Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  Maya tells Alana none of this. She holds her coffee near her face again and sips; it’s turned tepid since either of them spoke.

  “It’s completely terrifying,” Maya says. “It’s also …” A thousand million other things.

  When she’d finally come back from her time in Florida, it had taken her weeks to get Ellie to forgive her. Ellie was sullen and quiet, spending more and more time close to Stephen or alone in her room. Maya had the summer free and worked to court her, taking her for days alone in the park and around town while Ben was with Stephen or with friends. Her daughter, like her mother, loved the subway and wandering the city. They filled whole days finding new and different ethnic restaurants, pastry shops. Maya dragged her to run her hands over the spines of books at all her favorite shops.

  “When El was tiny …” Maya says to Alana, “She was probably six or eight months old—I was hardly leaving the house still, except to go to work—a friend of mine forced me out to go with her to MoMA.” It was Laura, always Laura, reminding Maya how to live. “We drove up there with Ellie screaming in the car seat and I was already regretting trying to do normal grown-up things too soon, wondering if I ever would again. I had her in the carrier.” She laughs. “She shit all over herself within the first five minutes.” She feels Alana smile. This is right, she thinks. “She was facing out, strapped to me again, looking at the paintings. My friend …” Laura was so young then and surprisingly comfortable with Ellie, taking her from Maya for an hour or two when Stephen traveled, for long walks, letting Ellie lie on her in Maya’s bed while Laura read. “It was Jean Dubuffet, you know?” Alana smiles. “This sort of accidental warmth and joy.” She stops, remembering the paintings, the texture of them up close, the disproportionate portraits, the burnt reds, the blacks and browns. “And El just lost it,” she says. “She started squealing.” Maya laughs, remembering, the feel and weight of Ellie wriggling, strapped to her. “People stared, thinking she was crying at first, that I was this awful person, disrupting the sanctity of these great works. But she was squealing with this incredible joy, you know? Like whatever he was doing, she understood it. I realized she could teach me. That even from the beginning, she would see the world in ways I’d never even thought to see before.”

  Fall 2011

  They’re outside again. The bag has gone from Cooper’s hand to the front pocket of his pants. It forms a small, almost imperceptible bump below his waist. Ellie wants to be free from him. She wants to take the alligator and the onetwothreefourfivesix.

  “Shit,” she says. She takes her phone out of her back pocket. It hasn’t rung or vibrated, but she looks down at the black face and then over at Jack.

  “Annie texted.” Jack looks at her, then back toward the old woman.

  Ellie says to Cooper, “We have to go.”

  “Seriously?” he says.

  Ellie shrugs. “Sorry.”

  “Listen …” His eyes wander to Jack, then back to Ellie.

  “We really have to go,” she says.

  She starts walking toward his car.

  “I can pay you for some of those,” she says, nodding toward his pocket. She says it quietly, leaning toward him, hoping Jack can’t hear. He turns away from her, unlocks the door. She helps Jack up into his booster seat.

  “Nor?” Jack asks.

  “Jack doesn’t think you should.” His car is old and the locks don’t work. Cooper has to reach across the seat to open Ellie’s door.

  “It’s fine.” She grabs Jack’s knee a minute, but he pushes her away. “Just, since you bought more than you would have.”

  Cooper laughs. “I’m sure you feel bad.”

  She pulls on her seat belt, stares down at the purple alligator that still sits in her hand. She reaches into the back pocket of her shorts where she has stuffed a wad of cash. She was planning. She’s been trying not to look it in the face. She puts the alligator on the dashboard, hands the money to Cooper; she rubs her other hand up and down along the side of the wet sandy canvas of the seat.

  “Enjoy,” he says, handing three pills to her and pocketing the money.

  She doesn’t say anything about the other three. She looks briefly in the rearview mirror, but Jack turns his face down as she looks at him. She sees his dad in the way his face has flattened out.

  She thrums her thumb quick and careful on the alligator. The scales of it sting briefly each time her hand hits it.

  Back at the house, the pills are in her pocket. Jack looks like he’s about to cry. Ellie leaves Jack in his room with his bugs while she slips back into her room and stuffs the pills to the bottom of her lowest drawer. She calls to Jack and for a while they sit together silently on the couch. Ellie Googles the cockroaches Annie bought him last week and starts reading different random facts out loud. Jack doesn’t mention where they’ve been, so Ellie doesn’t either. She picks the pieces of sand off Jack’s feet and drops them on the floor.

  The clouds come quickly, covering the sky all at once, and the first crack of thunder comes just as she gets up to find the Nutella jar. They pass it back and forth, and Ellie swipes big mouthfuls with her index finger and licks the remnants from underneath the nubs of her fingernails. Another crack, and this time the power goes out. The house is dark and the TV switches off. The roof is tin and the rain is loud against it. Jack grabs for the Nutella jar. “Can we go outside?” he asks. Ellie can smell the rain through the screened porch. She’s kept the door to the house open and when Jeffrey’s gone they keep the air conditioner off. “Now, Jack?” she says. He loves the storms almost as much as she does. Often, they sit under the overhang that covers the front door and stick their feet out as it pours. Ellie looks at him, taking one more swipe of chocolate for herself, then licking her finger and cleaning a smudge off his chin.

  “Now,” he says.

  Jack leads the way to the backyard. There’s a hammock hanging between two trees and a small brick patio that holds four chairs and a table, all made of wrought iron that has just begun to rust. The rain’s coming hard now, and Ellie can barely see to the fence around the backyard. Jack holds tight to her hand and they step out underneath the downpour. She looks over at Jack, who has his head tipped back just like her, his eyes shut tight, his nose scrunched up. They walk out past the deck and lie down in the dirt that’s turning quickly to a muddy slush. The palm fronds whip back and forth, lashing loudly, Jack laughs as the mud squishes underneath them, and the thunder cracks again.

  Winter 2013

  Maya holds tight to her coffee. “Sorry I’m late,” she says.

  “You’re not,” says Charles. He’s wearing slip-on shoes that are lined with fleece, no socks, a dark blue crew-neck shirt under a brown suede blazer, no coat. His hair falls over the tops of his glasses. He’s beautiful, she thinks. He’s beautiful in the way he moves and talks, in the way he has hold of his brain. If there were a way to simply have him always fifty feet away and living his life, that’s what she’d want most. She wants to give him small things and ask for nothing from him. She wonders if it would be possible to make herself so small he doesn’t notice when she’s close.

  Jackie enters, and then three other students. Charles sits, and Maya leans back against the desk.

  “I …” he says. “The other night.”

  She holds her hand up.

  She turns back to the desk and holds her Mrs. Dalloway close to her chest. Woolf today. Clarissa. Septimus. Isabel and Shakespeare. There is still that.

  Halfway through class a hand from the back of the room rises: a boy who hardly ever speaks. He wears a black skullcap, pulled back off his forehead so bits of blond hair peek out from underneath.

  “Seriously, though, Septimus, dude’s crazy, right?”

  Maya stares at him. She’s afraid to look at Charles.

  “I mean, what’s he there for? It’s this story about this woman and her party, then all of a sudden, dude kills himself.”

  Maya nods. She’s not sure she can answer. She picks up h
er copy of the novel, the edges furred and softened, the back cover ripped. The students stare at her, the lot of them. She feels Charles’s eyes right through his glasses. She opens the book, close to the end, begins to read.

  She can see perfectly, her first, her second, her seventeenth time inside these sentences. The breathlessness with which she’s always read.

  There was an embrace in death, she reads.

  She thinks maybe she won’t look up at them till they’ve all left.

  “I think we’re done today,” she says, still facing the page. She listens to the shuffling of bags and papers. Charles murmurs something to them as they scurry out. She keeps reading through, quietly to herself now, to the end of the novel, ten more pages, before she looks up to see Charles standing there.

  “Are you okay, Maya?”

  She can’t remember if he’s ever said her name.

  “You want to sit down a minute?”

  She shakes her head. “I need to get out.”

  He tries to help her with her coat as they walk toward the exit. She sloughs him off, walking quickly, clutching the handle of her bag with both hands as he holds the door and she walks through.

  Overnight, they’ve hit a warm spell. The sun shines on her face. She wishes it were still cold and cloudy, that she could stay more bundled up. “What happened to winter?” she says. If he hears, he doesn’t answer. He walks with his large bag slung across his torso, the weight of it flapping at his hip.

  “I live on 111 and Amsterdam,” he says.

  She nods.

  They walk briskly down Broadway. They go east at 112th Street, past the bookstore. Across Amsterdam is the huge cathedral Maya’s always loved, the garden in front, the spires, the mounds of steps. He leads her past the Hungarian pastry shop, unlocks a heavy metal door, and heaves it open hard with the side of his shoulder; they’re in a small dark vestibule, six silver mailboxes line the wall. He leads her up the steps and she tries hard not to think.

  Fall 2011

  “Annie’s getting jealous.”

  Ellie breathes in one sharp breath. They’re having dinner. Tourist season has swept the town full suddenly, and Annie’s hardly home at night.

  The pills are in her drawer. Every night, before she goes to bed, she lays them out on her desk and counts them.

  Jeffrey nods toward Jack, who has climbed up onto Ellie’s lap as they eat take-out Indian.

  “We finally found someone he loves as much as her,” he says.

  Ellie burrows her face into Jack’s hair. Jeff gets plates and forks and spoons and lays them out, and Ellie takes a bite of her biryani, eyes still averted down.

  Jeff pours two glasses of wine. “I’m a little jealous too,” he says.

  Ellie helps Jack serve himself food, then holds her wine glass. She lets the weight of it settle in her hand

  “You two surfing.”

  Ellie laughs, turns to Jack. “We’re pretty awesome, aren’t we, Jack?”

  “And your boyfriend?” Jeffrey asks.

  Ellie stops a minute, wonders what Jack might have said when she wasn’t with them. She looks briefly toward her room.

  “So he is, then?”

  Ellie looks back toward Jack. “Of course not.” She pulls her cardigan more tightly to her. Rain falls in violent heavy drops and pounds along the roof.

  “Didn’t work out?” asks Jeff.

  Ellie looks down into her wine and helps Jack cut his lamb into smaller pieces. She takes a long sip of the Syrah before she speaks again.

  “It only rains like this here,” she says.

  He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You …” She just assumed he’s traveled as much as his wife has, but watching his face now, she thinks, Of course.

  “I love it,” she says, her eyes fixed on the rain.

  “Of course you do.”

  He says it like he knows her, like he knows exactly what she’s always been.

  Spring 2013

  His apartment is a single room with a bed, a desk, two chairs, and two small windows; a galley kitchen runs along the wall. The bed is tightly made, with a dark blue duvet cover with two red-and-white-checked pillows on top.

  “Cozy,” she says.

  He pulls the larger chair that’s leather and on wheels out for her and sits primly on the bed.

  “Septimus,” he says.

  She shakes her head, crosses her arms, sits back. “He’s always been my favorite.”

  “Of course he has.” Like he knows her.

  He looks past her out the window. “Communication,” he says.

  “It’s all he wants,” she says.

  His back straightens. “Except it’s so much harder than he thinks.”

  “Fucking doctors.” She smiles and uncrosses her arms, walking over to his bookshelf. He stays where he is. She fingers a Marguerite Duras, a Nabokov, picks up the Evan S. Connell.

  Maya opens the book and keeps her eyes steady on the small, careful paragraphs. She closes the book again, runs her fingers up and down the dark blue cover. “You like the sad ones,” she says.

  He shrugs. “I guess.” He pushes his glasses up and pinches his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m not sure I’ve read much that isn’t at least a little sad.”

  “At least a little sad,” she says, walking back to the desk, and touching a stack of papers that sit on top of it: his dissertation.

  “How is it?” she says.

  “Who knows?” he says. His back rounds again. His hands rest on his knees. “It’s almost finished.”

  She looks at him, then back down at his work. “You’re sure?”

  “It’s as done as I can do.”

  “What does that mean?” She’s trying to drag something out of him, something that will show her what he’s capable of.

  He eyes the papers, then puts his palms behind him on the bed. “I’m not sure I care if it’s any good. I think I want to teach high school.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been teaching up in Hunts Point. An after-school program. It’s just so much more active, you know? Instead of all these useless papers no one reads.”

  Maya laughs and begins flipping absently through his chapters. She’s a little hurt that he didn’t tell her, that she didn’t already know that he’d been teaching someplace else. She wants to ask if Caitlin knows.

  “You know my life is those useless papers, right?” she says.

  “Oh. No,” he says. “You’re not like that. You’re not one of those teachers who’s just here to publish and get some useless appointment.”

  “Some would consider that one of my problems.”

  “But it’s so absurd,” he says. “To want these accolades that mean nothing to the world.”

  “And Hunts Point? Means something more?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s actual engagement. I can see it, you know? What I’m giving every day.”

  She stares at him: of course, she knows. Her students, reading; it’s the one thing she’s felt capable of giving properly.

  “Well, I guess then you should do that.”

  He nods. “But I have to finish, you know. It’s been too many years of my parents patiently awaiting my arrival at an Actual Career.”

  “Where are you from?” she asks and can’t believe she doesn’t already know the answer. She has an image of a pear-shaped mother somewhere in Ohio. She angles her knees farther from him in her chair.

  “The Bay Area,” he says.

  “Far,” she says. “They must be proud.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “They like to say Columbia. They like to say PhD. The fact that it’s in literature, I think, they keep to themselves.”

  Maya laughs. “I’m sure they’re proud.”

  He’s so close; she could reach her hand out and rub it slowly back and forth over his head.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “I tell them about you,” he says.

  Both of them look straight ahead.
<
br />   “How much your help has meant to me.”

  He turns toward her. She can’t look at him. If she looks at him, she’ll cry. “Thanks,” she says.

  His hands hold tight to his knees.

  “You should be easier on your parents.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “They’re just not very interesting.”

  “Interesting or not. They must have done some good things, making you.”

  “You say it like I’m a loaf of bread.”

  “Of all the analogies.”

  “I like to bake.”

  “You bake,” she says. She laughs, holds up her hands, acknowledging defeat.

  “We make ourselves,” he says.

  “And some of us make bread.”

  He smiles. “They loved me as well as they could.”

  “And it wasn’t enough for you.”

  “It was fine.”

  “I wonder if there’s ever more than that.”

  They’re quiet a long time and she looks out the window. She watches the cars out on the street, people walking, talking on their phones. His eyes are full of too much expectation. He leans toward her, but she stays far enough away that they’re touching only at the knees.

  Fall 2011

  The television plays on low and Jeffrey leans in toward Ellie, who holds Jack. He loops his arms around Jack’s waist, the back of his hand and then his forearm brushing Ellie’s waist. He smells like the wine they’ve shared throughout the evening. The second bottle he opened silently, refilling the round thin globe of Ellie’s glass each time it got below half full. Besides a lamp lit in the far corner of the room, the lights are off. They’ve been watching a movie, a movie Jack chose and to which Ellie has stopped paying attention. Jeffrey leaves the room, carrying his son and smiling at Ellie, smiling at her in a way that she thinks might be different than each time he’s smiled at her in the past.