RODGE WAS NOT a hurrying kind of guy, but he moved quickly when the front doorbell kept ringing like an alarm.

Cecile hurried in. “I had to hit the bell with my elbow. My God.”

Rodge got the box of Band-Aids and soon was covering the blisters at the base of his wife’s thumbs, along her fingers, over her palms.

“Ow,” she said and then laughed to reassure him. “The staple gun tried to kill me.”

“You need to hire an assistant.” “It’s only one room.”

“If you can’t get help, you should quit the whole idea,” he said. She laughed at him.

“Look at your hands.” “They will heal.”

“I mean it.” He worked for a hospital in accounts receivables and his world was full of people who ended up in the ER, sometimes dying because of preventable accidents. “I’m telling you to stop. I insist.”

“No.”

The Jordan house—the Jordan room, and a small room at that—was her first job. She didn’t have enough money to hire an assistant, not after living off her savings while she learned the interior decorating business.

It was not lost on him that as soon as their wedding was over, Cecile had begun redecorating him. But he’d been flattered, really. His coworkers noticed him all of a sudden. And Cecile’s concern for the right cut and collars of his shirts— well, it had been fun to get so much attention. But now she was all about the Jordans. The way the Jordans lived. How everything about the Jordans was just right.

“And when they don’t pay you? How will you like the Jordans then?”

“They gave me a deposit,” she said, her voice rising. “Of course they’ll pay the rest.”

That night, he couldn’t get near her with her hands swollen and balanced over her crotch like a fence. He went out to the living room and sat alone in front of the TV, cracking open a beer and staring at a sports channel. This had been his life before meeting Cecile. He didn’t want it back.

***

Cecile Collette had been Pat Graves before she decided to quit her office management job and follow her passion, a financially dangerous move. “It’s now or never,” she told her coworkers who’d gently implied she was out of her mind. She was forty-nine. This was in Pittsburgh. She moved to Cleveland. It was only two hours west, but it was somewhere else. She wanted nothing around her to lull her back to old routines. Everything would be new, including her name.

Since she was changing her life, she decided to dip her toe—might the ice have finally melted?—into the waters of love. She joined online dating sites, one of which coughed up Roger “Rodge” Debrett, only two years her junior, who pro- fessed to liking candlelight and long walks in the rain—bogus she was sure—but whose mint green shirt with dark-green stitching, epaulets, and white buttons cried out to her for rescue.

They met for coffee. He talked a lot about himself, but she ignored his sales pitch. Rather, she was assessing his comb-over, the fit of his jacket, the possibility he’d inflated his value. And had there been damage in his early years? Yes, she thought, I could do something with him.

***

Naked and spread-eagled, she listened, shocked, to her loud and uncontrollable giggling—she giggled?

Rodge hopped in circles, his lowering hard-on bobbing up and down, his tie over

his hair like a headband while he cried, “Hoo ah! Hoo ah! Hoo ah!”

It was during their honeymoon—two nights at the Renaissance-Marriott with a pair of tickets to a Browns game and dinner at Johnny’s—that he noticed how she’d touch every fabric she came close to. It made him think of Braille.

“Isn’t it all just cotton?” he’d joked, listening to her identify what the bedspread was, what the thread count was, what the pillows were expected to do. A cold look came into her eye, and he hurriedly backtracked and let her know he was actually “pretty bowled over.” Hell, she had to realize, he told her, “I don’t know any of that stuff.”

Her eyes remained steady. “I don’t want you to know it,” she said. “It’s only important that I know it. It’s what I do.”

“Well,” he smiled a certain smile, “as long as it’s not all you do.”

***

In the morning, Cecile let herself into the Jordan house, a rambling clapboard in Cleveland Heights, big as far as she was concerned, but lacking the reach and manicured lawns of wealthier neighborhoods. Inside was a mix of valuable and worthless pieces and, like place-savers, possessions of the two children who were off at college. There were also toys for the toddler, a late baby, Poppy.

Hallie Jordan told Cecile she’d called her after seeing her ad in the church bulletin. Which church Hallie meant would remain a mystery; Cecile had joined three. Possible clients would connect Cecile Collette Designs with the fellow parishioner seen in a (Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic) pew. She had also joined the Rotary, the Mandel Community Center, the Chamber of Commerce, and two book groups. All this in addition to her website and a blog.

And only the Jordan room to show for it. Cecile learned that the problem with following a passion late in life was muscling onto the turf of people who’d fol- lowed their passion a whole lot earlier. She was gently but unequivocally rejected for hire in their shops. Her competition was not only dug in but fiercely defensive. She was an unattended nova in a very small heaven.

“Cecile,” Hallie cried as she came into the kitchen. She was carrying Poppy. The little girl had Down syndrome, and her wide face held a questioning look as she turned to Cecile.

“Hi, you two.”

“No, what happened to your hands?”

“Nothing. They’re fine. Comes with the territory. Hello, Poppy. Hello.” The child tucked her head into her mother’s neck.

Turning to find her purse and car keys, Hallie said, “I may not be back before you leave. Help yourself to coffee, okay?”

When they’d gone, Cecile felt that icy freedom of being alone in someone else’s house. Quietly, almost on tiptoe, she walked through the first floor. Framed photos covered the walls of the hallway. Smiling Jordans. The two older kids holding Poppy between them like a prize. Troy Jordan in a summer chair, mugging in Ray-Bans. The fact that no one was breathing or speaking in the pictures encouraged her to idealize their lives. She studied the progress of the older two, from baby photos through school years and into young adulthood, taking them into her heart until she might have given birth to them herself. She returned to her work in a confusion of moods: inspired, sad, motherly, joyful, even elegiac, having lived through a generation of a family in a concentrated twenty minutes.

The problem she’d been solving for Hallie was a room off the kitchen. It was too big and too open to be made into a pantry, and the lack of windows made it difficult for any other use. Cecile drew up a picture of the room as a breakfast nook inside a tent, pleated fabric covering the ceiling and walls, light fixtures that were simple and strategically set.

Hallie hadn’t been sure of hiring her until she’d seen the drawing. “You can do this?”

Outlining the room in furring strips had been easy. Getting the pleating around the central point of the ceiling had gone well. Tall, she was also strong and not afraid of ladders. But using the staple gun became an issue. By the time she attached the fabric along the top of the walls, she could barely move her hands. A hammer and tacks worked until she smashed a fingernail.

She decided to spend the morning trimming and taping the fabric edges. After methodically working around the little room, she found her fingertips drying out and splitting. Moisturizer would help, but it might stain the fabric. In her tool bag she had a box of disposable latex gloves. She put on a pair and continued.

That night, with her hands throbbing anew, she began to think she hadn’t asked enough for the job. She’d been afraid to lose the business if she asked for more money. Wasn’t an initial low price better? But the room was turning out amazing.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry. Nothing’s wrong, Rodge. Go back to sleep.”

She wanted to kill herself for not asking enough money. There were guidelines. Why hadn’t she followed them? Well, she hadn’t, and that was that. What she needed were more clients, which raised another question. What was keeping her from making Hallie her friend? They were about the same age. Going over the short conversations they’d had, it seemed as if Hallie was offering friendship. But that could be courtesy. A presumption on Cecile’s part could be damning for future business. But if they became friends, Cecile could connect to Hallie’s other friends and then the friends of those friends.

“Quit sighing.” “Sorry.”

“What’s the matter?” “Nothing.”

“How about we do it?” “What? Oh. My hands.” “Are we ever going to do it?” “Of course, but my—”

“We can do it without using your hands.” “Rodge, it’s pretty late.”

“Don’t move. Okay? I’ll do everything.” “But I need you to get me turned on first.” “I know. That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s not really—Rodge.” “Keep your hands in the air.” “It’s not—”

“What!” he yelled. “It’s not what? There’s always something that—this started with the Jordans. You have to get away from that snob crowd. It’s them!” She threw back the covers and hurried out to the living room.

Rodge followed, yelling. “The damn Jordans, damn, rich Jordans. You have to stop this stupid stuff, Cecile.”

Cecile now began seeing Rodge as she would a large, unmovable cabinet that drew the eye from the rest of an otherwise beautiful room.

He yelled.

She shoved him toward the front door. He yelled louder.

“I need my sleep,” she screamed, “so I can do a good job for the Jordans. It’ll get me more work.”

***

It was the following day when the trouble started. After Hallie settled Poppy in for an afternoon nap, she saw Troy getting out of his car. His face looked dam- aged. “How come you’re home?”

“Can you come inside?” he asked and let her lead the way into the house. “Is that woman here?”

“No. She’s picking up a light fixture. She’ll be back.” “Christ.”

He went into the living room and sat down, waiting until she sat across from him. “First thing this morning, because we’re getting backed up, I call the outfit making the new machine.”

“For the eco bags.”

“Yep. I say, ‘Hello. It’s Troy Jordan. I’m checking on the order.’ And he says,

‘What order?’”

“He lost your order?”

“There was no order. He never got an order. No deposit, no nothing.” “So you reordered?”

“With what? There’s no money. That shit took the loan money. My partner.”

She stared at him, picturing his partner’s friendly, undistinguished face. “He took it where?”

“He stole it. He’d been out for a week, so this morning, I call up the machine people. ‘How’s it hangin?’ I find out nothing’s hanging. So I start checking. He cashed out our line of credit. I don’t know where he went. He’d put in for vacation. I thought he was in Wyoming.”

“Wait. He took the money for himself ?”

“I was with the lawyers for two hours before I had to get out of there. That shit left with over three million dollars, and I have to pay it all back, which I can’t, and no machine, no way to fill the new orders. No nothing. We’ve been backed up with shipments and getting the place up to speed for the new stuff.”

“There must be papers. Contracts.”

“Oh there were, yeah. I signed all sorts of papers. They were dummy papers. Nothing was real. I called in the lawyers. They called the prosecutor and the FBI. Jesus Christ. Everything.”

“God.”

“I trusted him.” “Was he on drugs?” “I don’t know.”

“Or gambling.” “I don’t know.”

“What about insurance? Is there insurance?”

“Nothing that stops the bank from taking the business. They’ll take everything. Or they’ll give me another loan, and I’m not sure I can manage two of them.”

“He’ll be found. You can’t disappear anymore.”

“I’ll never see that money though. And I may be sued. I may be indicted. I

don’t know what legal costs I’m looking at. The payroll still has to get out. This morning I thought that machine we ordered, thought we ordered—I was worried about the ventilation and the electrical codes—and this son of a bitch—”

“Legal costs? They can’t indict you.”

“You know what’s funny? He knew just when we had the most cash available to cover everything. I was at the table making plans with this shit, and all the time, he’s waiting for everything to ripen.”

Hallie was silent, staring at Troy, who now flung himself up and against the back of the chair as though the thing had goosed him. She only stared at him for something to focus her eyes on while this news shifted and butted inside her head. She began thinking very quickly.

The cars, she could sell one of the cars and a lot of the furniture, most of it, and sell the house, the contents of their life suddenly flying off into the blue.

It came to her that she would never want to eat anything ever again. What’ll we do? seemed a question both inadequate and redundant to the moment. After a long time—sunlight slipping from the front of the house to the back, the middle of the day leaving them with the beginning of an afternoon—the news was no longer something that happened to other people. Never to them.

He said, “We tell the kids the rest of college is their dime. They’ll be all right.” Seeing her face, he said, “They will be.”

“I know.”

“I wish I was younger. For what’s coming. I’m thinking of driving off a bridge.” “Don’t drive off a bridge.”

“Okay.”

Poppy. Security for Poppy. Now something violent squeezed her heart. She felt herself trembling.

He said, “Off a cliff ?” “No.”

“I think I’m serious.” “Please.”

A slow creaking noise came to them. Cecile was letting herself in through the back door. There followed a long struggling sound as though she might be burdened with a large package. The noise became a scrabbling. Then the quick suction of her shoes—was she trying to be quiet? The kitchen might have been the aim of an inept burglar. Had someone else decided to rob them? One thief wasn’t enough? They got two?

Catching her husband’s eye, Hallie’s shoulders began to shake. Troy threw up his hands. He began shaking, too, his eyes shut, his mouth opened wide, gasping back laughter. After a short time, hysteria played out only to return when they heard Cecile call out to them from the kitchen, “I’m here?”

“Okay,” Hallie managed to answer before leaning sideways against the sofa arm, her eyes squeezed shut, shaking with strangled laughter. Grief seized up inside her. “Oh,” she said finally, sniffing, sighing. Pointing toward the kitchen, she whispered, “That room might make it easier to sell the house, the—decor?” She was gripped again in hysteria, tears down her face and her breathing hiccupping.

***

That evening when Rodge came home from work, Cecile was soaking her hands in Epsom salts. He found the ibuprofen and fed two pills into her mouth and held a glass of water gently against her lower lip so she could swallow them.

“He was home in the afternoon,” Cecile told Rodge. “Troy. I heard them laughing in the living room. I was hanging the chandelier. It’s not a real chandelier. It’s plain. But it was just big enough and just heavy enough. Thought I’d fall off the ladder. And don’t look at me like that. I can hang lights. It was just . . . They were laughing. You know how people make those wheezing, sucking sounds like they’re trying to be quiet, but they can’t stop laughing?” She felt close to tears, hurt by the suspicion they’d been laughing at her.

What she didn’t tell Rodge was what followed the laughing. There was a long moment of silence, and then Cecile realized they’d moved to the living room floor and were having sex, the noise from them loud and thumping, someone’s voice yowling, the other voice grunting. It felt like the whole house was in on it. She hurriedly finished and ran out before they reached the end. On the way home, she nearly had an orgasm at a red light, so aroused was she by Troy and how she imagined he was going at it in the next room. That she’d overheard them infuriated her. She couldn’t recall instructions on how to deal with this sort of thing in her professional guidelines.

***

The atmosphere in the Jordan house that evening affected Poppy, who, sensing something wrong, fussed and was unhappy. Both parents gave themselves over to her, distracting themselves with her care. Long after the little girl went to sleep, Hallie and Troy were still knocking about the first floor, tidying up as though cleanliness might save them. Unable to stand being awake any longer they finally went to bed.

Anger came in waves for Hallie. She worried about Poppy. The older kids would take care of their sister as everyone aged, as she and Troy passed on, but that wasn’t what flayed at her. It was her child’s immutable innocence. Like light, this moving, diapered light. Hallie responded with such a need to protect her that a threat of any kind sent her soul raging against the universe, screaming at it from inside her head.

Troy was awake. She thought he might be crying. Like a lover bereft. She remembered him before the theft, anticipating his company’s future, a new machine for the newly designed bags, ecologically sound, his war against plastic. For months, so much excitement and wonder. Like a teenager with a first love. He was heartbroken.

What would they do?

Her job was suddenly important. Teaching remedial math had flattered her sense of civic spirit, the extra cash allowing her to hire someone to fix that worthless sort of room off the kitchen. She’d teach more classes. But that would leave her less time for Poppy. She’d need more time for the child now that she couldn’t pay for Poppy’s team. Only she’d have to work more hours—

They’d sell the place, of course. Pay off the mortgage. Maybe sell it themselves to save on the agent’s fee. Yes. They’d do that. They’d have everyone they knew over, a goodbye party and—Does anyone know anyone looking to buy a house? A sell-the-house party. Her spirits rose at the idea of everyone coming inside to them, one last time. Soon, she thought, before it’s all over.

***

The following morning, Cecile let herself into the Jordan house. She was wearing her best clothes, expecting a group of people to see the tented room reveal. Instead, she was alone. She waited. She took photographs. When she felt she’d captured every angle, she waited some more. Hallie finally came downstairs and into the kitchen, a mean, bitter expression on her face. Poppy was walking with her, holding her hand.

Cecile said, “Ready when you are!”

Hallie let the little girl go in first and followed. “Oh. Very nice. Yeah.” She laughed. “My God. It’s actually magnificent.” She leaned against the doorway. “Oh my God,” she said as though completely defeated. “I’m going to have to. I knew I would.” Cecile was amazed at the woman’s response. Poppy turned and toddled out of the room. Hallie followed the girl. “Poppy. Come with Mommy.”

And wouldn’t you know, Cecile thought, catching some errant threads. At eye level beside the doorjamb. She used her thumbnail to tuck them under the fabric. She searched around in case there were more. Sure enough, at the angle

where the baseboard met the molding. On her knees doing a quick fix, she heard a car move along the driveway. She wondered if Troy had come home again in the middle of the day. Back on her feet, her face close to the edge surrounding the door, she gave it a last going over.

“Honestly,” she laughed, thinking Hallie was still close. “Two tiny threads. There’s always something, isn’t there.”

No response came. She went out to the kitchen. Hallie and Poppy had disappeared. She called out. No one answered.

Hallie’s number was on her cell, and when she tried it, she heard it ringing on the second floor. Calling Hallie’s name again, she walked through the house. She found the door that led to the basement and hollered down. Nothing.

Angry now, she decided to stay until someone appeared. All day if she had to. The final bill was in an envelope in her purse. She went into the living room and sat where she could see most of the first floor. No one would get by her.

After about twenty minutes, she heard a car again. It was Hallie driving up with Poppy.

“God,” Hallie said on her way in. “I can’t get my head around anything.” Settling the child in her left arm to free her right hand, she began pulling cash from her purse. The money, with the distinctive blue line announcing these were hundred dollar bills, was folded and jammed into Cecile’s hand. “Grab it while it’s going,” she said, her eyes tearing. “No more where that came from.”

Cecile felt it would be bad form to count it out. She closed her bandaged fingers around all the cash. It had an unanticipated feel. She had expected a check.

Hallie went into the tented room with Poppy. Her voice harsh, she told Cecile, “I was right. It does make the rest of the house look like crap.” “I could do the living room if—”

“No, no. God no. We’re selling the place.” “What?”

“I’m having everyone over for a party. The last stand at the Jordans’. We need to unload it, like yesterday.” She stared at the walls and ceiling of the room, and her face began to soften. “Yeah. I’ll miss this. It’s so beautiful. Beautiful.”

Cecile felt her breath getting shallow. New owners might not like a tented room. What if they tore it out? “Why?”

“So we can start over. You should buy it. Do you want it? The roof has to be replaced, and the furnace gets wonky.”

Unsure of what to say—a simple no seemed rude—Cecile asked, “How much do you want for it?”

“Whatever. As much as we can get.” She put her hand over the back of Poppy’s hair, stroking it. “And we’ll have a big party. This was a good house. We’re having a big send-off. Goodbye house. We have a lot of friends. Someone might know someone. Otherwise, I call a realtor. Whatever.”

Cecile said carefully, “Can I help you set up? For the party? I can do up a table so it’s—”

“No! This is crackers and a bowl of punch. They won’t be coming for the food.” “I won’t charge. I mean, I’ll just do it for free, like an ad for myself.”

“Oh.” Hallie said. She seemed to bring Cecile into focus. “Okay. If you want to.” Taking another look at the room, she said, “You should come to the party. Right? You have to be here. People will ask how you did this. I couldn’t tell them. Come, okay?”

***

It was after five, and Rodge made himself a drink.

“I’m so late,” Cecile cried as she hurried in. The amount of worry in her voice alarmed him. “I don’t want to be early to this thing, but I don’t want to be too late either.”

“Are these clowns some kind of royalty?” “You aren’t drinking are you!”

“No.”

“Where’s your good jacket?”

The way she was fluttering all over made him want to catch her as though she were a huge bird let loose in the place. She yelped when he got his hands on her.

When he began roving down her breasts, she yelped louder and hurried away. The bathroom door was slammed in his face. He heard the shower running. Furious, he had another drink.

And another quick one before he took his own shower and, later, because it was really annoying him the idea of her excitement about the rich people, a very short one before letting Cecile help him into the new jacket she’d bought him. His old jackets no longer buttoned across the front. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he threw back one more before they left. “Honey,” she said in a strong voice. “You don’t need that.”

As he drove, she held on to the handle above her window.

“Where is this place,” he asked in a voice that told her the place couldn’t be anywhere good.

“You’ll like them.” He said nothing.

“And I have to tell you, my God, she wasn’t kidding about cheap food,” Cecile laughed. He recognized her bright and cheery come-on-Rodge voice. “Wait’ll you see. Saltines. A block of cheddar. And this punch bowl. I helped her get this silver monstrosity out of the attic. A couple of cans of fruit juice and a gallon of cheap gin. Otherwise there’s a pitcher of tap water. I’m still laughing. It’s that she just didn’t care. She thought the whole thing a big hoot. But I arranged it so it really looks, just, oh my God. And all I did was take some leaves from a catalpa tree I found near the back of the garage and some sprigs of euonymus. I think she appreciated what I did. The table looked incredible. It’s good to be friends with people. The punch bowl belonged to her great grandmother. It took me over an hour to polish it. And right next to it, she sticks this tower of plastic party cups. I’m serious. Those little—”

“All right.”

“All right, what?” She waited. He was silent.

“Rodge, just be yourself. They’ll love you. Just the way you are is fine.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

They had to drive three blocks beyond the address to find a parking spot.

At the front door, he sucked his gut in hard. Affecting a very formal tone, he said, “Now. My dear.” He held the door open. “After you.”

Gently, she said, “You might stick to water.” A lot of  noise. There was a crowd of people. “Everyone!” Rodge said in a loud greeting, his hand up. The people closest turned, smiled, made room.

She went into the dining room and almost hollered. The catalpa leaves and euonymus sprigs were piled up like compost behind the plate of crackers. The rest of her greens, as she looked, were on the floor. The table was covered with unmatched platters of deviled eggs, meatballs stuck with toothpicks, rolled ham slices, bite-size quiches, cookies. Of course, Hallie’s friends. But didn’t Hallie know her friends would bring food? Without thinking, Cecile moved a few sprigs and leaves, freeing them and then rearranging them. She heard, “Excuse me,” and moved to let a woman who’d entered the house behind her with a dish of crudités and dip find some space. Cecile introduced herself while stifling a little rage. Stay on course. Meet everyone. The table design was a freebie. The first people into the house would’ve noticed it, and that’s more than enough.

She turned to Rodge, wanting to encourage him to eat something, but he was pouring out two glasses of punch, and she took one from him, thanking him.

“By all means,” he said, “my dear.” “What?”

“Should I make a toast to you,” he said, smiling.

It was then that she heard Hallie’s voice from the kitchen saying, “That’s her.” She looked over. Hallie and a few women were grinning at her as she called, “Cecile!”

The woman beside Hallie yelled, “That room!” Cecile realized others had turned to see who she was. “Come see it,” Cecile said to Rodge.

As she moved to join Hallie, she realized Rodge had noticed the greeting she’d been given. And she saw from the corner of her eye that he didn’t like it. He picked up the ladle and replenished the punch in his cup, his expression full of injury.

She threaded her way through the crowd to get to the kitchen. Here she began to realize the people around the Jordans were the same hodgepodge as the furniture, unmatched and plain or beautiful or young or very old. Her spirits lifted; the mix augured a place for her too. And weren’t they all talking with such animation! The party went at a faster speed than any party she’d been to before. She stepped with buoyancy into the kitchen. To let her pass, a number of arms lifted cups containing the juice-colored gin of the punch, and this put her in mind of weddings where the bride steps under a salute of swords.

“Oh,” she laughed, ducking to get through. She felt very young. She joined Hallie and her friends at the doorway of the tented room. The lights from the hanging fixture and the sconces she’d installed had the place looking magical.

“You did this?” One of Hallie’s friends asked her. “How did you do this!”

“You like?” Cecile laughed. Yes, she happened to have some of her cards with her. “No job too small,” she sang out softly. “And the bigger the better. Anything and everything.” She remained near the decorated room while this group lauded her. Her heart filled. Were her feet even touching the floor? If I can’t make something beautiful, she thought, I don’t want to live.

Rodge supposed he should squeeze into the kitchen and see the room, but instead, he lifted his chin in a signal to Cecile. She should follow him. He was going into the living room. That’s where it seemed obvious party guests should go. They didn’t belong in the back of some kitchen.

Two couples standing near the sofa were deep in conversation. He moved near them, stumbling slightly over the rug.

One of the men said, “I don’t think four hundred. Maybe three fifty?” They were pricing the house, he realized. He moved a little closer. The talk turned to mortgages and interest rates.

Rodge said, “Hah,” and the four people turned, smiling at him. “How much would you say they’d get?” one of them asked.

“I wouldn’t buy a whole house,” Rodge said. The words felt sticky on their way out of his mouth. “I’m in . . . condo. Gotta condo. Right.”

They stared at him. Then they turned away.

He went back to the dining room. To a young woman nearby, he said, “Looks like the well might rush dry.”

She gave a cursory look into the punch bowl before moving past him.

As he drank from his refilled cup, he caught sight of Cecile in the kitchen. Her head was thrown back, her mouth wide open. Her eyes were closed. She was crying out, “Oh!” and the group around her was laughing.

He went back into the living room and kept going. He ended up in the hall- way. The hallway was covered with family photos. He went over and looked at them. Bending close, he wanted evidence of privilege. Cecile should see this, he thought. Vacation pictures of people who hadn’t paid her. That cash she’d come home with hadn’t fooled him. He believed the wads of bills had come from her own savings account to save her pride, to convince him the Jordans weren’t stringing her along. Meanwhile, she was over here polishing their silver all after- noon for nothing. He had to save her from this mess she’d gotten herself into.

He didn’t hear Troy descending the staircase.

***

Troy had put Poppy to bed. The idea of the party had seemed crazy enough to him to wrestle his feelings onto a mat, pinning them down and leaving him agog. Distraction was carrying him for the moment. That was the immediate plan.

He was halfway down the stairs when he spotted the comb-over and the enormous gut on a middle-aged stranger. The man was inspecting each of the family photos with a pronounced sneer on his face. The sneer was aimed at pictures of the older two, Troy’s son and daughter. Babies and then toddlers, his children maturing through beach trips and graduation pictures. And then Hallie with the newborn, and from Hallie’s arm, a waterfall of blankets all the way to her sandals and, peeping from the crook of her arm, a pink knitted cap. Whoever this man was, he gave a snort before draining his cup, after which he turned to walk back through the house.

In the dining room, Rodge picked up the ladle in the punch bowl. He saw Cecile spot him from the far end of the kitchen. She shot her hand up. He glared at her. Her face, and her hand flapping, told him to come and look. Her expression promised it was fun. His glare replied all this nonsense had gone on long enough. Two men beside her joined in. Now he had a trio waving him forward. They looked like cartoons. He turned his attention to the punch, scraping up the last of it.

Troy had followed him. “Who are you?”

Rodge smiled at his host. “I’m Rodge,” he told Troy and put down the ladle. He held out his hand. “Cecile’s husband.”

Troy ignored his hand. “Rodge Collette? You’re an interior decorator too?” “Debrett. I’m Rodge Debrett. And I work at University Hospital.”

“What are you, a doctor?”

“A doctor? No. Not exactly.” He pulled at the edge of his new jacket with the hand that had been refused.

“What are you!”

Rodge took his time, wanting to frame a title for himself that might flatten this son of a bitch. “You think I’m one of the docs? No, your error.” He felt his balance go off kilter and grabbed the side of the table. As he steadied himself, he had a glancing view of his wife and the women and men around her watching him with alarm. Watch this, he wanted to tell them. “Listen,” he said. “A doc? I’m the man who makes sure those doctors get paid.” His heart seized a bit just then because he believed the other man was about to hit him. He braced his feet on the floor, fists up, ready to return a punch.

Troy didn’t hit him. He turned his back on him and walked away.

Rodge hollered, “What am I? You want to know what I am?” and unzipped his fly.

Cecile saw this and so did the people around her. A few more heads turned in his direction and, with that, more and more people turning to see what had every- one suddenly paralyzed. His hand pulled out his wrinkled, fleshy coup du ciel as Cecile had happily named it. It moved, growing slightly as though sensing many people. Turning its singular eye, Who all is here in anticipation? Then the thick hand of its owner directed it down. Rodge peed into his cup, a few drops ricocheting up, the noise echoing in the sudden silence. He poured the cup into the punch bowl, a torrential noise given the hush. To the sound of his wife crying out to him, he did this a second time for good measure.

***

The house with the tented room sold quickly. The furniture was sold, too, and one of the cars. Until a plan was in place, the Jordans moved in with Hallie’s mother, who lived in a bungalow in Bay Village with her partner and her partner’s dog, a Great Pyrenees. The dog, a natural nanny, hovered over Poppy, who grabbed its fur and hugged it, followed it, fed it, and often napped against its heavy belly.

The two elder Jordan children came home to find work and cheap rooms. They were there at dinner when Hallie’s sisters and brother came over with their partners. The dining room was crowded. A chair had to be brought in from the garage. Hallie now and then put her hand on Troy’s back, rubbing the soft fabric of his shirt. It was less support for Troy—though it was that—than a warning to the others not to pile on with advice or opinions. The two grown children watched their father as though unable to recognize him. When Troy announced he’d begin again and it would be even better, it was a non sequitur. Hallie’s mother brought up the affection the dog had for Poppy. She told anecdotes about previous family dogs, devious terriers and foolish hounds, but the stories gained only a little flight before losing air.

Finally someone asked, “Who was that guy? At the party?” The room came to life. Hallie and Troy began laughing. “Oh my God, that guy!”

“I will never drink gin again in my life.” “Or punch. Nothing liquid.”

“But who was he?”

“That’s what he was saying. That guy. He was telling Troy who he was.” “I didn’t care who he was.”

“He came in with Hallie’s decorator.” “Did she bill you for it?”

“He was the only thing that made me glad to sell the house. I couldn’t eat in that dining room again.”

As they laughed, talking about the party, Hallie looked for the dog. There. Once she found the dog, she saw Poppy, her lifeline, an antidote. Seeing Poppy, she felt her breath come deep and steady. She sat back, calm now, and felt her son’s arm around her. She heard her grown daughter’s voice, “You should go into catering, Mom.”

***

“Beatrix Windsor,” Cecile, now Beatrix, introduced herself to the woman. They’d left St. Paul’s after Mass at about the same time, and the woman looked approachable. “I’m new to Grosse Pointe, to Michigan in fact.”

“Oh. Welcome. You’ll like it here.” “Just hoping to find things peaceful.” “This isn’t a business move?”

She turned for a quick look at the lake before they headed into the parking lot. “I lost my husband.” She didn’t mention how. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I wanted to kind of start fresh. Away from memories.” “I don’t blame you.”

“And my business is portable. I’m an interior decorator.” “A decorator.”

She would not be downhearted. The divorce had left her nearly penniless, but enough remained after they sold the condo to cover an apartment rental and new business cards. She found part-time bookkeeping work, something to hold her until Beatrix Windsor Interiors began taking on clients. Her ads were already in the bulletins of her new churches. She had not been afraid to knock on doors of design shops and show photos of the tented room. One owner said she might be used, as he’d put it, for any overflow. Just that slight promise had thrilled her. To keep her spirits high, she worked evenings on her living room. Her landlady was impressed. And the landlady might know people.

There were nights she was tempted to go back to a dating sight and find another man. A fantasy of romantic moments tempted her. There were times she longed for the bustle of children, of pets and schedules and hurrying, the measure a shared life would take of her. But then she’d sketch out a solution to the problem of a room and become so engaged she’d question if love was really in her best interest. People didn’t blossom beneath her talents the way a sofa or a wall could. Burned bridges and a foolish man be damned, she could be happy. Michigan would get beautiful. She had her passion.

 

 

With permission of the University of Iowa Press ©2020 Eileen O’Leary. Used with permission.

All rights reserved.

JENNIFER SCANNED the waiting room of her dental office, dividing the patients into predators and prey. The compact man seated against the front wall, with the completely shaved head rolled back and legs spread a foot apart was definitely a predator, likely a dominant male leopard. The lithe woman on the left side, with cheesegrater cheekbones, blond bob and blood red lipstick? Also a predator, perhaps a cheetah. Jennifer paused at the teenage girl, a jumble of doughy cheeks, stringy, dark hair, and meaty thighs in tight jeans hunched over reading a book in the right corner. Prey, she determined, maybe a wildebeest. Jennifer blamed her six-year-old daughter Lily’s teacher for this involuntary reflex, which had started two weeks ago with a field trip to the zoo. Since that visit, with the gusto of a gleeful dictator, Lily demanded that her environment be filled with animals. Immersed in a fog of animal-shaped foods, animal-printed clothes, and animal documentaries, Jennifer’s vision was altered like she was wearing a pair of 3-D glasses. As she bent over patients, filling cavities and installing crowns, she envisioned herself as an Egyptian plover, seated inside a crocodile’s mouth, cleaning away the debris.

“Mr. Eckhart?” she said, addressing the leopard. “I’m ready to see you now.”

The leopard rose, creating a vacuum in the waiting room that prompted the cheetah and the wildebeest to readjust themselves, recrossing their legs and extending their arms as they watched him saunter towards the office entrance. The wildebeest lifted her book and Jennifer caught a glance of the title, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Jennifer felt a pressure in her chest, a burst of guilt, and a flash of recognition. The leopard bumped into her as he passed and she followed him, closing the door behind them.

As Jennifer drove home that evening, navigating the smooth asphalt streets and crisp curbs of the leafy suburb where she lived, her mind replayed memories with the low resolution of an old VHS tape.

“Thanks for driving me home, Mr. Slade.” Jennifer tried to control her heart rate, conscious that her left elbow was only inches away from the cute English teacher’s right hand on the stick shift between them.

“No need to be so formal, Jennifer. We’re not in class. Call me Greg. Mari- el and I are glad we found someone Michael actually likes. He looks forward to us going out now.”

“He’s a great kid,” Jennifer said, looking straight ahead, not trusting herself to make contact with Greg’s pewter grey eyes. “I enjoy babysitting him. Beats sitting at home on a Friday night.” In the enclosed space of the car, Jennifer could smell the combination of Greg’s Irish Spring soap and Old Spice cologne mixed with something else she couldn’t place.

“A pretty girl like you? I’m surprised you don’t have boys beating down your door.”

“You don’t have to be nice.”

“I’m not being nice. I’m just stating a fact,” he said, patting her plump left thigh. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jennifer.”

Parked outside her home, a large colonial among a sea of colonials of varying neutral colors, Jennifer felt the phantom heat of a hand on her thigh. She looked down and confirmed that her legs were now taut and toned, clad in fitted black trousers. As she ascended the granite steps up to the entrance of her house, accompanied by the reassuring clatter of her heels, she closed her eyes to recenter herself.

“Where’s my Lily doll?” Jennifer called, as she entered the foyer of her home. She walked towards the living room, where the “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King was playing.

“Mommy’s home!” Lily yelled, leaping up from the floor. Jennifer smiled as Lily’s slight and stretched bones embraced her. She was always grateful that Lily was an ectomorph like her father, Peter.

“Did you have a good day, sweetheart?” Jennifer asked, embracing Lily, inhaling the scent of her apple shampoo.

“Yes, I drew a picture of an elephant. Daddy put it on the fridge.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see it,” Jennifer said, pausing the video. “Go wash your hands and we’ll have dinner soon, okay?”

“I thought I heard you,” Peter said, entering from the kitchen, the lines of his pinstripe suit emphasizing his height. Predator, most certainly a lion, Jennifer thought with a flash of pride, admiring Peter’s mane of thick black hair and lean, muscular limbs. He drew her in for a hug, and she inhaled deeply, wanting to dose herself with his pheromones. She could only smell his expensive cologne, a pleasant chemical reproduction of the scent of burnt cedar. Her temporal lobe whispered a line from Sylvia Plath’s “Applicant”: “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it?”

“Have you seen The Lion King before?” Peter asked, motioning to the television screen, which was frozen on the image of little Simba being presented to the predators and prey comingling peacefully below to celebrate his birth.

“Once or twice,” Jennifer said, looking down. “God, that movie is like twenty-five years old now. Damn, I feel old.”

“We’re not old. Just oldish. Don’t worry about dinner. I put the baked ziti that Marcella made in the oven. It should be done in a few minutes,” Peter said. “I hope you don’t mind if I hide in the study to work a few hours after dinner. I’ve got that trial starting tomorrow.”

“Of course, do what you have to do,” Jennifer said, forcing a smile. “But I’m not finishing that movie with Lily tonight. We’ll never get any sleep if she sees Mufasa get trampled.”

Throughout dinner that evening, Jennifer’s head throbbed. The lights from the chandelier in the dining room seemed too bright, and the laughter of her husband and daughter seemed canned. She felt she was in a play, reciting the same lines and responding to the same cues that she had for many years. The sauce that coated her pasta tasted metallic, and the Malbec she usually enjoyed burned her throat. Neither Peter nor Lily seemed to notice that she rotated her food around her plate instead of eating it.

Later in bed, overheated and wide awake, Jennifer removed the comforter, then the sheet without trying to disturb Peter sleeping beside her. She saw herself sitting in English class, and could feel the hard back and seat of her desk, which felt too small for her. She saw herself focused on the notebook in front of her, drafting a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare as assigned. She could hear the barely suppressed giggles of Michelle and Karen chiming behind her
as they passed notes, and felt a warm rush of self-consciousness. She was certain that they were writing about how fat she looked in her new babydoll dress, which suddenly seemed too short. Or maybe they had noticed the week’s growth of hair on her legs, which she had forgotten to shave that morning. She still hadn’t gotten into the habit of shaving her legs regularly. Maybe that was the difference between herself and the popular girls like Michelle and Karen, who always had smooth shiny legs. Feeling eyes on her, she looked up towards the front of the classroom, and Greg winked at her.

Jennifer grabbed her iPad from the nightstand, causing Peter to stir and grunt before rolling further to his edge of the bed. She logged onto Facebook and typed in the search bar: “Greg Slade.” Her breathing became shallow as her index finger hovered above the search button. She would know more, but never enough, and maybe knowing nothing was best. She inhaled and pressed search.

Greg’s profile was minimal, consisting mostly of photos in which Mariel had tagged him. His face and figure were the same, though the black curls were now streaked with strands of silver. Jennifer tried to reconcile the image of the middle-aged boys’ soccer coach with the charismatic, young teacher who had dominated her thoughts in high school and college. With a flash of satisfaction, she noted that Mariel had not aged well, with a slight paunch and dull brown hair. And little Michael, the boy she used to babysit, was now a tall, handsome man, several years out of college, engaged to be married.

Jennifer looked at the time on her iPad. 4:23 a.m. As she feared, she had opened a dam that she would be unable to stop, and she had no one to blame but herself. A hunger pang traveled from her stomach to her throat, reminding her that she had barely eaten dinner. She crept out of the bed and tip-toed down the stairs to the kitchen. She microwaved the leftover pasta, taking it out before the microwave beeped. It’s okay, she reasoned, as she lifted heavy forkfuls of cheese-glazed macaroni to her mouth before the dim light of the microwave. You didn’t have dinner. You won’t get any sleep if you’re hungry. But don’t make a habit out of it.

After several nights of minimal sleep, Jennifer was feverish and desperate for distraction, trying to stem the flood of humiliating memories that she hoped she didn’t remember properly. She watched wildlife documentaries with Lily, slowly becoming Lily’s willing accomplice in her animal obsession. To Lily, the lions were huge cats who would purr loudly if she pet them, and the zebras were pretty striped horses that she could ride. Jennifer, however, was intrigued by the unwritten and unspoken codes that seemed to govern all the animals in their interactions with each other. There were the elephants, gentle grey giants who traveled in breeding herds led by matriarchs. The females, protective of their calves, would kick out rambunctious males who threatened the younger ones. Then there were the solitary leopards, with their spotted lithe bodies and hungry pear green eyes. The female leopards would eventually abandon their cubs, leaving them to roam and hunt alone. Still, all the animals were guided by the same primal drives. Hunting and grazing to eat. Mating to procreate. No right or wrong. Just instinct and survival. Hunger and satiety. While she only watched documentaries geared towards children with Lily, she spent each night glued to her iPad watching videos of wild animals stalking, chasing, growling, and biting. Only picking at her food during the day, Jennifer would find herself ravenous as she tried to fall asleep. With Peter slumbering beside her, her growling stomach would compel her to creep downstairs to scavenge on leftover rotisserie chicken and cold pizza by the low light of the refrigerator.

“Ah, my two favorite girls are here,” Jennifer’s mother Nancy said, welcoming Jennifer and Lily to her home. “Come here Lily, give your grandma a hug. I have a gift for you,” she said, handing Lily a blue bag.

Lily pulled out a small safari guide outfit. “Look, Mommy! I love it, Grandma! Can I wear it now?”

“Of course, go try it on.” Nancy said, and Lily ran off to change. Nancy’s eyes narrowed on Jennifer’s hairline. “Too busy to get to the salon, dear?”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Jennifer said with a roll of her eyes. “I didn’t mean to offend you with my horrible roots.”

“No need to be fresh, Jennifer. Blonde hair suits you. But you do need to keep up with it.”

“I really wish you hadn’t bought her that outfit. I’m not sure this is a healthy obsession anymore.”

“The only way out is through,” Nancy said with a knowing smile. “Don’t fight it. Just let her immerse herself until she grows bored and another bright shiny object will distract her.”

Jennifer looked around the living room of the house she had grown up in, and her eyes fell upon the prom picture placed on the mantel above the fireplace. There she was, in a satin violet gown, her round face framed by permed hair and bangs teased high. Jennifer winced at the bulk of her teenage self, especially compared to Amy, the slender friend she had attended the prom with, standing beside her in the photo. She closed her eyes as she recalled when Greg had approached her that evening as she stood alone in the hotel corridor, escaping the ballroom full of teenage couples bound by hormones slow-dancing.

“You look beautiful in that gown,” Greg said with a wide smile, drawing her attention from the framed Renoir print she was inspecting on the wall. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to sit at a table alone while everyone else was dancing with their dates,” she said, regretting her honesty as soon as she spoke.

“I wish I could ask you to dance.”
“Please stop that,” Jennifer said, with a conviction she didn’t feel. “What?”
“Stop leading me on.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking two steps back. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ve discussed this before. You know I have my career and family to consider.”

“Nobody would have to know,” Jennifer said, emboldened in her heels and long satin gown. “I would never tell anyone.” “You would wind up hating me.”

“Impossible.”
“You would feel like I took advantage of you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I just turned 17, you know. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I care for you, Jennifer,” he said. “But I’m doing what’s best for us both.”

 

“So I ran into your cousin Stacey and her daughter Beth the other day,” Nancy said, interrupting Jennifer’s thoughts. “You wouldn’t believe how much weight Beth has gained.”

“Mother, Beth is like twelve years old. Can we not criticize a child’s weight? What if Lily heard you talking like that?”

“Lily doesn’t have anything to worry about. She’s thin as a rail, like her father.”

“That’s not the point,” Jennifer protested.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing, Jennifer. I don’t know why you’re so moody today. Would you mind helping me with the garden after lunch? There’s so many weeds this summer, I can hardly keep up.” Working alongside her mother in the garden in the hot afternoon sun, Jennifer licked her lips. “Do you remember Mr. Slade?”

“Mr. Slade? You mean Greg? Your English teacher?”
“Right.”
“Oh, yes, very nice guy. He always thought very highly of you. Are you still in touch?”
“No, I just came across some pictures of him and Michael on Facebook recently. Would you believe little Michael is engaged now?” “Really! Doesn’t time pass quickly?”

As Jennifer dug into the soil, reaching under the roots of the weeds and pulling them out, her temperature rose. It was irrational, she knew, to be mad at her mother for not asking questions that she was desperate to answer.

“Careful, dear, you’re pulling up some of the flowers,” Nancy said with a creased brow.

“Can you keep an eye on Lily?” Jennifer asked, peeling off her gardening gloves. “I thought I might take a look at some of the stuff we have stored in the attic and take it off your hands.”

“I thought you’d never ask. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Jennifer ascended the stairs to the attic and quickly found the cardboard box marked “BOOKS” that she was looking for. There, buried in the bottom, beneath her college chemistry and biology books, was her dog-eared copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. She flipped through the pages, smiling at the emphatic exclamation points, question marks, and underlined verses, made by her own hands years ago but seemingly by another person. She stopped turning the pages at her favorite poem, “Daddy”: “You do not do, you do not do, any more black shoe…” Jennifer couldn’t read the words without reciting them aloud, as she had when she was a teenager. And there, on the inside cover: Dear Jennifer: I hope that you enjoy this as you embark on the chapter of your life. You will be missed. With affection, Greg 6/24/97. The date reminded Jennifer of the warm summer evening Greg had given her the book.

“I’m glad you could come to the poetry reading with me.” Greg said as they walked back to his car. “It’s certainly not Mariel’s type of thing.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” Jennifer said, trying to match Greg’s long strides in her platform sandals. She had chosen her outfit carefully, a low-cut floral dress that defined her waist. Not being invited to Karen’s graduation party had stung, but being here with Greg would have been her first choice anyway. “You didn’t have to buy me a book.”

“It’s nothing, just a small graduation gift. I know how much you enjoy Plath’s poetry.”

“God, her work is so electric,” Jennifer said, flipping through the pages. She wouldn’t tell him that she already had a copy. It was this one, the one that he had signed, that she would keep. “Forget becoming a dentist. Maybe I’ll run off to England and become a poet like her.”

“I’ve no doubt you can do whatever you put your mind to.”

“I only wish I could speak the way she wrote. Her genius makes me feel inadequate.”

“You’re a very impressive young woman, Jennifer. You graduated seventh in your class and you’re enrolling in the most prestigious school in the area this fall. We should go somewhere and celebrate.” He grabbed her left hand, and for several seconds they awkwardly attempted to interlace their fingers. Once their fingers were intertwined, he gave her hand a squeeze that accelerated her heart rate.

“I don’t know, maybe…” This was almost too perfect, she thought, exactly how she had imagined it would happen. “Alright, if you have time.”

Jennifer’s shallow breathing was interrupted by Lily singing outside. She bit her lip, wondering if her mother had ever stumbled across this book with its inscription. Tucking the book under her arm, Jennifer descended the stairs.

“Can we stop for ice cream, Mommy?” Lily asked as Jennifer drove home. Jennifer’s eyes were drawn to Lily’s legs, swinging in the passenger seat beside her. Lily’s shorts seemed tight, cutting into her thighs, which had a faint coating of light hair. Was Lily gaining weight or just outgrowing her clothes? Jennifer considered the generous serving of potato chips that Lily had eaten with her tuna sandwich, and became conscious of her own jeans cutting into her abdomen. It had taken effort to button them that morning, likely the result of her late night visits to the kitchen. “No,” Jennifer said. “Dinner’s only a couple of hours away.”
________________________________________
Subject: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu
To: gslade@aol.com
Date: September 7, 1997

Dear Greg,
How are you? College is okay. This semester is mostly prereqs for dental school but I was able to fit in a poetry course. It’s interesting to study how Yeats and Dylan influenced Plath. It’s hard to focus though. All I keep thinking about is seeing you again, and feeling the vibration of your voice go through me when you hold me in your arms. Let me know if you want to see me when I come home for Thanksgiving.
Love, Jennifer

________________________________________

Subject: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard @pearson.edu To: gslade@aol.com
Date: October 29, 1997

I’m not sure why you haven’t written back. Maybe you’re too busy or you’re sick. Or maybe Michael’s new babysitter is prettier. But sometimes when I think about the evenings we spent together by the soccer field over the summer, I wonder if you didn’t take advantage of me.

________________________________________

Subject: RE: Hello
From: gslade@aol.com
To: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu Date: October 30, 1997

Jennifer- I’m sorry that you feel I’ve neglected you. My primary concern has always been your well-being, and I thought some distance would give you some perspective. I remember agreeing that this would end when school started. I think it’s best that we don’t have any contact and that you focus on your school- work and give some lucky fellow at Pearson a chance. Greg

________________________________________

Subject: RE: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu To: gslade@aol.com
Date: November 1, 1997

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song

One evening, several days after visiting her mother, Jennifer tried to remain still in bed, attempting to control the buzzing in her head and the electricity in her legs that demanded release by movement. Even in her lightest linen night- gown, with the air conditioner blasting artic air, her skin was a feverish shell that refused to cool. Though she had placed her old copy of Ariel on her nightstand several days ago, Peter hadn’t commented on it, and she doubted he had even noticed it.

There was, she had to admit, something familiar, almost nostalgic, about the obsession, the unhalting thoughts traveling an infinity loop, reminiscent of the sleepless nights and hunger pangs when she was in college, which had seemed romantic in its own way. Fresh from Greg’s rejection in the fall of her freshman year, she avoided the loud voices and bright lights of the school dining halls, nursing her starvation like a flame, holding a vigil she intended to keep until she received some affirmation from him. She had watched with satisfaction as her curves disappeared, thinking he would be sorry if he saw how ravaged she was by his rejection. She recalled her parents’ campus visits, when they would comment on her weight loss with approval, and Jennifer would feel pride knowing that the shift in her shape was visible.

Jennifer ran her hands along her stomach, threateningly concave, as if something inside was attempting to punch its way out. The late night trips to the kitchen could not continue indefinitely. She almost wished that her movement would wake up Peter and that he would ask if she was okay. Perhaps the words, whatever they were, would come with his prompting. Then again, Peter would view it as a problem to solve, and she herself couldn’t clearly define what the problem was.

Suddenly Jennifer recalled there was one outlet where she might get some relief. On her iPad, she logged onto XOXO, a women’s site that she and her receptionist had read and mocked during their lunch hour earlier that day. Jennifer created an anonymous account and started a thread on the discussion board in which she poured out all her memories, trying to create an accurate portrayal of all the interactions with Greg that were haunting her. The innuendo-laden conversations and the intentional grazing of her arms and legs on the drives home which escalated to declarations and rejections that never stuck. The evenings in the parking lot of the soccer field which began the night of the poetry reading the summer after she graduated. The depression that swallowed her years in college after he cut off contact. The lack of appetite that nearly
led to an eating disorder which had recently morphed into binge eating at night decades after her last contact with him. She concluded her 652 word post: “Should I report him?”

Jennifer waited until her lunch hour the following day before checking for responses to her post. Seated in her office with the door closed, she was shocked to see 81 replies, an almost universal condemnation of Greg:

KittyKat• 6 hours ago
Girl, OF COURSE you should report him. The man committed a FELONY. He GROOMED you. He RAPED you. Do you really think you were the only one? What about all his other students and babysitters? Don’t you have a responsibility to help all the other girls who are unfortunate enough cross this predator’s path? DO IT NOW.

PeachesAndCream • 5 hours ago
I’m so, so sorry you had to go through this. This guy sounds like a real piece of shite. Seriously, we had to invent the word “fuckboy” for men like this. Just follow your gut and do what you think is right for you. Stay strong!

Then, like a punch in the stomach:

TequilaRain• 3 hours ago
Why does everybody have to be a victim these days? She was old enough to consent, and she did. She wasn’t even his student when they started sleeping together. #metoo is not for bored women processing midlife crises. Stories like this make people doubt the experience of real survivors. I’m going to save my outrage for real abuses of power. Go ahead and report if you want, but I doubt you have a case.

Jennifer’s blood warmed and rushed to her face. How was it possible, she wondered? How could a stranger she had never met size her up so well?

“First, are you our sort of person?” Jennifer’s memory echoed Sylvia Plath’s “Applicant” as she entered the steakhouse with Peter for their tenth anniversary dinner. For Peter, the answer was an unequivocal yes. In his striped dress shirt, unbuttoned just so, and suit pants perfectly tailored to skim the top of his leather shoes, he was a man in his natural habitat who appreciated the code of conduct of a place like this. The silverware would be replaced between courses, the wine would be served at the right temperature, and the breadcrumbs would be swept before the entrees were served. Jennifer felt constricted in her black lace cocktail dress, which she had struggled to zip earlier. She hoped, with her cheekbones contoured by NARS blush and her stomach flattened by Spanx, that the effects of her late night visits to the fridge weren’t showing.

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked, with a practiced smile, as he placed a glass of Shiraz in front of Jennifer and a glass of draft beer in front of Peter.
“I’ll have the 16 ounce New York sirloin. Well done.” Peter answered.

“And you, Madame?”
Jennifer’s stomach rolled with hunger as read the menu. “I’ll have the 8 ounce filet mignon. Rare. And…an order of the parmesan truffle fries.”

“Someone’s hungry,” Peter said with a teasing smile as the waiter walked away.
“I didn’t have lunch today,” Jennifer countered. Her eyes focused on the pan of rolls, glossy with butter and dusted with coarse salt, at the center of the table. Her mouth salivated, though Peter appeared oblivious to them, and she clasped her wine glass to avoid reaching for one. She had promised herself that tonight she would focus on Peter, eat her dinner, sleep through the night, and avoid a late night trip to the kitchen. Maybe the wine would ease words to her lips that she otherwise could not form. She tried to make eye contact with Peter as he scanned the room, full of well-dressed pumas and panthers, seated in curved cognac leather booths, washing down bite-sized chunks of pink meat with red wine. Not a wildebeest or warthog in sight.

“Tell me a secret,” she said, running a finger along the rim of her glass. “Something about yourself that you’ve never told me before.”
“You think we have secrets from each other after all this time?”
“I know we do,” she said, hearing the effects of her second glass of wine in the flirtatious lilt in her voice.
“Hmmm, well, when we first started dating, I was actually seeing someone else. A teaching assistant for my constitutional law class,” Peter replied with a mischievous grin.

“Really?” she said, leaning back with wide eyes. “I was the other woman?”
“I was going to break up with her anyway, but I waited until the class was over. It was never really serious.” Peter placed a large piece of pink-brown meat in his mouth, revealing paper-white incisors and canines as he chewed. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Well…” she said, taking a large sip of wine. “You know how I told you Elaine and I studied in the law school library because the medical school library was too loud and distracting?”

“Right.”

“Well, that was a lie. We were there because Elaine wanted to meet law school guys. She thought the dental school guys were too nerdy. She had her eye on you for weeks.”

“Really?” Peter asked with a chuckle. “You mean I was being stalked?”

“I suppose you were. And we had a nickname for you. Prom King. Like, if law school had a prom king, you would have been it.”

“I’m flattered, I suppose.”

“You know, I always wondered,” she said, watching Peter take a sip of beer. “There were two of us that you always ran into at the library, and I’m the one you asked out. Why me?”

“Maybe because it seemed like you cared less and would be a challenge,” Peter said with a shrug. “And I always had a thing for petite blondes.”

Jennifer recoiled at the description of herself as a petite blonde. But she supposed that’s what she was by the time they had met, or at least closer to that than the dark-haired chubby girl she was in high school. And he had mistaken her shy insecurity for cool indifference. She recalled Elaine regularly approaching Peter, asking him for a spare pen, asking what time it was, presenting herself like one of those lionesses in a wildlife documentary with a lifted tail signaling she was ready to mate. He would never admit what Jennifer suspected, that Elaine’s thick eyebrows, faint mustache, and zaftig figure made her like a member of another species that he could never consider seriously breeding with.

“She never forgave me, you know, for dating you,” Jennifer said. “I broke girl code before it was even a thing.” Jennifer’s face flushed when she re- called first telling Elaine that she and Peter were dating, and how she had feigned ignorance of Elaine’s own interest in him. With a coldness that she didn’t know she was capable of, Jennifer later ignored Elaine on campus, trying to avoid the flash of guilt when she saw her. The delight she felt at being chosen by Peter, however, had overridden any remorse she felt.
“Well, here we are, married ten years later,” Peter said. “I would say things worked out the way they were supposed to.” Peter reached for her hand, and Jennifer winced at its cool touch. She remembered the few times Greg had held her hand, and how its warmth would radiate through her body until she felt inebriated. Surely, she thought, this must hint at some important difference between the two men, between their metabolisms and appetites. It had seemed so reassuring in those first days when she and Peter started dating, when she was certain that a man with a cool hand was one she could trust.

Peter released her hand and reached inside to a pocket in his coat and withdrew a navy blue Mikimoto box. “Happy anniversary, my dear.”

Jennifer opened the box, revealing a set of white pearl stud earrings. Creamy and smooth. Tasteful and elegant. Hard and cold. “They’re beautiful,” she sputtered.

Peter leaned back with a self-satisfied sigh that churned Jennifer’s stomach. Usually his ease with himself would transmit itself through osmosis to her until she adopted it as her own. But tonight she was impermeable. If he initiated sex tonight, maybe she would go along. But he probably wouldn’t, and she didn’t really want him to. Grateful, Jennifer reminded herself. Be grateful. Wherever Elaine was now, she would probably be jealous.

“Mommy, hurry up! It’s starting!” Lily said, yelling from the living room to the kitchen.
“Be right there, sweetheart,” Jennifer called, cutting the ham and cheese sandwiches into triangles, the way Lily liked. The National Geographic channel was broadcasting a safari live from South Africa that morning, and Lily’s anticipation was infectious. Jennifer smiled at the sight of her daughter in her safari guide outfit gripping a stuffed leopard doll.

“There’s reports that Prince Leopold, the dominant male leopard in this park, is nearby,” said the safari guide, a young blond woman with a pleasant South African accent. “There’s fresh tracks to our right. If you listen closely, you can hear the impala barking and racing out of the area, so he’s probably close.”

“Mommy, are they going to show a leopard?”
“We’ll see, sweetheart.”
“Look, look!” the guide said excitedly. “He’s poking out from behind the termite mound…he might have waited too long, the impala have a head start, but wait…there’s a little one…the poor thing is having trouble keeping up…it looks like she has a limp…there he goes!”

“Look, Mommy, they’re racing! They’re so fast! Oh, oh, he caught her! He’s biting her…Mommy, the deer’s bleeding! Is she okay?”

Unable to tear her eyes away, Jennifer leaned forward as the leopard sank his teeth into the neck of the impala and lifted her body. She recalled the words of Plath’s “Pursuit”: “Crying: blood, let blood be spilt; meat must glut his

mouth’s raw wound.” The impala let out a plaintive wail, waving her limbs in a desperate attempt to reach the ground. Blood dripped from her neck as she twitched from her ears to her hooves, and her large brown eyes stopped blinking. Once the struggling stopped, the leopard lowered the impala to the ground and began to licking the impala’s stomach tenderly, as if thanking her for her sacrifice.

“You see,” said the guide, “Leo first has to remove the hair so that he can break through the skin. It’s easy work with those rough tongues.”
Suddenly, with swift efficiency, the leopard chomped at the impala’s trunk and began separating the muscle from the ribs. Within seconds he had the smooth, round pink stomach in his mouth, and he dropped it to the ground. Leaving the stomach behind, he began walking with neck of the impala in his mouth, limbs and head dangling on the ground.

“And now Prince Leopold has his dinner,” the guide said admiringly. “The poor impala didn’t really have a chance. As you saw, Leo took out the stomach contents, which means he is probably going to hoist his meal up a tree to protect it from other predators. And look at him, there he goes up now, racing up the marula tree! Never fails to amaze me. Of course, this may not be appropriate for our more sensitive viewers.”

Jennifer suddenly became aware of Lily beside her, white as snow and breathing deeply. Jennifer grabbed her towards her chest, anticipating the howling she sensed creeping to the surface. Suddenly Lily exploded. “Why, Mommy?” she wailed. “Why? Why did he eat the deer?”

“When I see things like this,” the guide continued, as if hearing Lily through the screen, “it always helps to remember that predators are only doing what they are meant to do. And the herbivores are an integral part of the delicate balance out here in the bush. Every animal has a role. The circle of life, and all that.”

Later that evening, Jennifer sat on the bed, face in her hands as Peter paced their bedroom. “I don’t know how you let this happen. Jesus, Jenn.”

“Will you please keep your voice down? I’m sorry. It just happened so quickly.”

“Right, it was completely unforeseeable that a live safari would show a hunt and a kill. Damn it, Jenn.”

“For God’s sake, she’ll be fine.”

“She’s probably going to have a breakdown in school and then we’ll have DCF on our backs.”

“Stop overreacting. I’m sorry I’m not perfect like you, Perfect Peter.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately. You’ve been up all hours with your face stuck in your iPad, walking around like a zombie every day. We haven’t had sex in weeks. You’ve been sneaking downstairs to eat in the middle of the night. And now it’s starting to affect Lily and you’re lashing out at me.”

Jennifer flushed with embarrassment learning that Peter had been aware of her late night forages in the kitchen. She stared at him pacing, admiring his tall, solid form and his graceful, strong gait. So righteously angry, with his puffed chest and dilated pupils. This was the man who chose her, the one who was here now. And yet he still knew so little about her, meeting her only after she had smoothed all her edges into something polished and opaque. Re- served, conscientious, nurturing; highlighted, shaved, and toned. A woman who would appreciate Mikimoto pearls and who never made him angry. That was the Jennifer Peter knew, at least until a few weeks ago.

Jennifer opened her mouth, uncertain of the words that would follow. “I have something to tell you, but I don’t know if it’ll make any sense.”

“You know you can tell me anything.”
“Remember when I told you that my first time was with an older guy?” “Ah, yes, the mysterious man you never wanted to talk much about.” She exhaled. “He was a teacher I babysat for. And I think that maybe he took advantage of me.”
“You mean he raped you?” he asked, finally stopping his pacing and turning towards her.
“No, I mean, not exactly. I was 17 when we started sleeping together. But I was 15 when he started coming on to me.”
Relief dawned on Peter’s face. “And why is this on your mind now?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe it’s watching Lily grow up. I don’t want the same thing to happen to her. And what if he’s doing this to other girls now? Maybe I should report him. Should I?”

“I don’t know, Jenn,” he said, rubbing his temples. “That’s a big decision. Do you really want to put yourself through that? And what about the statute of limitations?”

“So you don’t think it’s a big deal?” she asked, her voice rising.

“I’m not saying that, Jenn.” Exhaling deeply, he scanned her, barefaced in her bathrobe. He pursed his lips the way he sometimes did when he was displeased with a glass of wine. “I’m just trying to be rational about this.”

It hadn’t been Peter’s fault, Jennifer realized. She had lowered her voice, made herself smaller, and rid herself of the prey scent that she feared would lead to her being consumed. This allowed her to stand beside a predator, feeling safe and protected. But hierarchies, once established, could only be altered by a disruption to the natural order.

A chill originated from the sacrum of her spine and radiated to her fingers and toes.

“I think I need some time on my own,” she said. “I’ll take Lily and stay with my mother for a while.”

Later that evening, after packing her bags, Jennifer disrobed and entered the shower, letting the hot water run through her hair and over her skin. She remembered the theory from high school biology that every seven years all cells in the human body have died and replaced themselves. By that measure, she was two or three regenerations away from the girl who last had contact with Greg. But there was a caveat, which she hadn’t learned until her college anatomy class. The neurons of the cerebral cortex lasted from birth to death, and it was that remaining fragment in her brain that would never yield. Jennifer lathered her torso with citrus body scrub, thinking of how many changes her body had been through: overweight teenager, malnourished college student, pregnant mother- to-be. She recalled Plath’s Lady Lazarus: These are my hands. My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. She looked down at her legs and was shocked at how long the hairs had grown. She ran her hands along her right calf, and was surprised that it felt smooth, as the hairs were too long to be prickly. She grabbed the can of shaving cream and lathered her right leg with a coat of white foam. She placed a new razor on her ankle and dragged it up to her knee, leaving a track of slick, shiny skin where the razor had removed the cream, hair and skin cells.

 

1.
FOR A WHILE, I forgot that I was a sleepwalker. I went a few years without an episode, to the point that my wife only learned about it after we’d been married. It was unavoidable: one night she found me forcefully removing every item of clothing from my dresser.

“I tried to talk to you, but you wouldn’t answer,” she said. She wanted to know if she should wake me up next time, by patting my shoulder or slapping me or something.

“No, don’t ever do that. They say that’s the worst thing.”
“Then what should I do?”
I didn’t know. “Keep your distance, I guess. Stop me if I try to jump out the window.”
I’ve since read up on it. When I say “read” what I really mean is “I’ve read the first three results for ‘sleepwalking’ on Google.” It turns out you should wake the person.

They also say the causes of sleepwalking are sleep deprivation, stress, and alcohol. They don’t seem to understand that I drink alcohol because I am sleep deprived and stressed. Something tells me they’d find a problem with that.

 

2.
“When someone sleepwalks, they might quietly walk around their room. Or they might run or attempt to ‘escape.’”
— WebMD’s page for “Sleepwalking Disorders: Sleepwalking Basics” (Google result #3)

 

3.
I also talk in my sleep, usually just garbled nonsense. Sometimes a few words are strung together in the cadence of a sentence. One night my wife heard me taking stock of my unconscious in the voice of the Count from Sesame Street: “One, two, three…four Al Gores!”

 

4.
I don’t ever remember sleepwalking, though sometimes I regain consciousness in the middle of an episode. The first time was jarring. It wasn’t like waking up; it wasn’t gradual in the least bit. I suddenly recognized that the task at hand, one that I had been working at diligently, hadn’t been my decision.

It was inspecting door knobs in the hallway of a hotel. This was my wedding night. I was naked.

 

5.
I’ve spent the past year working for a travel agency. Most people don’t realize travel agencies still exist. I didn’t until I responded to a Craigslist post seeking an “Interpersonal Communication Specialist — MAKE $$$ QUICK!” In the phone interview, the man on the other end asked how often I traveled.

“Rarely,” I said. “I try to make it to my dad’s a few times a year, but next to that I mostly stay local.”

“Where does your dad live?” “Across town,” I said.

 

6.
“Employment of travel agents is projected to decline 12 percent from 2016 to 2026. The ability of travelers to use the Internet to research vacations and book their own trips is expected to continue to suppress demand for travel agents.” — The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Outlook Handbook

 

7.
We mostly cater to older women who have recently lost their husbands.

A lot of them tell me that they don’t really want to go on vacation, but that their children assured them that they’d “earned it.”

There are a few widowed men, and some recently retired couples. The common denominator seems to be age. And wealth, I guess. And an inability to use the internet. Maybe that one was obvious.

 

8.
My boss’s name is Michael Dagostino, but he asks everyone to call him “Papa Mike.” If you call him Mr. Dagostino, he tells you Mr. Dagostino is his father’s name. If you call him Michael, he tells you to step into his office and asks why you’re being so resistant to the organic culture of the office.

 

9.
Mr. Dagostino says he’s a “former hippie.” His favorite band is the Grateful Dead. He was at Woodstock and said it was a “perfect utopia,” which is redundant. He lived in San Francisco in the 70s, but he always makes quotation marks with his fingers when he says “lived.”

“I didn’t have my own place. No one did in those days.” If he couldn’t find a place to crash, he’d sleep in the park. Apparently they used to give out free food there — the “hippies,” I mean.

In 1976 he was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover cop. He beat the charge, mostly because “he knew a few people.” After that, he moved back east and opened the travel agency in 1980 as a way to “go legit.”

“I was on the wrong path. But what I’ve learned in my life is that we all have a path towards our true selves, and the cosmos has a way of kicking in your door and saying, ‘let me help you with that.’ My dream was never to own a travel agency, but now I can’t imagine anything else. Sometimes it seems like someone else’s story that was told to me. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t really, but I nodded yes. This was during my interview, and I really wanted the job.

 

10.
The proper term for sleepwalking is “somnambulism.”

“You need to do something about your sleepwalking,” my wife said. I wanted to correct her, but I knew I’d mispronounce it.

 

11.
She told me I should keep track of my dreams in a journal. She thought that certain dreams might lead to sleepwalking. “If you write them down, you might find a pattern,” she said.

She even bought me a tiny spiral-bound notebook for the bed stand. I’m supposed to write down whatever I can remember, as soon as I wake up. The first and only entry reads, “From what I can remember, I was lying down.”

 

12.
A psychiatrist told me that there’s no consensus in the field on the function of dreams. Carl Jung believed dreams were a representation of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud believed dreams displayed unconscious desires. But some psychiatrists believe dreams serve no purpose at all.

“They call it brain urine,” he said.

 

13.
Personally, I don’t think it has anything to do with dreams. I think people get sleepwalking confused with night terrors, which is probably why when I mention that I’m a sleepwalker people tend to look at me with concerned eyes. Pity, I guess.

I don’t know much about night terrors, but I’ve read that they’re caused by emotional distress that goes into overdrive during sleep. A waking nightmare. Sleepwalking is the opposite — it’s a physical body steered by a vacant mind.

 

14.
“My goal with this place has always been to give back to the larger community,” Mr. Dagostino told me on my first day at the travel agency.

At the time I thought he was talking about our town. He’s pointed out since then that he meant the “hippie” community, but I don’t think anyone really uses that word anymore. Well, maybe they do, but I haven’t heard it lately.

 

15.
All of my co-workers have pasts similar to Mr. Dagostino’s. Jade followed Phish for a few summers in the 90s, selling nitrous balloons out of the back of her pick-up. Ethan hopped trains across the country for six years, chasing warm weather and scavenging meals from the dumpsters of vegetarian restaurants. Desiree studied holistic healing and witchcraft with a wiccan earth-goddess in Asheville. She still has the certificate pinned to the wall behind her computer.

“I think you’d be an excellent addition to our team,” Mr. Dagostino said at the end of our interview. “You might balance us all out a bit.”

 

16.
Complaints about co-workers’ behavior I’ve emailed to Mr. Dagostino:

• “Jade’s kombucha mother is on the top shelf of the snack pantry and looksfar too heavy to be placed that high. I politely asked Jade to move the jar. She said she would, but it is still there. That was one week ago to the day. The shelf appears to be buckling.”

• “Desiree’s ‘employee teach-in’ on Friday included non-staff members who appeared to be paying Desiree for presiding over the ‘healing ceremony.’ While I do not object to Desiree’s religious beliefs, I believe this is both an improper use of the office and an insurance hazard, especially considering the amount of sage that was burned.”
• “Yesterday I found Ethan rooting around the refrigerator and noticed that he was removing all of the meat products. This included removing the turkey from my turkey and swiss sandwich. When I confronted Ethan, he suggested that his actions were an animal rights protest and he was thereby protected by the First Amendment. ‘Maybe you’d know that if you actually read it rather than blindly accepting what they taught you,’ he told me. I have since re-read the First Amendment and respectfully disagree with his interpretation.”
• “The jar for Jade’s kombucha shattered and brought the entire pantry down with it. As you know, Jade took a mental health day today. As such, I spent my lunch cleaning up shards of glass and globs of her mother. On a related note, we are out of snacks.”

 

Mr. Dagostino’s responses always begin the same way: “I want to thank you for your email.”

 

18.
“Clearly this kind of behavior is unacceptable and I’m sorry you had to go through that, especially considering the numerous conflicts you’ve been dealing with in the past few weeks. I’ve talked to Jade and we’re working on a plan to correct her tendency towards these sorts of actions.

Whenever I’m frustrated with someone, I ask how I might be able to use that situation as a moment of personal growth. How might this be an opportunity?

Throughout my life, I’ve come to the realization that nothing is ‘accidental’ or ‘mistaken.’ The cosmos try and point us towards our destiny, but we must be willing to accept that direction and use it to our advantage.

So ask yourself: what are the cosmos trying to tell me in this moment? I hope this helps.

Best,
Papa Mike”

 

19.
Several times I have drafted a response that reads: “Mr. Dagostino: This does not help.” I never press send.

 

20.
At the office’s annual winter solstice party, Mr. Dagostino stood on a chair and asked for silence.
“I feel immense gratitude every day that I’m able to work with you all. Your generosity, your openness, and your commitment keep me energized and enlivened,” he said, oscillating his head as he spoke, making eye contact with each of us. “More than anything, I feel so privileged to be a part of an organization that values individuality, creativity, and free-thinking. I’m humbled to be in your presence, and I thank you immensely for your gifts.”

With that, he poured us all paper cups of dandelion wine. I saw Desiree drop a pill in hers. When she caught my eyes, she sneered. “You going to send an email?”

 

21.
“Do you see yourself as a Travel Agent? Is this who you are?” my dad asked.

“I’m not defined by my job,” I said.

“When you meet someone at a party, what’s the first question they ask?”

“My name.”

“After that.”

I didn’t respond. He knew he was right, and so did I, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a party.

“It’s a good job,” I said. “Stable.” He turned back to the TV and let out a deep breath, the way he always did when he knew I was lying.

 

22.
My dad used to sleepwalk when he was a kid. He lived in the Bronx, in a two bedroom apartment on the 30th floor of a towering brick building. He shared a bed with two of his brothers, but he never seemed to wake them. “Heavy sleepers,” he said.

When my grandpa’d hear my dad stirring around the apartment, tripping over chairs and running into end tables, he’d follow him, fascinated. He’d open doors and press the button for the elevator. Once they made it all the way to the street before my grandpa decided they’d gone too far. He threw my dad over his shoulder like a burlap sack and walked him up the 30 flights of stairs, back to bed.

Maybe it’s genetic. My dad says he doesn’t do it anymore, sleepwalking. But my mom isn’t around, so how would he know?

 

23.
One morning a typed note was waiting on my desk. It read, “No One Wants You Here.” I grabbed it between my thumb and index finger, worried about compromising the culprit’s prints, and delivered it to Mr. Dagostino. I spent the rest of the morning making cold calls to senior centers, trying to distract myself.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Dagostino called me into his office and told me that Jade, Ethan, and Desiree had all denied writing it.

“Then who did?” I asked.
“Now, see, that’s what I’m wondering,” he said.

 

24.
That Friday, Mr. Dagostino emailed the office to explain that we’d be spending Saturday and Sunday at a retreat center outside of town. “An environment that’s not authentically open is a flawed environment,” he wrote. “I apologize for the short notice, but I think we can all agree that this is imperative.”

“I had plans with my dad this weekend,” I wrote him.

Rather than respond to me, he replied-all to his original email. “As I mentioned, we are working on being OPEN. That includes your calendars. Anyone who fails to attend will be terminated,” he wrote.

He signed it with one word: “Peace.”

 

25.
“You need to quit,” my wife said.

“But I love my clients,” I said. I think it sounded convincing.

“We could make it work.” She mentioned picking up some overtime, texted a friend who had heard of an opening at a call center outside of town. “We have options,” she said.

I tried to imagine starting a new job, all of the training and paperwork and general discomfort that I had already worked through years ago. Ice-breakers, name tags, handshakes, sexual assault presentations, “learning lunches.”

“It just feels like I’m too old to start over,” I said.

She stared at me for a few seconds, perplexed. “You’re 27,” she said.

 

26.
Mr. Dagostino began the retreat by leading us through an hour of restorative yoga, followed by a silent breakfast. “We need reflection before action,” he said. “We need processing, not prosecuting.”

I tried to use his mindfulness techniques while I ate my fruit salad, but I lost my appetite at the amplified sound of my own chewing.

 

27.
The day dragged. There was scream therapy, transcendental meditation, a video on harnessing positive vibrations. I learned that I am a Capricorn, and that the stars are to blame for my negative actions. “Unless you choose to ignore that knowledge,” Jade told me. “Then that’s on you.”

At dinner, Mr. Dagostino said that he believed we were making progress, but that we needed to cut to the heart. “If we’re going to improve the culture, then we first need to interrogate it.” He suggested we name what we believed were the core problems of the office. Everyone turned to me.

“I’m drawing a blank,” I said. “I love working here.”

 

28.
“We’re not being honest with others, which means we’re not being honest with ourselves,” Mr. Dagostino said. “I want everyone to imagine that this is an exorcism. We need to deal with these negative feelings. We need to hear them out so that we can expel them from our systems.”

That seemed to motivate my colleagues. Desiree said that I was prejudiced against her beliefs. Ethan called me a conniving neo-liberal pencil-dick. Jade told me my insecurities around her were based on a strong sexual attraction. Even Mr. Dagostino chimed in: “You seem to relish the act of suffocating others’ positive auras.” He said it as though he were a clinician offering helpful advice. “It saddens me.”

 

29.
Mr. Dagostino ended the day with guided breathing, telling us that we’d need a good night’s rest for the following day’s exhaustive final spiritual cleansing.

If I was lucky, I thought, my sleepwalking might yield some inadvertent revenge — stomping on Jade’s dreadlocks, kicking Ethan in the forehead, spitting in Desiree’s hemp satchel. I was surprised to find how comforting I found the scenarios, and re-played them, over and over, until the images began to blend together and the room faded.

 

30.
There was the blinding glare of headlights and the shot of adrenaline in my veins. I turned away, unable to see.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” a voice said. He sounded terrified.

I turned back to the light, my hand in front of my eyes, and asked him to lower the high beams.
He clicked them off in silence and my eyes began to adjust to the night, allowing me to finally take stock of the surroundings. A dead end sign. A few houses with driveways under the cover of tree branches, obscuring the sky for as far as I could see.

He was younger, probably still in high school, his face still scarred from acne. “Sorry about the lights. But when I saw you wandering…” He was uneasy, standing behind his driver’s side door like a cop in a TV shootout.

“How long have we been talking?”

“I’ve been calling to you for about three minutes or so. Are you drunk? High?” I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or jealous.

“Just walking.”

He closed his door and walked towards me, relieved by my lie. “Just wanted to make sure you were safe is all.” He took out a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and held it out, raising his eyebrows as if to say want one?
It was a brand new pack, maybe his first. “Thanks,” I said, even though I didn’t want one, even though I had never smoked before, not even at his age.

“I live at the top of the hill,” he said, lighting his cigarette. “It’s mostly old people down this end. And since it’s a dead end we don’t often get people driving down here at night. So, if I see someone walking around here, I usually assume the worst.”

He held out the lighter for me, and I leaned into the flame, the cigarette between my lips. I took a puff and then worried that maybe that wasn’t what grown men did, the lean-in. I had definitely seen it somewhere, but I thought that maybe it was in a movie about teenagers in the 60s.

I nodded and tried to pretend I was enjoying the smoke. “I was at a work event, not far from here,” I said, though I still didn’t know where I was.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a travel agent.”

He squinted, as if studying my face might provide an explanation. I was barefoot, wearing nothing except for my briefs and an undershirt with yellowed pit stains, but I still felt the need to defend myself. “It’s a good job. Benefits, stable income. It’s an honest living.”
He smiled, pitying me, this sad psychotic mess, a grown man who ran around at night in his underwear, who talked about jobs that didn’t exist and tried to make friends with teenagers.

I took another drag and coughed. He tossed his half-finished cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. I threw mine down, too, trying to match his bravado, then realized I couldn’t extinguish it with my bare foot. I kicked some dirt on it and hoped that was enough.

 

31.
The kid drove off and I started walking, hoping I’d eventually find something I recognized. I imagined Mr. Dagostino and the others waking to find me gone and wondered if they’d be concerned. Even though I didn’t know where I was going, I knew I wasn’t headed back to them. I thought I might be doing them a favor, one less obstacle to their utopia. Maybe I was doing myself one, too.

If all went as planned, I figured I’d get home just before daylight. I’d lift the covers of our bed, and my wife would roll around a few times, mumbling something I couldn’t understand, her eyes shut tight.

“Every thing’s fine,” I’d say, laying down beside her. “We’re finally going to get some sleep.” I didn’t know that she’d be listening. I didn’t know that it mattered.

 

It was 3 a.m. on the second day of March and the moon was waxing, gibbous, and full of rainbow. I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt, tripping on my feet but also on whatever madman’s panacea, whatever twisted elixir was coursing through my veins at the time. I can’t remember what it was called. I can’t remember who gave it to me. Might’ve been Dan–Dan’s always good for the bad, bad shit. The stuff that makes your eyes spin like kaleidoscopic whirlpools and gets the dandelions talking. I think Dan gave it to me. Did I see Dan that day? No, Dan’s been in the slammer for months. Or was he the one that OD’d back in December? That seemed more like Dan.

I don’t remember who gave me the stuff but I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt.

No, we don’t call it that even though the french school–a big blue monstrosity made almost completely from corrugated metal sheets like some kind of aluminum ocean–sits right behind the Shopper’s Drug Mart on that street. No, we don’t speak French here.

Let me start over.

It was 2 a.m. on the second day of May and the moon was waning, crescent, and winking at me. I was walking down Esquimalt Road, tripping on my feet but also on whatever madman’s panacea, whatever twisted elixir was coursing through my veins at the time. I was wearing my denim jacket and my tattered pair of blue high-tops, the one’s I was wearing when I kicked Johnny Z’s teeth in last summer at his sister’s birthday party after he caught the two of us fucking in the toolshed.

I guess you could say I was nailing her.

I guess you could say I was hammering her.

I guess you could say I was drilling her.

I guess you could say–

But enough about her. She doesn’t fucking matter.

It was 4 a.m. on the second day of Saturnalia and the moon was new and ignoring me like Donna Z three days after her brother caught us fucking in the toolshed at her birthday party. I was walking down the…the…

Where was I?

I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt, tripping on my feet and the sweet-and-sour sauce that was mingling with my blood. I was leaving from someplace and most likely going someplace but instead, I ended up at that Shopper’s Drug Mart, the one that was open until midnight.

I guess it was before midnight then. Shit.

Okay, get it together. Deep breaths. Clear your head and just tell it. Tell the story.

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Sherman Larson has eighty-seven bear traps buried in his front yard. Every few weeks he changes them–different patterns for different moods.

Pensive: Neat rows exactly a foot apart. Carefully measured to promote tranquility. Balanced. Zen.

Anxious: Haphazard clumps. Only some are set to activate, their mouths held open in silent screams. The rest keep their mouths shut.

Grieved: As close to porch as possible, layered almost one on top of the other. Protection against the cancer that reduced the woman he both feared and worshiped into a hollow husk.
This week: Zen.

Sherman rises from his twin bed and stretches. His tan arms, brushed with almost imperceivably light red hairs, are thin, but toned. He keeps in shape by cutting firewood and the thirty-seven pushups he does every afternoon after lunch. It is important to stay healthy.

He takes a deep breath, filling and filling, until the pressure hurts. He allows it to linger. This pushes the black Bugs away from his lungs. As long as he’s lived, so have they. Crawling inside of his chest, wiggling through his liver, in and out of the thick valves in his heart. He tried to dig them out, once. On that night, they burrowed deep into his core, past his organs, into his blood, infusing themselves in every platelet and cell. His only achievement was a bright red stain on the floor and a trip to the hospital. The doctors kept him under observation for seventy-two hours. They did not understand that he dug the carving knife into his chest, not to die, but to allow himself to keep living.

Bedroom: Fifteen steps from bed to doorway. Sherman avoids the landmine concealed under the grey-green carpet. A faded red flannel shirt, four white socks, and pair of light blue boxers cover the lump the mine creates. They are the only pieces of clothing on the floor. They have never been worn.

Hallway: Eight steps to the bathroom. He walks along the left side, one foot carefully placed in front of the other. This avoids the small pressure plates laid into the floorboards. If pressed, an electrical current triggers the arrows hidden in family photos lining the right wall. The photos are all share the same dark brown wooden frame. They are not of his family.

He does not remember when he started booby-trapping the inner rooms of his house. He just knows it is needed. Just as the Bugs have always been there, so has the feeling of looming, imposing dread. That something was watching him, waiting for him to let down his guard. Waiting to strike. The bear traps outside, the landmines indoors, all were necessary to keep it at bay.

Bathroom: Two steps into the doorway. He ignores the light switch on the wall. It is rewired to create an electric shock if touched. Sherman instead flicks the small metal lever on the side of the vanity mirror. Stepping out of his white Jockeys, he turns the hot water nozzle in the tub, not bothering with the cold. He steps into the stream, closing the dark green curtain around him.

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/