By Kirstin Allio
The air was watery, snow by afternoon. Taylor clubbed her hands inside her coat pockets. Her building, with a gray awning that seemed to corral the cold, marked the spot where the tree-lined street lost its trees and sidewalk and became a route-numbered highway that coursed through acres of big-box stores and family restaurants. Taylor set off on foot: the little townish town was in the opposite direction.
She’d had no idea she had poor circulation until she watched her freshman-year roommate running around all winter in dishabille, in camisoles. Emily Linder looked like she was peddling bra straps.
People thought distant places were colder. “Seattle!” As if it were remote and frigid as a star. She never tried to correct them, regarding the climate or the fact that she was from Lynnwood, in provincial Snohomish County. She was twenty-three now, she’d stayed out east after college.
She passed the gabardine public library, payphone under the exaggerated, modern eaves, cat-door of a book-drop for those, like cats, who avoided civic confrontation. Even the evergreen landscaping bushes, here, lost their pigment in the winter. There were law offices in a row of historic white houses. Taylor’s sophomore-year roommate had gone on to law school.
She felt as if she were holding cold rocks in her pockets. In western Washington Lenten Rose bloomed celery, eggplant, eggshell at Christmas; camellias budded by New Year’s. But she wasn’t nostalgic. An astrology column had once informed her that resignation was her coping mechanism. She pictured neat little gears inside her. Resignation was a form of low self-esteem – it didn’t take a rocket scientist. She thought of Emily Linder throwing herself across the bed freely, a smooth roll of back-fat exposed between her jeans and tiny tanktop. Emily had given up on Taylor in the first twenty-four hours.
She could circumnavigate the municipal park and be back home by nine-thirty. Ten seemed the earliest he might call her. She wished she didn’t have to take her hand out of her pocket to check her watch. She was freezing but she couldn’t bring herself to wear one of the pom-pom hats East Coast people pulled on nonchalantly. She was shy, vain, bored, boring. She didn’t fight it. What she did fight, now, was the monkish depression. On a Saturday morning. Getting out of her monk’s cell, walking to the village.
The park was designed in rays that went out from a bandstand. Taylor had watched children tumble across the concrete dais in the summer as if it were a giant bed, slightly forbidden. Now there were frost crystals in the pores of the sidewalk. She drummed over a petit footbridge and she could smell moldering blackberry in the streambed. A plaque described the provenance of the rose bushes, the brave and childish way the first settlers came from Holland, via New York, and the fact that a few of their diminutive farm buildings were even still looked after by the Preservation Society.
She curved around the decorative pond where a heron like a close-up of a mosquito had spooked the fish all summer. There were ducks in pairs in the wicker bushes. They would have walked arm in arm if they had them, thought Taylor.
Her sophomore-year roommate, Adina, was an Ambassador of the College. She had insisted Taylor join her for the Orientation Week cook-out, and they swung by other dorms on the way and collected a group of girls like a wedding party. It had taken Adina a full week to give up on Taylor. Taylor knew she could have told her and saved her the trouble.
She checked her watch again. There was a chance she’d miscalculated – her walk or his timing. She couldn’t help falling into an awkward trot. Her left leg was noticeably longer than her right, she was terrible at sports, her senior year of high school she’d been forced to take the remedial PE class for girls who’d always had their periods. The teacher had added a comment to the passing grade: “She should try to make stronger movements.”
She reached her building and sunk her key to the hilt. She felt as if he were watching her. Up the stairs, she used her arms for leverage on the railing. She pictured him reading her number off a scrap of paper that would be regurgitated in the wash if he accidentally left it in his pocket. The library, its inner lights slightly orange, the payphone with its sleek dark neck and gleaming umbilicus.
* * *
The first time he called she’d been dozing in a chair in her living room, bare sun across the floorboards. She’d been kept up all night by the young professional couple directly above her: how many times could two people cross their apartment? Living alone, it seemed like the phone could ring out of nowhere. No storm warning, clouds bunching together, wind smelling different.
“Is that Taylor?”
She was cold despite the sun on the floor, and disoriented.
“Is this your street?” he’d marveled, laughing.
He’d invited himself up to her apartment. What was the first thing she did when she came home from work? he’d asked her.
She’d protested.
“No, really.”
She imagined a stock version of herself moving down the thin hall to the kitchen. Her unsteady walk (x-rays and MRIs, it turned out leg length discrepancy wasn’t a sign of anything) had always irritated her mother. Her baggy socks and fallen ankles. Water for tea. Secretly she found coffee disgusting.
“Well, what kind of tea?” he’d teased her, and she knew he was more entertaining to himself than she was. She’d tried to block his view of the chair where she habitually hung the sweatpants and t-shirt she slept in.
The kitchen had an electric stove, a mismatched fridge and warped cabinets, as if the plywood were fifty-percent polyester. She ate discreetly, plain and dry, she was a budget vegetarian.
He said, “My wife’s a vegetarian.”
She felt like she was walking into a trap, taking down a Goodwill teacup. He pointed at it. “You’re not having any?” She took down another.
“You’ve got terrific southern exposure up here,” he continued. She looked around, bewildered. “I love apartments. I don’t know why we give them up when we turn into so-called grownups.”
She had never imagined living in a house. It seemed as foreign as living in China. He seemed to be serious about evaluating her whole set-up. Silence.
“Your cue,” he said teasingly. “So tell me about you, Andrew.”
He was a playwright with a playwright’s ritualized way of looking at the world. “Do you see what I’m saying?” The teakettle started hissing. Taylor surprised herself by knowing he wouldn’t care what kind of tea she poured him.
He had short gray hair and eyes like wood-grain. He wanted to write plays, but he collaborated on TV series. He was never the “based on the book by” or “based on the idea.” He wasn’t in L.A., there was that little problem. He unsheathed a dark silver cigarette lighter. He weighed it. “Come here,” he said, and she brought the tea over. He put the lighter in her palm and it was heavy, like water.
He waited until the tea was almost cold and then he took a single swallow.
“Do you know your neighbors?” he asked her.
The couple who kept her up all night – “Maybe they’re sleepwalkers,” he suggested. But most of the occupants of her building she had never seen at all and she imagined ticking them off a master list of human beings.
“That’s actually quite creepy,” he said with admiration.
* * *
Now she cleaned her apartment constantly, she felt like she was in a movie, even when she slept she felt like she was “sleeping.”
She worked part-time in the office of the private school where his daughter was a fourth grader. Weekend afternoons she filled in at a boutique decorated with hand-painted scarves and quilted dop-kits on the cakey little main street; both jobs came through the older lady she’d done errands and bills for through college. In any case he had walked into the school office looking for his daughter’s teacher.
She wasn’t supposed to leave the front desk unattended. Confidentiality, litigation, and the children of centamillionaires and semi-celebrities. But he had just stood there after she explained that she could help him set up an appointment, and to escape his stare she’d excused herself to go looking for the teacher in question.
The windowless teachers’ lounge was crowded with dented cupcakes and super-saturated pineapple left over from class parties. For a moment she was caught up in the carnage of broken oatmeal raisin, carrot sticks gone to sawdust. Her parents had been teachers but they’d shielded her. When she returned to the front office he was grinning over the biblical ledger.
“Did you just start here?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Where have I been?” he said, still grinning.
She shook her head, she had no idea.
He laughed. “I don’t know either.” He studied her. “Inside information, here,” he lowered his voice. “Everybody hates their kid’s teacher.” His eyes glittered. She didn’t doubt that he’d got what he wanted.
The next day she bumped into him at the town supermarket. Its chain name was in smaller letters, that’s how you could tell you were going to pay Yuppie prices, he informed her later.
He said, “I was wondering how I was ever going to – ” and he whipped up the air between them. He was serious. But how else, other than serious, would an intelligent person act in the face of his own infidelity?
In the face of her imagination. Her stomach felt like it was made out of parachute material. She could hear the rustle.
His wife was away on a tour of seven cities. He didn’t say “my wife,” he said her name, which was rare and formidable. She was a dancer. She must have worn her clothes as seamlessly as skin. It was his wife’s company: she made up the steps and chose the music.
“I’d like to meet her,” said Taylor.
He raised his eyebrows. She’d be on tour for two weeks, then she’d be back for three days, then a brief residency at a small college.
“Come on over and keep us company.” He and his daughter. “Do you eat dinner?”
Taylor glanced at her shopping cart and they both laughed because there was just the water bag of baby carrots.
* * *
He cast them both as outsiders in such a town: he was the right age but the wrong spirit, she – what was she doing here? He affected being baffled. He flattered her by implying she belonged someplace better. It was true, though: the only other twenty-somethings were soda-logged computer-folk from the middle earth of their parents’ basements. Boys of men, with loose lips and barber haircuts, one had spied her in the municipal park in the summer and asked her to go for ice cream.
Andrew laughed for a long time. His daughter was glued to a video. He brushed Taylor’s hair out of her eyes when she was drying the dishes.
“So?” he said finally, smugly, recovering, as if he already knew the answer.
She didn’t understand him.
“What flavor?”
“I – ” she started.
“Cruel!” He shook his head. “I figured.”
Actually, despite her terror, she had gone with the laundry-and-rec-room creature. She couldn’t remember what flavor. His body had seemed shapeless, like sheets over furniture. Gallantly he’d held the door of the Daily Scoops for her and then they were stranded together on the sidewalk.
Part Two
Taylor’s junior-year roommate had tried to interest her in ballroom dancing. Chunni was big-boned, forceful, Korean. She kept a crock pot like a cauldron in their room that smelled unrelentingly of reheated soup. Lined up across her desk were vials of homemade sauces.
“Dancing will make you more coordinated, Tayloh!” Taylor was unmoved; Chunni was stubbornly disappointed.
In fact Chunni was Taylor’s favorite roommate, with her stoic good nature, and finally Taylor relented. She would prove to Chunni once and for all that she was not, constitutionally or spiritually, social.
One Thursday night in early spring Taylor found herself as Chunni’s guest in a cavernous hall with thirty or so other Korean students, all dressed as if for church in the early1960s. Somehow Chunni had overlooked Taylor’s blue jeans and sweatshirt, and it was as if Taylor were the only female with legs. She begged to sit out, she promised to watch, but Chunni kept pushing her ahead like a broken wheelbarrow.
It wasn’t Chunni’s fault; Chunni may have been insensitive, but she wasn’t malicious. And there seemed to be plenty of affable young men who genuinely wanted to hold her hands, coach her through the footwork. As Chunni stood by, Taylor rejected them one after another.
The sense of public pressure mounted until the air turned hot and fleshy. All at once Taylor couldn’t catch her breath and suffocating, she fainted gently across a couple of vacant folding chairs. When she came to Chunni was squatting alongside her like a midwife, alarmed, holding her shoulders. The boys who had asked her to dance looked askance, not wanting to be blamed for anything. Chunni released her reluctantly, making her promise to return straight to their dorm room.
* * *
The other park in town his daughter called Stone Ladies. There were two statues, he called them platitudes of kneeling. “Of genuflection,” he added, eyeing her. “Are you Catholic?”
Seagulls fell across the park on guy wires. Taylor shook her head, but he continued to look at her as if she would revise her answer. The stone ladies were naked. Their eyes were closed, their noses aquiline. The left breast on each lady was fuller.
There was a little bit of a vista, the sky stacked up on the horizon. A steeple half a mile away was blurred by permanent haze at the edges.
They gravitated toward the small pond. They found out he was twenty years older. He said, “Why is it always exactly by decades?”
She was quiet.
He said, “Did you know there are different culling periods for men and women?”
His daughter seemed to have something going on under a cedar tree. “She’s kind of a water baby,” he boasted. “She fell in that pond once.” Taylor could see her as a nyad. She had a distractibility that made Taylor uneasy.
They sat side by side watching loose snow flakes mesh and dissolve in water. Taylor had to concentrate to keep her teeth from clattering. “This time last year it wasn’t half as warm,” he said accusingly, as if it stood in for a deeper truth about existence. He said she couldn’t keep avoiding the question of where she was from. She took everything he said as a kind of compliment. “Nobody’s from nowhere,” he chided. He cocked his head. “Unless they’re an angel.” He squinted and rolled an imaginary movie camera at her. “You’re a Wim Wenders angel!”
She hadn’t seen any of the movies. He said he hated when people said film instead of movie. He liked how she dressed too. He looked at her, appraising. “So where did the lovely Taylor spend her childhood?”
She didn’t want to force him to comment on the rain, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, or coffee.
“Mystery Child!” As if she were driving him slightly crazy. Taylor was freezing, laughing.
“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand to her. Slightly sexually crazy.
He bought a cone for his daughter and one for himself at one end of Elm Street. Soon his daughter was busy with her dripping chocolate. “I’m getting messy,” she warned them, and there was something messy overall, about her. Taylor had pocketed a whole ream of napkins. She stopped to hand them over. “But I’m sticky!” his daughter protested. Taylor could see. Around the wrists, in the armpits of her fingers.
His daughter was half a block ahead of them, licking her wrists, looking at the toy store display window. Taylor watched her drop the used napkins on the sidewalk.
* * *
He told her his daughter was slow to read and write. “But super creative.” He shrugged. From working at the school, Taylor had the sense that diagnoses came in waves, as if the diagnoses themselves were contagious. She herself had always felt safer in class with the smarter kids, those with subtler language capabilities. Although she didn’t manage to make friends with them. She closed her eyes for a moment. Differently-sized girls from the same age group swinging on the bars, high knees like carousel ponies, revolving in mill circles, the perfume of the thuddy woodchip carpet.
In her senior year of high school, one Advanced Placement program had been folded into another, and suddenly Taylor had all her classes with a girl named Morgan. Two girls with boy names, and Morgan soon uncovered the fact that they were both only children whose parents had divorced when they were eleven. They even looked alike, with their plain brown hair unfashionably barretted, their slightly protruding, oily foreheads. They both had such long legs that Morgan said ominously, “We have the proportions of crucifixes.” Her mother was Born Again. Morgan said she never would have been born at all if she’d known it involved the inanity of high school. Both girls were thinking of going out of state for college.
Morgan’s father lived in Seattle. Taylor concealed her admiration. He had a dollhouse bungalow, said Morgan, in one of the Lake Washington neighborhoods, Madrona, and he had given Morgan a pickup truck so that she could visit him independent of her mother. Morgan invited Taylor to come along one weekend and they left straight from school on Friday.
They listened to Morgan’s music on the freeway. Morgan sang along and Taylor found herself blushing. “I never know what to listen to,” she ventured.
There was heavy traffic. Taylor liked surveying it from the elevated cab – she had never ridden in a pick-up truck.
“We brought this upon ourselves,” announced Morgan, and it took Taylor a minute. “We invented cars,” Morgan elaborated.
Taylor looked out again: a sheet of traffic, nine or ten lanes across, stretching back and forward, a manmade infinity. She tried blaming herself for it, but it seemed like a force of nature. Maybe Morgan was into the environment? It was impossible to just – ask a question.
A couple of helicopters hung in the sky ahead, reflecting the cold sunset. Morgan had to duck a little to look out the windshield and up. She said, “An accident?”
“Yeah,” Taylor heard herself saying.
There was a big splash of metal and metallic lights flashing on the upcoming exit ramp, it looked like a seven-car pile-up. Taylor didn’t know how Morgan could count the mashed cars so efficiently. After they passed it they talked about having had no friends in childhood – without knowing if they would be friends, thought Taylor.
Part Three
Saturday morning Morgan packed two watercolor paint sets. They could easily walk to the lake beach from her father’s bungalow. All they had to do was fall down a series of staircases like chutes, narrow city holdings. Taylor caught glimpses of fanciful bohemian dwellings with floating decks, treehouse platforms behind thick bangs of foliage. She had no idea if it was a safe neighborhood but she felt a sense of romantic abandonment.
The sky was mixed, and Morgan dipped glass jars in the lake water. Taylor saw a transparent flickering creature caught in one jar but Morgan didn’t seem to notice. They set up in the grass looking over a crescent of sand and across the water. Morgan provided sporadic instruction, but didn’t seem moved by the fact that Taylor had never before painted.
The sky had a collar of tumbled clouds. A water bird came in for a ski landing. It made perfect sense that water was the basis for everything, thought Taylor.
Morgan pointed out the Microsoft city across the lake. “My dad calls it the military-industrial complex.” She was showing off a little bit, thought Taylor. They both put it in their paintings when the sun hit it: the towers beamed out and made the water look like oil. They painted the floating bridges that looked like dams, motorboats, sailboats, a u-shaped swallow.
Morgan laughed when Taylor said she thought it was one of life’s miracles that people knew how to get other people out of the water.
She stopped laughing. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You can’t swim?”
Was it possible Taylor had never been so happy? It wasn’t that she was good at painting. She was obviously terrible. Morgan leaned back to assess her own “canvas.” “Well,” she said, “this is what I would look like if I were a lake instead of a Morgan.”
Taylor produced an unbecoming cry of surprise before she could stop herself. But it was true. Her seemingly secret Taylor-ness was laid bare in the amateur landscape. She had no technique to save herself from drowning but she felt emboldened. She could swim, she could paint: how many other things could she do simply by trying?
The clouds got darker over Microsoft and there were rain lines and a flashbulb of lightning. Morgan made no move to pack up. Suddenly she cried, “It’s a double!” It was. Two of each color, at first bleary, then sharper, as if – said Morgan condescendingly – God adjusted the binoculars. The colors intensified, and then suddenly the rainbow was heavy enough to lay its tracks across the water.
It was strange: Taylor found she couldn’t keep her eyes on it. She watched a crow spear the soft bank and haul out a fleshy worm. She wished she could say that beauty was demanding.
But Morgan must have felt the same. “I can’t stand it any longer,” she said, and she began dumping the jars of used water.
* * *
The girls were cold when they got back and Morgan said they would take turns taking hot showers. Morgan went first and Taylor was alone in the bedroom. The low eaves were shortcuts of gravity and the walls were a shade of purple that reminded Taylor of roll-down maps in a social studies classroom. Morgan’s jeans lay over the pillow on her bed. Taylor went completely still and quiet before she lifted them; the risk seemed dizzyingly fateful, and even as she upzipped her own jeans and struggled damply out of them she knew it wasn’t worth it. Still. She wanted to know Morgan.
Morgan’s jeans were damp too, and now, over the vaguely shoe store smell of Morgan’s bedroom, there was the unmistakable odor of pee like heated pineapple. Taylor’s nose seemed to whistle so she breathed shallowly through her mouth and she taste the sweet-and-sour. Just as she was pulling the waist around her waist there was a knock on the bedroom door. She stopped breathing.
Morgan’s father must have stopped breathing too, she imagined. But she had to think. What was her best bet? Would he go away if she didn’t answer, or would silence be his cue to enter? It wasn’t like she was in the bathroom. Then, “Is one of you in there?”
“Just a moment,” said Taylor. She needed an hour. An eternity of him not coming in here. Should she try to get out of Morgan’s jeans and back into her own? Had he even heard her? Would he barge in when she was naked? She focused on the strip of light at the bottom of the door. She could hear herself ringing in her own ears.
He said, “Morgnificent?”
Taylor held still. The door began to open.
It seemed as if he didn’t see her at first. Then he was staring at her openly. She found she had pinned herself against the closet door. Was he incapable of hiding his true feelings? Grownups were more childish than teenagers. She knew she wouldn’t scream or fight. She was a rag doll, she was Morgan in Morgan’s jeans. She closed her eyes and waited.
“You and Morg could have been separated at birth,” he said finally.
“There you are!” Morgan exclaimed when she returned from the shower. She looked at Taylor strangely. “I thought you might have been making friends with my dad or something.”
When it was Taylor’s turn she took all of her clothes into the bathroom with her.
* * *
Morgan’s father had a showpiece coffee machine that looked like the prototype for an elaborate steampunk engine. He said it had cost more than Morgan’s pickup. Morgan handled the seething invention while he stood around and bragged about it. Taylor received a mug fit for a giant. She didn’t say she had never had a “latte.”
“Are you trying to keep her up all night?” laughed Morgan’s father. Morgan sucked hers down, keeping one eye on Taylor.
Taylor thought she would get better at fashioning trees. Interpreting shadow, expressing those grounded, native (said Morgan) runt berries along the lakeshore. Better at painting the sky drinking up the water.
But back at school, in their AP classes, there was no obvious ending. Just the slightly discomfiting feeling that there had been no beginning, either.
And later, when Taylor went over it, she was unsettled that Morgan made the coffee. Like a young wife to her father. Her long plain hair in two barrettes, braided belt around the waist of her blue jeans.
Part Four
Between each ring of the phone Taylor said to herself, I don’t know if it’s not him yet. Swiftly she pulled on a pair of clean white pants. He said she was like a colt, the off-center gait, persistent girlishness. A navy sweater, she’d looked better in the green one, known she would never have the strength to wear it. She twisted her hair up.
She cleared her throat. She wished she’d had a drink of water instead of pulling on her pants – she could’ve answered naked. Too late now. Six rings and people would think she’d been in the bathroom. He’d think – he’d see her streaming out of the bathroom before she’d even flushed the toilet.
People opened up or closed up with other people. They never stayed the same.
Her freshman-year roommate, Emily with the bra straps, Adina who would be a lawyer, Chunni the ballroom dancer, they all thought she stayed the same. It was the opposite.
The phone kept ringing. The last thing was shoes. Boots. He liked it when she ran around the park with his daughter.
* * *
Through courtship, marriage, and divorce, Taylor’s parents had taught at the same large, suburban-blue-collar high school. When Taylor left for college (her guidance counselor leered about West Coast quotas, but it was unclear to Taylor who was being taken advantage of), her parents promptly, if separately, retired from teaching. There was the little harbor of their pensions. All on her own, Taylor’s mother opened a florist shop in an undersubscribed strip mall. When Taylor came home for Christmas her mother’s house was filled with flowers that smelled like frozen peas and chlorine. The camellia bloomed in the front yard and Taylor cut a stem with four strawberry-pink flowers and put it in a juice glass on the kitchen table. Later the same day her mother had already tossed it. It was disconcerting that Taylor had had no idea her mother wanted to be a florist. Suddenly there was the possibility that even boring lives were secret.
Taylor’s sophomore year of college her mother hired a landscaping company to exhume the camellia and put in a matching pair of inky Japanese maples. Her eyes twinkled when she told Taylor the neighbors took note, that certain neighbors were now looking into their own landscape accents. Otherwise it was a subdued development of nine-hundred-square-foot ranches with their driveways on the left and a welcome bush to the right of their walkways. Taylor’s parents had sacrificed, long ago, to live in a better school district. Her mother had bought out her father.
Light lurked in the sky until ten o’clock at night in the summer, when Taylor was home working with her mother. There was a miraculous small-business loan for menopausal (her mother joked), single women business owners, and Taylor’s mother had bought a van with a refrigerated chamber. One afternoon they were picking through peaked corsages, saving baby thickets of baby’s breath, when an order came in from Seattle. “Well, well,” said Taylor’s mother, brisk with pride. “You just have to stick to your guns. Your dreams,” giggling. In less than an hour they were on the road, bearing the delivery.
Riding in the passenger seat of the van was like bouncing on a trampoline, even more so as they ticked off the Seattle exits below Northgate where the heavy commuter stretch was grooved and rutted. There was traffic. Taylor’s mother kept stuttering the brakes, which she claimed made them last longer. Taylor watched a sea plane scud down on Lake Union as they waited in the long line on the freeway bridge facing the towers of the city.
Taylor read the directions out loud once they took their exit, and soon they were twirled along park-like, lake-shore streets with no grid logic. Suddenly Taylor said, “Is this Madrona?”
Then she was embarrassed. As if she thought she had some claim to it. They passed gaudy deck-and-glass numbers, and enhanced stucco remodels of older Craftsmans. She felt that something wasn’t quite right, what should have been the same was different.
They overshot the address and had to find a place to turn the van around. Retracing the route more carefully Taylor spotted the numbers engraved in old brick, shrouded in laurel, at the head of a long, obscured driveway. They pulled through giant wrought iron gates tipped with lances and stamped with intricate red and gold escutcheons. There were Japanese maples like weeping willows at midnight.
They parked as quietly and inconspicuously as possible, and Taylor’s mother set out to find the foreman. The brick mansion and flanking carriage houses blocked the view of the lake and the mountains. The driveway was forested with red cedar specimen trees, and a flotilla of hydrangeas was so constantly gardened that it never quit producing blossom-heads of Aegean blue and antique indigo, Taylor imagined.
Quiet fell. Maybe wealth was quiet – or at least it didn’t speak to those who didn’t have it. Taylor undid her seatbelt and turned toward the van’s interior. She could not remember a single instance in her childhood when either of her parents had patronized a florist. It seemed for a moment that she could not remember anything about her childhood and she wondered if she were, in fact, still a child, and going to college out east was a dream she would wake from, shake off, and then find dissolved entirely.
She thought she forced herself out of her reverie. The refrigerated chamber behind her was sealed with a dwarf door, the stainless steel handle looked like some kind of ancient folk weapon. It was cold to the touch. Her mother would return any moment and Taylor would have the flowers unloaded and ready. Almost at the same moment that she opened the refrigerator door, the van began to tremble.
Taylor pressed herself back in her seat as if she’d been chastened. Outside, the black drive was crumbling around the van like piecrust. She felt the front wheels buckle. She closed her eyes. She felt the earth – as if the whole thing were a muscle – seize and shudder. She was falling down, over edges and false edges of earth, rocks fell with her, clumps of sod, sprays of acid-tasting soil. She managed to catch herself on the rung of a root. Still the contents of the earth rained down around her.
She must have blacked out. It seemed like a long time later that she heard the van’s alarm bleating from far, far above her.
She lay in the underground darkness. She could smell packed wet earth, and the kind of mold that finds its way into the molecular structure of concrete. Mold that looks like the man in the moon on a basement wall, thought Taylor.
Her mother had set up the laundry area in the basement as a guest room. “Your summer suite,” she’d shown Taylor. She’d seemed a little bit embarrassed, but knowing she shouldn’t be. A little bit resentful that Taylor was grown up, moved away; knowing she shouldn’t be. Taylor’s bedroom she now used as an office.
Almost before Taylor woke she realized it was the wrong dream. A florist had nothing to do with earth. Everything to do with water. The earthquake dream – she’d never told anyone. Not her mother. Her decision to remain out east had tapered into private silence. Her mother didn’t know if she could keep the shop open. Two nail salons had popped up, then vanished in the same strip mall, a music and movies store had gone into foreclosure, the liquor store had tried both reducing and increasing its hours. “I’m going to do more balloons,” her mother promised. There was the gap opening, widening, until there was more gap than earth between her and her mother.
* * *
She grabbed the phone as if she were jumping off a bridge.
“Are you at the library?”
He laughed. But it sounded too smooth, someone else was in the room with him. His wife would be stretching on the floor at his feet. Taylor could see her rolling up, vertebrae by vertebrae, hollowing her abdomen, ready now to begin marking steps and poses.
Was he an official liar, who told run-on stories that didn’t end until he, the liar-teller, believed every ornate detail? Were his excuses baroque, frosted with rosettes and angels? He’d called her an angel.
He wondered if she could come for dinner on Friday. “En famille,” he said, in a brighter register than usual. “And you can’t bring anything at all but your lovely self, Miss Taylor.” She tried to breath normally.
His house was on a residential connector street. The first time she was over he’d called it “our shelter house,” which he’d had to explain was sort of a muddled reference to certain glossy magazines, that probably didn’t translate. In fact he’d said, “You had to be there,” and it stung her.
“Do you feel ridiculous following the winding walkway?” he’d said cleverly, possibly making it up to her. Taylor had laughed, turning left and right and left again behind him.
That first time she was surprised his house was so modest. The entry had a coat closet with a thin tri-fold door and loose handles. He was not the kind of man who would fix handles on the weekends. There was a single futon sofa in the living room and unframed dance posters thumbtacked into sheetrock marrow. He’d bent to turn on a lamp, but it was the middle of the day, and it made the room feel like a school or a hospital.
He hadn’t seemed to care what she thought of his house. She felt like one of his daughter’s friends, mute but hungry for the after-school cookies.
Now, carving across the front yard in order to follow the walkway, Taylor wondered if the house would have changed with his wife inside it. Was it really her house? The front door was evergreen plastic. He had opened it before, so Taylor hadn’t noticed. He had taken her coat before. She had shed her skin with her coat so he would hold it.
She pressed the bell. She could hear it like a fire alarm inside, and she startled. She was in two places at once, the flimsiness between worlds. She wished she had knocked instead. She could have been the new babysitter.
She hadn’t really noticed the landscaping tufts before. She looked sideways and traced the artificial rock-facing that formed a low wall between the yard and the sunken driveway. Last time, his daughter had walked along the top of that wall rather than fall into line on the walkway.
Taylor heard rapid footsteps. She took a step backward.
“It’s Taylor!” cried his wife, throwing the door open.
She was stringy, hollow-eyed, with an enormous bony mouth that suggested her skeleton. No make-up. They faced each other. Her eyes skittered down the full length of Taylor.
“You found us okay?” She had stringy hair, too, that she pulled to the side and then wove into its own knotlet.
“That weird bear-left under the highway?” she persisted.
Taylor nodded. It wasn’t a lie.
Taylor folded her coat over her arm. The other times she’d been here, she’d taken off her shoes like he did. His wife had bare feet. She didn’t ask Taylor to take her shoes off and so Taylor didn’t.
His wife seemed flat footed, or ostentatiously tired, for a dancer. Her hair was inching its way out of the knot against her shoulder. She urged Taylor onto the futon sofa. She sighed. “It’s totally Andrew to remember the beer and forget the salad.”
“Oh, I could have – ” Taylor started. But his wife wasn’t apologizing for his absence.
Taylor found herself looking across the room at one of the dance posters. An extraordinarily long-limbed black woman swept in a snow-white sundress. The skirt made a half circle. One long leg seemed to hang from a hook in the sky. Her arms were endless, bare and gleaming.
They all drank beer with the rice casserole, and the salad was dotted with pomegranate seeds his wife had surgically removed from the pomegranate tissue beforehand. His daughter picked out the rubies and then erected a tent of spinach leaves. She dropped her fork. Without thinking, it appeared to Taylor, his wife leaned down and retrieved it.
There was no feeling in his look. Neither intimacy nor animosity. Some packaged cookies for dessert, and Taylor excused herself. She was tipsy, compromised, she never should have come. She drank water from her hands in the bathroom. She sat down on the burgundy bathmat, it had a weird, tinsel-like texture.
When she returned to the table he got up and began clearing.
“May I help?” said Taylor.
“No way,” he and his wife said together.
His wife opened the green door for her. “Where’s your coat?” she said. Taylor took it off her arm, where it had weighted her down the entire evening.
Part Five
He called her from the library. He was doing research, he really needed to come up with a big idea, he couldn’t go on like this, creatively he was impoverished, hand-to-mouth, he needed to talk to her, now did she see how hard it could be to live with a self-fulfilled artist like his wife? Did she want to meet at Stone Ladies?
She was self-aware enough to know she was depressed. How could it not be obvious that she was cold, insignificant?
But he came up behind her. “Hey lovely lady.” He wore cowboy Levi’s, the kind that make men look saddle-sore and bandy legged. They were so faded she could see the white warp and weft of the material.
He led her to the stone steps that terraced toward the pond from the statues. He motioned for her to sit beside him. She knew she’d freeze. She avoided the dried curl of an earthworm.
“I’m going to give you my little speech about love, Taylor.” He knocked her knee with his knee. “Ready?” He kept his knee against her knee now.
“About a week before my wedding I decided to call up my ex-girlfriend.” He rubbed his hands together. It was cold. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, Taylor had already noticed.
“I told myself I was the big man to apologize for not inviting her to the wedding.” He squinted toward the pond. “Because that’s what we do now,” he said. “We’re so open.” He tapped her once on her coat on her breastbone.
“My ex-girlfriend picked up the phone and I said, ‘Sweetheart.’” He paused theatrically. “It just slipped out!” He smiled at himself in wonder. “Then I had to tell her I was getting married.” He slid farther out along his thighs until the heads of his elbows were on his kneecaps. He seemed to need to look out into the middle distance. “I told her that all love was part of the same big love. That marrying my wife wasn’t as much about my wife as it was about being part of this big love,” he said, leaning back again, comfortably.
“So there you have it.” He turned toward her and she was sure he was going to kiss her.
But he stood up instead, and the sudden change in level made her almost seasick. Was she supposed to feel rejected? He took out the silver cigarette lighter and toyed with it. Her spirit was like an MRI. The metal hurt, everything went haywire in the echo chamber.
He refitted himself beside her, even closer this time, as if they’d suddenly been through something together. “Do you see what I’m saying?”
It seemed like the park was a painting of a park. There was a gray filminess about it. Nipples of light from the houses below – suddenly it was evening.
“Are you there?” he said. But he wasn’t used to listening. He wore that particular expression of dogs when they can’t find the stick their owner just threw for them.
She stayed where she was. The sky had a black eye, silver seams, seagulls coasted in on air bikes. He’d said he’d offer to walk her home but she looked like she was feeling pretty pensive.
What was there to go back to? Morgan’s disappearance? Her mother losing the florist shop? In both instances Taylor had been useless. Chunni had invited Taylor to her wedding just last fall and Taylor had never responded. There was always the demarcation of herself and the outside world. The park darkened like a theater.
It had seemed almost sacrilegious to turn her back on a double rainbow, but Morgan was the leader. They climbed staircases through vertical tunnels of dark and glossy laurel. This jungle was all steep-bank waterfront, Morgan informed Taylor. The cement stairs were eroded by moss and Taylor had to concentrate to avoid slipping. Without turning Morgan said, “It would be the perfect place to get abducted.”
Taylor felt a quick stab of guilt for picturing Morgan’s father. He was so kind and so cool and here she was, nearly mute, monstrously shy, descending on them for the entire weekend. Morgan halted suddenly and Taylor ran straight into her and cried out in surprise before she could help it. Morgan had a low, almost manly chuckle.
Morgan quit school two weeks before graduation.
The AP English teacher told them, and the socially deft students in the front row, commandeered by two brilliant Indian girls, speculated gothically before the teacher hushed them. Taylor cultivated indifference toward her classmates as a matter of survival, but it was terrifying the way Anjali and Enid could zoom in on someone, their psychoanalysis in high resolution.
As the class period dwindled, Anjali suddenly whipped around and fixated on Taylor. “You knew Morgan,” she demanded. The room fell silent. Even the teacher was trained on Taylor.
Taylor’s vision, her hearing, even the taste in her mouth pinholed. Her skin was a sheer sundress, everyone could see through it. Somewhere far away the teacher may have said something in her defense but Taylor’s ears were plugged with raw earth, her mouth was filled with dirt, it was packed in around her and she could only breath through the prick of light at the far, far end of the tunnel.