The next three days were strange. The girls had scheduled their leave (yeah, they were twenty-eight years old and still spent their days off together, with their parents and Tickles) so I was alone until Tuesday evening.
I spun my wheels, waiting. For someone, something; some relief, or disappointment.
A story.
I threw myself into tasks I would never have cared about normally: straightening up, cleaning, mail, ironing. I sorted clothes, papers, books, CDs, listening to tracks and rereading pages along the way. I didn’t turn on my laptop. I kept my hands busy to trick my mind. I pulled out my coursework and thesis notes, and rediscovered a series of sketches I’d made at the Compiègne transportation museum, on a beautiful autumn day about a hundred years ago. The softness of my highlighting strokes took me back.
I asked myself why I’d given it up. They were nice, my tales of trailers—and they saved me the shame of adding my idiotic efforts to all the ones art had already inspired. Why was I selling yo-yos instead? Why was I calling myself Choubi_angel and writing moronic comments punctuated by ridiculous emojis?
Why hadn’t I gone yet to visit the stables of the Het Loo palace in Apeldoorn, to admire Queen Wilhelmina’s pretty little watercolor paint box and her white funeral carriage? Why :-( :-/ :’-(?
I learned to live without calls or texts, without messages or voicemail. Without the security blanket of a “yes” or “no.”
I learned to deal with the ennui of my day-to-day existence, and even to find a kind of pleasure in it. Before you knew it I’d be making jam and embroidering. I was distracted. I rambled around. I thought about . . . well, about this guy who’d gone away for the weekend with a little bit of me slung over his shoulder. I wondered how old he was; if he was introverted, well-educated, curious; if he’d tried other numbers before my father’s; if he’d scrolled through my photos, his thumb stroking the screen of my phone. I wondered if he’d flipped through my address book, looked at the head shot on my ID card or the one on my driver’s license, where I still had a shaved head (and was dressed entirely in funereal black, of course)—or the one on my student ID, where I looked like I was on my way to take communion at La Madeleine. I wondered if he’d found my Hello Kitty condoms, my under-eye concealer, my four-leaf clover, my secrets . . .
Was he dissecting the contents of my bag right then, even as I thought about him? And the ten thousand euros; had he counted it? Was he planning on helping himself to a commission for services rendered? Would he pretend to be surprised? What’s what? There was an envelope, you say? Don’t ask me, I didn’t touch anything. I expected that, actually, because if he’d found my bag right after I left the bar, why hadn’t he caught up with me in the street? I hadn’t been walking very fast, after all; I’d had two mojitos in my belly and my whole life ahead of me . . .
Why?
Was he slow? Preoccupied? Some kind of weirdo? And where had he been sitting? Why hadn’t I noticed him—after all, I loved nothing better than to people-watch while slowly getting tipsy . . .
A long, quiet, restless Easter weekend in an apartment I used to love but couldn’t bear to live in anymore, hours spent in silence and reconciliation while waiting for a rendezvous I was both obsessed with and indifferent to.
It was the first time in years that I’d dreamed of my mom, seen her with her hair down and heard her voice. That gift was worth ten thousand euros and just as many tears, and if I’d known, I would have lost her bag a long time ago . . .