Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  *

  I was twenty-four the first time I skipped town to write. I printed out driving directions in Don’t Die–point type and drove to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in New Hampshire. Summer was ending, the LIFE IS BETTER AT THE LAKE welcome mats were being rolled up on porches across New England. My aunt and uncle were nice enough to hold off on closing up their place so that I might live out my writing fantasy in seclusion. I would be the very picture of a writer. Or at least their very picture of a writer. Our little John Grisham over here …

  When I arrived, a list of cabin instructions awaited me, pinned down by a box of fudge. There were emergency numbers, an explanation of screen doors detailed enough to be understood by future civilizations, and a canoe paragraph that I skipped entirely. I would not be living my life. I would be writing about it.

  How did I spend the next six days? I napped at odd hours. I read on the porch but became so hyperconscious of reading on a porch, I moved inside. I tried not to flush the septic toilet. I watched television. I drank an entire bottle of dessert wine. I ate Ritz crackers by the sleeve, glancing incuriously at the nutritional information. I gave myself ultimatums. You are not allowed to pee until you finish this paragraph. You may not indulge in episodes of The Real World unless you write four two pages. When people stop writing poorly and start not writing at all. I watched cycle after cycle of America’s Next Top Model and decided that the contestant who solves the “Tyra Mail” clue is the perfect level of smart. Go to great heights? I bet we’re jumping out of an airplane, you guys! Any smarter than this and you become unhappy.

  The morning of my last day, I took what passed for a manuscript down to the end of the dock. I stretched out my arms, ready to work. A duck waddled down the planks after me, stood beside me, and quacked. Oh look, I thought, nature. The duck promptly released a spray of duck diarrhea on my title page. Then it waited to be congratulated. I shooed it away, knocking the entire manuscript into the water in the process. The pages bobbed beneath the dock, white flags of surrender. I instantly accepted these events, maybe even saw them coming. Like when I transport dirty wineglasses from one room to the other, knowing that one will break en route. Or I’ll climb a ladder to change a lightbulb and think: This fixture is probably going to fall on my head if I unscrew it too much. And then I do. And then it does.

  *

  For years after that I stayed put in New York, writing during weekends and late nights, dividing my time between my kitchen and my living room. Until one day, when I got a call from my friend Margeaux, telling me she had moved to Russian River, California. I was unfamiliar with Russian River aside from having seen the words paired together on wine labels. I assumed it was just as bucolic as Napa and Sonoma, only less renowned. Like one of Gisele Bündchen’s sisters. But I did know Margeaux. She grew up in Berkeley, buying incense by the pound. She owned a dizzying number of sweatshirts with thumbholes in the cuffs and said “hella” a lot. She explained that her new place, perched in the redwoods, was “hella magical” for writing. Was I interested in house-sitting for a week? Reader, I was. Hella magical country houses do not grow on trees. Well, except for this one. Technically, this one did.

  After Margeaux retrieved me from the airport, we stocked up on provisions. This included items such as squash, rice cakes, flax cereal, a jar of cashew butter, and a pride of avocados. Since chipmunks had gnawed through Margeaux’s bike tires and the closest market was twenty miles away, the bags of groceries that rattled in the back of her car would have to tide me over. The plan was for her to teach me how not to blow up the house, then head down to San Diego for a family wedding. She’d be back in time to drive me to the airport. My only chore was to water her plants with a garden hose. As someone who never gets to use a garden hose, I was thrilled.

  We unpacked the food and stood on her porch, taking in the air, listening to her rather irritating wind chime.

  “Is that a wind chime?” I asked.

  Of course it was a wind chime. It sounded exactly like a wind chime sounds.

  That thing would be coming down the second she left.

  Tinging aside, Margeaux was right. Her house was a distraction-free zone. There was no television and the Internet only came through in one corner of the porch, where my laptop acknowledged the presence of a network called “KindBud420.”

  “Friends of yours?” I asked Margeaux, pointing at the screen.

  “Oh,” she said, gesturing somewhere up the hill, “the neighbors. You won’t see them. You won’t see anyone if you don’t want to.”

  The following days were some of the more productive of my life. I found in California what I had been looking for in New Hampshire. I wrote for hours, losing track of time. I wrote lying in bed and standing in the kitchen. I wrote outside, holding my pages in place with a steel camping mug, the magic hour light dancing on the rim. Every morning, I walked down to the river to watch the mist rise. This was a walk that made me earn its more idyllic sections by forcing me down a half mile of shoulder-free interstate with blind corners. Truck drivers mistook me for a meth head on a predawn stumble. Their tires spun gravel in my face as they offered colorful epithets from their open windows. I smiled and waved. Nothing could upset me.

  Beneath the bridge that stretched over the river, someone had spray-painted: IF IT IS RIGHT, IT HAPPENS. THE MAIN THING IS NOT TO HURRY. NOTHING GOOD GETS AWAY. —JOHN STEINBECK. I stood with my hands on my hips, inhaling through my nostrils, letting the words sink in—though I was not so far gone to California that I didn’t imagine how frustrating it would be to run through an airport with John Steinbeck.

  *

  Margeaux called the day before she was supposed to return. Until that moment, I had been only partially aware of a landline. It took me a second to locate the source of the ringing because it was buried under a Mexican blanket.

  “Hi,” she began, “we have a small problem.”

  I looked out the window. I may have gotten hose-happy on the plants. But how would she know?

  Apparently, Margeaux’s great-uncle had a heart attack during the wedding and was taken to the hospital, where he died by the time the reception was over. Margeaux and her great-uncle were as close as that particular relationship generally dictates, but since she was already down there, she felt obliged to stay a few extra days.

  “Of course,” I said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  I told her I was happy to live in her house a little longer, which I was. She thanked me and launched into the play-by-play of the wedding. I tried to listen, but as she spoke, I caught the refrigerator out of the corner of my eye. As much as solitude had helped my writing habits, it had terrorized my eating ones. I had not not been plowing through cereal as if being dared. I had not not eaten five slices of avocado toast on my first day. Last night’s dinner was a can of chili garnished with Tostito shards. But I am a grown woman, I thought. I can figure out how to feed myself.

  After we hung up, I approached the refrigerator. When I could stand the suspense no longer, I whipped open the door. There were bottles of salad dressing and spreads kept flush by a bar, as if on a condiment roller coaster. There were a couple of eggs, a browning head of lettuce, and something that could no longer reasonably call itself yogurt.

  “Crap,” I muttered.

  Things in the pantry weren’t looking much better. I went out to the garden to see if the plants could return the favor. Alas, there was nothing in bloom. I started calculating. I figured I could last about two days before I started stripping bark from the trees and licking it. Margeaux would be home in four. I stood on the porch and leaned on the railing. This was ludicrous. The not-kidnapped among us rarely starve within the walls of an actual house. But twenty miles of twisting trucker-trafficked road stood between me and the closest grocery store.

  I tried to distract myself through writing. I knew I could never be one of those people who forgets to eat, but there was always the chance I could be one of those artists who forgets to eat. But i
t wasn’t long before I found myself idly moving my arrow over the little slice of sonar on the corner of my screen. KindBud420. Where exactly was he or she? Or them. A family of KindBuds, maybe. KinderBudens if they were German. Dear God, they could have streusel.

  I closed my laptop and catalogued the contents of Margeaux’s pantry: baking soda, sugar, flour. There were two eggs in the back of the fridge. Was I willing to part with two precious eggs to make a cake for strangers? What an Anne Frank–ish dilemma. Minor as far as Anne Frank–ish dilemmas go, but still. Also, I didn’t have any oil. Maybe I could just use water. This was a bad plan. Was I really going to go banging down a stranger’s door in an area where most people displayed multiple BEWARE OF DOG signs?

  My stomach growled.

  I cracked the eggs into a bowl and poured in what was left of the whiskey.

  *

  Walking through the woods, I felt like a nosy housewife with a casserole. Or like Little Red Riding Hood without the hood, the basket, or the blind confidence. I zigzagged along, holding my cell phone in the air, hoping for a signal. The phone and I registered the house at the same time.

  There was a tall wooden fence that circled KindBud420’s property. From the fence dangled dozens of mercifully noiseless wind chimes, muted by the angle from which they hung. A row of terra-cotta frogs glared up at me from the dirt, their mouths agape. I knocked. Nothing. A rusted truck was parked on the lawn. On the passenger seat was the seldom-seen dual subscription to Maxim and Mother Jones. I knocked again, harder this time. The air exploded with the sound of dogs barking. A male figure yelled at them.

  “Hello?” I suggested.

  “Who is it?” the voice asked.

  I could see his eyes moving back and forth through the slots in the fence. It looked like he was holding a knife.

  “I’m your neighbor Margeaux’s houseguest and I have cake.”

  Tonally, this landed somewhere between international spy and “I carried a watermelon.”

  “Oh!” he said, opening the fence. “Come in, come in!”

  Two Yorkshire terriers came running out to lick me.

  “I’m Hank.”

  Hank shook my hand firmly. He was in his late twenties with a reddish goatee and a toothy grin. He held a pair of barbecue tongs. Once inside the house, he called for his girlfriend, Savannah, who emerged from the bedroom in a paisley tunic, all smiles and dreadlocks. They had been expecting me. Why hadn’t I come sooner?

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Margeaux mentioned something last week about maybe having a visitor,” said Savannah. “Was it last week, Hank?”

  “I think it was last week.”

  I suppose I, too, would be delighted by guests if I lived in the woods, though my delight would stem from a sense of relief, thus proving that I should not be living in the woods in the first place.

  “You brought us a cake!” Savannah exclaimed and hugged me. “We can have it after dinner. Hank, Margeaux’s friend brought us a cake.”

  But Hank was already back to marinating something that smelled delicious.

  “Do we know where I put the red wine vinegar?” he asked.

  “Did you make this?” Savannah asked, sniffing the brown slab.

  “I did,” I admitted. “It has whiskey in it. It might be inedible.”

  Savannah sat me down beneath a beaded map of Tibet and handed me a glass of organic wine. The dogs wheezed on my thighs. I couldn’t figure out what either of my hosts did for a living but knew better than to ask such an East Coast question. Hank grilled sweet potatoes and onions and went outside to check on the salmon.

  “Oh,” Savannah said, smacking her forehead. “You have to stay for dinner!”

  Yes, I really did have to. She plied me with hummus and crackers and dragged me out to their deck. The handful of visible houses all featured elevated decks with tall trees sticking up through them.

  “Check it out,” Savannah gestured, inviting me to stand on a bench with her.

  If you angled yourself at the exact right spot, you could see into Margeaux’s kitchen. There was my laptop on the table, surrounded by dirty mugs.

  “I’ve decided to sunbathe the rest of the week. If you’re going to stay in that house, you’ll basically have no choice but to see me naked.”

  “I could always avert my eyes.”

  “Maybe if you see Hank naked.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Maybe then.”

  As I shoved crackers down my gullet like a crazed pelican, Savannah pointed out the sights—where they planned on installing a zip line, their garden shed, their neighbor’s house down the hill, which boasted an outdoor hot tub that we could use anytime we wanted, the charred blueprint of a recently exploded meth lab.

  “Fucking tweakers,” she said, shaking her head. “One tried to break into Margeaux’s place before she moved in. Don’t tell her that. Hank pulled a shotgun on the guy. Don’t tell her that, either.”

  Hank and Savannah’s kindness was rare and overwhelming. It’s easy to go out of your way for a stranger if you know that person is subsisting on cashew butter. But I never revealed my predicament to them. I once attended a wedding where, while expounding his new wife’s virtues, the husband explained that she was the first person he’d call if he were ever in a Thai prison. Everyone cooed at this. But all I could think was: That’s not love. This isn’t to say they didn’t love each other, but what a horrible example. When the basic becomes exotic, you’re in trouble.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Hank said, poking his head out from the kitchen window.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” Savannah said, putting her arm around my waist.

  “Babe,” Hank called, “you want to light the incense?”

  “I’ll do it!” I shouted too loudly.

  *

  They insisted I take home leftovers. I didn’t bother with the “I couldn’t possibly.” I very much could and possibly. In exchange for a wobbly tower of tinfoil shapes, I left them Margeaux’s cake pan with a biopsy of the inedible cake cored from the center.

  The following day, I went for a hike, casually pulling ripe berries from bushes. On the way back, I heard a sharp laugh coming from the river. I sped up, hopping over tree stumps. I leaned over the bridge to see Hank and Savannah, lounging on inflatable rafts. All of the built-in beverage holders were occupied. It was 10 a.m.

  “Savannah!” I shouted, cupping my hands together.

  “Did you hear something?” the top of her head said to the top of Hank’s head.

  “Psssst!”

  “What are you doing up there?” she asked, as if no one in history had ever walked over a bridge.

  “Come down!” Hank shouted.

  I practically hurled myself down the hill to greet them. When I stopped sliding, I saw they had company. There was another friend on a third raft, floating beneath the Steinbeck quote. I waded out as far as the seam of my shorts, raising my hand and squinting. This new person was a cousin of Hank’s, a DJ with arm-sleeve tattoos and coasters in his ears. I felt a pang of disappointment that I was not Hank and Savannah’s only stray.

  “Get in, honey,” said the DJ. “No one cares.”

  “I’m not wearing any underwear!” I lied.

  Not being in the mood to strip in broad daylight seemed like insufficient reasoning for this crowd.

  “Well,” said Hank, “this is Alex.”

  I waved at him. He nodded in return.

  “You should come to dinner again tonight!” Hank shouted.

  “Oh, you have to!” Savannah said, agreeing so adamantly, she flipped her raft.

  *

  This time I just walked in. Bob Marley was pulsating from tiny speakers on the ceiling. The dogs licked my legs. Hank and Alex were hovering intently over Hank’s computer. Alex had removed the coasters from his ears so that his lobes hung in loose slits. There are few things sadder than an off-duty earlobe that’s been trained to accommodate a human fist. Alex’s forearm muscle moved beneath a patter
n of flowers as he lit a cigarette. He looked up at me.

  “You wanna bump?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  I have rarely known drugs to be a predinner activity. Cocaine in particular seemed at philosophical odds with this scene.

  “What are you guys looking at?”

  I pointed at the computer, assuming either Alex was picking out music or Hank was picking out a recipe.

  “Don’t show her that!” Savannah said, bursting in from the porch, holding a pellet gun.

  “Don’t show her what?” I asked.

  “Come on,” Hank reasoned, “she’s cool.”

  “I’m cool,” I said, speaking to the gun that everyone seemed to be taking for granted.

  “Oh, get over yourselves,” Alex said. “Have a look, honey.”

  He twisted the laptop around. On the screen was a series of vertical boxes, featuring naked couples. Most were full-body shots but some were only from the waist down and some only from the neck up, smiling and wholesome as wedding announcements. I tried so hard not to look surprised, my pendulum swung too far in the other direction. I nodded at the screen as if these naked couples were not as impressive as the many naked couples I see every day.

  “The worst,” Hank said, rolling his eyes, “is when Savannah gets a guy with a small dick. You should see some of these tiny dicks.”

  Should I, though?

  “Oh,” I said, “I’ll bet that sucks.”

  “Or doesn’t at all.” Alex snickered and scrolled.