People thought distant places were colder. “Seattle!” As if it were remote and frigid as a star. She never tried to correct them, regarding the climate or the fact that she was from Lynnwood, in mall-ridden Snohomish County. She was twenty-three now, she’d stayed out east after college.
She passed the gabardine public library, payphone under the exaggerated, modern eaves, cat door of a bookdrop for those, like cats, who avoided civic confrontation. Even the evergreen landscaping bushes, here, lost their pigment in the winter. There were law offices in a row of historic white houses. Taylor’s sophomore-year roommate had gone on to law school.
She felt as if she were holding cold rocks in her pockets. In western Washington Lenten Rose bloomed celery, eggplant, eggshell at Christmas; camellias budded by New Year’s. But she wasn’t nostalgic. An astrology column had once informed her that resignation was her coping mechanism. She pictured neat little gears inside her. Resignation was a form of low self-esteem—it didn’t take a rocket scientist. She thought of Emily Linder throwing herself across the bed freely, a smooth roll of back fat exposed between her jeans and tiny tank top. Emily had given up on Taylor in the first twenty-four hours.
She could circumnavigate the municipal park and be back home by nine thirty. Ten seemed the earliest he might call her. She wished she didn’t have to take her hand out of her pocket to check her watch. She was freezing but she couldn’t bring herself to wear one of the pompom hats East Coast people pulled on nonchalantly. She was shy, vain, bored, boring. She didn’t fight it. What she did fight, now, was the monkish depression. On a Saturday morning. Getting out of her monk’s cell, walking to the village.
The park was designed in rays that went out from a bandstand. Taylor had watched children tumble across the concrete dais in the summer as if it were a giant bed, slightly forbidden. Now there were frost crystals in the pores of the sidewalk. She drummed over a petite footbridge and she could smell moldering blackberry in the streambed. A plaque described the provenance of the rose bushes, the brave and childish way the first settlers came from Holland, via New York, and the fact that a few of their diminutive farm buildings were still looked after by the Preservation Society.
She curved around the decorative pond where a heron like a close-up of a mosquito had spooked the fish all summer. There were ducks in pairs in the wicker bushes. They would have walked arm in arm if they had them, thought Taylor.
Her sophomore-year roommate, Adina, was an Ambassador of the College. She had insisted Taylor join her for the Orientation Week cookout, and they swung by other dorms on the way and collected a group of girls like a wedding party. It had taken Adina a full week to give up on Taylor. Taylor knew she could have saved her the trouble.
She checked her watch again. There was a chance she’d miscalculated—her walk or his timing. She couldn’t help falling into an awkward trot. Her left leg was noticeably longer than her right, she was terrible at sports, her senior year of high school she’d been forced to take the remedial PE class for girls who always had their periods. The teacher had added a comment to the passing grade: “She should try to make stronger movements.”
She reached her building and sunk her key to the hilt. She felt as if he were watching her. Up the stairs, she used her arms for leverage on the railing. She pictured him reading her number off a scrap of paper that would be regurgitated in the wash if he accidentally left it in his pocket. The library, its inner lights slightly orange, the payphone with its sleek dark neck and gleaming umbilicus.
The first time he called she’d been dozing in a chair in her living room, bare sun across the floorboards. She’d been kept up all night by the young professional couple directly above her: how many times could two people cross their apartment? Living alone, it seemed like the phone could ring out of nowhere. No storm warning, clouds bunching together, wind smelling different.
“Is that Taylor?”
She was cold despite the sun on the floor, and disoriented.
“Is this your street?” he’d marveled, laughing.
He’d invited himself up to her apartment. What was the first thing she did when she came home from work? he’d asked her.
She’d protested.
“No, really.”
She imagined a stock version of herself moving down the thin hall to the kitchen. Her unsteady walk (X-rays and MRIs, it turned out leg length discrepancy wasn’t a sign of anything) had always irritated her mother. Her billowy socks and fallen ankles. Water for tea. Secretly she found coffee disgusting.
“Well, what kind of tea?” he’d teased her, and she knew he was more entertaining to himself than she was. She’d tried to block his view of the chair where she habitually hung the sweatpants and T-shirt she slept in.
The kitchen had an electric stove, a mismatched fridge and warped cabinets, as if the plywood were fifty percent polyester. She ate discreetly, plain and dry, she was a budget vegetarian.
He said, “My wife’s a vegetarian.”
She felt like she was walking into a trap as she took down a Goodwill teacup. He pointed at it. “You’re not having any?” She took down another.
“You’ve got terrific southern exposure up here,” he continued. She looked around, bewildered. “I love apartments. I don’t know why we give them up when we turn into so-called grownups.”
She had never imagined living in a house. It seemed as foreign as living in China. He seemed to be serious about evaluating her whole setup. Silence.
“Your turn.” Was he mocking her? “So tell me about you, Andy.”
He was a playwright with a playwright’s ritualized way of looking at the world. “Do you see what I’m saying?” The teakettle started hissing. Taylor surprised herself by knowing he wouldn’t care what kind of tea she poured him.
He had short gray hair and eyes like wood grain. He wanted to write plays, but he collaborated on TV series. He was never the “based on the book by” or “based on the idea.” He wasn’t in LA, there was that little problem. He unsheathed a dark silver cigarette lighter. He weighed it. “Come here,” he said, and she brought the tea over. He put the lighter in her palm and it was heavy, like water.
He waited until the tea was almost cold and then he took a single swallow.
“Do you know your neighbors?” he asked her.
The couple who kept her up all night—“Maybe they’re sleepwalkers,” he suggested. But most of the occupants of her building she had never seen at all and she imagined ticking them off a master list of human beings.
“That’s actually quite creepy,” he said with admiration.
Now she cleaned her apartment constantly, she felt like she was in a movie, even when she slept she felt like she was “sleeping.”
She worked part time in the office of the private school where his daughter was a fourth-grader. Weekend afternoons she filled in at a boutique decorated with hand-painted scarves and quilted dopp-kits on the cakey little main street; both jobs came through the older lady she’d done errands and bills for through college. In any case, he had walked into the school office looking for his daughter’s teacher.
She wasn’t supposed to leave the front desk unattended. Confidentiality, litigation, and the children of centamillionaires and semi-celebrities. But he just stood there after she explained that she could help him set up an appointment, and to escape his stare she’d excused herself to go looking for the teacher in question.
The windowless teachers’ lounge was crowded with dented cupcakes and super-saturated pineapple left over from class parties. For a moment she was caught up in the desertion of broken oatmeal raisin, carrot sticks gone to sawdust. Her parents had been teachers but they’d shielded her. When she returned to the front office he was grinning over the biblical ledger.
“Did you just start here?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Where have I been?” he said, still grinning.
She shook her head, she had no idea.
He laughed. “I don’t know either.” He stu
died her. “Inside information here.” He lowered his voice. “Everybody hates their kid’s teacher.” His eyes glittered. She didn’t doubt that he’d got what he wanted.
The next day she bumped into him at the town supermarket. Its chain name was in smaller letters, that’s how you could tell you were going to pay yuppie prices, he informed her later.
“Andy,” he said, which she knew meant he had no idea what her name was. “I was wondering how I was ever going to—” and he whipped up the air between them. He was serious. But how else, other than serious, would an intelligent person act in the face of his own infidelity?
In the face of her imagination. Her stomach felt like it was made out of parachute material. She could hear the rustle.
His wife was away on a tour of seven cities. He didn’t say “my wife,” he said her name, which was rare and formidable. She was a dancer. She must have worn her clothes as seamlessly as skin. It was his wife’s company: she made up the steps and chose the music.
“I’d like to meet her,” said Taylor.
He raised his eyebrows. She’d be on tour for two weeks, then she’d be back for three days, then a brief residency at a small college.
“Come on over and keep us company.” He and his daughter. “Do you eat dinner?”
Taylor glanced at her shopping cart and they both laughed because there was just the water bag of baby carrots.
He cast them both as outsiders in such a town: he was the right age but the wrong spirit, she—what was she doing here? He affected being baffled. He flattered her by implying she belonged someplace better. It was true, though: the only other twenty-somethings were soda-logged computer folk from the Middle Earth of their parents’ basements. Boys of men, with loose lips and barber haircuts; one had spied her in the municipal park in the summer and asked her to go for ice cream.
Andy laughed for a long time. His daughter was glued to a video. He brushed Taylor’s hair out of her eyes when she was drying the dishes.
“So?” he said finally, smugly, as if he already knew the answer.
She didn’t understand him.
“What flavor?”
“I—” she started.
“Cruel!” He shook his head. “I figured.”
Actually, despite her terror, she had gone with the laundry-and-rec-room creature. She couldn’t remember what flavor. His body had seemed shapeless, like sheets over furniture. Gallantly he’d held the door of the Daily Scoops for her and then they were stranded together on the sidewalk.
Taylor’s junior-year roommate had tried to interest her in ballroom dancing. Chunni was big-boned, forceful, Korean. She kept a crock pot like a cauldron in their room that smelled unremittingly of reheated soup. Lined up across her desk were vials of homemade sauces.
“Dancing will make you more coordinated, Tayloh!” Taylor was unmoved; Chunni was stubbornly disappointed.
In fact Chunni was Taylor’s favorite roommate, with her stoic good nature, and finally Taylor relented. She would prove to Chunni once and for all that she was not, constitutionally or spiritually, social.
One Thursday night in early spring Taylor found herself Chunni’s guest in a cavernous hall with thirty or so other Korean students, all dressed as if for church in the early 1960s. Somehow Chunni had overlooked Taylor’s blue jeans and sweatshirt, and it was as if Taylor were the only female with legs. She begged to sit out, she promised to watch, but Chunni kept pushing her ahead like a broken wheelbarrow.
It wasn’t Chunni’s fault; Chunni may have been insensitive, but she wasn’t malicious. And there seemed to be plenty of affable young men who genuinely wanted to hold her hands, coach her through the footwork. As Chunni stood by, Taylor rejected them one after another.
The sense of public pressure mounted until the air turned hot and fleshy. All at once Taylor couldn’t catch her breath and, suffocating, she passed out gently across a couple of vacant folding chairs. When she came to Chunni was squatting alongside her like a midwife, alarmed, holding her shoulders. The boys who had asked her to dance looked askance, not wanting to be blamed for anything. Chunni released her reluctantly, making her promise to return straight to their dorm room.
The other park in town his daughter called Stone Ladies. There were two statues, he called them platitudes of kneeling. “Of genuflection,” he added, eyeing her. “Are you Catholic?”
Seagulls fell across the park on guy wires. Taylor shook her head, but he continued to look at her as if she would revise her answer. The stone ladies were naked. Their eyes were closed, their noses aquiline. The left breast on each lady was fuller.
There was a little bit of a vista, the sky stacked up on the horizon. A steeple half a mile away was blurred by permanent haze at the edges.
They gravitated toward the small pond. They found out he was twenty years older. He said, “Why is it always exactly by decades?”
She was quiet.
He said, “Did you know there are different culling periods for men and women?”
His daughter seemed to have something going on under a cedar tree. “She’s kind of a water baby,” he boasted. “She fell in that pond once.” Taylor could see her as a nyad. She had a distractibility that made Taylor uneasy.
They sat side by side watching loose snowflakes mesh and dissolve in water. Taylor had to concentrate to keep her teeth from clattering. “This time last year it wasn’t half as warm,” he said accusingly, as if it stood in for a deeper truth. He said she couldn’t keep avoiding the question of where she was from. She took everything he said as a kind of compliment. “Nobody’s from nowhere,” he chided. He cocked his head. “Unless they’re an angel.” He squinted and rolled an imaginary movie camera at her. “You’re a Wim Wenders angel!”
She hadn’t seen any of the movies. He said he hated when people said film instead of movie. He liked how she dressed too. He looked at her, appraising. “So where did the lovely Taylor spend her childhood?”
She didn’t want to force him to comment on the rain, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, or coffee.
“Mystery child!” As if she were driving him slightly crazy. Taylor was freezing, laughing.
“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand to her. Slightly sexually crazy.
He bought a cone for his daughter and one for himself at one end of Elm Street. Soon his daughter was busy with her dripping chocolate. “I’m getting messy,” she warned them, and there was something messy overall about her. Taylor had pocketed a whole ream of napkins. She stopped to hand them over. “But I’m sticky!” his daughter protested. Taylor could see. Around the wrists, in the armpits of her fingers.
His daughter was half a block ahead of them, licking her wrists, looking at the toy store display window. Taylor watched her drop the used napkins on the sidewalk.
He told her his daughter was slow to read and write. “But super creative.” He shrugged. From working at the school, Taylor had the sense that diagnoses came in waves, as if the diagnoses themselves were contagious. She herself had always felt safer in class with the smarter kids, those with subtler language capabilities. Although she didn’t manage to make friends. She closed her eyes for a moment. Differently sized girls from the same age group swinging on the bars, high knees like carousel ponies, revolving in mill circles, the perfume of the thuddy woodchip carpet.
In her senior year of high school, one Advanced Placement track had been folded into another, and suddenly Taylor had all her classes with a girl named Morgan. Two girls with boy names, and Morgan soon uncovered the fact that they were both only children whose parents had divorced when they were eleven. They even looked alike, with their plain brown hair unfashionably barretted, their slightly protruding, oily foreheads. They both had such long legs that Morgan said ominously, “We have the proportions of crucifixes.” Her mother was Born Again. Morgan said she never would have been born at all if she’d known it involved the inanity of high school. Both girls were thinking of going out of state for college.
Morgan’s f
ather lived in Seattle. Taylor concealed her admiration. He had a dollhouse bungalow, said Morgan, in one of the Lake Washington neighborhoods, Madrona, and he had given Morgan a pickup truck so she could visit him independent of her mother. Morgan invited Taylor to come along one weekend and they left straight from school on Friday.
They listened to Morgan’s music on the freeway. Morgan sang along and Taylor found herself blushing. “I never know what to listen to,” she ventured.
There was heavy traffic. Taylor liked surveying it from the elevated cab; she had never ridden in a pickup truck.
“We brought this upon ourselves,” announced Morgan, and it took Taylor a minute. “We invented cars,” Morgan elaborated.
Taylor looked out again: a sheet of traffic, nine or ten lanes across, stretching back and forward, manmade infinity. She tried blaming herself for it, but it seemed like a force of nature. Maybe Morgan was into the environment? It was impossible to just ask a question.
A couple of helicopters hung in the sky ahead, reflecting the cold sunset. Morgan had to duck a little to look out the windshield and up. She said, “An accident?”
“Yeah,” Taylor heard herself saying.
There was a big splash of metal and metallic lights flashing on the upcoming exit ramp. It looked like a seven-car pileup. Taylor didn’t know how Morgan could count the mashed cars so efficiently. After they passed it they talked about having no friends in childhood, without knowing if they would be friends.
Saturday morning Morgan packed two watercolor paint sets. They could easily walk to the lake beach from her father’s bungalow. All they had to do was fall down a series of staircases like chutes, narrow city holdings. Taylor caught glimpses of fanciful bohemian dwellings with floating decks, treehouse platforms behind thick bangs of foliage. She had no idea if it was a safe neighborhood but she felt a sense of romantic abandonment.
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