We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  “You know I would never put that necklace in a pocket,” she says. Of course he does know; he knows the whole story of the necklace that came with Tamar’s grandmother from Germany in 1936 and which her mother pressed into Tamar’s palm before she died, requesting that Tamar pass it on to her own children, which her mother died believing Tamar would still one day have. Tamar doesn’t need to voice the accusation; it’s in the air between them.

  “I’m sure you’ll find it” is all he says. “I have to go.”

  In the guest bedroom, she parts the sheets, the pillowcases, opens the drawers, and finds nothing. Most of Aziza’s things are still in her backpack; the only items hanging in the closet are the clothes Tamar has bought for her, barely worn and in some cases with the tags still on. Tamar is shaking. It is terrible to be invaded, and even worse to be refused.

  * * *

  —

  Anger dignifies her. Briskly, with little effort, she cows Beth, threatening to sue if she gets fired and making Beth promise to ban Ruben from the spa. She treats herself to an almond milk chai latte and then returns to the house and buys Aziza a plane ticket back to Stockholm. That evening, when Aziza and Albert are watching television, Tamar informs them both that it’s time for Aziza to go home.

  “Wait, what?” Albert says. “This is because of the necklace?”

  “No,” Tamar says. “It’s because of everything.”

  Aziza doesn’t know what necklace they’re talking about. She thinks about the apartment in Stockholm, which still contains her mother’s things, everything waiting to be sorted, sold, given away. The place is too big for Aziza to afford, and she will have to move somewhere. Lately she’s been thinking of going to school in London. She’s good with computers. She will walk in the rain to high grey buildings, where she will scroll through line after line of code. When she thinks about this distant future, she is calm. Only on the plane, a week later, after stilted farewells, does she burst into tears that disturb her seatmate, a businessman on his way to a sales meeting in Frankfurt.

  “Are you all right?” he asks her, and she nods silently. She is embarrassed not because of the crying but because she is in love with Albert, and the thought of never seeing him again is more than she can bear. In her backpack, rolled into a tight tube, is one of his blue striped shirts, stolen from the hamper, dank with his smell. When she hugged him at the house, on her final night, she leaned into him, her cheek wet, and then lifted a hand to his face. She felt him go rigid. Now her grief and humiliation mix together, and she sobs into the tiny oblong window, barely noticing when they leave the ground.

  At home, Tamar also cries. She and Albert sit on the couch together in the early evening upon their return from the airport, the windows open, a summer breeze tickling the curtains. They never found the necklace, despite ransacking Aziza’s room and bag and asking her about it over and over, unable to make sense of her confusion. She acted as if she had no idea what they were talking about, but didn’t defend herself either, seeming to accept their accusations as inevitable. “She must have thrown it away,” Tamar says. Passing by outside on his way home, Tim sees Tamar lean her head against Albert’s shoulder. He doesn’t feel guilty about the necklace; he’s forgotten he took it, and couldn’t even say where it is. Years from now, his mother will sell it at a garage sale for fifty cents, believing it to be junk. Tim and Aziza will keep in touch for a while, sometimes finding each other in the canyons of that ancient online civilization, sometimes texting or Gchatting, until the too-clear longing in his messages makes her uncomfortable and she stops responding. Still, he continues to believe that, if only she hadn’t left so abruptly, she would have learned to love him back; under very slightly different circumstances, he thinks, they would have stayed together forever.

  Risk Management

  Little got everything right. From the day she was hired, she was perfect. The filing, the phones, the calming of patients made hostile by tooth pain: there was nothing she couldn’t handle. Of course we all hated her for it, kind of, except the dentists, who loved her. You could see them congratulating themselves for hiring her every time they walked past the desk, where Little would be typing with blistering efficiency—she had those gel nails, and every week a different work of art was splayed across her hands, fireworks or hearts or skulls for Halloween—and simultaneously scheduling an appointment on the phone.

  “You are very welcome,” she’d murmur into the receiver while smiling at Dr. Pai. “We’ll see you next Thursday at nine forty-five.”

  Her name wasn’t really Little. It was something consonant-filled and Lithuanian the rest of us struggled to pronounce, and when Margaret, the office manager, clucked her tongue and said, “That’s a big name for such a little thing,” it was the little part that stuck. If Little minded, she didn’t say so. In Vilnius, I’d heard, she used to be a dentist herself, but here she had no license. Why she’d left her home, I didn’t know.

  At lunch we put the phones straight to voice mail and sat in the break room eating meals we brought from home. We made New Year’s resolutions together, started salads in January, fell off the wagon like dominoes around Valentine’s. Little never joined us. She put her coat on over her scrubs and disappeared, returning exactly forty-five minutes later with her frosty-pink lipstick reapplied. Then one day I was out running an errand and came upon Little sitting on a bench, a paper napkin tucked into the collar of her coat, eating a burger and fries. She smiled when she saw me. “Two things I can’t live without,” she said. “Fresh air and fast food.”

  She offered me a fry, and I sat down and took it. It was an ugly day in late March, windy and lusterless, spring hesitant to enter this unholy world. Little’s long blond hair whipped against her cheeks. She wore turquoise eye shadow and dangling gold earrings, and her raincoat was dark, shiny red. There were fifteen minutes left of lunch, and I didn’t want to go back. Margaret was on a tear about time sheets, and Caitlin and Alyssa, the hygienists, had been out drinking the night before; they kept laughing about how hungover they were and if you tried to talk to them they just shook their heads and rolled their eyes as if no one else had ever been young or drunk, much less both at the same time.

  I’ll say this about Little, she never rolled her eyes at anything. As we sat there, a man came out of an office building across the street and jogged straight toward us, pulling up short in front of the bench like a dog coming to heel.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he told Little. “I was in a risk management meeting.”

  Little held up a hamburger wrapped in yellow paper, and he grabbed it eagerly. She said, “It’s okay. Who is at risk?”

  “We’re all at risk,” he said cheerfully, and took a bite. “Who’s your friend?”

  “I’m Valerie,” I said. “We work together.”

  “Josh,” he said. “I’d shake your hand, but—” He shook the hamburger instead, indicating condiment spillage. He was wearing khaki pants and a white button-down shirt with a fleece vest on top. He seemed like the kind of guy who reads about extreme sports in magazines while doing a slow twenty on a bike at the gym. But Little was staring at him as if he’d invented the sun and made it rise on command.

  “Are you coming to dinner tonight?” she asked him. “I’m making kugelis.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said. His hamburger was already gone, and Little handed him a napkin, which he used and then returned to her, along with his wrapper. He smacked his lips. I saw he was older than I’d thought at first. He was balding at the temples, and the khakis were tight around his hips, bought for a younger version of himself.

  Little turned to me. “Would you like to come, too?”

  I shook my head; it was clear she’d only issued the invitation out of politeness. We’d never socialized outside of work. In fact I didn’t socialize with anyone from work, even Margaret, who was close to my age and lived in my neighborhood and whose
cats I took care of when she went to visit her aunt in Nanaimo for two weeks every July. I liked everyone fine, but forty hours a week is already a lot of time to spend with people who’ve entered your life by happenstance.

  I was surprised when Josh chimed in. “You should definitely come!” he said. “The kugelis, man. It’s a thing of beauty, not to be missed.”

  I was even more surprised to hear myself say yes.

  * * *

  —

  That night I took the bus to Little’s apartment, following her directions. She lived in a terrible neighborhood, one I would have avoided in normal circumstances. Not two weeks earlier, five kids in their early twenties had been found dead in an apartment building nearby, having overdosed on heroin laced with fentanyl. I was an avid follower of this kind of news. My own son and daughter were busy and straitlaced and held bachelor’s degrees and jobs, but I never stopped worrying about their lives going over a cliff. Every time the phone rang I braced myself for the worst-case scenario, and in this way I kept them safe.

  I stood on Little’s stoop, ringing her doorbell, and nobody answered. Behind me a car slowed menacingly, then sped up again. The building across the street had been boarded up, and on its front door was a spray painting that looked like a cartoon penis brandishing a knife in tiny hands. Just as I was about to turn around and go home, I saw Josh jogging up the block, waving.

  “Her doorbell doesn’t work,” he said. He had a key and let us both in. “I guess she forgot to tell you.”

  I followed him up a set of damp linoleum stairs to the second floor, where he gave a cursory knock and then opened the door. Little was in the kitchen, wearing a frilly red apron tied about the waist, listening to Russian hip-hop. My kids would roll their eyes at me knowing about hip-hop, but Caitlin and Alyssa keep me up-to-date. Little’s cheeks were flushed and I could tell that she’d been drinking, not that I cared. She and Josh shared a kiss that passed swiftly across the border from affectionate to uncomfortable. I cleared my throat. Little made for me next, pecking me on both cheeks. I handed over the wine I’d brought, and Little opened it and poured two glasses.

  Josh grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge. “Here’s to recovery,” he said.

  “Josh is three years sober,” Little said sweetly.

  “Cheers,” I said, then flushed because it felt like the wrong thing to say.

  We sat down in Little’s tiny living room. She’d done her best with the place, arranging colorful slipcovers and sofa pillows and some pretty paintings on the wall. But instead of camouflaging it, her efforts only made the dumpiness of the place more obvious. It’s like when I put on a dress—you think to yourself, Aw, that middle-aged lady made an effort and not What a looker. Sometimes it’s better to accept limitations than to defy them. I wondered why Little didn’t move. I wondered where Josh lived and why they weren’t living together.

  While I was wondering all this, Little brought out a tray of cheese and crackers, telling Josh about a patient this afternoon who’d gotten so loopy on anesthetic she’d put her hand on Dr. Ertegun’s knee and stroked it. Flustered, he ran out of the room. “Poor man!” Little said, laughing. “He was quite unused to the attention.”

  I didn’t think Dr. Ertegun was unused to attention from women, but I didn’t say so. When I first started working at the practice, he was a young dentist with a beautiful wife who left him because he was quite happy to get attention from women, if you know what I mean. After his divorce he went off the deep end for a while, drinking and staying out late, and he developed a pretty serious coke problem. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one Monday morning when I opened the office and found him lying on the floor in the waiting room. He’d voided his bowels. I called 911 and sat with his head on my lap until the ambulance came. His body was clammy and inert, skin the color of wet cement. I cleaned up the office before anyone else arrived and then went to the hospital; I was the first person he saw when he opened his eyes.

  Afterward he went on a monthlong “vacation,” aka rehab, and when he got back he started over. In time, he found one reason or another to fire everyone in the office except me. He kept me around not out of gratitude to me but as punishment to himself, a permanent reminder of how low he’d once fallen. I knew it and he knew it, but each of us kept it to ourselves.

  Josh started talking about the intricacies of risk management. He seemed like the most tedious person I’d ever met, and I’m someone who spends most days listening to people’s regrets about their inadequate flossing technique. He sat with his Coke cradled in both hands, his knees spasming up and down. The apartment was warm and his face developed a sweaty sheen; his glasses kept slipping down his nose. Instead of pushing them up with his fingers he scrunched up his nose to do it. Since they slipped often, this gave him a recurring grimace, like a man in perpetual vicinity of a bad smell.

  “Dinner is served,” Little said from the kitchen.

  She didn’t have a dining room, so we filed into the kitchen, served ourselves, and returned to the living room to balance the plates on our knees. The kugelis turned out to be a kind of pudding, and Josh wasn’t kidding about Little’s cooking—it was fluffy and rich, deeply comforting, the kind of food your mother makes for you in childhood and you spend the rest of your life trying to imitate and fail. My own mother was a terrible cook, as well as being not a very nice person, but I still thought about food and love this way, and when I ate a meal like Little’s I sometimes found myself on the edge of tears. I took a break and drank some wine. The Russian hip-hop was still playing in Little’s kitchen, low, rhythmic, and unintelligible.

  “So,” I said. “Is it true that back in Lithuania you were a dentist?”

  “What?” Little said, and burst out laughing. “No! Who told you that?”

  I tried to remember, but couldn’t. It was one of those pieces of office gossip that had floated around so long its original source had evaporated.

  “I was a hydrologist,” she said. “For many years I worked for the government making a—what’s the word?—a study regarding a proposed dam.”

  “She was also a dancer,” Josh put in, between bites.

  “You were a hydrologist and a dancer?”

  Little nodded, nervously, I thought. Josh said, “Vilnius is some kind of town.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No,” he said.

  “So why did you leave?” I asked Little.

  “There was so much corruption,” she said. “It was impossible to make an honest living.”

  Josh snorted, and Little shot him a glance. “Oh, come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s kind of funny, coming from you.”

  “It’s not funny,” Little said, standing up. “More?” she asked me, holding out her hand for my plate. It was an order, and suddenly I could see her in ten years, erect and scolding, ordering her kids around. I gave it to her, and she disappeared into the kitchen and didn’t come back for a while.

  Josh leaned closer to me, across the coffee table. “She catfished me,” he whispered. I could smell his hot breath, sugary from Coke. “When she was back in Vilnius. That’s how we met. You can’t blame her for wanting a better life. Catfishing—”

  “I know what catfishing is,” I said irritably. Nothing is more aggravating than the condescension of younger people. “But I don’t understand. Why would she pretend to be somebody else on the internet? She’s what everybody wants to be.”

  “True,” Josh said. “True.”

  “So what was she pretending?”

  “She pretended she was going to marry me,” he said. “My mail-order bride. Like in the good old days!”

  “Which good old days are those?” I asked, but he ignored the question.

  “After she got her paperwork and came over, she said she didn’t want to get married after all. That it was all just to escape. But
guess what? She figured out that I’m not such a bad guy. We might,” he confided, lowering his voice, “we might even be falling in love.” He sat back against the couch, raising his eyebrows at me significantly.

  “Congratulations, I guess,” I said.

  When Little came back she was even drunker. I was alarmed. At the office she gave off an air of cool containment. She was never frazzled. When people flipped out, as they sometimes did, from pain or drugs or a bill they didn’t want to pay, she never seemed the slightest bit disturbed. She had a way of smiling that made people feel she was on their side, even when she was ushering them out the door. It was a real talent. But right now she was bright-eyed in a bad way, fidgety with some emotion she couldn’t get a handle on. She handed me my plate and more fell than sat down next to Josh on the couch.

  “I also brought cookies,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t have time to make anything myself. But they’re from the Italian place by the office. The people who work there are really mean but the baked goods are delicious.” I was rambling.

  “Thank you,” Little said. “You’re nice.” Drunk, she seemed younger than usual. Or maybe it was her posture, slumped down on the couch with her knees slightly raised, twisting her hands in her lap.

  Josh said, “You’re the nicest one in the office, I hear. Some of those others sound like real witches. Is it a dental practice, or a coven? Ha ha ha.”

  “Josh,” Little said warningly.

  I put my plate down on the coffee table and smiled at Little in what I hoped was a placating way. “Every office has its politics, I think,” I said, and she smiled back.

  “Is it true,” she said then, “what they say about you?”

  I couldn’t imagine what anybody at the office said about me. I’d been answering the phones there for more than a decade. I’d never missed more than a day due to illness. I had photos of my kids on my desk, childhood pictures even though they were grown. They’d always be babies to me.