Once upon a time there were three skunks.
What is the tense for the things that have happened and continue to happen? The moon orbits. A child fails to tell its mother it loves her as often as it should. The universe expands, without edges or observers.
There were three skunks, and they walk perpetually across the lawn.
The first time I saw the skunks, it was a Wednesday morning. I was taking the trash out. The sun was up, but the pavement under my bare feet was cold from the night.
I’d almost forgotten to take the trash out. The carrot end was what reminded me. Once, I’d had a crush on a boy who liked to put fried eggs over piles of raw grated carrot. You could put sauce on it if you wanted, he said, but the texture was the important part. The boy lived in Seattle now. I’d been trying to elevate my breakfast, and to give myself a reason to text him.
Look, the text would say, I tried your recipe!
And there would be a photo of a perfectly fried egg on top of a pile of grated carrots.
I gathered materials: the egg, the carrot, the frying pan. It took me a while to find the box grater. It was in the cabinet with the Tupperware. I grated the carrot until I couldn’t grate anymore without grating the pads of my fingers. Then I held the leftover carrot nubbin over the trash. Then I remembered Jan and Steve had a compost pile. Then I remembered it was trash day.
It was a relief to remember, though it didn’t matter in any material sense if I forgot. I hadn’t produced much waste. But to forget would have marked my first week of house-sitting—my first week of real adulthood—with failure.
When I saw the skunks, I was halfway down the driveway. The garbage can had been making a racket, echoing and rattling as it dragged behind me over the concrete. I didn’t understand why the skunks hadn’t startled. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t noticed them sooner.
There were three skunks, and they were babies. Each one followed right behind the other, noses glued to the dewy grass. Something in their walk reminded me of handheld vacuums, though this was a comparison I reached weeks later, lying in bed watching skunk YouTube videos.
A baby skunk, it turns out, is a grown-up in miniature. Scale is the only variable.
I’d never seen a baby skunk. The unseeing was different from the way I’d never seen a moose, or the northern lights. I hadn’t been aware of waiting for them.
People who want to know more about the world have studied color. They’ve studied the way we see, think, and speak about it. If a language has two words for colors, those words will mean white and black. The other colors—the dandelions and the luna moths—still exist. So do the pieces of granite in the shade of a large pine tree in June. All of these things are called either “black” or “white.”
There were three skunks. If a language has three words for color, the words will mean black, white, and red. Languages with five color words add green and yellow. Blue comes next, and is subsequently subdivided. In communities where light blue and dark blue have their own words, people are faster at telling the different shades apart. It’s easier to see the things we have words for, though the blues go on existing.
The skunks did not have names. Sometimes they were together and sometimes they were apart. But they were never individuals, even when alone. In the same way that some languages happen to subdivide color into white, black, and red, this universe happened to subdivide the skunks into three bodies. In other universes it may be different. The skunks may have more or fewer bodies. Names confuse this. Names could make the skunks forget they are only segments of something larger.
Each skunk has a title: Eldest, Middle, and Third. They talk without speaking. The Middle Skunk flares the follicles at the base of her neck. The Third Skunk draws shapes in the air with his nose. We translate. Please pass the grasshopper legs? I missed you, darling.
Jan and Steve had two freezers: one in the kitchen, attached to the fridge, and one in the basement. In the long email of instructions—what day to put the trash out, where to find extra cat food, how to record the solar output at the end of the month—“the freezer” meant the freezer in the basement.
I was welcome to most of the food in the house, Jan wrote. It was just plain silly to have two bottles of ketchup in a single fridge! Though the email was signed “Jan and Steve,” I felt sure it was Jan who had written it. The exclamation marks were one clue. Anything in the pantry—pretzels, pasta—was also fair game. They could always buy more. However, Jan asked that I leave the freezer untouched.
The emailer seemed embarrassed to set the limitation, which was another part of how I knew it was Jan. She tried to justify: the freezer was where they stored the food they made and grew themselves. They couldn’t simply buy more homegrown blueberries upon returning home.
So the freezer took on an aura of mystique.
My father used to sing this song:
Why did the kids put beans in their ears, beans in their ears, beans in their ears?
Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
Because we told them no.
The first time I did laundry, I tiptoed to the freezer after hitting start on the dryer. Something about the deep grumble of hot air in a metal box made me feel unseen. The zipper of a pair of jeans clinked against the machine with each turn.
The freezer came up to my belly button. It was white plastic, textured with shallow veins. I lifted the lid and rested my forehead against the edge to hold it open. The frozen blueberries were stacked in plastic bags along the left edge. There were rainbow peppers, too, already diced into stir-fry-able matchsticks. On the right side stood towers of yogurt containers. The top one said BEEF STOCK and the one next to it CHICKPEA KALE SOUP. There were glass jars of pesto and tomato sauce. In the middle of it all was a large shoebox.
I opened the shoebox, though I already knew it was empty. The shoebox was part of the email.
Jan and Steve were hiking the Appalachian Trail. They wouldn’t do all of it, just what they could manage before Steve had to return to teach high school environmental science in the fall. The house would be mine for June, July, and August. Jan and Steve wouldn’t have access to their phones. If something happened at the house, they wouldn’t be reachable.
Jan and Steve had a cat. Her name was Athena. She was sleek and round, with fur like expensive upholstery. I’d met her once before that summer. If Athena died, I was supposed to put her body in the freezer. That was what the shoebox was for.
After I opened the freezer, I went to Jan’s sewing room. Though the email gave it that name—she called it “my sewing room”—the room bore no traces of sewing. There were piles of paper, a stationary bike, and an empty glass terrarium about the right size for a newborn Komodo dragon. It was the sort of storage that happens gradually, building up in layers that might mean something to a geologist. The only thing that meant something to me was the curtains. They had trucks on them.
This is a story about a skunk who sometimes felt she should seek her fortune. She was the eldest of her siblings, and that came with some responsibility. She felt other things, too. She felt the grass between the pads of her paws—the grass that existed in layers. The green butter knives of the tips; the milky cylinders reaching up; the crinkled taupe of past years, waiting to decompose or be knitted into a starling’s nest.
She felt hunger, and the urge to sneeze. She felt curiosity. Why did it give her pleasure to crunch a beetle between her teeth, and no pleasure at all to crunch a walnut shell? She felt love for her siblings, though that wasn’t a feeling she ever noticed. That feeling was more like the feeling of having skin—so base level as to be unknowable. If your skin disappears, there is nothing left to feel with.
A beetle sat in the bottom layer of the grass. An oriole sat in the apple tree. Our story starts with the oriole, but he isn’t any more important than the beetle.
Orioles migrate. They believe in forward motion, and the things that happened before happening again. Orioles can’t fly backward, but they can fly in circles. The brightly colored ones arrived first each spring. They sang loudly from the treetops, having found their true loves. Their mates—the yellower, more muted birds—would be there soon, but their true loves were the apple trees. These were the days of passion. The shivering syrinx, the feathers growing thick and glossy in the joy. This lovely squatting bearer of buds. Its bark was nickel and naked, without many gnarls. Our oriole returned to the same one each year. Was the apple tree aware? No. Was the oriole embarrassed to love something that could not know it in return? No.
He saw the skunks, walking below his tree. He had seen the skunks before, though perhaps not these particular ones. Filled with his passion, and the urge to vomit up everything he knew so that the world might feed on it, he called out.
“Skunks,” he sang, “let me tell you the difference between love and infatuation.”
The skunks gathered around. They rubbed their noses against the trunk. They learned. Infatuation meant walking out into the middle of the open lawn. It meant they were not quite in the middle of the lawn, but far from where they had started and where they were going, with a certain knowledge of hawks aloft in unknown air currents. Love meant the end. It meant reaching the underside of a bush or porch. It meant deciding whether to take a bath or a nap.
The skunks understood that these were the seeds of definitions, and that their knowledge would need time to grow.
“Thank you, Oriole,” they said.
They lifted their tails in unison and swished them once from left to right. It was like a ballet, or a windshield wiper.
Ellie and I went for a walk. We thought the line between childhood and adulthood was when you started to appreciate the pleasure of walking. In elementary school we’d done other things—tree climbing and stone soup making and deciding which last names, of all the last names on the planet, sounded best with our first names. Isabel Asgard or Isabel Reiner? Ellie Cook or Ellie Waterson-Williams?
Now I was a college graduate and she was a college dropout. We went for a walk.
It had just rained. Every time we got to a puddle I put my feet down slowly, heel to toe, so as not to splash. Ellie walked around the puddles.
Ellie was a person who would age gracefully. She’d stayed when the rest of us had left. For her the staying was an act in and of itself, rather than a lack of motion. Sometimes I looked at her—when we had agreed to meet at a café, and she got there first, and was sitting at the table not having seen me—and imagined how beautiful she would be with gray hair.
As we walked, Ellie talked about Sunday mornings. On Sunday mornings she took piano lessons from her old kindergarten teacher at the assisted living facility.
It’s sort of like church, said Ellie, because religion is God acting through you. At least, my mom is a Quaker and that’s how it is for Quakers. You sit and you wait until you think you know what God wants you to say and then you say it. And I think it’s the same, with loving your neighbors and helping the poor, and singing hymns all together. You’re doing the things He wants to do, but can’t because He doesn’t have a body. It’s like that with Judy. Her fingers have a body, but it’s a different body than what they used to have. She can’t play the piano anymore. So Judy tells me what to do, and I make a lot of mistakes, but I’m trying. For God, and for Judy, the important thing is that you’re trying. And it happens on Sunday mornings.
It’s important to them that it happens on Sunday mornings?
No, no, she said. That’s just another reason it’s like church.
So that was Ellie for you. She had a little rain gauge inside her that was always full. Maybe behind the breastbone. In the rest of us, the rain gauge had a leak. We were always craving thunderstorms.
But how are you? said Ellie. She stretched her arms above her head for a second. Tell me something.
I told her I broke up with Henry. Ellie had never met Henry, but she heard about him whenever I was home on breaks.
Nothing was wrong, I said, but everyone else was making all these plans. They were moving to cities because of each other. They were making their partners’ names into items that could be placed on a pro/con chart. I liked Henry a lot, but he felt like a person, not a factor.
Ellie nodded. And you feel okay about it?
I feel okay about it.
And that was, what, last month?
That was last month.
Next, Ellie wanted to know what happened yesterday.
Not much, I said. I saw some baby skunks.
Ellie stopped to pick a dandelion from someone’s lawn.
Tell me more, she said.
She used her fingernail to slit a hole in the dandelion’s stem and then bent down to pick another flower.
I tried to explain there was nothing to tell. I’d seen some skunks. I’d been restless all day. I kept opening the fridge and taking nothing out. It could have been a religious experience, except I didn’t think the skunks had wanted me to act for them, or if they had, I hadn’t gotten the message.
Ellie stood up again and crossed the street. The lawn over there hadn’t been mowed as recently, so there were more dandelions. She asked if she could make an observation that might seem insulting, but she didn’t mean it that way. Then she said she would just say it, because she hated when people asked for permission to say things. They were just trying to make themselves feel polite when actually they were being very rude.
I like these skunks, for you, she said. I think they signal a healthy new direction. Usually when you’re home from college, all you talk about is boys. Like probably I can name more boys you’ve liked than classes you’ve taken. There’s the one who always said hi in the dining hall, and the one who puts his hair up with a pencil. And that’s fine. But you’re not in college anymore, you know? You’re single, and you’re graduated, and you just saw some goddamn baby skunks.
Their hair, I said. Jesse puts their hair up with a pencil. Jesse uses they/them.
I tried to wipe some mud off the edge of my shoe and onto the grass. Ellie had six or seven dandelions strung together at this point. It was enough dandelions that they leapt around a bit every time the wind blew.
Right, she said. Jesse puts their hair up with a pencil. It’s all the same: pronouns, these skunks. You have to practice good habits.
Two inches and two seconds away, a clover flexed its leaves, as if it had been sitting too long at its desk.
The Eldest Skunk froze. She made all her muscles wake up. A clock coalesced under her sternum, and she drew a line in the air with her nose. Slice of grass—clover—and two seconds farther, counted out by her insides. There, to the left of that dandelion. She pounced.
A beetle.
A beetle was love, not infatuation, she decided. Hours later, there would be bits of leg left to tongue from between her teeth.
So this was June—June as the first segment of something long and amorphous, instead of the opening of a carefully manicured three-act summer. House-sitting would end, and the rest of it—life—would keep on going. September no longer meant a return or a beginning. Or it might mean a beginning, but it was up to me to decide what would be beginning.
I applied for a few jobs. I didn’t need a job—I wasn’t paying rent, and I babysat occasionally—but I had to pass the time. The bookstore never replied and the donut shop wanted me to start at 3:00 AM. At the yoga studio, I sat on a folding stepladder while the current receptionist explained the payment software. She was very pregnant, and performed each action with one hand on one side of her belly and the other hand on the other side, as if the baby were a large bowl of soup that she needed to keep from dipping her sleeves in.
Students ebbed and flowed past the desk. They wore earth tones, or neon. One woman carried a mat with a repeating pattern of a talking snowman from a recent children’s film.
The receptionist nodded to a person with short gray hair and a stainless steel water bottle. Hello, Linda! the receptionist said. Good class?
Linda paused in front of the desk. She sighed. Oh, she said, my sciatica is killing me. Last night I dreamed they took X-rays. In the dream they found a hard-boiled egg stuck in each hip flexor. I need to ask Roger about that. It might mean something.
The receptionist hummed in sympathy, if not agreement.
Linda hiked her yoga mat higher under her arm. Once she was gone, the receptionist turned to me, placing both hands on the right side of her belly.
That’s Linda, she said. You have to watch out for her.
The thing about Linda was that she always tried to insert her credit card too soon. It messed up the whole transaction. Then you had to void it, and Linda would get suspicious that she was being charged twice. Luckily, there was an easy way to avoid this. The receptionist had learned to keep the credit card machine right beside her until she was ready. Then she could slide it across the desk to the student. This was the most reliable method—the method she recommended. She patted the machine protectively.
I wanted to tell her she would be a good mother, but maybe she already knew.
I’ll email you the tax forms and everything, she said. And if questions come up, you can always call me. I won’t be gone. I’m not dying.
Outside the building, it was sunny. I would be back in two Tuesdays, to sit in the swivel chair instead of on the stepladder. It was nice to have things to look forward to. On the bike ride home, the wind snuck in my sleeves at the wrists, traveling up my arms until it puffed out my shirt shoulders. The receptionist hadn’t asked about my strengths or weaknesses, I realized. There’d been no moment to speak about a time I’d faced adversity, or to explain a tenuous connection between the yoga studio and my degree in anthropology. Oh well—so college didn’t matter. I would be a person in a chair.
I wished they had said, “You’re hired!” Sometimes it was nice to say things explicitly, instead of having them mutually understood. Sometimes people thought skipping over important questions would keep you from saying no.
I went to my father’s house for dinner. He and Brigitte wanted to hear how I was doing. It had hardly been two weeks. Two weeks was no time at all compared to the semesters I’d spent at college, but it felt awkward now that we lived so close—like one of us was being avoided or forgotten. The daily rhythms of their life no longer included me, and hadn’t for some time.
Brigitte was the reason I’d gotten the house-sitting job. She and Jan used to work together at a local green energy company. Jan did home visits and decided how many trees would need to be cut down to make room for the solar panels. Brigitte did marketing and designed the company lawn signs that went at the ends of people’s driveways. They wore the same brand of hiking boots to the office each day. They stayed in touch even after Brigitte switched companies.
I put extra kibble in Athena’s bowl before I left.
In my father’s kitchen, Brigitte got me a glass of water. I hovered near the table. It was a different kitchen, a different house, from the one I’d grown up in. The table was the same, but it had been a debate if they would keep Brigitte’s table or my father’s. My father chopped up a cucumber, transferred the slices to a plate, and wiped down the section of counter he’d been working at with a sponge. When I’d been small, he’d taught me to wipe counters with a rag. The sponge was Brigitte’s influence. I tried to see it as a positive. He was in love; people were capable of change.
The cucumbers went in a salad with beets and feta. As we sat down to eat, Brigitte clapped a hand to her forehead.
I totally forgot! she said. You don’t like feta, do you? I’m so sorry, I feel like an idiot.
No, no, I said. Feta is fine.
I was telling the truth. My taste buds had matured. Certain foods that used to trigger a gag reflex—feta, Swiss chard—were now pleasurable.
Really? said my dad. Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?
The response confused me. He was acting as if he’d remembered my hatred of the cheese—as if it was a central aspect of my personality. But if he’d remembered, why had he served it to me? We were in his kitchen. The menu was under his control.
I didn’t have much to report. The yoga studio job hadn’t begun. Jan and Steve’s roof hadn’t sprung any leaks. I would be babysitting Cecelia later this week.
Brigitte nodded. And are you thinking about the fall?
I grimaced.
Sorry, sorry, said Brigitte. Don’t listen to me—it’s early.
We ate corn on the cob, and said all the things you had to say when eating corn: how good it tasted, how wonderful it was to live in a place where you could buy it at the side of the road.
My dad wiped his chin with a cloth napkin. He said a groundhog had been at his zucchini plants. He needed to figure out where the den was.
My father was in a constant war with the groundhogs. Every year, they ate his vegetables before the plants reached vegetable stage. Every year, he filled in their dens with dirt. Then the groundhogs dug though the dirt and ate more vegetables. Then my dad drove to the store, bought smoke bombs, stuck them down the dens, and blocked up the entrances.
Oh, I said. I did see some skunks at Jan and Steve’s. That’s something that happened.
My father whistled.
Skunks, he said. Skunks are hard. They don’t always dig a hole—often they’re just under a shed or something. Hard to fill that in. You could try a Havahart, but then how do you move it without them getting scared and spraying? It’s a tough one. I’ll have to think.
Brigitte brought out a rhubarb crisp before I could say anything else. I don’t know what I would have said. How could I convince him that the skunks weren’t a problem, that they didn’t need a solution?
Have you seen Eli? asked Brigitte, looking through a drawer for dessert forks.
Eli was Jan and Steve’s son. He was two years older than me, and we’d gone to the same high school. In the email, Jan wrote that Eli had some boxes stored in the closet of the sewing room. He was in the habit, she wrote, of stopping by to rifle through these boxes. Jan had given him my phone number. He was under strict orders to text me before doing any rifling. She hadn’t given me Eli’s number, and he hadn’t texted.
I shook my head.
Brigitte looked surprised. She said she’d thought he was around—she’d thought he was working at that bakery in town.
I nodded. Eli did work at the bakery. But I hadn’t seen him—we’d never been friends.
Brigitte got up to look for a serving spoon. She had a pie server on the table, but for some reason it wouldn’t do.
I knew about the bakery from the social media accounts of Eli’s and my old classmates. It was a bakery known for its sourdough. Eli had been tagged in multiple close-up photos of crumb structure. One of his friends had left a comment with a lewd pun about Eli’s fondness for holes.
Brigitte held out a bowl of crisp for my assessment. More? Less?
I said it was perfect. I took a bite. It tasted the same as always. My father had made it. The recipe hadn’t changed, or my taste buds hadn’t aged out of the flavor.
Brigitte served my father a larger piece than she’d given me, and herself a smaller one. It annoyed me both that the portion sizes obeyed gender stereotypes, and that it wasn’t Brigitte’s fault—that was actually how much crisp we each wanted.
I always thought Eli was fairly good-looking, said Brigitte. But maybe I’m old and out of touch. I don’t know what counts as cute these days.
I shrugged as if I hadn’t thought about it. I didn’t expect her to believe the shrug, only to take it as a sign that I didn’t want to talk about it. My father, though, laughed.
See? he said to Brigitte. My daughter’s got her head screwed on right. She’s got better things to think about than cute boys.
In the dream, Orin pushed me down onto my back in the aisle of a bookstore. The carpeting itched under my shoulder blades as he kissed down my neck. I wanted to look at the light fixtures. I always liked kissing with my eyes open. It was like getting up early in the morning and having the whole house to yourself. But when I looked up to see what sort of lighting this bookstore used—chandeliers? track lights?—three of Orin’s friends came down the aisle holding a video camera. They were above us, arcing the camera down to create the right perspective. It was some sort of documentary. They wanted to know if I would do an interview. Obviously the physical chemistry was there, but what about the emotional connection?
For a minute I was excited to get my makeup done for the interview, but then I looked around and Orin was gone.
I wanted to see Ellie but I didn’t want her to think I was mooching her social scene. What was her social scene? She often ate pizza with her roommates, but beyond that I didn’t have specifics. Then my phone buzzed. She asked if I wanted to volunteer at the library plant sale together. I said yes.
The idea was that people donated plants, and then other people, or the same people, paid money for the plants, and then the money went to the library. We sat in folding chairs by the side of the road and tried to be glad instead of nervous when cars slowed down. I’d brought a water bottle. Soon it was almost empty. I decided not to drink any more water until there were only twenty minutes left.
It was another Sunday afternoon. Ellie talked about how she had lost count of how many deer she’d seen on her trip to Vermont the week before. It had either been eleven deer or twelve deer. That was something she loved about Vermont—how you could lose count.
I picked a long blade of grass and tied it in knots.
Did you see any baby deer? I asked.
Ellie frowned. You mean fawns?
I shrugged. I never knew what I meant.
It was the season for fawns. But she hadn’t seen any. Weird.
I held my water bottle up to my forehead like a plastic air-temperature ice pack. And how had her piano lesson gone, this morning?
Ellie kept her frown on. It was okay.
What was she learning, what piece was she working on?
She hummed a phrase. I recognized the tune, maybe from a movie soundtrack. It could have hid behind a shot of lush rolling hills.
It’s Debussy, said Ellie, but it isn’t going well. Judy’s not a very good teacher. She’s easily frustrated. Or not frustrated, exactly. More sad. And if she’s sad, then I’m sad. She wants it to sound a certain way. Her fingers can’t do it because she has arthritis, and my fingers can’t do it because they’re still learning, and we’re both just using this crummy little electric keyboard that probably wouldn’t sound right even if Yo-Yo Ma played it. So then we’re both sad.
A red car drove by without slowing down.
Yo-Yo Ma is cello, I think, I said.
Ellie stopped frowning. Obviously. But probably he plays piano, too. Probably he plays like twelve instruments.
She hummed the phrase again, this time in a different key. It was unlikely she realized it was a different key. She wasn’t very good at music. I tried not to be jealous of the arrangement. It was aspirational—to do the same thing with the same person every week, even though you were both bad at it. The badness proved you were doing it for each other instead of for the thing.
A blue Prius slowed down. Ellie and I were never nervous about blue Priuses. We always liked to laugh about how the plural of Prius might be Prii.
A man got out. He wasn’t here to buy anything. He had donated a bunch of ornamental grasses to the sale and wanted to see how they were doing. If they were a hot-ticket item, so to speak, if they were selling like hotcakes, then he had more at home that he could dig up and bring over. These grasses, he said, bred like rabbits.
The grasses were not selling. In fact we had not sold a single clump of grass. We had sold two aloe plants and a six-pack of basil seedlings. That was it.
Oh, he said. Well.
He browsed the vegetable table. Ellie and I tried not to look at each other. Then we had to look away so we wouldn’t laugh. We’d heard about this man. The library director had warned us about him. Every plant sale, he donated more clumps of ornamental grasses than anyone knew what to do with. But he donated the grasses so earnestly. The library director never had the heart to tell him they were all ending up on her compost pile. Her compost pile, she said, which was overrun with ornamental grasses, because the man was right about one thing—they bred like rabbits.
This pepper, said the man suddenly, lifting up a pot. Do you know what type it is?
Ellie went over and took the pot from him. On a piece of masking tape on the side, it said PEPPER. She shrugged.
I’ll take it, said the man. He was excited to solve the mystery. What would the pepper be when it grew up?
In the coming weeks, when I tried to rationalize my sudden feeling that a childhood home could also be an adult home, I thought about this man and his ornamental grasses. I imagined being known for something it had taken years to grow.
“Do you get bored?” asked the oriole.
If skunk communication is on one end of a spectrum, and words are at the other, orioles sing somewhere in the middle. They make noises through their mouths. The oriole didn’t mean “bored,” exactly. He was talking about the magnets in the tips of his wings. His children would hatch, and he would fly south.
The Eldest Skunk crouched next to the compost bin. Today it smelled of green banana peels and burnt toast, on top of the way it had smelled yesterday—moldy salsa—on top of the day before that.
“What are your magnets?” asked the oriole. He wasn’t implying anything. He really wanted to know. He wanted to understand the world so he could care for it more accurately. “What do the bones of your inner ear whisper about when you sleep? Will they shuffle themselves around at some point, and declare a new up?”
The Eldest Skunk closed her eyes. In her ears was the wind, rattling the green pine needles in the tree above her. She rolled over in the grass and curved her spine like a crescent moon.
The oriole told her a story about three pigs. The first pig built a house of straw, the second a house of sticks, and the third a house of stone. Maybe you’ve heard the story before. The Eldest Skunk hadn’t.
“We sleep under the forsythia,” she explained. That was her house.
She nosed at the black plastic of the compost bin. The plastic gave her a bad feeling, but she also felt that there was something good inside. The compost was the only place she ever felt shame, and she kept coming back.
A thought scuttled by. “Don’t pigs like mud?” the skunk asked the oriole.
He agreed that they did.
“Why didn’t the pigs build their houses out of mud?”
The oriole flew a few inches into the air, and then perched again on a lower twig. That was his point exactly. “Their inner ear bones must have rearranged themselves,” he said. “It must have been the magnets.”
The oriole loved this feeling—a meeting of minds. He flew back to the apple tree before anything could spoil it.
At night the skunks slept in a big pile. They stopped being three skunks, and became twelve legs and three tails. Any given patch of fur could be categorized as self, pillow, or blanket.
They didn’t need bedtime stories. Every day the leaves on the forsythia above them grew bigger, until they started falling off instead. The branches curved up and over, forming an arc.
The Eldest Skunk could feel the three pigs stuck in her throat. How could she get them out in the open? Her mouth couldn’t make the same noises as the oriole’s. Eventually, she asked her siblings what a fortune looked like.
A fortune?
A future, a calling, an expedition to build a different house.
But we have a house.
Exactly. That’s what’s been bothering me.
They tossed the thoughts around like balloons that were not allowed to hit the ground. The moon was halfway between new and full that night. The Eldest Skunk couldn’t remember which direction it had been moving in.
Waxing, her siblings knew. She relaxed. Sleep fell over them like a maple leaf in autumn—graceful and blazing red.
When it was the Middle Skunk’s turn to dream, she dreamed of branches snapping suddenly behind her. Over and over, she lifted her tail only to find herself reasonless. There was no source to the noise, and nothing to aim at. By the driveway there was a mailbox. In the forest there was a fallen log. Without motion, an item had no teeth.
Her tail was getting tired of all this up and down—in the dream. Surely there were alternative responses to stimuli. What did other creatures do when their pulse sped up? Did they fly away? Did they fall in love?
The pile of legs and tails rebraided itself. The Third Skunk took over the dream. He dreamed of moths. The moths stayed alive from generation to generation by matching their wings to the bark on the trees. The hawks kept looking past them because of the matching colors. The moths kept having babies because they weren’t getting eaten. But then the moths were gone, and there were snowflakes instead. The trees were gray. The snowflakes were white. The snowflakes felt brilliant and afraid of their individuality, like a flock of teenage girls at the mall. They needed a skunk. A wide white stripe could be a home.
Days passed. The skunks ate green blueberries that the mockingbirds had spat to the ground. A human mowed the lawn when the sun was high and the skunks were asleep. In the twilight, the skunks raised their feet high off the ground. Their ankles were damp with the blood of the grass. The air inside their ears and noses was pungent with green: moss, jade, pear. Shamrock, seaweed, olive, seafoam, underripe tomato, overgrown spinach. They broke from the single-file line to frolic this way and that.
I set an alarm for half an hour before sunrise. A sunrise was about the lead-up, not the peeking over the horizon. The time the weather app called “sunrise” came long after the most interesting colors. Though the colors weren’t my goal, I needed to be awake before the light.
In the kitchen I measured instant coffee into a travel mug without turning on the lights. I’d slept fitfully. Whenever I’d reached for my phone to see if it was late enough to count as getting up early instead of getting up in the middle of the night, the numbers had been almost the same as before. Then I would regret the reach—it had woken my arm; it had exposed me to blue light. I pushed the lid onto the travel mug. My eyelashes were stuck together in one corner.
The skunks needed a physical dimension. A crush couldn’t survive as pure idea. Jan and Steve had a half-empty bag of sunflower seeds in the pantry, but I resisted. I had to manage expectations.
Outside, I shuffled once around the lawn in bare feet. The grass had been cut the day before and the wet clippings stuck to my ankles. Every so often I squatted down to look under a bush. Back at the front steps, I sat down to wait for my ankles to dry.
In the movies I’d watched as a child, there were two mainstays: woodland animals eating from the hands of beautiful girls, and handsome princes falling in love with beautiful girls. I wasn’t an idiot, as a child. I knew that woodland animals didn’t eat from people’s hands. It stood to reason that a boy falling in love with me was just as far-fetched. Being a beautiful girl would have to be enough of a reward in and of itself.
The cold seeped through the seat of my jeans, and the sun, pooling on my cheekbones, curdled as it reached my eyes. My phone buzzed against my butt. I switched it to silent mode without taking it out of my back pocket, fingers worming between the phone and the denim.
Still, it was nice to think about. What would it feel like, for a skunk to press its nose into the space between my index finger and thumb? In my head, a skunk traced its nose down my knuckles, pausing at each divot. In my head, its nose felt like the tip of an underripe strawberry. Supermarket strawberries were never quite ripe. They were red except for the ends, which were still pale. The ends were cool and soft and harder than you expected.
Even if people had been explaining it to me my whole life—what it felt like to have a skunk trace its nose across your palm—I imagined I wouldn’t be ready. To be ready would ruin everything. If it was pleasant or unpleasant was beside the point: a skunk had eaten sunflower seeds from your hand.
Across the street, in the neighbors’ driveway, a robin hopped up and down. A man pedaled by on a recumbent bicycle, with NPR playing quietly from a Bluetooth speaker. At the foot of the porch steps stood a single dandelion, gone to seed. I picked it and pursed my lips. When I blew, the seeds went nowhere. They were too green, too stuck.
The grass on my ankles dried and the skunks did not appear. I pulled out my phone. The text was from a new number. It had been sent at 6:37 AM. The author needed his tennis racket and wondered if he might stop by to pick it up sometime today. He didn’t want to play tennis, but the deal was that if he played tennis with Rachid, Rachid would play Frisbee with him. Signed, Eli.
I didn’t know who Rachid was.
sure, I typed, anytime. My phone autocorrected sure to Sure, but I changed it back. Eli’s message hadn’t had any capital letters.
lit, said Eli two minutes later. i’ll b there at 1 ish.
The “lit” wasn’t a good sign, but I had already forgiven the skunks for not being where I wanted them to be.
At 1:16 Eli rang the doorbell. He was wearing a blue bike helmet. I’d wanted to be washing lunch dishes when he arrived, but there had only been a plate and a knife and a cutting board. Now they were in the drain rack.
Hi, I said, opening the door.
Hey, he said, sorry about this. I really need to stop using this place as like, a storage unit. It’s probably not very adult of me.
I mean, I said, it’s fine. It’s your parents’ house.
That it was me doing the house-sitting, and not Eli, made very little sense. He was paying money to live in an apartment on one side of town, and his parents were paying me to live here. Maybe it had to do with independence and self-differentiation. Maybe he’d already signed his lease by the time Jan and Steve decided to travel.
I opened the door wider so he could come in. He took off his bike helmet as if he were entering a church. His hair was curlier than it had been in high school. Or maybe it was just shorter. We’d been in chorus together, but I’d known who he was before that. Everyone knew who Eli was. It was a sort of personality quiz—if you thought he or Ryan was hotter. I always said Ryan. The question got asked a lot, whenever a group of girls wanted to feel more intimate with each other.
Eli’s house—suddenly it stopped being Jan and Steve’s house, in my head, and became Eli’s—started with a mudroom. The mudroom funneled into a narrow hallway, and the narrow hallway burst out into the kitchen. I didn’t know which of us would walk down the hallway first. Eli moved before I did. He kept walking through the kitchen and up the stairs, two at a time, without saying anything or looking back. I studied the magnets on the fridge. One of them was shaped like a yellow rubber duck, about an inch tall. It occurred to me that Eli might have been the one to choose this magnet. I picked up a dish towel and started drying the plate from lunch.
Eli came back into the kitchen carrying Athena. Maybe it’s in the garage, he said.
It wasn’t clear if he was talking to me or to himself or to Athena. He leaned against the counter instead of going toward the garage, but he was looking at that cat, not at me. I finished drying the plate and put it in the cupboard.
Do you want a glass of water? I asked. The question was a gift to myself—I knew he wouldn’t understand the reference.
He looked up. Oh, no, thanks. I should be going.
Athena leapt out of his arms. He went into the garage. I dried the knife and the cutting board. It occurred to me that the rest of the day would pass very slowly.
Fuck, said Eli, coming back into the kitchen for the second time. Did they get rid of my tennis racket?
I shrugged. Do you want help looking?
No, no. He shook his head. I don’t even like tennis. I’ll just tell Rachid it’s a sign from the universe.
Athena rubbed up against his ankles. She was never this affectionate with me. He squatted down to pet her. Do you like tennis? he asked suddenly, looking up.
I shook my head. I’d never even held a tennis racket.
Rats. That would have been better. Then you could’ve played Rachid, and I wouldn’t have to.
Sorry, I said. I considered suggesting that Rachid could give me lessons. It wasn’t that I didn’t like tennis, only that I’d never tried it. A year before, I would have stayed silent because I was too shy. Today I stayed silent so as not to give myself more boys to think about.
Eli stood up, dusting his hands on his thighs. Well, he said, sorry for the intrusion.
He hadn’t intruded. He’d only made me feel like an intruder. I said it was nothing, it was his house, he could stop by anytime.
He insisted it wasn’t his house, it was his parents’ house. He had his own place.
It was both understandable to want to make this distinction and utterly pointless.
Actually, he said, my house is having a little cookout thing on Friday, if you want to come.
I gripped my elbows with my opposite hands. I have to babysit, I said. I tried to convey disappointment without conveying the full extent to which I was disappointed. I really had to babysit. Jon and Amelie were going to see the new Batman movie. Batman was the only superhero Amelie liked. He was so noir. I would put Cecelia to bed and eat one of the mini Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars from their freezer.
Eli scratched his ear. Well, he said, I hope you’re having a good summer. Honestly, I kind of hated it when I moved back. Like, it felt weird to need to start over, socially, in a place I’ve always been.
I nodded slowly. It felt strange. My strangeness and Eli’s strangeness were probably different feelings, but it was nice to imagine they were the same.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I’d seen a boy from my ninth-grade PE class in an airport across the country. I hadn’t been able to remember his name. We’d run toward each other and hugged. Having gone to high school together, it turned out, meant something. There was a sense that these people had known who you were before you knew who you were, and that you could be honest with each other.
I guess I just got back, I said. Like, I haven’t been here long enough for being alone to mean being lonely. I don’t know. I go on hikes.
I tucked my hands behind me, between the edge of the counter and my tailbone. I’d been picking at the skin at the side of my fingernail.
Eli looked at home in a way that had nothing to do with whose house we were in. His arms hung like cotton shirts fresh from the dryer—loose without limpness. He looked like he really believed what I was saying.
Hikes, he said. Hikes are major. I remember that.
I laughed, and he laughed too.
Just let me know, he said, if you want to get coffee or something.
Then he left. A minute later he was back, without knocking, half jogging through the kitchen and up the stairs. I forgot my bike helmet!
Then he was gone for real. I turned around once in place. I wanted to turn on the tap and stick my head under the faucet. Instead I put my phone face down on a windowsill and vacuumed the whole house without listening to music.
There are metaphors for skunks: the bubbles in the electric teakettle before the automatic shutoff kicks in. A mountain lake with a snowbank sticking out of it. Water so clear you can’t tell how deep it goes. Drugs. Medicine. Hot spaghetti with refrigerator-temperature red sauce after a long day of physical labor. An old woman in pink tweed with a stuffed bird on her hat. Chrysanthemums.
Dear Ellie,
I went to the library today. It was a new library for me, since Jan and Steve live one town over from the house I grew up in. Some things are always the same, though: the circulation desk, the computer for catalog searching that’s so old the “F” and “J” have worn off their keys from all the fingers. I typed in “skunks.” I think I wanted to need to use the Dewey decimal system. I wanted to be given a number that said This is where you are. This is a place people have been before, and here are some topics next door to you. Instead, all the call numbers sent me to the young readers room. There was a book about a skunk having a birthday party, and one about a skunk becoming friends with a badger. As a topic, skunks seem to be more next door to unicorns than biology. I filtered for “nonfiction” and it turned out one result: a National Geographic Kids book on woodland animals. It was unavailable. I’m trying to cultivate that skunk-feeling, but it’s not working. A mother herded her small child away from me, even though I smiled at them, and the water fountain was broken. I checked out a book called The Skunk because it was hardest to tell, from the cover—a cartoon man looking over his shoulder; a city skyline—what the plot would be. I haven’t read it. Probably you will tell me to be patient. I can accept that as long as you don’t say a garden doesn’t grow overnight.
I traced the cap of the pen around my chin. There was nothing else to say. I closed my notebook. My journal entries were all addressed to my female friends. It was the only way to trick myself into knowing what was worth writing down.
Cecelia and I walked to the woods near her house. I had a backpack with Cheerios, apple slices, The Skunk, and Cinder Edna. I needed to share the skunks with someone. Part of the fun of boys was that you could tell stories about them to other people and the other people would find it exciting, at least at first. Cecelia was four. Even if it was too late for me, maybe it wasn’t too late for her.
She held my hand while we crossed the street. I tried to remember what it was like to have to reach up to hold a hand. Our shoulders were having completely different experiences.
We put wood chips on dry leaves and set them in the stream. Cecelia said her boat was going to China. I picked Seattle. There was an eddy. The boats kept coming back to where they started.
We must have made baby boats by accident, said Cecelia. They aren’t ready to leave their parents. We have to take them back with us.
The leaves were crinkling apart and dripping, but they got zipped into the outside pocket of the backpack. Cecelia insisted this was the only way they would feel safe.
There was a wide flat rock where we always sat for books and snack. Cinder Edna was a retelling of Cinderella. Edna and Ella are neighbors. Edna makes her own dress and takes the bus to the ball. She marries the prince’s younger brother, and they start a recycling plant behind the castle.
I wanted to read The Skunk next. Cecelia wanted Cinder Edna again.
Why? I asked.
Because it’s good.
But why is it good?
Daddy says its fem-nist. She flicked her hair behind her ear. This was a gesture she hadn’t had the summer before.
Hmm, I said, swatting at a mosquito. But it still ends with her getting married.
No, it doesn’t, said Cecelia. It ends with a recycling plant. You obviously weren’t paying attention. We need to read it again.
I wiped some pine needles off the rock and lay down on my stomach. Cecelia sat on the small of my back. She wanted to “braid” my hair. There was a pebble digging into my hip bone and I didn’t move. At camp, my favorite day was always the first, when they sat us down on stools and combed through our hair for lice, plastic teeth drawing pictures into our scalps. It sent tingles down my arms.
I read The Skunk out loud to myself and Cecelia pretended not to listen.
The Skunk was about a man who lives in a city. One day he notices he is being followed by a skunk. He turns left. He turns right. He locks his apartment door and takes a detour through the sewers. Still—the skunk. He asks what it wants, but maybe the skunk doesn’t speak English or doesn’t know what it wants, or maybe there is a skunk word for what it wants with no adequate English translation. The skunk stays silent.
I could feel my rib cage expanding on the rock every time I turned a page. Cecelia kept her fingers at the ends of my hair, away from the scalp. She didn’t interrupt.
Eventually the man moves to a new apartment. He rents a big truck and has a housewarming party. Something is missing. A woman’s ponytail takes on a skunk-like aspect. The black-and-white awning of a café makes his intestines leap. He squares his shoulders and stands on his new stoop.
When it was over, I asked Cecelia what she thought.
Did you bring a hair tie? she asked. She had my hair twisted up in a sort of cinnamon bun over my left ear.
No, sorry.
She let my hair go all at once. Let’s read Cinder Edna again, she said.
I didn’t argue. In the pictures, Cinderella’s prince was very blond and square jawed. The jaw was always tipped a little upward. If you put a marble on his tongue, it would have rolled right down into his small intestine.
My dad loaned me that book that everyone was reading about the grasses. It was about other plants, too, but the grasses had the most symbolic weight. They were different from the grasses in our lawn, and different from the ones at the plant sale. Humans were forgetting how to take care of them. The book had made my father cry, but he didn’t approve of people who watered their lawns. It was a waste of water.
For a little while life didn’t seem to have anything to do with Eli.
I arrived at 8:20 AM on my first day at the yoga studio. The previous receptionist had recommended 8:30. The key didn’t stick in the lock, and the alarm system flashed a green light after I entered the code. Inside, I sat on the swivel chair. It left my heels a half inch above the floor. I reached down for the lever on the side and lowered the seat. Now I had to sit up extra straight to feel any sense of authority over the empty room.
The first class of the day was Pilates. Though I thought of it as a “yoga” studio in my head, they also offered meditation, Zumba, and Pilates. Was there a word that encompassed all these things? Should it be called a “movement” studio? But meditation didn’t involve movement. The uniting factor was more abstract, and had something to do with self-improvement.
The Pilates teacher, Stacy, arrived at 8:45.
Hi, she said, waving one hand next to her shoulder in a frantic hello. I’m Stacy.
Stacy was tiny in a way that obviously came from her bones. Pilates wouldn’t make you look like her, and there was no tricking yourself into thinking it would. She had bleached blonde hair, grown out enough for the dark roots to make a circle around her face, like a little annotation in a book: Here is a face! She was surprised I hadn’t set up the fans. The studio didn’t have air conditioning. Instead, she explained, they relied on a complex arrangement of electric fans. We unlocked the storage closet and stared at the fans. They stared back. It was a lot of fans. Stacy walked me through the studio, pointing to certain places on the floor that were marked with electrical tape. Those were the spots where the fans went.
And then, she said, another fan goes on the folding chair, and the folding chair goes in the doorway between the studio and lobby.
She clicked the Bluetooth button on the speaker, scrolling through her phone with the other hand. Her nails were long and pink. They were the sort of nails people spent hours in salons to have applied, or the kind that people used as an excuse for spending hours in salons, unable to turn the pages of a magazine.
But obviously we don’t really set up the folding chair until class has started, she said, so people can still go through the doorway. Then she looked up at me, like Any questions? but also like she couldn’t imagine what possible question I would have. She’d given me all the necessary information. She wanted to scroll her phone in peace.
I got started on the fans. Yoga blocks were also part of it—they got wedged underneath the window sashes to encourage airflow. At this point in the morning, it was still cool outside, but it was important to be prepared. While I worked, Stacy retied her ponytail twice. Then she laid out a selection of what looked like giant rubber bands on the floor by the mirror.
So what’s your deal? she asked. College student?
There were a couple of colleges in the area, and sometimes people moved here for them. I shook my head. I grew up here.
She nodded and picked up her phone again.
I hadn’t accurately described my situation. Now the moment had passed. She probably thought I was younger than I was, or that I hadn’t been to college at all.
When the students came in, Stacy greeted each one by name. How was Ethan liking soccer camp, she wanted to know? Had Carmen figured out which cat was leaving the dead birds in the garden clogs?
Most people had prepaid class cards. I didn’t have to use the credit card machine, only initial next to their names on the sign-in sheet. They paused at the clipboard without looking at me, then floated onward into the studio. Did anyone notice I was new? Did anyone notice I wasn’t pregnant?
The class, when it finally began, was like a radio program. If I swiveled my chair to the side, I could see Stacy through the open door, on the other side of the box fan. I stayed facing the desk. Everything was noise.
I didn’t know much about Pilates. It was something people did to try and look hotter. That made it embarrassing—a confession of vanity. It meant you’d been infected by capitalist beauty standards. True hotness could only be achieved by hiding the work that went into it. Pilates might make you look hot to a person across the bar who didn’t know how you’d spent your Tuesday 9:00 to 10:00 AM hour, but once they understood that your beauty came from a set of carefully curated exercises and didn’t emanate mysteriously from your soul, the ruse would be up.
Stacy wanted everyone to take a moment to choose an affirmation. Maybe they wanted to feel strong. Maybe they wanted to let go of something. Maybe they wanted to honor the feedback their body was giving them, and take the modifications in today’s class.
Take these wants, said Stacy, and phrase them as something that’s already true. I am strong. I will honor my body’s feedback. Let’s go around, she said, and share our affirmations—if you feel comfortable. Meredith, you start.
Meredith wanted to feel in control. What she said was “I am in control,” but I knew how to reverse translate because of Stacy’s directions. Meredith wasn’t in control.
Maggie wanted to take this hour to focus on just herself, rather than her family. Her husband clearly never unloaded the dishwasher.
I wasn’t kind to these women, in my head. Their sincerity shocked me. Didn’t they know to roll their eyes at this sort of thing?
Kaz wanted a rounder butt. I will have a peachy booty, she said.
I liked Kaz.
Stacy laughed generously with everyone else. You will, she said, but we try to make these affirmations internal. We try to focus on how our bodies feel rather than how they look. Do you want to add a second affirmation, something internal?
A moment of silence passed. I watched the second hand on the wall clock above the door. It ticked from slightly beyond the two to slightly before the three. Why did we assume Kaz meant peachiness in an external, rather than internal, way?
I am brave, said Kaz.
The exercises all had industrial-sounding names. There were fire hydrants and oil riggers and planks and bridges. It was like being on a construction site. I played a game where I would close my eyes and try to guess what each exercise looked like, then open my eyes and turn my chair slightly to the left to check. Stacy raised and lowered her chest to the floor, elbows tucked in next to her body. I googled “oil rig” on my phone. Stacy looked like a grasshopper, not an oil rig. I googled “Pilates.” Pilates was a man, it turned out. His first name was Joseph.
Stacy said we had to stop thinking of our spines as one unit. She wasn’t including me in her “we,” and wasn’t talking about my spine. I closed my eyes to listen closer. She said we couldn’t take any of our vertebrae for granted. We were going to paint our spines down onto the floor, one inch at a time, leaving no gaps. This was part of a motion known as a “bridge.”
Pretend, said Stacy, that you’re a skunk. Make sure every inch of your stripe is touching the floor! Imagine your tail, stretching beyond your tailbone!
I opened my eyes.
After class, Stacy said she hoped having the door open hadn’t been a distraction for me.
No, I said, not at all. I liked it. I’d never heard a Pilates class before.
She blushed. It’s so silly, isn’t it?
No, really, I said.
Pilates was silly, but if Stacy found it embarrassing, that was just depressing. Had the sincerity of the women’s affirmations been a ruse?
It was interesting, I insisted. Poetic, even. That thing about the skunk, and the spine.
Stacy groaned. God, she said, shaking her head. I hate the skunk thing.
Once, years ago, Stacy had been taking a class where the teacher used the skunk analogy. That is so dumb, Young Stacy had thought to herself. The image didn’t even help. It would be more efficient to tell people to imagine they had a stripe down their back and leave the woodland animals out of it. But then Older Stacy had become a Pilates teacher, and found herself saying it.
I always tell myself I’m not going to say it, she said, and then it’s time for bridges, and I’m running out of things to say, and out it comes. It’s so bad. Like, I quit cigarettes. But I can’t quit this.
I was glad she hadn’t quit. I liked the skunks. Their presence felt like the universe nodding its head in approval.
I went hiking by myself. Hikes were different from walks. Walks happened near roads and houses, and were about appreciating your humanness: front doors could be orange, and humans were the ones who had made them that way. Hikes happened in the woods, and were about forgetting your humanness.
It was the first real hike I’d been on since moving back—I’d lied to Eli. I was trying to be honest in retrospect. He’d said hikes were major. I was taking his advice.
I walked through a spiderweb. It was unavoidable, stretching unseen across the path. The trail was one my father used to bring me to. I’d always made him go in front—that way he was the one who hit the spiderwebs. I wondered how many he’d walked through without comment, trying to convince me the woods were a benevolent place. Back then I’d hated hiking.
I ran my hands down my arms again and again. The feeling was still there. The spiderweb was still pressed against my skin, between my arm hairs.
The trail intersections looked familiar, but seemed to show up in a different order than they had in my childhood. Had the vernal pool always been so close to the birch grove?
The birches gave way to beech trees. Beech trees were my favorite. The sunlight that came through their leaves had a different texture. It was like the drop of sap that welled up when you cut the stem of a daffodil. When had I learned what made a beech tree a beech tree? There was the smooth gray bark, and the teeth around the edges of the leaves. I knew the knowledge came from my father, though I couldn’t pinpoint how or when. He liked to compare the trunks to elephant legs. Neither of us had ever seen an elephant.
Two squirrels played tag in the trees above me. Every so often one of them slipped, fell, and landed on a lower branch. For a minute it seemed like I, too, was part of their game. The trees they leapt between followed the path.
My phone buzzed. Hikes were the time it was both easiest and stupidest to be without your phone. What if you got lost? What if you were injured?
Yooooo.
The text was from Ellie.
I’m going to Vermont again this weekend, do you want to go visit Judy for me?? Pretty please???
Another message: She will be lonely :(
And another: You can learn piano!!!
When I looked up, the squirrels had disappeared. Maybe they had noticed their third player had dropped out, or maybe I had never been part of it to start with.
On Sunday morning, I put on the River Valley Co-op tee with the little holes around the neckline and went to Judy’s. I was proud of the holes. They proved my love for the shirt. At the assisted living facility, the receptionist wore teal cat-eye spectacles. They were so teal I had to look away and then back again. They didn’t seem like something that belonged to real life.
I wrote piano lesson in the reason for visit spot. This was a mistake. The residents, the receptionist informed me, were not allowed to provide services for monetary gain out of their rooms. It was a zoning issue.
Oh, I said, but there’s no monetary gain. I’m not paying Judy money. I can’t even play piano.
She frowned. Then why are you here?
To visit.
Yes, but what is your reason for visit? She spoke slowly and pointed at the words at the top of the column in the guest book, as if this was a “learn to read” situation. Eventually we crossed out piano lesson and squeezed in social above it. Room 211, she said. She wasn’t happy about it.
Welcome mats lay outside some of the residents’ doors. A line of porcelain hedgehogs stood guard on the narrow sill above 204. Were the people with bare doors the same ones who had left their lockers undecorated over half a century before? Or did tastes evolve? At 211, I wondered if I had remembered the number wrong. A magazine cutout of Cindy Crawford in a gold swimsuit was taped over the peephole. Cindy’s gaze had a strong handshake. She would be disappointed in me if I didn’t knock soon. I knocked.
Judy opened the door right away. She wore leopard print leggings and a sparkly headband.
I was just doing my exercises, she said, pointing at the headband. Then she demonstrated how she was supposed to hold on to the kitchen counter and move her legs back and forth. She had a collection of Jane Fonda workouts on VHS, but her physical therapist said they weren’t appropriate for her stage of life. So the VHS tapes were looking for a good home. Did I want them?
I don’t have a VHS player, I said. Judy was already someone I wanted to model myself after, but not for her VHS tapes. And I really didn’t have a VHS player.
Judy’s apartment was tiny and tiled in linoleum. A love seat the color of dead leaves filled one wall of the living room. A magnet on the fridge, in the kitchenette, said IT’S WINE O’CLOCK. I looked for something to say.
Well, I said at last, it’s nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much from Ellie.
Oh, good, said Judy. I love to be talked about. It happens so rarely once you’re old—that’s why it’s better to be famous.
Her voice had a crackle I associated with my grandmother, who’d died when I was ten. Suddenly I understood that the crackle might have been more a feature of age than personhood. Judy’s words came quickly, as if they, too, were wearing leopard print leggings.
Following her directions, I extracted the piano from behind the love seat and unfolded it. She asked if I knew how to type. It felt like a trick question. How to properly type, said Judy, with your fingers on the home row.
I sat on a stool, and she stood behind my right shoulder. I knew about the home row, but couldn’t think if it was something I used, the same way I couldn’t remember where the important buttons in a car were unless I was sitting in a driver’s seat. Letters appeared on the screen without me thinking about it.
This, said Judy, reaching around me to press a white key in the middle of the board, is middle C. This is your home row.
I put my index finger over the note she had pressed, pretending it was the J on my laptop. No, no, said Judy. She arranged my fingers herself, placing my thumb over middle C and curling the other fingers onto their respective keys. Her skin made me not believe in opposites. It was soft and rough at once.
We played a scale. Judy said the letters out loud as I pressed each note. It was like learning the alphabet all over again. I could see how she would have been a good kindergarten teacher—in her mouth, the letters all sounded like they wanted to be your friends.
I wasn’t good. Judy kept poking at my wrists, positioning them in ways that didn’t feel any different from how I’d had them before. There was a point in the scale where I was supposed to tuck my thumb under to reach the next note, which I couldn’t do without breaking rhythm, even at half speed.
At the piano, Judy might have been naked. Anything extra—in her voice, her movements, the path of her eyes—vanished. I remembered what Ellie had said about Quaker meeting. It was easy to take guided meditation seriously if no one laughed.
How much time was passing? At a certain point I asked for a glass of water. We were still practicing scales. The rush of tap water sounded like Cecelia’s white noise machine. I asked what Ellie had been like in kindergarten.
Judy handed me the glass of water before answering. She extended a finger and played a single note—one of the black keys at the right end of the keyboard. The same, I think, she said slowly. Most people are the same. There was a month when we had to check her pockets after recess, because she kept bringing woolly bears inside. I still don’t know where she found them all. But she was the same. Now play the scale again.
The scale wasn’t any better this time.
Eventually Judy said it was enough for today. Did I want to stay for tea?
I did. We boiled water and arranged a packet of wafer cookies in a star pattern on a plate. I put away the piano and sat down on the front quarter of one of the love seat cushions.
Judy asked what kind of tea I wanted and then said never mind, she only had Irish breakfast. She sat next to me on the love seat, farther back on the cushions. I balanced my mug on my knee. The cookie plate covered the whole top of the stool where I’d sat during the piano lesson. We laughed to break the silence. What were we waiting for? It reminded me of internet dates in college, when a boy and I would sit on a bed making small talk, trying to silently agree about when the kissing would start.
So, I said, have you always lived here?
Nova Scotia. Judy smiled. Her voice put its clothes back on. I didn’t understand how she could be two separate people in the space of an hour and still say that people stayed the same between kindergarten and adulthood.
I grew up in Nova Scotia, she said, sitting up straighter. Then I came here for college. Then I met Jim.
I didn’t have to ask for more. The Jim story was a story Judy knew how to tell.
At first, Judy and Jim were just friends. Acquaintances, really. Then one night, she and her friends were in a restaurant, and this group of guys had a table on the other side of the room. So Judy and her friends kept looking but not looking. Do people still do that, Judy wanted to know? She hoped they did. One of her friends liked the redhead, and another preferred the one with the beard. There was one boy sitting so they couldn’t see his face. He was just a cowlick and a pair of shoulder blades. That one, Judy said to her friends. I like those shoulder blades. She said it mostly to make her friends laugh. When they all got up to leave, the shoulder blades belonged to Jim.
I laughed. It was a good story even if I wasn’t the first to hear it.
Judy showed me pictures of Jim in her photo album, and I pulled up photos of Henry on my phone. Nice eyebrows, said Judy.
Eli had nice eyebrows, too. There weren’t any photos of him in my camera roll, so I didn’t bring him up. It was easier to tell Judy there weren’t any people of interest right now, and that I hadn’t met anyone since getting home. In a few ways, it was the truth. I’d met Eli long before this summer. Nothing was going on.
Judy’s pages of shiny paper felt so much more permanent than the images on my screen, though people insisted everything that happened on the internet was there forever. In the photo album, we moved backward in time. Jim was gray-haired and then Jim was brown-haired. Then he was reading a book to a small child; then he was spitting out a mouthful of spaghetti. One photo was taken from behind, on a mountain. His shoulder blades were underneath his backpack.
You should come next week, too, said Judy, picking up another cookie. Ellie never wants to talk about men.
I nodded. The tea was oversteeped in a way that stuck to the back of my throat. On my way out the door, I gave Cindy a little wave.
What did it all mean? There were the skunks and the boys, the Ellies and Judies. Ellie had sent me here, but I didn’t think she would have approved of the conversation Judy and I were having. Don’t you think it’s sad? she would have asked. That Judy has lived a whole long interesting life, and what she most wants to talk about is men?
I tried to feel the sadness of it. Mostly I thought: Imagine. Imagine a single person being more interesting than all the rest of your life combined! That would be a very interesting person. I wanted to meet a person like that.
I went back to Cecelia’s.
Come on, she said, come on.
She didn’t even let me take my shoes off. We had to go right back outside.
She’s been asking for you all morning, said Jon. Jon was Cecelia’s father. His work was something that happened from home and was related to podcasts. When he shrugged, it jostled the earphones resting around his neck.
Cecelia and I stood on her stoop. I asked where we were going and if we should bring snacks.
No snacks. We’re going for a walk.
The sun leaned over us, watching. I let Cecelia pull me along the sidewalk. She lifted her feet slightly higher than normal with each step. At intersections she looked behind us before looking left, right, left. Eventually we got to the park with the slide where she liked to play “the wood chips are lava.”
Did she want to play?
No.
Did she want me to push her on the swings?
Cecelia let go of my hand and spun in a circle, eyebrows lowered. How do we get to the sewers? she asked.
The what?
The sewers.
I squatted down next to her. It was as if two pages had stuck together, and the story had skipped ahead without my realizing it. We can’t go to the sewers, I explained. The sewers aren’t for people.
I didn’t even know if our town had a sewer system. The house I had grown up in used its own tank.
Cecelia stomped her foot. Yes, they are! The man in the book—he went to the sewers.
What book?
She rolled her eyes in four steps: look left, look up, look right, look down. She had just learned about eye-rolling and needed practice.
You know, Isabel. The skunk book! I want to find the skunk!
I sat back on my heels. Whenever people asked me why I liked babysitting, I cited the element of surprise.
Well, I said. That was a book. Books aren’t real. People don’t normally go in sewers, and skunks definitely don’t.
Then where is he?
It had been stupid to not bring snacks. She was going to cry. I think he’s asleep, I said. Skunks are crepuscular—it means they’re mostly awake at dawn and dusk.
That was something the internet had told me.
Cecelia blinked.
Let’s go home, I said.
Did you bring the skunk book? she asked.
I explained that I’d had to return it to the library. She nodded. Good. That meant she could check it out herself, the next time she went. We walked back hand in hand, practicing pronouncing “crepuscular.” Crep-us-Q-lar.
At night I lay awake. It was the time of night for imagining what your maid of honor might say in a speech, in the future. As a child I’d never drawn crayon sketches of poofy dresses or marched up and down with a pillowcase draped over my head. But I imagined my wedding. The important people in my life would lift a glass and tell a story. Whatever the story was, the wedding would be the epilogue.
The problem was that a maid of honor couldn’t tell the story of Eli without making me look pathetic. Isabel was in love with Eli for years. She moved back to town to pursue him, instead of to Philadelphia to pursue a career in natural science museum curation.
In my heart of hearts, I thought it was better to move across the country for someone you weren’t involved with than for someone you were. Then you weren’t deluding yourself. You knew from the start it was a fantasy—no need to wait for the breakup to feel like an idiot. I doubted the crowd at my wedding would understand this reasoning.
A maid of honor was meant to embarrass you, of course. Once, she would opine, so-and-so was outlandishly drunk. But I wasn’t drunk. I’d been in full control of all mental faculties when I agreed to house-sit for Jan and Steve.
I rolled over in bed. I reached out one index finger and touched the wall in front of my face. The paint was “eggshell.” I thought that was the word. It wasn’t “matte.” Sometimes the bones of the house settled and something would creak. How lucky houses were—they could exist without action. No one expected them to do anything.
The house-sitting idea had shown up in a text from Brigitte. She’d been wondering what I wanted for a graduation present. And oh, while she was thinking of it, Jan was looking for a house sitter this summer. Three months. Any chance …?
It had been spring. That was the season we all developed an interest in real estate. We sat in the library with one tab open to the weather forecast, one tab open to the essay we were writing, and three tabs open to apartment websites. We typed “Philadelphia” into the search bar as filler. It seemed the sort of thing. It wasn’t New York; it wasn’t far off. Someone had told us—somewhere we had read—it was more affordable. It had Young People.
In the evenings we propped a laptop on the porch railing and watched House Hunters.
Brigitte’s text had the allure of the concrete. I’d been inside Jan’s house before, so there was no need to account for fish-eye lenses. And it would give me time. I could figure out real jobs and real apartments when I wasn’t worrying about essays. For a second, I pulled ahead in whatever race Mikayla and Henry and I were racing. I knew where I was going.
A breeze slipped through the screen of the open window. I rolled over again to face it. The moon must have been full, or a couple of calendar squares away from full. My jeans lay in a pile on the floor. They had the look of a mountain range seen from an airplane window. I hadn’t been on an airplane in a long time, not since the clouds could speak. Come, the clouds used to say, it’s time to make snow angels.
A skunk came over the mountain and Mikayla, in a purple dress, said, Isabel was always weird about Eli, and I was asleep.
Roger was the most popular yoga teacher. He was a person you met gradually. He’d shaken my hand on my first day, inclining his bald head as he pronounced it a pleasure to meet me. He was stout and wiry. Everything that bore noticing about him required a point of comparison. That first day, I couldn’t have said his classes were popular, because I didn’t know how many students the other classes had. I couldn’t have known that the cluster of gray-haired women waiting to speak with him after class was unusual. He was a man, and the other instructors were women.
In late June, he paused while putting on his raincoat to ask how I was liking the job. His raincoat was plain and black and ended at his hips, just like mine. The last of the students finally trickled out. While they’d stood talking to Roger next to the stereo system in the studio, I’d refilled the bathroom paper towels, printed the daily transaction report, and powered down the computer and copy machine. Now I was waiting to lock the door behind us. Rain thrummed against the windows. I said it was an interesting job to have because I didn’t know anything about yoga. Everything I saw became an observation.
Roger nodded. And what have you observed? he asked.
I locked the door. Now we were in the vestibule between the studio, the attorney’s office it shared a building with, and the door to the outside. I took my umbrella out of my bag but didn’t undo the Velcro around it.
The women really like to ask you questions, I said, facing the outer door as if we were still moving, even though we’d stopped. They don’t do that with the other teachers—hang around after class to talk.
Roger tilted his head up, as if studying the drips lined up at the edge of the awning outside. Hmm, he said. That is an observation.
I mean they’re flirting with you, I said after a moment. The silence of taciturn men could be uniquely frustrating and often led me to spurts of bravery.
Roger looked amused, in profile. Oh, he said, I understood that that was your interpretation.
A crack of thunder rolled down the street.
It’s not yours?
He shrugged, pulling his hood up over his bald head. I couldn’t imagine referring to Roger’s head without putting the word “bald” in front of it. He was so bald. He probably massaged expensive vegan moisturizer into his scalp every night.
I think, he said, that women of a certain age just want someone to talk to, sometimes.
He let that sink in, then asked if I had a ride home—it was awfully wet out there. His wife was on her way to get him, and he was sure they could drive me, too, if I needed.
I shook my head quickly. Outside, I pinched the neck of my coat tighter around my chin. I’d misinterpreted the interaction—he’d been waiting for his wife, not for my conversation. What age, exactly, qualified one as a “woman of a certain age”? The phrase offended me, but I couldn’t say why. Didn’t everyone want someone to talk to? Was this desire something else I was meant to be embarrassed about? Or maybe it was more complicated—maybe it only became embarrassing once you reached the “certain age.” Judy and I could talk with impunity because we were too young and too old. Also because we were talking to each other instead of to a man.
The Eldest Skunk had more conversations with the oriole. The compost smelled of tapioca, and then of apple cores.
He told her about three goats who wanted to cross a bridge, and taught her to count.
“See the leaves on the clover?” he said. “One, two, three. See the pigs in the story? Straw, sticks, stones. One, two, three.”
The Eldest Skunk brought the oriole three underripe blueberries the next morning. Three was the number that fit in her mouth: one in each cheek and one under her tongue. She spat the berries carefully onto the ground at the base of the apple tree. Overjoyed, the oriole thought she was ready for bigger numbers. They waddled and flew together from dandelion to dandelion. One! Two! Three! Four, five, six, seven! Eight, nine, ten, eleven!
The Eldest Skunk only remembered “eleven.” It tasted best to her ears.
The next time I went to Cecelia’s house, the carpet was covered in skunk books. Her house didn’t have a mudroom, so it was especially jarring. The door spat you right into the open-plan living room/kitchen. There were books all over the floor.
In the books, skunks learned to say please and threw each other surprise birthday parties. They dug for beetles. They walked by colored “Did you know?” boxes. Did you know a newborn skunk weighs the same as ten marshmallows?
We stayed inside because it was raining. Jon cleaned out the fridge. His earphones were in his back pocket instead of around his neck. He was supposed to be working whenever I was with Cecelia, but often spent time with the fridge—cleaning, excavating, procrastinating. Today he attached a piece of masking tape to a shelf on the door. MUSTARD. A pile of half-finished applesauce pouches lay behind him on the counter.
A skunk phase is better than a princess phase, he said.
I had a flashback to my high school history teacher proclaiming that sixty seconds was the maximum amount of time anyone really needed in the shower. It wasn’t that I disagreed. Still, the teacher’s hair had always been short enough not to need shampoo.
We kept getting only halfway through a book before Cecelia would decide we were done, push it shut, and put a different one in my lap. I worried I was enabling a quitter attitude. I went along with it anyway. Maybe being a quitter was a good thing—maybe it meant Cecelia would know how to change course when things weren’t working.
I want to see a real skunk, she said.
In my head, I agreed. Out loud, I tried to explain that skunks didn’t work like that. They appeared or they didn’t. They were shy. If we wanted them too badly, they would never come.
Cecelia understood faster than I expected. Like Santa? she asked. He’ll only bring the presents if you fall asleep?
At Jon and Amelie’s, every Christmas Eve, they set out a plate of cookies. In the morning the cookies were gone, replaced with presents and a short note from Santa. What did skunks eat, Cecelia wanted to know? I pointed to a page in a National Geographic Kids book. Insects, larvae, eggs, small animals.
But what do they eat for dessert?
Jon, as the final arbiter of all knowledge, was consulted. Now there was a half-made sandwich on the counter, with a bottle of honey-mustard dressing and a jar of Dijon beside it.
Cecelia tugged on his pant leg. What do skunks eat for dessert?
Mustard, darling, said Jon without looking down.
Cecelia wanted to have Skunk Christmas right away. She would cover a plate in mustard and leave it on the stoop. In the morning there would be an empty plate.
By this point, Jon’s brain had caught up to what was happening. You could see the battle playing out across his forehead. His eyebrows jumped together and apart. On the one hand, the danger of stifling his daughter’s creativity. On the other hand, the waste of mustard!
But Cecelia, I said, don’t you think Skunk Christmas should be a specific day? How will the skunks know to come looking for the mustard?
I suggested June 30—the eve of July 1. The switch between months was a good time for holidays. The skunks would know to expect special happenings.
Jon’s eyebrows threw a “thank you” at me. June 30 was days and days away. It belonged to the future, and was likely to be forgotten.
Great idea, he said. That way, you’ll have more time to prepare.
One twilight, the oriole had bad news. He valued his conversations with the Eldest Skunk, but his mate would be arriving soon. He and the skunk could still talk, but not as they once had. He would be busier. He would have duties.
The skunk understood, and didn’t understand. She understood that he would be busy. She didn’t understand why the busyness was bad news. To her, each hour of waking was measured by how hungry or cold she was at the time. Her desires were confined to the achievable. She never wished for sun when it was raining, though she might wish for a dry, hollow log.
She walked toward the stream. The oriole followed. He hadn’t met his mate for this year, but he would know them when he saw them.
The Eldest Skunk wanted to show him the skunks in the water. Today only one water-skunk appeared. It didn’t blink, even when a water strider skied over its eyebrow. The Eldest Skunk felt happy to be introducing her friends to each other.
The oriole dipped a toe in the stream. He turned his beak back and forth between the skunk in the water and the skunk on the land.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a reflection?” he asked.
The Eldest Skunk made a paw print in the mud, and then another one next to it with the same paw. She looked at the skunk in the water with what could only be described as love.
The oriole stepped back.
“Never mind,” he said. “Thank you for introducing me.”
June 30 approached, and Cecelia did not forget. The skunks grew in her mind like an inflatable bouncy house, or a crush on a bespectacled stranger in a café.
I pushed her on the swings. She described what she would be for Halloween.
I’m going to be a skunk, she said.
With four-year-olds, the question of what to be for Halloween was never out of season. It was important to always have an answer ready, even if you would end up being something entirely different come October.
Cecelia wanted to wear all black. Amelie would glue white felt down her back. There would be a big fluffy tail—materials TBD. In one hand she would carry a jar of mustard, and in the other a spray bottle.
Today, the back of her T-shirt was covered in smiling butterflies. Her ribs, every time I gave her a push, felt more like plastic straws than bones.
But I’m going to be a nice skunk, she said, so I’m going to spray lavender-smell. Higher, Isabel, push me higher!
She wanted me to do an underdog. The word “underdog” hit me in the face, like so many things I’d forgotten.
My dad had done underdogs for me. An underdog was when you kept moving forward as you pushed the swing, and walked under it, lifting the child above your head before letting them swing down behind you. It was simple in memory. I gripped the sides of the swing and walked forward. Suddenly the physics didn’t make any sense. I backed up. I tried again and the same thing happened.
I’m sorry, I said, I can’t. You’re going to fall out of the swing.
Cecelia kicked her legs impatiently. No, I’m not!
Then my arms aren’t strong enough. I can’t lift you that high.
She tilted her head back to look up at me. Daddy does underdogs all the time.
I know, I said. I’m sorry.
Cecelia squirmed off the swing and kicked some wood chips out of her sandals. Let’s go back inside, she said.
Inside, we got right down to business. We had to finish our skunk holiday cards. The yellow crayon was already shorter than its siblings. We’d drawn so many mustard bottles. When we’d started the cards, Cecelia had wanted to draw the skunks themselves. But black and white was hard. She didn’t understand how to let blank space be a color. She didn’t understand why the white crayon, layered on top of the black one, only made things a muddy gray. Mustard bottles were easier. They were yellow. They could be outlined by me and colored in by her.
After cards were decorated, there was the problem of what to put inside. I refused to write “Merry Christmas.” This was Skunk Christmas, I insisted. We were inventing the wheel. I didn’t use that expression. Cecelia wouldn’t have understood.
She rolled around on the carpet a bit, like she always did when grown-ups wanted her to be creative. Happy mustard, she said. Write that.
I wrote Happy mustard.
When Amelie got home from work, she sat cross-legged on the floor and read through every card. Happy mustard. Wishing you a mustardy year to come. Stars and stripy skunks forever. I odor you! Dear Skunk, stop following me, love, the man in the book. Dear Skunk, I’m sorry, please come back, love, the man in the book. Dear Skunks, I love you a lot and would like to meet you but if you are too shy that’s OK too, love, Cecelia.
The oriole made his house out of sticks, and dead grasses, and strands of human hair that someone had plucked from their hairbrush and tossed out the bathroom window. The Eldest Skunk kept track of the nest. She looked up at it on her way to the compost bin, and again when she walked back from the compost bin.
The oriole didn’t have time to dwell on his true love, the apple tree, anymore. He still dwelled in it. His brain was clogged with architectural mud, and mental maps of which stretches of ground held the tenderest earthworms, best suited to an infant oriole’s gullet.
Did he love the apple tree less because he thought of it less often? No. But how else should we measure emotion?
Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night with the weight of a small mammal on my chest. I tried not to move. If Athena noticed me stirring, she would disappear.
In the linen closet there was a shelf for bath mats. Right above them was a shelf for smaller towels: hand towels on the left, washcloths on the right. The washcloths were all folded in quarters. Their corners matched up exactly in the stack. Sometimes I wondered if the closet had had a makeover before Jan and Steve left, or if it was naturally beautiful. Sometimes Athena was nowhere to be found. At those times, she was napping on the bath mats.
Finally I removed the bath mats, hand towels, and washcloths from the closet. The top bath mat was matted with cat hair. You could peel off sections of hair all in one piece, like Band-Aids. I put that one in the laundry basket.
Athena appeared at the top of the stairs. She sat down and looked at me, letting her tail drape over the first step. The tail swung back and forth.
I put the remaining bath mats on the shelf where the hand towels and washcloths had been, and vice versa. Leaving the closet door open, I backed down the hall and sat on the carpet. Now the closet was between Athena and me.
Athena turned and trotted back down the stairs. Her belly swung back and forth underneath her. Her tail stood straight aloft.
So Cecelia had a purpose, and I had nothing. I lay on the couch and touched my phone screen.
At Cecelia’s house, Cinder Edna lay forgotten under the coffee table. The first page was folded back under the cover by mistake, developing a crease that would one day rip half the words away. I tried to feel like a good influence, instead of like a math professor realizing their student has developed a more innate understanding of calculus than they could ever aspire to.
I clicked into “Messages.” My conversation with Eli was just out of sight. If I scrolled down even a centimeter, it would appear—his name, and the lit that was still our last message—there beneath the text from Brigitte about whether or not I was interested in an armchair that had been posted in her “buy nothing” internet forum. In an effort to reuse, people sent out photos of things they didn’t want anymore in case anyone else wanted them. I’d once arrived at my father’s house to find Brigitte taking a picture of a mostly empty jar with a few Brazil nuts at the bottom. Originally it had been full of “mixed nuts,” but it turned out Brigitte didn’t like Brazil nuts. She posted the picture. Later that afternoon a stranger came and picked up the almost empty jar.
I clicked into the message with Brigitte. It was a nice armchair—blue with fat buttons across the back. In those days there was something sinister about offers of furniture. They seemed designed to remind me that I had nowhere to put it.
I closed the app, then reopened it, scrolled to the message with Eli, and typed:
Hey, wondering if you’d want to get coffee on Tuesday?
I hit send without considering the implications of different punctuations or days of the week. Then I put my phone face down in the middle of the living room carpet. These moments of freedom, when I was so proud of myself for sending a message that I couldn’t care at all about the reply, never got old. Sometimes they lasted until the next morning.
I folded laundry. I didn’t turn on the radio.
On the evening of June 30, Jon texted me a bird’s-eye-view photo of a plate of mustard on their porch steps. A moment later, another photo came in: Amelie holding a dish of crackers and a wine bottle.
Skunk Christmas, he said, with the little green checkmark emoji.