Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  The car turned down into the tunnel. The smell of exhaust hit Maya, then the bright lights on either side. She rolled her window up.

  It had been awkward. She’d tried at first. A man she’d never met had asked her what she did. He was condescending, the way he kept looking past her for some other, better conversation, feeling stuck, perhaps, sitting next to this small woman whom he did not know or care to get to know. She always felt slightly, in some specific but noticeable way, as if she were awkwardly dressed. This night it had been the shoes she was wearing, high-heeled and open-toed, shoes she aspired to wear with confidence and then was not quite able to walk in comfortably. They were garish, she saw as soon as they’d made it uptown, not quite right, and she was forced to spend the night seated, her feet tucked beneath her chair, leaning forward with her elbows resting on the table, wishing she were—like every other woman in the room—wearing flats.

  “Woolf,” she’d said in response to the man’s question. Clipped and inappropriate. But she was gauging him, testing—Stephen hated when she did this; why, he asked her, could she not just be pleasant and smile and nod—she was interested in how he would respond. Would he think Thomas or Tom or Tobias, would he know immediately, because of her demeanor or the way she pulled tight on her shawl, that she meant the tragic female character, the one who’d chosen water over life? He was the husband of one of Stephen’s colleagues, a mathematical philosopher, empiricism. If pushed, Stephen would have had to admit he didn’t like the wife any more than Maya liked this man. He traded futures. Maya’d loved the sound of this, the idea of such a phrase. But it had been much less interesting than it sounded as he’d explained. And there was, then, the third glass of gin and lime.

  “Virginia,” she said when he stayed silent. “The presence of the absence.” He looked at her as if she were speaking some language unknown to anyone but her. “Death,” she said. “I look at how she has used it in her work to explore both the experience and effects of death, the particular way in which it’s always present, entering the room, overtaking life, dissipating, sliced like a knife through everything.” She stopped to sip her drink again. “Death as communication when all other forms have failed.” He squirmed and cupped the base of his drink with meaty fingers. He shook his glass and tipped it, then sucked slowly on a piece of ice.

  “I also teach,” she said.

  “And the kids get that? They can make sense of all of that?” He had a fleshy face, and a burst blood vessel had left a splotch of red below his eye.

  “Some of it,” she said. “They’re very bright, the kids I get. They’re wonderful.” She believed this as she said it, smiled thinking of them. “I teach intro classes also. It’s a pretty universal concern, though, right?”

  He nodded. “It’s not really practical, though, huh? It certainly won’t help them get jobs.”

  Maya sat up straighter and pulled her shawl more tightly to her chest. “Practical,” she said. “It’s literature.”

  She’d meant this as corrective. But he stared at her smugly, as if she’d just proven him right.

  “This is the problem with liberal education,” he said. “These kids are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to leave school without a single marketable skill.”

  “Do you consider knowing how to think impractical?” she asked him. Her voice had risen. She was somehow, inexplicably, standing up. The shoes and then the gin: she was unsteady on her feet.

  “I happen to think quite well,” he said.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” Maya’d said.

  She might have raised her voice.

  People were watching. She could feel Stephen’s eyes.

  He pulled her away.

  “You were about three seconds from throwing your drink.”

  “He was an ass, Stephen.”

  “Did you think you might convert him if you yelled more?”

  “I wasn’t yelling.” Maya placed her now-bare feet back on the floor. Stephen glared at her. They’d just come through the tunnel. She looked ahead to avoid facing him. She watched the light turn to yellow and then red.

  “Stephen!” she said. But they were halfway through the intersection by the time the brakes caught. Horns honked. Maya fell forward and her head hit hard on the dash.

  Summer 2011

  “I did in vitro,” says Annie. She talks freely, ambling from topic to topic, not seeming to mind when or if Ellie or Jeffrey joins.

  They’ve been swimming—after fifteen minutes in the car, Ellie staring down at her hands, nervous, Annie chatting, Jeffrey smiling, trekking over the boardwalk, Ellie barefoot on tiptoes forgetting how very hot the sand could get, finally then forgetting Jack and Jeff and Annie all behind her, diving in and thinking, perfect—those few minutes she was underwater like there might be no one in the world but her.

  “It took us two years before it worked,” Annie says.

  All three of them have showered. Ellie put her clothes away while Jeffrey and Annie fed Jack and put him to bed. She tried on a dress and two pairs of shorts, before she chose a loose-fitting pair of jeans and one of Ben’s old soccer shirts. They usually all eat together, Annie told her, but all the hours in the water have worn Jack’s tiny body out.

  “I never thought I wanted a family, you know?” She moves from the pantry to the stove and pours a cup of rice into boiling water; she grabs the cutting board from Ellie and scrapes the garlic and the onions into a pan. “I always felt so independent,” she says. “But then, I was almost forty and desperate for someone to love like that.” Ellie’s still a minute, trying to figure out what “like that” means, but Annie doesn’t explain and Ellie doesn’t ask her. Annie takes the strips of peppers Ellie’s cut and drops them in the pan. “Jeffrey.” She nods toward him. He wears shorts and a short-sleeved white button-up. He holds his hair behind one ear and smiles at his wife. “I thought he would be ambivalent. We’d talked about it, you know? But it seemed like we’d decided by virtue of waiting as long as we did. He has his kids, you know, his patients. He gives so much to his work. But once we started trying, he was more attached to the idea than me.”

  She stops then and looks at Ellie. She puts the top on the pot with the rice and pulls a chair out so Ellie can sit. The kitchen’s large, with bright yellow cabinets above burnt-red counters covering two full walls. They have an island in the middle with a stovetop and lines of spices. The kitchen opens straight onto the living room, where two long couches sit catty-corner to one another and look out lines of windows onto the overly lush yard and then the river beyond that. “You think you’re not that caught up in your idea of yourself as woman, you know? But it turned out I wasn’t above that sort of empty ache.” For a minute she’s quiet, turning down the rice, looking at Jeff. “It was the third time we tried that it finally stuck.” Jeffrey sits at the table close to Ellie. He has a magazine in front of him, an old New Yorker. He flips pages as Annie talks.

  “I guess I’ll always be most grateful for that push,” Annie continues, and Ellie watches as she smiles at her husband, his eyes still angled toward the pages of the magazine. “And I have him now.” There’s a way that the “him” sounds that makes clear to all of them that she means Jack. “It’s hard to imagine there was a time when I might not have. I never thought I’d be living here either or running that restaurant.” She says the last word like it tastes sour, raises an eyebrow, firms her lips. “But it suits me. And I like the water.”

  “Me too,” says Jeffrey. He stands up now and grabs a green pepper from the pan where Annie’s mixing them together with the garlic and large strips of onion. He kisses Annie once, brusquely, on the cheek. “All of it.” He winks at Ellie. “Me too.”

  Annie goes to check on Jack as they sit down to dinner. Jeffrey offers Ellie wine as she settles in her chair. She almost says no, but he’s already reaching up into the cupboard for another wine glass as he asks. Ellie doesn’t want to be the sort of girl who can’t handle a glass of wine when it’s offered h
er. She likes the face that Jeffrey makes when she says sure and smiles. He’s tall and tan and only looks his age when his skin crinkles on his forehead and around his eyes as he smiles, which he does, his head tilted toward Ellie, as he fills her glass. When Annie comes back she looks at Ellie’s glass, then over at Jeffrey, but whatever thought she has she keeps to herself.

  She must not know, Ellie thinks. Or what she does know isn’t all there is.

  Ellie loves the feel of the glass’s stem between her fingers, the way the weight of the wine shifts subtly as she tips it to her lips. She drinks slowly so as not to have to pour herself another glass.

  Annie tells her a bit about the restaurant. Things are slow now because it’s summer. Like so much else in Florida, Jeffrey says, the tourist seasons are backward too. The whole place empties out from May to September. It gets too hot and the snowbirds head up north. So she’ll have time to get to know Jack gradually. Jeffrey’s schedule is also slower, since he works with kids and many of them have also gone for the too-hot months.

  They eat quickly and move to the couches in the living room. The couches are a dark blue and the cushions are hard when Ellie sits. She pulls her legs underneath her in the corner. She wonders briefly if she should have asked first, if she should put her feet back on the floor. But, quickly, Annie does the same as Ellie; she rests her feet up underneath her, then stretches them out on Jeffrey’s lap; Ellie settles in as Annie talks.

  “You know, he was the prom king.”

  Jeffrey has one arm around the back of the couch and the fingers of his other hand move slowly up and down Annie’s bare shin.

  “And she was Daria,” Jeffrey says. He’d spoken hardly at all during dinner and Ellie’s startled a minute by the sound of him.

  She looks at them blankly. She doesn’t know who Daria is.

  “Oh, god,” says Jeffrey. He holds tight to Annie’s ankle, face formed to pretend-terror. He hasn’t looked directly at Ellie since he poured her wine. “We’re really old.”

  Annie shakes her head at him and swats his hand away. “It was this show,” she says. “On MTV.”

  “You know MTV, right?” asks Jeffrey.

  Ellie nods. She takes one small sip of wine and doesn’t swallow right away.

  “She hated everyone,” he says.

  Annie hits him again, pulls her legs off of his lap, and pulls them underneath her. “I wasn’t that bad.”

  “She was one of those girls who wore a lot of black and scowled at people.” Jeffrey furrows his brow, first at Annie, then just shy of Ellie’s ear.

  “You make me sound awful,” Annie says.

  They both laugh, and Ellie envies this: the playful closeness, the story that’s been told so many times.

  “Your mom was her only friend.”

  Ellie stiffens at the mention of her mother. She reaches for her wine and takes too big a sip.

  “Also true,” Annie says.

  “Did you guys know each other then?” Ellie asks. She wants to keep the story just on them.

  “Definitely no,” Annie says.

  “She’s much older,” says Jeffrey.

  “Screw you,” Annie says to Jeffrey, then turns to Ellie. “Two years.”

  “But she’s also a genius,” he says. “So she was four years ahead of me in school.”

  “Geniuses don’t run fried fish restaurants.”

  Jeffrey shrugs.

  “I would have hated him,” Annie says.

  Jeffrey laughs, swatting Annie’s ankle. “Right back at you, kid,” he says.

  Ellie pulls the blanket folded over the couch back and spreads it across herself. She stares out the window, rustling trees, takes two small sips of wine.

  “Your mom saved me, though,” says Annie. “I was this sad and angry little ball of nerves.”

  “Feral,” inserts Jeffrey.

  Annie ignores him, eyes on Ellie. “She took me in,” she says.

  “You know. She’s not so good with boundaries, your mom.” Annie smiles toward her feet. “She was so young then. At first you forgot how young she was because she was so smart. And she could talk, you know? Even then. She had no training and she was pretty clearly just making it up. But she talked and talked and at some point you realized what she was saying might be worth something. She wore flip-flops to class and she’d sneak out to run on the beach during her off periods. I had her in the afternoon and there were usually specks of sand on her feet by the time she taught our class.”

  Ellie can almost imagine all of this, but still, it’s impossible for her to see it fully in her head. Her mom is so completely the person she’s been Ellie’s whole life.

  “I was reckless. You know? I was sixteen. I had no idea what all of it was for. I went to school because I was supposed to. My parents’ line was always, we go to work, so you go to school. That’s an awful way to sell it. I skipped a ton of class. I drove around a lot and listened to the same awful music over and over. I’d drive six hours down to Key West, go swimming, and drive back.”

  “She had a convertible then too,” says Jeffrey. “It’s always more fun to be the tortured depressed teenager when your parents are rich.”

  Annie doesn’t look at him. He gets up and pours himself a glass of wine. He brings the bottle from the kitchen into the living room and is already refilling Ellie’s glass, not looking at Annie, before either of them can tell him no.

  Annie eyes her husband. Then fixes her gaze on Ellie. “Your mom listened to me. All I really wanted was to talk, you know? To cry to someone without them telling me I was sick.” She reaches behind the couch and pulls a throw out of the basket filled with blankets. It’s still over eighty late at night, but Jeffrey keeps the air conditioner at sixty-two. Annie wraps the throw around herself and burrows back into the corner of the couch, not touching Jeffrey. She could be Ellie’s mom in that moment, folding in on herself.

  Winter 2013

  Maya rides the subway just after rush hour, standing, holding the pole, and brushing up against a man in a suit who types furiously on his phone. There are empty seats, but she can’t sit. She’s going to a dinner party by herself. She and Stephen rarely socialize together anymore. She explained briefly where she was going. He’s agreed to try to have a nice conciliatory dinner with their son.

  Maya’d dressed carefully, showering, dabbing lipstick, swiping mascara, making herself stare back at herself longer than usual in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom in their room. She wears a dress, even though she hardly ever makes this effort in winter, the tights, the sweater, the slightly more than sensibly heeled boots. It’s the third thing she tried on. She wanted to feel a little less like the person that she always is. The dress hits just above the knee, in big patches of blue and purple. She bought it with Laura. With Laura is the only time she shops and the only time she buys clothes in colors other than black or gray. She has brushed her hair back and fastened it loosely at her neck with a small wooden clip. She feels, if not pretty, necessarily, then foreign enough to feel capable of interacting in the unstructured setting of this gathering.

  There are few people who could get Maya to leave the house after dark these days, but she hasn’t seen Caitlin in almost two years. She is one of Maya’s former students, applied to the program four years ago, explicitly to work with Maya. And Maya had lobbied hard to get Caitlin in. She’d gone to a not-well-thought-of state school, and while her grades were impeccable, her other achievements were unremarkable. Her writing sample had been messy, unedited, not academic really at all. It had read like a sort of literary love letter to Woolf, whom she’d meant to focus on. She’d written on the moment in Mrs. Dalloway when Septimus sits with his wife to make a hat. About how he had an eye for colors, could see things most people couldn’t, but needed his wife to bring his ideas to fruition in the world, about the impossibility of communication, the need to turn the abstract into the tangible, how some people cannot achieve this without the help of someone else.

  Maya’d
been so moved by her writing. She’d finally managed to convince the committee that the potential evident in Caitlin’s work was worth the risk of taking on a less-credentialed student. And Caitlin had, immediately, delivered on the potential Maya had seen. Caitlin had always seemed older than most of the other grad students; she lacked that smugness so many people her age possessed, that certainty that though they’ve made so few major life decisions up until this point, when they did they would somehow prove better and less compromising and complex than all those that came before. And then, after two years of being exactly what Maya hoped she’d be, Caitlin abruptly left. She’d been effusively apologetic. She wanted to write: novels, fiction, her own art—she’d said all of it in a whisper, in Maya’s office, a sweater wrapped around her and her arms crossed as she spoke, afraid, maybe, to throw the full weight of such aspirations out into the world.

  Caitlin had met Ellie once as well. Ellie loved it at first, Maya bringing students home for dinner. When she was small these students all doted on her. She was precocious then and perfect-looking, the big dark eyes, the long sharp nose. When Maya brought students home—twenty-somethings, quiet, awkward, with their broken-in leather bags and their furrowed brows—she promised them a home-cooked meal that Stephen then cooked. She was proud of this as well, being a woman for whom the man made the meals—she took pleasure in showing them off, her gorgeous happy family, the warm quiet world in Brooklyn that they’d built for themselves.

  But soon after Ellie turned twelve there was a marked shift in how she received these young people. She sulked when they came over. She picked at her food and then snuck up to her room.

  They’d been talking about the novel Caitlin was working on. It was still nascent then. She’d ridden the 2 train back with Maya from campus, the two of them sitting next to one another, knees touching, awkward suddenly outside their usual context.