The Shame, page 10
Breaking the rhythm of my trance, Asa walked into the room, and I quickly closed my laptop. He was holding up a piece of paper.
“What the fuck, Alma?” he said. He waved the paper closer so I could see. It was the unsigned book contract from the toy company.
“I’m thinking of not doing it,” I told him. “It’s stupid. I’ll become a toy.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. And then: “You’re crazy.”
“Why? Because I have standards? Because I’m resistant to being pressured? Easy for you to say, married to conservatism, all of you.” I was making things up as I went; only some of them made sense.
“I’m tired, Alma,” Asa said. “You make it all so hard. For yourself. For me.”
“Fuck you!” I said, as if to prove his point. I stood up. I went right over to him. I looked him in the face. “You’re a goddamn hypocrite,” I hissed, and sat on the couch. My sisters were right.
“You’re kidding me!” His voice went higher and began to crack. He got that look on his face, the one about the injustice of misperception. He hated to be misjudged. And I wasn’t sure if I was actually giving up on the toy book project. In truth, I didn’t know what to do—it was a lot of money, and I had enjoyed making the sketches. But I wanted to see Asa’s reaction. I wanted him to tell me I was brilliant again and again, that I needed to do this project. That I was an artist. I wanted him to beg me to do it. But instead, I yelled after him as he left the room: “You want me to sell myself!”
I opened my computer angrily. Celeste had already replied. “When can we meet?” she had written. And I knew then that I had found it—my purpose. I looked at the clock. I wrote: “Tomorrow.”
The kids were safe in bed, and I heard the sound of water running in the bathroom. Asa liked to take long, hot showers, and I noted this as yet another strike against him. I put on my shoes. Then I left.
Six
I looked at my engine light, which was back on. Maybe in winter I would have been more cautious, but that morning I ignored it. I pulled onto a cobblestoned block as the sun began to rise. I had a feeling of purpose and forward motion, but no clear direction in which to apply it. I thought about what Celeste might be doing. Last night she had been at the Japanese embassy. How late had she stayed up? Would she sleep in? Maybe not—it was Friday. But now I was checking, and she was awake after all. There she was on her back deck, drinking coffee in her bathrobe, with her ankles crossed in marled socks. She was on her way to an early yoga class, the coordinates of which I could only guess—but then I didn’t have to guess at all, because she posted the name of the studio, and when I tapped it, I could see myself as a blue dot moving on a map. I turned around and got back on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
I was in Williamsburg; it was seven. It took me a while to find parking, and by that time, I was sure the yoga class had ended. This was an energetic journey, I said to myself, and energetically there was a large part of me that didn’t want to run into her, or perhaps didn’t believe it would be possible. Asa kept calling me and I ignored him. He left messages that I didn’t listen to. He sent me an email filled with serious concern. He wondered if I was dead.
I needed some coffee. I went into a café with cathedral ceilings, glossy wood stools, a chalkboard menu featuring the dozens of varieties you could choose from. There were six people making coffee with calculated grace; they had been trained for this. The floor was marble. I had no idea what to order, and for a while I stared dumbly up at the menu.
Eventually I chose an Americano. I dug in my bag to pay the cashier. It was now the morning rush, and the line snaked long and winding behind me. But as I grabbed my coin purse, it caught on the zipper of my bag. It was bloated to the size of an orange, filled with quarters and dimes; it had been falling apart for years. Suddenly, coins flew across the room, showering tables and floor, scattered like seeds, and dropping into people’s cups. I kneeled and began to collect them, frantically. The knees of my jeans grew dirty as I chased after my money. I had to excuse myself again and again as I crawled beneath the high tables, and people lifted their legs to let me through. I bumped my head against shins and handbags. I felt so visible, all at once, like a cloak had been thrown off. I was sure the other customers could see my desperation, the bags under my eyes from the long night of driving.
Maybe this was a sign that I should turn back. That I wasn’t welcome here. But—as with the warning in my car—I ignored it. And when I had collected my coffee and my coins, I went outside and saw that the sun was shining and the air was warming up, and I was in the fractals of urban life. I found my mind warping around the corner of a building. I took a break to brush off my jeans under some scaffolding, and I looked at my reflection in a window to get a sense of myself.
At a crosswalk, I waited for the light to change and saw the other people chewing their cud, lost in their own little worlds. There was a man with a bike chain around his neck. There was a woman wearing blue lipstick and a spike through her lip, an old lady with a shopping bag full of bread crumbs. There were kids in glittered sneakers on their way to school, a napkin floating by, someone smoking on a stoop. No one looked at me. It was as if I wasn’t even there.
Why did I suddenly feel taller, more substantial, with a swing in my step? The store windows I passed, which could have filled me with despair and longing, didn’t. I was wearing my leather boots, molded perfectly to the shape of my feet. Of course, I thought every so often of my family. Asa was taking the kids to school by now, and they would be distracted by their own social obligations. He would go to his classes, his meetings. I guessed he would pick up the kids at the end of the day. They’d figure it out. What once would have worried me felt irrelevant.
Everywhere I walked, I kept my eye out for Celeste. At every turn, every intersection, every car opening its door, I thought I might see her. I felt breathless, determined. I wanted a cigarette for the first time in years, just to hold something in my hands. And I wandered. In one sense, I was lost in a sea of millions, with no concrete information on where Celeste lived or what her plans were. But in another sense, I knew exactly where I was going. I just had to wait for her to tell me.
I stopped for a moment and checked my phone. Had she written me back, had she given me an address, a place for us to meet? But there was no verbal reply, so I went to her images. There, she was enveloped in a new green sweater, a gift; she was thanking her friend for it. She presented a still life of a staghorn fern and a basket and some kind of smooth rock in the corner of a shop with white walls. I looked at the location, and mapped it on my phone. I had never done anything like this before, but it was so simple.
I was breathing the air she was breathing. I was sidestepping the garbage that she, too, was avoiding. I was letting myself linger over the details that were also part of Celeste’s physical day. And I was flooded with memories. There was a gallery—was it somewhere she’d been before? There were ceramic busts in the window like the one on her mantel. There was a vintage store. I thought she actually shopped there; wasn’t there a costume she had purchased? There was a diner in an old Airstream—Celeste liked their mac and cheese. And then the blue dot on the map that meant me hovered over the place where Celeste had just been.
I looked up into the window of a little fiber studio. The glass was painted with white lettering, like an old apothecary bottle, and inside were window seats covered in embossed fabric, linen chairs embroidered with roses, and baskets filled with roving, yarn, and knitting supplies. There was a loom. There was the staghorn fern in the corner. I felt a sense of eerie recognition, like I had been there before, and in a way, of course, I had. In the window I saw a hand-knit angora wool sweater hanging from a birch branch. Just like hers, only yellow.
I went in and touched the sweater. My hands were clammy. The price was secured with a safety pin: $195. I had the feeling I was being watched. It was unclear if the store had opened yet, even though the door was ajar. I made an effort to keep my hands visible. The owner of the shop came out of a back room and sat behind the register, making me jolt to attention: “Isn’t it beautiful?” She told me the angora was from rabbits on a farm in the Hudson Valley, that she had gone to one of their events just last week. “The farmer is the most wonderful woman.”
I held the soft sweater in my hands. I told her it was pretty. She replied that it was actually pulled at one buttonhole and was meant only for display. But then, after a brief pause, she said she would give it to me for 40 percent off, that she thought it would look amazing on me. My fingers were shaking as I thrust my credit card at her. I wanted this to be over. Did I want a bag? No, I would wear it, I said, and I put it right on.
I walked for many blocks, and soon it was noon. The morning had darkened. Another call came in from Asa, which again I ignored. I could see rain was coming. It had gotten colder. As I watched the shapes of people moving through the streets, I began to feel very far from home. I checked my phone, but I couldn’t locate Celeste. I looked at my email, nothing from her, then back again at her array of images. Really, she could be anywhere. I would have to wait. As a distraction, I thought I would stop and eat something.
I went into a restaurant with blue awnings and a Moroccan-inspired menu, round wooden tables and green leather chairs, and little white bowls piled high with sugar cubes. The waitresses were wearing structured boatneck tunics over tights. There was a table available at the window, and I sat there, resting my bag on the window seat cushion. I ordered whole-grain toast and a tea that came out on a blue-rimmed saucer with the name of the café hand-painted around the edge. The waitress brought me a glass of water. There was a newspaper on an empty seat at the table next to me, which I flipped through while I ate. Almost at once the café filled up, and after eating my toast, I ordered another cup of tea and a plate of Gorgonzola, walnuts, and honey. I was vibrating a little from the lack of sleep. I was taking my time, though, allowing myself to savor the moment. I could be anyone I wanted to be.
A young woman and twin girls, probably around the age of five, sat down at the table next to me. They were dressed in several layers, and it took the young woman some time to get each layer off the children. First came the parkas, that one was easy. Next the two thick sweaters, over their heads, bringing loose blond hair up with static. Then, a long-sleeved shirt, one each. And there was more: one had a giant necklace of felt balls, the other a lip balm hanging on a fabric chain, and each in turn needed to be removed and filed away into the young woman’s bag. But right after she opened her bag to do so, each little girl demanded her necklace back, and just as quickly as the woman had shoved them in her bag, she retrieved them again, handing each necklace back to its owner. Only she had mixed them up accidentally, disobeying the social order, and there was shrieking centering on a new conflict. One girl denied having the other’s precious necklace, claiming it to be hers, and she was refusing to trade back. There was grabbing over the table settings and breaking up of the grabbing. The young woman was starting to seem embarrassed and looked around to see if anyone else in the café was watching. It was clear now that she was not, in fact, the little girls’ mother. They were wielding a certain power over her, and her mannerisms seemed practiced but not intuitive, like those of someone trying to master something that didn’t come naturally to her. An aunt, maybe. But no, on second thought, an aunt would be magical, the girls would see her not very often, they would acquiesce, they would behave to impress her. This was more than likely a caretaker, and she was probably new, because the girls didn’t listen to her and there didn’t seem to be a set code among them. She kept asking them to use inside voices, but the girls ramped up their whining with each of her pleadings. She begged them to trade back necklaces and they refused, flatly, and I saw a glint in one of the girls’ eyes as if to say to her sister, “Let’s keep fucking with her.” Eventually one girl tipped over her water glass, and the woman scrambled to find a napkin to clean it up before it spilled over into their laps. The other child just sat there and didn’t help.
I flagged the waitress, who was slammed. She brought them over a dishrag, and the woman began mopping up liquid, which had pooled onto the floor. The little girls swung their legs gleefully, until one foot caught the woman on her ear. That was it, she got out from under the table. They were leaving. They wouldn’t get a treat after all, and she would be reporting all this to their mother at the end of the day. The girls started to cry, and as their despair escalated, the young woman began to look desperate. “Okay, fine,” she said to them. “I won’t tell her if you promise to behave.” That shut them up. One of them negotiated: “Let us watch a video.” This had become unbearable to witness. She was cornered, the young woman, by two little wolves. But she capitulated, and it was settled, the girls loosened and began to obey. The young woman put back on their layers of clothing, and handed both girls their mittens, which they put on independently, without help, all four thumbs in all four thumbholes. The waitress came back with my bill.
I left the café and sat for a while listening to a busker. As the city blew by me, I sank deeper into solitude. Asa would soon be picking the kids up from school. He would return home expecting me to be there, but the house would be empty and cold. Phin would be contemplative; Asa would have to redirect him, start a fire. Eden would cry out for me. They would race around the house, expecting me to pop out from behind a corner. They would ask Asa when I was coming back. He would change the subject.
But maybe they wouldn’t miss me. Maybe they wouldn’t even notice. Asa usually stopped at the country store on the rare occasions when he picked them up, something I never did, and who knows, maybe he’d let them watch more than one movie that night. They might be happy I was gone. They might say to him, over ice cream, “I hope she doesn’t come back.” Well, maybe I wouldn’t. Then again it was possible they would notice how little butter Asa used in their noodles, and then they would want me again.
I checked my email again and saw there was still no response from Celeste. Why wasn’t she writing me back? Had I done something to upset her? No—when I reread my email to her, I found it charming, and only partially a lie. Where was she now? After the fiber store she had stopped giving me information, and for all I knew, she was gone, driving in a car or boarding a train, on her way somewhere. It started to rain, soaking me almost instantly, and I ran into the first doorway I could find.
I was in a women’s clothing store, expensive, with spare offerings. The walls were faded red brick, the ceiling white. Down the center of the room, which was lined with steel racks of billowing, expressionistic clothing, was a wooden table covered with neat rows of shoes. It was familiar in some ways, but more impressive, more important-feeling than any store I had ever entered. At the far end of the table was a case displaying tiny jars of face cream, white with black plastic caps. Next to the display case, on a wooden stool, sat an old steamer trunk filled with silk scarves.
I walked slowly around the room—there was no saleswoman I could see—letting myself admire each piece of clothing, flipping through the racks carefully as if I were looking for something in particular, imagining myself in situations where this glamour would be warranted. The beauty captivated me; I was saturated with longing, or maybe it was just appreciation that had over the years hardened into longing. I let my hands caress the fabrics. I thought of painting, I thought of the ocean, I was absorbed in the swirl of textile and color. It was cold and I wrapped my arms around my own soft sweater, sort of waltzing in slow motion, satisfied with my recent purchase and unable to imagine room for more. My eyes were closed. I had lost myself to anxiety and sleeplessness, and had wandered into my own dream. When I came to the end of a rack, I stopped at the jars of face cream.
The store was mostly empty. On the other side of the room, however, slightly obscured by the display case between us, was a woman with her back to me. She was listening intently to a saleswoman, each of them holding one of the containers of ointment. The saleswoman was describing the “Crème Reine,” which was made by a little-known convent of nuns in the French countryside, and whose price tag reflected the care and secrecy of its creation. The nuns rose at three thirty each morning to begin mixing the lotion, breaking just a few times a day, to attend chapel and worship. The holy cream was blessed by each of them, and the concentration and commitment of their spiritual practice could undoubtedly be seen in the quality of the product; the jars had been flying off the shelves in over ten countries across the world, a shock to the company, which saw the line as an experiment in collaboration at best.
