Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  “Oh?” My throat constricted around my words. “How so?”

  “Well, I never used to come here so much.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Only on Tuesdays.” He shrugged helplessly, pushing the glasses up his nose. I realized with a start what he was confessing; that he’d sat at this table, every Tuesday since we’d run into each other over three weeks ago, waiting for me to come in. I set my teacup on the table, hugged my bare arms. The café’s air was too conditioned and I longed to be out in the cleansing August rain. Tai refilled my cup, and we glanced around the room, as if searching for the nearest exit.

  He cleared his throat, asked about the summer art camps, whether or not I had a space for his son in the fall workshop. “I know he’s a pain in the ass, but I think he’s got something, you know? Just needs some guidance.”

  “He wasn’t any problem for me,” I said. “Maybe a bit stubborn.”

  “Won’t take anyone’s advice. Mine least of all.”

  “Well, that goes with the territory, doesn’t it? Isn’t he about seventeen?”

  “All of that. And going on forty, some days.”

  “And five on other days, right? Same with my daughter.”

  “The whole letting go thing stumps me.” His hand shot roughly through his hair again. “How much, how soon, how to do it without totally detaching, right? Just to protect yourself from heartbreak.” He laughed joylessly. “You’d think a Buddhist would be great at letting go.”

  “Eli doesn’t strike me as a kid who’s ready to be let go of.”

  “He likes you, Sylvia. There’s hardly anyone he likes now, over twenty. Not even his mom.” He pulled his lower lip into his mouth, let it out slowly. There was no getting around his rough beauty. I assured him Eli could come to my workshop, promised I’d save a space.

  “But you could have registered him online,” I teased, throwing him off. He laughed, splashing tea down his white shirt.

  “I’m always spilling stuff around you,” he said as I handed over my napkin. “Next time, I’ll dress all in black, like a Goth.”

  “Next time?” I asked.

  He cocked an unruly brow.

  We were awkward then, chatting about the weather, the war—which seemed to be growing nastier rather than winding down.

  “So much slaughter,” I said.

  “I know, I know. Enough suffering to drown in.”

  We stared at each other, shaking our heads, our attraction already tired and sweet.

  “It’s a crazy planet,” I noted, at the same moment he was saying, “What a world.” Then both laughed as if we were outside all of it, momentarily, looking in.

  “Not that anyone has time to notice.” He crossed one leg over the other. “It’s rush rush, isn’t it? Everyone juggling.”

  “Well, it’s hard to find any balance, especially with kids.”

  “Right. But you have to. Because one day, I turn around and, holy shit—my son’s almost grown, my parents are gone. I’m telling you. Gone. It all happened so fast, while I was, I don’t know, sending faxes or something.”

  “But how?” I asked, as if really expecting him to have an answer. “Time will always win.”

  He uncrossed his legs, looked at me as if trying to memorize my features. I felt his eyes navigate my cheekbones, slide down the bridge of my nose to the uncomfortable mole beside my mouth. His hand moved to his own mouth, fingertips brushing his lips.

  “Take off your watch, Sylvia.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I dare you. You’ve been glancing at it every thirty seconds since you sat down.”

  “Have I really?” I looked away. There were too many people in the café. A student from one of my workshops smiled up from his notebook. A woman from the PTO bustled out carrying a tray of coffees, and my neighbor’s daughter worked the register. All of them, ticking staunchly through the requirements of a day—as real and solid as cows.

  As I unlatched my watch, slipped it into my black leather bag, I felt conspicuous. Had I done something wrong? Had I betrayed Nathan already, just by playing hooky, pulling into the parking lot when I knew better, following an impulse because it had been a shitty morning and it was my birthday, after all?

  Tai got up to refill our teapot and I thought about this birthday. Everything felt more treacherous and brittle, as if my joints were turning to slate. The night before, I’d noticed the faint but undeniable geography of lines around my eyes, gray hairs starting to spring from my part like electric wires—stiff, untamable, even more unruly than the usual auburn coils. So this is how it begins, I’d thought, the slow unraveling. I was feeling my body’s inexorable descent, the slight thickening of upper arms, the now-prominent veins on the backs of my hands, just like my mother’s.

  I felt a stab of remorse. It had been weeks since I’d spoken to her, offering my usual list of excuses about why we couldn’t come west—work, money, the renovation, how the girls had their summer camps and recitals. They were all good reasons, and she’d heard them all before. We hadn’t been west since before Emmie was born.

  Tai had sat back down and was talking about his work—he was a landscape designer who wrote books on indigenous gardening—and how he’d starting giving himself Tuesdays off, because he realized that work had taken over his life. He spoke in hyperbole; things were amazing or wretched, taking over his life or totally omitted, and I watched the thick bow of his mouth, wanting to untie it.

  “I’m talking too much.” He drew his left hand over his brow. “Sorry. I do that when—”

  “It’s my birthday today,” I interrupted. “And I keep thinking that’s why I’m here, because I needed to do something special, for once. Something different.”

  “Well.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms. “Where do you want to go?”

  “To go?”

  “Clearly we have to go someplace, on a day like this.” He cocked his head toward the window. The clouds had, in fact, parted. Strands of mottled sunlight illuminated the steam now rising from wet pavement.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. I have so much work, and—”

  “You said it yourself. You need to do something different.” He shrugged and tipped his chair back as if he could take or leave this outing, but his eyes glowed like they would burn holes through the glasses. “You’ve already taken off the watch.”

  We were silent for a solid minute, regarding each other. I remembered twenty years ago, stopping at the Grand Canyon at dusk on my way across country: how I’d inched out onto a thin, triangular precipice that jutted irresistibly over the chasm, my legs dangling into blackness, toes tingling with catastrophe.

  “Listen.” I leaned forward. “I’m just wondering, you know, what this is about.”

  “About?” His chair scraped back down as he planted his elbow on the table, cupping his bearded chin in one hand.

  “I mean, clearly this meeting wasn’t about Eli, or my artwork, and, well, I just want to know if I’m supposed to be feeling guilty or something, because—” I was breathless and tongue-tied, my words bumping into each other like logs in a jam while Tai just stared, those bright eyes unnerving. “Well, because I’ve got enough guilt in my life,” I concluded, cheeks blazing.

  He nodded, drew in a long breath, then reached out and placed his warm brown hand over my freezing pale one. “Look, Sylvia, I don’t want you to feel guilt. It’s a useless emotion.”

  “Oh?” I laughed. “Some would argue that it has a purpose.”

  “Hmm. Good for upholding traditional institutions, I guess.” He smiled.

  “Yes, just think where we’d be without it.”

  “Everyone would be like me—divorced, no scruples.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “I just find you sort of insanely lovely. If you haven’t figured it out.” He dropped his eyes to the tabletop, though his hand remained. My breath caught in my chest, stammered there like a cupped moth. “What is it, thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?�
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  “Forty-two,” I said, face scorching again.

  “Okay, then. Happy forty-second. We don’t have to go anywhere after this teapot is empty.”

  “Good. That’s good.” Air rushed back into my lungs, a pulse in the back of my hand where the skin pressed lightly against his. I thought of Emmie’s paper butterfly mobile, translucent wings beating toward the night.

  “So. I want to know what you’ve been painting.” He withdrew his touch.

  “How about a hike, then?” My words seemed to vibrate in the café’s frozen air.

  For months I’d replay the scene: sliding onto the passenger’s seat of a vintage maroon Saab, checking my reflection in the mirror as we backed out of the parking lot, sped away from the town where everyone knew my face. I’d picture us, tiny and ridiculous, climbing into the heart of the Berkshires on recognizable roads that suddenly seemed foreign, and maybe that’s what I was after—a sense of life suspended, action without decision, the illusion that I could look down on myself calmly, as if watching a character in a play.

  Only, I didn’t feel calm. As we drove higher into the hill-towns, as Tai talked in his deep city voice about his childhood and asked after mine, my heart vibrated in my throat. The light was impossibly bright through the sunroof, the sky painfully blue. Every bump on the road thrilled and terrified. It was the same feeling I used to get at sixteen, doubting the existence of God; the same feeling at twenty, trying a new drug or man. It was how I’d lived for a time—courting danger, putting myself in harm’s way because I could. I did it, back then, to let myself know that I belonged to no one, that my mother could no longer control me, my father would never again lay his hand on me. Not even Jesus could claim me anymore.

  At twenty-something, I also wanted to quell the mind-warping ache of having lost them—father, mother, sister, God. I wanted answers, and stupidly, thought they would come on the edge of a knife: on the back of some man’s motorcycle, helmetless and wind-lashed, veering up Pacific Coast Highway in the dead of night; inhaling a line of white powder off someone’s smudged bathroom mirror at a party; walking, walking into all the bleak, trashy neighborhoods of the city—East Hollywood, La Brea, Wilshire, Echo Park—just to quell the restlessness that required constant movement, above all, required me to apply to far-off art programs, then get in my car and drive through the hot eye of the country and beyond. Never be still, the ache said. Never stop moving. What you seek may be around the next corner. Around one of those corners, blessedly, stood Nathan, steady as stone, and he caught and held me in his gentle hands as one catches a bird, stills its frantic beating. For fifteen years he’d held me in his loose carpenter’s fingers, fluttering on the edge of the continent, three thousand miles from where I started. I couldn’t imagine where I would go from here.

  We pulled into a muddy parking lot off a dirt road somewhere west of Plainfield. There was one other car—an old Honda with a dented rear bumper and Rhode Island plates. Tai got out and lit a cigarette before the trailhead map, then offered me one. I shook my head. I’d quit my pack-a-day habit years ago, after many crushing attempts, and wasn’t about to start again now. He didn’t offer to escort me over the enormous puddle we seemed to have parked in. I just waded through it, hitching my skirt above my knees.

  “There’s a pretty easy trail here,” he said. “Runs along the river for a few miles. It shouldn’t be too muddy, although—” Here he stared at my mucky feet in black leather sandals. “I guess it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”

  “I know, I know. These shoes are ridiculous, aren’t they?”

  “Impractical girl,” he scolded, stomping out his cigarette after three drags. “That’s probably what your doctor father says—an impractical artist, right? A dreamer.”

  “My father said lots of things about me before he died. But not that, I don’t think.” I felt deeply uneasy about the work I was leaving undone, the distance we’d traveled, the sun inching its way to the core of the sky. I started chewing a hangnail.

  “Sorry,” said Tai, bending over to tighten his bootlace. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Maybe we should go back,” I offered.

  “We most definitely should,” he conceded and laughed, straightening up. “But it’s your birthday, and you wanted a hike, right? Besides, there’s an incredible view.” He took me by the elbow, pressed me into the dark open mouth of the trail. “And you still have to tell me why you have so much guilt in your life.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I followed him over a fallen log, onto a path strewn with decomposing kindling and last year’s leaves. He leaned down to grab some of the thicker branches, tossing them into the dense woods on either side. I glimpsed the ample outline of shoulders through his white linen shirt. My leather sandals sunk into the rain-soaked earth, making a sucking sound each time I stepped after him, the warm mud oozing between my toes. Each time he heard it, he chuckled. Once, when my foot sank inches into the muck, he had to turn and tug me out, his hand lingering on my forearm before he resumed his resolute pace.

  We walked the narrow trail in silence, listening to the river rushing through a small canyon below, the distant cawing of crows and sputtering of grackles, the summer breeze in the treetops, rustling of squirrels and other animals we couldn’t see. It had transformed into a gorgeous, rain-washed Tuesday and I could almost convince myself that this was ordinary, that I was just enjoying my birthday with a friend, with no other reason for my racing pulse than exertion. Gradually, the trail widened and we began talking. Tai talked about his business creating wild gardens from indigenous plants and grasses. He pointed out and named some lesser known flowers and shrubs—Bloodroot, Jimson Weed, Trillium, Wild Calla—and told me how he’d had to relearn many of them since moving back east from California.

  I talked about my work teaching art to teens, and admitted that I hadn’t painted any landscapes for over a year, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “I just haven’t felt much desire,” I told him. “Or maybe I’ve run out of pictures. Every time I start something, I come up blank.”

  “Does your husband support it—your art?”

  It was the first time either of us had mentioned Nathan. I stubbed my toe hard on a tree root. “Shit,” I whispered, hopping in place.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.” The truth was, I was struggling to keep up.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he called back.

  “Well, it’s not like he’s offered me a cushy life where all I have to worry about is making paintings.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Sylvia. I’m wondering if he loves your work.”

  “Does anyone love what competes with their needs?” I snapped, shocked at my own defensiveness. I was about to go into my tirade about how things change when there are two children and two jobs and never enough time or freedom or money—how nobody gets their needs met—when Tai halted in front of me so suddenly, I walked smack into him and had to grab his bicep to keep from falling over.

  “Shh—hold still.” He reached to steady me, placing his left palm against my hip. His back radiated warmth beneath the thin shirt, muscles tense, alert. “There’s a great horned owl. You see it?” he whispered. “Right in the top of that yellow birch.” I couldn’t see anything; the sun’s light perforating the leaves momentarily blinded me. I caught traces of sage (his aftershave?), the yeasty odor of sweat and cigarettes. I took a step back. Then, the sharp rustling of leaves overhead, the flashing of two enormous amber wings, and the bird was gone.

  “How did you know it was there?” I murmured. Tai turned and placed both hands on the bones of my shoulders, as if to unmake me. I could count the silver threads in his beard, the crow’s feet radiating from each green-gold eye. My heart throbbed beneath my cotton tank.

  “I spend a lot of time hiking,” he finally said, the jasmine from our tea still on his breath. His glasses started to fog. “And sometimes hunting. But not so much anymore.”

  T
hen he let go of me so suddenly, I shivered.

  “There’s an amazing spot ahead,” he called as we started to climb up a steep incline, and I followed again, light-headed.

  “I should get home,” I blurted. “I don’t even know what time it is.”

  “That was the idea.” Turning back grinning, a maple leaf stuck in his hair, he looked like a middle-aged Puck.

  At the top of the incline, the woods thinned to a rocky outcropping overlooking a meadow, through which a narrow path meandered toward a small farm bordered by a low rock wall, a white-steepled church clutched in a stand of pines. A perfectly oval, emerald-green lake shimmered from the edge of the view, its banks dotted by the creamy backs of sheep.

  “It used to be an old reservoir, but it’s not used for drinking water anymore.”

  “It’s so serene.”

  “Hard to remember the screwed-up world from here,” he said.

  “Yeah. My daughter would love it—she’s always looking for the perfect, pristine New England scene. Funny, for a girl who likes punk and indie-rock, huh?”

  “Maybe you could paint it for her,” he said quietly. “Maybe this is the view that’ll get you going again, Sylvia.”

  The wind tugged at the ends of my hair, and I closed my eyes, surprised by the sudden urge to cry. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was—for seeing? For kindness? I wondered if I would ever again inhabit that intuitive, rigorous place where art was made. Was it true that Nathan was unsupportive of my work? And did such wondering explain why I was tromping through the Berkshire woods on a weekday, behind a near stranger who smelled like sage? What the hell was I playing at? I felt myself pulled backward into an old, peculiar dream—my body shrinking and expanding at the same time so that I could no longer tell what size I was.

  I was startled by Tai’s hand in the small of my back.

  “Let’s get you home,” he said.

  “Do you come up here a lot?” I asked as we started down the trail.

  He turned and smirked at me before replying, “Oh, yeah, I bring all my married girlfriends to this spot.” There was an edge to his voice I hadn’t yet heard, and my back stiffened. Had I irked him? Was this supposed to be funny? I also didn’t know how much time had passed since the café, and was again anxious about the hour, picking up the girls. It occurred to me—not for the first time today—that I’d have to make something up about where I’d been, how I’d spent the morning of my birthday. Or maybe I didn’t have to lie; it wasn’t as if anything had really happened. Relief rushed in as I realized I could still get the girls by three, run to the grocery store, set the table for our dinner with perfect equanimity—