She hugged her books to her chest. Her ponytail was askew in that way that looked messy but had become fashionable. Blue rings lined her eyes.
“I’m really sorry I’m late,” she began.
“I’m afraid I can’t count you present for coming half an hour late to a class,” I replied.
“I know.”
“Three tardies is an absence—and too many absences could really hurt your class standing.”
“I really am sorry, Ms. Gallagher. I promise I’ll do better. I just came up because I thought I should explain …” She lowered her eyes. “My little sister died four months ago. I know it’s been a long time and I should, like, be getting on with it, but sometimes I just have trouble getting out of bed. I just thought you should know.”
I was thrown off guard. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say.
Numb to this response, annoyed by it, Ashley shook her head.
“No, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal or anything. I mean it is, but it shouldn’t affect my studies.” She pulled at a hot pink hair twisty looped around her tiny wrist. It snapped back against her skin. “It’s hard to stay motivated sometimes. I wanted you to know it’s not because I’m not interested in the class—I am, honestly, I just might miss sometimes for … unrelated reasons.”
“Thank you for telling me.” I thought a moment. “Why don’t we consider your absences excused in advance? If you can e-mail me the days you can’t come, I can write back a description of what you missed, be sure you get the right assignments.”
“I don’t want special treatment.”
Before she left, I promised I would remember our conversation and that I would be happy to talk with her if she ever needed a listening ear. She was as uninterested in my listening ear as she was in my special consideration.
Though the rest of the day went on in its usual blur of lesson plans and student e-mails, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ashley. I regretted how hastily I’d found refuge in a label. Knowing that she had just buried a sister, I saw every detail of her appearance differently. The rings beneath her eyes were evidence of sleeplessness and weeping, not hunger. She wrapped her arms around her body for comfort, not warmth.
That afternoon Mom called to report two deaths at Kent State.
“It was a fire. Caught while they were sleeping, all of them in their beds completely nonsuspecting. There were ten people in the house total—they all got out but those two. Died of smoke, we can only hope.”
“That’s awful.”
“The girl was in the boy’s bed,” Mom explained. “They weren’t even dating, just together for that one night. I’ll tell you what, that girl didn’t know what she was in for: You give a boy an inch he’ll take a foot, that’s what your grandmother always told me. But then it doesn’t seem like people much care about that kind of thing anymore. When I was growing up you didn’t sit on a boy’s bed without sending the wrong signal. Now nobody seems to care. Everybody’s about this booty call, is that what your students are calling it?”
“More or less,” I said, switching my phone to my left ear and hiking the strap of my heavy bag higher on my shoulder.
“It just goes to show you.”
“Show you what?”
“So how’s Eli?” she asked brightly.
“He’s fine.”
“He’s at the apartment?” Her voice strained with the effort of sounding nonchalant.
“He’s at work,” I said vaguely, careful to imply this was not a new development. Monday he’d had a phone interview with Zoë’s boss that lasted all of three minutes. He was hired to work at The Brewery on the spot. I had every suspicion this was Zoë’s doing; the coffee shop was a popular place to work and had been turning down applications for weeks.
“Is he helping with the chores?” she asked, unimpressed and undeterred. “If you’re going to have a man in the house you might as well make him useful. Have you changed the batteries in your smoke detector?”
“Our landlord takes a look through our place every year,” I said. “I’m sure we’re fine.”
“You really ought to check them anyway. Those batteries can die.”
“Mom, I’m sure we’d know if they died.”
“I’m just saying. You go check them, and if they’re not working, I’ll buy the replacements.”
“They don’t need to be replaced,” I said, slowly counting my breath with each word.
She punctuated the ensuing silence with a sigh. “With this wedding and with Brian leaving us, I just don’t need more worry.”
I promised I would check the smoke detector and hung up.
I told Zoë about the situation with Ashley. “One of my student’s sisters died.”
“Really?”
She didn’t look away from the television. We were in her bed watching a PBS special on killer whales. Since declaring my sabbatical from television, I only watched when she watched and she only watched what qualified as educational. Michael was at her desk, bidding on eBay and chewing a Bic pen cap. He was hoping to win a new Hydr8r Ultralight HydrationWater Bladder.
“She didn’t say how, just that it was recent and that she thought I should know in case she didn’t make it to class sometimes.”
When Zoë failed to respond, I said, “It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around. I don’t give these kids enough credit. I get sucked into this stereotype that they’re spoiled middle-class grade-grubbers, not even thinking what they might have been through in their lives. Hey—are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Well.” I stared at her profile. The blue then white then yellow light from the television flashed on her cheek. “What do you think I should do?”
“What can you do?” she murmured.
I pinched her arm. “Zoë to the land of the living.”
“What?” she scowled. “It happens, Amy. People die. Her sister will always be gone, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Michael and I shared a look. While Zoë was generous with her things, she was less generous with her sympathy. The years Zoë’s mother had spent in and out of the hospital had done more damage than good to her capacity for compassion where illness and death were concerned. When confronted with someone in pain, there was always an unspoken competition: had said person suffered more or less than her own family?
Silently, we watched the whale masticate its prey, the blood blossoming beneath the water in a pale pink cloud.
To dispel the tension, Michael asked me, “Did you go to the gym this morning?”
“I went.”
He winked. “Atta girl.”
Atta girl. Michael’s verbal equivalent of a firm slap to the butt.
Zoë squeezed my thigh. “Feel the burn?”
I lifted my leg, considering it as though it were a separate creature from my body. “Nothing yet.”
“What have you been doing?”
“The recliner bike thing.”
“The recumbent,” she corrected.
“Sounds political. The machine you can’t vote out. ”
I was glad to have a name for the thing I despised. It felt perfectly asinine to sit in a chair pedaling ninety miles an hour and going nowhere. Too much like a bad analogy for my life.
“I’m trying to get her to take one of my classes,” Michael said.
“You should take a class,” Zoë said. “It’s more rigorous than just working out by yourself.”
“I don’t think I’m up for that.”
“I’ll take one with you,” she said. “It will be fun. Kind of a roommate bonding thing.”
“What do you think we’re doing here?” It was rather intimate, the way we’d squashed our bodies into her tiny twin bed.
“Being lazy,” she countered.
Combined, Zoë and Michael’s zeal for physical fitness was nothing short of evangelistic. Though they never succeeded in drafting me for group fitness, I finally agreed to train for the spring 5K they were both runni
ng for breast cancer research. I could hardly turn down the chance to support Zoë’s mother in some small way. And running seemed the one exercise suited for the writer’s life, the solitude, the pain. (Wo)Man vs. Nature. It always seemed spiritually invigorating on the Gatorade commercials.
Saturday afternoon, Eli found me stretching in the kitchen. He poured a cup of coffee and eyed me curiously over the rim as he drank.
“Joining the madness?”
“Don’t discourage her,” Zoë said. “You really aren’t going to want that.” She tugged on the scarf I’d wrapped twice around my neck. This was in addition to the turtleneck and the Ohio State hoodie I was wearing over my brother’s old Buckeyes T-shirt.
“It’s negative ten degrees,” I said. “It’s freezing.”
“I’m telling you,” she warned, “five minutes and you’ll be burning up. You don’t want to sweat too much anyway.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re insulated.”
She wore form-fitting Spandex black pants and a green windbreaker specifically designed for runners. I was the Orphan Annie to her Nike Goddess.
I turned to Eli. I held out my arms. “Do you think I’m overdressed?”
Even when invited to look at my body (however padded and overdressed), he kept his eyes fixed on mine. In a moment of clarity, I realized this marked a defining difference between men like Michael and men like Eli.
“I’ll be on the couch,” he said. “Come join me when you give up.”
Outside, Michael and Zoë were arguing about whether to take me for an interval walk/run or whether to just start out at a slow pace. She wanted to start me off slowly. He wanted to just see me run. They bickered until she gave up and went off on her own, leaving me alone with Rocky. We jogged out of the neighborhood and alongside University Way. Immediately I wished Zoë had won the argument. Michael slowed his steps to a leisurely pace, but I struggled to keep up.
“Don’t hold your breath,” he said. “Breathe consistently: in, out. In, out.”
I nodded. It was difficult to hear him over the roar of blood in my ears. Zoë had been right about the layers. Though I could feel the cold wind numbing my nose and chafing my cheeks, I was sweating profusely. Beside me, Michael’s body moved with the seeming effortless grace of a trained athlete. His arms swiveled easy and loose at his sides. His feet padded buoyant on the sidewalk, the rubber soles of his shoes bounding off the cement. Somewhere to my left he spoke with the maddening calm of a husband coaching his wife through labor. “That’s good. In, out. In, out. Watch your step.You’re doing great!”
At the edge of campus I stopped and bent over, resting my hands on my knees. “I don’t think … I should overdo it … the first … time.”
“Walk it off,” he said. “Head back to the apartment on Collins Street. I’ll do a loop through campus and catch up with you.”
I nodded in agreement.
It took two blocks for my breathing to slow and my legs to unwind. Once Michael was out of sight, my power walk slowed to an amble. Campus was quiet. Occasionally, a student passed on the sidewalk or drove by talking (or, more alarmingly, texting) on a cell phone. I imagined students bunkered in their dorm rooms, sleeping off the previous night’s party or cramming anxiously for an early Monday exam. I heard girls’ laughter behind the bathroom doors and could smell the pungent funk of the men’s hall: dirty socks, sweating bodies, and the miasma of trapped hormones.
Somewhere in that crowd, Ashley was trying to pioneer her own life. She had hours and days to spend; I wondered if the absence of a loved one left any capacity for the normal. When she’d said her little sister died I’d pictured a child, a miniature version of Ashley with pigtails and baby cheeks. But I still called Brian my little brother, and he was twenty-five.
I made it back to the apartment without seeing Michael again. Eli met me at the door with my ringing cell phone.
“Third call you’ve missed,” he said.
“Mom.”
“Hey, honey,” she chirped. “Just calling to ask if you returned that sweater yet.”
“I haven’t had time.”
“Don’t keep it just because I bought it for you. I don’t like it when people keep things they don’t like to be nice, you know that.”
I kicked off my shoes. “Honestly, I just haven’t had a chance to return it.”
“I put the receipts in the boxes before you left, so make sure you don’t lose them.” Her voice tapered off. I thought I heard Richard in the background. “Amy—are you still there?”
“Ye-es.”
“Did you check those batteries yet?”
“No.”
“You girls live on the second floor. Smoke rises, you know.”
When I hung up I could hear Eli in Zoë’s room one wall away, talking to Jillian. She was the only person he talked to on the phone for more than five minutes. Sometimes he emerged from these conversations cheerful. Other times they put him in a black mood that didn’t lift for hours. From the low, frustrated murmur of his tone I predicted tonight would not be a good night.
I showered, dressed, began dinner. The three of us ate separately. I took a book to bed, in need of distraction.
In the middle of the night I woke with a start, the book Empire Falls flat on my face. I was sweating as if I had just come inside from a long run. There had been fire, someone screaming—had it been my brother?—but the details of the nightmare had vanished upon waking. I stared at the ceiling, palms flat against the mattress, feeling my heart pound.
When I’d calmed down I got up from bed and crept into the living room. The minute hand on the bookshelf clock clicked its way around the hour. Eli lay on the couch, still dressed, his arms curiously folded over his chest as if disapproving of something in his sleep. The apartment was blue with moonlight. The curtains threw shadowy patterns intricate as doily cloths on the cold hardwood floor.
I dragged a dining room chair to the hall, climbed on top, and pressed the red button on the smoke detector.
A high-pitched ring pierced the silence. I released my finger, but the alarm did not stop. As I scrambled to remove the battery from the machine, Eli ran to my side. He pulled me down off the chair, climbed up in my place and expertly popped the battery out of its plastic cradle. The siren stopped. Zoë had stumbled from her room, stark terror on her face. Seeing me, her fear turned to exasperation.
“Well that was exciting,” Eli said. He set the batteries in my hand.
“Just take the steak knife to my heart the next time you want to kill me,” Zoë said. “It would be less traumatizing.”
Despite her irritation, relief washed over me, as if the cry of the alarm had frightened away any possibility of danger.
8
Once we’d all grown accustomed to the idea that Eli’s stay was temporarily permanent, he wasted no time getting famous.
Leaving the coffee shop with Zoë and Eli one afternoon, we were stopped by a middle-aged woman in a full-body sweat suit who let Zoë pet her new puppy while she asked Eli what to name him. “You’re so good with that kind of thing,” the woman gushed.
Without pause he said, “Name him Fargo.”
“Who was that?” Zoë asked when the woman had safely powerwalked out of earshot.
He stroked the growing beard that now covered his chin. Whether it was purposeful or the result of neglect was anybody’s guess. “I have no idea,” he said.
People began showing up at our apartment asking for him. Several were Jillian’s friends, who knew Eli from his previous job at Juxtapose. There was Diedre with dreadlocks the exact frayed blond of old ropes softened by use; she had somehow talked Eli into helping her collate two hundred handmade chapbooks she planned to scatter across the country. For a week they lay scattered across our living room. Amber and Lynn, Jillian’s housemates, liked to sit with him on the roof, chain-smoking and gossiping, even though Eli declined to participate in either activity. Kevin McCormick was the most frequent guest. He was a
graduate student working on his MFA in sculpture, a painfully shy man who began every conversation with a comment about the weather. He and Eli spent whole days scavenging at junkyards and welding found objects. Because he was helping Kevin, because he worked after course hours, and because he was so amiable, no one bothered to ask Eli whether or not he had jurisdiction to use or even be in the campus studios. He returned to our apartment late at night, carrying freshly fired ceramic pieces and newly printed lithographs in ink-splattered hands.
He had a creative energy that would have been medicated with Ritalin in someone half his age. His hand trembled when he drew, from excitement or from caffeine. He drew on his jeans or his hands if he couldn’t find paper. He didn’t eat at home if he could find someone who would go out, and just about anyone would do: He handed out his friendship indiscriminately.
The Volkswagen was partly to blame for his notoriety. The van looked innocent and playful crowded between the bullying SUVs the students favored that year, a clown car infiltrating military camp. It bounced through Copenhagen’s narrow old streets like Mr. Rogers’ cheerful trolley. People honked and waved.
His new and many friendships, however, were a direct result of his job at the coffee shop. He hosted poetry night, introducing each artist with one-minute bios he’d drafted from brief interviews conducted beforehand. The menu marker board featured quirky Morretti illustrations. Because Jimmy, The Brewery’s owner, had created Eli’s position, assigning him to shifts that did not need a third barista, Eli was essentially paid to sit at The Brewery six hours a day hopped up on espresso and practicing Foam Art: the delicate making of patterns in people’s lattes. He could make a branch of delicate leaves, a wobbly star, and—most endearing with the women—a floating heart.
The first thing Eli did when he got his paycheck was offer to pay his share of February’s rent. He stocked the kitchen with things frozen and dyed, novelties our fridge hadn’t seen since Zoë’s dietary takeover: Tombstone pepperoni pizzas, salami, banana freezer pops. Because he was a guest, she didn’t protest.
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