CURRENT

Sara Rauch

I emerged from the upstairs bathroom, having gone in twenty minutes before to cry my eyes out. I’d redrawn my liner and lashes from Poppy’s makeup bag, but I still felt shitty, was thinking of slipping out the side door through the yard and running for home. Clara caught me off guard. She was there at the top of the stairs, waiting. I jumped and said, “Shit.” I was past polite, past profound. I knew my eyes were puffy and bloodshot despite the freshly applied kohl.

“Sorry,” she said. “I saw you come up here and—”

I studied her, her outfit and unfamiliar face. I’d glimpsed her downstairs, sitting by the window alone, beer in hand. She had a nose pointy like a woodpecker, and a crest of dark blond hair, pale skin, shadowy smudges beneath her light blue eyes. All I could manage was, “Oh?”

She said, “I wanted to talk to you. Now that I’m standing here, it seems like I’m being strange.”

It did seem strange, but I’d been crying in the bathroom at an afternoon potluck, wishing my ex was dead and not my dad, and it was one of those floating September afternoons that always got under my skin. My thirty-second birthday was a week away. My mother had sent a ring—she rarely visited, though I’d asked her to many times—a thick band set with rubies, and a note that read: This is your year for peace and passion. My mother was a gemologist, so I figured this arcane blessing had something to do with the stones. I rarely wore jewelry, but I wore the ring that afternoon, constantly aware of its weight on my finger.

“No, not strange. I just wasn’t expecting you,” I said.

Clara stepped toward me and touched my arm. She said, “I’m Clara. I work with Dale at the university.” There was something in Clara’s face, some openness, that made her proximity, her assertiveness comforting rather than grating.

“Sienna,” I said. “Poppy’s best friend.”

For many weeks I’d had the feeling that I was approaching a cliff, with no idea of what came next, with no parachute or brakes. All the desire I once carried—to be an artist, to do something with my life, to make meaningful contact with another human being—had come to naught. I carried with me, instead, an unbearable sense of loneliness.

“Why’re you hiding out up here?” Clara asked.

“Avoiding my ex.”

Dale and Poppy’s parties were legendary. Today the crowded rooms of their immaculate house and the people in bright colors dappled across the back lawn merely added to my sense of removal. How unlike my best friend I was, with her perfect hostess skills. But like always, I’d come early, in my black jersey dress, to help her set up. To listen to Poppy gossip about the hook-ups and breakups of our mutual acquaintances and several couples I’d met at other parties. What Poppy seemed to be saying today was that nothing was wrong with me at all—relationships blossomed and they shed their petals, the cycles of life, blah-blah. At least she was kind enough not to point out that it’d been many years since she’d seen me in bloom.

“Your ex is here?” Clara asked, biting her lip.

“The cocky brunette. Nancy.”

Clara shook her head, which I took to mean she didn’t know who I was talking about. Nancy was visiting from the West Coast, that’s why Poppy invited her. You don’t mind, do you? Poppy had asked, putting a baking sheet of biscuits into the oven. It’s been seven years, I’d said and was happy that Poppy couldn’t see my face. The worst part was I knew I shouldn’t mind. It’d been forever. And it hadn’t been that great anyway. Nancy was self-absorbed and bad in bed.

“One great thing about moving a lot,” Clara said. “No need to confront your past at parties.”

“Are you new to town?” I asked.

“Two years.” She pushed her hands through her hair, letting the little pomp on the front fall back against her forehead.

“I’ve been in the Valley since college,” I said. “Fourteen long years.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I do, I just wish—I don’t know. For something new. New air.”

“It’s overrated.”

“What is?”

“New air.”

I looked down the stairs to the glass sliding door that opened out onto the patio. There was Nancy’s back, and the lit-up face of Poppy’s friend Annabelle. They were drinking martinis and leaning in close to one another. I felt the warmth of Clara’s arm near mine, the little blond hairs tickling me.

I stood, not steadily, and said, “I need to get outta here.”

Clara said, “Do you want to go to my place? It isn’t far.”

Under any other circumstance I would have said no. But that afternoon did not feel normal. I felt like a fish that had suddenly grown legs, or a human waking to a set of gills—unsure of what to do with myself, afraid of the strange gift I’d been given.

I said sure. I motioned to Clara to follow me, and we slipped out the side door by the downstairs bathroom. Walking across the lawn, the grass long and lush and tickling my ankles, I felt a moment of urgency pass through me. I stopped abruptly and turned. Clara, not paying attention, almost crashed into me.

I said, my voice quiet though I knew it didn’t matter, “I wonder how long it’ll be till they notice we’re gone?” And I giggled. The sound was foreign as it emerged from my mouth and filled the air. Clara raised her eyebrows and gave a sly smile.

“Maybe never,” she said, and I hoped she was right.

She whistled at the old maroon Volvo. I dug in my purse for my keys and when I unearthed them, she closed her hand around mine. “Could I drive? I love these old cars,” she said.

“Where’s your car?” I asked, confused.

“I don’t have one.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I walked,” she said.

I never let anyone drive my car. The old Volvo’s clutch was loose and it frequently ground between gears or stalled out in second if it wasn’t given the proper finesse. It had been my dad’s before he died.

Maybe it was her hand around mine. Maybe it was the dying of another summer. Maybe it was the feeling of a petal or two loosening from the bud. I gave her the keys. She got in and leaned across the seat to pop open the door. She said, “Get in.” Coming from anyone else it would have seemed a command, but from her, it was gentle. Most everything about her was gentle.

All I really knew about her was that she worked with Dale (which department, had she said?) and that she lived on Wood Street and dressed like a dandy. Or at least, she had for the party we were leaving—pressed gray trousers and matching vest, a burgundy tie knotted over a white short-sleeved oxford.

I’d never been to Wood Street, in fact had no idea where it was. It wasn’t like Northampton was a small town, but having been around for so many years, I figured I knew all the streets, neighborhoods, places to see or be seen. Wood Street, Clara told me, was at the edge of town, out by the highway.

It was only a few miles, but Clara took the long way, down the narrow back streets, turning right and left and left again. Her pants pulled taut over her legs as she worked the pedals—she was slender but solid, I could see the muscles in her thighs flex as she pressed the clutch—and her spoon-shaped fingers manipulated the gearshift with ease.

Stopped at a red light, she glanced over at me. Autumn hadn’t peeled back summer’s warmth, though September was almost finished, and we drove with the windows down, my arm extended and hand gliding the air currents. Poppy would wonder where I was when the party ended, but that was several hours away. She liked to recap the minutiae as she cleared dirty glasses and loaded the dishwasher. It was her favorite part of the party, or at least one of them. Her sweet round face would be flushed with more gossip, recounting the silly moments—Did you see Max hit Greg with the croquet mallet? Priceless—who’d been drunk and who’d not shown.

Clara and I drove past pastel Victorians and farmhouses with sagging front porches. She drove slowly, as if relishing each turn the wheel made, each time she downshifted. I stared out the window, saw my reflection in the side mirror—dark hair lifting in the breeze, the sharp curve of my nose. The streets became unfamiliar, the houses and yards shabbier.

I lived near the college, in the opposite direction from which we were headed, in a second-floor apartment with refurbished wood floors and drafty windows. The apartment, beautiful and spacious, cost more than half my monthly income at the food safety nonprofit where I worked, but I’d reasoned it was worth it—given the location. I could walk to cafés and bars, there was a meticulous park only a few blocks away. Years ago, when I’d signed the lease, I’d reasoned that was enough. Now it loomed as a symbol of my inadequacy—sterile and stagnant.

As we got closer to the highway, she said, “I have a cat. You aren’t allergic, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I have a cat too. Laurent.”

“Mine’s Bell.”

“Like the translator.”

She looked at me as if I’d unintentionally caught her naked. Then she looked forward again, smiling. “Yeah, like the translator.” Her teeth were remarkably white but very crooked, both incisors jutting over the teeth in front of them.

She pulled up to the curb in front of a small white house with white shutters. She eased the gearshift into neutral, sliding it back and forth a few times before killing the engine. Noise from the highway filled the air: steel rushing, the peculiar long whine of cars passing through, the occasional horn or tractor trailer, the dissonance of movement.

“Here we are,” she said.

I sat staring at the house until she reached across me and opened the passenger door. She didn’t touch me, but her arm so close to my chest made me hold my breath. I was suddenly afraid, as if the gills I’d imagined growing earlier could suck in air because of Clara’s presence.

Clara got out of the car and waited for me to do the same before locking it with the key. Most people didn’t know that was how to lock those old Volvos, that just pushing down the button inside the door did nothing. She handed me the keys and we went up the walkway together.

“You have a house, but not a car,” I said. Agitation and desire bubbled in me.

“A fair trade, don’t you think?” she said.

She opened the front door, letting me enter before her, and I was about to turn, about to say I have to go, because I wanted to go, wanted to put space between me and this woman I barely knew, whose hand was on the small of my back sending spark waves through my body, when I noticed the white. It was hard not to. Everything in the small front room was painted white. Not ivory, not cream. Pure white, straight from the can. The only furniture in the room was an overstuffed white chair, atop which sat a small white cat. Bell. She meowed and jumped down and ran into the house.

Fascination short-circuited my nervousness and pulled me farther inside. I followed Clara from room to room. Each yielded more white—floors, baseboards and molding, the entire bathroom, the bedspread and curtains and mirror frames. There were occasional splashes of color—a squat, curvy aqua-color vase on a little shelf, a deep purple throw over the end of the bed—but everything else was white. And there wasn’t much of anything. Entire rooms were empty. Probably every piece of furniture in the house would have fit into her bedroom, which was not particularly large. I tried to think of something to say, but only inane sentences—You like white—came to mind. I kept quiet and tried to not let my mind run over with anxiety. We passed a door with a small square cut from the bottom—The basement, Clara said. Was the basement also white? I wondered. It was better not to know.

In the kitchen, the last stop on the tour, everything, as I expected it to be, was white. The refrigerator, the stove, the countertop and linoleum, the dishes sitting on the open shelves. It was a small space, as if it had been carved out of an old pantry as an afterthought, and for both of us to fit inside, we had to stand very close. Clara’s body gave off a sweet heat—vanilla and patchouli and cherry cigarillos. She offered me a drink.

“Milk?” I said before I could stop myself.

Her lips curled in a wry smile. It was unbearably sexy. “No milk,” she said. “Water, whiskey, or wine.” W words, I thought. How strange.

“Whiskey.”

“Good choice.” She reached up and brought down two white handleless mugs and a bottle of bourbon.

By now, the sun was slinking downward in the sky and diffuse light fell through the curtainless window, suffusing the kitchen with an ethereal gilt. The whiskey’s deep amber glowed. Clara did not offer ice, and though I would have preferred it, I didn’t ask for any.

“Let’s go out back,” she said.

“Clara,” I said.

“Sienna?” She turned to me, and the light coming in the window threw her face into shadow. There was, in her features, something so placid, as if she had never expected anything her entire life, and thus had never been disappointed.

“Sorry, nothing,” I said. I wanted to ask about the white, wanted to ask why she’d invited me home, wanted to reach my hand out and grab hers, feel her warm palm and supple fingers.

We went through the dining room and out onto the deck. The yard was a small patch of scrubby grass, and beyond that a line of evergreens bordered the incline up to the highway, where I could see the guardrails and cars as they zoomed by.

“You get used to the noise, after a while,” she said, sitting in an Adirondack chair. Painted white, as was the deck. I sat next to her in the other Adirondack.

“Are you tenured?” I asked, and then regretted it. What a weird thing to bring up out of nowhere.

“Tenure track, yeah,” she said.

“I didn’t ask what you teach,” I said.

“Philosophy,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Not a philosophy person, eh?”

I shook my head. “A little abstract for me. I took one class in college. Practically failed.”

She laughed and sipped her whiskey. “It isn’t like the real world. That’s true.”

“Why Northampton?” I asked.

“Why not? When you have debts to pay and no one dependent on you, any new town will do.”

“Really?”

“No,” she said and lapsed into silence. After a while, she said, “I grew up in this house. And my parents gave it to me when they up and relocated to Phoenix. The position opened up at the college and I thought, Why not? I’d been gone seventeen years. Why not come home?”

“Why haven’t we met before?” I asked. Poppy and Dale threw parties at least once a month. Certainly Clara would have been invited.

“I don’t go out much. I’m pretty solitary.”

“Why’d you come to the party today?”

She stared off into the line of trees bordering the yard. “Hard to say. Needed a change of scenery, I guess. What about you?”

“I always go to Poppy’s parties. She’s my best friend.”

“Do you like them?”

“What? The parties or Dale and Poppy?”

“The parties.”

“Mostly,” I said. “But they can be—what’s the right word? Under-stimulating.”

She nodded. The way the setting sunlight fell over her face exaggerated her sharp features. I wondered if it did the same for mine—if my neck appeared skinnier, my ears larger.

“Dale and Poppy seem very happy,” Clara said.

“They are. They’ve got the perfect life.”

“You think so?”

As soon as she asked, I knew I wasn’t really sure. Poppy certainly pretended to be happy if she wasn’t, and I went along with it, never questioning or pushing past the surface. Our friendship no longer plumbed the depths the way it once had, in college, and in that disorienting first year out of it. When she married Dale, Poppy entered a world I no longer belonged to, and though I had no real desire to follow her there, I missed the old her—the one that matched me.

But I’d been alone long enough to harness my often disturbing disorientation within the world. Those moments when the solid earth slipped out from under me and left me kicking in the ether. When I woke at night gasping for breath and wondering where I was. With my dad dead, it happened more and more often.

Even the seasons, those trusty indicators of time’s passage, seemed to slip and slide away from me. This afternoon, the sultry warmth of it, the drifting, decaying smell of leaves and whisper of cool evening, something cracked open inside me. Nothing, I knew, was as it appeared. “I honestly don’t know,” I said, answering Clara’s question. I had no idea if Poppy’s life was really perfect, and I would never dare ask. “Nothing’s perfect, I suppose.”

Clara and I watched the sun descend. It had been a long time since I’d sat like that—with everything and nothing to say. As the thick gashes of magenta and orange striped the horizon, Clara became not a stranger, but a promise.

Dusk settled around us. Bats swooped for mosquitoes. Cars continued to pass by, en route somewhere else. The noise became pleasant, an afterthought, muted the way sound is when you’re submerged in water.

Clara said, “I saw you at the party and I recognized you.”

“You recognized me?” I said. “From town?”

“No. I mean I recognized you from life. Like déjà vu, or reincarnation. Something like that.”

“That’s quite a line.” I felt my peacefulness dissolve.

“It isn’t. I mean it. You looked lost.”

“You’re not going to start talking about accepting Jesus as my savior, are you?”

“No saviors. I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“But you believe in past lives?”

“Sometimes. Right now I do.” She reached across the space that divided us and rested her hand on my forearm. I allowed her hand to touch me, allowed the strong pull of human contact.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m rusty. It’s been a while since I’ve done this.”

“I’m not lost,” I said, but it had been a long time since I’d let a woman touch me.

Clara brought her eyes to mine. “You’re very beautiful,” she said, cupping my chin in her hand.

My entire body reeled, and we stared at one another, hooked by the taut line of connection threading between us. If I kissed her now, it would be acknowledging the half-animal that careened inside me. It would be admitting I liked being pulled in by her. And though I wanted it, it seemed too dangerous to let the wild thing loose, desperate as it was for air. What good was a fish with legs? Or a girl with gills?

Clara’s lips, her face, were so close. I could smell the whiskey on her breath, the warmth of it mixed with the exhaust in the air and her vanilla perfume. It was an inch, two, to taste her.

A horn blared past, smearing the angry sound across the yard. In a flash I stood, moving through the screen door, to the kitchen, my car. As I put my cup into the sink, the door opened again and Clara was there. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “But I should go. I—” My words came tumbling out, confused, my mouth cottony from the whiskey, my body flushed. “Why is everything white?”

“I like an empty canvas,” she said.

“You’re a painter too?”

“No. Metaphorically.”

“You don’t have anything on the walls.”

“It’s more about possibility,” she said, leaning toward the wall closest to her and drawing something—a name, a curvy mermaid, a violin; I couldn’t tell—on it with her finger.

“Isn’t that tiresome? Always waiting for what could be?”

“You tell me.”

It was as if she’d seen directly into my heart, into all that I’d held close, the protected hopes that I’d been too frightened to fulfill. I walked through life veiling that fragile space, and now someone I barely knew had looked right at it. My life was stalled out. I wanted all those next steps into adulthood I’d not taken: a partner, a house, a family, a career—and at the same time, those steps were a litany of normalcy that I knew would never fit.

We stood staring at one another for what seemed like a long time. My lips were dry, my underarms damp with sweat.

“Sienna.” Clara stepped toward me, brought her hand to my hip. “I meant what I said. You’re very beautiful.” Her face was so open, so tender.

“Thank you. Thanks for the drink,” I said. “But I have to go.” I stepped back from her.

“Thanks for letting me drive—it’s a great car. Runs like a dream. You must take good care of it.”

“It was my father’s,” I said. My father had taken good care of it.

Clara smiled, slow and sad, and again the wild oxygen of desire flared through me. I let myself out.

I didn’t check my phone for messages until I got home. Poppy had texted twice and called once. Sienna, just wanted to make sure you’re okay. You seemed a little out of it and then you disappeared. Call me.

Most of the night I lay awake, thinking about Clara’s narrow nose, her funny poof of hair, the way she’d held my chin so gently in her fingers. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of her driving, my hand on her thigh as the streets and houses and trees flew by. I dreamed of a cardinal nesting in a tree choked by bittersweet. I dreamed of breathing underwater.

In the morning, after I’d showered and had coffee, I called Poppy. I had not shaken the steep yearning that filled me, or the strangeness of my dreams. As the phone rang, I looked down and saw I was still wearing the rubies. I twisted the band around and around.

Poppy answered. “You sly devil.”

“What?” I asked, though I knew full well.

“You went home with Clara. I knew it. I knew you’d love her.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Oh, Sienna,” she said. “Stop being silly. She called Dale an hour ago and asked for your phone number.”

“He gave it to her?” It was as if a wave crashed over me.

Poppy sighed. “Of course he did.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” Poppy said. “You’re ready for this.”

The gills flared.

Poppy continued, “Clara really, really liked you.”

As I had her. I’d found the current. I stopped resisting and followed it upstream.