The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (13 page)

“It’s all right,” Lee said.

“No,” I said. “And I really do like your friends. I liked staying with them.”

“We won’t do it anymore,” Lee said.

“We can’t stay at motels,” I said. “And it’s nice to get out of the van every once in a while.”

Lee didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” I said. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

I wondered if Lee had fallen asleep. “What about your friend Kathryn”—I said it softly, in case he had—“that Carlos mentioned? Would you like to see her?”

“Well,” Lee said finally, “she doesn’t live that far from here.”

As soon as we climbed out of the van in front of Kathryn’s house, a girl flew out of the door, landing in Lee’s arms. They laughed and kissed each other and laughed again.

“Maggie,” Lee said, “what are you doing here?”

“Fact is, Lee,” she said, “Buzzy’s partner got sent up, so I’m staying here awhile case anybody’s looking for anybody.”

“Yeah?” Lee said. “Is Buzzy here?”

“He’s up in Portland,” she said. “He said it would be better if we went in different directions just till this cools off. I guess he’s got a honey up there.”

Lee shook his head, looking at her.

“Never mind, baby,” she said. “I’ll win, you know that. I always win.” Lee laughed again.

Inside, Kathryn put out her hands and Lee held them. Then she looked at me. “You’re cold,” she said. “Stand by the fire, and I’ll get you something to put on.”

“I’m O.K.,” I said. “Anyhow, I’ve got things in the van.” But she took a huge, flossy blanket from the back of the sofa and wound it slowly around and around me.

“You look like a princess!” Maggie said. “Doesn’t she? Look, Lee—she looks like a princess that’s—what are those stories?—under a dark enchantment.” Kathryn stood back and looked.

We drank big hot glasses of applejack and cinnamon, and the firelight splashed shadows across us. Kathryn and Maggie and Lee talked, their words scattering and shifting with the fire.

Numbness inched into my body, and my mind struggled to make sense of what my ears heard. Maggie had left the room—I grasped that—and Lee and Kathryn were talking about Carlos.

“I miss him. You know that, Lee?” Kathryn was saying. “I think about a lot of people, but I miss Carlos.”

“You should call him,” I tried to say, but my sleeping voice couldn’t.

“Well,” Lee said.

“Wait,” I wanted my voice to say. I knew I wouldn’t be able to listen much longer. “He talked about you…”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “I found myself feeling sorry for him. It was pretty bad. I hated to feel that way, but it seems like he hasn’t grown. He just hasn’t grown, and the thing is, he’s lost his nerve.”

“Kathryn,” I wanted to say, and couldn’t, and couldn’t, “Carlos wants to see you.”

I slid helplessly into sleep, and it must have taken me some time to struggle back to the surface, because when I’d managed to, Lee was saying, “Yeah, she is. She’s very nice. We’re having some problems now, though. And I don’t know if I can help her anymore.”

I heard it as a large globe floating near me, just out of reach. I tried to hold it, to turn it this way and that, but it bobbed away on the surface as I slipped under again.

I woke in a bed in another room, bound and sweating in the blanket, and I could hear Lee’s and Kathryn’s voices as a murmur. I flung the blanket away and pushed myself out of my clothes as sleep swallowed me once more.

In the morning I awoke puffed and gluey from unshed tears. I wrapped the blanket around myself and followed voices and the smell of coffee into the kitchen where Maggie and Kathryn and Lee were eating pancakes.

“That’s one sensational blanket,” Maggie said. “This morning it makes you look like Cinderella.”

I dropped the blanket. “Now it makes me look like Lady Godiva,” I said, not smiling. Kathryn’s laugh flashed in the room like jewelry.

When I came back to the kitchen, dressed, the others were having seconds. “Oh, God,” Maggie said. “Remember those apple pancakes you used to make, Lee? Those were the best.”

“I haven’t made those in a long time,” Lee said. “Maybe I’ll do that one of these mornings.”

“If we’re going to be staying for a while, I want to go get some things from town,” I said, standing back up.

“Relax,” Lee said. “We’ll drive in later.”

Kathryn and Maggie gave us a list of stuff they needed, and we set out.

“Kathryn’s very beautiful,” I said. “Maggie is too.”

“Yeah,” Lee said.

“You and Kathryn seem like good friends,” I said.

“We’re old friends,” Lee said. “Your feelings never change about old friends.”

“Like Carlos,” I said. “Hey, why is Maggie’s boyfriend giving her a hard time?”

“He’s an asshole,” Lee said.

“Kathryn doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

“No,” Lee said.

“She must get lonely up there,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Lee said. “Besides, people come to her a lot.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Like Maggie,” he said. “People who need something.”

We parked in the shopping center lot and went to the supermarket and the hardware store and the drugstore, and Lee climbed back into the van.

“You go on ahead,” I said. “There’s some other stuff I need to do.”

“It’s a long walk back,” Lee said.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re sure you know the way?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“All right,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”

I felt a lot better. I felt pretty good. I looked around the parking lot and saw people whose arms were full of packages or who held children by the hand. I watched the van glide out onto the road, and I saw it accelerate up along the curve of the days ahead. Soon, I saw, Lee would pull up in front of Kathryn’s house; soon he would step through the door and she would turn; and soon—not that afternoon, of course, but soon enough—I would be standing again in this parking lot, ticket in hand, waiting to board the bus that would appear so startlingly in front of me, as if from nowhere.

I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny weights-and-balances apparatus, rapidly disassembling on contact with oxygen.

The First Two Weeks

I lie on the floor and howl with grief. A friend tells me, “During the third week it will occur to you that you’re insane, and you’ll think, Well, now I’m insane. What difference does it make whether I smoke or not? This is a trick to get you to smoke.”

The Third Week

I am insane, but I am determined to wait it out.

Today I bump into someone crossing the street. I begin an apology, but when he tells me to watch where I am going in a tone I consider unnecessarily condemning, I seize him by the lapels. For an instant we look at each other. Then I release him back into the surge of pedestrians and continue on, stiff with fear.

I have gained twenty pounds. I weep unstintingly for the victims of tragedy I see around me on subways, in restaurants, and on the street, but the victims look at me oddly and move away. I find that I have elaborate opinions about things I have never previously given a thought to, and that it is imperative that everyone within earshot understand exactly what I mean, and why, in detail, I mean it.

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad. I cannot tell how long anything takes.

Spring

The smoke-free air is a flat, abrasive surface that I must inch my way along, but I am subject to sudden seizures of pellucid hatred which impel me out the door during dinner or in the early hours of the morning, or, when I am too helpless to move, into weak, furious storms of tears. Although I am demanding and insatiable, everything I want is sucked dry of flavor and color and warmth by the time I get it, like packaged foods in an employee cafeteria. When I wake up in the morning, my jaws ache.

Friends

My attachments to people are chaotic and unreliable. I can’t tell whether I am behaving oddly or not. Sometimes I feel that people think I am but don’t mention it, and this makes me angry when I think they’re right. I am angrier, however, when I think they’re wrong.

Sometimes I explode at a surprised acquaintance. I am afraid that I may say the final thing to someone, but these episodes occur so quickly that no one seems to comprehend what has happened. There is a feeling only of a slight break in continuity, as if a roomful of people had received an extraterrestrial visit that was posthypnotically expunged.

Summer

I have always not been able to do things, but I can’t rely on this as a principle now. Unfortunately, it is now possible to find out what I am not able to do only by observing myself in action. If I start to shake or fume, whatever it is that I’m doing is something I don’t do. I feel that I am a zoologist trying to discover the natural environment of an unknown animal found in a pet store. I wish this were the task of someone else, but the biological setup of our planet requires a rather strict one-to-one relationship between each corporeal entity and the consciousness with which it is accustomed to associate, and it seems that I am stuck. I will just have to keep trying various things, according to no principles whatsoever.

I take a Vacation

I go spend several weeks in a huge house with many people where I seem unable to go outside into the sunlight. Instead I lie in bed in my dark, chilly room, drinking glass after glass of vodka. Once in a while I break an emptied bottle on the wall or the floor.

Occasionally I feel called upon to say something. “Well, I don’t know,” I say when I encounter someone in the kitchen, where I sit for hours late at night staring and crying. “I’m feeling a little weird lately.” This seems to take care of the matter.

One day someone takes me to swim, which is something I have not done voluntarily for as long as I can remember, in the warm, curving pool of a nearby motel, which hums with fluorescent light.

I was once told that catatonics seem to enjoy swimming, and I can see why. The water registers one’s presence and confers meaning to one’s motor impulses, yet there is no threat in water, as there always is in air, of sudden, shattering injuries, inflicted or received.

I think I might like to try going swimming again, if I can find someplace to do it in the city.

Kathy tells me that she goes swimming at the YMCA, and she points out that there’s no reason I shouldn’t try it. She is an extremely judicious person. If she doesn’t see any reason not to try it, I probably don’t have to think through the whole thing to see if I do. Next Tuesday she will bring me as her guest.

I find that often between opening my eyes in the morning and putting on my final piece of clothing, three or four hours will elapse. Sometimes I am on my way out the door when something happens—the phone rings, or I notice that there are dishes in the sink, or I remember that I should get a load of laundry together, or I catch an unnerving glimpse of myself in the mirror, or I realize that I have errands that lie in opposite directions and that none of them is really important enough to take precedence over the others, or important enough to do at all, when it comes down to it, and that I don’t have enough money to do all, or maybe even any, of them, and I probably never will, and even if I should, so what—and there I am for the rest of the day.

People quite often ask me what I do with my time. I don’t know what to tell them. Actually, I don’t know what they are getting at. What it really is that I don’t know is why they want to make me feel the way they are obviously going to make me feel when they ask me this.

Wednesday

Kathy took me to swim at the Y with her yesterday.

In the Y

The Y is this whole thing. In it there are floors and floors and floors, all equipped for different kinds of amusements. On the third floor alone, besides the locker room for women and the showers and the sauna, and the clothes dryer, and the lounge with a TV, there is a meeting room, the Mini-Gym, and the Martial Arts Room.

The Roof

On top of the Y there is a roof with brightly colored plastic chairs shaped like long, narrow hands, which hold people tenderly under the sun.

The Track

There is a track on the eighth floor—a thin band around the edge of a room on which people in sneakers run slowly around to music that sounds as if it is coming from a cranked-up toy.

The Basketball Court

There is nothing in the middle of the track—just a huge hole bounded by a railing, under which there is the seventh-floor basketball court. From the side of the track, Kathy and I watch long lines of people doing sloppy-looking exercises on the court below.

The Pool

The tiny, cold pool is on another floor altogether, which seems mostly to have something to do with men. The pool has its own showers, and it has a man, too, who sits in a little glass booth. The pool feels unbearably cold, but Kathy convinces me that it’s necessary to suspend one’s evaluation of the temperature until after half a length.

Kathy

I ask Kathy how she can remember where everything is. She says, “Well, someone once asked my mother how she remembered all of our names, and I mean, that really just wasn’t one of her problems with us.”

But in fact Kathy can also, when the elevator stops in front of us, tell whether it’s on its way up or down.

The Locker Room

The best thing, I think, is the locker room. At its portals is Bess, who lights up in a smile upon seeing Kathy. Dusty sunlight streams down on her through the wire meshing on the windows.

In the locker room itself, everything is very quiet, and the lockers are arranged in rows, like a cornfield, so you don’t have to stand in the middle of a bare room, all fat. There are large lockers to use while you’re in the building and small lockers, not big enough for real clothes, to use when you’re not. This is to save space (and it really does; I figured it out).

There are women combing their hair by dryers on the wall and talking quietly by their lockers. Somewhere a voice says, “Well, the trouble with anesthesiology is, everyone you work with is asleep.”

The Sauna

The sauna is like a little tropical hut.

Monday

Kathy calls to ask if I want to go to the Y tomorrow. I’d like to, and probably I’ll be able to, especially because she wants to meet there, so I won’t be able to call her at the last minute and cancel.

Smoking

It used to be that I never got angry. That is, I would start to feel angry, but the moment I opened my mouth to voice my feelings a cigarette would be inserted into it, and instead of expelling a stream of words I would inhale a stream of smoke. Only then would I exhale, casting a velvety mist over everything in the vicinity. How I long to do that again!

Tuesday

We do get to the Y today, just as planned.

In the lobby we decide we are going to swim, sauna, and exercise. Many showers and changes of costume are entailed by this program, and when we try to determine the most expeditious way to proceed, I feel helpless and defeated. Kathy suggests we take each thing as we come to it, and I feel much better.

We hang our jeans and T-shirts on hooks in the large locker. We put our shoes on the bottom and line up the soap, shampoo, and our pocketbooks on the top shelf. The locker is like a small apartment, and we are keeping it nice. We have both more or less mooshed our underwear into our jeans, but everything is still at a manageable stage. It takes a lot of concentration to remember, between taking things off and putting things on, and putting in the large locker and on oneself the things that one has brought, and putting in the large locker and on oneself the things that have been in the small locker, exactly where each thing should go. But when we are finally ready to go up to the pool, I feel that I have a solid foundation on which to build.

Upstairs, without seeming to notice us particularly, the swimmers adjust their lines more narrowly, and we climb in. I swim back and forth, twice on my side, and twice with a kickboard.

It takes a lot of effort to keep your head from getting wet when you swim, so that in itself is probably very good exercise.

Downstairs, I can’t help noticing that people shower at dramatically different tempi. No one in the shower seems disturbed by this, however, so I assume there is no normative manner in which to shower, and proceed in my own way. No one says anything about it, either encouraging or derogatory.

Spending Time

I like the women who are here in the locker room in this long afternoon, and I wonder about their lives. A picture comes into my mind and grows. In this picture I am still here in the locker room, but it is winter now, and the light is falling. I have a career, in this picture. I am a banker, or an account executive, whatever that is, or I work for a foundation. Every day after work, I go to the Y and I swim back and forth in the pool or stretch and bend in the tiny dark gym. There are other women in the locker room, these women perhaps, and others. Their lives are less substantial than mine, and they dress quickly and simply, leaving before I do, to go home to small apartments. I shower and dry myself and take from my locker a long silk slip and a gown. I put on a necklace and earrings of dark pearls, fine pale stockings, and shiny shoes with very high heels. I take from my locker a long fur stole and wrap myself up in it. I walk down the stairs—moonlight throws the shadow of the wire cage across my gloved hand on the railing, and my shiny shoes resonate on the linoleum. As I leave the building, the last few others are hurrying off along the slushy sidewalk or unchaining bicycles from the rack in front of the building. I am left alone now on the wide front steps where I am waiting.

I wish it were winter now.

Ellen calls and asks what I’m doing with myself. When I say I don’t really know, she says, “Well, I mean, you get up, and then what do you do?”

Sometimes it seems to me that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them.

I joined the Y today. It will turn out to be a big, horrible waste of money, but I just wanted to be at the Y, which is cool and dim and echoing. It is automatically reassuring to be in that building filled with people of different colors and backgrounds and ages. The web of commonality is a safety net, in case anybody might be falling. Falling…