by Lila Savage
Of course, Jill was well beyond caring; she didn’t even recognize herself in a mirror, and would have long, nonsensical conversations with her reflection. Bryn treated the haircut like a practical matter, like making a meal or vacuuming, something to check off his list. Ella didn’t like for Jill to look crazy, or dirty, or like her clothes were for a larger woman, because it compounded her vulnerability, or at least highlighted it, made it visible to strangers on the rare occasions when they all went into public. It wasn’t that Jill’s decline was shameful; it just felt somehow private—not like a secret but like something sensitive to shield from curious eyes. Ella wanted Jill’s every encounter to be respectful, and the choppy, almost waxy hair combined with her shuffling and mumbling didn’t invite respect so much as prompt discomfort, avoidance, averted gazes, crossing the street.
Ella was aware of Bryn’s body, so near her own, so different from the four- or five-foot distance they both usually seemed to need to feel comfortable. She had thought she’d known his face and frame as well as she knew the rooms of his house: the brown of his eyes, so dark they were almost black, and the jut of his cheekbones, and the set of his shoulders, all of him observed day after day like the ever-present bananas dangling from their hook over the buffet, and the wedding invitation that was always on the fridge door, and the faint smell of the compost bucket in the sunny mudroom off the kitchen. Now, so near their hands occasionally brushed, it felt rather like she were opening the buffet drawers to find details to his physicality that were normally obscured by distance, lines, and stubble. Even his hands, on which her eyes had rested thousands of times as they’d talked, seemed new to her, rougher, larger.
She took in his brown wrists, shirtsleeves pushed up over his forearms, such a contrast with Jill’s unpredictable hands and dirty nails; the small gleaming scissors; the tendrils of hair floating down to the grass. It was so strange to actually feel the heat coming off his body; this somehow made him feel more real than he ever had before, like seeing a television personality in the flesh. She noticed his hair needed cutting, too; it was falling over the collar of his shirt, and she briefly considered offering to trim it as they released Jill from her chair. Would that be overly familiar? Immediately she knew it would be; she reared back from the thought, a little disconcerted, and followed Jill inside, leaving Bryn shaking out the hair-covered towel Jill had worn around her neck.
They had tea, as usual. Ella was making her way back from the bathroom when she was surprised by the sound of the doorbell, and then a little panicked to hear Alix’s voice carrying down the hall: “Hi, I’m here to pick up Ella if you’re through with her.” Ella rounded the corner into the living room and found Bryn standing next to Alix, who had known better than to introduce herself, but Ella felt she couldn’t let this get any further out of hand.
“Finally you meet!” she said, with forced cheer. “Bryn, this is my partner, Alix.” He looked very surprised, then quickly regained his composure.
“So nice to meet you,” he said, shaking Alix’s hand. Ella’s embarrassment about the situation mingled with pride: Alix was so very beautiful, standing there with her mass of golden hair, her enormous brown eyes, her endlessly long, slender legs. She felt bad that it mattered to her how Alix looked, how men envied Ella, the surprise that registered when people saw they were a couple, as rare as unicorns, the mythical feminine lesbians, hands entwined.
She tried to get a read on Bryn’s response—was he hurt that she hadn’t told him before she’d been forced to? It seemed unavoidably so, but likely he didn’t want to seem as though he were justifying her hesitation by acting less than delighted. They left quickly, with shy smiles. When they got to the car, Alix said, “Sorry about that!” And then, “You didn’t mention he’s so handsome.”
· 17 ·
Ella and Alix lay beside each other in bed, looking up at the lazy rotations of the ceiling fan.
“Well, he knows now,” Ella said.
“It can’t really matter, can it?” Alix asked, taking Ella’s hand and squeezing it too tightly, as she often did.
“Probably not to Bryn, at least not beyond the weirdness of me not telling him sooner,” Ella said.
“Do you feel relieved?”
Ella paused to consider this. She did feel relieved in one sense, certainly, albeit with an edge of something vaguely unpleasant.
“Yes, though I also feel, not embarrassed, but maybe a little ashamed? Not of being queer but of revealing myself as a sexual being or something. I don’t know—it’s confusing.”
“I never really understood all this sex-shame stuff,” Alix said, turning onto her side to look at Ella.
“That’s because your parents are atheists.”
“If you could do your childhood over, would you grow up without religion?”
“If I could do my childhood over, I’d change a lot of things.”
“You would still want to have gone to church?”
“It isn’t really about that, about church.” Whenever Ella tried to make sense of her religious upbringing, she quickly gave up; it was such a mixture of comforting familiarity and pain. And it felt so unchic—not the remnants of her faith but her confusion—in contrast to the seeming flexibility and simplicity of Alix’s moral worldview.
“What were the good parts about it?”
Ella paused before answering, and they could hear the footsteps of their upstairs neighbors overhead.
“I guess the importance of awe at something larger than oneself. Only it’s costly, because you recognize your own smallness. And it isn’t just awe—I can feel awe at a mountain or a thunderstorm. It’s awe at something both inside and outside of, of me,” Ella said. She lay quiet for a bit, considering this, and then she realized Alix’s hand was slack in her own. She’d fallen asleep.
Ella could remember exactly where she’d been, exactly what she was doing when God died. Not when Jesus died on the cross but when her heavens emptied—when she became, for the first time in her life, alone. It had been soon after graduating from college, an ordinary night without a precipitating event. She’d been lying in her grandparents’ guestroom and enjoying the summer moonlight and she’d thought, Well, what if it isn’t true? She’d thought it idly, with an almost cheeky curiosity. Only even just thinking it was like the time, as a child, she’d been curious about what would happen if she stuck something in the electric outlet. It almost threw her to the floor, the entire structure of her world collapsed on top of her, she remained dazed and shattered for hours. For a time she pretended nothing had changed, but that didn’t work. Eventually she thought, defiantly, Well, I can choose to believe in God if I want to. Nevertheless, choosing was a far cry from knowing, it was like choosing to believe you’d win the lottery, rather than knowing you would inherit a fortune, although with stakes inexpressibly higher. Not because she had hoped for an afterlife—heaven had never been a big selling point for Ella—but because of life itself. Everything was difficult and bleak enough even with the comforts of faith, with an infinitely loving and omnipotent force overseeing it all. The loss had been nearly unbearable. She had sought an example to follow in her grandfather, in the clear blue of his eyes, honest and free yet lonely, the terrifying beauty of godless heavens, only her internal experience differed from what she observed in him. She had felt more broken, unmendably broken, than free. She no longer had access to redemption.
Ella still grappled with that same sense of brokenness, of self-loathing. It seemed impossible that she might love herself. Then recently, just walking down the street, she’d thought—unbidden, almost a revelation—that she needn’t love herself, that the task could be God’s. She was beloved if only she could believe in the lover. For a moment she’d felt such relief, that the burden of loving herself had been lifted, she’d felt as though the impossible were no longer being asked of her. Her world, however, no longer fit tidily into that equation a
s it once had. Ella was untroubled by picking and choosing the bits of Scripture that suited her; it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that she’d come to see religion as a crutch for the weak, for she was admittedly weak and saw no crime in crutches anyway. It was that some part of her rebelled at the thought of reembracing, so unquestioningly, the sinfulness of her nature. There was poison in her, but was she poisonous? Was her essence poison? Was there nothing large in her that was her own? Sometimes the holy in her felt as real as her conception of God. She was practiced at self-scrutiny, she knew how to bow her head in repentance, yet while she was no stranger to willfulness and pride, she believed she knew nothing of the posture of majesty. Was there room for humility in the Divine? This question wasn’t abstract for Ella. This question had made her cry, walking down Hennepin Avenue.
More troubling than these questions of divinity and redemption was the devastating solitude. In the days after losing God she would lie alone in her bed at night with just her restless limbs, just her cascading thoughts. Before the dark hadn’t sat empty above her, and the corners of her room, though shadowed, had been warmed because they were inhabited. Perhaps a different sort of human would have known how to fill the darkness. Such a person would have heard the wind in the trees outside the windows and thought of all the years of growth, all the nights of breezes, all the trees in the world and the trees that stood before and were gone and the trees not yet planted. There would have been thoughts of all the people sleeping in the surrounding houses, and all the people who weren’t sleeping, and the world would have felt, maybe, full. Even though now she could still summon these perceptions, they couldn’t make her feel. What she’d used to feel had been more than a feeling; it had been a knowing that her consciousness never sat alone in a wooden chair in an empty room, never watched the light coming in through the window slant longer and longer, never watched the light fade, never listened as darkness fell in silence. It had been knowing that her consciousness never ceased to be in conversation. Could the never redeemed like Alix fathom what any of that meant? To trust, from one’s earliest knowledge, that one’s every thought was heard and considered? Censored, yes, but she’d never claimed it was without cost.
It had become easier to bear the solitude once she’d met Alix. The solitude had remained a part of her, inside, though companionship was such a comfort. She reached and stroked Alix’s slightly sweaty hair—Alix had night sweats nearly always, like a napping toddler—and she ran her index finger down Alix’s cheek. Alix surfaced just enough to squeeze the hand in which hers still rested but didn’t open her eyes. Ella reached inside herself, seeking the bit of loneliness that was ever-present. In this moment it felt indistinct, and Ella was grateful.
What was her spiritual practice now? She thought of Bryn and Jill, of the fullness that knowing them gave her. This wasn’t the job she’d planned on; she’d planned to join the creative class, she’d planned for upward mobility, she’d planned to wear lipstick to work and to earn a salary and to earn it with her mind, but there was something wrong with her, something wrong with her mind, only her hands could be directed, assigned mental tasks evaded her, slippery-sieved, and this was the job she had now. Still, wasn’t there beauty in the practice of love and the roll and sweep of it? This question carried her past her late-night wakefulness. She rolled over, pulling Alix’s arm around her waist, and they nestled together in the darkness.
· 18 ·
The bathroom was filthy, absolutely filthy. Everything seemed to smell like decay, like Jill’s unhealthy saliva and suspiciously unclean hands. No doubt there were traces of feces everywhere: on the ragged towels that were strewn throughout the rooms, on the dingy pillowcases that had worked their way off the limp pillows, on Jill’s pilled fleece hoodie with stains at the wrists and down the front, on the worn slippers she would slide off and on, again and again. The battered sofa. The throw blanket Bryn’s sister had crocheted that neither Bryn nor Jill had ever liked.
Now winter was emerging, the wind sliced, the yard no longer invited. They would be captives in that drafty house until spring, shuffling, raw-knuckled, from chilly room to chilly room, dragging tattered bathrobe ties behind them. Shoveling icy steps in early darkness. Hibernating in the bleak glow of the television set. Bryn and Jill had always been creatures of summer, of warm nights, cold drinks, the outdoors. It seemed to baffle Bryn to observe Ella’s enthusiasm for fall, and now winter. Ella loved the coziness, and even the chill. She loved the moodiness, the landscape bleached of color, the guilt-free hours spent curled up indoors with a book, a drawing, a new recipe. Before too long it would be Christmas.
Bryn was out on the front porch, and Ella imagined him observing the dreary sky. Perhaps he was wondering if the season’s first snowfall would come tonight. Ella imagined he felt largely indifferent. The wind was terribly cold, and likely he hunched into himself, flicking ashes from his cigarette over the railing. Maybe he was picturing Ella and Jill inside, the baby gate latched to contain them in the den, Jill like a bumper car, bouncing from surface to surface, irritable, unfocused, Ella with her legs curled under herself, reading a novel, clutching a mug of tea. She imagined Bryn thinking of her, thinking that Ella could wrest tranquility where others couldn’t, and that Bryn suspected this was a learned art, something that came from years of tedious, distressing caregiving work. One took the rewards that were available, he might think, given the circumstances. Whatever made things bearable.
Ella counted the pages left in the essay she was reading, as though this, and not the time, indicated how soon her duties would end. It was like reading to stop being hungry. It never worked; the words sped or dragged by and the hunger remained, words were not food, but there was this illusion of industriousness, as though goals beyond enrichment or entertainment might be achieved.
Ella sighed and pinched the book shut, glanced at Jill through the doorway to the bathroom, where she was, once again, running the water in the sink, her hands frigidly cold and wet, splashing senselessly, patting her face, muttering. Ella had herself on a schedule so she wouldn’t go insane, turning the tap off over and over. She would turn it off only every five minutes, if Jill walked even a few steps away from the sink. Ella was the sort of person who turned the water off while she brushed her teeth, used a basin of soapy water to wash dishes. Mindful of waste, perhaps even a little compulsive, and it all felt so useless, watching Jill—what was the point? What happened when Ella wasn’t here? Did Bryn spend all of his hours turning the tap off? Did he wake regularly through the night to check the sink? It was maddening to consider. Ella wanted to shut the water to this sink off, by closing the valve itself, but Bryn’s weary apathy seeped into her, and Ella understood, because what would Jill do with the water off? Reach into the toilet, even drink from it. And closing the bathroom door would just mean that Jill couldn’t use the toilet. There were no tidy solutions.
Bryn came home a few hours later minus evidence of how he had spent his time away, his chapped hands dangling empty from the sleeves of his worn jacket. His nose was pink, and his eyes were dull under his shaggy hair. Ella pictured him walking around Lake of the Isles, a lonely figure in the cutting wind, but she didn’t ask where he’d actually been. Bryn held his hands over the clanking radiator to warm them, and Ella looked around guiltily, thinking she ought to have done some tidying up in his absence. Bryn never asked her to clean, and this made Ella very happy.
The fact that Bryn never expected her to clean made her feel guilty for not trying to make Bryn’s life easier. If she really cared, wouldn’t she scrub that bathroom? She asked herself this, again and again, but she couldn’t bring herself to do anything about it. Every time she sat to pee and noted the scent of stale urine, the grime and balls of dust and hair accumulated on the floor, she felt a surge of motivation. She would scour this bathroom; it would be an act of tenderness. And then she would return to the couch and a collection of short stories, or a volume of poems, or her
own journal. She would either pretend she would clean the bathroom later, or she would try to push the possibility from her mind, almost like pretending there was no bathroom, and the guilt would encroach on the edges of her pleasure in the book, sharpening it even as it became tainted.
Bryn looked gaunt; his flannel shirt was wrinkled, the collar twisted in the back, and Ella wanted to fix it, as though this might fix other things, a sort of domino effect of care. Avoiding joining Ella on the love seat, Bryn moved a pair of shoes Jill had stuffed with a magazine and a hairbrush from the easy chair to the floor and sat warily, as though he distrusted comfort. Ella got up, turned off the water, sat down. Moments later it was on again, and Ella tried not to wince. She checked to see if Bryn looked annoyed, but he was beyond noticing such things.
“Did you get a chance to look at that website I sent you?” he asked.
“I did,” she said, “but I found it a little overwhelming. I don’t really know how to narrow it down, since I don’t know your finances. I’m sorry.” Bryn had finally admitted that it was time to look at care facilities and had asked Ella to help with the research, telling her to keep track of the hours spent. She had agreed reluctantly, only because she couldn’t bear to refuse him; she was so bad at that kind of thing. There were reasons she wasn’t a social worker.
“Are you coming over tomorrow?” he asked.
“I can,” Ella said, “if you like.”
“No, that’s okay, I just couldn’t remember,” he said, and she felt a little relieved. It was silly, what would she do at home? Read but without getting paid an hourly rate to do so. But it was worth it, to enjoy reading without having to turn off the water every five minutes, without the nightmare that was changing Jill’s clothes, made worse by the newly frigid house. Ella was always cold there now. Then she looked at Bryn, and pictured him alone with Jill all the empty hours of the day, and heard herself saying, “I’ll come at three.”