by Jenny Offill
Actually, a mistake, because now the owner wants to tell me all about the old days in Flatbush. Things have changed. The neighborhood has changed. New people keep moving in from other places. They don’t understand the way things are done. They’ve got no patience. Sometimes they don’t even know the name of what they are asking for.
He goes on describing me and my ilk. Possibly I will have to buy something to get out of here. I’ve gotten trapped once before, trying to buy blue masking tape. And this man tells the most depressing stories; even when you think a story won’t be like that, he finds a way.
But now this man is telling me how much he loves his store, how he could list every nail and screw he carries. Ever since he was a boy, he has liked the look of them, the way the weight of a good tool feels in your hand. But the people who come in nowadays, they’re used to the chain stores. They don’t care about service. They don’t care about expertise. And their understanding of inventory is unrealistic. “If you want Home Depot, go to Home Depot!” he says.
I buy the cheapest hammer in the store and he lets me out of there.
* * *
…
It is dusk when Henry and I leave the park. A car nearly runs us over. Now we’re right next to her at the light. My brother goes up to the window. “Lady, you almost killed us,” he tells her. But she won’t look at him. “You and your precious lives,” she says.
Later, I tell the story to Margot.
“You talk about your brother a great deal,” she observes.
“We’re close.”
“That’s not the word I’d use.”
“What’s the word?”
“Enmeshed,” she says.
* * *
…
This one’s daughter was an addict. She always had Narcan on her in case she had to revive her. Then for a long time she didn’t come in. Now she is telling me about the day her daughter OD’d. “I went to the grocery store,” she says. “I went to the grocery store for one minute.” She wants to pay her fines, months and months of them, but I pretend there aren’t any.
Last week, we got trained to use it. And when that person comes to, do you think they will be happy you saved their life? the facilitator asked. No, not at all, was the correct answer.
Do you ever take on the burdens of others? is question five on the enmeshment questionnaire.
* * *
…
Eli won’t stop fidgeting tonight. He tips his chair back and forth until I get mad at him. Then he gets up to sharpen his pencil. “I wish it were winter,” he mutters. There is a prompt at the bottom, reminding him to answer the question in a complete sentence.
Eskimos live in very cold countries. We make our houses out of wood or bricks. The Eskimo makes his house out of snow. There is little wood in his cold country. Can a snow house keep him warm?
“Isn’t it Inuit?” I say. “Eskimo is an old word, I think.” He isn’t listening to me really. Later, I go looking through my books to see if I can find what I’m remembering. And then, just when I’m about to give up, there it is in a box of my old papers. I wrote half a dissertation once. “The Domestication of Death: Cross-Cultural Mythologies,” I was pleased to call it.
I wait until bedtime. Eli and I have this routine that is always the same. Just before he’s drifting off he’ll tell me about his day. Then he’ll close his eyes, crush my hand in his, and say, “Happy thought?”
When Houses Were Alive
One night a house suddenly rose up from the ground and went floating through the air. It was dark, & it is said that a swishing, rushing noise was heard as it flew through the air. The house had not yet reached the end of its road when the people inside begged it to stop. So the house stopped.
They had no blubber when they stopped. So they took soft, freshly drifted snow & put it in their lamps, & it burned.
They had come down at a village. A man came to their house & said: Look, they are burning snow in their lamps. Snow can burn.
But the moment these words were uttered, the lamp went out.
(as told by Inugpasugjuk)
* * *
…
Exams are over, but there are still a few students lingering on campus. A girl whose name I forget comes into the library to shoot the breeze. She has brought me one of those healthy juices she likes to drink. It tastes like a shake made of cut grass. There is powdered bee pollen in it too and this allegedly protects the drinker from all manner of ruinous things.
She tells me that her phone was stolen and she’s been using a really old one instead. She won’t get the newest model, she’s decided. “So I just go at a slower pace. I know I’m missing things because I can’t respond quickly enough to what people say or show me, but that’s okay. It gives me more time to think,” she says.
I am charmed by her. She seems practically like a transcendentalist. I take another sip of her grass drink and think maybe it is giving me some kind of burst of energy.
She takes out her phone to demonstrate its obsolescence to me. It is exactly the same kind as mine. Mine is two years old but still retrieves things for me in the blink of an eye.
“Wait,” I say. “Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?” She considers this. “Yeah,” she says, “seconds probably.”
I take the car service home because I’m ridiculous. Mr. Jimmy is complaining about how “that company” is ruining his business. For some reason he won’t say the name, but I know who he is talking about. He came over here from Ireland as a teenager; twenty-five years he’s been driving, he says. “They don’t even check out the people they use. It’s just anyone with a semi-new car.” I have heard this, I tell him. There is even some case where a passenger said the driver assaulted her. He gives me a quick look. “Right,” he says. “No standards.”
Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims.
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
* * *
…
It’s my birthday tomorrow. “Now you are officially middle-aged,” says my coworker who carries around the X-rays. She has never liked me because I don’t have a proper degree. Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods.
Lorraine has organized an after-work celebration. We go to that bar where I used to work. It’s called the Burrow and it’s well named. Dark and small and warm. And my friend Tracy is here to pour us extra stiff drinks. I decide to drink gimlets because it’s more festive.
We catch up a little. She is six months into dating a handsome, horrible guy who lives in Philadelphia. She details his moments of cruelty, punctuating the story with little laughs. “And then I drove all the way there to see him even though it terrifies me to drive in traffic.”
When she got there, he had left a note on the door saying he had to go out of town unexpectedly. Let yourself in, the note said, but he’d only talked of, never followed through with, giving her a key.
“You need someone kind,” I say.
Something in her eyes then, something hard to read. Finally, it registers. She feels sorry for me and for all the rest who have thrown in their lot with kindness and decency. “Sure, sure, I suppose I could go for someone safe,” she says. “But I’ve never felt like this bef
ore. Never.”
But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?
When we worked together years ago, she always told me I had no game. She said this because allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring. Do you, did you, will you? I just want to know.
I offer her some birthday cake. She goes into the usual bit about temptation and sinfulness and maybe this and maybe that, and we have to go through every station of the fucking cross before she takes a bite of it. “That was delicious,” she says, then hustles off to make some drinks. I’m on number five, I think. Maybe six.
Let’s pause here.
But I don’t, I don’t. Now I’m talking to everyone at the bar. I’m telling stories, good ones at first, then not so good as the night wears on. If only I’d remembered that old proverb:
When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.
Because the fact that there are six thousand miles of New York sewers and all of them lie well below sea level has become my go-to conversational gambit.
In the morning, my head is pounding. There is a tableful of presents. There are waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Also, Ben stayed up late sharpening pencils he found under the couch. He set aside the nicest ones for me. I am pleased to put them in my backpack. Especially this red one I thought I’d never see again.
* * *
…
Mr. Jimmy notices I am limping. He tells me that his adult son became disabled through no fault of his own. “No fault of his own,” he repeats. “It breaks your heart,” he says, and I agree.
I try to reach Sylvia as I wait for the bell. “I have to call you back,” she says. “I’m about to send off this article, but I have to come up with the obligatory note of hope.”
It’s stupidly hot out. I stand there, sweating in my black T-shirt. Amira’s mother is right next to me. You have to try, Eli told me yesterday. You have to ask. It’s almost summer and he’s getting scared. How will he see her? Where does she even live?
But I don’t know the name of Amira’s mother. And she is talking to her friend in a language I don’t speak. There are four days left of school, three minutes until the bell rings. I put my earbuds in and listen to an episode about something called the “mesh.” It’s a better term than “web,” they think.
A man calls in from Dallas. What do you mean interconnected? he says. There is a pause and then the ecologist speaks: There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.
TWO
Someone’s setting firecrackers off already. It’s not even noon. The dog is being driven crazy by the sound and can only be soothed by a thousand rounds of slobber frog.
Finally, I have to stop, because my hand is slick with spit. I go to the bathroom to rinse it off. There’s some antibacterial soap Ben bought last week at the dollar store. It’s a bright pink. Don’t use antibacterial soap! Catherine told me, because lalalalalalalalala.
Ben is cleaning out the hall closet while Eli and I sprawl in front of the air conditioner. It’s Monopoly day. Yesterday was Monopoly day too. We are saving money this summer by doing less camp. So here I am, waiting some long minutes while my son debates about buying St. James Place.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
The dog growls softly on the couch. Eli buys up all the railroads. Ben skates across the floor in socks to bring us red, white, and blue Popsicles.
Voted, that we are the saints.
* * *
…
All Eli wants to do is watch videos about robots. But they are always a disappointment. Here is some professor from MIT explaining how this crablike thing has learned to seek light and avoid obstacles. “Go!” he tells it, and it winds through a maze to find the tiny bulb at the end.
And Mrs. Kovinski has turned her TV to full volume so she can blast away every thought in my head. She watches only two things: soap operas and the nonstop news channel. I turn on some music, drown it out a bit. How handsome am I, right? How handsome?
* * *
…
It’s harder to get away in the summer. But still I go on a few trips with Sylvia. One thing that’s becoming clear on our travels: people are really sick of being lectured to about the glaciers.
“Listen, I’ve heard all about that,” says this red-faced man. “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”
* * *
…
One morning a student tells me failure is not an option and is angered when I laugh. I assume a cheerful manner. I tell her, Hey, me too, I used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least. She stares at me. Sorry? she says. After she goes, I slip into the bathroom, make sure I don’t have lipstick on my teeth.
Sometimes now with students there are these moments when it feels like a sudden cold wind blew through. So lately I’ve been checking that my sweater is buttoned right, that my T-shirt isn’t too weird. I’m like a woman carrying a full cup into a room of strangers, trying not to spill it.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda.
When I get home, I drop the mail on my desk without looking at it. This is my favored routine. But for some reason in the morning, Ben spots how big the pile is. He comes into the kitchen, holding a stack of things.
“What do you think will happen if you don’t open the bills? Do you think someone will come and take them away?”
Survival instructors have a saying: Get organized or die.
I have to go to work, says he, says me, says everybody.
“They keep leaving Chinese newspapers on my steps and I’m not Chinese,” Mrs. Kovinski yells down the hallway.
Using the following scale, CIRCLE a number to indicate what you miss about when you were younger and how much you miss it.
1 = Not at all, 9 = Very much.
Family
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Not having to worry
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Places
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Someone you loved
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Things you did
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The way people were
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Feelings you had
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The way society was
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Pet or pets
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Not knowing sad or evil things
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
* * *
…
I’m starting to understand why all those people want to go to Mars. The guest today on the show is explaining that many scientists are in a state of barely suppressed panic about the latest data coming in. Their previous models were much too conservative. Everything is happening much faster than expected. He signs off with a small borrowed witticism.
“Many of us subscribe to the same sentiment as our colleague Sherwood Rowland. He remarked to his wife one night after coming home: “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”
* * *
…
What scares you most about the mission?
I won’t be afraid of anything if I’m chosen.
What will you miss the most on Earth?
I will miss swimming the most.
* * *
…
In Maplewood, we sit on the porch, looking at their yard. Catherine’s mother says she’s thinking of planting a lilac bush. Her father says the last one died, you ha
ve to pick a hardier variety. It is possible they are having a fight, but it is so quietly done that I can’t be sure of it.
There is nothing to do but walk around here, so I decide to ignore my twinging knee. We walk down the street beneath the flowering trees. No one else is out except the gardeners. Legions of them on the lawns, working quietly. There is one house where a famously liberal rich person lives. On this lawn, the gardeners are allowed to play their Mexican music.
Henry makes us go farther even after everyone else goes in. Catherine asked him to marry her last week and he said yes. Her parents say he has their blessing. We walk a little in silence until we reach the edge of their neighborhood and encounter one with more modest houses. CROOK, LIAR, THIEF, says the sign in one window.
“I’m going to do it wrong,” my brother tells me. “I can feel all the wrong thoughts coming. What if I mess it up?” he wants to know. He is smoking now, one cigarette after another after another. “You will be forgiven,” I tell him.
* * *
…
Somehow I have stuffed a too-full garbage bag down the chute. I am flushed with triumph as I enter the hallway. Then I see Mrs. Kovinski by the elevator. She’s got a cane now. She slipped and fell while on jury duty. Funny thing is it was a slip-and-fall case, she tells me. And tells me and tells me.
Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer.