by Lila Savage
“Hey! No!” yelled a concerned man in a hard hat, his exclamations followed by a torrent of worried Spanish. Ella grabbed Jill’s wrist and yanked, and Jill bellowed and fought, teetering over the gully. The man with the hard hat approached them, frowning, and Ella addressed him with fraught urgency. “She’s impaired,” she said, perhaps the least comprehensible descriptor to offer a man who had thus far only addressed her in Spanish, but Ella didn’t want to insult him with dumbed-down English and, reflexively, didn’t want to insult Jill, who couldn’t understand anyway. “She doesn’t understand,” Ella clarified apologetically, still pulling on Jill’s flailing arm. It seemed he understood, and he helped Ella, berating her with an anger that seemed almost tender, in words she couldn’t interpret.
They went back to the pond after that, and then to the truck, which Jill still wouldn’t get in, and then circled the lot like boxers, sizing each other up. It was humiliating, having to physically intimidate a shrieking disabled woman in public, but Ella succeeded in her most pressing goal, which was to keep Jill away from the construction site. Had Bryn been inside for hours? It certainly felt like it when, at last, he emerged, pushing the bike along with a triumphant smile on his face. He squeezed Jill’s shoulder affectionately, and once the bike was loaded, they climbed into the truck’s cab. He was eager to tell Ella the ins and outs of his adventures in bike repair, how he had been on the verge of giving up when he’d found the only part in the entire shop that would work, and what he’d had to do to prep the bike, and to attach the pedal, but Ella only half listened, trying to decide what to say when he was through.
Normally she wouldn’t want to tell an employer about a near disaster on the job, but she never wanted to find herself in another situation like this one, and she felt it was important that he was made to understand the difference between how Jill interacted with him versus her. She couldn’t control her like he could, couldn’t guide her, could offer only so much bumbling, unwelcome protection. She kept it brief, tried not to sound like she was complaining.
He nodded in assent, and then went back to talking about the bike. He took pleasure in his success, it seemed—was that what this was about? Was he pleased to have demonstrated some competence? Was this a welcome departure from the drift of his days, where nothing, it seemed, had a tidy, practical solution? Was it an affirmation of his manhood? Or was Ella only looking for ways to feel better about accepting his help? When, at the end of the day, he handed over her crisp twenties as usual, she refused them with color creeping into her face. “You shouldn’t pay me for helping me,” she said, and, with a hardness to his face, he put the money back into his billfold.
She left with an uncertain feeling, like perhaps what she’d done wasn’t right, but equally sure she would have felt worse accepting the money. What had that hardness been, that coolness that had crept into his gaze? And why had she really refused the money? If she were honest, she had been thinking of Nick, picturing him embarrassing his dad over it, criticizing Ella for taking advantage: “First you pay her to read the paper, now you pay her for the privilege of fixing her bike? Jesus,” he would say, as if Bryn were a silly old man, helpless in facing the manipulative wiles of a sly young woman. She couldn’t bear it; she had been determined to prevent it. What had made it unbearable? The truth in it, of course, for it wasn’t Nick saying these things but Ella’s own head. Not the bit about Bryn being a silly old man but the sly part, the manipulative part, for why had the rightness of Bryn’s solution struck her? Because she was a girl who didn’t know how to fix bikes, because he was a man from a generation that saw this as reason enough to do it for her. It wasn’t the chivalry that had appealed to her but the convenience of it. At last, she’d sighed to herself, a bit of the patriarchy working in my favor, disregarding, for the moment, how inconvenient it was to live in a culture that discouraged mechanical aptitude in women.
Only that wasn’t Bryn’s fault. It wasn’t a tidy equation where this was the tax on his privilege; it didn’t work like that, especially since it could never come out even. It wasn’t fair to either of them to pretend it could, for Ella to simper and blush and accept it as her due, for Bryn to stretch manfully, roll up his sleeves, make things right. Was this also part of the subtext for Bryn? Part of his chilled response to her squinting, pedestrian weighing and totaling? Perhaps he’d thought they’d struck a different kind of bargain, one where her wide eyes had said, “Daddy, please?” to which he’d sighed with a muscular largesse that said, “Okay, sweetheart,” except that in the end, instead of the implicitly promised demure gratitude that would remind him he was a man, she’d put on her spectacles, taken out her checkbook, and queried, all business, “What do I owe you, sir?”
Maybe she had made him feel foolish, having offered to pay her for the favor he had done, as if he thought she was a princess, as if an opportunity to be of service was its own reward. Or, so much worse, maybe it had been an act of gratitude, this help he had offered her, and she had refused to be thanked, had refused the intimacy of owing him as, perhaps, he felt he owed her. He doesn’t owe me any thanks, she thought, a little unhappily. She didn’t do nearly enough for him, and the idea of his gratitude embarrassed her, that the meager, compensated tasks she performed might stir a disproportionate tide of feeling. It showed the vastness of his need, how it weighed impossibly against the heartbreaking modesty of what he expected from her, and again, unwillingly, she confronted the wince in his stride. The irony, of course, was that she had earned the refused wages today like no other; it had been the hardest shift she had ever worked with Jill. It felt petty to even consider that angle, Ella thought, a little wretchedly, as she pedaled home with remarkable ease.
· 12 ·
“I leave town Wednesday, want to get a drink tonight?” Liz asked.
“I’m getting a drink with Liz,” Ella yelled down the hall with her phone twisted away from her mouth.
“Have fun. Tell her hi.” Alix was in the depths of a project and couldn’t be bothered to glance up, even when reaching for a plate of food.
Liz had been Ella’s first girlfriend, when Ella was nineteen, a college freshman. Liz was now finishing up her PhD on the East Coast and they didn’t see each other often, but when they did, Ella felt like a version of herself that she didn’t otherwise seem to have access to. It was like spending a prolonged chunk of time with her mother; she reverted into some earlier incarnation.
As she walked through the door of the neighborhood bar, she saw Liz standing, talking to two strangers, holding a beer that was already half empty, wearing a baseball cap crammed over her short hair. Every bit of it was so very Liz that Ella paused and took a preemptive draft of nostalgia that blended affection with irritation, for Liz’s extroversion had always wearied Ella, and Ella could never even begin to keep pace with her drinking.
They embraced, and as Ella dragged her toward a booth, Liz wrapped up her conversation with the strangers in friendly shouts. Within fifteen minutes Ella’s irritation had bloomed into exasperation, and yet she decided to nurse that same first beer for the rest of their conversation because she was already having trouble not kissing Liz, not settling into those familiar arms. It was a good thing there was nowhere to dance here; Liz had always been a dangerously good dancer.
“How’s Alix?” Liz asked early on, and when Ella replied, “Great,” she saw that Liz was both disappointed they were still together and pleased Ella was still gay. She had always hated it when Ella dated men, and presumably it had little to do with wanting to date Ella herself, because the time when it had counted, that time when the breakup actually took, she had been the one who had ended it. Ella assumed the reason Liz would prefer her single now was so that they could fuck, and also, like others Ella had dated, because she would like to hold Ella in reserve, a backup plan for the long haul in case nothing more suitable came along.
They talked about Liz’s thesis, and all of her numero
us Plans, for Liz was a Visionary, she was practical, ambitious, and well girded with upper-middle-class money and self-assurance. Ella was confident Liz would end up famous, if only in lesbian-feminist circles, but were there more interesting circles to be famous in? Ella had her doubts. And then Liz wanted to know about Ella’s plans, and this made Ella feel suddenly tired and sad. Liz already knew all about why Ella had dropped out of graduate school, she both understood and didn’t—or, at least, if the reasons didn’t mean much to her, she recognized the gulf in class background and temperament that made an advanced degree a means to an end for her and for Ella, an intolerable experiment in upward mobility. Ella’s plans involved sitting with Jill for six hours the next day, posting an ad for a roommate for the time Alix would be in Spain, taking the Greyhound to visit her grandmother over the weekend. In contrast, Liz’s plans involved, among many other things, founding an international nonprofit. Liz nudged Ella to set her sights a little higher, with an impatience that felt like love. “We need you,” she said softly. “We need what you have to offer,” and Ella was overwhelmed with a desire to cry.
When they said good-bye under the streetlight, they hugged exactly as long as they could without kissing, soft cheek to soft cheek, breathing in the familiar scent of each other, remembering it clinging to pillows and borrowed T-shirts, remembering how it felt to be nineteen and ecstatically happy and frightened and alive. Still, it was with contentment rather than regret that Ella slipped into bed next to Alix’s sleeping form. She didn’t want to be with Liz, with her alarming gregariousness, prone to inviting three or four others to join them on what was to be a romantic getaway, with her eagerness for the next round when everyone else’s glass was still almost full, with her too-keen insights into Ella’s laziness and self-absorption, a tendency that somehow made both of them look and feel bad. And Ella wouldn’t want to be nineteen again, not truly. The only part she really missed was the feeling that it all lay ahead of her, that it all might come easier than she dared hope. That planning time of life had shuddered with fear and promise, when the things that Ella could and couldn’t do were yet to be determined and her quirks hadn’t yet calcified into neuroses.
The years between nineteen and twenty-nine had been full of disappointments. It had been a decade of ruling things out, of finding everything just as difficult as she’d feared and maybe even harder. She had thought that she’d at least have succeeded in leaving by now, that her world would feel fresh and expansive from the vantage point of an exotic metropolis, some cultural hub that was far elsewhere, but her apartment sat exactly six miles from the house she grew up in. She hoped rather than trusted that her thirties would be better; even if they weren’t, she was happier now, in her restless, pensive way, than she had ever been before. She loved Alix. It was too dark to see it now, but she loved the drawing Alix had made that hung across from their bed, and she smiled in its direction. She liked that she could ride her bike to work in the morning, flying past the sugar maples that would soon be transformed into crimson aureoles. She liked that Bryn would greet her with real gladness, and that these days, Jill would periodically sit with her in front of the picture window and watch the wind tug the changing leaves, and then, when Jill rose to resume her self-imposed pacing duties, Ella could comfortingly regard the empty house about them like a clock, with Jill the ticking second hand and Bryn, upon his return, a scheduled chime, signaling it was time for tea, and in between, all the notched minutes and hours were marked by Ella’s hands, holding book or charcoal or threaded needle and loose button, or scrawling dreamily over the pages of her journal while Jill folded towels or murmured to her baby doll. At such moments, she wasn’t even sure what more to want, for the stillness so utterly suited her.
· 13 ·
Ella stubbornly biked to work in the rain even though taking the bus might have shortened her exposure. She was going to get wet either way, she reasoned, so she might as well save her bus fare. When Bryn opened the door for her, she was embarrassed about how wet she was, her pale face dripping and gleaming as if the rain had washed all the color out, her leggings soaked from the tops of her rubber boots up to the point where the bottom snap of her raincoat cinched it shut. This was not how a professional began her workday. She had grown too comfortable.
“Um, maybe you want to let me in through the garage?” she asked, but Bryn just shrugged and went to find her a towel as she eased her feet out of the boots, followed by the socks, which stayed behind. Ella very much wanted to remove her wet leggings but, though her shirt was longer than some dresses she wore, she couldn’t imagine herself nonchalantly talking to Bryn without pants, her shirttails parting suggestively when she sat, her naked legs curled beneath her on the sofa. When he returned with the towel she dried her face, her hair, and then the length of her legs, as if the tight black fabric were actually her skin, and the practiced motions felt like a strange demonstration of what she did each day when she got out of the shower, only this time with clothes and an audience, although she noticed Bryn had politely averted his eyes.
Bryn’s serious expression matched the prediction she had formed when she’d first seen the sky through her bedroom window, for she now knew his moods and their triggers as well as she knew Alix’s. It didn’t occur to her that he might also know hers, in part because she felt like an observer inserted into his natural habitat, where she would always be the self-conscious outsider, and he would have the illusion that everything was the same with or without her presence, a lulling sense that he was in his private realm; also, because she tailored her moods for the demands of the job, smoothing her face and voice like a tablecloth, her irritation or tiredness or boredom showing only faintly, like residual fold lines crisscrossing the table’s length. Still, after so many months, could he read her? Did he care to try? She never thought to wonder, for she was simply the help; she trusted that her moods didn’t matter if she didn’t subject anyone else to their ripples and sighs.
Ella decided she would put her leggings in the dryer when he left, wrapping a blanket, if she could find one, around her legs as a barrier against the chill air, but Bryn just stood and looked out the picture window with an expression that suggested the sky had betrayed him. “Let’s have our tea early, maybe it’ll clear up,” he said, with more defeat than hope in his voice. Ella resigned herself to more time sitting wet, but the tea offered a cheering promise of warmth.
They settled into their usual places. Jill was coaxed with her usual plate of cookies, unaware that she wasn’t supposed to be hungry for them for several hours yet. Cautiously, Ella tried to soften Bryn’s frown, with partial success. They talked with what Ella considered a comforting normalcy, the easy informality of the everyday, the same chip in the plate as yesterday, but also the memory of yesterday’s meal. Ella liked the way, more and more often, they could replace a word or even a laugh with a glance, or not even a glance, an assumption that the other understood, so regularly reinforced there was no need to seek proof. Served on the everyday dishes was the everyday stuff of life; they didn’t venture into the abstract. Bryn told her about how he got the scar on his thumb—an occupational hazard of carpentry. They commiserated about relatives with regrettable political views and compared notes on their respective trips portaging in the Boundary Waters. Ella boasted about the fat northern she’d caught and eaten, and Bryn genially let her ride her victory. He wasn’t the sort of man who needed to one-up, unless he was provoked, usually by Nick, who seemed to believe that any show of strength from his father was designed to prove he was still a child. There was ample room for affection, even respect, in their rivalry, though the strain of Jill’s decline sometimes lured their less admirable traits to the surface.
Ella routinely made allowances for that, excusing minor lapses here and there, but somehow the cumulative effect didn’t register, maybe because she wanted to believe that she knew Bryn, at least to the extent that she was able, for his inner life and his outer se
emed sectioned off by temperament and also by long habit. She didn’t acknowledge that, overall, she wasn’t getting the best of him, or even the ordinary him, but the least favorable version, worse, even, than during the shocked, panicked aftermath of Jill’s accident, for adrenaline provides strength, but the extended grind of Jill’s descent left him powerless, diminished, with a thread of rage and an ache of grief. Why was this so hard for Ella to see? Because she still refused to examine his injury, as if it were skin torn off his shoulder in a raw patch the size of her hand, now bleeding, now crusting over unhealthily, now weeping fetid liquid. She believed if she looked at it squarely, her own shoulder would throb unbearably, that his suffering might be contagious, that there might not be any cure, that she would leave his house, return to her ordinary life, and suddenly find she could no longer lift the knowledge that Alix would one day die, that Ella would, too, her shoulder would strain against this once-manageable dread, mirroring the weeping of Bryn’s wound.
· 14 ·
Ella had just arrived and she and Bryn stood a few feet apart, with Jill busily brushing imaginary crumbs off the table into her hand. Bryn smiled, with a strange tightness to his face, and the usual spark in his eyes was glittery, almost hard.
“My mother died last night,” he said.
“I’m so sorry!” Ella said, and she moved as though to touch his arm, and then hesitated, hovering, her head tilted up to meet his eyes.