The next morning, I sat alone on a commuter train heading south to Washington, the wheels groaning as they spooled over the track. Heat rose in a haze from the trees as we passed little-used stations, buildings that were once hubs of commerce back when trains had the energy of America onboard. How many times had I taken a train to and from my father’s house in Maryland, feeling that I was the daughter he loved? The smell of diesel, the mothy flutter of fluorescent lights in their narrow overhead tracks, the snap of the conductor’s hole punch that wore grooves into thin slips of ticket paper—all this was my father.
I saw now that none of it was.
My phone buzzed and I thumbed it open, hoping it was Lucas with an invitation to meet him that night. We’d go to some dim bar, where we could drink whiskeys, our knees touching, and I’d tell him about what happened until I cried and he took my face in his hands. But it wasn’t Lucas. It was a weekend; he rarely texted on weekends. It was my roommate Katherine, saying again she was sorry about my dad, and with a reminder to send her money for the electric bill. My stomach plummeted in disappointment, and I got a floaty, pins-and-needles feeling. Lucas was never spontaneous. He couldn’t be, because of his wife. Our time together was carefully choreographed based on her schedule.
What I had to look forward to was a sad Sunday with my roommates in 1938 House, the once-grand, now-grimy three-story group house we shared. Mallory and Adrian would be playing loud go-go music and arguing about capitalism. Nick would be cooking lentil mush and jotting his random ideas on the wall we’d covered with whiteboard paint, and afterward he’d fill the crusty lentil pot with soapy water and leave it in the sink, where it would sit for days. At some point Katherine would breeze in with individually wrapped chocolates or a bouquet of flowers left over from an embassy event she’d run. She’d want to sit on the couch after her grueling day as the social secretary at the Moroccan embassy, her long legs tucked up under her, and speak at length, as usual, about the ambassador’s annoying, interfering mother-in-law.
Their normal world now seemed bizarre, untouchable, heartless. What was abnormal—my father’s home without him in it—was suddenly appealing, even comfortable. Colette was there, and Van, my community in grief. What was I doing on this rattling train, moving out of my father’s world, where a man could die suddenly in his own bed, going into one where twenty-somethings argued over who ate the last of the jalapeño-flavored potato chips? My life felt pointless.
The door at the front of the train car opened, and a girl hurried in, wearing a strapless orange dress that showed off the inky-blue tattoos on her back and arms, a frieze of sea creatures. She threw a small purse onto the seat across from me. Why, on an empty train, had she chosen to sit so close? I watched her peek over the seat in front of her, then duck and scrunch down so that her face rested against the window.
The car door opened again, carefully this time, and a foot appeared in a worn sneaker, followed by a man with a sunburned nose and an undershirt that was stretched out so the chains he wore around his neck were visible down to the crosses. “This is better,” he announced, positioning himself in the aisle beside the girl in the orange dress. “How far you going? I have a cousin down in Richmond, said I could come stay.”
The girl murmured something with her head turned away. The man mentioned the beers he had in his backpack. He commented on the humidity. He bemoaned his lack of chewing gum. He said he was tired of northern women, ha ha. The girl responded with a few benign words, and I saw she had decided that her best strategy to get away from him was light conversation. It was the nonconsensual version of many terrible dates I’d been on. A week ago, witnessing this would have made me angry, ready to fight for her, but today I felt nothing: It was just another man stalking another woman. I watched it from a distance, from the inside of a cloud.
Pain was what I needed—or pleasure. A hand brushing against my neck, my hips arching upward. I needed to narrow my focus, to feel something, anything at all. It was a weekend, and Lucas clearly wasn’t going to be available or thinking of me. The last time I’d heard from him was right before the funeral.
Since I met Lucas, I hadn’t been on ErosAble, the popular dating app. It now seemed urgent that I set up a date for tonight, especially if it meant I wouldn’t have to wander around the house while my roommates went about their Sundays. Maybe I could have the kind of casual, wild sex that would poke through this fog, and I could make Lucas jealous at the same time, which might result in seeing him sooner. I logged on to the app.
The man in the undershirt had taken a seat and gotten busy on his phone, facing away from the girl in the orange dress. From where I sat, her eyes looked closed. In the new quiet, I scrolled through dozens of men, as uncomplicated as skimming my hand over racks of silky underwear at a department store.
Almost instantly, there were two messages in my inbox. One included the caption Heyyyyyy there under a photo of an engorged penis sticking out of boxers printed with sheep. The second was from This Cyclocross Life, who had written a brief note that neither demeaned nor flattered me. He had given my profile four out of five winx. His profile showed a bearded man in flannel leaning against a tree aflame in fall foliage and a list of interests that was compellingly bland: Biking. Coffee. Trivia. Public Radio.
If Lucas ever filled out a profile on ErosAble, he would carefully curate his list to appear specific and profound: Picasso’s Blue Period, development economics, Ethiopian food, Ani DiFranco lyrics, the late novels of García Márquez. Lucas had read García Márquez in the original Spanish. He spoke four languages and hated translations, said he wanted to experience authorial intent directly from the source. But Lucas would never troll a dating website; he was too considered, too mature—a big brain in the big world, not a headless torso with a hint of hip tattoo.
I dashed off a quick note to This Cyclocross Life, asking if he wanted to meet up, not saying, What would I have to do to get five winx from you?
I took out my notebook of first lines. Dad’s poem was written on the second-to-last page, and I let my eyes blur around it without reading. Who was that lagoon woman at the funeral, her long black scarf unwrapped, standing in the back of the chapel as I recited my father’s words?
With a sudden and terrible authority, I realized who she must be. After Dad’s second divorce, before he met Colette, he had gone dogsledding with an adult adventure program that brought groups to rural Minnesota for lessons in snow camping and self-reliance. Each day they would travel dozens of miles by dogsled, and at night they pitched camp in the snow. All participants had to spend one night away from the group, alone in the woods, snug in their tents. I could never quite imagine my father in the Minnesota woods, the trees draped with fresh snow, silent birds gliding from branch to sky. At home, he’d puttered around the yard, occasionally swam in the bay in summer. He wasn’t an outdoorsman, but it had lingered, this time with the dogs.
There had been a woman on that trip whose water bottle broke, flooding her sleeping bag when she was miles away from the group. She thought she might freeze to death if she lay down to sleep in the pooling water, so she put on her parka and boots, brought a mat out onto the snow, and did slow yoga for seven hours until the first light of dawn, when she found her way back to the camp, where my father slept soundly surrounded by the warm breath of dogs.
It was not her capacity for discomfort or uncertainty, I think, that made my father love her but that she conserved her energy to make it last through the night. Even as a child I understood that my father pinwheeled from experience to experience in great bursts, that he was voracious, that he loved deeply and often. I imagined that he loved this woman for her restraint, her body that did yoga in the dark. In his retelling, she had no name. I’d asked to hear this story again and again, each time hoping for a new detail about the woman, a blast of acid clarity, like biting into a cold orange. I wanted to meet her, to understand her. I wanted to be her.
Maybe they had reconnected and had been meeting in secret. And then I remembered the funeral guest book and its unfamiliar name and address. I brought up the photo I’d taken of the signature: Linda T. 14 Horseshoe Road, Lucknow. If she was the yoga woman from my dad’s time in Minnesota, she was now living in the area. It was plausible that they had been seeing each other.
I squinted down at her name. Linda T. Could she also be the L. M. Taylor from the will? Was this the recipient of my father’s baseball? A woman who had come late to his funeral, shoulders hunched, crying into a tissue? I felt petulant and wronged as I cycled through the story again, embellishing. Had a woman he had known only briefly gotten the treasured baseball? And his own daughter, whom he had known since she was born, and had played catch with many times, had been given a gag gift. It might as well have been a whoopee cushion or a dribble glass. He’d prioritized and sentimentalized the sex he’d once had with some woman over the abiding love he’d felt for me. And I knew he did love me. But once you have a child, she and her entire generation nip at your heels and make you old. Whereas a woman in a bed makes you young. That must be it. That was the bitter story I told myself as I imagined spending the rest of my life staring into the idiotic eyes of the gingerbread-man tie rack.
The train slowed at an intersection; beyond the tracks, two men in waders climbed the riverbank, carrying fishing poles. Teenagers in swimsuits headed in the opposite direction with inner tubes. In my peripheral vision, I saw the man leap up and loom over the girl in the orange dress. “Why you have to be like that?” he said, chopping his hand through the air. The car went dark as we bolted through a tunnel and then we emerged in daylight sharp as ivory. I looked in both directions for a conductor.
“Please,” the girl said in a pained voice, searching for my eyes across the aisle.
“Fucking bitch!” he snarled.
On the cracked blue seat, I hovered on the precipice of defending her, but I did nothing. The man turned and sneered in my direction, and I averted my eyes. For a moment everything was still, the air charged with the possibility of something worse.
“Fuck this shit,” he declared finally, and went humping unsteadily down the aisle.
I felt the weight of her gaze on me but was afraid to look at the girl in the orange dress to see whether the expression on her face was one of gratitude or disgust. I had a good idea which it was. I’m sorry I didn’t protect you. I don’t care about anything: My father is dead. It was an excuse for everything and an excuse for nothing. By the time I’d opened my mouth to speak, the girl in the orange dress had turned away.
The first line of Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding was written in careful penmanship on page 37 of my notebook: It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. How did McCullers get away with those two unrelated adjectives to describe the season? The cruel vagueness of the word “it”?
If I could do it over again, I thought, I would keep a notebook of second lines. “First lines can be flashy,” I’d told my dad once, hoping to impress him, “but second lines point to what the story is really about.” “Give me an example,” he’d said. “What about the second sentence of The Member of the Wedding,” I had said, reciting it: “ ‘This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.’ ” And he had laughed softly, proudly.
I gathered my bag and walked onto the wobbly platform between train cars, holding the rubber cable strung from one doorway to the other. In many cultures a dead person undergoes a transition from life to the underworld; he crosses the swollen river Styx; he enters a liminal space until his soul is set free. I felt in that liminal space too.
One moment he was alive. The next, dead. I was beloved, alive; then given a strange inheritance, dead to my father. The glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack. My own mother hadn’t even known what it meant. I texted her to ask, and she’d replied, No idea. So weird!!! In the in-between space where I now stood, the sky was dark. When I glanced up, the train was pulling into Union Station and we were under the soot-black roof in D.C., waiting to disembark.
A message flashed across my screen from This Cyclocross Life. Would love to meet up tonight.
I met This Cyclocross Life at a hot new restaurant. I’d dropped my overnight bag at home, ducking out without seeing my housemates. I hadn’t changed my clothes, but I didn’t care. As I stood before him now, it was clear that he was shorter than he had appeared in his photo. He had a canvas satchel slung over his arm, and one leg of his jeans was cuffed near the knee so it wouldn’t catch on his bike chain. His calf, drumstick-shaped, was thick with hair.
When the waitress came to our table, he said, “Two regulars and a coupla waters.”
“Please don’t order for me,” I said.
He peered at me through large, stylish glasses. “It’s not that I’m ordering for you. This restaurant only serves one thing.”
The food came on slabs of granite. On the slabs were deep, asymmetrical bowls of noodles. Hidden inside the bowls were layers of things to uncover: scallions, pork belly, egg slices, crunchy fried mushrooms.
As we ate, he told me that it was his job to choose the music that aired between segments on NPR’s Morning Edition. He pulled up that morning’s show on his phone and we listened to the reassuring voice of Steve Inskeep report a story about Chinese sanctions. Then a tinkling, upbeat melody signaled the end of things.
“I chose that,” he said.
While he talked about off-road bicycle racing, I found myself wondering whether he had to tuck his penis carefully into some spandexed corner before long bike rides.
His studio apartment was just off Logan Circle, in one of D.C.’s newest condo buildings. I’d been at my father’s less than a week, but a new city seemed to have been built atop the old, as though a giant child had updated his erector set. There were construction cranes in every direction and new apartment buildings with little glass balconies the size of milk crates hanging off the sides. “The only constant in D.C. is condo,” my roommate Mallory had said.
Upstairs, This Cyclocross Life grabbed two Narragansetts from a small refrigerator and fumbled with his sound system until electronic music came through the speakers. Above a brown futon hung a poster for a band called Asteroid, No. Five lanky white guys sat on a group of chairs turned backward and sideways, so the musicians were either straddling them or sitting in profile. At the bottom of the poster was the line “Ce n’est pas un groupe.”
He settled on the futon, watching me. I put the cold cylinder of beer against my neck.
“I only drink ’gansett between May and September,” he said. “Then I switch to pale ale until January. In the late winter I do Guinness.”
“David Attenborough could narrate a documentary about your seasonal regularity,” I said. He didn’t laugh. I looked again at the poster. The faces of the Asteroid, No musicians were pale and lumpy. “How do you think they decided who would sit backward and who would sit sideways?”
He followed my gaze to the poster and then looked back at me. “Do you want this?” His hand fluttered uncertainly in his lap—it was this small gesture of insecurity that swayed me. I leaned over and went for his lips, but I had trouble finding them in the thicket of beard. He didn’t seem to mind. In one motion, he stood up and backed me over to the bed.
This Cyclocross Life had a good body under his Full Communism T-shirt. Unlike his bicycle, his penis seemed to go at only one speed.
“You okay?” he asked, his mouth inches from mine.
“Uh-huh.” I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the feeling of him inside me, but I felt nothing, no pleasure or friction, just unfamiliar weight. I’d had casual sex before, and even when it was bad, there was discomfort or pain, awkwardness or adrenaline. But now nothing. As my body was pressed into the mattress, I went cold with panic. Counted silently to myself the seconds and thought of Lucas, how he seemed to intuitively understand me when we had sex; if I wasn’t present, he would feel it and stop immediately. Nothing like this man on top of me. What was I doing?
He finished and flipped onto his back, dropping the condom off the side of the bed. I turned to face him. “My father died last week,” I said.
“Oh wow, I’m sorry.” He pecked me on the cheek. “That’s tough.”
“I gave his eulogy.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“I did?”
“At dinner.”
“Sorry.” Why hadn’t I remembered that? What else had I told him?
He shifted uncomfortably. “How’d he die?”
I turned my head away. I didn’t want to offer him anything else.
An aneurysm
A broken heart
A catfight
An embolism
A fatal mistake
My father’s face was slipping from me, but I could see Lucas’s face clearly. His dark eyebrows and feathery hair. His voice that went ragged with desire.
This Cyclocross Life was talking. I propped my head up to look at him, but I couldn’t make out the words. “Do you want to stick around? Or go home?” he asked again.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Go home, I guess.”
As I bent to pick up my things, I heard a hollow knock. The baseball had fallen out of my backpack and rolled across the floor, thumping against the leg of his futon.
I scrambled after it, but he was already reaching down to grab it. “Why do you have a baseball?”
“Give it back.” I was ice-cold and prickly all over. I suddenly felt I might vomit.
“You play?”
“It was my father’s,” I said. “He left it for me in his will.”
“Oh.” He tossed the ball back to me. “I’m a Cubs fan, which I know is dumb.” He flopped back on the bed. I realized he had accepted it, as if my saying it made it true. He left it for me in his will.
“Bye,” I called, letting myself out of the apartment.
“I’ll text you,” he said.
On the street, the air smelled of sulfur. Lightning flashed in staccato bursts, making the street garish. I took deep breaths until I was steadier and, turning left onto Rhode Island Avenue, picked my way over the roots of an oak tree that had burst through the pavement. The baseball beat against my hip like my own secret heart.
How wrong I had been, to think sex with a stranger would deliver me from the dead feeling and give me the control I was after. I had picked This Cyclocross Life because he was bland and unassuming—I thought he would be safe. But I couldn’t seem to feel safe.
I summoned the image of Lucas’s face looking at me across the pillow, reaching to touch my hair. I took out my phone to see if he had texted. Nothing. I tapped out a message. Where are you? Just went on a date, ramen and sex
He wouldn’t respond immediately; he’d be with his wife.
The NPR app on my home screen had a little bubble in the corner signaling that it needed an update. I stood on the sidewalk, thinking of those NPR voices and the music that played between segments, all of it somehow lurking in my phone, waiting for me to press play. The NPR producer’s lips on my neck. I’m sorry, that’s tough. I pressed delete. The app shrank to nothing and then it was gone.