by Jana Casale
“Leda.”
She looked back at him filling an empty space in the unwinding party. She wanted to call out to him, but she just waved.
CHAPTER 4
Hollandaise Sauce
Leda watched a woman in the subway seat across from her with a grocery bag. The woman was older and held a container of hollandaise sauce on her lap. She moved her hands over the lid, opening and closing it as she chewed indiscriminately. The smell of the hollandaise sauce filled the subway car, and Leda turned away a bit to avoid the stale odor of food on public transportation. The woman’s clothes were dirty and the grocery bag looked as if it had been used many times to carry many things. Her face was gray and her eyelids were sunken. Leda noticed a small brooch attached to a faded ribbon in her hair. It didn’t make the woman’s appearance any better, any less gray, any less unkempt, but it was there. I guess you always have to do something with your hair, she thought, and touched her own hair, silky and young. Somewhere, she imagined, this woman had done many things. Soft things and hard things and was beautiful with a brooch. There was a countertop she held on to and a man who stood beside her telling her fancy possibilities that made her laugh lightly and feel probable. The woman got off at the next stop. Her coat brushed Leda as she pushed past and the smell of hollandaise lingered behind.
For the rest of the ride Leda spent her time folded into herself. She listened to music and watched the people moving then still. Somewhere in her knowledge of cosmopolitan life she was aware that attempting to meet the gazes of strangers was dangerous. Her mom said, “You are moving to the city now. You will no longer be able to look at anyone.” Leda looked at anyone. She would look at men and catch their stares floating in the underground current. Yes, I will sleep with you, her stare would say, but not really, because I am only looking at you, and I wouldn’t sleep with you anyway. Sometimes men would meet her stare; sometimes they wouldn’t. Her fragility and feelings of linearity hung in the balance so thinly that her sense of self could inflate or deflate in the precious few seconds of a stranger’s glance. It was a troubling and weightless system of moment-by-moment worthiness or worthlessness. It was exhausting and oftentimes depressing. Sometimes so much so that she wouldn’t bother with it at all and would look at her phone instead.
The train was mostly empty. There was a man in a suit to her right. He wasn’t looking at her. She leaned her head back against the seat. The subway was warm, and she was almost too hot in her coat. For a moment she thought about taking it off but decided against it after remembering what she was wearing. She’d recently ordered a shirt from an online store called Amour Vert. All the clothes were made of tree pulp or vegan silk. If you spent more than two hundred dollars they’d plant a tree. She’d wanted the blouse in a print of delicate yellow flowers, “wildflower” they’d called it, but it was sold out in her size so she went with the green stripes instead. Now that it was hers she thought she liked the green stripes more. It flattered her complexion, she thought, and it made her look linear, she thought. By a happenstance of so little she would never be the girl who wore yellow flowers and because of it she’d be convinced she liked green stripes. Either way the blouse was too sheer to be worn comfortably on the subway, even if just in front of the guy in the suit who wouldn’t look at her.
She lifted her head back up and pulled off her gloves. First she tucked them into each other and placed them on her lap, then in her bag, then she thought better of it and put them in her coat pocket. This was how it was in the wintertime as she made her way from train to school and home again; the panic and the subsequent relief that she hadn’t lost her gloves were a triumph realized multiple times a week. The lost gloves of her life would be left in the places as follows: two subways, a park bench, a bagel shop, a boat. The boat was a rowboat, and the glove was her father’s. It was a big leather glove borrowed from him as they went fishing the single time in her life she would ever go fishing. He told her a story about a radiator, and she felt sick from the tide. The long, narrow blue horizon grayed as the weather turned to rain. He rowed them back to shore, and she watched her father struggle with the oars. She felt younger than she was until she saw him struggle. At that moment she realized she was an adult now, and her father struggled with rowing. She didn’t remember the glove until he asked for it later, and then she knew she’d lost it. It was the left glove.
The subway rolled beneath her, pulling through the only stop that was aboveground. Suddenly, the car filled with natural light and the people became instantly softer. Outside she could see the city unfolding rapidly. The buildings, a park, the people were too small to see from the train. Then as quickly as everything was before her it sunk away back into the underground of artificial light.
The next stop was hers. As she got up she saw a small child holding a piece of colored chalk. The little girl looked around dazedly and tried to draw on the subway door. Her mother pulled her back, and the child dropped the chalk. Leda watched her look for it but instantly forget it as her mother handed her a little plastic flower. The girl spun the flower in her hand and smiled. Leda couldn’t see the chalk, but she worried about it rolling around loose behind them. She wished she could say, “Your chalk. You forgot about your chalk.” She watched the little girl walk off ahead of her, holding her mother’s hand and spinning the flower. She stepped off the train and checked for her gloves. They were still in her pocket. She looked back for the chalk, not that she would have picked it up, but to see if it was there. It wasn’t, but she thought she’d heard it rolling as the train roared away.
CHAPTER 5
Writing
Leda got home and threw off her jeans. It was late afternoon, and the sunshine was still brilliant and warming, filtering in through the half-drawn blinds left neglected from morning. She played an Édith Piaf record, and then a song by a band she couldn’t remember the name of. It was something like “Leelong,” but it wasn’t Leelong. She changed into a white tank top and her bad underwear, turned the heat down, stretched out on the floor, and flipped through a magazine. Her bare feet were pressed up against the wall, and she kicked in beat with the music. The magazine article was about fifty ways to please a man in bed. How stupid, she thought. Most of them don’t even know one way to please a woman.
“Try dressing up as a naughty nurse and use a stethoscope to hear your man’s heartbeat pound away!” it read.
Leda imagined that there were many sad women reading this article and doing tentative Google searches for stethoscopes, and perhaps even a few went through with the whole charade. Somewhere in the world right now a woman is holding a stethoscope and a penis at the same time, she thought. She flipped through the rest of the magazine, smelled a perfume sample, and took a quiz entitled: “What Kind of Sexual Warrior Are You?” which yielded the result: “You are fierce and relentless. No man can get out from under you, and that isn’t a bad thing!” Leda wondered who wrote the quiz and how they came up with the criteria for the descriptions. What a depressing job, she thought, but she still appreciated it. It was nice to be a sexual warrior. She could agree that she was fierce and relentless, so much better than “coy and demure,” as another description read. After a while everything was boring in the way it always was, her apartment, sitting around, the magazine, the music, her bare feet pressed up against the wall. She thought back to the train, and the walk home, and the smell of her neighbor’s cooking, something peppery and bright. The day had reminded her of a story she’d thought of writing about cherries. She got out her computer and started typing.
The summer I went from a C cup to a D cup was the best summer of my life. I’d started work at a cherry stand and the long days of sitting, as well as the incremental sugary snacks, had caused me to gain a little over ten pounds. All of July I was in denial but by August I’d started to note the difference, so I’d skip breakfast or walk to work. I never attempted to lose the weight in any significant way, and, in retrospect, there must have
been some kind of subconscious attempt on my part to preserve it because as soon as I could no longer wear my smallest clothes I found a certain solace, a liberation in no longer caring. Before that I’d spent so much time and concern over my weight, but the day I switched bras marked a march toward the heaviest and ultimately the freest I would ever be.
Leda sat up and reread what she wrote and thought it was okay but lacked a certain polish. She braided a braid in her hair and looked at her knees. One of them she’d missed when shaving. She’d spend much of her life with unshaven, or nearly unshaven, legs. There would only be two occasions that she’d actually shave in the way she had intended. One was a Wednesday at the age of thirty-seven and one was a Sunday at the age of fourteen. She’d never consider leg hair removal to be a failure of her life, but really it was.
That night she finished her story, ate pizza, and masturbated before bed. She thought of a man tying her up and having sex with her from behind. The man was no one in particular because it wasn’t about him. When she slept she dreamt of fifty ways to cherry, and when she woke up she rewrote the ending to her story twice.
CHAPTER 6
Workshop
“I really don’t get the ending,” the girl across from her said. “Are we supposed to feel sorry for the main character? Because I really don’t. And it’s boring. Why do I care?”
“I don’t really have a problem with the ending, but I feel that the cherry thing is too heavy-handed. It’s clearly an allusion to virginity,” the boy two seats down said.
Leda dreaded her Thursday class all week. It was a fiction workshop given by the editor in chief of her university’s prestigious literary journal. She’d registered for the class seconds after registration had opened under the influence of friends who’d said things to the effect of: “You have to take a class with Patricia Rainer!” “Patricia is the best!” “It will change your life!” The very first day Patricia Rainer came to class in a coat with a fox hair collar and Leda thought, I’m not going to get along with this person.
The class itself was populated by hipsters who name-dropped Jack Kerouac and small-batch coffee roasters. They were edgy. They were clean. They held crippling insecurities managed by entitlement and a distaste for popular music. It was not uncommon for many of them to rip into a story with the kind of zeal that could only be attributed to a lingering despondency related to their parents’ divorce or some such problem. This was what Leda held on to as the skinny girl across from her with the bralette and pinched face tore her story apart. Leda would think, Maybe you should take up ice-skating and then you would have more confidence and wouldn’t feel the need to tell everyone they are terrible. You are only sad because you are terrible, but ice-skating may help you feel better about yourself.
“I also think it’s heavy-handed, but I think it only comes across that way because nothing happens. It’s a story about nothing,” Pinched Bralette said.
“I don’t have a problem with that, though. Just ’cause it’s about nothing doesn’t mean nothing happens,” the boy beside her said.
His name was Nick and Leda had been in two classes with him in the past, including a poetry workshop. She remembered this one poem he wrote about being in the woods with his father. He used the word evergreen and she thought that was nice. They never spoke much outside of class, but they did have one conversation standing in line for the elevator. He’d asked her what she was taking next semester and told her about a place nearby that gave out free sandwiches on Fridays. As he spoke she thought he seemed like someone who had never touched breasts before, a sense she derived from an almost indiscernible nervousness in the way he breathed, a sound that could be described as an almost whistle at each inhale. Upon noticing it she felt taller and more luminous. For the most part she lived her life thinking of herself as a person, Leda. But then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of the cold harsh common dregs of patriarchy, some man would jump up and remind her she was in fact not a person at all but a woman. Usually it was derogatory, but on rare occurrences, as it was with Nick, it would remind her of the blissful and unequivocal truth: they were afraid of her. All of them. It made her feel limitless and powerful. No longer human at all, something more, something greater, a superhero flying through the sky and sinking away the breaths of all mortal men.
She was happy that Nick had found it in himself to defend her work against Pinched Bralette. Pinched Bralette, who was otherwise known as Abby, doodled on a notepad as he spoke.
“I thought the perspective was really nice,” he said. Pinched Bralette looked up for a second, squinted her eyes, and went back to drawing. Go ahead and draw, asshole, Leda thought.
She waited patiently as the conversation turned from whether her piece was boring or not to whether Cleo was a good choice of a name for her main character. One girl said: “I like Cleo, but I think she seems more like a blond than a brunette, but maybe that’s just me.” Leda underlined “Cleo” in her notes, writing, “blond?” in the margin.
Leda was not permitted to speak until the end of the workshop, but if she could have spoken she would have said, “But what about the polish of it? Does it lack a certain polish that keeps it from being any good?” But she couldn’t, so she just sat there and nodded, silently unanswered.
As the critique came to an end, Patricia, who had formally said little more than the occasional “Ummhmm,” began to stir as if she were planning on speaking. Throughout the workshop, Leda kept looking at her for at least some kind of facial reaction, but the professor looked as dull and unassuming as the gray-blue turtleneck she wore. Finally, after Pinched Bralette said, “You know, you should really read Big Sur by Jack Kerouac,” Patricia spoke.
“That’s an excellent suggestion, Abby. Jack Kerouac is one of my absolute favorites.” She nodded thoughtfully at Abby, and then turned to face Leda and took a big breath in her very calm and particular manner.
“I think there are a lot of things working with this piece. I very much appreciate the use of the cherry stand. It gives the story a sort of rural quality that I quite like. I don’t think it’s a story about nothing, but I have to say, I think, Leda, you need to really consider what it is you’re saying here. In this case your heroine is a sort of superwoman. She has risen above any personal insecurities or vulnerabilities. She’s almost a poster child of this feminist ideal. And as much as I appreciate the idea that you are getting at with that, I think you may have more to offer us than this.”
The room was quiet and maliciously still. Patricia had such control over the way she spoke that it seemed to forbid the possibility of any interruption. Leda didn’t notice any of it though; she didn’t even really consider the way Patricia spoke or the soft way she turned the paper in her hand. She just heard what she said and sat there feeling smaller and smaller. Her story and its cherry stand melting away into an oblivion witnessed by twelve hipsters and herself in mortifying silence.
When she got home she heated up some soup, but she hadn’t done it right because it exploded all over the microwave. She ate a sandwich instead, but the cheese was old and dried out. She called her mom as she ate.
“I hate workshops. I always leave and think, ‘I’ll never look at that story again,’ ” she said.
“I understand that, but you can’t get so down on yourself. You know you’re a great writer,” her mom said.
“Do I know I’m a great writer? I feel like a failure.”
“Stop it! You’re not a failure.”
Leda always called her mom to complain about everything terrible in her life. Most conversations ended with her saying something to the effect of “And I’m getting fat” and her mom telling her she was not getting fat. Her mom understood precisely what made her tick. What pulsing affirmation was needed to get her through from day to day and week to week and month to month and year to year. Leda called, and her mom answered, and they loved each other like one, two, three. Easy, fresh,
perfect.
“I thought you said you didn’t even like this professor,” her mom said.
“I don’t like her. Well, I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t like her; it’s just that I feel like, she basically said the whole story is a joke. That I don’t know what I’m talking about. It just makes me think that maybe I just don’t know anything. Maybe I’m just believing all this stuff about myself, and none of it’s true.”
“I think you’re giving the whole thing too much thought right now. Go to bed. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Okay, but I’m also getting fat.”
“You’re not fat, Leda! I love you. And you are a great writer. Don’t forget that, ever.”
Leda let herself eat an entire bag of Hershey’s Kisses that night. She thought about Pinched Bralette and sexless Nick. She tried not to think about what Patricia said, but whenever she did she’d feel a burning in her chest and her ears would buzz a little. It was nervousness or sadness or the feeling of uncertainty that she’d become so accustomed to, a feeling that would be familiar all her life. The next morning she did feel better, but she never went back to the cherry stand story. Years later she’d find a copy of it and read the first paragraph. It did lack polish.
CHAPTER 7
Showering
The prospect of a hot shower was sometimes the only reason to walk, to move, to let the day pass by like a reflection. There was so much misery and boredom in day-to-day life but showering was a momentary respite from it all, the steam, the warmth, the limitless possibility that filtered through the sound of the water pounding her back. Anything is possible, and I am naked, she would think, insulated by the shelter of the shower curtain.