As I sat at the bar and I began to have the feeling I was a tin of dog food errantly placed on the exotic-fruit aisle with the tinned lychees and pineapple tidbits and I also knew that I was not a tin of dog food because a tin of dog food would have the luxury to simply be its dense and nothing self, and a tin of dog food wouldn’t push and wish against its tinned-ness, wouldn’t need to get anything.
Two women came up and put a plastic crown on the head of an oval-faced man standing near me at the bar. It was his birthday, it seemed, because the little crown had
Happy Birthday
written in purple cursive on it and even though every person who could read the crown was probably not the one having the birthday, something was still understood. What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem and I shifted slightly down the bar, toward a wall, to make room for all the people who cared that the oval-headed man had been born, then sitting at the bar seemed like a sad, pathetic place to sit. I couldn’t remember why coming to a bar was the choice that I had made, a clearly foolish, desperate, sad-looking choice, and I accidentally made eye contact with a man hunched over his arms on the other end of the bar and his eyes said something to me, asked me something people are always silently asking in these kinds of places and I wanted to scream at him,
Don’t bother
, but I just tilted my head to the wall and mouthed those words to myself, hoping he’d somehow get the signal.
27
Cars went, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood a considerable distance from the highway, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard last night, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone to remember us and come back and take us home, and I noticed the elaborate story I’d made for this little plant and wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been and I stood, again, alone, listening to the ocean falling over itself, hitting rocks, and I thought about going to the beach to have an idealistic moment with the ocean, but all the romance of travel had shriveled and now the ocean wasn’t such a thing to me; I was just trying to get somewhere, and later some bloke dropped me off in a little town, by a park that was in a neighborhood where people who don’t go to parks live, a neighborhood where people who do go to parks wouldn’t want to go. There was a monument by the entrance with some benches surrounding it. After a while two people walked up and sat on the ledge of the monument. They were dressed in identical outfits—school uniforms—white polo shirts and navy pants. They began kissing. One person was a boy with shaggy blond hair and the other was a girl with short black hair. They kissed rhythmically, their mouths the only point of contact, and I ignored them, or not quite ignored them but started reading a book, and while I looked at the book I started thinking of when I wore school uniforms and went with my boyfriend to a park to kiss in the spot where we thought no one would notice, except for that one woman who noticed that one time as she was passing in her hot-pink jogging outfit, the woman who said,
Ah, young love!
, in a tone that was not entirely unkind, and I thought it wasn’t kind to make us conscious of our youth and our then-uncomplicated love. I stared at my book, moving my eyes across the letters and thinking of that woman, of
Ah, young love!
and of her hot-pink jogging suit and of the wet smirk on that boyfriend’s face as she speed-walked away. The two uniformed people were still kissing, diligently nodding their faces together at a steady tempo.
I stayed in that park until the sun went down and then I stayed longer. I found a bench not near a streetlight and did something like sleep for some hours. In the middle of the night I found a jar in a trash bin and I pissed in it and then I placed the jar back in the trash bin and I know that may seem a little ridiculous, but I thought it gave sleeping in a park just a shred of dignity if I didn’t pee right into the dirt like an animal, that if I could contain my own waste then I was somehow a person on an adventure, not a person with limited options and limited means and possibly dwindling sanity.
In the morning, there were birds. There were birds here just like there are birds anywhere.
28
Sometimes, I realized, many emotions sit on a face, at odds: a lip curl, a neck tilt, an echo in an eye. This was clear when the shed door opened and a woman was there and she didn’t seem too surprised by me being there, slumped sideways and using a wad of garden gloves as a pillow and I squinted from the sudden light and she said,
Oh, dear
, and she seemed happy and annoyed at the same time, pinched brow, tiny smile, her eyes doing something else entirely.
Well, good morning
, she said, and I said something and she said
, Is everything all right?
(And everything was not all right because I had been wandering for days or weeks, unsure of where I was going, eating from trash bins, being
alone
, the way Werner said I wasn’t meant to be, and I would show him, I thought, except I’d show him without actually showing him, because he wouldn’t see me sleeping in sheds and under grapevines in pitch-black vineyards because I’d done that all alone, waiting for daylight, waiting for an idea of what to do with myself, wondering if this kind of aloneness was what I really wanted—)
I’m all right
, I said, but she didn’t say anything else and I realized she was waiting on more of an explanation, but all my explanations seemed to be at odds with my mouth, were on strike, had called in sick, or maybe never existed and I felt like crucial organs had taken off in the middle of the night, like my kidneys had crawled up my body and out my ears and left two small sandbags in their place and all my lymph nodes had been burned into charcoal lumps—
I was walking and got lost
, I finally said.
It was dark. I’m sorry.
No reason to apologize, dear, it happens to the best of us.
It does not
, I thought but did not say, because I knew I was not a part of
the best of us
, and these kinds of things did not happen to
the best of us
, just to
some of us
in extremely rare cases when a person forgets how to reach any reasonable wing of herself, but I wasn’t going to go correcting this woman (
Ruth
, she said, putting her hand out to help me up) because I knew, at least, that telling a stranger that you couldn’t reach any reasonable wing of yourself just wasn’t a pleasant or helpful thing to say, not a good first impression, not a thing to say in daylight.
Ruth sighed and smiled.
Stay for brekkie, then? Get cleaned up?
The house was antique and silent, and she showed me to a little, white bathroom and said I could use the green soap, the one shaped like a seashell. I unlatched my backpack and let it thud behind me and shed all my clothes and turned on the claw-foot tub, and I stared into a mirror, my tanned skin exaggerating the white in my eyes, hair wisps curling with sweat, dirt smeared around my face.
When the tub filled I slid in and soaked and forgot where I was and I thought about the question of whether the police had taken away the papers that Ruby had dropped off at the professor’s office that day, because once I had asked him if he still had those papers and he said he wasn’t sure where they had gone; and I said,
You don’t remember? Why don’t you remember?
Husband:
It was a long time ago, Elly, and it was a very difficult year
— And I:
But why wouldn’t you remember what happened to them?
And he’d said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.
* * *
In the living room an elderly woman was slumped like a sandbag in an ornate wingback chair.
Nina, I’d like you to meet Elyria
, Ruth said.
Elyria, this is Nina.
Nice to meet you
, I said, trying to seem calm and normal and nice—not a woman with a wildebeest renting a room in her, not a woman who sleeps in garden sheds and phone booths and anywhere—but my voice sounded like I had borrowed it and it didn’t fit my mouth, not my real thoughts made into real words, but some awkward hand-me-down.
It’s lovely to meet you, dear
, Nina said, not looking up. Her belly paunch looked like risen dough.
Mother
, Ruth said,
you could make an effort at the very least.
A what?
An effort
, Ruth said louder,
you could—would you just sit up? We have a guest, Mother, really.
Fine, fine
, Nina said, but she didn’t move any part of herself. She was wearing five or six pearl necklaces tangled together. A bowl of wet blueberries was balanced on her gut and a tear of blueberry skin was wedged between her front teeth.
I’m just going to the garden for some herbs
, Ruth said.
I’ll be right back. There’s coffee and tea if you’d like it.
Nina looked around the room as if someone might try to sneak up on her, then looked at me.
So, how is it? Sleeping in the garden shed?
Oh, it’s just okay
, I said.
I think it sounds like fun
.
I’d like to have some fun again. Once I slept sitting up on a train. Imagine that. A young woman all dressed to travel—just sleeping—sitting up sleeping with her gloves and hat still on!
* * *
After I went at a plate of scrambled eggs and toast like a stray dog, then a second plate, then a bowl of fruit and more butter-heaped toast, Ruth started asking questions (the expected ones: where-was-I-from, where-was-I-going, why-had-I-slept-in-her-shed) and I tried to sip tea as if I was the kind of person who sipped tea as I told her the truth: that I wasn’t lost because I no longer had a destination, that the place I’d wanted to stay in New Zealand had fallen through and the backup plan had fallen through.
I really do enjoy being alone
, I told her, and I tried to smile, but I realized that I wasn’t quite smiling and what was happening was there was water on my face and it was coming from my eyes and this was surprising to me, but it didn’t seem to surprise Ruth, who tilted her head and asked about my family as if she was a therapist, someone accustomed to sudden, naked pain, and I found myself unable to lie like I had so many other times.
I told her about my husband and Ruby and my mother and I told her everything and I was so tired by the end of it and my chest was shaking and I exhaled and I felt a little relaxed and Ruth, with her concerned and respectably wrinkled face and her silk blouse and pale lilac trousers and the scent of rosemary haloing this emphatically wholesome situation called her life, Ruth looked at me and said,
Would you like to call someone, dear?
And all I could do was agree with her because it would have been nearly impossible or possibly illegal or at the least difficult to disagree with her wholesomeness— I said,
Okay
, and she brought a rotary phone out and the only number that came to mind was the number my mother would write in Magic Marker along my forearm when she sent Ruby and me out to play—
Just in case, you can never be too careful—
and sometimes you couldn’t tell her fours and nines apart—
Thatsanine, notta four
—and Ruby and I would mimic her later,
Thatsanine, thatsanine
, we’d say this invented word to other kids who had no idea and we’d smirk at each other and run through sprinklers to wash off the Magic Markered number, and we’d say,
We’re never going back now, she’ll never find us now
, but we always went back and we always remembered the number and I don’t know why I dialed that number that afternoon at Ruth’s house, but I dialed it as if I had finally found the case she’d meant by
just in case
, and just like that there was a skeptical
Hello
on the line and I said,
It’s Elyria
.
Oh…,
my mother said.
Elyria? Huh.
I’m okay
, I said.
I thought you might be
, she said,
you always seem to manage. Where is it you went?
New Zealand.
Well, that’s pretty far.
We were quiet for a moment and she said,
Are you still there?
Yes.
You know, there was a moment there we all thought you were dead. Is that what you wanted us to think?
I realized it was early evening there, so she’d maybe only had a few afternoon vodkas. I told her that I didn’t want anyone to think I was dead, that I just wanted to leave.
You know, Elly, I really thought you’d be over all this by now. It’s been six years.
I stared at Ruth’s whitewashed china cabinet.
Hello? Are you there?
I’m here
, I said.
Well, don’t you have anything to say about that, Elyria? Anything?
About what?
You leave on the anniversary of—you know … It’s always been about Ruby for you, even the marriage—you know that—everyone knows that. I’m just the only one that will say it.
She laughed a little and audibly sipped something.
That’s not what it’s about. I didn’t—I didn’t even know it was …
But I must have known it was, I realized, somehow, I must have known. I let the silence settle.