“They’re not soft at the beginning. They’re hard lumps.”
He poked her thigh absentmindedly with the skewer.
“What I’m saying,” Debbie continued, “is I would’ve given my daughter adequate information.” She snatched the stick out of his hand.
“You’re high,” Dana said.
“I would never have let her mistake growth for death.”
* * *
—
Georgia has three sisters. The four of them have curly hair and curveless hips and the same groove between their nose and mouth—a little wider than normal. They all live in different states, but Georgia is the only one in a different time zone. Whenever she thinks to call them, they’re already asleep.
She lives alone, in a glass building. Her ex-boyfriend was the one who chose the apartment, because he was the one paying for it. When they broke up, it was because he needed—wanted, she corrected him—to see more of the world, so she was the one who stayed. She had a roommate for a while, to cover the cost. Now she has an empty room and not enough money. To Dana, she calls it the study, or the guest room—whichever sounds better.
The best thing about the building, in Georgia’s opinion, is that it has a view of the identical building across the street. There’s an apartment that’s the mirror image of hers, occupied by a man who wears Bluetooth earphones and expensive-looking slippers. During the day, he works at the counter in his kitchen while various TaskRabbits maneuver around him and his appliances. Georgia has never seen the man having sex—this is always the first thing people want to know—but he seems social. He hosts dinner parties and is often being interrupted by phone calls.
“I’m always the one calling,” she complains to her friend. “I’m never the one getting called.”
“But we’re young,” the friend assures her. “Eagerness isn’t undignified until you get old.”
Georgia and her ex-boyfriend dated for six years. They met during the first week of college and were having sex by Halloween. Georgia had never had sex before, and she was surprised by how effortful it was—like taking a test. In the moments afterward, her jaw clenched with familiar dread, the certainty that her failure was about to be revealed. Her head was cloudy with anticipation, and when she spoke, her voice sounded thick, not quite like her own. I love you, she said, without having planned to say it. Her boyfriend smiled. When he said it back, some dam opened up inside her. Like being drunk, without the nausea.
They began making routines together right away, and soon enough it was impossible to imagine their days apart. They watched the same sitcoms and did their laundry together in the basement of the dorm, sitting on top of the machines while they waited. Once, her boyfriend slid a finger inside her there, the dryer vibrating underneath them. She’d been afraid of someone walking in, but she tried to enjoy it. Later, she found an unfamiliar sock clinging to their clothes. It made a crackling sound when she peeled it away from one of her T-shirts.
When they moved into the glass building, they merged calendars and playlists and underwear drawers. It seemed inevitable that everything, eventually, would follow. Georgia pictured sand on a beach, the grains sifting and resifting with each wave, the same wet grey once the tide went out.
* * *
—
When they first find out about Dana, Georgia’s friends ask if he takes Viagra, if his skin is papery. Does she have a code name in his phone? They are disappointed to learn that Debbie knows about the affair. She knows Georgia’s last name and phone number. They have never met in person, but Debbie has texted Georgia and Georgia has texted back. With the family-and-friends discount, Debbie has sampled some of the food from Georgia’s company: ancient grains, Cornish hens, mushrooms named after instruments. Debbie is also free to have sex outside her marriage, but so far, Dana says, she hasn’t exercised the right.
Sometimes, Georgia takes pleasure in the maturity and complexity of this arrangement. The truth is that deception might be more exciting. For a while, Georgia tried to become obsessed with Debbie. She asked Dana questions that might yield covetable information. Does Debbie eat dairy? How many continents has she been to? Is she good in emergencies? What is her biggest regret?
Dana interprets these questions as symptoms of jealousy. He’s flattered. He admits that Debbie has discontinued the meal delivery, because there’s too much packaging. A duck breast wrapped again and again in Saran Wrap, three strands of saffron swimming in a Ziploc bag. The food is good, Dana assures Georgia, she just can’t bear the waste.
Dana’s job is something in the boring kind of law. They don’t discuss it. Debbie is an architect at a prestigious firm whose work is all over the city. Georgia takes a tour of the rare-books library Debbie helped design, and parks her car outside a house with no right angles. The buildings are not Georgia’s idea of beautiful.
“But they’re literally monumental,” she tells her friend afterward. “I mean, what will we leave behind?”
* * *
—
Debbie memorizes sonnets—one, sometimes two, a week—because she’s heard it keeps the brain in shape. When she’s awake in the middle of the night, she recites herself back to sleep. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.
Her memory has always been a point of pride. Debbie never forgets phone numbers or deadlines, never asks for directions twice. Everyone is impressed when she remembers the name of a sibling or a pet.
Dana is the opposite. He forgets Tim’s blood type, lets the GPS guide him to the gym. Above his desk, there is a Post-it with all the answers to his online security questions.
What was your first job?
What is your grandmother’s maiden name?
Dana claims he was a paperboy, but Debbie suspects this is the warping of nostalgia—romance for a past that was never really his. As the list gets longer, the questions get stranger, as if the project of authenticity has gotten harder and harder to solve over time.
What city would you prefer to live in?
What is the name you almost gave your first child?
The answer to the question is William. There is no special story to explain why the name was discarded at the last minute. Will is just an idea, an alternate history that only two people have ever considered. Debbie is calm when contemplating the irreversible course of her life, the forks she can’t untake, the things she can’t unname. She has never had patience for mothers who wish they could turn back time.
“Parting with something isn’t the same as losing it,” she once told a woman who cried through every school play.
“Parting!” the woman sobbed. “I want to be whole.”
Debbie rolled her eyes.
When her grip on her belongings loosened, she told herself to let go. Tim grew up. Dana traveled, and so did she. Her face—the loose skin over her throat, the downy hair on her cheeks—ambushed her in the mirror. She scolded herself for her vanity. Her beauty had never been hers.
Debbie sits down at her husband’s computer, his supposed secrets surveilling her from the wall. It might be nice, she thinks, to discover these passwords and actually need them—to log in and feel the staticky proximity of the unknown. But there is no affair to uncover, no paper trail to follow. Everything is out in the open, where it is vast and cold and hard to stand.
* * *
—
Tim tells everyone he knows about his next film. He hasn’t been on a date in more than a year, but he’s almost always messaging someone on one of the apps. The women are smart and funny and surprisingly easy to talk to.
“What happened to meeting people at parties?” his dad asks, when Tim explains how the apps work. Dana almost sounds sad. “Or finding people by chance?”
Tim tells the women up front that he isn’t ready to meet in person. Looking for friendship, one of them says: I get it. He agrees, but this isn’t exactl
y right. You want to fall in love, another says, without being in love. Maybe this is closer to the truth.
The women complain to him about other men on the app—the photos with cute babies and wild animals, the strenuous attempts at decency and indecency—and withholding his own complaints makes Tim feel virtuous. He doesn’t mention his exes or his parents or his neighbors, the newlyweds whom he hardly ever sees but hears all day. They yell and curse, have sex and sob.
Some of the women have seen his documentaries, or pretend they have. Once, a woman in Dublin suggested they watch one of them together, even though they weren’t in the same place, even though his evening was her middle of the night. They’d press play at the same time, she explained: they’d text throughout. A bottle of wine and a bag of popcorn for each of them. Tim said sure, but as soon as the opening credits appeared, he turned it off. He considered watching something else—she’d never know—but he couldn’t bring himself to lie. She was nice about the whole thing. I hate looking at pictures of myself, she said, trying to commiserate. They picked something animated instead—a kids’ movie that was supposed to make adults cry. (He did, a little.)
Tim’s new film is about a boy who emerged from decades in a coma. It turned out he’d been awake all along. For years, the boy’s father took care of him like a saint, changing his clothes, giving him sponge baths, cutting his hair when it grew past his eyes, even though the eyes never opened. Eventually, the father grew old and tired, and he hired a nurse to help with his son. She was the one who said she noticed something flickering inside the boy, who by then was no longer a boy. The miracle awakening followed, with its share of joy and hardship.
It sounds beautiful, one woman says. It sounds cheesy, another says. Thank you, Tim says to both.
* * *
—
Debbie’s sixty-fourth birthday falls on a Friday. Dana calls Georgia to reschedule plans.
“You forgot?” Feeling angry on Debbie’s behalf fills Georgia with righteous satisfaction.
“I inverted the numbers,” Dana says.
“Friday is the sixteenth.” She is sitting cross-legged in the guest room, the walls bare but not clean. “You thought her birthday was the sixty-first?”
“I got mixed up.”
The room used to contain an expensive rowing machine, which her ex-boyfriend took with him when he left. Now there’s just a futon. When Dana spent the night for the first time, Georgia kept the door to the room closed. Part of her was embarrassed by it—the empty walls, the pillowless bed—and part of her was excited: a secret she was keeping, a future she hadn’t unveiled.
“Have you bought a present?”
“Debbie doesn’t approve of gifts.”
This sounds admirable.
“It’s a power play,” Dana says. “The moment you give a present, you force someone into debt. The receiving party is always, in some sense, the guilty party.”
He explains this coolly, efficiently. For a second, she imagines him in his office, which is nothing like her office. A closet for his suit jacket and his spare jacket, a paperweight on his desk and a prize on the wall. Her own job seems, just then, like a pointless game: the Ping-Pong paddles, the flip-flops, the piles of Saran Wrap clinging to itself.
“What about gratitude?”
“What about it?”
They change their dinner reservation to Saturday, and on Friday Georgia texts her friends. She tries on outfits she hasn’t worn since college. She straightens her hair, which she hasn’t done since high school. The straightener sizzles each time she closes it, sighs each time she opens it.
“You look like the ninth-grade dance,” her friend says when Georgia arrives at the restaurant.
“You remind me of hating myself,” says another.
They drink tequila and compare early sexual experiences. Georgia squeezes a wedge of lime until all the cracks in her hands sting.
“Raise your hand if you’ve masturbated in a library.”
“Raise your hand if you’ve given a blow job in a moving vehicle.”
Georgia hasn’t, but she says she has. Her friend returns from the bar with two shot glasses in each hand.
“If Dana had a daughter,” she says, “do you think he’d still be dating you?”
* * *
—
The morning after her birthday, Debbie listens to all of her voicemails. Some of them are voices she hasn’t heard all year. The childhood friend, the college friend, the office friend. The friend from architecture school who pulled all-nighters with her, both of them weeping silently over their cardboard. The friend from a long-ago pregnancy class, whose twins were sucked out of her.
Debbie’s sisters—two of them, plus a sister-in-law—leave messages from the car, the yard, the kitchen. A microwave beeps insistently in the background. A baby gets on the phone. Birfday. Her sisters are all grandmothers now. They say it’s the best job they’ve ever had, which isn’t saying much: they haven’t worked since they got married. One of them lives around the corner from her daughter, who is raising three kids—triplets—all by herself, who spent all her savings on fertility treatments that promised just one. Sometimes, the daughter said, you get more than you bargained for.
Debbie’s own mother had never pretended to enjoy being a grandmother. She told Tim to call her by her first name. Let’s just be friends, Debbie heard her tell him once, when he was still a baby. She visited on holidays, wrote him postcards, promised to take him to Istanbul, her favorite place in the world—but she drew the line at babysitting. She’d done her share of parenting. Debbie’s father, she said, had been a kind of child, too.
This year is the year Debbie outgrows her mother—turns the age she never reached. Until now, it had been a small reassurance to know that the two of them had undergone the same effects of time. Her mother’s life didn’t look much like Debbie’s: she’d married, divorced, married again; she’d applied for her first job when she was forty years old. But she knew all the things Debbie wanted to learn. How to get from one year to the next, how to wait and weather, how—sometimes—to change. Her hair lost its color. She wore shoes that were good for her knees and clothes that were plainer and plainer over time. She believed in being ready—she had a condo without stairs, a detailed will—and she believed in being honest.
“Aging,” her mother said, “means realizing everyone can live without you.” A pause, and then she added, “Will live without you.”
She insisted that she was lucky to get sick before she was really dispensable. Debbie’s sisters told her she was still young, and she said—old enough. She did chemo and something experimental and then she said stop.
Would her mother have gotten rid of her uterus? Would she have wanted Debbie to get rid of hers? They were different questions, weren’t they? Debbie stares at the phone and wishes she could conjure up her mother’s voice. Wishing makes her a child again, stranded in a dark room, in a big crowd, on an airplane for the first time. She still has so many things to ask. What happens next?
* * *
—
On the night she gets locked out, Georgia hasn’t seen Dana for two weeks, and she is glad for the excuse to call. She gave him a key, even though he rings the doorbell every time. It’s the beginning of spring, when half the trees are still cold and skeletal and half are bursting pink—cherry trees covered in down, magnolias dropping satin tongues all over the sidewalk. One year, Georgia was caught off guard by the changing of the seasons: she looked up and everything was heavy green. Ever since, she has vowed not to miss it.
She walks up and down the block and calls Dana from under a dogwood tree. She kicks up a heap of petals, browning at the edges like the hem of something dragged through the mud, and she calls again. She sits there for almost an hour before she decides to call Debbie.
They have spoken only once before, and Georgia
has thought about her voice too often to actually remember it. It’s an efficient voice—a voice good at giving instructions, at making itself understood—but not an unfriendly one. Debbie is hundreds of miles away, at the kind of conference she dreads.
“The hotel shows off for the architects,” she says when she picks up the phone. “The shower has six different settings, but I just want normal.” She doesn’t sound impatient, just tired.
“Where’s Dana?”
Debbie takes one short breath. Georgia can hear the hard spray of water in the background.
“He’s out with his girlfriend,” she says.
There is no particular sympathy in the way she says this, which is its own sort of kindness. Georgia reaches into her pocket one last time, as if the keys will be there after all, as if the whole scene can be undone. Seconds go by while she can’t think of anything to say. A second, she thinks abstractly, is a surprisingly long time.
She doesn’t call the locksmith right away. She goes to the bar on the corner, even though it’s about to close. She’s never been inside before, because there is always a sports game playing through the window. It takes Georgia a minute or two to realize that the man at the other end of the bar, half on the stool, half off the stool, is the man who lives across the street in the other glass building. This close, she can see that his face is puffy and his neck is badly shaven. When he goes to the bathroom, he doesn’t come back. Georgia takes sips of yellow beer while the bartender wipes a rag in lazy arcs.
“Should we check on him?”
The bartender lifts up the man’s glass and Windexes underneath. He shrugs.
The door is unlocked and the man is asleep on the toilet. His pants are still on, his earphones still in. He smiles vaguely when Georgia wakes him up, and lets her guide him to the closest booth. She checks the contacts in his phone. There is a long list of outgoing calls to someone named Ashley and a lot of texts about invoicing. Georgia looks for Mom and Dad, and then is embarrassed for looking: the man is forty, maybe older.
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