by Lila Savage
· 6 ·
At last, Bryn was willing to leave Ella and Jill alone, and Ella felt that her probationary period was over and her real work was beginning. How difficult could it be? On that first day, Jill unlocked the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Ella managed to block the wooden gate that enclosed the yard before Jill got to the sidewalk, but what to do next? She tried to convince Jill that they should go back inside, only it was like trying to convince a cat of something; it was utterly wasted breath. She pleaded and reassured, she promised that Bryn would return to the house soon and expect to find them there; still Jill’s hands remained clamped on the gate, ready to release herself should Ella step aside. Ella tried to lightly grip Jill’s shoulder or hand, to guide her into the house, and Jill cringed away from her touch, yelling forcefully, and Ella feared that the neighbors would find something amiss. Likely this set of circumstances was just the sort of thing Bryn had feared might happen if he left them alone together too soon. They stood, almost immobilized in their standoff, for what felt like an hour, with Jill single-minded in her determination to escape.
Ella barely dared contemplate what might have happened if Jill had reached the gate first. Would Ella have been forced to chase her down and drag her inside? Was she strong enough to win a physical struggle? Would she have followed Jill down the city streets, interfering only if she tried to walk into traffic? How would Bryn have found them if that had happened? It was terrible to consider.
At last, Jill tried to make her way to the backyard, and Ella was able to corral her toward the steps, since Jill moved predictably away from her. When Ella finally closed the front door behind them, she wanted to blockade it with the sofa, but settled, instead, for sitting on a wooden chair directly in front of it, like a guard at her station. It was unfortunate that Jill knew how to unlock the door, that was true, but as it turned out, only for another month or two. Every skill was leaking from her.
Ella coaxed into being an idea of who Jill was, who she had been; she sculpted it inventively from the rough material she was given. This was necessary, because Ella felt the need to love Jill, and it was easier to love a person. She tried to imagine the life Jill and Bryn had shared before the accident (seldom referenced, never elaborated upon—Ella never heard exactly what had happened) that had changed their lives so abruptly. There was something about the way Bryn carried himself that suggested Jill had taken the lead, been the bold, perhaps slightly reckless one. It seemed surprising, given that Bryn had been the more physically beautiful of the two, though it also made a kind of sense. It wasn’t that Bryn was weak-willed; he just seemed somehow to Ella like the younger brother to a decisive female, like he had something to prove, but also that he was accustomed to looking up to a more self-assured and perhaps exasperated woman.
Bryn spoke of his life with Jill, especially the early years, before Nick was born, as if it had been endlessly exciting: living abroad on the cheap, drifting through the seventies, picking up carpentry work here and there. He spoke of old friends from that time as though they still mattered to his self-conception, as if the value of his life was still somehow affirmed by these events and people and discussions and private jokes remembered across the decades. He sounded like he had prided himself on being an outsider, but an outsider who belonged. This belonging had something to do with those old friends, although it was most meaningfully rooted in the we of him and Jill; her fiery head next to his had turned the wandering into adventures, had rendered the lack of money bohemian, had made the creep of the years feel well spent.
Ella’s life was yet short and uneventful, but still, she felt a distance between them that spoke more of temperament than age. She was not a we sort of person, despite her four years with Alix. Ella had never dreamed of being a we, she felt a distance between herself and other we’s, the girl who started every sentence with my boyfriend or my girlfriend, the people who followed their SOs around parties as if they would be lost without them. Even in this relationship, Ella thought of herself—and, when possible, referred to herself—in the singular. When she remembered road trips and parties and even the endless sociability of college, it wasn’t the connections she had built with other people that seemed significant but the revelations about herself that the circumstances had enabled.
Bryn didn’t just value belonging, he generously extended it to others. He was soon including Ella in the family’s jokes and sayings, enveloping her in a friendly we that included himself, Jill, Nick, and Nick’s wife, Lisa. He gave Ella crisp green beans from the garden, a bit of cherished sourdough starter, cuttings from houseplants she admired, first pick from the Goodwill donations. It didn’t feel patronizing, although it might have, like a domestic worker wearing the castoffs of her wealthy mistress. Ella felt more like a daughter, like she rightfully should outrank the strangers picking through the thrift store shelves. Her table, where the silver-plated napkin rings ended up, felt like an extension of the family table. She pictured Bryn and Nick sifting through the buffet drawers, thinning the feminine detritus that Jill would never again polish and position on the Thanksgiving table. “Maybe Ella would want these,” one might have said to the other, comforted, in a small way, by knowing where the unwanted objects might end up. But that was silly, Bryn was so unsentimental, he seemed to relish clearing the various surfaces of the long-occupied house. He was only being practical in his generosity.
Ella was accustomed to developing complicated relationships with the objects that belonged to her clients, especially those she worked long, regular hours with, over the course of months or years. Shopping for and cooking in two kitchens became confusing—was it Ella or Betty who was out of ketchup? For whom had she just bought a carton of eggs? And then she came to learn the exact shapes and locations of stains on the carpet, and every bit of Lladró or Belleek or Arabia in the china cabinet, the dusty dried flowers on the sideboard, the porcelain dish of gummy cough drops, the tattered wool runner tied to the high back of the rocking chair, the tea-bleed of rust on the bathtub enamel, like whiskers adorning the metal spout. Such familiarity became almost proprietary, as though seeing the objects every day gave her a kind of claim upon them, which wasn’t to say that she wanted them, not usually, but rather, in the same way that a roommate might begin to feel like a sibling, as though the proximity translated into a knowledge tinged with belonging.
Sitting at her station, Ella looked around the living room and let the relief of boredom settle over her. Jill was folding towels again, making messy squares and shaking them out, smoothing, patting, matching corners badly. She hissed through her teeth as she worked, the sound interspersed with almost purposeful mumbling. Ella felt like an uninvited guest: What must Jill make of her presence? This strange girl sitting quietly in her house, watching her go about her business? Was Jill even aware of her when they weren’t interacting? It was a peculiar kind of loneliness, sitting in that spare, bright room, almost silent but for the hissing, almost unoccupied but for the two of them. Ella looked at the potted lily; she thought about how there weren’t any lamps in the room, or throw blankets, toss pillows, bookshelves, drapes. The gleaming coffee table was bare, floating on its muted area rug, a rectangle framed by a rectangle. Was this how Bryn had spent his days before he hired Ella? The minute hand moved incrementally; the sunbeams shifted to warm a new patch of floor. Was this how Ella would now spend hers? It was better than cleaning Sharon’s portable commode, and yet a sadness seemed to infuse the sunbeam, seemed to reflect off the coffee table and the glossy leaves of the lily. But it wasn’t sadness for Jill, or for Bryn, who, after all, had accepted his caregiving role, one choice among the limited options he faced, yet with its own incentives. He was doing all he could for this woman he loved, and that was something, more than most people had.
Ella thought about her own choices and how she had ended up here. It didn’t feel like something she had chosen. Certainly it wasn’t the most she was capable of,
sitting in this wooden chair, blocking the front door; the problem was that every competing offer involved worse work for comparable pay. Reluctantly, her mind dipped into her decision to leave graduate school, like a harried parent poking down the back of a diaper to see if it was wet. Leaving hadn’t felt like a choice, not really. This was tired ground to reexamine, and to what end? She wasn’t going back. Suddenly, the years stretched out in front of her, the hand working its way around the clock, first this one, and then the next clock, in the next living room. Next year she would be thirty. This wasn’t the life she had imagined for herself.
Ella heard the key in the lock and scrambled to put her chair back before the door swung open. Bryn strode in smiling, a paper bag of groceries in each hand. “Stay for tea?” he asked over his shoulder as he walked into the kitchen.
· 7 ·
It was after sunset, and Ella and Alix were walking around Lake Harriet with ice cream cones in hand. It was a perfect July evening for lake walking, warm, with wind that kept the mosquitoes at bay, and, for a moment, Ella felt wonderfully content looking out across the water.
“I ran into Jenny today,” Ella said. “That girl I babysat when I was a teenager.”
“Yeah?” Alix said, only half paying attention. “How’s she?”
“Oh, fine,” Ella said. “She’s at, like, St. Thomas now, studying marketing or something. She asked me what I’m doing.”
“Yeah?” Alix said.
“I said I take care of elderly people, and she said, ‘Oh, now I feel bad.’ ”
No one had ever said explicitly that to Ella before, it felt like a frank version of what she was always hearing—“How wonderful. I could never do what you do.” Jenny had smiled at her, looking remarkably beautiful, sun-kissed with bare shoulders, wearing delicate sandals, holding only her car keys. And Ella had stood there, absurdly burdened with library books and groceries and all the objects deemed vital or potentially useful for her day. She had hauled it all to and from work on the bus, flat-footed in cheap men’s sandals, suitable for cleaning Sharon’s bathroom. If Jenny felt bad, Ella felt worse: old, tired, disappointed.
“Let’s move to Europe,” Alix said, as she sometimes did, only this cheerful bit of pretending failed to buoy Ella’s mood this time. She flopped onto the bench where Alix had just settled.
“I’ve decided to apply for that residency in Spain,” Alix added, a little bashfully. Ella was startled but didn’t want to be discouraging.
“I told you I think you should. Still, you know I can’t come. With what portfolio would I apply?” Ella dabbled in her creative pursuits, a drawing or painting sketched in but incomplete, a poem, an essay, and then six months of browsing interior design magazines, reading novels, hours of creative energy devoted to elaborate meals and rearranging everything in their apartment, whereas Alix tore into her art like a dog with a rawhide chew, nearly every day, no matter how long her shift at the coffee shop proved to be. Somehow it didn’t make Ella feel bad, Alix’s talent and the modest beginnings of recognition thereof. Alix’s talent inspired Ella. But Alix’s discipline she did covet for herself, deeply, even a little bitterly.
“You could come as an au pair,” Alix said, rising from the bench and stretching.
“I think I’d rather sit with Jill, thanks,” Ella said.
She’d considered it, now and again, but the rewards of an exotic location seemed scant compared to the effort caring for the children of wealthy parents would require. The more elder care Ella did, the less appealing child care became. The naps were so much shorter, the falls and diaper changes so much more frequent. Ella tended to favor the easy and safe, and increasingly, she feared, the familiar.
“Go without me,” she said. “I’ll find a roommate.”
“I’ll hear back in December,” Alix said. “Then we can talk about it.”
As they resumed walking, Ella pictured the nine months without Alix unhappily. She would miss her terribly to be certain, though it also seemed so tedious, to be left with the inconvenience of living with a roommate, of continuing the plodding pace of her life while hearing, from a distance, about the novelty of Alix’s. If it was hard not to get discouraged now, how much worse, she realized, it could become. Actually, Ella was being too optimistic. She was focusing on her inconvenience and her jealousy without fully considering the solitude. Ella was an independent person, but she acknowledged, in reluctant, wistful little moments of melancholy, that Alix was the only thing in her life that couldn’t be improved upon.
Their relationship had begun by exceeding her hopes for what friendship could bring, and then it had surpassed her erotic and romantic fantasies, for before Alix, Ella had generally preferred the wanting to the having, the ache of appetite over fumbling attempts at satiety. Similarly, Ella liked to imagine going on trips, even liked to plan them, but didn’t really like to go, because what if she ran out of money? What if she got lost? What if it was tiring and expensive and disappointing, and someone stole her wallet, and the weather was terrible, and she missed her train? So much better, safer, to imagine the trip as she might like for it to unfold, to feel the surge of excitement, of possibility. Though she also knew that fantasies of travel and seduction were masturbatory exercises in nostalgia, revisiting, time and again, the imaginary scaffolding that still stood, conveniently, in place: here are the cobbled streets of an ancient city, here are the pastries filled with marzipan, here is the surf breaking on the sand; or here he or she is, wanting me just as I have always longed to be wanted, settling that most exquisitely painful of questions, probing that most erotically charged of all tender, abused places: Do I deserve to be wanted? Am I good enough to love?
With Alix, all of these hollow fantasies seemed childish and boring, for even though they were tailored to what Ella believed she wanted, they never taught her anything new about what else there might be to want. Alix had kicked aside the dream set that had stood in place since adolescence and stirred up Ella’s romantic imagination with marvelous unpredictability. To Ella’s surprise, it was the imperfections that most improved upon the fantasies; it was the ways they were able to hurt each other, and comfort each other, that made it all real, made the stakes feel as though they mattered. The more Ella knew of Alix’s flaws, the more fiercely she loved her, the more she practically shook with the desire to protect her, to meet each need she was able to whether petty or profound. Whenever Alix bought the wrong thing, was tempted by some product’s flashy label or sly illusion of a “deal,” Ella would sigh crossly and watch Alix’s pride in her savvy purchase slip into wariness. Ella would feel a cutting guilt over having so easily deflated Alix’s minor happiness, but it was more painful still to picture Alix navigating the world with such dangerous innocence. Ella would think, with determination, I must always be here to take care of her. When she imagined Alix as a beautiful, gray-haired woman of seventy, she pictured the skin on her elbows roughish, puckered, loose, and the feminine vulnerability it would reveal made Ella want to kiss those future imaginary elbows worshipfully, made her want to cry with love and fear of death.
The things Ella had imagined she wanted in a long-term lover seemed so insignificant, so recycled compared to what Alix offered. She had thought that she wanted someone masculine of center because she had learned to eroticize power, but Alix was utterly a girl, not just in her lithe, curving body or her pretty clothes but in her self-deprecation, her naïveté, her easy, unembarrassed tears. Ella had thought she wanted someone possessing expansively cultivated expertise, that she might always learn from them. Alix was yet too young for any sort of expansive expertise, but her curiosity was exhilarating, exasperating, and, best of all, infectious. Ella had thought she wanted someone self-assured, so that their choosing of her would feel like a solid affirmation of her worth. Alix’s lack of self-assurance meant Ella was more interested in loving her life-affirmingly than in checking to see what receiving Alix’s lov
e proved about herself. It was like sitting down with a menu and looking for the ingredients you knew you liked—sweet red peppers, the bite of citrus, savory bacon—and then finding more pleasure in anise, tamarind, cardamom. The best part wasn’t the novelty of the flavors but the feeling that if this surprise can bring me such pleasure, what other delights might yet be found in unexpected pairings?
· 8 ·
Ella locked her bike to her usual street sign and rang the doorbell. When it failed to draw a response, she circled the house to investigate the backyard. As she peeked around the corner, she saw Bryn sitting in a burst of sun. His body appeared lazy with contentment, although fatigue was more probably what had caused his limbs to spread loosely, his head to tilt back. He was smoking a cigarette, something Ella had never seen him do. Normally Ella found smoking distasteful, but there was something so beautiful and unstudied in his pose, the sun on his upturned face, the tendril of smoke escaping sensually from his mouth. The strain was gone from his body, at least momentarily, and Ella luxuriated in the sight. He looked, for a moment, like a much younger man, and this illusion of youth wrung Ella’s heart. Turning his head he caught sight of her, and she tried to muster a friendly smile, hoping the expression on her face hadn’t been condescending in its sympathy and pleasure.
“Hello,” he called out cheerfully, and gestured to the empty chair that faced those he and Jill occupied. Ella dropped into the seat with exaggerated relief, her tote bag flung aside, her knees pulled to her chest. The weather was magnificent, they agreed, coasting between the oppressive heat of summer and the warning downtempo of fall. As they chatted, Ella felt with growing determination that it was past time she corrected the male pronouns he used to refer to Alix. She would say something today. Now. But her speeding pulse gave her pause, made her wincingly, blushingly, look away. It felt like that surge of dread that so often preceded announcing one’s gayness to the unsuspecting. That was exactly what this was, of course, for she wasn’t outing Alix as female but herself as female-partnered.