note his vulnerable masculinity, of course she would, he’d asked for it. But we were all trying, all the time, I reminded myself. That’s how we become the people we are, impressionistically, chiseling lumps of selfhood off the truer, moldering form. There was always the effort to prove, though only certain people got to do so with pleasure. I tried to reel empathy from any part of myself.

I used to like that story, too, I said. Same generation, I guess.

It ends sad, he said.

It had to.

Rich spun the bag of clothes again. The plastic left pale ridges across his wrist. He said, what are you, twenty? Twenty-three?

Twenty-eight, I said.

No shit?

Asian genes.

Same, he said, tilting ear to shoulder.

I must have looked confused. I said nothing. There was nothing I could think of to say. Rich waited for me to go on, then smiled. He said: You Stanford sun-hat Asians always gonna forget brown Asians.

I rolled my suitcase directly in front of me, snapped the handle down. Then I wrapped my legs around the sides of it and squeezed, remembering the book that was inside.

You don’t know anything about me, I said.

I think you’re tired, this man said. Real tired.

I am tired.

What do you have going on on the rock?

The rock?

On Whidbey? he said.

Trace and I had rehearsed several potential responses: I was visiting family (boring, no follow-up questions). I was meeting with researchers to study moss and hydrology (for this I’d googled the absolute basics). Always I could default to I don’t speak English, the quickest way to be left alone, forgotten. But Rich was frank and direct and didn’t regard me with pity; no, he didn’t have that pitying scrunch between the eyebrows, the soft tone—it wasn’t there. He knew my real name, and speaking to him felt like a challenge, one I shamefully, senselessly, wanted to pass. So I told him the truth: I’m hiding from someone. From a lot of people.

Rich fanned the corner of the book with the tip of his thumb. Back and forth, tightly, like a deck of cards. He looked right at me, unmoved, elbows on his knees.

Someone, Rich said. He hurt you, or he wants to? 

He already did, I said. He’s a pedophile.

Rich didn’t budge. His big seal eyes blinked sleepily. Trace would toss me off the boat if she knew I’d shared this much. My mother would say, You have got to be joking, maybe even get uncharacteristically violent. I knew better than to spill; I knew anyone could be a friend of Calvin’s, maybe someone he’d met inside, someone with my photo and information printed and folded in their wallet. But there were so many lessons I’d never learned in my life, so many mistakes I’d continued to make, and some thrill giving up and into that person.

So you’re hiding? he asked. Why now?

Now people know about it, I said. So he’s back. 

I don’t know about it.

Other people know, I said, trust me.

I thought of the book. The photo on the cover. The New York Times Bestseller stickers glinting from her cheeks on the wall display at the airport. Trace had pulled my hand to keep walking. I was supposed to spend the summer on Whidbey to reset and recalibrate unplugged, to find that safety bubble, at last. These were other peoples’ words, but I knew how to use them.

What does this guy say he wants? Rich said.

He says all kinds of stuff. Says he wants to apologize. 

Does he, apologize?

Depends.

On what?

On how you see it. How you think of apologies. 

So what’s your issue? he asked.

A woman pushed inside from the deck, and the wind fluttered Rich’s hair before the door snapped closed. She was yelling into her phone to someone named Joey, and she said his name a lot: Joey, I said what I said. Listen, Joey, I’m not coming to Ballard, Joey, don’t be so stupid.

The issue, I said, is he finds me. He doesn’t go away. He’s out now, and he writes me—

Words aren’t violence, Rich said. He shook his head. 

This is a violent person.

Well, Rich said. You say he’s a pedophile. Why would he care about you now?

I didn’t like somebody else talking about Calvin like he knew him, coolly calling him a pedophile. It was unnerving to hear it so casually with no bulk to it; his tone ground my deliberateness and my fear to dust, the life I’d lived leading to that word of who Calvin was, and the thorned acceptance of what that made me.

You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I said. I looked him in the eyes.

Oh, there it is, Rich said. He smiled again. There, that’s where it lives.

I looked down at my fingers as if something were stuck there, something to be addressed. My fingertips, frayed from picking. Blood dried in horseshoes around the nail beds. I tried to focus it, the swell, the heat rising inside, a crimp in the gullet. Not the crying kind—but the other feeling. There it is. I looked back up at Rich.

It’s ’cause you’re too nice, Rich said. Guys fuck with girls like you because you let them.

I’d kill him, if I could, I said. I’d shoot him in the dick. 

That’s how you’d do it?

The dick, then the head.

Nah, you wouldn’t, he said. Let me guess, you sleep with a gun, right? What kind?

I said nothing. Rich leaned closer. A focused crouch, hands ready, as if dribbling a ball.

Tell me. Smith and Wesson, 38 Special? You sleep with a big boyfriend, too?

I’m a dyke, actually.

Hey, girl, I’m cool with that, he said. Then, a thought behind his face. Slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth before he said it: You’d let him do it again, before shooting him. You don’t have that in you. Guarantee.

You have no idea, I said, and we sat there for a moment, the fluorescent ticking overhead. The boat slowed. I didn’t go to Stanford, I said.

The woman screamed at Joey some more from a nearby bench. She plugged one ear as she listened to what he had to say. I thought Joey had been a boy, but now it sounded as if he had been a lousy lover and owed her money. She hung up and threw the phone into her big purse, said, Unbelievable, to the rest of us.

Where’s the bad guy live? Rich said. 

Florida.

Florida Man.

Don’t shit on Florida, that’s a boring thing to do, I said. 

You still live there?

No.

Exactly. So where’s he in Florida?

Do you know what a pervert park is? I said, trying to prove a lax knowledge of my own life. That’s what they call them in Florida. Where he lives. It’s called Gateway to Grace.

I work East Coast a lot—cargo ships, cruise lines, Rich said. I’m down there next week, staying through summer. I got friends in Opa-locka.

What do you do, exactly?

Rich nodded his head like he was thinking. He said: Boats. Marina stuff.

He slapped the book down next to him, then buried his face in both hands, breathing in hard. He flicked the tip of his nose with a thumb. Sniffed. Outside the glass doors of the ferry, a little girl on the deck threw pieces of bread, or crackers, at some gulls that curved down to them. Behind her, the clouds parted a Magic 8 Ball blue.

Well, Rich said, looking up at me. He looked calm, almost sedated. You want me to kill him for you?

I glared at him. His stubble, his dry knuckles. I imagined him snapping off gloves, a dirtied spade, wiping prints from a revolver with a soft, meshy cloth. Then I imagined Calvin—bound and blood battered—screaming for his life in a ditch near the Everglades. A gator would finish him. It was all ridiculous.

I can do it for you, Rich said. It’d be my honor. Even the score in this small way. For the sun-hat nice girls.

He leaned back and crossed one foot over a knee. I crossed mine too. The children in the aisle were gathered by their parents. Backpacks and strollers. Arms flung around necks.

No one would ever connect us—who could connect us? I’d have no reason to kill this guy. But I could. Easy, without a hitch, trust me I could.

What are those people eating? I said. Rich looked outside, where I pointed. The birds multiplied and the little girl screamed. Orange life buoys clung to the deck gates, quivered brightly and weakly as the boat moved.

Probably chowder bowls, he said. 

They love chowder here.

It’d be fun actually, Rich said. Taking your guy away.

I liked that he wouldn’t drop it. That he was asking something of me. A permission. He needed me to play along, to assuage some want. I knew what that looked like.

I told you, I was going to kill him, I said.

You don’t have it.

I can be scary, I said. Ask anyone who knows me.

I don’t know anyone who knows you. Then, after a pause, he said, You couldn’t scare anything.

I scare.

Scare me now, Rich said. Come on. Gimme your best. Scare me good.

I looked out the window to the water, the deep blue mat studded with white. An identical ferry passing by. Mount Rainier glowing like a postcard. I once went on a date with a woman who said she’d never get serious with someone who rolled a suitcase. That it was a lazy, humiliating thing to do—to not hold a suitcase by the handle, a proper handsome Samsonite from long ago, luggage with dignity. I didn’t know how to scare this man. I never would.

Are you lying? he said.

I’m not.

You seem like a liar. I just need his name. Gateway to Grace. Give the name. After this we never met. You’ll never hear from me again.

Give me your name, I said.

Rich Amani, he said. Do you trust that I’m a good person? 

Absolutely not.

I respect that, he said. That’s fair.

Do you think I’m a good person? I asked. Out of the ferry’s loudspeaker, words clanged, indecipherable. The boat slowed even more. The island: closer.

Good and nice aren’t the same, he shrugged. Does he deserve to die?

He doesn’t deserve to live. 

That’s the same thing, Rich said. 

I don’t think it is, actually.

Say it, Rich said. Just say it out loud. It’s good for you.

Passengers opened the doors to exit. Cold air trailed through the room, and I pulled my jacket tighter to my chest. The ride was ending, a ramp ahead lowering to the boat, bridging to the rest of my life.

I said, Every day, when I wake up, it’s the first thing I wish for. Him gone.

Well, give the name, then. If you want me to.

I stared at Rich and he stared back. A dare with our eyes, who’d break first. That Disney villain scar, his twisting bag of clothes—I smiled, caught myself, straightened back up, serious now. Scary. Something mirrored between us, but he still didn’t think I could.

Calvin Boyer, I said, and Rich stood as soon as I said it. 

Well, that was easy, he said. Birdie, good for you.

He slipped the book in his back pocket and walked away toward the deck.

The post This Cocky Stranger Is Offering to Kill for Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

My sister raises her glass of sangria and clutches her heart, sequined top and cleavage trembling with her gratitude. “You guys are the sweetest,” she says.

It’s her birthday and the three of us—Valda; her best friend, Harriet; and me—are splitting a carafe of prickly pear sangria on the rooftop bar at El Nido. It’s been impossible to get into this place since it opened. I had to book our reservations a month ago and couldn’t get anything earlier than 9pm. Not ideal for a Monday night, but Valda loves exclusive things and I’ve insisted on treating.

Granted, a month ago I thought I’d have a job by now and would be paying for our dinner with real money. I’ve been trying not to use my TOT card unless absolutely necessary, but seeing as I’ve been staying on Valda’s couch for three months, this probably qualifies.

Our server appears and asks if we’re ready to order food. Valda and Harriet nod and work their way down the list of tapas we decided on—Padrón peppers, jerk mussels, dates, mushrooms, calamari, beet salad, lobster thermidor, and sea bass, which are all somehow priced like mains. I try not to do the math in my head, so instead I admire our server’s balayage and wonder if she paid for it with money. It looks expensive. Which I guess is another way of saying it looks good.

When I step inside to find the bathroom, I catch sight of a lanky man hunched in a familiar way over his cocktail. My face goes numb. He throws his head back too far in laughter and I know it’s him.

Years ago, Sam worked at the textbook publisher with me. Just a blip before moving on to the bigger things that had always been waiting for him. Data was a beautiful thing in his hands. Complicated sets poured themselves effortlessly into visuals. The one time we slept together, back when I was harboring delusions of us moving to the Hills and presiding over the city as some kind of power couple, I pictured a time-lapse video he made of phonemes in languages over time—dots migrating across a map of the world that swelled my tongue with longing.

Sam’s work runs on the front page of the Chronicle now. I know his stuff before I even get to the byline. It pulls my eye out of the stories and sets off a hunger in my chest. It’s always the most elegant thing on the screen, a dancing, interactive chart that lights with color as you move your mouse.

I emailed him last year to ask about any job openings at the Chronicle. I’d taken three pay cuts at the textbook publisher by then and knew I wouldn’t outrun the layoffs forever. It was a humiliating email to send and even more humiliating to receive his reply: Audrey, hey! Good to hear from you. Unfortunately nothing that I know of. You’re still at AdAstra, huh? Can’t believe you’ve stuck it out all this time. Good for you. S

1) My name is Aubrey, not Audrey. 2) Obviously I’d memorize this email and the word good would forever lose its meaning.

It’s true that I’m probably not qualified to work at the Chronicle. I’m a good designer, but I can be clumsy with code. I’ve been trying to remedy this, sitting on Valda’s couch all day fiddling with Python and R, trying to animate my static charts and plot in 3D.

I haven’t emailed Sam since I lost the job at AdAstra because the only thing more humiliating than telling him I still work there is telling him I work nowhere.

I force my shoulders back and approach his table. The woman across from him is glamorous and poised. High red ponytail. Gold cuff wrapped around one bicep like something Cleopatra might wear. It makes me think of the interview tip I read, to Wear a fashion statement to spark conversation. I’m wearing a plain gray dress and a silver necklace with a tiny A that hangs below my collarbone. If my outfit is making a statement, it’s whispering.

He sees me and his eyebrows go up. “Audrey, hi!” He asks how I am and introduces the redhead as simply Genevieve, which means they are on a date.

I tell him about the layoff in the brightest tone I can manage, one that indicates it’s no big deal, an opportunity for better things. I smile and remember to Look your interviewer in the eye. “The Chronicle doesn’t need anyone, do they?” I ask, as though this has only just occurred to me. Demonstrate that you’ve familiarized yourself with the company’s work. “I saw your piece about cell phone usage policies and car accidents last week—it was amazing.” I don’t mention that I locked myself in Valda and Dave’s bathroom with it and masturbated on the fuzzy bathmat. Car accidents are not sexy, but the chart was so streamlined and clean and I kept thinking of his fingers moving across the keyboard, punching enter in the same gentle, decisive way he’d curled them into me.

“Oh gosh, thanks,” he says, as though he barely remembers this chart. “But damn, yeah, I don’t think we’re looking for anybody right now.”

“Well,” I shrug, “if anything comes up, I’ve been fleshing out my portfolio. Working on animating a multivariable set right now.” These are probably second nature to Sam, so not a great brag.

“Oh, well, cool.” He nods. “If you want any help, I’d be happy to look it over for you.”

“Wow,” I say. “Yeah, I mean, that’d be great.”

I wonder if Genevieve will feel threatened by his offer, but she smiles brightly.

“Sure,” Sam says. “Send it over. I’ll take a look.”

I think of Valda and her friends, how casually they thank one another for favors with lavish spa days and expensive wine. If I had real money, I could send a fancy fountain pen to Sam’s office later, with a note that says, Thank you for your genius eye! Instead, I take out my phone and say, “I actually won the TOT lottery after the layoff. I’ll send you some TOTs right now.”

They’ve been running a pilot lottery system since the bill passed two years ago. Only ten percent of applicants get approved; it was such a relief when mine went through.

“Oh, cool,” he says. “I mean, you don’t have to.”

People say this, but as with real money, it’s just the cue to say, “I insist.” Which I do.

Between courses—glistening bowls of peppers and mussels, cheese-crusted lobster, all of it outrageously delicious—Harriet asks if I’ve heard anything more from Freeman & Freeman. A week ago, I had a preliminary interview at the finance company she works for after she referred me to HR. It went about as well as it could, given that no part of me wants the job. Or, I should say, only the part of me that wants an apartment of my own again and money for food.

When Harriet told me they were hiring a data visualist at Freeman & Freeman, I’d been staying with Valda and her husband Dave for two months already, listening to Dave every day on his headset through the thin office wall. “Oh, great,” I said, trying to believe it could be great. When she forwarded my resume to HR, I sent her a hundred TOTs from my phone and the caption !

I tell her I’m still waiting to hear back about the performance task I sent in. The datasets they gave me to visualize were complicated and deeply uninteresting. Risk assessment, revenue trends. Analyzing them felt like dragging my brain over gravel. At AdAstra, I made charts of whale migration patterns and human lifespans throughout history. “They said I should hear back tomorrow if I’ve made it to the next stage.”

“Well, I have a good feeling about it,” she says. Harriet is the kind of person who has a good feeling about a lot of things.

When the server with the balayage drops off our check, I lay my TOT card on the tray and slide the A on my neck back and forth on its chain. Like all TOT cards, mine is bright yellow—a horrendous, almost chartreuse that calls as much attention to itself as possible. I’m sure everyone on the rooftop with us can see it. It’s awkward enough using it at the grocery store or on the bus, but here, where churros are thirty-five dollars, I feel like I’m committing a crime. Valda and Harriet generously ignore it.

I remember standing at the voting booth two years ago, clicking Yes on Prop 10: Alternative Banking, and feeling magnanimous. What were a few of my tax dollars to help “redistribute access to those in need”? The FOR column in the ballot booklet listed endorsements from every major state politician and researchers at prominent universities citing the psychological benefits of gratitude. Take your thanks to the banks! The AGAINST column was blank. Now I imagine filling the space with the word “humiliating.”

Still, of course, I’m grateful for it.

When our server comes back, she lifts the check tray and makes only the subtlest of glances around the table, as if wondering which of us is responsible.

A minute later, she returns with a strange look on her face. “Um, I’m sorry,” she says to the table. “This card has been declined.”

“Really?” There’s no way I could’ve maxed it out already. I’ve only had the thing since I lost my job and have used it as sparingly as possible.

She nods. “Do you have, um, a debit card? Or a credit card maybe?”

“Shit.” My spine curls. I dig through my purse, even though I have neither of those things with me and no money in the accounts anyway. In a zippered pocket, I find two yellow tokens worth approximately 3% of this meal. I can’t decide if it’s worse to procure them.

Valda interrupts. “I’ll get it.”

Harriet puts out a hand. “Absolutely not.” She looks up at our server. “It’s her birthday.”

“Happy birthday,” our server says uncomfortably.

Harriet opens her purse. “I’ll get it.” And as easily as one might hand over a napkin, she deposits her blue credit card on the tray.

I check my account from my phone and it reads Uh oh! No remaining Tokens of Thanks . 

I scroll back through my payments looking for the error, but the math, somehow, adds up. The payment I sent Sam an hour ago maxed it out.

I don’t know how it happened so quickly. The amount I was approved for seemed astronomical at the time. Plenty to tide me over for a brief stint of unemployment. The woman who approved me recommended I pay it off in increments every month. “Some users like to select a recurring date to come in. We can book you for every month on the 1^st? The 15^th?”

I was in the middle of a fight with my landlord at the time, a woman who’d been terrorizing me ever since she’d found out her rent might be arriving in TOTs. She’d turn the water off at random intervals, “in case someone needed to fix the plumbing.” She’d taken two of my windows from their frames and put them in storage, claiming “new ones were on the way.” Flies and bees wandered in freely, and every time I left the apartment I worried my things would be stolen. During my approval call, a squirrel let itself in and knocked over a plant.

I swished at it with a flyswatter and told the woman on the phone I’d have to figure out my payment plan later. “Your limit is on the higher end,” she said. After I’d been selected, I filled out a long questionnaire intended to determine my gratitude capacity. Thankfully, gratitude has always come naturally to me. “I don’t recommend paying it off all at once. Some users find this experience taxing.”

I’d heard grumblings to this effect—a couple of people at AdAstra had accounts—which is maybe why I’ve been putting it off. Also, the Alternative Banking Office is all the way across town and I don’t have a car. I wonder if the tokens in my bag—the remainder of a bonus from when I opened the account—are enough for a ride there tomorrow.

The server returns with Harriet’s card and smiles brightly at her. “Thanks so much.” She turns to Valda. “And happy birthday.”

Valda has a meeting up the 101 the next morning, the wrong direction from the ABO, and Dave has a consultation with a big prospective client, so I tell them I can get myself there. Dave never lets me drive his precious Audi, and the tokens in my bag are only enough to borrow his bike anyway. This is the sort of thing I once imagined would be free—a single ride on a bike that belongs to my brother-in-law. But I hand over the tokens and try not to feel rage as Dave pokes at them in his palm. Nothing is free here.

“Height okay?” he asks, headset already fitted behind his ears, doorknob in hand. He can see that it’s not, and I can see that the answer he needs is yes.

I give a thumbs up and he closes the door to the garage behind him.

The seat must be too high by six inches. I pray it’s one of those easy-adjuster posts, but it’s not. No toolbox or wrench in sight. I hoist myself onto the bike and wobble my way across town, overlarge helmet shifting on my head. It feels like someone is taking a potato peeler to my calves. At red lights, I fall gracelessly, bruise my pelvis on the bar. When I get to the ABO an hour later, I’m so tired I can barely lift my arms to lock the bike.

Entering the lobby is like stepping into a child’s birthday party. Blinding yellow walls. The words Give thanks! and You’re very welcome! in person-sized letters across them. Smiley faces in the exclamation marks.

I tell the woman at the front desk I’m here to pay off my charges. “Wonderful.” She smiles. “Do you have an appointment?”

I explain that my card maxed out last night and I came right away.

“Oh, hmm. Maxed out?”

I nod.

“That may be a slight problem.” She types something into her computer. “There’s a surcharge for walk-ins, so you’d need to have some cushion in your account.”

Shit.

“We have an appointment. . .,” she scrolls, clicks, types, “. . .next week if you want to come back then?”

I imagine biking back across town. A week without spending. I need TOTs for everything.

“I. . . can’t.” I look around the room, at the few people filling out forms or waiting with a clipboard in hand. “Can I wait here, maybe, until there’s a cancelation?”

She offers a sympathetic frown. “That would still be a walk-in, I’m afraid.” She must see the distress in my eyes, because she reaches out a hand and lays it gently on mine. The nerves in my fingers throb, skin rubbed raw from gripping the handlebars too tightly. “Let me see what I can do.” She gets up and disappears behind a yellow door.

When she returns, she’s smiling like the exclamation marks on the walls. “Great news. I spoke with my manager and he says he’ll waive your surcharge if you clear the account.”

“Clear the account?”

“Just, pay the whole balance today.”

“Oh.” I exhale. “Sure, I can do that, sure.”

“Perfect.” She hands me a form to fill out and a yellow pen. “Oh good,” she says. “You brought a helmet.”

When my name is called, a man with a retractable keycard swipes us through a heavy door into a yellow hallway. We pass door after door, behind which I hear muffled music or silence. As we turn the corner, a door marked Room 7 opens and the sound of weeping escapes. The words “I am” pierce the hall. A man in a yellow lab coat locks the door behind him. He makes a quick Yikes or Woops face at the man I’m following.

“Is that person okay?” I ask the man with the keycard.

“He’ll be fine.”

We turn down another hallway. “He didn’t really sound fine.”

“Have you been here before?” he asks over his shoulder.

I shake my head.

“It’s all non-invasive. Completely safe, medically-speaking.”

“Medically-speaking. . .” I read all the paperwork when I was setting up the account—my mother taught me to never sign anything without reading every word—but the section about the repayment process was just a long, scientifically dense description of a brain scan.

He waves his hand dismissively. “The rooms back there are for small debt. Some people just bring the dramatics.”

I want to ask how my own debt ranks, but the man stops and unlocks a door. I feel a little woozy, but I follow him into another wing, then into a small room, covered floor-to-ceiling in yellow padding. 

I stash my belongings in a cubby by the door, and the man gestures to a barber chair in the middle of the room. The chair faces a big-screen television and what appears to be a giant thermometer. A long, white wire dangles above the open seat.

“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable. You’ll have a few minutes to clear your mind, then one of our adjusters will be here to help you with the process. Any questions?”

I think about asking if it hurts, but he says, “Okay then,” and slips out the door.

My tailbone stings as I lower myself into the chair.

Eventually, a knock.

“Yep,” I say.

Another man in a yellow lab coat enters, introduces himself as Cameron. I focus on my gratitude that it’s not the man who made the Yikes or Woops face. He settles onto a stool beside a panel of controls and a computer.

“So, Aubrey. How’re we doing today?”

It doesn’t escape my attention that Cameron is extremely attractive, though I’m not sure if this is objectively true or if he just got my name right. I tell him I’m good.

“Great.” He smiles. “I’m told this is your first time.” I nod and he identifies the wire dangling in front of me as the sensor, shows me how to separate the end into two buds that fit in my ears. “Comfortable?” I imagine he’s holding me from behind, moving the hair off my neck. I say yes. 

“Okay, so I’m going to read through your payments, and I want you to think back to the moment of exchange. When you visualize it, a clip from your memory will appear on the Memovision,” he gestures at the TV, “to help you reenter the experience. Then this big guy over here,” he points to the thermometer like they’re old friends, “will take a read on your gratitude levels. When you’ve filled the gauge all the way up, we can move on to the next payment and do it again. Sound good?”

I nod.

“Great. I’m just going to read the company statement before we get started.” He flips a page on his clipboard. “Financial distress has been shown to impact physical and psychological health, leading to higher rates of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and suicide.” His voice is strangely chipper. “Fostering and acknowledging gratitude, on the other hand, decreases stress hormones and feelings of anxiety. Regularly practicing gratitude may lead to lasting changes in brain chemistry that promote happiness and wellbeing.” Cameron looks up, smiles. “Today, we’re collecting the necessary receipts to maintain public support and keep this program alive. Incidentally, we’re also providing the client—Aubrey Cline—an important opportunity to spend time with the gratitude they’ve been cultivating since their Alternative Banking account was established. We’re honored to be working with you toward this mutual goal of improving your health and wellbeing!” He turns the clipboard around, hands me a yellow pen. “I just need your signature here, acknowledging the purpose of today’s visit.”

I read the page, like my mother taught me, and sign.

“Okay, we generally start with the smaller payments to ease you in. Work our way up to the big stuff.” I imagine one of his fingers slipping inside me, then another. My chest thrums, pelvis aches. “Ready?”

“Um, yeah.”

He begins with a day in the grocery store when I toppled a corner display of limes. The Sprouts interior appears on the Memovision in soft-focus. It’s the same day my last paycheck from AdAstra came in and those limes felt like my whole life scattering across the produce aisle. A woman weighing grapes stops, bends to pick up the limes between us. “Limes on the run,” she says, like we’re playing a game. Later, when she wound up behind me in line with only a handful of items, I told the cashier to add them to my bill. 

It’s immediate, the feeling that washes through me for this woman. A digital simulation of mercury flies to the top of the gauge. A soft ding sounds.

“Wow,” Cameron says. “That was fast.”

A loud part of my brain wonders if he finds my gratitude attractive.

Cameron reads a series of payments to strangers or people I barely know—bus drivers, cashiers, baristas. Every time red fills the thermometer in a matter of seconds. Red, ding, red, ding, red, ding. A heaviness sags in my chest, but for once I feel powerful, capable. “Whaddaya know,” Cameron says. “No assistance needed.” He laughs, and I think I detect a flush in his cheeks.

Next is a payment to my mother who lives across the country. The Memovision lights up with the soft green of my old living room. Looking at it again makes me sad. My hands appear onscreen, taping up a box, writing KITCHEN on the side of it in Sharpie. My mom comes through the door carrying two pizza boxes and a bottle of wine. “Guess who does To Go food if you ask nicely?” She opens the boxes to reveal sourdough pizza from the fancy restaurant up the block. “Mom,” I hear myself say. “I thought you were gonna get sandwiches from the deli.” “Well,” she says, “I thought this would be a nice treat. No reason.”

Of course, there was a reason. It was my last week in the apartment because my landlord had flat-out refused my TOTs when her harassment campaign hadn’t done the trick. I’m pretty sure this is illegal, but she threatened a lawsuit and I didn’t have the money to gamble on it. It had been ten years since I moved into that rent-controlled studio and my landlord had been itching to get me out ever since rents had skyrocketed. I knew it distressed my mother that she couldn’t help—Valda and Dave had bought their house with a down payment from Dave’s parents—and shame burrowed into me for causing her that. “Let me get it,” my old self says, tapping out the payment on my phone. “You came all the way here to help me move.”

I look over at the gauge and the red wobbles around the mid-point, rising and dipping a few times. Embarrassed, I glance at Cameron, who gives a breathy, sympathetic laugh. “Moms,” he says. “Always tricky.”

But my mother is not tricky and I was grateful. I remember it. Onscreen, my past self slips into the bathroom, sits on the closed toilet. I hear myself start to cry through the speaker and wish Cameron would look away. The gauge dips again. No, I think, no. I close my eyes and imagine digging through a sandbox of my shame, excavating handfuls until I knock against something buried there. I open my eyes. The red climbs in the gauge. My neck cramps, shoulders tense. Ding. 

“Doin’ alright?” Cameron asks.

I nod.

“That’s right, you’re a pro.” He smiles coyly and reads my payment to Harriet. Already, nausea twists behind my eyes. On the Memovision, Harriet sits beside me on Valda’s couch, looking over my resume, assuring me brevity is fine. Freeman & Freeman will love that I’ve been at the same company for so long. “Okay,” she says, “I’m doing it.” She attaches my resume to the email she’s written, clicks send. Her computer makes a whoosh.

Current-me has the impulse to check my phone. It’s possible there’s already an email in my inbox, inviting me to a second interview or beginning, Unfortunately. . . Both possibilities make me feel ill.

I glance at the gauge and am dismayed to see it’s mostly empty, the red hovering at the one-third mark. I was grateful to Harriet—of course I was—and it feels unfair that I should have to prove it. The red dips lower.

Onscreen, Harriet closes the laptop and pours us glasses of white wine. She pours another for Valda and the three of us cheers. “To a bright future for little sis,” Harriet says. I’m older than Valda by two years but her friends always forget this because I’m single and broke.

Valda smiles, features blurrier than Harriet’s. “To movin’ on up.”

When I saw the starting salary at Freeman & Freeman, I thought it was a mistake. It was three times what I’d made at AdAstra. Harriet grimaced when she saw the listing. “I guess our charts people don’t make a ton,” she said and I wondered, for the first time, what her life was like, what it meant for numbers like this to look small.

The red in the gauge drops to the one-fourth mark. I grasp the leather armrests, palms beginning to sweat.

“Would you like some assistance?” Cameron asks.

My heart beats loudly in my ears. I want to say no, but the red drops further. “Um, okay.”

Cameron scoots his chair in and twists a few dials. He types, clicks. “Alrighty. So. It looks like this position is quite a lucrative one, given your employment history.” Cameron can see my employment history? I tell him I’m grateful for the opportunity. But the red drops again.

He looks back at the computer. “Okay. Well. It appears this recipient—Harriet—hasn’t referred anyone to the company in,” he scrolls, “three years.” He looks at me and my heart knocks against the center of my collarbone. I wish Cameron were less attractive so I could focus.

“Her last referral was fired after some account mishandling. Lots of internal drama. . .” His eyes move back and forth across the screen. “Wow, a whole restructuring of the department ensued. She’s been reluctant to attach her name to applications since then.”

The red wobbles and I close my eyes. I didn’t know any of that. I feel a tenderness for her, a growing warmth. She must believe in me, or really love my sister, or both. I open my eyes and the red is rising steadily, slowly. My arms grow heavy. Chest tightens. Ding. I exhale.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Great.” He clicks the mouse and asks if I need a break. I can’t leave the room until the session is over, he explains, but I could stand up, stretch my legs. I shake my head, wanting this to be over and still wondering if I can impress him.

It seems to work, because he says, “Dream client.” He blushes. “Just, sometimes people take these long breaks. Like, totally, move around a bit. It’s when they start staring into space for an hour that I’m like, that can’t be helping? Definitely not with my commission. If you request me,” he says, “I can work your account every time.”

I’m starting to feel like I might throw up, but I say, “Yeah. Definitely.”

Then he reads my weekly payments to Valda, which he decides to lump into one large payment with a keystroke. My hand appears on the Memovision, carrying suitcases into Valda’s apartment, stacking them in the corner of Dave’s office beside the pull-out.

I’m scared to look at the gauge. I’m grateful, so grateful, but I’m aware of other feelings closer to the surface. Shame, annoyance. A general sense of inadequacy for mooching off my little sister. The loathing that surges whenever Dave is around. 

When I do look at the gauge, the red is all over the place. Quivering, jumping, falling. Cameron says, “This happens with recurring payments. It’s aggregating data over time, so it may take a minute to settle.”

When I first mentioned rent to Valda, she made a face. “Rent?” But Dave interjected that they’d probably have more expenses with a third resident. “Might as well take some help from the government.” I’d been happy to—wanted to—send her a TOT payment until he said that. It felt good to know I could offer something. But Dave saw it as the government’s money anyway, as rightfully his. Suddenly I wanted Valda to put her foot down. To say, Aubrey doesn’t owe us anything. Aubrey’s family. Aubrey has worked her ass off and we only have this house because someone else put down the money for it. Instead, she shrugged. Said, “If you really want to.” 

I watch breathlessly as the fluctuations slow and the red teeters in the middle. Not terrible, I think. Then the red spikes once more and drains almost entirely from the gauge. Shit.

“Okay, well, no worries,” Cameron says. “That’s what I’m here for.” He toggles some buttons, types. “So.” Bounces his head as he reads. “This payment is significantly lower than the rent in your prior apartment.”

I try to focus on the amount I’m saving, but the Memovision displays a bleary image of Dave’s office as my alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. He works for a travel agency headquartered on the other coast, so I need to be out of the room by 5:30. Like every other morning, I strip the sheets from the pull-out, fold it back up, drag the marble coffee table back in front of the couch so it all looks untouched. Dave knocks on the door at 5:29, says, “Okie doke,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe.

The sliver of red that was visible at the bottom of the gauge disappears and a sound like a car alarm comes through the speaker. I startle and Cameron shouts over the noise. “It’s okay!” He twists a dial. “Let’s do a counterfactual, okay? You’ll have a little more control there.”

I don’t know what that means, but I nod.

“I’m initiating a park sequence!” he shouts. Clicks, types. A dimly lit park appears on the screen. Chain-link fence, dead grass, a single bench surrounded by broken glass. It looks like no park I’ve seen in town, but Cameron tells me to envision myself there.

It’s hard to imagine anything with the alarm still blaring, but sure enough, my body appears onscreen like a character in a video game. I’m wearing grimy sweatpants and a sweatshirt I do not own.

“The sun has set,” Cameron shouts over the alarm, “it’s getting cold.” My avatar shivers and I feel it too. “You lie down on the bench and try to sleep.”

My avatar approaches the bench. It’s covered in bird shit. I look at Cameron and he nods, encouraging. Surely this is not actually the alternative to staying with Valda and Dave? Couldn’t I have flown home and stayed with my mother? Built out my portfolio from her bedroom while her book club drank margaritas down the hall?

The park onscreen begins to melt and Cameron says over the alarm, “Ope, ope. Gotta focus. We’ll have to reboot if you wipe this scene.”

I inhale and feel the night chill again. When my avatar lies on the bench, the metal is hard and I feel it in my hip. Or maybe that’s from this morning when I fell off Dave’s bike.

I think about how this is the reality for so many people, people who are not me, and I recall the give of the pull-out couch in Dave’s office, the goose down duvet Valda pulled from storage. The alarm goes quiet and I try not to think about the ethics of using other people’s misfortune to pay off my debt. A tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. The park fades from the Memovision and Valda’s living room replaces it, my legs folded into the sectional, computer open on my lap to a screenful of code. The red climbs incrementally as I focus on the warmth, the WiFi, the fridge full of food. Dave’s voice comes through the walls. “. . .fewer of our deliverables. . .” His work-laugh is a stone skipping water. “. . .absolutely position this to your liking. . .” Their Pomeranian, Randy, whines to go outside. It’s my job to walk him now, to feed him and pick up after him, since I’m “free all day.”

The red dips again. My throat tightens. Something scrapes in my lungs.

“If I may,” Cameron says. “This payment was made to—,” he checks his screen, “—Valda Cline?” I nod. “She hasn’t made many appearances.”

I see far more of Dave than I do of Valda, but it’s true the payment goes to her. I breathe and remember the day I moved in. On the Memovision, she FaceTimes our mother and says, “Guess who gets a permanent sleepover!” When she was little, she used to beg to sleep in my room. She’s thirty-two now and works eighty hours a week, but insisted this arrangement would be fun, would be just like when we were kids. The red totters in the gauge, climbs slowly.

It hasn’t, of course, been just like when we were kids. 

When we were kids, there was no Dave, asking every day when I think I’ll have a job. No Dave, planning extravagant outings every weekend—wine country, hot springs, trips to Hawaii—because he knows I can’t afford to come. I keep expecting Valda to notice, to suggest we stay in and play board games one weekend. Valda and I grew up with the same lack of money, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she pouts and calls me a party pooper for never wanting to use my TOT card on fun things. “You have free money right now!” she says. “Live a little!”

The red in the gauge is erratic again—down, up, back down. All of these things have unfolded on the Memovision.

“Hmm,” Cameron says. “How about another counterfactual? We can do something a little more targeted.”

“Um. I don’t know.”

Cameron nods. “They can be uncomfortable, but they’re a very efficient way of extracting gratitude.”

The word extracting makes me shiver.

“Let’s just try it out, see how you do.”

I say nothing and he taps the keyboard. My avatar appears onscreen again, this time in a yellow sundress I’ve never seen before. A living room materializes around me that looks like a set from a play. Bland hotel art surrounds a giant wall mirror. “This is your home,” Cameron says, and I think, Mine, okay, I could be grateful for that.

A man walks through the door in a blue business suit, sets a briefcase on the ground. He looks not unlike like Sam. “Honey,” he calls to me, “I’m home,” even though I’m standing right there. My avatar walks to greet him and I decide to indulge this hypothetical with a long kiss, a bit of tongue. The character onscreen doesn’t seem to expect this. He freezes momentarily, says, “Thank you, my wife.” Then something changes in his demeanor. He lifts his nose, sniffs. “Where is dinner?” he says angrily. “I have worked all day and am hungry.”

I stifle a laugh. I, too, have been cooking dinners for Valda and Dave. Because they have worked, because I am “free.” It’s not exactly the same tired plot here, but it’s not so far off.

I imagine my avatar saying, “I’ve been busy today too,” and she does. “With the baby,” I add, for maximum defensibility. A crib pops onto the screen. Cool. Just like that, a baby.

“Our baby does nothing all day!” my husband shouts. “Just like you!”

Jesus, I think, and my avatar repeats this. “Jesus.”

“What did you say?” he screams. I don’t know who wrote this script, but we’ve gone from zero to a hundred. My husband grabs my avatar by her dress collar and throws her to the ground. My jaw drops. What the fuck, I think. My avatar says, “What the fuck.”

“You are useless,” he screams. Veins pop in his neck as he lifts my avatar by her waist and throws her directly into the mirror on the wall. The mirror shatters and rains down around her.

“What the fuck,” I scream.

“What the fuck,” my avatar screams.

My head throbs like it has hit something. I close my eyes to block out the scene. No fucking way am I doing this. Getting gratitude this way. Extracting. My mother has alluded to the three years of her marriage to our father, before she left him, before he lost parental rights. I know it involved yelling, broken things. But I open my eyes and the red climbs in the gauge. My stomach turns.

“Great,” Cameron says. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

I feel nauseous, heavy-limbed. I focus as hard as I can on Valda. Guess who gets a permanent sleepover! Finally, her face overtakes this horrible scene on the Memovision. I’m so relieved I could cry—Valda hugging me from behind when she gets home from work; Valda listening to me talk about the new chart I finished, even though she still doesn’t understand scrollytelling; Valda loaning me a dress for the Freeman & Freeman interview. The red passes the halfway mark, the two-thirds, higher. I feel all the bones in my ribcage when I breathe.

I’ve been trying to make myself small at their house—never leaving a dish unwashed or a crumb on the table, keeping my belongings folded and stashed in suitcases. Last week, I was curled into a blanket in the corner of the couch and Valda accidentally sat on me. “Oh my God!” she said. “I thought you were a blanket.” I felt strangely proud. She sat back down on me intentionally. “Best blanket.” Now, in the barber chair, the memory of her weight in my lap grows, expands. Crushes something in my tailbone. I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?

“Stop, stop,” I gasp. I want to tear the sensors from my ears, but for some reason, I can’t. My arms won’t move. “What’s happening?”

Cameron hits a button. The Memovision pauses on a close-up of Valda’s face. “You okay?”

I tell him my arms won’t move and he says, “Shoot, okay. We’ll take a break.” He retrieves the clipboard. Flips several pages, scans. “Are your fingers tingling?”

Yes, I realize, nodding.

“No problem. We can work that out.” He scribbles something on the clipboard and rolls his stool over to mine, asks if I consent to a massage.

“Um, okay.” I feel myself blushing.

He lifts my left arm and, to my horror, I feel nothing. I ask if I should be worried about that and he says, “Nah. The feeling will come back in a second.” As he massages my arm, he says, “I know this can be a little—unsettling. But the research on gratitude shows tons of benefits. Reduced stress, stronger immune system. You’ll even sleep better.”

I’m having trouble listening, because the feeling is returning to my left arm and Cameron’s touch is soft and gentle. He rolls to my other side, works his way down my right arm. My palms begins to sweat. I realize I’ve been sweating for a while. My left hand comes away slick from my temples. A faint odor’s coming off me. “Could I, maybe, have a towel?”

I once read that a post-workout flush is attractive to potential mates—something about replicating the exertion of sex—but I’ve never sweat sexily. Valda calls me a lollipop when I get home from a run, my face bright red. When I can lift both arms to his satisfaction, Cameron digs through a drawer and tosses a hand towel into my lap.

“Okay.” He marks something on his clipboard and looks at the gauge, which seems to have emptied again during the massage. “We can finish this payment now if you want, but I’d suggest we move on and loop back at the end. Clear out what you can first. Bigger doesn’t always mean harder.”

I flush and feel crazy for hearing innuendo in everything he says. “Okay. Sure.”

He taps the keyboard. “Alrighty then. Only one other payment.” He sounds delighted, but I know which one it must be. I don’t understand how it could be bigger than my weekly rent, but Cameron adds, “This one does come with an overdraft fee. Pretty hefty, I’m afraid. That’ll get ya.” I take the opportunity to bury my face in the hand towel and soak up the sweat that drips from my hairline. The fibers are rough against my skin.

“Ready?”

I breathe in the scent of lemon detergent and something plastic and wonder what will happen if I don’t move or respond.

“You’re so close, Aubrey.”

My neck seizes. I can feel the hollow in my chest where something has been wrested from me. There is, I imagine, an inverse correlation between gratitude and the amount of gratitude demanded of you. I see the scatter plot in my head and the dots dropping sharply off, stray limes rolling down a hill.

“Not to rush you, but my lunch break is coming up in a few minutes here.”

Behind the hand towel, I imagine finishing this session in time for Cameron’s break, joining him at the seafood restaurant on the pier. We share a prawn cocktail and he confides in me that the inverse correlation is real, that he’s never seen anyone muscle through every payment so quickly. I inhale, sit up, set the towel on my knee. “Okay.”

Cameron smiles, reads the payment, and the screen displays the inside of El Nido. My chest constricts as Sam offers to look over my portfolio.

Even before the overdraft fee, I sent such a big payment because I thought he might not do it otherwise. Also, I wanted him to know I didn’t expect anything because of our history, that night on his rooftop in the fog.

Before I can stop it, the restaurant fades from the Memovision and Sam’s rooftop comes into focus. I hear myself moan through the speaker in the ceiling. Sam’s bare chest appears, his thin muscled arms reaching up to me, patchy chest hair gold under the string lights. I’ve masturbated to this memory for years but it’s a shock to see it onscreen.

Cameron hums uncomfortably.

I look over at him. “Sorry. How do I turn it off?”

“Just—” My voice moans louder through the speaker. “Ah, really concentrate on the moment of exchange.” This, too, is a moment of exchange. But Cameron reads the payment again and the Memovision cuts back to El Nido.

Sam says, “I mean, you don’t have to,” waving a hand that’s been inside me, fingers I’ve sucked on.

I look over at the gauge, but before a reading can appear, my moans siphon back through the ceiling. Sam’s rooftop is back. Fog closing in on us. So low it obscures all the neighboring buildings and creates the impression we’re alone up there, fucking inside of a cloud.

“Um, let’s—yeah, let’s back up.” Cameron rereads the payment. El Nido rematerializes.

Sam says, “I mean, you—,” but the frame freezes and the audio of us breathing and moaning plays behind it.

“Fuck me, Audrey,” Sam says, somewhere off-screen, and just like that I want to die, because even Cameron knows my name is not Audrey.

Apparently the frozen picture of El Nido is enough for the gauge to take a reading, because a moment later, the alarm is back. WAH WAH WAH. “Yes,” Sam cries, “fuck yes.”

Cameron shouts the payment again, but the alarm and the moaning carry on. He clicks frantically at the computer. Grabs a phone from the wall. “. . .screen is frozen. . . what do I do. . .” When he hangs up, he types, shouts, “We’re gonna try some music, okay? Sometimes music,” he taps his chest, “gets deeper.”

He pulls a lever under the desk and the lights dim. A disco ball descends from a hole in the ceiling. “Really try to focus on the payment,” he shouts, as Celine Dion competes with the breathing and shouting and moaning and alarm. Dots of light spin over us and Cameron cranks the volume until Celine’s is the loudest voice in the room. I’m thankful to be here, she sings, thankful to feel clear. . .

I don’t know how I’m meant to focus on anything right now, but I try to get the picture of El Nido on the screen to move. Sam’s face is frozen with his lips puckered. It’s basically impossible not to think about kissing him. Not to remember how, at one point, he wanted that.

As though someone has turned up the volume on our sex track, my voice climbs over Celine’s. “Tell me how you’d chart this,” I say, panting. Sam, distracted: “Chart what?” “This,” I say. “How good I’m making you feel.”

I only vaguely remember saying this, but hearing it pumped through the sound system at full volume, my stomach turns, face heats. I don’t know how to make it stop.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “So good.” I remember being frustrated by that, because it wasn’t what I’d asked. I’d wanted axes, plot points, code. Now I want to vanish. The memory of Sam’s rooftop is spoiling. Cameron, Celine, the disco ball—they’re all ruining it.

I pull the wire sensors from my ears, but this just skips the audio on our sex track so the last few seconds play on repeat. How good I’m making you feel, my voice says. Sam’s Oh yeah. So good.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

Celine and the alarm carry on in the background.

I turn to Cameron. “Can you turn it off?”

He lifts his palms. Shouts, “It’s stuck.” 

It feels like I’m cracking down the center, listening to this terrible remix, Sam’s frozen lips puckered at me onscreen. I push myself out of the barber chair and feel my legs protest. I’m not sure they’re going to hold me. “Can you let me out?”

Cameron grimaces. “Safety regulations. We can’t.”

Whose safety?, I wonder. “Please, I need a break.”

He shakes his head at the door. “No can do. But. . .” Flips through the pages on his clipboard.

A whole chorus backs up Celine. Thankful to be here.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

When he finds the information he’s looking for, he digs through the desk drawers and tosses me a pair of noise-canceling headphones. “See if these help,” he shouts. “Maybe we went the wrong direction with the music.”

I turn them on, fit them over my ears, but all they really do is dampen the lower register, muddying Sam and Celine. The alarm comes through unhindered. So does my voice. How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel.

I stumble toward the back wall, as far from the speaker as possible. When I get there, my legs buckle under me. I slide down the yellow padding. My head spins with the pinpricks of light.

I think of the voting booth, my ballot booklet open to Prop 10. I imagine adding my gratitude scatter plot to the AGAINST column, the caption Mathematical impossibility. Nowhere did it say you’d feel like a person turned inside out. Nowhere did it say your nose would try to split your face open.

I realize I’ve been banging an open palm against my nose when a trickle of blood makes it into my mouth. I wish I could throw up or pass out. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. I knock my head against the wall and suddenly I understand why it’s padded. An impulse I’m unfamiliar with takes over as I bang my head harder and harder. Cameron’s on the phone again, gesturing agitatedly at his screen. My head bounces off the cushioning. I can almost feel the vomit creeping up my esophagus.

When I got the stomach flu growing up, my mother would sit on the bathroom floor with me and rub my feet. Valda, who never seemed to catch anything, would lie beside me, feet in the air. “Me too! I’m sick!” she’d cry. She always wanted to be where I was.

Last weekend, when Dave surprised her with a romantic birthday getaway, her voice hitched. “I wanted to celebrate with Aubrey, too.” Dave told her she’d love the hotel he’d booked, plus it wasn’t refundable. “I guess we have our girls dinner on Monday. . .” At the time, I thought she was looking for excuses to go, but now I wonder if she was buckling under pressure. If she misses our old dynamic as much as I do. “You know Dave,” she said to me once. “Loves to get his way.” A protective tenderness rises in me.

I try to push myself up, but my legs are too weak. I tip onto all fours and drag myself toward the barber chair, knees burning on the glowing carpet.

How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. Celine must’ve changed keys, because the words thankful and alive seep in through the headphones.

The chair seems impossibly high when I get to it. I slump onto the metal footrest, try to still my vertigo. I wish the disco lights would stop moving.

Suddenly Cameron’s crouching beside me, asking if I want help up. I nod and he grabs me under the arms, lifts clumsily. I feel like a baby being hoisted by someone who doesn’t like babies. I’m achingly aware of the sweat dripping from me, the odor clinging to my shirt. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. He sits me in the chair. I feel the nausea rising. I lean forward and the headphones slip from my ears, clatter onto the floor. All the sounds barrel back at me. WAH WAH. Oh yeah. So good. How good I’m making you feel. I vomit onto my knees. It’s mostly stomach bile because I didn’t have breakfast.

“Oh boy,” Cameron says.

“Sorry,” I groan. I’ve splattered his pants and shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

Cameron picks up the phone again, asks for help in Room 14. I’m no longer a dream client. Celine’s back to singing about butterflies. My ears clog. Brain blisters. I dig my fingers into the leather armrest and one of them sinks into a hole there, finds rough-edged metal beneath. I rip at the hole until the metal edge is exposed and wonder if I could use it to crack my head open and make this all stop. Safety regulations. 

Cameron must see me fiddling with it because suddenly he’s retrieving Dave’s helmet from the cubby. “This is probably a good idea.” He sits me up and sets the helmet on my head, snaps the straps—too loosely, I think—under my chin. His hand comes away flecked with blood and vomit. He wrinkles his nose, wipes it on his yellow lab coat.

“Sorry,” I repeat. Somehow the helmet makes the possibility of death via armrest real and I feel a little afraid of myself.

Cameron proffers the dangling sensor like a rhetorical question. I can feel his desire to be done, gone, eating lunch in a fresh pair of pants.

I wonder what it would take to get me out of here, to never do this again. Suddenly, I want the Freeman & Freeman job. I can see that life now—bored out of my mind every day but going to wine country with Valda on the weekends, living in my own apartment. I’d be the one people sent TOTs to: Thank you so much for letting us crash in your spare bedroom! I’d get to say: There’s no need. Or, It’s really okay. Maybe I’d even have a rooftop that occasionally flooded with fog. I take the sensors from him.

“The control room is working on a full reboot,” he shouts over the noise, “but it’ll mean starting over.” I can hear the annoyance in his voice, so I try not to gawk at him. “If you can get this thing filled up before then, that’d be—you know, great.” The thermometer is still at zero, the alarm blaring alongside every other sound.

I fit the sensors into my ears and wonder if this will actually kill me. There’s no way I’ll be able to start over. I feel myself beginning to resent even, for some reason, the lime lady from Sprouts. The Memovision’s still frozen on Sam’s face at El Nido—eyes half-open, lips protruding. Stupid of me to have sent so much. I try to focus on the generosity of his offer—the measly half an hour it’ll take from his life. No, not that. The kindness of helping an old friend. The alarm falls away as a tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. I feel faint. Celine and the sex sounds carry on. A slow-burning rage grows in me—that I can’t just thank Sam with money, the way Valda and her friends do. Gift cards and bottles of wine they deliver and never think about again. Sam’s giant puckered lips taunt me, incense me, and his face begins to fade.

I’m doing it. Rage must be the trick. But then a new, blurry face replaces Sam’s. Eyes half-open, lips protruding in almost exactly the same way. Dave. He’s too close to the camera—to me—and I know what this memory is, even with the voices of Sam and Celine playing over it. It’s 5:31 a.m. I’ve overslept. Dave makes awful, kissing noises like he’s coaxing their dog out of bed. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Am I gonna get this minute back?” Even now, I can feel the pressure of his thumb on my mouth, wiping at my drool. The revulsion washing through me. The horror of the seconds I lay there, wondering what exactly I owed him.

I wait for my past self to scramble out of bed. Tell him not to touch me. Instead, a yellow haze takes over the screen. No, not the screen. My vision is yellowing out, the way it does when I stand up too fast. “I—can’t see,” I say, breath catching. I’m not sure the words have made it past my lips. There’s solid yellow everywhere.

Thankful to be here, thankful to feel clear.

How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.

I hear myself crying and it must be my current self because something salty drips into my mouth. My lungs are hollow. Fingertips tingling. I need Cameron to hear me, to get me out. I remove a foot from the footrest and feel for the carpet. Push myself up, take a step.

Everything goes black.

Suddenly, I’m sitting on a rocky outcropping at the beach with Valda and our mother, feet dangling into the sand. It’s eight years ago. Valda’s about to start law school and our mother has come to help move her in. Valda never even visited the other schools she got into. She wanted to be here, where I live, to drink cheap wine with me by the ocean, as the three of us are doing now.

We sip from compostable cups and discuss all the things we’ll do together now that she lives here. Hiking, farmers markets, five-dollar Tuesdays at the cinema. Our mother sets her cup at her feet, grabs one of our knees in each hand. “My girls.” She tears up. “My girls.”

Then, disco lights spinning. Celine Dion crooning about paper dolls. How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good. It takes me a moment to understand where I am. Dave’s face is frozen on the wall, at a strange angle. I must be on my back, facing the ceiling. Something trickles into my eye and I lift a heavy hand to wipe it away. Blood. My forehead is throbbing. I feel around my head and find a helmet there, Dave’s helmet. It has slipped so far back as to be useless. Did I hit my forehead on the way down? Death via armrest.

A ding sounds and I think, deliriously, I’ve done it. Filled the gauge. Finally, finally. But the gauge, even from this angle, shows the same tiny sliver of red. No, it turns out, I’m not sufficiently grateful. Not to Sam, not to Valda. Certainly not to Dave. This is the ding, I realize, of my phone in the cubby. An incoming email. We are pleased. . . We are sorry. . .

I close my eyes again, hoping this will return me to the beach. But the music and the voices loop faithfully—Oh yeah. So good. Soon fingers are prodding into my neck, feeling for a pulse. I open my eyes. Someone—not Cameron—bends over me. She looks familiar. She takes my hand in hers and I realize it’s the woman from the front desk. She doesn’t look fazed by the sex noises or the too-loud music. “Aubrey,” she says, and the sound of my name is like a caress in my hair. “Are you still with us? Can you keep your eyes open?”

I try to do what she’s asked, but my vision begins to yellow again. The woman goes in and out of focus, yellow smoke I try desperately to clear. “Is the man in Room 7 okay?” I croak. She glances away from me, perhaps at Cameron, whom I can no longer see. “Room 7,” she says uncertainly.

My eyelids grow heavy, close. A far-off voice that sounds like my own says, Let’s do a counterfactual.

Valda and my mother and I dangle our feet into the sand at the beach. Valda laments that her sublet has fallen through at the last minute.

“Just stay with me, Val.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “I know you’re tight on space.”

I wave my hand. “Of course. As long as you need.”

A distant voice says, This is not an appropriate counterfactual. The voice sounds like mine, siphoning through a speaker in my ear canal. Another voice pipes in: Aubrey? Are you with us? Can you stay with us?

“Okay!” Valda leans over our mother to cheers her cup of wine to mine. “Permanent sleepover!”

My mother taps her cup to ours and we laugh.

“Not permanent,” Valda promises.

“Temporarily permanent,” I say.

A woman appears beside us on the sand then, forehead bleeding profusely. Blood dried under her nose. Vomit stains on her t-shirt, pants. She looks like me. She gestures at the three of us, addresses someone I can’t see. “You’re not getting this,” she says. “You’re not measuring it.”

Measuring what?, I wonder.

“There’s something you can use here.” She begins to cry. “I know there is.” Her voice cracks, her edges blur. “Please,” she turns a hazy yellow. “Please.” She flashes a blinding chartreuse and is gone. 

Someone down the beach turns on a portable speaker and Celine Dion comes through, singing about butterflies and heaven. From somewhere far-off, voices I dimly recognize.

How good I’m making you feel.

Oh yeah.

So good.

The post I’m Broke But I Swear I’m Grateful appeared first on Electric Literature.

Serious clowns have their faces painted onto blown-­out goose eggs. My son tells me this on the drive from Corpus Christi to Houston. The custom began in the sixteenth century, a method of remembering makeup patterns, but now it serves as copyright. The eggs are done up with acrylic paint and accented with felt and glitter, with tiny flowers and ribbon and clay, and the records are preserved in the Department of Clown Registry in Buchanan, Virginia. He says a clown’s makeup is called his slap, and whiteface clowns rank highest in the hierarchy. Then the augustes, with their red cheeks and ivory mouths. Then character clowns, then hobos. The first known clown appeared in a pharaoh’s court during Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty—­he was a pygmy. Clowns in Russia carry the same clout as pianists, as ballerinas.

It’s a tepid Friday in March, and we’re going to a clown convention at a Marriott by Hobby Airport. On Sunday he’ll compete in a contest hosted by Clowns of America International. Asher is thirteen. He’s a hobo.

“Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia,” he says. He’s paging through one of his clown books in the glow of my truck’s interior light. Outside, the dusk is particulate. We cross the Brazos River, rust tinted with sediment. A megachurch’s illuminated cross, as tall as the mast of a great ship, rolls over the horizon. My son says, “The fear stems from how the heavy makeup conceals and exaggerates the wearer’s face. Also, the bulbous nose.”

“Do ballerinas carry a lot of clout in Russia?” I ask.

“It’s like being a football player in Texas. Like being one of the Cowboys.”

“Hot damn,” I say because it sometimes gets a laugh. Not tonight. He’s too wound up; he’s been x-­ing out days on his calendar for two months. “Are we talking Landry years or Johnson years?”

“Landry. No question.”

That Asher knows his Dallas Cowboys history always calms me. I’m suddenly more comfortable in the truck’s cab. My wedding band catches the light of the low moon, reminding me of thrown copper. I say, “A lot of wide receivers study ballet. It helps with spatial awareness.”

“Besides Santa Claus,” Asher says, “Ronald McDonald is the most recognized figure in the world.”

At the hotel, two giant plywood clown faces command the lobby. From chin to crown, they’re eight feet tall. Asher stands in front of them while I check in—­he’s so enthralled that I half expect him to kneel—­and only moves when a long-­haired woman asks him to snap pictures of her posing between the clowns. The desk clerk hands me breakfast coupons and keycards, Asher’s welcome packet and lanyard. Our room’s on the sixth floor. As we ascend in a glass elevator, Asher tells me the long-­haired woman has been here a week and she estimates there are over a hundred clowns at the hotel. “Tough luck for coulrophobics,” I say, and he smiles like I’ve passed an exam. It fills my every cell with breath. My mystifying son—­the boy can send a tight, arcing spiral forty yards, but he’d rather hole up in his room with Red Skelton videos. After showering, he emerges from the bathroom wearing a shirt that reads Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me and orders room service. Throughout the night, the hotel trembles when the nearby planes take off. I wake up often, confused as to how we got where we are.

I work in oil and gas. I’m a geological technician, which means I spend my days pulling well information. I study maps generated by geologists and run numbers to track which wells are still producing and which need to be plugged and abandoned. I like knowing what’s burning beneath our feet, the black oil and farther down, the clean effervescing gas. The knowledge makes me feel simultaneously large and small, and in that I find comfort. After I blew out my knee during a college scrimmage, I switched my major from communications to geology. I wanted, I think, to encase myself in rock, in hard things that last.

Geo techs don’t make a lot of money; we leave that to engineers and landmen. This trip to Houston is a stretch, and although I could’ve saved half a month’s pay by booking a room in the motor court across the freeway, I didn’t want to skimp on what Asher’s taken to calling the most important weekend of his “career.” I want him to feel fussed over. I want him to know I’m on his team. As the convention approached, I imagined moments we might share: father and son splitting their first can of Lone Star, talking about the birds and bees, or maybe passing the pigskin, analyzing the pitiful seasons the Cowboys have been suffering, the injuries and heartbreaks that now define a once-­great team. (Before we left Corpus, I aired up our old football and dropped it into the truck bed, just in case.) I also thought it might be a chance for us to finally talk about his mother. Jill’s been gone two years. She was forty, and the first time she visited the doctor, the tumors lit her X-­rays like a distant constellation. Three months later, the images were blurred with metastases. “Like a snowstorm,” Jill said, sounding oddly pleased. She didn’t make it to Thanksgiving. Asher and I avoided turkey that year and ordered pizza, then we went to a movie full of explosions and rooftop chases. “We’ll make new traditions,” I said. That Christmas he asked for his first makeup kit and a foam nose.

On Saturday morning, at the breakfast buffet, I realize my son will likely get thumped in his contest. He’s just outmatched. Even with their painted faces, these clowns look severe and cagey. Purposeful, I think. Ornery. There are probably thirty of them in the restaurant, and another fifty mingling in the atrium. Their costumes are elaborate and expensive—­billowy and silken and intensely colored. Pigment assaults me. They wear patent leather shoes as big as rural mailboxes. Two of them walk on stilts and can rest their elbows atop the plywood clown heads in the lobby. Some are bald. Others are neon geysers of hair—­red and orange and purple, Afroed and spiky and twisted into formidable braids. One clown wears goggles and flippers and a small inflated pool around her waist. They’re all adults, I’d guess mostly in their sixties, and they’ve come from as far away as Quebec and Maine. Seriousness radiates from them like heat from asphalt. They have swagger and business cards.

I’m embarrassingly relieved Asher didn’t come to breakfast. He’s awake but wanted to rehearse his routine alone in the room. His event is Paradeability. He’ll be judged on the originality of his act and how many times he can complete it while moving through a gauntlet of would-­be parade spectators. We’ve practiced in our backyard with a stopwatch. We record the sessions with a video camera propped on our propane grill, then Asher studies the footage and makes adjustments. As I eat my omelet, I catch myself hoping they give out ribbons for participation, something he can at least hang on his wall.

A clown in the hotel atrium starts squeezing a bicycle horn while another skips in circles, tossing confetti. His limberness surprises me. In a high falsetto, they sing, “We’re having a hoot, an absolute hoot!” It’s easy to imagine Jill here, trailing Asher, snapping candid pictures of him with the clowns. At home, framed photos of him hang on almost every wall—Asher selling raffle tickets, Asher feeding a brown pelican on Padre Island, Asher sleeping. Photography wasn’t her hobby—watching Asher was. She was rarely in front of the camera, something I realized too late. Her absence blitzes me everywhere. The way the sheet and pillows on her side of the bed stay undisturbed, regardless of how I toss in my sleep, is menacing. The junk mail that still comes addressed to her leaves me as cored out as a cantaloupe. Lately, on Sunday mornings, I’ve been hitting open houses in different neighborhoods in Corpus, trying to wrap my head around moving. I tell Asher I’m going to church. Maybe he believes me.

“Here’s someone who knows eggs-actly what he likes for breakfast,” a woman says. She’s beside my booth, but a beat passes before I realize she’s talking to me. She’s in a pinstripe suit, wielding a clipboard and walkie-­talkie.

“Do what?” I say.

“Professor Sparkles got me with that one earlier this morning, but when I say it, people just seem baffled,” she says. She extends her hand. “I’m Dayna. With a y.”

“I’m—”

“Asher’s daddy,” she says.

I shake her hand, puzzled, wondering what kind of information is on that clipboard. Then I remember her: the woman from last night, the one Asher visited with while I registered. Her hair is up this morning, and she looks like a pretty librarian, drab amongst all the color. I say, “Are you a clown parent, too?”

“I wish,” she says. “Mine’s a cheerleader. She’d walk five miles to avoid a clown.”

“I suspect that may be an epidemic among cheerleaders.”

“Asher’s a cutie. What kind of clown is he?”

“Hobo,” I say.

“I would’ve guessed auguste.”

“He likes thrift stores,” I say.

“An original, I love it. Come to enough of these and you see the same getups every year.”

“This is our first. I’m afraid we’re out of our league.”

“Horsefeathers,” Dayna says. “You’re eggs-actly where you’re supposed to be.”

I smile and take a sip of cold coffee. “Professor Sparkles would give you high marks for that one.”

“Let’s hope not. Last time a clown left marks on me, my husband almost put both of us through a window.”

Behind Dayna two clowns are covering a conference room door with pink balloons. Because I can’t think of how to respond, I say, “That’s not so good.”

“Fourth floor, the Hilton in Nashville. Three years ago.”

“I didn’t know clowns were so prone to scandal.”

“Neither did I,” she says. “Isn’t it fun?”

His name is Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He keeps a notebook with ideas for costumes and gags, and on the cover, in pillowy letters, he’s written, Pretty Much the Only Property of Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He subscribes to a quarterly called Clown Alley. He’s saving for a unicycle. Every couple of weeks we make thrift store rounds, hoping to scare up plaid trousers and polka-­dot bow ties. Once, he found a dented bowler hat at the Salvation Army and cradled it like a wounded animal the whole drive home. He spends hours in the bathroom applying and reapplying his slap. I’m positive he’s never kissed a girl.

Not that he’d make a bad catch. He has his mother’s eyes and dark hair. A good jaw and nice posture, sturdy shoulders. Before he cottoned to clowning, I had him pegged as a quarterback, maybe scholarship material. He used to love watching the Cowboys and casting for redfish in Baffin Bay. His grades are good, but not so good that he eats lunch alone; any chance he gets, he incorporates clowns into school projects. He has friends, kids who call too late at night, who invite him to the beach. Last year he flirted with cigarettes for a month; his clothes smelled of sour smoke when I did the wash, but just when I gathered the nerve to confront him, the odor evaporated. Occasionally he’ll get detention for cutting up or skipping algebra, and I admit those infractions probably leave me feeling the way other parents do when their kids make honor roll. I’ll manufacture some annoyed concern and tell him to mow the yard as punishment, but­ really it’s in those moments when I feel most like a father, when my blood duty is clearly defined, when I halfway believe I can do right by my inscrutable son.

After breakfast, I find him in front of the mirror in our room, adjusting his red foam nose. He’s painted on a charcoal beard, and his cheeks and eyes are chalky. His eyebrows are thick rectangles. He wears his bowler and baggy pants, a necktie as wide as a flounder and two-­tone bowling shoes. I suspect the shoes are stolen. They appeared two weeks ago, after he went to a bowling birthday party.

“Looking mighty fine,” I say. I’ve brought up pastries and chocolate milk that I show him in the mirror.

“I had my bow tie on, but I looked butler-­ish.”

“Good call,” I say. “It’s a sea of bow ties down there. Originality matters.”

Asher studies his reflection. He’s remote again, the giddiness from last night buried under his slap. I wouldn’t mind starting to chip away at his hopes for tomorrow’s contest, but I can’t figure out how, so I just sit on my bed and watch him. He fiddles with his tie, loosening and tightening, then moves­ toward the pastries. He shakes the milk carton and debates between a muffin and Danish. His mother used to do this. She never knew what she’d order until the last moment, and then it was even odds whether she’d flag the waiter and reverse her decision. He opts for the Danish.

“I didn’t see any other hobos this morning,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s true.

He chews, takes a swig of milk. In the too-­big clothes, he appears younger than he is. He says, “The hardcore clowns will come tomorrow for the contests. Today’s novice-­y. There’s a talk on balloon sculpting. Workshops on improv and face-painting.”

“Hot damn,” I say. “Should I bring the video camera?”

“I think you’d need a conference badge.”

“I bet there’s an auguste who’d look the other way for a few jars of face cream.”

Asher puts his Danish on the dresser. He slips into his blazer. There are mismatched patches sewn randomly on the coat; I stitched them using a needle and thread from Jill’s nightstand. He says, “I just don’t want you to be bored.”

I’m about to say that whatever we do will be fine, I only want to spend the day by his side, but then I realize he’s brushing me off. My mouth goes thick. I’m awash in a blunted, disconnected feeling, like I’m nothing more than a family friend watching someone else’s kid for the weekend. I resist an urge to ask where he got his bowling shoes.

“Sure thing,” I say. “I need to review some maps anyway, run some petroleum numbers.”

He pulls a pair of fingerless gloves from his pocket and tugs them on. He says, “Are you going to church tomorrow?”

Maybe there’s an edge of suspicion in his tone, maybe not. Either way, my guard goes up. At last week’s open house, the realtor glanced at my wedding ring and suggested arranging a time to show my wife the property. I gave her a false name and the phone number for La Cocina, a Mexican place where Asher and I used to get takeout. Now I say, “I’d planned on skipping. I feel a bout of heresy coming on.”

He steps back from the mirror, assessing his costume. My heart goes panicky. I’m afraid he’s about to call me out on church or ban me from watching him compete tomorrow, but instead he says, “Then we should practice in the morning.”

“I was thinking,” I say, “if you’d rather just watch tomorrow, maybe get ideas for next year, I’d be game. We can make this an annual trip.”

“It’s in Chicago next year.”

“One of America’s finest cities,” I say, though I’ve never been. “We’ll make a vacation of it.”

“Sweet,” he says. “If I win tomorrow, next year’s fees are waived. They want you to defend your title.”

“The most important thing is to enjoy yourself,” I say.

He crosses back to the dresser, takes another drink of milk. I think he’s about to reach for his Danish again, but he goes for the muffin. He tears off a piece with his fingers and places it in his mouth like a dip of snuff. He chews slowly, careful not to disturb his makeup.

Before Asher goes downstairs, I take pictures of him on our balcony. He acts put upon, but he enjoys posing. We make plans to eat dinner together—­it’s clear he agrees to this out of pity, but I’m elated nonetheless—­and then he’s gone. In his wake, the room is littered with makeup sponges and a silence so complete I have to turn on the television. I surf the channels, flipping past adult pay-­per-­view, public access preachers, and movies with actors I don’t recognize. I exhaust the stations a second time, then a third. I try to review the maps for the new prospect my office is vying for, an oil play down near­ La­redo, but my thoughts keep veering. I worry that losing the contest will undo Asher. I worry that for all the ways I know I’m letting him down—­my inability to buy the toothpaste and fabric softener he likes, the grief I occasionally allow him to glimpse, my lies about church, our eating too much takeout—there are still deeper, more insidious failures that will only rise to the surface after doing irreparable damage. It’s disorienting, such melancholy. I can’t remember a day when I haven’t thought that, with his mother gone, I’ve forgotten how to be a father. Not a day when I haven’t thought, I used to be good at this. I leave a note—­addressed to Po’ Boy rather than Asher—saying I’ll be in the hotel bar.

The bar is closed, though, and the lobby is mostly deserted. A family is checking out while a housekeeper, a woman with multiple earrings, polishes the granite planters by the elevator. Behind closed conference room doors, I hear the murmur of people speaking into podium microphones. “Obviously,” a man says, “miming wouldn’t work there. You have to use your noodle.” The plywood clown faces have been commandeered as message centers. There are pamphlets for a San Antonio clown camp tacked to a cheek, a sign-­up sheet for ride-­share on a nose, and pieces of personal correspondence all over—folded notes addressed to Spangles the Clown, Purple Peggy, Sir Smile-­A-­Lot. A table next to the door covered in pink balloons serves as a lost and found. So far, the only thing that’s been lost is a yellow feather boa. The door is propped open with a box holding a disco ball. No lights are burning in the room, so the surfaces are dim, given to deep shadow. Most everything is draped in sheets.

Then a switch is flipped and fluorescent light opens the space. It’s the vendors’ area. A man in denim shorts and rainbow suspenders emerges from the back, whipping sheets from the tables. He says, “When you see something you can’t live without, just holler.”

The vendors’ area is an L-­shaped corridor; it might normally be a hallway leading to the laundry room or kitchen. Inside, I feel the inexplicable need to move stealthily. There are displays of leather shoes—­jester-­toed and oblong, sequined and high-­heeled—­and a few tables boasting nothing but makeup. There’s a walk-­in booth with frilly costumes on hangers and an elaborate wig arrangement—­thirty Styrofoam heads, tiered according to style. Tables are devoted to magic tricks, juggling props, and party favors. The suspendered man leafs through a convention program in an airbrushing booth. He’s surrounded by wispy clown portraits and stacks of white T-­shirts emblazoned with his handiwork. At the far end of the corridor is an open space with a rack of unicycles and large three-­wheeled bikes. I pick up a chrome unicycle, as if gauging its weight, though I have no idea how to assess such a strange machine. I lift it to my shoulder like a rifle and sight down the frame, foolishly making sure it’s straight.

“Careful,” the man says, “she’s loaded.”

I lower the tire to the ground, bounce it a couple of times to check the pressure. “How much?”

“That’s Zany Laney’s booth. She’ll be back after the balloon talk.”

I wheel the unicycle back to the rack.

“What type of clown are you?” he asks, bored.

Without thinking, I say, “Hobo.”

“Hobos are destitute. Where’s he getting the scratch for a unicycle?”

“I’m mixing it up. Come to enough of these and you see the same things over and over.”

The man shrugs, puts his program under his chair, then goes to straighten the pallets of airbrushed shirts on his table. He says, “I like hobos. Emmett Kelly, Otto Griebling. It’s the only truly American clown.”

“You ever get folks asking you to airbrush their faces on goose eggs?”

“Son,” he says, “I’ve been asked to airbrush faces on things that haunt my dreams.”

“How long does it take?”

“To haunt my dreams?”

“To airbrush a face on something.”

“Depends on the face. Depends on the something.”

I like the suspendered man, his irascibility. I like how he’s unfolding the shirts and then gingerly refolding them so his artwork is more visible. He’s the size of a nose tackle. I say, “I’m not actually a clown.”

“And thus the mystery of the unicycling hobo is solved.”

“My son is, though. I’d like to get his face painted on something.”

“Regrettably, I believe the gift shop is fresh out of goose eggs.”

“How long will you be here?” I ask.

“Until the Lord our God rises again or happy hour, whichever comes first.”

In the lobby, there are huddles of clowns deciding which workshops to attend. Someone, somewhere, puffs at a kazoo. Dayna is sitting with an auguste, an unhinged-­looking woman in her seventies, and speaking into her walkie-­talkie. I don’t see Asher. Another hobo has materialized, though, a hunched man shuffling around with a sign that reads CAN YOU SPARE A LAUGH? I watch him, searching out anything that might prove useful for Asher, but the hobo just mopes by, wearing a hangdog expression and tuxedo pants cut off at the calves. One clown waves him away, but another grants him a belly laugh; it’s showy and territorial. The hobo bows. Then he catches sight of a clown with a tinselly wig pushing a whiteface in a wheelchair, and he’s all energy as he maneuvers in front of them. They stop, and he brandishes his sign with a cocked head, pleading. The man in the wheelchair nods. He hunts around for something in his lap. I think he’s misread the sign and is looking for change, but then he produces a device, one of those mechanical larynx numbers, and presses it to his throat. I don’t hear anything at first, but soon there are low peals of disembodied laughter vibrating toward me like a flock of harsh, metallic birds. I retreat into the parking lot, the sad noise still buzzing in my ears when I reach my truck.

Hobo clowns likely came out of the Great Depression, though it’s possible their roots stretch back to vaudeville. Asher wrote a report for his history class. They’re forlorn and downtrodden, ever the brunt of jokes. They’re always on the receiving end of pies to the face, kicks to the keister. That Asher reinvented himself as the only clown without hope or mirth bothers me. I assume it’s because of his mother, but maybe not. I’m afraid to ask.

And yet when he returns to the room on Saturday evening, he’s jazzed up and garrulous. I’m immediately optimistic about dinner. Maybe we’ll split that beer. Maybe I’ll find words to inoculate him against tomorrow’s disappointment. He hangs his blazer on the desk chair and tells me, breathlessly, about the compliments he’s gotten on his costume, about learning to twist balloons into airplanes and dinosaurs. Better still, a workshop instructor said he had such a knack for painting faces that he could get work at birthday parties. The instructor suggested setting up a website, running classified ads in the paper, acquiring a tax ID number.

He’s in front of the mirror again. I think he’s wiping off his makeup, but soon realize he’s touching it up. I say, “Will Po’ Boy be joining us for dinner?”

“Change of plans,” he says. “The Calliope Ball is tonight. It’s unmissable.”

“You have to eat, Ash.”

“There’s a buffet. Mexican, I think. We can eat down there.”

“We? What happened to that airtight clown security?”

“I scored you a badge from Mrs. Barrett,” he says. “She didn’t want you feeling left out.”

“Mrs. Barrett?”

In the mirror, I can see him clipping on a bow tie, sliding the stem of a plastic sunflower through a hole in his lapel. Outside, a jet is descending and the noise rattles the windows.

“Ash?” I say.

“You met her at breakfast.”

“Dayna?”

“She’s the director of the conference. She said you seemed lonesome.”

The lobby is transformed by darkness and oldies music. The disco ball I saw earlier now hangs from a tapestry of Christmas lights, spinning and refracting color. Asher hands me my badge and says he’ll meet me in the room later, then, before I can protest, he squeezes into the crowd and disappears. Clowns sidle past each other with plates of enchiladas raised above their heads. I smell chili powder and corn tortillas. The suspendered man is sipping a beer by the glass elevator, chatting with two clowns in tutus. When he sees me, he cocks his arm and pantomimes throwing a pass. Seconds later, I act like I’ve caught it, right in the numbers.

I climb the stairs to the second-­floor balcony and peer down. Asher is already talking shop with the shuffling hobo and a female auguste. They’re interested in whatever he’s saying, nodding and letting him go on, and I hate that I didn’t bring the camera. Jill would have. She would have stood beside me, snapping pictures and watching the mass of clowns move below us like a cloud of phosphorescent marsh gas. I try to imagine which costumes she’d like. It’s a habit. When I take Asher to the mall, I guess which necklaces she’d want from jewelry store windows. Driving to my open houses, I keep an eye out for gardens she’d appreciate, and inside the rooms, I envision how she’d arrange our furniture, where she’d hang the photos of Asher. Now, I wonder if she’d like the cowboy with the checkerboard Stetson and matching boots. The woman in the yellow jumper and platinum wig? The scarecrow with a black balloon raven perched on his shoulder? I feel no affinity for any of them. They all look grave and infirm to me, an endangered species, a well that will soon be dry and abandoned.

A female clown, a whiteface in a pink jester costume, walks onto the balcony. She wears a ruffled collar and a three-­point hat. I assume she’s looking for someone in the group below, but she steps closer and says, “Sulking alone wasn’t quite what I intended when I gave Asher your badge.”

“Dayna?”

“Call me Ginger,” she says. “Ginger the Jester.”

“I didn’t know you were a clown,” I say.

“I’m good with secrets.”

The glass elevator, packed tight with whitefaces, passes the balcony and stops in the lobby. Asher is still with the hobo and auguste, and soon he’s being introduced to someone in a skunk costume. He doffs his bowler. The skunk curtsies. I feel conspicuous with Dayna beside me. Maybe Asher wouldn’t recognize her dressed as a jester, or maybe keeping tabs on his old man is the furthest thing from his mind, but I worry. Before Jill died, she’d joke about my romantic future. “One year’s too soon,” she’d say, “but if you’re not ringing some gal’s bell by year three, I will, from on high, assume you’ve switched teams.” I did an intentionally poor job of masking how much I despised such talk, but later, when she’d lost so much weight and asked me to promise that I’d eventually move on—­“For me,” she’d said, weeping, “for Ash”—­I had conceded only to spare us the rest of the conversation. I can’t remember the last time I stood this close to a woman. Dayna’s perfume smells of daylilies. Her gloves are satin. My blood is teeming with a miserable, traitorous vitality.

Dayna has been talking. She says, “That’s what my daughter calls it, the John Wayne Gacy Convention.”

“Asher wanted to do a school project on him, but I banned it. I got the silent treatment for a week,” I say. I’d forgotten about that uncomfortable phase last year, when Asher was preoccupied with Gacy and seemed to always be spouting dark trivia. Gacy was a whiteface named Pogo. He painted sharp corners on his mouth, whereas traditional, non-­mass-murdering clowns use round borders to keep from scaring children.

In the lobby, Asher is waving to a group in the glass elevator. They wave back as they ascend, the glimmer of the disco ball reflecting on the windowed wall. “Chantilly Lace” starts up. My heart feels dizzy in my chest.

“Kids are the pits,” Dayna says, dancing a little with her bottom half. Behind her, the elevator opens and clowns slowly exit, like their joints hurt. Dayna says, “My daughter was spatting with another cheerleader, something about a boy, and she mixed Nair into the girl’s shampoo. Can you say, ‘suspension’? Can you say, ‘permanent record’? Can you say—”

“How good?” I interrupt.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said you were good with secrets. How good?”

“Oh,” she says, a lovely lilt in her tone, her hips still keeping time with the music. “­ Really good. Unfathomably good. Better than—”

“Room 618,” I say.

“Wow,” she says. “Okay. Wow.”

“Take the stairs,” I say, making for the elevator.

When I go to my open houses on Sunday mornings, I worry Asher thinks I’m meeting a woman. I expect to return home and find him waiting, his eyes narrow with betrayal. Asher at the kitchen table, glowering. Asher pacing the house and brooding over the questions he’ll hurl at me like stones: Who is she? Do you love her? What would Mom think? But he’s always asleep when I get back, the door to his room unopened since the night before. The house is disappointingly quiet, indicting in its stillness, so I wash the week’s dishes to bide time until my son emerges. Sometimes I intentionally clang pots and pans together, then apologize for waking him. Had I not started telling him I was going to church, he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone.

At the showings, I ask about school districts and property taxes, mortgage liens and mineral rights. Such questions, I think, paint me as a serious buyer, but I’m also hoping for some combination of answers that will spur me to action. Early on, I expected to be easily swayed. The smell of fresh paint and carpet, the gleam of marble counters and the pulsing sound of sprinkler systems in lush lawns—­I thought they would prove irresistible and I’d want to make an offer on every property. But the houses punish me with newness, and I feel negligent and untethered, guilty for having left Asher at home. I can’t actually imagine putting our house on the market or packing up our rooms. Once, the notion of surrendering my keys to another family brought me to tears. I was scrubbing bowls in the sink after visiting a three-­bedroom ranch on Riley Drive, and Asher came out of his room and caught me.

“Dad, I think you’re crying,” he said, as if alerting me to a nosebleed. He wore his Clowns Will Eat Me shirt, his dark hair was mashed from the hard sleep of youth, and he seemed mortified to find me in such a state.

“The service this morning,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

On Sunday, the lobby has been transformed again for the Paradeability event. It’s roped off in a zigzag course. One of the giant plywood faces marks the start point, the other stands at the finish line, and the route is lined with clowns and bleary-eyed family members slurping coffee. There are twice as many clowns as yesterday; if I look in one direction too long, the clashing colors make me lightheaded. I position myself halfway through the course and actually feel like I’m at a parade. Asher waits in queue with the other competitors, pacing. I worry he’ll vomit or faint. He didn’t return to the room until after one this morning, and although Dayna was long gone, it’s possible he spied her leaving. When we practiced his routine before breakfast, he was off his game, sluggish and tentative, and his lassitude felt like an accusation.

Before each competitor enters the circuit, an announcer rallies the crowd. He calls us ladies and germs, fillies and foals, boys and girls. If the clown is new to the competition, he says, “Ladies and germs, our next contestant is a First of May.” But the event is sleepy, tedious. I have to keep turning the video camera back on because it times out between competitors. Some clowns juggle through the course—­rings, bowling pins, rubber chickens. Others just mosey along cracking jokes. There’s a hobo who sneezes into a paper sack every few steps and sends a plume of powder into the air, then he offers the contents of the bag to the crowd and mocks offense when we decline. The woman wearing flippers and the inflatable pool acts like she’s swimming by, and every so often she spits a high arc of water into the audience. How she refills her mouth is a mystery. A whiteface in a silver astronaut costume stomps along, occasionally lifting her bubble helmet to shout, Moonwalk! There’s a clown on stilts who moves in slow motion, reciting poetry with an Irish accent. Passing me, he says, “I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on.”

Then the announcer says, “Boys and girls, how’s about another First of May?”

There’s a smattering of applause, a long, bending whistle.

“Well then, ladies and germs, set my head on fire and put it out with a hammer, here’s Po’ Boy the Hoboy!”

For his routine, Asher wears a pair of boxing gloves and has a small cardboard box tied to his ankle with a yard-­long cut of twine. Once the clock starts, he says, “You want a piece of me? I’m the best kickboxer you’ll ever see!” Then he kicks the cardboard box ahead of him and starts bobbing and weaving and punching his way forward until he catches up to it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When he’s throwing his jabs, he exhales through his red foam nose, sharp like a real pugilist. That was my idea. Granting the twine doesn’t get tangled around his shoe, he can usually run through the routine six times in a minute.

And despite his lousy practice earlier, in the contest he’s a crackerjack. I’m caught off guard by how his voice carries, the snap of his jab, the accuracy of his kick. The box lands directly in his path every time. When he passes, spectators whoop and cheer and sound horns. I feel like I’m in the bleachers at a bowl game and the audience wave is approaching. People maneuver for a better view; they lean and jostle and nod venerably. I record everything. I feel an almost unbearable pride, and my stomach roils with guilt for having ever doubted him. On his fourth stop, he’s close enough that I have to unzoom the camera lens. “You want a piece of me?” he says to an auguste. She raises her hands in surrender. Everyone laughs.

Then, when he kicks the box, the twine breaks. The box is borne aloft, cartwheeling through the air, until, after what seems like minutes, it lands in the crowd. There’s a collective gasping—­“Holy smokes,” someone says—­and confusion as to whether this is part of Po’ Boy’s routine, a premeditated flourish at the end. Had he noticed the audience’s credulity, Asher might’ve been able to call an audible. But he freezes. There’s a wretched silence, and I want to run to him, to gather my son in my arms and spirit him away. By the time the box is being passed back ­toward him, he’s composed enough to start throwing jabs again and proceed forward. I expect him to stop when he reaches the finish line, maybe to find me in the crowd so I can reassure or console him, but he bolts from the course. Everyone applauds, more confused than ever, while Asher heads for the exit. I stop recording just before he opens the door and disappears into the radiant sun. Then I go to our room.

Some mornings I wake up forgetting Jill is gone, and for a perfect crushing moment, a moment that is both too long and too brief, I think to reach for her in bed. Then I remember, and the old life recedes, like a tide being drawn back into the ocean. For the rest of the day, I feel halved. Other mornings, I’m positive I’ve lost Asher. Once, the fear was so consuming I snuck into his room and watched the blanket—­a clown print—­rise and fall with his breath; it was all I could do not to lie down beside him. Or I’ll come home after work, calling his name as I close the front door, and if he doesn’t answer right away, my heart will stutter. How often have I braced myself against finding a note, written in the same bubbly hand as Po’ Boy’s notebook, saying he’s decided to light out on his own? I worry my son will run off with the circus the way parents of promiscuous daughters worry about abortions. I can’t believe I’m enough to keep him here.

When I find Asher in the parking lot, he’s on the tailgate of our truck, smoking a cigarette. In his costume and slap, and with the smoke ribboning into his eyes, he looks old and grizzled, convincingly penniless.

“Heads-­up,” I call from across the parking lot and wing our football ­toward him. I’ve had it in our room since yesterday and went to retrieve it after he fled the lobby. My pass is wobbly, shamefully so, but with his cigarette clamped between his lips, Asher scrambles and catches it.

“What’s this?” he says, turning the ball over in his hands.

“It’s you,” I say.

It took the suspendered man only half an hour to cover the football with Po’ Boy’s image—­charcoal beard, thick eyebrows, alabaster complexion, and crimson nose. He worked from the screen of our camera, using a picture I’d snapped of Asher that morning. The ball looked so fine, so astoundingly lifelike, I’d thought to hold on to it for a birthday or Christmas present—I never know what to buy—­but I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait. When I showed it to Dayna last night, she said, “You’re a good father.”

“My wife died,” I said.

“Oh, sugar,” she said, “I know that.”

Maybe Asher told her. Maybe, given the hours she’s spent surrounded by elaborate masks, my unpainted face seemed impossibly readable to her. I don’t know. I broke into a humiliated sweat, sacked by guilt and relief, and willed Dayna to leave. Soon she kissed my scalp and slipped from the room without a word.

In the parking lot, Asher toes out his cigarette with his bowling shoe and blows a stream of smoke over his shoulder. The air smells acrid, poisoned. He studies the ball like a man deciding on a bottle of wine. He says, “This is pretty sweet, Dad.”

“The gift shop was out of goose eggs,” I say. Maybe he smiles a furtive smile, I can’t tell. A silver jet rumbles into the sky behind him.

“The twine broke,” he says.

“There should’ve been a flag on the play.”

“It’s never happened before.”

“You handled it like a pro,” I say. “Next time we’ll use a nylon cord.”

He spins the ball in the air, catches it. He says, “I don’t smoke a lot. I just bummed that cigarette from a housekeeper coming off her break. I’m sorry.”

I avert my eyes, arrange a pensive expression on my face. He expects me to be angry, and I know I should be. I should ground him. I should ask if he’s taken a good gander at that crippled clown with the mechanical larynx. I’m aware of this just as I’m aware of the oil and gas coursing miles beneath our feet. This is prime fathering time here, the moment when I should impart solid, inviolable wisdom that will serve as his north star and guide him into a healthy future. But right now every truth seems porous, every judgment skewed. I feel something give inside my chest, as surely as when my knee buckled in the scrimmage and I knew my world was forever altered. When I look at Asher—­the dour mask, the clothes that once belonged to someone else, the weary secrets buried beneath his obsession—­I see only the smallest traces of the boy Jill and I raised together. Instead, I see myself. It gives me vertigo, this recognition, like I’m staring at a mirror that I’ve always taken for a window.

Asher is looking at his football again. I think he likes it, but I’m careful not to betray how much this pleases me. Cars and trucks are swooshing by on the freeway. A plane is about to touch down.

Asher says, “I ­really am sorry about smok—”

“Come to church with me,” I interrupt.

“Right now?”

“Next week,” I say. “I think a little fellowship might be in order.”

He nods, contrite. He thinks I mean to scold him, and I’ll let that ride to keep him honest, but punishment never enters my mind. The prospect of our finding a church together is invigorating, and I feel as though we’re on the verge of something essential forming between us. We’ll get dressed up. We’ll file into a holy building and take our places among men in bow ties and old women with powdered cheeks and bright lips, believers seeking shelter. We’ll sing and pray, confess our sins and mourn our dead. We’ll kneel before ancient altars, behold the glory of ritual and sacrifice. We’ll weep and be saved. We’ll go every Sunday. After services, Asher and I will hit a thrift store, or we’ll swing by an open house and try to divine the years ahead. We’ll talk about girls and college and his mother. We’ll talk until our voices grow hoarse. When we return home, I’ll slap a couple of steaks on the grill and we’ll scroll through TV channels, looking for a game. If the Cowboys are playing, the stands will be packed with fragile men wearing wild wigs and oversized jerseys and war paint on their faces. Asher and I will root for all of them, the heartsick fans and their doomed, beleaguered team. We’ll hold our breath when the quarterback lets fly with a Hail Mary. We’ll hope for a miracle as the receiver stumbles ­toward the end zone. His arms will be extended and his legs weak and his palms open to the sky, and from where we sit, from our house, he’ll look like a man trying to outrun everything behind him, like a man begging, at last, for mercy.

The post This Clown Convention Is Our Family’s Only Coping Mechanism appeared first on Electric Literature.

The night before we met with Babette, Sarah and I had almost canceled the interview due to stress. At the time, our daughter, Sophie, was just three months old and refused to take the bottle. Sarah had had no trouble breastfeeding her, but Sophie rebuffed the synthetic nipples, despite the many sizes and flows we’d ordered. Our night nurse had been no help, and Babette sensed our distress. When we told her about the cause, she responded, very plainly, that it was a phase that would soon pass; she asked us if she could give it a try (she was older than every other nanny we’d interviewed and seemed wise for it). Sarah handed Sophie over to Babette, and she cradled Sophie in her lap. She dragged the bottle’s nipple across Sophie’s lip and lifted it away, almost teasingly. After about thirty seconds Sophie latched. Sarah and I sat in the chairs opposite our baby in disbelief. Babette left and we offered her the job the next day.

It took Babette time to get used to the sprawl of our Tribeca loft. I’d also been surprised by the space when I moved in (Sarah owned it). The high ceilings, the industrial-grade kitchen, and the twice-a-week cleaner. Sarah was adopted—one of six siblings—and her family money was old, from cardboard manufacturing. She’d been the only child to be involved with the business, pioneering a sustainability packaging program and founding the family’s philanthropic organization, where I worked as communications director. I’d never dated someone so wealthy before, and I often resented how unconcerned she was with the finances. I’d grown up solidly middle class in Baltimore—my dad waited tables at a high-end steak house, and my mom worked as a public school administrator. Even then, I’d been considered wealthy by some.

There came a point in my relationship with Sarah when I had to accept that I too was rich. After all, the money might become mine at some point, albeit partially. I’d felt like a fraud proposing to her, and then signing the prenup. The pageantry of my kneeling before her family’s standing. Accepting that this rarefied life was mine, and that, really, I didn’t have to work for anyone else ever again, was unsettling at first. I felt an acute guilt bearing my mom’s passive-aggressive comments. And oddly, this was the moment when Moses, Sarah’s gray tabby cat (to whom I was deeply allergic yet had built a painstaking immunity over the course of a year) attacked my feet. Whenever I left the bathroom after a shower, he’d hiss and pounce on my bare toes. As if he’d sniffed out an old fear of mine. As a kid, I’d had dreams about small creatures—opossums, squirrels, and beavers—assailing my toes. I was convinced Moses had penetrated my psychology, pegged me as an intruder. This was a lifestyle he too enjoyed, and he was protecting it. He ate from an automatic feeder that was double the price of my espresso machine.

When Moses took immediately to Babette, it felt like a betrayal in both directions. Since I’m also employed by Sarah’s family, Babette and I shared a strange kind of kinship. Both on the payroll. Both enjoyed benefits. Both had to be wary of occasional reprimand. Babette also had a cousin in Baltimore, so she knew where I was from. And she’d been surprised that I knew anything about where she was from—Guyana—and that I loved West Indian food. It wasn’t long before she insisted on teaching me how to make roti. Sometimes she stayed late and we cooked together. Roti had become a staple of our kitchen and Sophie’s favorite food.

The best part of my day was Sophie running to the door when I came home from work. “Daddyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” she said, clobbering my knees. Babette had put Sophie’s golden hair up in two violet butterfly clips. She looked older.

Babette came over with a small snack bowl in hand; she’d been slow to rise from the couch. She wore an Atlantic City T-shirt. “This girl is getting so smart, I tell you.”

As I hoisted Sophie up, she promptly squeezed my nose.

“How was your day, Jordan?” Babette asked.

Jordan isn’t my name. I stood bouncing Sophie for a moment and looked at Babette, waiting for her to realize. I thought maybe even Sophie would. “Good,” I said. “I was eager to get home to this little stinker.”

The moment to correct her about my name quickly passed.

“You need a ride tonight?” Babette asked.

On Tuesday nights, I played in a pickup basketball game with friends at a high school in Sunnyside, Queens, where I used to live. She lived close to the neighborhood.

A moment later, the front door opened. Sarah came in from work. She moved cautiously, and I wondered if this was because we’d just found out she was pregnant again. (We hadn’t told anyone.)

“Mommmmmy.” Sophie shimmied down and ran to the door.

“Hi, Sarah,” Babette said, yawning.

“Hello, everyone,” Sarah said. She slipped off her shoes and took Sophie into her arms. She leaned over, and I kissed her cheek, tasting the sweat from her Orangetheory class.

I watched Babette again to see if she might realize, having now said Sarah’s name, that she’d mistaken mine. But she walked into the living room to pick up stray toys from the floor. She tossed Sophie’s alligator into the large patterned basket in a tall arc.

“Maybe you should let me in your basketball game,” she said to me.

Her own laughter had a way of crowding out mine, especially in response to her own jokes. It was a laughter that seemed too harsh for her. I remembered basketball practices when I’d have to switch to guard taller players in the post, hearing them yell to the gym, I’ve got a mouse in the house.

“My mom used to come and watch me play,” I said. “I could use a fan in the stands.”

I went to the bedroom to grab my gym bag. Before we left the apartment, Babette reached down to line Sarah’s shoes up with the rest of her heels by the door. Moses walked over and brushed his body against Babette’s arm as she did.

In her car, an air freshener dangled from the rearview next to some Diwali beads.

“How’s the family?” I asked.

Babette bumped the steering wheel with the butt of her hand. “My granddaughter got another ticket. And she didn’t show up to the hearing last time. Now I have to take her in. A pain, I tell you.”

She had two teenage granddaughters, one about to graduate high school.

“Girls are sweet when they’re young,” she continued. “Then they grow up and you wish you had boys. But then you remember that boys become men and you’re glad again that you had girls.” She laughed to herself. She wore her glasses when she drove and sat up close to the wheel.

“You never wanted a son?” I asked.

“My daughter was plenty for me.” She smiled to herself. “I know Sarah is pregnant.”

I turned and eyed her. “How?”

“A mother just knows,” she said. “You want a boy? Momma’s gonna need an heir.” She cackled.

We crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which was lovely in the evening, offering a dusk-gilded view of the city. As we got deeper into the backstreets of Queens, a calm came over me, the residential blocks reminding me of neighborhoods in­ Baltimore—Pigtown and Butchers Hill—the Formstone fronts and the large swaths of sky rising above the roofs. It was like being dropped off for practice again.

Babette sighed before speaking. “My husband had his hours cut at work. I’m so grateful I have you all. He is too. I don’t think I tell you enough.”

Her husband worked as a janitor at a yeshiva in Queens. Babette had said that the Jews paid him well.

“I’m so sorry, Babette,” I said. “I remember how hard it was on my mom when my dad had his hours cut when I was in high school. Will your husband look for another job? Or part-time work?”

“He’s hoping it’s just temporary, a few weeks. But he’s definitely open to other things.”

I told her I would ask around in the meantime. Before I got out of the car, she patted me twice on the forearm. “Good luck on the court!”

Later in the week, we assembled Sophie’s dinner as a family. Sophie sat on the lip of the counter, schooching her butt on the marble.

“Iwanroti,” she said.

“We can’t eat roti every day, sweetie,” Sarah said.

“Why?” Sophie frowned.

“Because we need variety in our diets.” Sarah chopped broccoli florets with a large knife. Her blond hair draped her face just below her chin. She looked beautiful, if a little severe, after a long day. “It’s more of a snack, not real food.”

“It’s real food, sweetie.” I pinched Sophie’s knee. I could feel Sarah’s blue eyes resting on me. “It’s just the more you eat something, the more likely it is that you’ll turn into it!” I pinched harder, and she leaned over giggling.

As Sophie sat with her dinner, Sarah and I drank Malbec on the couch, her glass filled with a demure new pregnancy splash. Before long, Sophie grew restless again. We told her to sit in her tiny chair until she was done, which she rarely did, even with Cocomelon on the TV. Instead, she spread out on the couch behind the table. With her butt angled high in the air, she planted her cheek on the cushion and watched.

“It’s almost bath time, stinky butt,” I said.

When she didn’t respond I crept over to her and stared at eye level. “What are you doing lying down like this?”

“Resting my ear,” she said. “Like Babette.”

Sarah set her glass down; we stared at each other for a moment.

“What, honey?” Sarah asked.

I tilted my head at her. “What do you mean?”

“Resting my ear like Babette does,” she repeated. After a minute, she grew bored by our questions and flipped over onto her back. I nuzzled my head into her stomach, and she laughed uncontrollably. We continued playing as Sarah cleared Sophie’s plate and went to start the bath.

When Sophie was down for bed, Sarah and I spoke quietly in the kitchen.

“What do you think Sophie meant earlier?” Sarah asked.

I lacked a sound explanation. But then I remembered. “Babette called me Jordan the other day.”

She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“Like it was my name. I thought she was making a basketball joke since it was Tuesday, but I think she just forgot.”

“Stockton I can see, but Jordan, babe?” She grinned. “Did you say something?”

I shook my head. Moses sat upright in the corner and stared, which he did constantly, to unnerving effect. “I waited too long and then it felt awkward.”

“And how does it feel now?”

Sarah was quick, and her playful rebukes always made me laugh. She poured me more wine.

“I bet it was the name of the guy she used to work for,” I said. “She’s old. She’s bound to slip up.”

“Resting her ear,” Sarah spoke to herself. “It must be something Babette said. Bizarre.”

At work several days later, I received a video clip from Sarah out of the blue. I assumed, at first, that it was her trying to be sexy in the way she’d started lately; a brief striptease or view of her bare thighs below the table. Her confidence was intoxicating. These clips had a way of landing at the most inopportune times of the day, which only added to their power. But this one wasn’t sexual. Only when I started playing it did I see Moses in the frame. His triad nose darted at the camera, and I realized it was the view from his feeder. It had a camera and came with an app, too, but we’d never reviewed any footage or cued up the live feed; I’d forgotten about the capability. Then I saw Babette and Sophie in the background. Babette was seated on the couch, and Sophie was on the floor playing with her stuffed alligator. The view was partially grainy, and it glitched every few seconds. I felt like a depraved voyeur as I watched, yet I couldn’t stop. Gradually, Babette began to lean. She caught herself once and sat upright before slouching over again. My heart sank to watch Sophie on the floor, playing alone. Soon enough, behind her, Babette was completely horizontal. I rewound and watched it again. I realized then that the clip’s sound was off, but I couldn’t bear to add any more information to what I saw. Sophie dropped her alligator and rose from the floor. When she leaned over the couch, Babette startled and sat up. They appeared to talk for a minute, and then Babette hugged Sophie. And then it was done.

That night, Sarah and I divided the evening routine. I read Sophie her favorite book about a penguin’s first day of school, imagining what it would be like once Sophie started preschool next year, when Babette would have to watch two kids.

When I came out, Sarah nodded at me, holding up a bottle of white. Her face shone with snail mucin.

I nodded, and she came over to join me on the couch. “I’m shocked,” she said.

“I can tell.”

“You’re not?”

“I am.”

“Well your energy is off,” she said.

“It’s just that . . . I felt uncomfortable watching the video.”

“No shit—We agree on that.”

I pressed my lips against the glass. “Isn’t it illegal to spy on someone?”

“Please. We’re all spied on, all the time. It’s practically nationally sanctioned,” she said. “You do understand what it is you saw? Sophie was playing alone while Babette was passed out beside her.”

“I know.”

“I thought you’d be a tad more worried by it. There’s no way we’re continuing to pay someone who literally sleeps on the job. How’s she going to watch two?”

“It’s dangerous to extrapolate,” I said. I thought about Babette’s husband looking for work. “Maybe this only happened a few times.” I worried this was tacit encouragement for further espionage.

“Once is enough.” Sarah sat back. “Once is unacceptable.”

Moses leapt onto the couch and curled up in her lap.

“We can’t be rash.” I bounced my foot. “Babette is a huge part of Sophie’s life—our life.”

“She’s an employee, babe. We pay her to do a job, an extremely important one at that. It’s clear that Sophie has seen her do this before, enough to repeat Babette’s excuse.”

Sarah brought her fingers to her lips. I rubbed her shoulder, feeling more of my own tension. “I know, it’s not right. But just think for a second—they’re safe inside the apartment. The place is still babyproofed.”

Sarah shrugged out from under my hand; Moses seemed to balk too. “What if Sophie was choking? I can’t believe I’m having to convince you.”

“Imagine it was an afternoon when Sophie was with your mom, and she happened to nod off briefly on the couch? Babette woke right up when Sophie came over.”

“My mom’s not a narcoleptic.”

“Babette is family,” I said.

Sarah looked surprised. “I know this sounds cold, but let’s be honest: the whole nanny as part of the family thing is the bullshit we tell ourselves to feel better. Sophie is family. We should’ve known this with Babette’s age.”

Sarah had picked up enough speed to bypass my hesitation.

“So, what do you think we should do?” I asked. “We can’t just cut her loose. That’s ruthless.”

“Why do you keep thinking of this from her perspective?”

“I’m thinking about this from Sophie’s perspective. It’s a lot to ask of her to get used to another nanny.”

“You need to consider us—which will be the four of us soon. We’re your family.”

After lunch the next day, I sat in a meeting that ran for over two hours, glad to focus on something that wasn’t Babette’s narcolepsy. But when I returned to my office, I found another email from Sarah. No subject line. I opened it and saw two clips, both of which were dated earlier in the day. Too big to text, it read above the first. Volume up, below the second. I felt trapped by Sarah’s insistence.

The first clip opened with Babette, again, stretched out on the couch. My stomach tightened and I closed the clip. The other clip showed Babette and Grace, a nanny in our building who watched a boy Sophie’s age. They had playdates frequently. The four of them sat in the living room; I turned up the volume. Sophie was singing “Following the Leader,” ignoring Mikey, the little boy. When this stopped, they played with magnet tiles on the floor, and I could hear the stray clacking plastic. Then I heard the adult voices. Grace was younger than Babette, strident as she spoke. You need to ask them for a raise, she said. These people are rich, it’s nothing to them. Don’t let them take advantage of you. Grace went on to tell Babette how she had demanded more money at her last year-end review. She told Babette that, honestly, she needed to talk to me. Babette’s laughter was startling. Please, she said. You know that man is scared for his life in here. He’s a punk. I’d have better luck asking the cat for more money.

I tensed. My legs locked up. I looked over my shoulder like I was the one being watched. I played the clip once more to hear her self-satisfied laughter, to see her frail old body jiggle. Then I slammed the laptop shut.

When I got home that night, Moses’s feeder had been moved to the other side of the room, positioned with a clearer view of the couch.

“Hey, Jordan,” Babette said.

I dropped my bag to the floor; I mustered a hey.

Sarah glared at me before she spoke. “Did you just call him Jordan, Babette?”

Babette turned back and forth between us, as if she thought we were playing a joke on her. Sophie colored furiously at the table as the three of us stood in silence. Then Babette’s face opened up; she palmed her mouth and her eyes dilated. “I’m so sorry.”

I feigned a smile without speaking, then nodded.

“Gosh—I’m embarrassed.”

“What you guys talkinabout?” Sophie perked up. This was something she’d started asking lately, whenever adults spoke in nontoddler-inflected voices.

Sarah stroked Sophie’s hair and said it was nothing. Moses’s head reared up from the couch.

Babette came over to me. “Jordan was my old boss. I worked for them for so many years.”

Then she reached out for a hug, her body soft against mine.

“I hope you’re not offended. I must be getting old!”

Sarah leaned her head, pretending to doze off behind her.

“It happens,” I said.

After Babette packed up to leave, I walked her to the door. She spoke before I could. “Did you hear back?”

I was confused. “About what?”

“The job for my husband?”

I couldn’t believe her gall. “I’ve only started asking about it. I need more time.”

“I really appreciate what you’re doing for us, so thank you.”

“Listen,” I started. “Sarah and I are hoping to talk to you on Friday. Just for a few minutes after work?”

“Of course,” she said. Her face stiffened for a moment as she pulled out her glasses from her bag. “I’m really sorry I called you Jordan,” she said. I could see under the light that her lenses were slicked with grime.

The next evening, Sarah skipped Sophie’s bath and got her down early. I waited for her in the living room with a glass of seltzer, avoiding alcohol’s dulling effect. Sarah poured herself a sip of the Orvieto we’d brought back from Umbria the previous summer.

“You still in a mood?” she asked.

“Just thinking about Babette.”

“I feel like maybe I was a little rash before,” she said. “I was getting sentimental thinking about how sweet she was with Sophie as a newborn. The way she was with her bottle. We were lucky to find her when we did.”

I was surprised by her soft turn. “I know,” I said. “But I was thinking about what you said about the family before.”

“Oh?” Moses sat still beside her feet. “So you think she’s got to go?”

I stopped short of an about-face. “The prospect of hiring someone new is daunting. I’ve been torn,” I said. “But clearly now Babette’s naps are a pattern.”

“I knew the nannies talked behind our backs, but that clip was excessive.”

I nodded in agreement. “And look,” I said, pointing to a small stain on the carpet. “Babette used to clean stuff like this. She’s letting a lot slip.”

Sarah pursed her lips at me. “My mom offered to help us out if we needed it. She thinks we should let her go too.”

Tired of water, I got up to pour myself wine. “So, how do we do this? We’re supposed to tell Babette we’ve been surveilling her?”

“In the state of New York, it’s entirely legal to have a camera installed on your property for protection.”

I pictured Sarah, hunched over her laptop, devouring the stipulations of law.

“Sophie brought it to our attention, anyway,” she said. “We don’t have a nanny cam, technically. We’ve never monitored Babette before. It’s only by chance that we found this out.”

“I suppose we’re simply confirming something that Sophie told us,” I said. The wine caused a band of heat to form in the middle of my face. “I already told Babette we needed to speak to her on Friday.”

Sarah set her glass down and inched closer to me. “Wow, babe,” she said. Her energy shifted suddenly. She looked at her phone and clicked something closed before tossing it onto the couch. Then she shooed Moses away with her foot.

She mounted me. I stared at her mouth. She kissed me hard and bit my lip. Gripping my throat, she rose over me. We had fucked in the living room after finding out she was pregnant again, which before then we hadn’t done in months. As she started sucking my neck, I noticed the glossy white cat feeder in the corner of the room, with its tiny light on.

When Friday arrived, I felt nervous. I’d never fired anyone; we had scripted talking points.

Sophie buried her face in her alligator stuffie in the living room. “My love, what are you doing?” I asked her.

“She’s been silly all day, this one. I tell you.” Babette wore her burgundy Juicy hoodie with rhinestones, the one her husband had gotten her last Christmas. She sat in the chair beside me.

Sarah hovered in the kitchen, making herself tea.

“So, what did you guys get up to today?” she asked. She eyed me as she dipped her tea bag.

“Aw, we had a lot of fun, huh, Soph?” Babette pitched her head as she spoke. “We drew. We played restaurant. We went to the playground with Grace and Mikey.”

Sarah sat in one of the chairs facing us.

“Sophie climbed the big ladder all by herself. Even Mikey’s still too scared!” Babette chuckled.

Sophie looked up. “He’s scared.” She bared her tiny teeth at me.

“Thanks for making some time to talk with us,” I said. “Firstly, we want to thank you for how wonderful you’ve been with Sophie. I don’t think we tell you that enough. From the first time we met you, you never stopped teaching us how to be parents.”

Sarah widened her eyes at me. Babette mumbled some appreciation; her hands lay cupped in her lap.

“And we know just how exhausting the work can be,” Sarah interjected.

I stared back at her. “We’ve been thinking a lot about Sophie and how the next few years will play out, preparing to start pre-school, deciding what her schedule will be like.”

Babette nodded along.

“A lot is changing,” I said. “And we feel like we too need to make a change.”

I could only look at Babette for another second. Instead, I focused on a new, small stain on the Moroccan rug. A dry discoloration camouflaged by the spiral pattern near her feet.

“What you guys talkinabout?” Sophie had clued in to the room’s changing tenor. Her face was blank, innocent.

Sarah got up and grabbed Sophie to sit on her lap.

“Our childcare needs have evolved, Babette,” I continued. “And we’re really sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

She looked down, hanging her head. Then she looked over at Sophie. “What?” she said finally. “I’m shocked. I didn’t think it was this—I thought I was getting a raise!”

“We’re giving you a month’s severance, and we’ll write a good review for you on the Tribeca Nannies site. You’ll find another family to work with,” I assured her.

“It’s not even been three years.” Babette’s eyes filled with tears. “You said how much finding someone for the long term was important to you all when I first interviewed. Someone to grow with Sophie. I was so sure I would be with you all for ten years at least. I love Sophie so much. I can’t bear to think about leaving her.”

Babette looked for Sophie again, but she was resting against Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah kissed the top of Sophie’s head.

“I know this is hard,” I said. “It’s been such a tough decision for us too.”

“Tell me—why are you firing me? What have I done? I’ve only ever been good to you.”

Babette’s voice grew loud. Moses darted across the carpet, startling me.

“Sophie needs more active engagement, someone who’s able to scrabble around on the floor with her.”

“But you knew that wasn’t me when you hired me. And I do play with her, entertain her, all the time. I never mislead you.”

I lowered my voice a bit. “Sophie said you were sleeping during the day.”

“What?” Babette looked indignant. “I only ever rest my head when she naps. I never sleep!” She paused momentarily and raised her fist to her mouth. “I thought you were decent people. But I’m a fool.”

I stood up and glanced at the cat feeder. Moses feasted from it now. “Babette, you don’t even clean anymore,” I said. “We come home to dirty dishes.”

“Now you’re really lying,” Babette yelled.

“Look.” I pointed at the stains on the rug. “Why are there stains?” I was angry now. “That’s unacceptable.”

Sophie started to cry, sniffling. She covered her face. Sarah rose and took Sophie down the hall to her room.

“This isn’t you,” Babette said quietly. “She’s putting you up to it.”

“It is me, Babette,” I said. “I’m firing you.”

She started to weep. I sat with her for a minute as she gathered herself, then led her to the door. Her sobs echoed in the empty hall as I shut the door behind her.

On Monday morning, when I left the bathroom after showering, Moses loped down the hallway and clawed my toes. I splayed myself against the wall, failing to deter him by flicking water from my feet. I ran away and finally closed him off from my room to get dressed for work.

“Are you starting to feel relieved?” Sarah asked when I came into the kitchen. “I’m proud when I think about how you handled it. We did the right thing, babe.” She pinched some sea salt onto my overnight oats and fed me the first bite. “I’ve already found a woman I love,” she said. “Early education degree. Young. Vibrant. Well slept.”

Sarah’s mom was heading into town soon to help for a bit. I wished my mom could do the same, and I realized then that Babette would never drive me to basketball again. In truth, I was wary of another nanny—the way a new person in the house inevitably reveals and refracts new aspects of yourself.

“She’s coming on Wednesday to meet us,” Sarah said. She came close to me. “Today’s going to be a good day,” she said. “I can feel it.”

After a strategy meeting later that day, I returned to my office to find an email from Sarah. The subject line: XoX. I turned away from the screen, incredulous. The sole relief of the last days was not having to confront another one of these videos; it was gratuitous at this point. I almost didn’t open it. But when I looked again, I saw that the clip was dark—nighttime—and the view of our living room was dim. After I pressed play, it took a minute to distinguish the large form on the couch as two people. I watched the bright points of my eyes peering back at me. Sarah and I were having sex.

I got up to close my office door. When I came back to resume the clip, Sarah moved slowly on top of me as I reached into her hair. My face flushed before my computer screen to witness it; I’d never seen myself in this way, in the motion of fucking. The clip was just over twelve minutes. I scrolled ahead, impatient, our positions staggering and changing. Toward the end, Sarah had come to sit behind me. She held a hand roughly over my mouth as she reached around. My lips now were dry while I watched her stroking me, watched her muffling my moans as she finished me off. The clip stopped abruptly. I sat back in my chair and stared at the final frame. I remembered this moment, just before I’d gone to the kitchen to get a towel. Right before I’d crouched down on my bare knees and tried to scrub clean the stain I’d left on the rug.

The post My Wife Pays Me and I Pay the Nanny appeared first on Electric Literature.