by Rumer Haven
Minutes later, she stood in the shower stall with her back to the head, looking through the glass door. It was dotted with limescale like a giant snow globe in freeze-frame, with her as the attraction inside. The toothbrush on the counter flashed its light like a warning signal.
As her vision blurred the light into two menacing eyes, Margot blankly looked over at the side window. She caught herself about to overanalyze yet again what she thought she’d seen out of it, wondering why she dwelled on such stupid things while the rest of the world carried on with big-picture importance. Got things done. All her brain wanted to do anymore was roam and reflect, not assert and achieve.
What if I permanently fall out of the habit of nine-to-five? Of suiting up in business casual and charging at the world in proactive, high-heeled fury?
As it was, she’d easily gravitated to her black Converse sneakers and skinny jeans with graphic tees and cardigans every day, reserving every other day for tucking her unstyled hair into a tweed cap. Makeup optional. It was glorious.
Tipping her head back into the water’s stream, she whispered, “Free…”
But when she looked forward again, all she could see was the enclosing gray of fogged glass. The shampoo stung her eyes, so she jolted her head back to rinse her face. The water seemed to surge with greater pressure, and she sputtered as she accidentally swallowed some.
Trapped, she now thought as her chest tightened.
A wave of claustrophobia seized her lungs, and, wheezing, Margot twisted the faucet handle to turn the water off. Instead, a searing stream stabbed at her flesh. Her spine arched, rigid, as she frantically spun the handle around this way and that until she found the off position. UK taps sometimes reversed the hot and cold from what she knew at home, so she cursed her force of habit and wished she’d taken a bath instead. Touching a cool hand to her singed forearm, she whimpered as it left white fingerprints on the flushed skin.
Once toweled off and dressed in Rand’s terrycloth robe, Margot shook off her shock and ran upstairs to boil water in a stovetop kettle. Not that she felt kindly towards this liquid in its heated form at the moment, but she did fancy some tea. Jogging back down to the bathroom, she combed through her hair’s wet tangles before moving on to her moisturizing regimen.
She was dabbing gel on the thin skin beneath her eyes when a shrill scream rang out from behind.
“Jesus!” She’d forgotten about the kettle. One of these days, she’d have to adapt to Rand’s electric one that boiled water so much faster, so much more quietly.
She made a beeline for the stove range to turn off the gas flame. Clattering about the upper cabinet, she fished out a tea press and poured a healthy amount of Earl Grey into its infuser. Then she filled the pot and inserted a tea light into the warmer underneath.
Leaving her caffeine fix to steep on the counter, she gave herself permission to lazily lie down on the sofa for a few minutes as she waited. Feet propped on the couch arm closest to the front windows, she knew she should resume getting ready for that morning’s lecture, but she felt a headache coming on after that adrenaline rush in the shower. She was listless, and suddenly didn’t care if she was late to her seminar.
Now that she thought about it, she didn’t care if she attended at all. Like she’d said to Derek, she wasn’t making up for a failed class or career. She’d called it professional development, but it was more for kicks and changing things up than anything. It was all by choice. Her choice. She didn’t have to be here and doing this. She didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to.
And I could give a flying fuck if I don’t see Chloé, whom she was supposed to meet for their assignment again after class. Maybe it was just Chloé’s superior airs, but something soured Margot’s stomach at the thought of seeing her classmate, twisting it until she could almost taste the bitterness of bile rising to the back of her tongue.
It seemed a shame to waste the first blue skies London had seen in days, but her chest was still tight, and her temples felt pinched in a vise. She closed her dried, aching eyes and just seeped into the sofa’s leather.
Falling gradually to sleep, poetic lines glided into her thoughts like ripples on the waves of her subconscious.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The sound of traffic outdoors rustled Margot awake, shattering the meadow of yellow she’d been reclining in. After a deep breath, she whispered the poem out loud again before sinking back to sleep.
Before long, though, she heard someone enter the room. Had Rand come back? Or was it Gwen, expecting she’d be gone already for class? Without opening her eyes, Margot sensed the presence approach the sofa and hover over her. Standing still, inspecting. While it didn’t touch her, she felt its energy softly press on her in three areas down the length of her body: her arm, her hip, her thigh.
She couldn’t move in her panic over who or what may have just let itself into Rand’s flat when the door should’ve been locked. She was terrified to be so vulnerable, lying prostrate in nothing but a bathrobe. But she had to open her eyes. Had to confront the invader.
Her brain signaled to her eyelids to rise, but paralysis overtook her senses as if she were in rigor mortis. The eerie childhood chant, Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board, whispered through her ears as her mind struggled to take command over her body.
Open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes.
She channeled her desire into a singular focus.
Just move, move.
The effort was tremendous, but Margot fought her growing dread and urged herself on.
Move, move.
She became aware of her head, aware of her neck.
Move.
Her arms materialized, if only phantom limbs. She wanted to lift outside of herself, to reach out and grasp her own shoulders where they were pinned to the cushion and shake them.
Her chest expanded, swelling with energy. With a sharp inhale, she lurched, and the morning sun ignited her eyelids. They fluttered, then opened, and just as she processed that she’d been dreaming and there was no one standing next to her, a crisp snap sounded in her right ear. She swiveled her face toward the kitchen—just in time to catch a cloudy white movement swoop the other way in the corner of her left eye, toward the windows.
It had happened so fast. Steaming in sweat, Margot now saw nothing but the wall with its two gaping windows and her feet still propped on the sofa’s arm. Slowly, she boosted herself up and swung around to a seated position, staring at the empty space between the couch and coffee table that she was so certain had been occupied less than a minute before.
To her right was the kitchen and doorway to the hall, both vacant. She leaned forward to see more of the front entryway. The unit door was closed. She then looked back at the kitchen, where she thought she’d heard the snapping sound, and remembered the tea. The flame inside the warmer flickered spastically beneath the teapot.
It was probably the wick that crackled and gave off that puff of smoke. Must be almost burned down. God, how long was I sleeping?
She sank her face to her fingers to rub away the sleep and salty moisture, breathing deeply to open her chest. A look at the clock confirmed she was most definitely not making it to class on time that morning. Assuming her project partner would call to reschedule if she didn’t show up, she turned the ringer off on her pay-as-you-go mobile phone to let Chloé go straight to voicemail.
Or hell, for all I care.
Margot lay back down and curled into fetal position for a few minutes. With her elbows tucked in and her fists pressed to her lips, she wondered what was with this nasty mood and what she should do about it. Her gaze traveled to Rand’s bookshelf, and, after a few minutes, she finally stood to idle about i
n front of it.
Stroking her fingertips across the rows of spines, glossing over travel guides and narratives, biographies, and business texts, she found a slim paperback of poetry wedged between an atlas and art book. Slapped askew on its front cover was a neon-green sticky note.
Found it for 2 quid. A sound
investment in your cultural
literacy, tho I know you already
luv your WW—and I don’t
mean Walter White ;)
~G
An impulsive gift from Gwen, it seemed.
Wonder if she makes him laugh.
Ignoring the little pang reverberating in her stomach, she questioned if “WW” was Walt Whitman and flipped through the book to read at random.
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition sent
To be a moment’s ornament.
Margot made theatrical motions with her free hand as she read aloud the next few lines of not Walt Whitman but William Wordsworth. After praising the eyes and hair of whoever “She” was, Margot went on:
“A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.”
She read the rest silently as the female specter evolved into a flesh-and-blood woman.
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
a Traveller between life and death.
Even Margot’s romantic pessimism gave in to the words’ sentiment—the exceptional love they described, that didn’t falter once the rose-colored glasses were snatched off. She wondered if a man could really love like that, if Rand could or already did for Gwen. Could Margot, for that matter?
Appropriately enough, the poem on the next page jabbed at her single status: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” She begrudgingly began to read it but soon lost herself in the reverie of a simple moment gazing at daffodils. The final stanza repeated familiar lines.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood…
The same lines she’d just recited in her sleep. But now that she was awake and staring at the poem itself, she didn’t recognize it from anywhere but that dream. Where had she heard it before? And how had she come to memorize it? High school English assignment, probably, but could she recall that after all these years? Regardless, it was weird that she’d happened to open the book to that poem right after she’d just remembered it. She flagged the page with Gwen’s note as a reminder to record the coincidence in her dream diary.
In the meantime, Wordsworth had painted his scene so vividly that Margot took it as an unequivocal sign of the cosmos to stop thinking about how beautiful it was outside and just get up to be part of it. It was for her own good. Though she ached for a relaxing bath despite having just showered, she got dressed before she could give in to the temptation and ventured out into the world.
She got as far as Brompton Cemetery.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves as if to bless the sacred ground. A stone angel veiled in ivy peered over the resting place of her eternal charge, while crows sitting on nearby obelisks sharpened their black beaks on the stone.
Margot sipped a chai latte from her takeaway cup as she sat on a bench of brittle wood. Her coffee-shop napkin was full of epitaphs, and she’d just finished writing, “lamented by one,” all that was legible on the headstone in front of her. She wished she could read more and find out who’d been the “one.” A spouse? Child? Sibling? Parent? And why only one person? This was a grand monument, but was the deceased’s life so lonely that no one else grieved?
Mature trees canopied the graveyard in peaceful seclusion, but in the morning calm, the little demon flittering in Margot’s mind had nowhere to hide. Among the daisy-like weeds growing from the graves, an image of James’s face came before her, sunken into a striped bed pillow and smiling with soft words. An unexpected, gentle warmth pressed on her heart.
She did miss him. Of course she did; she’d loved him, but had lost faith that she was ever in love. There was a difference, and Margot and James had tripped into the fissure between. He hadn’t hurt her purposefully, and he’d always been quick to apologize after any fight. But by this point, Margot believed to her core that there was no less meaningful word in the Standard English language than sorry.
If love means never having to say it, then how about loving someone enough to not do anything worth apologizing for in the first place?
Another specter of James materialized before her, and she remembered herself standing with him at an elevated rail station in Chicago on a bitter February evening last year. The temperature that night had been too low to even snow, so the moon and stars pierced the clear, navy sky more brightly than the cobwebby lanterns. James had held her close for warmth as their footing vibrated on the rumbling platform, and Margot recalled looking up at the stars, then releasing an arm to shake her hand in the air.
“Don’t forget, we come from the stahz!” she’d said, affecting the voice of an exotic old woman.
James had crinkled his nose. “What?”
“You know. My favorite movie?”
He’d shaken his head with no recognition.
“Before Sunrise, with Ethan Hawke? American guy and French girl meet on a train and agree to spend the day together in Vienna? And a palm reader tells them we’re all made from stardust?”
“Oh, I thought it was another of your moldy-oldie movies.”
“Shut it. But it’s true, you know.”
“What is?”
“That people come from stars. Ashes to ashes, stardust to…just dust, I guess.”
“Okay, Moby.”
Shivering together, they’d looked northward for the El until turning their faces back to each other. Margot’s stomach had fluttered as James looked deeply into her eyes, searching, surely moved by what she’d said and overcome in the emotion he held for her.
And then he’d said, “Hold still a sec,” and poked an indelicate finger at the corner of her eye, scraped, and grimaced in mild repulsion as he flicked the real object of his concentration away. “Eye snot.”
No, Margot didn’t quite regret breaking it off. Everything happens for a reason; she must have done the right thing. If she hadn’t, would she be here now, experiencing life anew in a different hemisphere on her own steam? What was tugging at her, then? Making her feel less whole, more faceless each day?
When Rand wasn’t at home, she couldn’t shake that sensation of being strained through a sieve, dispersing her atoms to meld into the background as she soaked into the carpeting like her spilled wine—or evaporated with her bathwater, becoming more and more transparent. All she could do was look around the walls at someone else’s books, someone else’s photos, wanting to see herself somewhere in them. The closest she ever came was in the mirror.
Maybe that was why James, too, had always seemed to look right through her. But how closely had she really looked at him? Always so preoccupied with how she appeared in his eyes, she could no longer see his face as more than a smooth mask, couldn’t recall whether he’d had any birthmarks or even the specific shade of his eyes.
In striving to see him, her gaze fell on the headstone in front of her again. She squinted at it while reaching into her purse to put her pen back inside.
Damn.
She’d just looked a squirrel right in its beady eyes, an unintentional invitation for food she didn’t have. When it scampered over to get a closer look at what treats might be in her bag, she stared at the animal blankly and held up her pen as all she had to offer. “Useless human with your stick of uselessness,” its wee rodent brain must’ve thought. “Next time,” she promised, oddly flattered the creature had at least noticed her.
She packed up and rose, accidentally knocking over her chai and anointing the dried weeds below with its milky spice.
“Meh. There,” she said to her speckled-gray companion. “Have yourself a spot of tea, then.”
The squirrel da
rted away, leaving Margot to walk until she found another epitaph to jot onto her napkin.
AFTER HAVING PAINFULLY ENDURED
PROTRACTED AND INTENSELY ACUTE SUFFERING
That’s, er, shockingly informative. Bet she was a huge whiner. And that it didn’t cost so much to engrave by the letter back then. Hoping she herself would never suffer in a “protracted” nor “intensely acute” manner, Margot looked at another stone.
WRITE ME AS HAVING LOVED MY FELLOW MAN.
Sounded more selfless, yet she doubted it. Did this guy actually ask someone to write that? What an ego, or maybe he was hiding something, a string of mistakes that no well-intentioned epitaph could make up for. But why should Margot care? He was a stranger from another lifetime whom she would never meet. Yet here she was, wishing he’d lived his life better.
She flicked her pen back into her handbag like a dart and stood to walk toward the cemetery’s rear gateway. And like every other time she visited, she felt an overwhelming need for the loo by the time she reached this segment of the yard. Next time, she’d skip stopping at the café beforehand.
Fighting her sudden discomfort, she couldn’t help wondering if maybe, instead of the tea, it was her body forcing her to remember that it was still alive, that she should assert that like the tall grass standing proudly and the wildflowers beaming yellow and fuchsia. She sucked the same air as these armies of perseverant life but related more to the disheveled tombstones, ruptured from their foundations to lean at awkward and inconsistent angles toward and away from each other. These monuments had surrendered to time, allowing the elements to file down their edges and render identities anonymous as, decade after decade, the dressed stone returned closer to its natural appearance. Gates of mausoleums rusted away and upper slabs of sarcophagi shifted and chipped, liberating the grass growing inside them.
Margot edged closer to a tomb that echoed loudly with buzzing insects; when she peered into its blackness, a cool, ancient scent wafted to her face. Continuing to idle along, she scanned the moss and vines that clung to and devoured the markers sprouting all throughout this garden of marble and granite, the Gothic juxtaposed with the Romanesque, Celtic crosses with Grecian urns.
