by Jana Casale
“Don’t you think that’s patronizing?” John had asked her when she wore them in front of him.
“No, how is it patronizing?” she said.
“Well, do you think they really mean it that you’re a genius or do you think it’s supposed to be ironic?”
“I think they mean it for me.”
She had never considered what the implication of having so much ugly underwear could possibly be, but now, as she sorted through her drawer, so many truths of her inner being seemed physically manifested in her choice of undergarments. I value comfort, she thought. I value affordability, she thought. I value cotton, she thought. She decided to make piles of which to take and which not to take, marking three Post-it notes with “Yes,” “Maybe,” and “No fucking way.” By the time she sorted through all of it, the “No fucking way” pile dwarfed the other two. She texted Elle and asked her if she had a similar problem when she moved in with Shane. Elle texted back: “I only wear thongs.” Shut the fuck up, Elle, Leda thought, and pushed the “Maybe” pile in with the yeses.
The difficulty of leaving right after graduation was that the lease on her apartment wasn’t up until September. Luckily the landlord agreed that as long as she could find someone to take it for the summer, he’d give her back her deposit and make no issue of her breaking the lease. She put up a Craigslist ad under the subject line: “Cute and Cozy Studio Available.” She got six e-mails within the first twenty minutes. Four were from guys, one was from a girl, and the last was from a frantic-sounding couple hoping to live there together. She wrote back to the couple first and explained that her landlord would only allow one person to live there and that the place was way too small for two people anyway, to which she got an immediate response of “Would you talk to your landlord and just check maybe? We can pay an extra 25 dollars a month and my boyfriend can do yard work.” Jesus, this poor girl. Leda imagined her desperately e-mailing from studio to studio, trying to make this living-with-her-boyfriend fantasy come to life, even if it meant sleeping in the kitchen while her boyfriend raked leaves. I wonder if she’s gone through her underwear yet, she thought.
She e-mailed the single girl to see if she wanted to come look at the place that afternoon. She figured it would be safer to have the girl come than the guys, given the fact that she’d be alone. She didn’t even have to consider it really; she knew she’d never put herself in a situation that had so much potential to end in rape. So much of her life was devoted to the avoidance of getting raped. It was like a ticking in her mind, a gauge of safety that was always active. I shouldn’t walk down that street, it would say. Is there anyone walking behind me? it would say. I can’t go out that late, it would say. It’s not safe to meet guys from the Internet alone. And so she e-mailed the girl. To be extra cautious she searched her on Facebook before offering to meet. Her name was Marilyn Larmont, and in her picture she was strawberry blond and pretty and smiling with sunglasses, holding a lollipop. “Very Lolita,” someone wrote in the comments. She felt safer seeing the girl in her lollipop glory, but even so, she asked to meet at the café around the corner. The girl happily agreed. “I was going to suggest the same thing,” she wrote. She clearly didn’t want to be raped either.
Marilyn was less pretty in real life, but she still had the kind of strawberry-blond lollipop look from the photo. After greeting each other and seeing that neither of them was secretly a rapist, they walked back to the apartment.
“I’m in the middle of packing everything up,” Leda said as she unlocked the door, “so don’t judge too harshly.”
Once they were inside Leda couldn’t help but be critical of her little home. She imagined what Marilyn must be thinking seeing the old fridge and tiny oven, seeing her bed next to the mini sofa. Everything seemed so painfully her own in that moment. Her bathroom door and her slippers pushed to the side. Here I am, she thought. I’m small and I’m pressed together just like my slippers. It was then that she first felt a sense of relief at the thought of moving in with John.
“Oh my gosh, I love it!” Marilyn said.
“Really?” Leda said. She looked at her kitchen floor, which had coffee stains and a crack running down the middle of the linoleum.
“Yeah, it’s exactly what I want.” Marilyn walked around the small space with a light, sort of whimsical confidence. She was the type of person that Leda usually couldn’t stand, someone who laid claim to a place just by being so impossibly hip. She just stood there in her loose-fitting beanie with her fingernails that were manicured with green nail polish only on the ring finger, and everything was hers. Marilyn touched the bureau and opened the closet. Leda looked at her thin legs sticking straight out of her miniskirt. She was wearing Mary Janes and knee socks, and her thigh-to-calf ratio was nearly equal. She is so linear, Leda thought.
“Yeah, I’ve looked at, like, three places, but two of them were in a basement and the third was basically just a room in this old lady’s house. This is exactly what I’ve wanted,” Marilyn said.
“Well, I’ve loved it here so I totally understand that. Are you going to school in the city?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, nice.”
“Why are you leaving again? Did you say?”
“I’m moving to California with my boyfriend.”
“Oh, that’s cool. What are you doing out there?”
Leda didn’t know how to phrase her answer. I don’t want her to think I’m doing nothing. I don’t want her to think I’m a loser. I don’t want her to know I’m scared. “I’ll be working on my novel. My boyfriend got a job at Google so that’s why we’re going.”
Marilyn looked her up and down quickly. She seemed more scattered and less whimsical.
“That, oh, that sounds really nice.” She folded her arms and pulled off her beanie. “You’re really lucky.”
There was a nearly imperceptible shift in the dynamic between the girls. Leda felt a wave of self-assuredness that surpassed the potential of Marilyn’s thin legs. She no longer worried about the apartment being so small or her own, or that she would never have dared to wear knee-highs. She was moving with her boyfriend to California, and that meant something, at least to Marilyn, who was feeling foolish in her beanie. Who was to say why someone else’s life or legs meant anything to either of them, but in this room that was a kitchen and a bedroom and a living room, there was so much suffering in the silence. Marilyn agreed to take the apartment.
“Good luck in Cali!” she said as she left. And Leda watched her put her beanie back on as she rounded the corner of the block, disappearing, thin and whimsical if not still scattered.
Two days before Leda left, her mom came over to help pack up the rest of the apartment.
“You have so many candles,” she said as she emptied out a drawer by the stove.
“I get them as gifts. I don’t even like candles, but it seems like that’s what everyone always gives me at the family Christmas parties.”
“Why don’t you like candles?” her mom said. She pulled another candle from the drawer and held it at a distance so she could read the label without her glasses. “ ‘Pumpkin Autumn.’ ” She smelled it. “It smells like nutmeg. Everyone thinks pumpkin smells like nutmeg.”
“I can’t light them.”
“What do you mean you can’t light them?”
“I’m afraid of lighting matches.”
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t be afraid of lighting matches.”
“People get burned.”
“No one gets burned.”
“I’ve gotten burned.”
“What, when you were eight? Leda, you’ve got to know how to light a match. What are you going to do your whole life?”
“John can help me or I’ll buy one of those lighter sticks.”
“Do you have matches?”
“Yes.”
“Come over here. You’re le
arning how to light a match.”
Leda walked over and grabbed the matches from their designated spot in the window above the sink.
“Okay, you just hold it like this and you strike it fast with some pressure. See? It’s easy. I’ll show you again.”
Leda watched her mom then. She was the kind of woman who was so effortlessly elegant at all times. She had a certain feminine ease about her. A consistent togetherness and softness that never wavered despite how tough of a person she actually was. She was the type of woman who had grace. She was the type of woman who lit matches.
“You try it now.”
Her mom handed her the matchbook. She tore off a match and struck it fast with some pressure. Her hands shook as it lit up strong and bright.
“Good, now light the candle,” her mom said.
She leaned over the counter cautiously and lit the Pumpkin Autumn candle and blew out the match.
“There,” her mom said. “Now you’re ready to go to California.”
A few minutes later the apartment smelled like nutmeg.
In the end it took her nearly three days to pack up the entire apartment and decide what she was and wasn’t bringing to California. Much of her stuff was going into storage, a sort of insurance policy on coming home in “less than a year,” as she and John kept saying to each other. It was easily discernible what she would and would not need in “less than a year,” except when it came to packing up her books. She waited until the very last moment to put them in boxes. Her whole apartment stripped apart from her bookshelf, and the piles of books beside her bookshelf, and on top of her bookshelf, and beside her bed, and in her kitchen book drawer under the sink. She made a rule that she would only take the books she hadn’t read yet, but it was torture packing all the others away. Please don’t ever leave me, House of Mirth. She organized the boxes in order of what she thought she’d like to read most, with the least likely on the bottom (Gravity’s Rainbow) and the most likely on top (the only Tom Perrotta book she hadn’t read yet). When she came across the Noam Chomsky, she flipped through the pages; they were still so crisp and free of fingerprints or stains. The book felt weighted and smooth in her hand. She smelled it again for the second time since she bought it, and tucked it about halfway down the pile. She figured she’d get to it before John and she would be back in New England. She imagined herself sitting in a fancy window seat of an old Victorian looking out on the bay, reading Chomsky and sipping some kind of lemonade or piña colada. She sealed up the box with red duct tape and wrote “Books” with a thick black Sharpie across the side. She took a step back and looked at her books all taped up like that in their box, and then she drew a heart around it. “Books,” it said in a heart.
They took a late flight because it was the cheapest, but it became apparent pretty quickly that there was very little chance that she’d be able to sleep. Her seat was broken and wouldn’t lean back all the way; despite this the man behind her still managed to poke her in the back with his knees at least every fifteen minutes. John offered to switch with her, but she still preferred to be by the window. She was hoping to see the bridge as they landed. Every time she nearly fell asleep she’d get restless and think of all the stresses in her life. She’d feel the vibration of the plane lifting her away from her old self, her little apartment, her parents, Christmases with snow, and then she couldn’t sleep. I’ll be home for Christmas, she’d think and try to find a more comfortable position. I’ll see my parents and the snow. John fell asleep almost immediately, which was disheartening. Occasionally she’d wake him by accidently bumping his elbow or jostling his seat. He’d wake up slightly and in a half-sleep stupor he’d say things like: “What time is it?” or “Aren’t you tired?” Leda would answer just to have something to do even though she knew he wasn’t really listening. Four hours into the flight she was becoming a bit delirious from ex-
haustion, restlessness, and lack of recline. She intentionally bumped John’s shoulder and jostled his seat. “Talk to me,” she said. But John just turned his head to the other side and said, “Almost there.”
After that she tried to read but couldn’t get into her book. There were no movies to watch so she decided to try to write a little bit. She wrote a poem. It went:
On the flight
City at night
No peanuts
Going nuts
No hope
Rope a dope.
She read it over and then titled it: “Seat Without Recline.” The next time she flew she took the poem with her, and after that she deemed it her lucky flying poem. Five years later it would be lost in an unfortunate washing machine accident in her jean pocket.
She got up to use the bathroom about an hour before landing. There was a line, but she didn’t mind waiting. It was nice to stand. The lady in front of her was a short, older-middle-aged woman with curly hair and bright lip liner. She had a shirt on that said “Florida” that was tucked into her khaki shorts. She turned and smiled at Leda.
“You’d think there’d be more bathrooms on this flight with all the people,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s true. I guess there’s only this one and then the one for first class.”
“They probably have two. There’s no way they’re waiting as much as we are. This is my third time up and every time I’ve had to wait.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” She began tiring of the woman.
“Are you going to San Francisco or on to someplace else?” the woman asked.
“San Francisco.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice. It’s a beautiful city, you know.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying.”
“Is this a vacation?”
“No, my boyfriend got a job at Google so we’re moving out there together.”
“That’s incredible! What fun. You’ll have to visit Fisherman’s Wharf and the bridge, of course. Oh, you’re just going to love all the cute little houses. It’s been a while since I’ve been, but I remember just loving all the little houses.”
“Yeah, it looks beautiful in all the pictures I’ve seen.”
“It’s the second most beautiful city in the world only to Fort Lauderdale, my hometown.” The lady pointed to her shirt. “Fort Lauderdale has beaches you just wouldn’t believe. The water is so blue.”
Leda nodded. “I’ll have to go sometime.”
She got back to her seat and finally dozed off twenty minutes before the flight landed. She woke up to John shaking her arm.
“Look, the bridge,” he said, pointing out the window.
But she couldn’t see anything.
“Sorry, I thought I saw it for a second,” he said.
After they got their luggage and rental car, they headed out toward the city. Even though they were staying nearly an hour south, and it was almost 1:00 a.m., they couldn’t resist it. Leda felt a sense of anticipation, cool and stark and wandering. She wanted to see the bright lights of the new place, all the buildings and beautiful little houses and the bridge. When she blinked she envisioned herself like Mary Tyler Moore, just tossing her hat into the air. Tossing and tossing.
On the drive in they passed rows and rows of palm trees. I am no longer on the East Coast, Leda thought, and she tried to take a picture of a tree as they stood at a stoplight, but it came out too dark and blurred. She deleted it.
They came upon the city skyline, but it didn’t look particularly like anything special. John wasn’t sure where the city center was, so they headed toward the tall buildings. They drove cautiously but without much direction, turning down any road of vague interest. Both of them kept an eye out for the Victorian houses they had seen in pictures, but there wasn’t anything like that. There were a lot of older buildings, and the streets seemed empty except for the homeless people.
“Where is everyone?” Leda said.
“It’s very
late,” John said.
“It’s a city, though.”
“I don’t know…,” he said.
They drove up a steep San Francisco street. Her body fell back against the seat, but she pulled herself forward and held on to the dashboard. She looked out her window at the world growing more and more angular, no longer perpendicular to her perspective.
At 1:52 a.m. they gave up on their ambition with the city—whatever that had been. Between them in the silence and exhaustion little could be confirmed. As they headed south Leda looked back. She could see a bridge lit up in the night.
“Is that the Golden Gate?” she asked.
“I think it must be,” John said.
She unrolled her window and leaned out, the wind blowing her hair in her eyes; she couldn’t get a good view, but there was some satisfaction in the effort of trying to see.
“At least we saw something,” she said.
But it was the Bay Bridge she was looking at, drifting farther and farther into the night. The Golden Gate was nowhere in view.
CHAPTER 23
Attempting to Swim
As part of John’s relocation package, Google put them up at a Residence Inn in Campbell, California, a small town emblemized by its historic water tower. The town center had a few restaurants and a cute vintage candy shop that Leda would be disappointed to later discover was actually part of a chain.
