The woman waited for Jayne’s answer, tilting the pack in her direction, a pleasantly neutral expression on her face. She shook the pack slightly. One cigarette slid invitingly out.
Jayne felt touched, by the graciousness of the gesture. Just right, friendly but not pushy. Nicely anonymous. No names had been exchanged. If interrogated later, neither could say who the other was. The woman continued to hold the pack tilted toward Jayne, not looking at it.
“I never buy them,” the woman was saying. “I found these.” She tapped her cigarette once, as if in punctuation, and the ash fell off in the snow. “In the break room, at work.”
What little Jayne could see of the woman, between her hat and her scarf—a stripe of glossy brown forehead, flashing brown eyes, pink lipstick—smiled. Stuck to one of her straight white teeth was a single fleck of tobacco. She took another deep, thoughtful drag. “They’re not even my brand,” she said, exhaling.
“They’re mine,” Jayne said.
The woman crinkled her eyes at that. Like the devil, Jayne thought. Debonair. As if she already knew they were Jayne’s brand, and had conjured them, for her pleasure. This is how these things start, Jayne knew. Half of temptation was social obligation. At this point it seemed rude not to accept.
The woman shook the pack again as if reading Jayne’s thoughts.
“Thanks,” Jayne said.
• • •
Jayne placed the cool papery cylinder between her dry lips, the fruity smell twice as sharp in the cold. Even unlit it was delicious. The woman clicked her lighter and a flame sprang up close to Jayne’s face.
She inhaled cold and hot at the same time, feeling dizzy as the familiar poison spread. The women smiled at each other. Jayne had forgotten what a good, clubbish feeling this was, this sisterhood of nicotine.
They smoked in silence for a minute, focused on the pleasure.
“My husband doesn’t know I smoke,” the woman said, holding her cigarette up and addressing it as if it were a small person who ought to be included in the conversation. Jayne nodded.
“He won’t smell it?” she said. The woman made a smiling frown and shook her head. Then she patted Horatio, tossed her lipstick-stained butt into the snow, and turned back in the direction she’d come.
“Have a nice day,” she said, over her shoulder.
• • •
When Jayne got home she brushed her teeth. Now she pulled into the bowling alley parking lot.
Lydia: 3:00 P.M.
Lydia went upstairs, to her office, to get a fresh yellow tablet. She wanted to make a list of everything left to do, but as soon as she entered the room, its lulling chaos, the piles of out-of-order personal history, surrounded and sedated her. She sat down—just a minute’s rest, she thought—and looked at the little patch of desktop she’d cleared a few days earlier. The neat spot comprised only a few hundred square inches but seemed huge, an oasis of order amid the palimpsest of creative dead ends heaped around it.
Lydia merely had to reach her arms in any direction and stir paper to uncover years’ worth of false starts—half-read clippings, sketches for paintings, course proposals, notes for unfinished essays. Beneath that was other, harder-to-look-at stuff—letters, postcards, the dreaded and ever-present mementoes. What was one supposed to do with these things? The letters, especially, gave off residual sparks of the emotions they’d first aroused, and not only warmth. Guilt sometimes, or envy. Or that old standby, regret.
She’d been cleaning, or trying to, but she’d only made things worse. Every object, every slip of paper, called up a world of possibility within a world of too many possibilities. She didn’t know what to do with any of it so she set the paper down and picked up another. Not a single scrap was meaningless. Or rather, not a single scrap was any more meaningless than any other. She couldn’t throw out any of it or, if she did, she might as well throw it all out. What to do with a charmingly designed teabag wrapper from a trip to Wales, that had traveled back to Chicago in her blue jeans pocket and showed up when she went to do the wash? She’d stashed it in a drawer; now, enhanced by time, it reminded her of when she and Spence were happy. Or a ticket stub from a pleasant evening of outdoor music, or a subway map for a city she hadn’t been to in eleven years, or a stone from a beach in Wisconsin? She had friends who would put it all in labeled drawers, but they were a different sort of person than she was. To Lydia, that was tantamount to burial.
• • •
Burial. The thought brought her back to the present, the looming possibility that had made her think it was time to put things in order in the first place. She needed to organize her effects for those who would take over when she was gone, if such a thing happened, lest they throw it all away. Which she supposed is what would happen anyway. Probably the most decent thing to do would be to save them the trouble and throw it out herself, now, she thought. The rudeness of not doing so, of leaving someone else to confront this mess, made her feel embarrassed, but the thought that there were things here that someone might actually want had delayed the process.
If only she were more decisive, like Elaine, Lydia thought, recalling the ceremonial pitching of the blue books.
Lydia plucked a rubber-banded stack of years-old, unanswered Christmas cards from a pile and dropped it—bravely, decisively—into the wastebasket. There, that wasn’t so hard, she thought. She had been meaning to sort her things for some time now, years, honestly. But while she waffled, things kept piling up. Unread books, old letters, birthday cards. Recipes, to-do lists, photos of friends with their children or their beloved animals, photos of Maxine. It was all a depressing reminder of the passage of time, not to mention a reminder of her inability to place one thing in importance over another, a trait that had gotten her where she was today, she knew.
• • •
Lydia opened a drawer. Here, under a little packet of rubber bands, was a valentine from her mother, dead for thirteen years. She couldn’t throw it out now. Drawings, drifts of them, sat on the floor gathering dust. A cliché for a reason, she thought—it was literally true. Her drawings, which used to excite her, had gathered actual dust and made her sneeze.
Just last week she’d forced herself to start to sift through them. She’d spent Sunday afternoon with a pile on her lap and another pile on her drawing table, sorting them into more piles—good, bad, and indifferent—but there were so many other ways to see them that soon she had eight piles, then eleven, each a different category. Soon they covered the floor and she’d had to set little notes on each pile with the name of the category written across it—Store. Recycle. More interesting sewn together with colored thread? Better as poems? Shred! She stopped altogether when she came to her Irreducible Truths.
She’d worked on them for the better part of a year, every morning at dawn, before she walked Maxine. For forty-five minutes a day, she’d written over and over on a single dated page. She’d set a kitchen timer and started at the top and when she got to the bottom she went back to the top and continued, until the page was torn and illegible and the time was up. At first she just wrote as if she were keeping an ordinary journal. The genius in that was that if Spence found it he wouldn’t be able to read it. But that soon came to feel meaningless, not only because the overwriting obliterated the text but in the way that all journals do, with their forced philosophy and endless fretting. Lydia wanted to move beyond that. She began to think of the writing as a meditation, written chanting. That’s when she came up with the idea of irreducible truths—writing one true thing over and over.
After that, every day, she wrote a new irreducible truth for a set amount of time. She wrote until her hand hurt and the words were illegible, until the pen tore through the paper. As she wrote she counted. Sometimes she wrote the Lord’s Prayer, or a verse from the Bible, or a line from a poem, or just something she thought was true. On the back of each dated page, written lightly in pencil,
she recorded that day’s truth and the number of times she’d written it. Animals are perfect. 78X. Be here now. 117X. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. 153X. Now she had piles of what must be hundreds of them, all looking like gibberish. She’d imagined she was working toward a show, to which she planned to invite Norris, or at least toward enlightenment, but she’d had to stop. Her hand started to cramp.
• • •
Now it just looked crazy. And what did any of it amount to anyway, Lydia thought, looking around at her piles of dusty paper. Why had she wasted her time? What had once seemed meaningful was no longer. Lydia gathered up her Irreducible Truths and dumped them in the trash.
Elaine: Mid-Afternoon
Elaine was cleaning the kitchen, as she did every Saturday afternoon. When in doubt, throw it out was her policy.
She knew exactly how the party would go. Sometime between the second and third glass of wine someone would want to talk about politics. Then they’d start to argue. They, not Elaine but the others, felt it was important to be passionate. What a load, she thought, tossing that day’s newspaper into the recycling bin without even taking it out of its plastic sleeve.
The one item Elaine most wanted to throw out, she couldn’t. She averted her eyes from the glossy real estate brochure, the one for the Florida retirement “village” where her sister lived and into which she was trying to install Elaine. Now that their mother was dead, her sister pointed out, there was no reason for Elaine to stay in Chicago. Elaine didn’t know how to tell her sister that even if she had wanted to leave her whole life behind to move into some sweltering swamp of a country club where she was expected to learn how to play cards, which she most certainly did not want, that she couldn’t. She couldn’t move to a place where they didn’t allow pets. Someday she might want another dog. Besides, how could she move away from here and leave their mother alone in that snow-covered cemetery? But Elaine couldn’t throw the brochure out until she’d composed some kind of placating reply.
Paradise, it said on the cover, in thick, loopy orange type that Elaine knew was intended to subliminally suggest a sunset. Sunset Village. The note her sister had stuck to it said “three still left with causeway views!” Elaine slipped the glossy thing out of sight, between the well-thumbed pages of her old paperback copy of Middlemarch, which she’d been rereading at breakfast, and went back to tidying up.
It happened every year, these political arguments. That’s when she used to volunteer to walk the dogs, though she didn’t dare now, in her state, on this ice. Maybe tonight she’d take the opportunity to load the dishwasher instead. The running water should drown them out nicely.
She didn’t want to hear about it, their politics. Didn’t believe in it anymore. She’d come to think of it as a man sham—that’s what she called it in her imagined conversations with her mother. It’s no choice at all, Mom, she imagined saying to her. It’s just a bunch of suited-up men of the fortunate class, flapping their silk neckties at each other.
Elaine had supported Hillary, when she ran in the primaries, in 2008, though her younger friends had laughed at her. Gender was a red herring, they’d told her. Hillary would be more of the same. Elaine wasn’t so sure. At least she would have liked the chance to find out.
• • •
Fact was, all that interested Elaine anymore was women.
She couldn’t remember when it started. Without even noticing, she’d let her friendships with men lapse—or maybe the men had. She’d never married. As for romance, she hadn’t been on a date in eighteen years. Even in politics, it was only women that interested her now and not even the politicians, usually, that bunch of pantsuits. She was more interested in watching the dragged-along wives, with their sly lipsticked smiles. She wondered what they were thinking, standing there looking so pretty and so stifled. She suspected them of the same subversive thoughts she would have been having, though she never would have been there in the first place. Not nearly pretty enough.
Elaine imagined saying this to her mother, who wouldn’t disagree, but would take a big slurp of coffee and nod. Facts were facts as far as she was concerned. She was just as happy Elaine hadn’t been a hit with the boys. Look where pretty got her, she’d said once, to Elaine, pointing out some sad-faced former homecoming queen at the grocery store, pushing a cartful of squalling kids.
None of the others who’d be there tonight had any patience for this sort of thinking, Elaine knew. That’s not politics, that’s gossip, Jayne would say, whenever Elaine wondered about the wives. Elaine didn’t care, though sometimes even she wondered why she was so interested, never having been a wife herself. She liked to read about women bureaucrats, too, the anonymous workers who once in a blue moon showed up in the news, looking like opossums when you turned on the porch light. It was the sort of job that would have suited her, Elaine thought, if her father hadn’t railroaded her into becoming a teacher. She’d ended up an English teacher, of all things, as if she cared whether the great unwashed ever learned how to punctuate a sentence. Truly, she didn’t.
She would have liked to work for the government, she thought. She would have worn a navy blue suit and a white blouse every single day. Brooksley Born—now there was an interesting woman. If she’d been a man they might have listened to her; there might not have been a mortgage crisis. Though if there hadn’t been, Elaine thought, she wouldn’t have an excuse to not move to Florida. As it was, she could always claim she couldn’t move until she sold her condo.
Of course, the one who interested Elaine most was Hillary.
But she is a suit, everyone had yelled, back when Elaine still bothered to voice an opinion.
Elaine didn’t care. She’d voted for her. She’d even, in her one and only moment of political activism, campaigned for her. True, she’d been younger then. Walking door-to-door wasn’t the ordeal it would become, even two years later. At the very least, she’d thought, trudging along with her briefcase full of pamphlets, she was burning calories. But it had been a commitment, too, making enemies like that. People had slammed doors. The difference between doing it and not doing it was everything, she’d realized, then. It changed you, and when you lost, that changed you again. She was too old to lose now. She didn’t recover, didn’t forgive. And now she didn’t care.
She kept her mouth shut about all that now. Everyone under a certain age looked at you sideways if you admitted you’d voted for Hillary, young women especially, like Norris. They thought there was something off about you, like tainted milk, that you were past your expiration date.
What Elaine didn’t tell anyone was that she’d cried the night Hillary suspended her campaign. Silly, she thought—some old bag in bed all alone, crying over an election. She’d surprised herself. Who cried anymore about anything, at this age? Why bother? It only made things worse.
That night, Elaine dreamed about her mother. They’d been stranded together at O’Hare. Their plane couldn’t take off. Elaine had woken up in a sweat thinking, We can’t get off the ground, then felt relief—it was just a dream—and fell back to sleep. But there she was again, back in the airport, and there was her mother, still waiting for her on the other side of sleep, in one those plastic airport chairs with her little zippered fake leather suitcase on her lap and her knee-high stockings drooping around her ankles, trusting Elaine to get her on a plane and off the ground. But Elaine couldn’t do it. It made her sick to think of all the ways she’d failed her mother.
Hillary had grown up in a Republican suburb north of Chicago, not that far from Evanston, where Elaine lived now. Elaine had driven out of her way, more than once, to pass the house, back when it looked like Hil could win. Once she’d parked outside. She’d taken a road map out of the glove compartment and sat across the street with the map in her lap, like she was lost, in case she looked suspicious, if that were even possible in a Subaru. She’d sat there under the special street
sign that said Rodham Corner—posted up high so it wouldn’t get stolen—trying to imagine the young Hillary carrying her schoolbooks up the front steps. After a while she’d driven around the block, twice, hoping for a glimpse into the backyard, but the yard was fenced and there wasn’t much to see. She’d driven into the little suburban downtown, then parked her car and took a walk.
Not much there, either, just the usual banks and chain restaurants, boutiques selling expensive, useless stuff. Most of the shops looked new, like they wouldn’t have been there when Hillary was. Elaine peeked in the window of the oldest-looking place she could find, a coffee shop connected to an old movie theater. She wasn’t hungry exactly, but she wanted something, some excuse to stay and soak up whatever Hillary essence she could. Hillaressence.
The place was empty, but there it was, the Sign of Hillary, behind the cash register—a framed photograph of her with Barbara Walters, both of them coiffed and beaming, in pantsuits, posing with the restaurant staff. There’d been a television interview there, according to a plaque posted beneath the photo.
Elaine had taken a seat in a cracked vinyl booth by the window, in view of the photo, and waited. After a while a man came out of the kitchen and looked at her, then went back into the kitchen. Then a girl came out and walked to her table and set a greasy water glass down in front of her and handed her a huge plastic menu.
Elaine had ordered the Hillary Burger. The thing that made it different from a regular burger, according to the menu, was the topping—a little mound of chopped green olives. I wouldn’t call it tapenade, Elaine imagined saying to her mother, imagining that she was sitting across from her. Her mother would have grunted and scraped the olives off.
The burger was all right, a little dry. Elaine thought they should have made more of an effort, a special sauce, maybe, tangy mayonnaise at least. According to a blurb in the menu the place had been Hillary’s “favorite haunt” when she was a girl, and the olive burger her “favorite treat.” She liked to go there after a double feature at the movie house next door, the menu said. It seemed unlikely to Elaine, Hillary wasting her time that way, but you never knew.
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