Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  “Of course, Anna,” I say.

  “I can’t believe you’re really here,” she says, and I know the sentiment is genuine. She looks for a cheese knife on the counter. She opens a drawer next to the sink, then closes the drawer, then opens it again and closes it once more, opens it, closes it. She breathes out in a long, steady breath. “Old habits.” She shrugs and opens the drawer one more time. She climbs the stairs in long strides.

  I pause for a beat, then I collect my shoes and leave. A ghost again set free.

  It’s not for me, this kind of moment. Something inside me can’t be contained by the shape of her house, her life. Something about me does not and will not fit. I feel myself protruding like a broken bone, breaking through the skin. Perhaps it’s a matter of qualifications, the way they both certify and prohibit, the way I find the fullness of my life constantly halved, constantly qualified. Could I someday be qualified for happiness, for steadiness?

  I wander the streets until crepuscular notions settle over the silent town, a single moonbeam gifting me my route back through the city.

  The last time I see Anna, I see her in a dream. The last time you see someone is never the last time you see them. The empty space a person leaves behind retains heat; a retina will preserve a face for later. In the dream, Anna wanders toward me through a park, wearing a cashmere jumpsuit. Her eyes are fixed on mine, but as she approaches, I notice they’re looking past, through, beyond. I notice it isn’t even Anna at all.

  “Anna?”

  “Anna to you too,” she says, and she continues walking.

  “Do you know that girl?” the Chairman of the Board asks. My necklace burns even in sleep, and he strolls beside me.

  “Not anymore,” I say, and we link arms and leap into a conference call, holding steady on the line.

  I hold the line for my favorite boyfriend, standing at a phone in the back of a bar on the other side of town. I remember the bar at home with longing, and the boyfriends, and their favorite drinks, none of which are on the menu here. I can’t even start a tab properly in their honor. My favorite boyfriend devotes himself exclusively to pumpkin spice this time of year, in his cocktails and his coffee and his attitude. A one-man harvest for the coming cold.

  “Hello?” he says. He sounds calm and distant.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “Me?” he asks. Then, “Oh, right. Hi, you.”

  “Everything OK?”

  “Better than OK,” he says. “Hold on,” and the phone spits out garbled sounds. “There. Now you’re on speaker.”

  “Hi, everyone!” I say, but I’m met with a bothered silence, mumbles and half phrases.

  “Should we invite her?” one voice whispers, perhaps my flaneur boyfriend, always concerning himself with the etiquette of breaking my heart.

  “It would be the classy thing to do,” my frugal boyfriend says, “if we can swing the cost.”

  “What’s the protocol at the venue?” my real estate boyfriend wonders aloud.

  “We haven’t even voted on a venue!” another voice complains.

  “Invite me where?” I ask. “Invite me to what?”

  “To the wedding!” my earnest boyfriend says.

  I hear the other boyfriends groan. “Way to spill the beans.” “Nice going, buddy.” “Just blurt it out, why don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We’re getting married,” the tallest boyfriend says.

  “All of you? All of you are getting married?”

  “Not at the same time, but in the same lifetime,” says the food systems analyst. “I’m baking the cake, obviously.”

  “Cakes, plural!” says my caffeinated boyfriend. “Ganache,” he swoons. “Coffee.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m getting married first,” says my agnostic boyfriend.

  “And I’m taking the two years after that,” says the insurance salesman. “End of life is much too risky.”

  “Middle age!” shouts my gym rat boyfriend to cheers and wahoos and hollers of approval.

  “I’ve been assigned the separation,” says my handy boyfriend. “I can fix anything, even a marriage.”

  “But who? But who are you marrying?”

  From the back of my apartment—because I know they’re standing, lounging, hanging, as usual, at my apartment, at the Hangout—from within the invading force of boyfriends, I can detect a kernel of static. No, laughter. Gentle hiccups. Champagne popping? A soft tap of fingernails on a table, a giggle, and the noises surrounding a smile.

  “Hi, superstar,” says Farren. Her voice hits me in the head and nearly knocks me down.

  “Farren?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. As we say at the agency, You cruise, you lose. By the way,” she adds, “I love your pet lizard!”

  “When you didn’t come back,” says my favorite boyfriend, “we asked Farren to find us a replacement.”

  “They didn’t have to look far. This is a placement I feel fit to cover!” Farren says, and I hear the boyfriends laugh with her. I laugh too, a reflex, because I feel utterly banished. I cough the laugh into my hand, disgusted. So devastated it might as well be a scream. The boyfriends are a swirling pool of sound, and I can no longer distinguish their voices.

  “We’re going to be husbands!” they cheer.

  “And maybe then we’ll be fathers!”

  “And I’m going to be you!” Farren says. Good old Farren, faring so very well for herself, fare thee well to me.

  They explain that after much deliberation, Farren voted my life coach boyfriend out of the apartment. He was having problems with the other boyfriends, real problems manifested in encounters, confrontations, microaggressions, the hijacking of date nights, and if you can’t get along with your housemates, you can’t get along with your life mate, or so the saying goes.

  “Farren is a superb mediator,” says my pacifist boyfriend. “Superb. I think I’m developing some real feelings for her. Really. I never expected to feel this way, and so soon.”

  “It’s just,” I stutter, “you couldn’t have waited a little longer?”

  “Waited for you?” the real estate boyfriend asks.

  “You couldn’t have waited just another little while?”

  “Oh, we waited,” says my tallest boyfriend. “We were a waiting room full of waiting for you.”

  “Do you even know how long you’ve been gone?” asks my insurance salesman, aggression teasing his voice.

  “We were loyal!” yells my earnest boyfriend, whom I’ve never heard get mad, not once, not ever. “We only spooned each other three times, four times maybe, tops.”

  I picture the boyfriends supine on the living room floor, then turning on their sides in a long chain of spoon.

  “And anyway,” says Farren, “what do you know about loyal? You leave placements left and right. You can’t hold a job to save your soul. You who botch assignments, as if there’s anything more valuable in this infinite world than a day’s worth of work.”

  “It was just that one job! Just that one time!”

  “Oh please. I know about the stolen boots. About the blimp. I even know about the witch. Who do you think you’re fooling, girl?”

  “Farren, how could you do this to me? I don’t understand.”

  “Is she worried about losing Farren or us?” the boyfriends cry, astonished.

  “Never mind her,” says my favorite boyfriend, comforting the group. “Hush, hush.”

  I hear them consoling one another, mending one another, on this night that was meant for celebration. Here I go, ruining everything. Here I go.

  “Sometimes I have to wonder,” my favorite boyfriend says, “if she even knows our names.”

  The line disconnects.

  At the bar, I spend my earnings on a bottle of the best. “It’s a bachelor party!” I tell the bartender. I toast to their engagement, their future, the boyfriends, nearly husbands, their five o’clock shadows and twelve o’clock sunburns,
the spots they let me nuzzle underneath their chins. The perforation of their bitten nails, their love handles and handlebar mustaches and their muscles, their footholds for my comfort. Their inclinations and inhibitions and insecurities, lazy mornings throned in blankets, pressing against their bodies, the pillows slipping from under our heads, falling into the galactic space between wall and bed. I remember meeting them in other bars, at restaurants, on jogs and on benches. Lifting weights and running late. Happy hours and just OK hours. Attending concerts, live, unplugged. Attending parties on rooftops, attending festivals and picking fruit from trees upstate, attending other weddings. Speed dating and slow dating and dating just right, a friend of a friend of a friend. Introductions. They entered my world like a relay team, carrying and passing the baton, their racing arms spreading toward Sunday in a sweaty, sudden dash, now continuing forward, onward, and away.

  I click my former employer’s boots against the barstool in celebratory rhythms. If I return the boots, she’ll stop trying to get in touch. I don’t want her to stop trying to get in touch. I want the defiance of a life spent almost in touch. I toast to the woman who lives with her shoes. She’s probably been asked to officiate the wedding.

  “You’re cut off, lady,” the bartender says.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I toast to Farren, to her newfound loves, to my old loves. I do love them. I do miss them. I miss them in the worst way. I miss them! I tell the bartender. My Boris, my Juan, my Hugo, my Claude, my Riko, my Roger, and Bob. To Paul H. and Paul D. and even Paul R. To Steve and Sameer and Ken, to David and Goliath, to Jack, to Jeff, to Jerry, to all of them, to all of them, to each of them alone.

  “The First Temp wore a fedora,” my grandmother said. “The First Temp had real style, you know. Real gumption. The First Temp packed a bag to take to the office, and her office was the entire world. She packed a bag full of mints and tissues and emergency rations, and water for drinking and a paperback for reading and a passport for easy travel. She had runs in her stockings, and she had a way to mend those runs. She could curse like a sailor, but only in front of sailors. She could run in heels! She could run everywhere. She couldn’t stay anywhere.

  “I knew a lot of temps in my day, back when your mother was just a little girl. I knew a woman who knew a woman whose great-cousin twice removed knew a woman who knew the First Temp. She didn’t like her much. But who ever said getting liked was the point?

  “The First Temp made a wish every night, and she wished for the steadiness. She wished for it to come at her fast and sudden, like a ton of bricks, like a piano from a window, falling on her head. The First Temp made a wish every night, and who am I to say if her wish came true? This isn’t that kind of bedtime story, girlchick.

  “The First Temp was prepared. No one is prepared anymore, not these days. Remember, your grandmother tried to prepare you for something. For anything. Remember, listen to your mother. Your mother wasn’t the First Temp, but she isn’t the last. She knows something about something.”

  HOME WORK

  Outside the bar, near the dumpster, smelling of booze and damp with rain, morning deigns to greet me. The little boy’s face hovers over mine, blocking the sun like a low-flying cloud.

  “Would you like to talk to me,” he asks, “instead of talking to yourself?”

  He can’t be more than seven years old.

  “Sure,” I say. “Hi.”

  “What do you do here?” he asks.

  “I look for jobs.”

  He doesn’t laugh at me, but nods in a serious way. He offers a hand so I can sit myself upright.

  “I have a temporary job for you,” he says. “I’ll pay you money.”

  I agree to follow him to his home, and to perform the job of being his mother. I throw my cigarettes in the trash, finally unlearning that old, temporary skill. He leads me down the alley and through the copse of trees, past the prison, deep into the forest, to a clearing, to a strip of stores abutting a stream. Somewhere along the way we cross the street, and I realize he’s holding my hand.

  There’s no one else in his apartment, and the building looks all but abandoned. The sounds in the hallways have no bodies to catch them, muffle them, and they ricochet forever, lost bullets. The pitter of a mouse, the patter of shifting beams, horsehair walls wallpapered on an inconsistent slant. In one corner rests a kitchen, and in another corner a couch. A rug with one corner turned up and over, revealing hidden colonies of dust.

  “Here, have a seat,” he says. He points to the floor, resetting the corner of the rug with his toe. We sit across from each other.

  “Where’s your real mother?” I ask.

  “Abducted by pirates. But she’ll be home soon.”

  I remember Darla ripping the cap off a bottle of cider with her teeth, and I stay silent. The captives in the dungeon, the inventory in the hull.

  A kitten crawls from under the couch and nestles in the boy’s lap.

  “Do pirates like cats?” he asks, his voice shaking.

  “There’s no purr in pirate,” I say. “Never fear.”

  The cat curls against his chest and stays put when the boy stands, its claws cutting into his shirt.

  “Wear this,” he says to me, and he hands me her apron, her slippers, her shirtdress, her vest, her leather jacket, her Halloween costumes, her skinny jeans, her nightgown, her shower cap.

  “Your real mom was pretty cool.”

  “Is.”

  We sit and do his homework on the floor until he’s tired, his cheek slipping from the cup of his hand.

  “Well, I’m spent,” he says, and he shuffles to bed like someone older. “Make yourself at home.”

  The boy does exactly what he said he would, which is pay me to cook and clean and give him advice and tell him a different story every night. Sometimes I’m supposed to scold him or punish him, and sometimes I’m supposed to yell for no reason, get sad, and stare out the window.

  “Like this?” I ask, leaning my forehead against the glass.

  “More desperate,” he says, studying my gaze. “Pick a point of focus outside and commit.”

  I commit to a flowerpot across the street.

  “Now pick something just beyond the flowerpot, something only you can see.”

  I settle on a long, lithe creature of the forest, a predator from my imagination.

  “Much better,” he says. “You look real sad.”

  “Thanks,” I say, smiling.

  He rolls his eyes. “Stay in character!”

  I cut his hair and watch him brush his teeth and lift him high so he can spit in the sink. I lift him on my shoulders and spin him around the room. I buy the groceries and cook the groceries, dividing them from their bundles and bunches and loaves, slicing and stirring and whisking, building flavor profiles, concealing vegetables, chopping at pleasing angles to create from the crusts on his plate a face with a smile. Supplying nutrients for growing boys. Tupperwared leftovers filling the fridge.

  I tell him the story of how to bake a pie. I tell him the story of the daily news. I tell him the story of how he was born, which he has to tell me first.

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” he explains, snug under his sheets.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Sometimes it really is.”

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” I repeat, and he settles into my retelling.

  I tell him stories about the jobs I’ve had, and even the boring stories make him squirm and scream. I pick the boredom until it bleeds. I don’t tell him the stories are true.

  “Tell me the stories, tell me the stories,” he says, clapping his hands against his knees.

  “Okay,” I say, and I take a sip of water. These are stories I know well, but sometimes a mother needs a minute. “Once upon a time, there was the assassin. There was the child.”

  “What else?”

  “There was the house with the doors that opened and closed.”

  His eyes start to widen, then f
lutter, then droop.

  “There were bombs and blimps and barnacles, and a little boy who was best of all things.”

  I walk out of his room backward, watching him sleep. “The box of stamps and the corkboard calendar and the pink book of message sheets to tell you what happened exactly, specifically, in detail, While You Were Out.”

  “Leave the light on in the hall,” he calls after me, and I do.

  The boy is as pale as potatoes and skinnier than the women at the agency, which is really saying something. So I perform some extra work that he wouldn’t know to ask about. Like researching vitamins and malnutrition and dietary supplements. I use the money he pays me to buy medicine from the man at the bar, and my little boy’s cheeks turn pink again, if they were ever pink to begin with. I remember the time I almost had an accidental little boy of my own.

  “Why are you using your salary for my medicine?” He kneels in his chair so that we’re the same height.

  “Because I care about you, and you’re sick.”

  “You’re not supposed to care about me. That’s not your responsibility.”

  “Actually, it is,” I say.

  “I promised you a job, not a family,” he says, a baby snarl dilapidating the base of his chin. He’s already growing up cruel, I think, brokenhearted, primed to break hearts. I wonder if he’ll grow up to be someone’s boyfriend, their only boyfriend, or one of many. Someone’s father. Father of many. Someone’s pal. Someone else’s kid. Then I remember his mother, the pirates, Darla. I crush the vitamins and hide them in his food.

  “I thought I made myself clear,” he says later, spooning the evidence onto a saucer. Mashed squash pebbled with pills.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry,” and finally he smiles. He dangles a string for his cat to catch, and the cat is pleased to catch it.

  The boy tells me about his ten-year plan, about how he wants to run a business when he grows up, how he could run a business very fairly. A business he could pass on to his kids, something that would stick. “First you need a prospectus, like this,” he says, drawing a circle with his finger on the kitchen counter. “Then you start hiring,” he adds, “like how I hired you.”