by Amina Cain
The woman to my left looked at me anxiously. I was not crying loudly; still, I imagine it was disturbing, or at least a great distraction.
When the concert ended and we stood to leave, I was surprised I hadn’t been kicked out. A few of the concertgoers smiled at me, especially the older ones. I was grateful for that. They pitied me, I suppose. Or they related to the moment. They had once felt it. Now the woman to my left wouldn’t look at me at all.
Walking home, I noticed in a bare tree a huge nest, and for some reason it made me feel alone. But I was not alone, other people were walking everywhere. And I had a husband I was going home to. I had a good friend.
AND THAT MEANT something, didn’t it? For indeed I was a part of people’s lives. They were a part of mine. In the middle of the winter, Dana’s family went for a week to visit relatives in the country, but Dana had to stay home for her performances. I stayed with her so she wouldn’t have to be alone and a bedroom was offered to me, but I only kept my clothes there. Every night, Dana and I talked until we fell asleep. Sometimes I drifted off while she was still talking, or else I was the one talking when I realized she was no longer awake. Then I would think for a while until I too was sleeping.
One night that week it began to snow and didn’t stop for two days. Three of Dana’s performances were canceled, so she practiced in the front room of the house. In a different room I did my stretching. Afterward we went out into the snow, into the quiet. It had become a blanket, covering the city, covering something in me. It seemed to affect Dana too. She let go a bit of her seriousness. She was softer, looser in that weather.
I imagined her eating meat. Instead, she ate a bit of snow.
When we came inside, we changed out of our damp clothes and dressed comfortably for the evening. We made popcorn, and read, and sat in front of the parlor windows.
After I had read several chapters of the book I’d brought with me, I set it on my lap. The snow was again falling fast.
“I’ve never really been drunk,” I said, “though once I shared half a drink with someone.”
“Never? Even I have been.”
“I want to be.”
Dana set her book on the sofa. She disappeared from the parlor, then came back with two glasses of something sweet and strong. She handed one of the glasses to me and bowed.
Soon enough, I was walking anywhere in the house I wanted, sitting in every room; sometimes Dana was with me. Only once did I run into the maid, and she was the embarrassed one, even though I was the trespasser. Some of the time Dana and I were dancing; I’m sure the maid saw us then. A waltz, which made me think of Antoinette, then something much more frenzied than a waltz. I was happy when I was frenzied, when I was moving in that way. We danced until we had exhausted ourselves. I fell asleep on the sofa with Dana by my side.
Later I found myself alone again, at the enormous dining table. I didn’t remember waking up. Against the far wall sat a huge cabinet filled with good china and copper candlesticks. How different houses were from each other, yet our cabinet was filled with the same things. But as much as it appeared static, the cabinet was a work in progress—what was in it would change. Some of the china would break. Perhaps some of it would be stolen. Later on we would all be dead, but the cabinet would remain, and the people who used it would be different, though likely related to the ones who had used it before.
“Here you are,” Dana said, beside me again. “It’s three in the morning. What are you thinking about?”
“Cabinets, dear Dana.”
We went upstairs and undressed for bed, Dana helping me to unbutton the back of my dress, after which I helped her. Then I fell asleep feeling a little sick.
I DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE, but one cannot stay away for too long, longer than is normal, even when one wishes to be abnormal, as my husband might say, and Dana’s family was coming back. When I arrived at home the next evening, dinner was waiting, as I knew it would be. My husband and I ate together, me with a headache, a real one this time. There was our cabinet, the lights from the candles flickering upon it. I saw that ours was less beautiful than the other.
As I cut my food into little pieces, my husband watched me closely. He himself barely seemed to eat. “You look younger tonight,” he said.
“We’re both like children.”
“I don’t think so. Why do you say that?”
“Do you feel like an adult, truly?”
“Of course.”
“Then I guess we are different in that way.” I ate like a pig and paid attention to what my headache felt like. I had two things to focus on, my food and my pain. “Last night I got drunk. You’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t feel well.”
My husband put down his spoon, not undramatically. “What was the occasion?”
“I wanted to.”
“I see. Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes. I liked that I was with Dana.”
“Dana is lucky, then.”
“No, I’m the lucky one.”
My husband picked up his spoon again; then to my great surprise, I imagine because he was jealous, he said that we could smoke hashish.
“When?” was the only thing I managed to say. How indelicate.
We sat in the parlor and he showed me how to smoke, how to hold the little pipe, and how much to take in. There was a whole other world and he knew this world. I felt suddenly I didn’t know him, yet I knew I never had. In another way, I was closer to him than I’d been before.
The hashish took away my headache and was pleasurable, more pleasurable than drinking. I thought I had known decadence, but this was something else entirely. I had not lain around in quite this way. I had not been this relaxed, and in my posture I was able to let down my guard. Everything my husband said I thought was funny. This was completely new.
We ate again and the food was delicious, the cider sweet and cold. Even the glass that held it, so clear.
Later, when the hashish had worn off, I went to our bedroom alone to lie down. From the bed, the bathroom door open, I could see the hook with my bathrobe hanging from it, my towel.
There are my things, I thought, with some astonishment and comfort. But what right did I have to a bathrobe like that, a towel? There are those who have neither, who must dry off with a pair of old pants. Even the quilt I was lying on was nicer than many of the clothes people got to wear, nicer than my own dresses had been, and something about that was obscene.
Relax, I told myself. You don’t have to think about this now. There is always tomorrow.
IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER I had gotten drunk and then high. I had spent time with my friend like this and then with my husband. If I’m honest, I enjoyed both. For a while such warmth was in my body, if not in the air, and I was able to carry these experiences with me.
In the parlor, my husband and I planned a trip to Brazil. I wanted to also go to a swamp.
“Why did you leave there?” I asked him.
“You’re not the only one who’s ever wanted to get away.”
He was right; I paid little attention to what his life had been like, what it was now. But I didn’t say that. I sat stiffly in my chair. Quite grotesque.
For Solange’s birthday I got her a new dress, a pair of shoes, stockings, a bracelet, a long winter coat. As usual, she seemed to think it was odd, not only that I had given her presents, but so many of them. Still, she left the house that morning wearing all of it. She was to have a week off and I was happy for her. While she was gone, I cooked dinner twice, simple meals my husband didn’t seem to care for, such as polenta or lentils, and the rest of the time we ate in restaurants.
Sometimes in the afternoons Dana came to visit after her rehearsals and we’d lie around in my study. We would talk about the ballet in which she was dancing. We would talk about my writing.
“Am I changing?” she asked dreamily.
“Yes, you’re changing. But the best parts of you are still here.”
She would kiss me on the cheek. She would pick up the boo
ks on my desk and look at them, the little objects I’d gathered on my walks. Then she was off. Her days were busy.
I, on the other hand, spent those days lost in my reading. I sat in front of the fire sometimes with my husband, and sometimes alone. I forgot where I was, so forceful were the settings and characters in those books I read, so fine and deep. Yet when I came to, it wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it pleased me very much.
THEN I BEGAN TO FEEL NERVOUS, and with that the pleasantness disappeared. I would wake up in the morning ready for something bad to happen. Again I felt that spring would never come, and the cold seemed dangerous. I thought of people freezing on the street. To have no home to go into would be horrible.
I felt the cold enter my writing, but I transformed it. Harsh, but not barren. I couldn’t write like that. Dana practiced her dancing so often I was afraid she would break both her legs, and though I told her of my fear, she continued.
“It’s the only thing I want to do,” she said.
Writing was not the only thing I wanted to do, but the important thing, I thought, was that I wanted to do it more than anything else. I would write for an entire day, then do nothing for days on end. I’d look at my notebook and feel bored. After some time, however, it was my life that was boring, and I missed writing, so I would begin to write again.
I went on like that, writing, not writing, carrying something anxious with me, waking up in the night or the morning with a sense of dread.
It was hard to eat; I didn’t want food. But I would force myself to eat it, even if it took me a long time. Solange would come to the table when I was eating lunch or breakfast, confused I was still there.
“Do you not like your lunch, madame?”
“I like it, but I don’t have an appetite right now.”
“Shall I clear it from the table?”
“No, I want to try.”
And so I would.
At dinner my husband was impatient. When things became difficult for me, my husband made them worse. Even reading offered no escape, the suffering of the characters was so great:
But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Alice, and then of Rufus, and I realized that Rufus had done exactly what I had said he would do: gotten possession of the woman without having to bother with her husband. Now, somehow, Alice would have to accept not only the loss of her husband, but her own enslavement. Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense.
TO BE ALIVE and sometimes grieving. To eat dinners and sit in restaurants. To sleep with my husband and then tell Solange which rooms need cleaning. To clean my own study and then read in it. To sit in a dark theater with a lit stage in front of me. To walk with Antoinette and then with Dana. Walking along the lake, the snow falling on my boots, my hat.
There are the waves that rise differently in the cold temperature, the animals lifting their heads. If I lift my head too? Dana lifting her head onstage.
The cold air sets high above the buildings and I go downstairs. To my husband, our life together.
If the fascination can move inside, is it not also within me? And at the same time outside with the leaves, which are blowing along the street? Outside with the stray dogs, who have all of their freedom but not enough comfort. We were born to die, but death can feel unreal if we’re comforted in the right ways. And if we cannot comfort ourselves, are there other tricks to keep it distant? Death will come no matter how comfortable we are; it doesn’t work in that way even if we feel it might. Today, for instance, I am far from it. But on other days: will it happen here, here, or here? I imagine it while crossing the street. On those days I am much too close.
The women working in the glue factory, I think of them often. Why was I saved from that life, from a mass of dead horses? We should memorialize the horses, remember them truthfully, and the women who have to spend their days in that way. Yet I too have used glue. I have benefited from a woman who never stops working, walking back from the factory in the morning and the night.
ONE DAY THAT SPRING WHEN I was crossing the street with a premonition or paranoia of being run over on it, I saw Antoinette. I thought she had disappeared forever into the city, yet here she was in front of me, holding her bags from the market, walking next to the park. How real she looked, yet it was completely unreal to see her.
“Antoinette,” I called, and when she turned around, I asked, “Are you alive?”
“What a question. Of course I am. I could ask you the same.”
I must have been as unreal to her indeed, appearing as if from thin air after having been gone for so long. I couldn’t help studying her, with her long brown hair braided becomingly around her head. She wore a dull dress, but it was gathered at the waist with a colorful sash, and that made it pleasing.
As I looked at her, she looked at me also.
“You’re different from when I last saw you,” she said.
“I married someone rich. Is that what you mean?”
She nodded. “It agrees with you.”
“I’m still trying to figure out myself whether it does or not.” I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. I was nearly ecstatic. “You’re different too. It’s been two years.”
“I suppose I am. Lots of things have happened.”
“Like what? Tell me.”
“I got married too, for one thing.”
“Antoinette, I’m so glad for you. Do you love him?”
“Endlessly. He’s a very kind man. And handsome.”
“And is he poor?”
“Yes, but I don’t care about that now. We’re happy.”
While we spoke, a group of young children stood near us, a little too close, I thought, for we had arrived at the corner before they had, but that is what children do. They had come from the zoo, and their teacher was giving them a lesson on the animals they’d just seen.
“The one-humped camel is from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa,” she said in a high voice.
“And the two-humped camel?” a child yelled out. Another child started crying.
“And you, do you love your husband?” Antoinette asked, in the midst of all this.
“I like him very much. And admire him greatly.”
“I see.”
Whether I loved my husband was of no interest; I wanted to change the subject. “Antoinette, I’m very sorry I never said goodbye. It was wrong of me not to tell you I was going away.” Though I sounded almost completely phony when I said this, it was not how I felt. The emotion was intensely true, but I wasn’t able to communicate it in the way I was experiencing it.
“Don’t be silly, you have nothing to apologize for.”
I took her hand. Next to us the child was crying still. “Nothing? What do you mean? What kind of friend does that?”
“I assume you did what you needed, that you had your reasons.” She glanced at the teacher, who had moved to comfort the child, then went on, “But it’s true I was hurt then. You were there with me at the museum, and then one day you were gone. At first I was worried, but one of the others said she saw you in a shop, looking quite fine.”
“Yes, I was okay.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, that’s what I mean. I’ve moved on. It’s nothing you should dwell on.”
“Will you visit me? Please? I want to know you again. Will you do it soon?” I tore a page out of my notebook and wrote down my address, and though I wasn’t sure she would actually come, she promised me she would.
The city streets alive with daily life, I walked through them marveling that finally I had seen her. It had taken so long, yet it happened. I hoped we could be friends again. Even seeing her for those few moments had brought a great warmth.
At home I lay in bed, thinking, and when my husband came to the bedroom, I told him what had happened, but I felt he took it lightly. “I thought she would be angry at me, and she admitted she had been hurt, but it seems she’s forgiven me already.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
My husband touched my face awkwardly for a moment, but he didn’t stay with me. Soon, I heard his footsteps moving down the hall. I heard Solange there too, the great soother.
Then I was alone and I didn’t like it. Maybe I should be alone always, I thought.
That night I read through dinner. I didn’t join my husband in front of the fire.
He ignored that absence, but he didn’t ignore me when he came to bed. “Are you unhappy again?” he asked me.
“I’m pensive, but I guess you wouldn’t understand something like that.”
“Wouldn’t I? What is it I’d understand, then?”
“Card games and work.”
“Is that all?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“You’re quite mean when you want to be.” He turned away toward the wall and I turned toward the other, the very picture of an unhappy couple, an unhappy marriage. We were not long for this world.
It was true, I was mean sometimes. But I didn’t have it in me to be kind to someone who saw me only in relation to property and propriety. To be domestic first and then to be a shallow vessel out and about in the world. Didn’t he understand that was not who I was? I wondered why he had chosen me. And why had I chosen him? Had it been for survival, for experience? Both of those things, I guess.
IT TOOK ANTOINETTE so long to visit I gave up on the idea, but one miraculously warm, rainy morning there she was at the front door. While she took off her muddy boots and arranged her hair in the hall mirror, I watched her closely. I was happy to see her.
“You’re soaking wet. I’ll find you some dry clothes.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You can’t sit down like that. You’ll be uncomfortable.”
“I won’t.”
But I insisted and went upstairs to get one of my favorite dresses. Beautiful, but not excessive. White and black, two colors I loved together. I knew she would look lovely in it. In the parlor, she sat in front of the windows with green trees behind her.