by Kyra Wilder
I really couldn’t find her. I went back to the living room. M said, Did you find her? I said no and M looked to his boss, to his boss’s wife and smiled at them and said something that was supposed to be about E that wasn’t really about her. She’s always this or that. When you’re a guest in other people’s houses, you have to say things to each other for them to hear. Oh E, we’d have to say, she’s always like this, or this, whether she was or wasn’t.
I sat back down at the occasional table. M’s boss’s wife looked up from the calendar on her phone and poured me another cup of tea. She offered me the plate of macaroons but by then I knew the game and said, No thank you, in the right sort of mildly shocked oh-I-couldn’t-possibly sort of way.
I drank the tea and M’s boss’s wife sighed and tapped some more at her phone. There, she said, looking up. Tickets are booked, she said. Darling, she said, to M’s boss, I’ll be gone for a week. I’ll miss you so much! And M’s boss smiled back at her and patted the baby and it was clear that of course they would miss her too and also that they would love her so much more when she got back. Maybe he said it, M’s boss, We’ll love you so much more when you get back, he might have said. Well maybe they would.
There’s always so much to do! she said and smiled and looked at me and what else could either of us have done with that. Yes, I said and crossed my legs the other way and smiled again and got up to look for E.
Finally I found her. She was in the hall bathroom, opening bottles of oil and soaps and pouring them down the sink. The room smelled so strongly of perfume that I took a step back then of course immediately ran inside and grabbed her arm.
What are you doing, I almost yelled, pulling her out of the bathroom. Too roughly, too roughly. I knew it was. I couldn’t bend well in the dress. I couldn’t grab her and run away like I should have in my stockinged feet that were already slipping. The floor seemed to have turned to ice underneath me, just like that.
She looked at me with her dark nothing eyes and all I could do was pull her out into the hall. My hands were shaking again and for a moment I wasn’t pulling her anymore but holding on. I left her in the hallway and ran into the bathroom and shut the door. I opened the faucet and let the water run. I rinsed out all the little bottles that E had left in the bottom of the sink. They looked maybe like scarabs, lying there, spent. I lined them up on the little wooden shelf by the sink where E had surely found them, but that wasn’t right. I turned the tap back on again, as high as it would go and I smashed the bottles one by one into the perfect porcelain finish of the sink. The bottles chipped the sink where they broke, throwing themselves against the finish like those pods of whales that kill themselves sometimes, hurling their great and perfect bodies up onto the beaches for nothing. Sometimes where they broke, the bottles, the two cut places touched each other for just a moment like veins, like anything at all that had been done could be undone, the doing of it. I crushed the bottles all back into sand and washed all the bits and pieces down the sink. I pulled all of the quilted tissues out of the tissue box and stuffed the toilet up with them. If anyone asked I would tell them E had done it.
One of the bottles I didn’t break though, a small one, grey-green, about the size of my index finger with a red cut-glass top the size of a knuckle bone. I slipped it into the pocket of my dress. Hah! Because I had also been a child, because I was still capable of thoughtlessness, of recklessness, of a little bit of life. Inside the bottle it smelled like mist and moss clinging to some mountain rock. It smelled like the last tiny bit of morning.
I left the bathroom and collected E and we went back into the living room. There was light everywhere there, still in all the right places. We were washed in it as we came out from the hall. There they are, M said.
M’s boss’s wife was holding the baby, bouncing her a little against her shoulder, running her hand along her back, humming. They sort of blurred together, baby and mother, there where her lips and cheek touched the soft swoop of her mother’s neck. They were like a paperclip, made of one long line. The simplest thing done exactly right.
M was standing at a window with M’s boss, looking out over the lake. The afternoon was over. We made our excuses, said thank you thank you thank you and we’ll have to do this again soon. Then we were through the door and out into the hall. B was slipped into his stroller asleep and didn’t wake and while we climbed into the elevator smiling and waving back towards the door we looked every one of us like wonderful people and best families.
Don’t forget to have the arrangements made for you, M’s boss said. We’ve got to get out there Monday. I’ll call Aurelie and let her know. She’s going to have a hard time finding first-class tickets for both of us I think, but I imagine she’ll work some magic for you. M laughed a bit. M was so good-natured. M knew just when to play along. M’s boss said, All right then and winked at me. M’s boss’s wife said something to me about the children and made a nice face. I made my nice face then and wished her good luck on her trip and with the baby.
We were almost done. We were all horses coming round the final turn. Our sides steaming and bloody maybe but we could all see the finish line now. M shut us all up tight inside the birdcage elevator. We went creakily down, and then we were out again on the street.
13
M pushed the stroller down the sidewalk. B slept like a picture of a baby. The lake was so blue and beautiful and I put my arm around M’s waist and E ran on ahead of us. I leaned into him a little, just testing really, a foot on a frozen lake in March. He looked down at me and smiled.
If only we could have been exactly like we must have looked to other people. If only we could be like pictures, all light-caught surface with nothing inside. All emptied out and perfect. M and I could hold hands every Saturday for a hundred years and always be the same. We could match each other step for step with nothing in between us, or perhaps we wouldn’t move at all.
Across the street from us a young woman in a green dress put her hand up. I thought she might be hailing a cab but after a moment I realized she was looking at us. A tram slid between us and when it had passed, there she was, running across the street. She was tall, with long legs and long hair, so she got over to us quickly. She was so quick that she arrived in pieces, first her long long legs, then her hips, then all the rest of her. She was waving a phone at M.
Wait, a moment, she said a little breathlessly. I only just heard. Damn these shoes, she said, and put out a hand to steady herself on M’s shoulder. She did this casually, her eyes on her shoes, her hand knew the height of him by heart. I felt the line of her zip down me suddenly, when she did that. Touched him. Zip. Right through me.
Damn these shoes, she said again, smiling. Teasing. A nice girl. She smiled nicely at everyone. M, me, everyone.
They’re no good for running, she said. Jean should know not to call me with anything urgent on Saturday, when he knows I might be wearing these shoes, she said, still teasing.
She had the most delicious Parisienne accent. One of those accents that laps at the words like a cool tide, drawing everything around her closer, closer, closer.
I was on my way to Jean’s she said. Just now. To check the arrangements. But then I saw you. She said this to M and she smiled at M.
Then, balanced only on the needle heel of one of her boots, she teetered, started to fall, came suddenly undone, and M reached out and caught her. It took my breath away when he did that. When he caught her like that. To see her a moment later saved, which in this case is to say in his arms. For that same moment I was underwater, plunged breathless into it. I mean, I couldn’t breathe.
E was pulling my hand. I hadn’t seen her come back. Really, I had forgotten all about her. Who’s that lady, she said and M laughed with the woman still in his arms and the woman laughed with M’s arms still around her. M tipped her back up and they untangled themselves. His hand caught in the strap of her tiny glittering bag and so for a moment there was a thin gold chain wrapped around them both.
/> This is Aurelie, M said. My assistant.
Aurelie.
!
I can’t believe it! the woman who was Aurelie said, pushing a lock of hair from her eyes, pulling her dress back down across her thighs. She was testing the heels of her boots on the cobblestones, putting herself back together. Playing at it.
This is why every French girl knows it is terrible luck to work weekends, she said, smiling at M. But these Swiss. What do they know.
M kept his hand under her elbow until she was steady, then let her go. You can get the tickets? he asked her and she said, Of course! I only wanted to know if you preferred the early flight or midday. Monsieur Jean, he likes to sleep in, but I thought perhaps you would like to go earlier.
No, M said after a moment. No, that’s all right. We can go out midday together.
She nodded and pulled up her phone, checked something. Tap, tap, tap, went her manicured nails against the little screen.
Parfait, she said. Got it.
M sighed, tired. He was so tired and so important, there on the street. He was thinking maybe right now about some deal to be struck or renegotiated, he was thinking maybe right now about important things. All right, he said, I suppose I’ll see you Monday then. You’re coming with us?
Of course, she said, I wouldn’t miss it. Well, have to run, she said. She had lots of work, there were tickets to book, a plane to catch. These Swiss, they never know how to stop working and have some fun, she said. I was watching M watch her. I was hearing all the things that she was saying right over the droning buzz that was starting up inside my ears.
She ran back across the street in her black heels, in her green dress, leaving us all standing, to me like dazed bystanders around a cavern, a wreckage, a sudden pillaging hole in the earth.
I pulled my shoulders up around me and tried to stop my thoughts before they happened, but I already knew that I knew. I knew that I knew that I knew and I knew that there was no stopping knowing. There was no stopping knowing at all.
Another tram pulled up and let off a stream of people and we were all swallowed up and suddenly a part of it all. All the people moving past us towards the lake took bits of us with them. Take it, I said.
There was a shop I wanted to go in, a shop I’d been wanting to go in for a while, for the guest room. For the white sheets. It was the best, maybe, in the whole city, for linens. It was right up the street. I told M, I’ll only be a minute. I was starting to sweat. The store looked cool, almost dark inside. Come inside, it said, and see all our pretty things. We have what you need in here, it whispered. Price tags dangled in the window like loose teeth.
What, M said. In there?
Yes, I said. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Something was going to happen to me. Sweat, tears. Something. I was already reaching for the door handle. I had to keep going fast to stop my thoughts from coming, to keep ahead of them.
M hesitated. It looks a little cramped in there, he said. The stroller won’t fit. Here, he said, and handed me his wallet. Here, take this. You stay. I’ll take the kids back to the apartment. Take some time for yourself, he said. You’re always with the kids, he said. You deserve a break. Have fun, he said. Have fun! I’ll see you when you get back. He said that too.
My heart was going so fast. We can say so many words sometimes and never say a thing. If you close your eyes you could be anywhere and that is always true.
A tram came and he got on it, the number twelve. He pushed the stroller easily, held E easily with his other hand. They would be fine. He could even make them dinner. M had always been a good cook. A really surprisingly good one. Back when he was in grad school he used to make bread dough in the mornings and it would rise all day and make our apartment smell like yeast and honey.
Once he cooked us a steak that cost him as much as I made in a whole day and we ate it sitting on the back porch off paper plates balanced on our knees. Once we went camping and forgot our tent. Once he bought me a book that was just exactly the one I wanted and I thought that no one could have known that I would have loved just exactly that one but me. Once he had a green car that I had to push down the block to get started and then run around to the passenger side and jump in before he put it in gear. Once he asked his grandmother to teach him to sew and he sewed me a shirt and I wore it, even though it was terribly made and much too large for me, for months, until one of the sleeves actually fell off while I was at work. All these things were true about him. All these things were true about me too.
I was alone on the street in front of the shop. I felt naked and out of place without a stroller in front of me. It was as if there was nothing left to explain me, nothing left to help make sense of me at all. I almost ran after M, after the tram, but that would have been silly and I’ve always, to be honest, had a horror of creating a scene, so it seemed that the only thing to do was to go inside the shop. Sometimes we’re just left aren’t we? Sometimes the only thing to do is the thing we said we would.
It was an old shop that sold linens, the best. Hydrocotton double-weave towels from Denmark. Tablecloths, table-squares and runners from Ekelund. It was the kind of place where the shop girl might ask you whether you preferred to sleep on sheets made from French, or Belgian, flax. I really had been meaning to go for some time. Everything that I had said to M had been true.
I went straight to the bed linens and touched them. I put my hands all over them. I slipped my fingers in between the folded stacks of them. A shop girl came over and began telling me the names of each kind of sheet, explaining to me the different washes. Stone wash to save the colour, vintage wash for sheets that never aged, cotton wash for soft and bright and new. Then she started to show me the possible colours, lifting up the folded sheets one by one and holding up a corner, to show me how they, each differently, caught the light.
Ocean Smoke, she said, over a soft grey bundle. Dawn Owl, she said holding up another in blue. Mole’s Back, she hummed over a mushroom-brown set. Her voice sounded very close to an incantation. Reverent maybe, and why not? What is a name but a spell to bring something into life and keep it there? A dressmaker’s pin slipped through the shoulders, isn’t it? A name. It holds you in place, makes you real.
Isn’t that why mothers name their babies really. With these sounds, these particular sounds, don’t they say, the new mothers, I will keep you alive and here with me. Like I said, dressmakers. Pins.
Tallow, the girl said holding up a wan yellow sheet.
Elephant Tusk, holding up ivory coloured shams.
Elephant’s Breath, holding a slightly darker one.
The sheets I guess broke everything down into pieces. Carcasses snipped up into their most lovely parts.
Do you prefer the Tusk, madam? the shop girl said, watching me in that careful way of well-trained shop girls. Or the Breath? They are both so lovely, she said.
And they were, they really really were.
Approximately four billion years from now our galaxy is going to crash into our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, and a new galaxy is going to form. Someone somewhere has already given that new galaxy a name. Milkomeda. Imagine the audacity of that. The ridiculous human-ness of that. To look four billion years into the future, into a future in which it is almost inconceivable that any human will be alive, and to begin to name things. Just how far removed though is a galaxy from a child? What is a child but two strands of data ploughing into each other in the dark cosmos of a woman’s body. Galaxies, don’t they crash together every day.
How could anyone sleep on sheets dyed a colour called Elephant Tusk? Beauty makes the unimaginable easy though, and the sheets were that.
I pointed to the whitest white and bought them. The set at the top of the stack. Don’t tell me anything about it, I said to the shop girl. I bought the whole set, duvet cover, pillowcases, shams with pressed edges, fitted sheets and flat.
The girl told me about the sheets anyway, she couldn’t be stopped. She told me how they were made from cotton
that was brought to Italy from Egypt and woven there on giant hundred-year-old looms where the sun streamed endlessly through farmhouse windows and every grandmother made raviolis that were tiny and soft like babies’ finger bones. You paid extra but you could feel the sun, the way it had soaked into the strands, the warp and weave of the cloth. You paid extra but you dreamed every night of wheat fields and olive trees and rolling hills, sun on your shoulders and tables dripping with olive oil and prosciutto. She could have been telling me that, I was trying desperately not to pay attention. She wrapped the sheets in yards and yards and yards of tissue, everything was encased when she was done. Encased just exactly so.
I bought a throw pillow too to put on top of the bed when no one was in it. I said don’t tell me anything about it, but she did anyway. She talked and talked and so I had to talk too. It had been painted, she told me, in Venice. And I said, hesitating, that it looked just like it had. She thought I meant something about the colour. Oh yes, she said, that blue, it only comes from, but I wasn’t listening. I meant only that it looked like a beautiful thing that had already resigned itself to sinking into the sea and I loved it for that. In the painting on the pillow manic streaks of colour glubbed deeper and deeper underneath what was absolutely a beautiful and striking blue. Exuberance of the Resigned I would have called it, the colour, if it had been mine to name.
In a room behind the counter where the girl was slipping the last of my sheets into an embossed paper bag, I saw what I had really come for. Wooden shelves stacked high with duvets. Down, wool, bamboo, cotton, summer weights and winter weights, and, I had heard, read I mean, real eiderdowns. There was a skylight in the roof and as I walked into the room I saw how the light just tumbled down from it in strands like Rapunzel’s hair, turning the duvets stacked on the shelves there a kind of gold. For a moment it was so quiet and wonderful inside me.
