In the grocery store, a stranger behind me in line said they liked my pants. I thanked them and pulled out my phone. Then I remembered the experience of being complimented was over. Ellie wasn’t speaking to me. I had no one to report the small moments of my life to.
I returned my phone to my pocket and smiled again at the stranger.
They smiled back, but their lips were thinner this time.
Sorry, I said. They’re new. The pants.
I faced frontward. The pants were a few years old. I’d needed an excuse. Compliments weren’t supposed to mean so much; you weren’t supposed to prolong eye contact with people in grocery stores.
The cart in front of me was mostly paper towels. I’d expected the large items to move quickly. The customer sorted through a big pile of coupons. Since when did people still use coupons? They handed a slip of paper to the cashier, and the cashier shook their head. Expired. A slip of paper fell to the floor and the customer bent to retrieve it. The cashier cracked their neck. Even when the right coupon was located, the customer kept their eyes lowered: hands, PIN pad, conveyor belt, wallet. These were the things that bore watching.
Finally, I unloaded a tomato, an avocado, a sleeve of tortillas, and a block of cheese from my basket. I glanced to my left. The stranger had taken their phone out. They held it in one hand, the hand resting on the push bar of their grocery cart.
Paper or plastic? said the cashier.
Oh, I said, I brought my own bag. I like your nose ring.
Thanks, they said.
Outside, the parking lot reflected sunlight back into my face. I could understand why seagulls hung around shopping malls. Previously, I’d pictured the thread between myself and my phone as a sort of tendon. Since the kiss, or since the fallout from the kiss, the thread felt more like dental floss. Nothing terrible would happen if it was cut. But this loosening wasn’t happening to anyone else. I was alone with my freedom.
August was my mother’s favorite month. She liked to talk about the day when she could first smell fall. She waited for it each year, and felt a shift. I’d never believed her. Cold didn’t start until September. Today, though, the strap of my tote bag pressed my shirt into my armpit without making a wet spot. I turned my phone off and tucked it between the side of the bag and the sleeve of tortillas.
Ellie was making the right choice. I’d been a bad friend when I kissed Brynn, and when I didn’t tell her about kissing Brynn.
Ellie had gone to the bakery. She’d been worried about her life path. Whenever she got worried about her life path, she tried to adjust her perspective. If she took enough small steps in a good direction, life would take care of itself. Chocolate was always a good direction.
She pointed to the brownie she wanted. An edge piece, not a corner. That big one, there.
Guess we’re in the same boat, huh? said Eli, who was on shift that day. He slid the brownie into a wax paper bag.
Ellie liked to pay in cash. It made life more tangible, and more like a game—like Monopoly, or playing house and using leaves as money. She paused with her quarter over the tip jar.
What do you mean? she asked.
Eli, too, had eaten a brownie that morning. He, too, had been dumped.
Ellie pulled the quarter back toward her. She didn’t mean to rescind the tip. She was just confused.
I wasn’t—she began. I’m not—
The brownie lay on the counter between them.
Who dumped you? she asked finally. Maybe this was just one of those dumb boy things. It was a convoluted way of asking for sympathy.
Eli, by now, was realizing he’d messed up. But there was no way to backtrack, or if there was, he couldn’t think of it fast enough.
Brynn, he said at last.
Ellie hadn’t heard from Brynn in a couple of weeks. The romance had fizzled, she’d guessed. It wasn’t a big deal—they hadn’t even kissed. Still, Eli’s words sent two shocks through her. The first shock was negative: Brynn and Eli had been involved. The negative part was less the information and more the fact that Ellie hadn’t been privy to the information until now. The second shock was positive: Brynn had dumped Eli. Could that mean she wanted to pursue other options more seriously? Could that mean she wanted to pursue Ellie more seriously?
A numbness, separate from the shocks, entered Ellie’s fingertips. Eli had said “too.” Eli was opening and closing his mouth like a fish. There was more to the story.
I think, said Ellie, that you need to tell me everything you know.
Ellie was good at deciding what she needed, and at asking for it.
Brynn had dumped three people: Eli, Ellie, and me. She was moving back to Albuquerque. She’d told Eli that she would have dumped him anyway, even if she wasn’t moving. She cited something about a shoe store, that he didn’t understand, and something about kissing Isabel, that he did.
I took comfort in that detail. The kiss hadn’t been a total waste.
The boy wasn’t looking at his phone or reaching one hand into the glove box in search of the plastic fork. He was looking straight ahead and noticing the sign that said SLOW CHILDREN. It was early morning. He had many hours to drive. In another minute the trees would be orange, reflecting the light of the sun coming over the horizon. Some minutes after that, the trees would be green again. He was on his way to see a boy he wasn’t dating. They had kissed before, and this evening they would kiss again. Maybe after more evenings—he tried to be reasonable, it would have to be lots and lots more evenings—they would date. The drive was nine hours. Nine was an embarrassing number of hours to drive only to kiss someone. He felt young and spontaneous at the center of this embarrassment. One hand was at ten and the other hand was at two, even though his driver’s ed teacher had told him that the new rule was nine and three. His father always used to say, “What makes the children around here so slow?” when they passed those SLOW CHILDREN signs. It wasn’t a funny joke. It was even less funny now than it used to be, but he still thought of it and his father probably still said it, though he hadn’t seen his father for a few years now.
Have we said enough? The driver was at least as good a person as you are. The skunk stepped suddenly from the bushes and into the road.
I saw the three large birds standing at the end of Jan and Steve’s driveway. I knew they were vultures right away—I was my father’s daughter. Athena, Athena, went my heartbeat. My hands were suddenly hot on the steering wheel. The shoebox in the freezer flashed across my inner eyelids.
As I got closer, I could see my mistake. The blot on the ground was black and white, not tabby orange. The vultures lifted their heads to look at me. Since their eyes were on the sides of their heads, they stood in profile. I held off on hitting the brakes. I needed those birds to recognize my superiority—the superiority of a motor vehicle.
They didn’t move. I hit the brakes. The first vulture flapped its wings once in response. All three stepped away from the carcass. They lifted off slowly, like old men standing up from their recliners.
My car came to a complete stop a few feet from the entrance to the driveway. The skunk—the body—lay exactly centered in the northbound lane. Part of it had been squished flat, but the final tuft of tail stuck up. The fur swayed slightly in a gust of wind.
Another car approached in the rearview mirror. I pulled carefully around the skunk and kept driving. At the next driveway, I turned around. Coming from this direction, Jan and Steve’s was on the left. It was a wider turn. I had more space to line up the car wheels so they would pass on either side of the body.
Once I got inside, I drew the curtains. People were not like cars. We didn’t mark them with models and years, or advertise updates on billboards. How, then, to remind myself that my feelings were for an Eli of the past, not an Eli who existed now? Was that even a fair distinction to make? Maybe all relationships were like that—contingent on past versions. Take Ellie, for example: if we’d met today, I couldn’t have felt such deep affection for her.
I removed a cheese stick from the fridge and bit into it. Normally I ate cheese sticks in strings, peeling them off one long strand at a time. There wasn’t time for that, now. A skunk had died. I took a bite without removing the plastic wrapper from the bottom of the stick.
Maybe the universe was giving me an opportunity. I could put this skunk in the ground and cover it with dirt. I could move on with my life. I took another bite of the cheese stick. It didn’t seem fair. I didn’t want to bury the skunk just because the universe was telling me to.
Why did the kids put beans in their ears? Because we told them no.
There was a snow shovel in the garage, and yellow rubber gloves in the cabinet beneath the sink. I picked up the shovel and put on the gloves.
The skunk didn’t want to leave the pavement. I had to scrape at the edge of the carcass with the shovel to get it to unstick. The air reeked. Once it was in a trash bag, and once that trash bag was in a second trash bag, I wadded the whole thing into the shoebox. The cardboard was still cold from the freezer. It fit snugly, like a loaf of bread in a pan. I wrapped the box in two more trash bags.
Even separated by so many layers, I wondered if the smell would penetrate the rest of the freezer. Would the stored soups and blueberries be inedible? Would Jan and Steve ever speak to me again? Here, at last, was a story for my maid of honor to tell.
The black plastic looked morose among the jars of pesto. The skunk deserved better, but the shortcomings of the ceremony stemmed from material limitations, not internal ones. I felt the joy of giving something everything I had.
There were still questions. Who was the skunk in the lawn? The Eldest, in the final moments of her life? More likely it was one of her siblings. But mostly I felt settled. I didn’t need to delete any phone numbers because I didn’t feel the desire to click on them in the first place.
I went to Stacy’s Pilates class. On the way there, I stopped at my dad’s house to get a pair of leggings. I hadn’t expected to need my leggings this summer. My boxes—all three of them—were stacked in one corner of the basement. Which one had the leggings in it? They all said ISABEL on the side. There was a manila file folder in the top box that was new since the last time I’d opened it.
ISABEL—DAYCARE, the label said. It was my mother’s handwriting. Inside were scribbles in various colors and mediums: green crayon, red tempera paint, purple watercolor. At the back was a typed paragraph signed “Ms. Sarah.”
Isabel, it said, is a joyful and self-sufficient member of our community. She listens to directions and has an impressive attention span for someone this age. She can easily zero in on one task for an extended period of time! Because of this, she sometimes has trouble when it is time to switch from one activity to another (e.g., from art to lunch). She enjoys princesses, the swing set, and the pretend kitchen area. She plays peaceably with others. We feel so lucky to have had her in our class, and wish her the best as she moves up to the Yellow Room!
The leggings were right underneath the file folder. I put them on in the basement so I wouldn’t need to change at the studio.
Stacy grinned when I told her my plan. She set up a mat for me, right in the middle of the room, so I would have someone to follow no matter which direction we faced. I stayed at the desk, signing people in, until the last possible second.
Okay, Isabel! called Stacy when it was time. We’re ready for you!
Everyone clapped.
Because I already knew about the affirmations, I’d thought of mine ahead of time: I am trying new things.
Though the vocabulary of the class was familiar, the movements were foreign. For donkey kicks, we were supposed to kick our legs backward, holding our knees at a ninety-degree angle. It was part of having a toned butt. It seemed simple until I looked in the mirror. My leg, unlike the other legs in the class, was not at a ninety-degree angle. My leg was at more of a sixty-degree angle. It turned out that how things felt were separate from how they looked. I couldn’t trust my nerve cells to tell me where my body was, or what shape it was making.
At the top of the movement, really squeeze your butt, Stacy instructed. Pause for a second. The muscle won’t work unless you tell it to! We create change purposefully!
Arms were the most painful. We moved them up and down like robots and swans and praying nuns, and then pretended to crack walnuts between our shoulder blades. By the time we let our hands drop to our sides, bits of muscle leapt under my skin like toads under a bedsheet. I couldn’t predict when or where the toads were going to jump.
After class, Stacy asked me if I’d liked it.
No, don’t answer that, she said. Wait a few days. Your body will feel different tomorrow, and different again the next day. On the third day, you can decide if you like Pilates or not.
Ellie asked if I could come over.
When I got there, one of her roommates, Fern, was making kimchi. Shards of cabbage littered the kitchen. They were working from a video recipe. They kept having to dry the salt water from their hands to scroll back and rewatch sections.
Here, I texted Ellie. I let myself in through the screen door.
What have you been up to these days? Fern asked. I’d met them before, when I’d been home on break from college, though their hair was a different color than the last time I’d visited. Ellie and Fern had lived together for years.
I figured we’d be seeing a ton of you this summer, they said. But I guess our paths haven’t crossed.
I’m a receptionist at a yoga studio, I said, studying the mounds of vegetables on the cutting board. I babysit. I’ve been house-sitting, but I need to find a new place for September. I don’t know. Did you grow these peppers yourself?
Fern put down their knife. Oh, they said, well—
They broke off, frowning. Oh. Never mind.
What?
They shook their head. I forget what I was going to say. Yes, I grew the peppers.
I nodded. The knife thumped against the wood and we didn’t have to speak.
Ellie came out of her room. She waltzed to the cutting board and stole a piece of carrot without asking.
Porch, she said, pointing back outside.
To call Ellie’s porch a “porch” was generous. It was a stoop made of wood. We sat on the steps.
I’m sorry, I said, once we were sitting down.
Ellie sighed. She hugged her knees into her chest and picked at a hangnail on her big toe. She believed I was sorry, but she didn’t believe I wouldn’t do it all again.
I had really hurt her feelings when I kissed Brynn and didn’t tell her about it, she said. Or when Brynn had kissed me. The kiss wasn’t even what hurt—it was finding out about it from Eli, of all people. It didn’t matter. That wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. She had something she needed to tell me, that she should have told me before. So maybe she understood now—how hard it could be to tell people the things they deserved to know.
The mail truck trundled by. It paused at Ellie’s mailbox, then grumbled onward without dropping anything off. We both waved at the driver.
I’m moving, Ellie said. She looked sideways at me, then back at her toes.
Maybe not forever, maybe just for the fall. But I leave this weekend.
Ellie had gotten a job at a state forest in Vermont. She would lead nature walks for families. She would point out red efts, and places where lightning had struck trees. When it rained, there would be educational materials to design: brochures and scavenger hunts and water cycle coloring pages. The forest called it a “fellowship” because it was just for the fall, but there were opportunities for advancement. Her friend, the one she had visited earlier in the summer, had a spare room.
I pictured Ellie in thick hiking boots, with a backpack covered in drawstrings. She looked happy. I couldn’t decide where the happiness came from. Was it the drawstrings, or the fact that she was Ellie?
That’s wonderful, I told her.
She looked at one of my eyes, and then the other. I’m really excited, she said.
I’m happy for you.
You don’t mind? That I’ll be gone?
I said obviously I would miss her, but we weren’t attached. She wasn’t responsible for me. I knew other people in this town.
I didn’t say that she hadn’t been speaking to me, anyway.
And you’ll have to visit, she said.
Did this mean I’d been forgiven? I stretched out my feet beyond the steps, into the lawn. The news came to rest inside my belly as a relief. We knew how to do long distance. We were good at it. With Ellie in Vermont, our friendship could continue.
Did you like it? she asked after a moment.
Like what?
Kissing a girl.
She’d turned toward me, and was leaning back against the railing. Yes, I was forgiven. It seemed important to answer honestly, as a way of saying “thank you.” I thought about which words to pick.
Yes, I said. I liked it. But does that mean anything? Like, isn’t kissing like a massage? It feels nice, objectively. No matter who’s doing it, or if there’s “chemistry” or whatever.
I did the air quotes with my fingers.
And was there chemistry?
I don’t know!
Ellie sighed. Her hair was still damp from the shower. The pieces at her temples had dried in fluffy ringlets, framing her face. I wondered, not for the first time, if Ellie was the person I should be kissing. I didn’t think so. But hadn’t Pilates shown me how skewed my self-perception was? Why did people kiss, in the first place? It always seemed a bit desperate—as if the kissers needed some physical proof of how close they felt in that moment, or were worried they would never feel so close again. On the steps with Ellie, I didn’t fear the future. There had been times in our friendship when we’d been closer than we were right then, and there would be times in the future that we’d be closer still. We didn’t need to kiss.
Anyway, said Ellie. You can sublet my room, if you want. Fern would be happy if it was you.
Oh! I said. Oh. I mean. How much is the rent?
The offer seemed like more than I deserved. I said I would think about it. My friendship with Ellie would survive, even if the planet didn’t. Relational history was hard to outweigh, which was one of its benefits as well as its curses. You could mess up pretty majorly and still be a net positive in someone’s life.
By now it was midmorning. We stayed on the steps, watching the sun drag itself up the ladder of the sky. Maybe the sun, too, was a small child preparing to brave the playground’s tallest slide. We said it out loud—that we hadn’t seen each other as much as we expected to this summer, even before all the Brynn drama. Ellie couldn’t picture a day in the recent life of Isabel. What time did I wake up? What did I eat for breakfast? What did I think about? She didn’t like not being able to picture me.
I asked for the address of her place in Vermont, and she texted it to me right then so I would have it in my phone. I said I would write her a letter, with a stamp and everything. I would try to explain.
There was a moment when the Middle Skunk and the Third Skunk were bereft. The Middle Skunk was the oldest, and no longer in the middle of anything. The Third Skunk was one of two. Their titles didn’t fit. But the skunks had always been pieces of a whole. It had always been a coincidence that they were three, instead of two, or a billion. Whatever had belonged to the Eldest Skunk came to rest in her siblings. Their taste buds held a memory of rust and squash blossom that hadn’t been there before.
The skunks ate worms from the fruit that fell out of the apple tree. It was getting colder at night, and they slept under the porch instead of under the forsythia. In the morning they were quiet. Why did they keep dreaming about pigs and goats? Neither of them had ever seen a pig, or a goat. It didn’t make sense.
The Third Skunk helped the Middle Skunk lick the patch of fur behind her ear. The wind blew.
It was time to harvest the potatoes. The plants had died back early this year. Once the stems and leaves were brown, my father prepared to dig for the roots. I’d helped every autumn when I was small, but never while I was in college.
We took turns with the spade. When my father stomped the blade into the earth, it was a continuation of his leg. He pried the handle back like an oar through water. He canoed; he danced; he did his job. The dirt flipped over. I crouched on the other side of the bed. I watched for the circles of gold and pried them out with my fingers. With the first turn, the soil moved in large bricks, still stuck together. After I pulled the obvious potatoes, we did a second pass. The dirt crumbled in my fists like a block of feta cheese. My dad prodded through with the tip of the spade. Any clod large enough to hide a root vegetable had to be deconstructed.
At each fresh stomp of the spade, we held our breath. There was always the chance that the shovel would hit a potato, splitting it in two before its time. Sometimes there was a noise when it happened—something like a bite from an apple. I watched my father’s face as he stomped. Even if a potato’s death was silent, you could see it in his eyes. He could feel when he’d hit something.
The crescents at the tops of my fingernails turned black. I sat back on my heels and wiped sweat from my eyebrow. Dirt clung to my pores in its wake. It felt sort of like the clay masks you could buy in the skin care aisle.
When it was my turn with the spade, I struggled. The top of the metal cut painfully into the sole of my foot, even through the garden clogs I’d borrowed from Brigitte, and the earth never moved in one piece. I had to tug at the handle multiple times to convince it to shift. Still, I kept at it. My father sorted through the clumps of dirt. Elegance didn’t matter—we would find the potatoes either way.
He told me about a deer he’d seen last week. He’d been driving home at night from a potluck. The deer had been in the road. Seeing deer like this always left him shaken. If you hit one and it went through the windshield, you were both goners. At the same time, the deer was beautiful. My father couldn’t help but feel grateful for the encounter.
He pulled a long thin potato from the ground. Humph, he said. Thinks it’s a sweet potato, does it!
He put it in the basket.
What about you? he asked. Any wildlife sightings?
“Any wildlife sightings?” was our stock question. It was what I’d asked, over the phone, when I was at college and wanted to hear his voice. If I paid attention to the answer was beside the point. He would talk about the red foxes. His voice would keep going. For him, maybe it really was about the animals. In the city I’d never had much to report—a Great Dane in rain boots, but that was different.
There was a skunk, again, I said. I wiggled the spade farther into the earth.
It almost sprayed me. It lifted its tail and everything. For a second I was so sure—but then nothing. It was almost disappointing.
My father nodded. Maybe it’s genetic, he said.
What?
Oh, come on. I’ve told you my skunk story before, haven’t I?
I let go of the spade and rubbed at the dirt on my forehead. My father had many stories. If one of them was about a skunk, surely I would have remembered it by now. This summer, of all summers, something would have reminded me.
My father dusted off a potato. He cleared his throat.
As he spoke, it came back to me. In the story, he’s camping. The heat’s unbearable, so he drags his sleeping bag outside the tent in search of a cross breeze. He wakes in the middle of the night with the weight of a small mammal on his chest. He blinks at the skunk. It whips around, tail in the air. And then it’s gone. It runs away.
So you see, said my dad, it must be genetic. These skunks getting ready to spray us, and then chickening out.
I folded my hands on top of the spade. Do you think it means they like us more, or less?
My dad laughed. Next time, he said, ask the skunk.
I looked it up later, on my phone. Skunks were twenty times better at smelling than humans, it turned out. They weren’t immune to themselves. Especially when close to home, they tried not to spray if they could help it.
We laid the potatoes in lines on the grass and hosed them off. My dad sorted them into piles: soup potatoes, baking potatoes, use-up-fast-before-they-rot potatoes. After they dried, we weighed them pile by pile to calculate the total crop.
Three pounds more than last year, my dad said proudly. Good work, Isabel.