by Carol Anshaw
No one is listening to her. Everyone in the room is magnetized by the bad news flooding out of the TV. It’s as though the television is in meltdown, but of course it is actually the country.
The pool trick doesn’t work this time. She’s the only one in the water, sequestered for an hour, but driving home, the radio is a torrent of gloom. Sailor meets her at the door. Graham is in front of the TV in the living room, which is running but with the sound off. He’s on the floor, rolling and covering his head. He’s not saying anything, just rolling back and forth.
She crouches down beside him. She rubs her hand over his hair. She scratches Sailor’s chest. “Guys, I think I’m going to take an Ambien and go to sleep. I just can’t think about this anymore tonight.”
Maureen calls. She was at what was supposed to be a victory party, but everyone is just going home now. “Nobody even said good night. They were like miners going into their own private tunnels.”
“Let’s talk in the morning. I know waking up will be slamming into an abutment, but eight hours of whatever’s just happened will have passed.”
* * *
One of the happiest moments of Cate’s life was in front of another TV, eight years ago, waiting through another set of returns, when Barack took Ohio, and so the presidency. Now all that is about to be pulled inside out.
Even medicated, she can’t sleep. In the kitchen, Graham is still up.
“How will the world survive this?” he asks. It’s 4:30 a.m. He’s sitting at the island, hunched over, drinking coffee. His ponytail has come undone; his hair hangs Christlike to his shoulders; he’s in his own private Gethsemane. “The people who voted for him. I feel like I should have gone and talked with each of them. Brought charts, scientific articles, photos of melting glaciers, dying polar bears, shown the value of immigrants, how much better it is to consider races and genders equal. I should have told them coal mining isn’t making a comeback.”
“This is very bad, but a lot of it was mechanical malfunction. Too many things are wrong with the machinery. All the gerrymandering. The voter suppression, the low turnout. The obsolescence of the electoral college. Many more people voted for Hillary, but we’re going to have him for president. We need to sit with this for a while,” Cate says. “Then get to work turning it around. Get inside the wheelhouse and start pushing against the heavy wheel.”
“The surveillance is going to get much worse.”
“Let’s take a break. Let’s walk this dog.” Sailor concurs by swiping at the back of her shin. “When things get bad, he always worries it’s about him.”
duck egg
She stands in the ankle-deep water that slides across the sandbar, kicked up into spray by the dogs running its length, then back again. The water is a cold that eventually becomes bearable. The sky holds the vibrant blue of renewal, a postcard of spring. All well and good, except this is the second week of November. (The first week, it was raining, then freezing.) Through the morning, the temperature has drifted up to seventy. Of course this can’t be right, and is surely a harbinger of floods and fires to come, dust storms, mud sliding into living rooms, deadly whirling winds plucking off roofs. Still, it’s impossible, just for today, not to be viscerally thrilled.
Sailor leads a pack of dogs he has whipped into a lather. Most are not as fast as he is, and drop away after one sweeping circuit out of the lake, onto the beach then back into the water. By then he is left with only another big dog—a loose-limbed Ridgeback. They fool around a little, chest-bump, then go down to the lake for a drink. Sizing up the possibility of friendship, finding a match in size and weight, energy level, good smell. The two of them slam against each other as they run in sync, taking the turns wide, angled low. From the side, they look like a single dog in motion, and then they are out of the water, up on the beach, then back in again. Cate has noticed that these sorts of temporary attachments, once formed, are exclusive. For their short duration, they are powerful. If a third dog tries to edge in, he gets barked away.
Watching Sailor run is a furious pleasure. He’s an Olympian in his prime. Cate is a forty-two-year-old woman with crappy knees from too much running on concrete through her twenties and thirties. She will never know what it feels like to be young and light on four legs. Tuning in to Sailor is the closest she will get. He watches her peripherally. Then, as he passes, spraying Cate lightly with the water flying off his fur, he looks back at her and grins. The dog beach is about him, but it is also about the two of them together. It is where she is learning about dogs. She’s a beginner. Graham never comes along with them; he is plageophobic, also anxious about melanoma.
A significant number of the surprised have shown up. The beach resembles its summer version—bustling with dogs and humans. People are dressed in variations on a new climate-change style—autumn resort casual. A lot of parkas with shorts. T-shirts and wool watch caps. November is the new August.
Sailor and his friend are now standing side by side, stock-still, biting hard on opposite ends of a short branch. Their serious jaws are clamped tight in a silent, stationary battle of wills. And then the stick loses all value and they are boxing in the shallow water. She doesn’t sense the presence of another human until a hand wraps around her arm just above the elbow, thumb pressing hard into her tricep, a gesture so familiar, so stupidly arousing.
Everything about Dana is trip-wired. Distance is Cate’s strongest line of defense and when Cate insisted—this was about a year ago—Dana reluctantly agreed to stay away, but now she appears to have gone rogue. Even not counting her stalking Cate on Clark Street by Kopi, this is the second time in the past few weeks she has turned up. The first was maybe accidental—maybe—at the Jewel, in front of the fish case. Cate was looking at the different kinds of salmon. She was just about to say “Coho” to the fish guy when she noticed Dana over at the meat counter and so did a one-eighty into the cereal aisle in a determined way, as though her cart was pulling her along like an old lawn mower. So that was the Jewel. Dana doesn’t go to the supermarket to buy meat. She owns a restaurant and gets her groceries wholesale. Today is one step farther over the line. Since Dana doesn’t have a dog, a chance meeting at the dog beach has zero element of chance to it.
Cate turns and runs into a bit of trouble getting to “hi.” She can’t even look straight at Dana. Even now, she isn’t up to that. Even now, she is only up to looking at Dana’s feet, blocky, with an errant hammertoe on the right. She has taken off her shoes and socks and is now, like Cate, up to her ankles in zippy-cold water. The starter switch of hope flips inside Cate, followed by discouragement that she still feels this much. And that’s what it is—all feeling. Electric impulses light up in tear ducts and pulse points, private parts (which suddenly feel much less private).
Breaking free from Dana was one of the original pieces of Plan C—her taking-charge plan, authoring her own narrative, blah, blah, blah. Moments like this, though, make having a plan seem ridiculous. But maybe Dana coming here means something’s up. Something big. Like breaking up with her girlfriend. But all she has to say for herself is “I’m sorry. For bothering you. I just miss you too much.”
“Oh man, I hope so. But this is exactly what you are supposed to not be doing. This is still the part where you stay away and I get over you. And anyway, shouldn’t you be asleep now? Why am I seeing you in daylight?”
“Scouting out provisions. I’m just back from Indiana. There’s a woman in Michigan City who raises ducks for eggs. Have you ever tasted a duck egg? They’re fabulous. Deep-orange yolks.” She pulls one out of her jacket pocket, hands it to Cate.
“I just had gold leaf on a coddled egg the other night,” Cate says.
“I know that place. A lot of, you know, sophistication going around these days.”
Dana’s place, Toaster, is a retro-hip twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Lincoln. She works on a higher plane than gilded eggs. Scrambled duck eggs fit the narrative of her menu. Parisian baguettes she bakes herself. Nothing arch, jus
t better in terms of ingredients and preparation. Working on a play a block away—this goes back to the beginning, years ago—Cate and Adam Pryor and Lonnie McKeen, the lighting designer, would get together there for tech meetings. The attraction Cate felt toward Dana was so dense it had its own place in the booth. One night as they were leaving, Dana slipped Cate her cell number on a pack of matches, like they were in a 1940s detective movie.
At first it was just about sex, a secret affair. The secret part was so Dana’s girlfriend, Jody, wouldn’t get hurt. Jody is embedded in Dana’s life because of something Dana at first didn’t want to elaborate on. Initially Cate took this to mean Jody was fragile and needed to be taken care of. But it turned out the obligation was rather Jody having saved Dana. The specifics of the rescue were cards Dana kept chested for a time, but eventually laid down as troubles with addiction. Until then Cate had thought cocaine was an occupational hazard mainly for rock musicians and stock traders. But apparently apprenticing in high-wattage kitchens was, for Dana anyway, more manageable with coke. And then the coke was the problem. And then with some incredible amount of patience, a draining of their accounts for high-end rehabs, Jody pulled her out of all that. Dana thinks she owes her life to Jody. How can Cate get in the way of that? How can she even want to?
But when she tried to pull back, she found her principles had been shredded by desire. Principles lay in ribbons around her feet. She had allowed herself to fall into a ridiculous sort of heart-throbbing love based on small, colorful explosions of urgent sex and careless revelation. Huge amounts of self-exposure made possible by containment in a cloister. Over time, these revelations accumulated into a potent sort of knowing obtained by confession. Eventually, she and Dana found themselves in a place where they knew each other better than they knew anyone in their real lives.
Cate’s life was a cycle of concentrated time with Dana followed by delicious aftermath. Cologne trapped in a scarf. The chorus of a song, maybe “Stolen Dance” played on Dana’s cell as it rested on a box of four hundred eggs, then later turning up on the radio while Cate was driving. Then the thuddy drop into the gray scale of actual life. Then the longing, then the return to the scene of the crime for another crime or two.
The GPS and time stamp of the affair were the hour between Dana arriving at Toaster for the night shift—relieving the day cook and waitress—and the arrival of Felipé, who worked the front of the restaurant at night while Dana cooked and also did the baking for the day to come. Or on the other end, the nights when Cate, sleepless anyway, would drive over to Toaster at six in the morning to grab a cup of coffee, then a bit of making out in the freezer before Dana was expected home. Once in a while Dana engineered a situation where she could get away to meet Cate at her apartment or workshop.
From the first, Cate wanted more of Dana than she was ever able to get. It wasn’t a good position, always wanting more. This never brings out the best in anyone. It went on until Cate stopped liking herself. At that point she thought: Enough. Stopping was harder than she’d imagined it would be, but she did it, and she has stuck to it.
But even right now, having successfully come through over a year’s withdrawal, and with her good reasons still marshaled, Cate’s resolve has drifted into a small fantasy in which Dana suggests a cup of coffee. Then the small but peppy sex mouse in Cate’s brain starts scrambling around to think what coffee shop nearby might have a single-occupant bathroom. She feels sensible for confining the fantasy in this way. Running with it would allow visualizing just a stall, in any restroom, even one in a scary park bathroom with sheet-metal mirrors and broken locks and puddled floors. Worst, she can tell that Dana, standing inside Cate’s silence, has sensed the existence, if not the particulars, of the fantasy.
* * *
Sailor comes whipping by. Cate doesn’t bother telling Dana that he’s her dog. Dana doesn’t need to know her dog. Dana no longer has any sort of purchase on her. Cate turns back to look hard at the horizon where the lake is steaming up a little, the last of the recent rain lifting off. She hates how much she feels exactly now, when she would have hoped to feel nothing.
Sailor loops around, then jumps up to put his front paws on Dana’s shoulders and bounce off. Of course he’d like her.
“Could we get together tonight, late? You know, to talk. I’m so flipped about everything, our country. My mind folds in on itself when I try to make sense of what just happened. And my own life without you. I need to talk. Jody’s out of town. Her sister’s having a lump removed from the back of her neck.”
“Cancer?”
“No, it’s some better kind of lump. A cyst maybe? But her sister wants Jody’s support anyway. Their family is basically one group hug.”
This is a rare piece of domestic revelation, that Dana’s house would be vacant enough tonight for Cate to pay a visit. Cate waits a beat for that invitation, which doesn’t come. Cate has never been inside Dana’s house. She knows where it is and what it looks like only from Google Street View.
“You can’t come by my place. Graham’s split up with Eleanor. He’s staying with me for a while. He would definitely notice your arrival. Then he’d put together an intervention. The kind where guys in black burst in and put a bag over my head and take me by my arms and haul me away. Until I come to my senses.” She pauses, then, a little too late, remembers Maureen. “Plus I’m seeing someone.”
“Yeah,” Dana says, dismissing this as an irrelevant detail, getting back to logistics. “Then what about Blackhawk?” Cate’s workshop.
“The problem isn’t locational, it’s that I don’t want to wreck any more of my life being in stupid, tormented love with you.” Cate enjoys hearing how confident she sounds. Also how she can finally look straight into Dana’s eyes (unfortunately fascinating chasms, they’re the green of the flesh of a lime) as she says this. But they both know that, caught in a weak moment, maybe even the next time Dana shows up wherever, Cate’s better judgment could crumble and wind her up on the movers’ blanket thrown onto the big table at the workshop—fucking. Then, worse—crying. Mercifully, Cate’s phone hisses in her pocket. She pulls it out and puts the duck egg in. A text from Maureen.
can u c me?
followed by a string of question marks and emojis of puckered lips. Maureen is deft, sometimes even ironic, with emojis. They may be the language in which she was born to write. At first Cate takes this message to mean Maureen is asking if she is free to meet up, then understands it means she is here, at the beach. Cate left her a voice mail earlier saying she was so depressed about the election. She thought Maureen would just call back, but apparently she has instead shown up. Cate looks around until she spots her, standing atop the rocks above the beach, waving, smiling. Impressive timing.
“That’s her?” Dana says, peering in Maureen’s direction. “Okay. Right.”
Cate doesn’t know what Dana can be dismissing from a hundred feet off, but it’s a conversation she hasn’t time for. She pulls up her hood, clears her throat, and starts walking. She half-turns once, to hold a hand up to Dana. A waveless good-bye. As though they are just a couple of regulars at the dog beach. Sailor follows Cate. When they get up to the patch of grass that overlooks the beach, he ambles off a little way.
“Hey,” Cate says.
“One of your beach buddies?” Maureen says.
“Someone I used to know. You run into everyone here sooner or later.”
She hard-shifts into the election, what it’s going to bring. They guess around a little.
“Big cuts in funding for the arts,” Maureen says. “But let’s be happy while we can. About your good fortune. This play is going to be a big break for you. Molly Cracciolo and Lauren Mott. You’re moving into the stratosphere.” Maureen is so happy for her it makes Cate a little high all over again. She goes on. “Off-Broadway, for one thing. Bloomsbury, for another. The 1920s. The 1920s in England. Those will be sets you can really sink your teeth into. Those rickety wicker lawn chairs. Interiors—those mulli
oned windows and velvet drapes. That really heavy upholstery.”
“But they want ideas in three weeks. Three weeks minus the four days since they told me. They FedExed the script.”
“You can do it. You don’t have anything left to do on the army thing, right?”
“Previews start Thursday. I’ll be so glad to have this behind me. I’m not even putting it on my résumé.”
“Look how fast he is,” Maureen says, meaning Sailor, who has left them to take a final loop around the beach, leading a fresh pack of small, yapping dogs around a curve. Cate has to keep an eye on him. He enjoys rolling puppies and certain small dogs, which is fun for him, but sometimes not as much fun for them. When she looks across the beach, Dana is no longer there.
“He learns a lot here,” Cate says, turning back. “Like, he’s learned to take the inside and lean low going around the bend. He learned how to swim when I started bringing him here in September. Another dog taught him. Sailor just followed him in. They learn from each other. It’s cool to watch.”
Maureen grabs Cate’s hand and pulls it around to the small of her own back. “I haven’t been this crazy about anyone in a long time. I thought maybe that wasn’t going to happen for me, that I’d become too alone, too critical, too particular. But now this. I didn’t tell you about me and Frances to freak you out. I wanted to walk across the bridge between us. How can two people be close if they cling to their unknowability?”
Although a lot of Maureen’s relationship analysis sounds like it came out of the same factory as the inspirational rocks Cate imagined for Frances’s living room, she can hear the sincerity within what she is saying. She can also hear the shell of the duck egg cracking in her pocket. She tries to cover by speaking a little louder. She hopes it’s not leaking through.