Flakes of snow vanished where they hit the street, leaving only the shadow mark of a letter erased. Here came Tessa in her banana-yellow coat, jeans tucked into her boots, arms outstretched from halfway down the block. Edith! she said. Oh my god, Edith. Edith did not let herself run. They collided mid-sidewalk, a spot of warmth in the middle of the city. Let me get a look at you. This baby-fresh face. The scratch of gloves over skin once covered by beard.
Hey Joan. Been a minute.
An hour, at least. Tessa took her in. Edith felt like her old self in these cold-weather clothes. Skinny jeans and a baggy sweater. Tits reduced to vague lumps and hips nonexistent. God you look great. I can’t believe you’re here.
So do you. She’d been right: Tessa looked no different. She’d always be the girl Edith loved at nineteen. Twenty years might pass, fifty.
My car’s right down here.
You have a car again?
Plus ça change. Are you going to be warm enough?
Edith shivered. But you loved the T.
Don’t worry, dear Edith, the T and I are still well acquainted.
Inside the car, Edith held her hands before the vents’ blasted heat. Here she was. Beside Tessa. Snow slushing off the windshield.
I also can’t believe it, she said.
That’s what I’m saying! What the fuck, girl. Tessa looked at her seriously. You’re not allowed to stay away this long again.
What a warm way to live.
I promise.
Edith had not seen Boston from the front seat of many cars. It was easy to lose track of where they were, the city alien from the middle of intersections.
I feel so silly, coming back here as a girl.
What do you mean?
I don’t spend a lot of time in places where I used to be a dude, she hazarded. It feels so obviously wrong. Getting away with something, or failing to.
Is it a feeling of risk? Like you used to have an easier time moving through these streets and now . . .
Maybe. That wasn’t it at all. You return as a new person, a whole person, all the messy parts of the journey hidden away inside you. It’s your responsibility to explain. Like being thrust into the second act of a play. Fifteen minutes and half a dozen years pass. Now the children are played by adults. Now the boy is played by a girl. In tonight’s performance, the role of Edith will be played by an understudy.
But Valerie had been there, had known without words. That life was their life.
Each table at the sandwich shop was filled by a young couple or family. What did people see in her and Tessa? Did they have the draw, the intimacy crackling over short distances, that people in love carried? Edith felt like a heel of bread gone hard and dry in the freezer.
Her chicken salad was sweet with halved grapes. The coffee hot and rich. Before Tessa touched her chicken Caesar wrap, she drew the book out of her purse. I don’t want to forget, she said. A felt-tip pen in her other hand. Would you?
Edith’s name stared up at her. The gold wash of Helen Frankenthaler’s Persian Garden. Title like a false promise: Someday We Won’t Remember This.
Yeah, for sure. This embarrassed her too. I didn’t know you’d read it.
Who do you think I am?
Tessa watched her. Years of signing Edith and still her pen stumbled.
Don’t read the inscription until I’m not around.
That scathing, huh?
I won’t have you seeing me sentimental.
Those nights, those weekend mornings. Slipped into the heart of the city to write some silly story. Tessa always asked to read them before they were ready.
As soon as she handed the book back, Tessa flipped to the title page.
Hey! For Tessa, my Joan, it read. You were there from the start. Still incorrigible after all these years.
Tessa grinned, picked up her wrap. I have to tell you, she said. I read it practically peeking between my fingers. I was terrified I’d show up in there.
Tessa was all over the book. Every person she’d loved was. She didn’t know how to write an honest book—a book about love and friendship and uncertainty and loss—without bringing them in.
Why terrified?
Terrified it would be inaccurate. Terrified it would be exactly right. No one should be written about, I think. You get all caught up in the gaps of things. Are you all right? Edith coughed. An unchewed grape scraped her throat going down. That book’s going to be worth a lot if you choke to death, but I still won’t forgive you. Little by little sips of coffee cleared the cough away.
God, you know who I ran into yesterday? Charlie.
Oh yeah, we see each other now and then.
Do you hang out?
Not really. Her nose wrinkled. You think some people get more hetero as time goes on?
I for sure think Charlie has. All those Facebook posts of him and Polly. Posing in an apple orchard, posing on the beach, posing with Charlie’s mother on Mother’s Day. Visions of a life that so sickened Edith she’d deactivated all her social media. All those old posts, those internet memorials to boyhood, banished into the ether. I’m getting lunch with them.
Tell me what you think of Polly.
From their phone calls, each had a basic sketch of the other’s life, now to be inked, shaded, colored.
Where are you living these days?
Literally across the street from our old place, if you can believe it. At night I can see the light in your old bedroom.
Tess still worked in the city’s homelessness response systems. All the friends she mentioned had familiar names. She’d always been the one with friends. She and Valerie both—they knew how to make a world around them. Impossible not to love them.
Did you tell them about me?
What, that you’re a girl now? Yeah, obviously, everyone’s happy as shit for you.
Gotta be worth some clout in Somerville. Having a trans girl ex.
They’re throwing me a parade. I’m going to be mayor for a day. Arca and Charli XCX are singing the national anthem.
Do you still talk to Meghan?
May-gen. And no, I don’t.
The snow had stopped by the time they finished lunch. Nothing stuck. There was only the gray wash of sidewalk, street, and sky.
How’re you doing with the cold? Want to walk down the bike path?
I can deal.
(On a midwinter night, they had waited for a bus that did not come. They’d gotten dinner in a far-flung part of Boston, gone to a bookstore they didn’t usually visit. It had been nice up until the point they stopped moving. To stand freezing in the city you called home and recognize none of it. Edith wanted to give up and call a Lyft; Tessa had refused. We’re not going to contribute to the degradation of civic infrastructure.)
Tessa scrounged in her pockets. You have a quarter? Edith passed one over. Tessa flipped it, scowled, flipped it again. I’ve started doing this thing to cut down on smoking. I only have one if I flip heads. Another flip. Ideally it means I smoke half as much. Another.
That’s some kind of statistical anomaly you’ve got going.
It happens more often than you’d think.
Smoke the cig, Joan. I’ll have one with you.
There we go! Washington’s face silver in her palm. Edith made her keep it.
How’re your parents? Edith had to resist asking the same question again and again: Who knows? Does everyone know? Had it come as a shock?
They don’t still mail me cigarettes, if that’s what you’re asking. Come here. She lit both cigarettes behind a cupped hand. Anyway my folks are good. They’ve been going on every cruise they can find.
I’m sorry, they what?
They went on a Disney Cruise. They went on the Weezer Cruise.
Do they know who Weezer are?
They sure do now. Edith liked how their cigarette ash disappeared into the wet sidewalk. A small part of the pantomime. I think they like boats is all. What about you? Your dad okay?
That unimaginable Virginia summer. Valerie stretched across her parents’ guest room bed. Immaterial days. Endless, uncertain days. This was the thing. That feeling hovering around her since that first gray morning. Boston was a home that no longer belonged to her. Exiled not from place, but from time.
He’s holding up. They’re the same as ever, I guess. Playground memories, pretending to smoke rolled-up pieces of paper as breath clouded cold air. I dunno, Tess, the more time passes the less I feel like I know them. I always thought adulthood was when we’d have a real relationship.
And then you realize that all there is is all there ever was.
Yeah.
Tessa lit a second cigarette with the end of her first. They do love you, though.
They do. But that wasn’t enough. Love without substance was just language, just a game.
Edith’s parents had visited her at college once a year. They took her and Tess and Val to the expensive seafood restaurant across the street, cajoled stories from Edith’s friends, loved them. There were clear roles for everyone but her.
I thought maybe it would be different after my dad got sick. Might as well dive in. Did Val tell you about that trip?
We weren’t talking in those days.
Edith had assumed Tessa also got calls from the road. Days Val would disappear into her relentless need for space—not only from people. She needed the openness of America between cities. All those roads connect, she said. You won’t believe where they’ll lead. Maybe Edith had been the only one she called. Her distorted voice, carried down those endless highways. Too much and never enough.
Edith stopped and Tessa kept going. Look, Tess.
Edith. Tessa turned toward her. There she was, that nineteen-year-old girl with choppy bangs and too much eyeshadow. There was Edith, the scruffy, gangly boy, awkward in his body with no hint of why. They could have been at a party. Jason Derulo pounding out the walls, and Edith bumming a cigarette, asking, Does anyone actually like this music? And Tessa firing back, What, you’d rather they play Joni Mitchell?
We don’t need to talk about it, Tessa said.
I wish we didn’t. She didn’t want the loss. Didn’t want to risk the fragile love, the spiderweb of smoke, that hung between them.
What if there were no past. What if there was only the bike path, the cold air, the fire that burned down to their fingertips. The two of them in motion. I think—
What. Tessa didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound tired, or frustrated, or confused. You want absolution? Fine, I absolve you.
That isn’t it.
What, then. Three men in red spandex biked by. What did they see—friends, family, strangers? How long did it take for you guys to get together? A month? Six weeks? It was longer, but not long enough. You wanna know if that hurt? Of course it did.
It had nothing to do with you.
I’m sure you think that’s true. She threw down her second cigarette and fished the quarter back out. It came up tails.
Tessa, don’t—
Hold on, would you?
Edith’s cigarette had a column of ash jutting from it. She didn’t move; if her fingers burned, let them.
Washington’s face. The brief flame, the smoke that came after.
I’m sure you found yourself depressed, Tessa said, discouraged, far from home. I’m sure you were only looking for some hand to hold, to pull you from the mire. But you had to know it would hurt me. Both of you. She gestured, her cigarette toward Edith’s. Put that out before you hurt yourself. Edith did. Can we keep walking?
The path was dotted with young couples swaddled in wool coats, bootied black dogs on retractable leashes. This could be worse. They weren’t really talking about Valerie at all.
I know some of this is unfair, Tessa said. I know that you get all my anger because you’re here and she’s not. Had Tessa said Valerie’s name all day? You know I asked her once? Before you left.
Asked her what?
If she was interested in you.
And she said no.
She said, I wouldn’t do that to you.
Of course she did. The trouble with Valerie was that everything she said was true and everything was a kind of game she played against herself.
It was snowing again and going to snow. Let’s go back, Tessa said. You need a real coat. Edith couldn’t fathom a response that would fit this conversation’s needs. Tell you the truth, I’m not upset anymore. Or, I don’t think about it enough to be upset. But at the time? It sucked. Tessa handed her another cigarette and left her to light it herself. The three of us loved one another so much. (“We’re not the three of us anymore, Mary.”) There was a unity to it. A kind of family. (“It’s just one and one and one.”) And when I found out that you two had gotten together—it was like we were all interchangeable. It was worse—like I’d been a placeholder for you. Magical, sparkling Valerie off in America’s far reaches, manifesting her destiny et cetera and so forth. And so you settled for the nearest thing.
Edith could have pointed out it was Tessa who suggested they split up. Tessa who decided they would never work. Edith had only followed suit because she always did. But Tess hadn’t forgotten these things.
How did you find out?
She told me! She said she felt responsible, but I don’t think that’s why. She always needed us to know how okay she was.
Yeah. Edith fought the urge to brush accumulated snow from Tessa’s hair and shoulders. I’m sorry. Whatever that’s worth.
I don’t need you to be sorry. It’s a thing that happened. A million other things have happened since. Were happening even then. She stopped, squeezed Edith’s arm. This is the thing about us being friends. And I wouldn’t trade that. Complicated history and all.
Edith wanted to tell Tess she loved her. When they’d begun dating, those words had taken on a permanent power, a wariness they’d never held before.
The wind picked up. Their cigarettes sizzled out in the snow. Can we go somewhere? Tessa said. I’m freezing.
They’d all met still bearing the last vestiges of their separate youths. With Valerie there was arm-wrestling and hand-slapping games. Each time she lost to Edith there’d come a little smile: That’s the most gender-affirming outcome for us both. She spoke of depression as if she’d diagnosed it using Robert Burton. She never had trouble getting out of bed, only coming back to her own. Tessa had been borne on her own abandon—sleeping with every member of the women’s ultimate frisbee team and smoking cigarettes. But the thing that Edith marveled at, that she found permanently, implacably wondrous, was the balance. They pulled each other back from their most self-destructive moments—Joni, please bring your legs off the windowsill—or leaned into them together, staying up all night before their art history final drinking Fireball whiskey and watching for the sunrise. (As they’d discover around the time the sky went eggshell, they were facing west.) There was no trial they would not take on together. But Edith never stopped worrying. Val springing the Punisher open and closed. What do you need a knife for? And Val said, What does anyone need a knife for? Tessa did coke off an ex-girlfriend’s finger, ran it across her gums. Temptation and torture. They starved, craved, caroused. Paths crossed, eyes closed, hand in hand. Exes dogged by soft ohs.
They were children.
They stopped at CVS, ibuprofen for Edith’s aching tooth. It was risky to dull the pain—she might chew the wrong way, clench her jaw—but she couldn’t stand it. She’d seen pictures of the stump of her rotless tooth. It looked like a bombed-out building. People don’t usually bleed this much, the dentist said.
Tessa stood past the checkout with Edith’s book, flipping between inscription and dedication. For Valerie Green.
Did she get to read it?
Some of it. Edith chewed one pill, a second. Her throat silted by bitter powder.
Tessa winced. Still doing that with pills, huh.
It makes me believe in them.
The sky was gunmetal. They stepped into the first café they passed.
I forgot how fast it gets dark here.
God knew Boston would be too powerful if we had more light.
The café floor was spattered with snowmelt. Students read or solved differential equations. There was a calmness to them all. The early part of the semester, when you know your finals will never come. Edith and Tessa claimed a table. Two coffees and a plate of biscotti.
Do you still write ever?
No. Tessa looked at all the hardworking children in the room. No, you know, I used to feel bad about that. Like, it felt so important when we were in college—writing those little one-acts and getting people to perform them. You remember, I tore out half my hair getting that girl to star.
Their senior year, she’d adapted the biography of a Sixties It Girl. She’d cast the most popular girl on campus to play the lead. Imogen-someone had sown discord by sleeping with half the cast, showing up at rehearsal drunk. She’d taken a year off, after, to go to a recovery program.
As I recall, you were mostly stressed she wasn’t sleeping with you.
Stressed that she wanted to. It’d be an abuse of power. Anyway, Tessa said, I still get ideas now and then. Little scenes in my head. Two people talking about someone they used to know who’s gone missing, or a woman taking care of her dying mother. But eventually I realized that I’m never going to put them together.
You still could.
I don’t want to. I used to think writing would, like, change people’s lives. But it turns out there are much, much easier ways to do that. The biscotto cracked in her hands. We’re getting affordable units set aside in luxury complexes. We’re getting real childcare reforms. You know, I talk to people every day that don’t know who Arthur Miller is, let alone Annie Baker, let alone whoever I would be.
You’re Tessa goddamn Pacheco.
Who is that, though? No one much in the grand scheme of it. But I don’t care anymore. Who cares if life is small? It’s still life. She broke the cookie into smaller pieces. Neither she nor Edith moved to eat one. I think it was only ever being around you and Valerie that made me think I needed more. I was writing for you two as much as for me.
Let’s blame Val, since she’s not here to defend herself.
No one’s getting blamed. God, she could make the world seem so . . .
Interesting?
Ridiculous. Do you remember that Italian student she hired to read her letters?
What kind of monster would forget Carlo? “Beeg keeses.”
The summer between junior and senior years, Valerie had gotten a scholarship for an intensive language program in Vermont. The program stipulated she couldn’t write or speak in any language but Italian, and so she’d found Carlo, a rising sophomore, and paid him twenty dollars a letter to translate. All her letters were signed, Big kisses, Val. There was a palpable air of relief as Carlo reached the end: Beeg keeses. Sigh. Val.
Poor guy, we should’ve bought him a fruit basket or something, Tessa said.
He got paid.
This is what I mean. She’d corral whoever was nearby into her absurd vision of the world. They’d become a part of the performance with her.
We all had stuff we had to work through.
Yeah. One finger, pushing around the bituminous chunks of biscuit. Look, Edie, can I ask? Do you think the accident was—
It was like looking down from a very high place. It was like she had tried to drink an entire gallon of milk.
No. Edith had her doubts about Valerie’s death. The foggy mountain road, the twisted guardrail. The mind reached for a story, and there were only so many ways trans stories ended. But, no, she didn’t think Val had killed herself. I don’t want to talk about this, actually.
Sorry. Each took long sips of their coffee. What are you working on now?
I don’t want to talk about that either.
It wasn’t fear of showing emotion. It wasn’t that talking about Val’s death would make it seem more real.
Okay well what do you want to talk about.
I’m sorry Tessa, it’s not—
I forgot that you could be like this.
I’m not, not anymore, not usually.
The hour grew late. People packed their things, walked into the cold. There were well-lit dining halls with Sodexo feasts. There were homes with their partners, slouching into each other, a few hours of bad TV, and then sleep.
In every draft of her book about Valerie, Edith had been trying to write about home. Her first book was all about leaving—leaving Rome, leaving Earth. It was time to write about staying put. But she had never learned, not really, how to stop.
She didn’t want to learn anything. She wanted to fold back time to those years when she loved Tessa so much, and Valerie, and knew that there would always be another day when the three of them came together again.
I don’t know how much longer I can stay in Texas, she said.
Wow, this is a much cheerier topic, you’re right. Edith couldn’t help laughing. Because of the politics?
Because of money. If I don’t finish another book soon, I dunno how I’m going to stay in my apartment. Edith hadn’t said this aloud before.
Oh, but you can find another place. Or a roommate. Or a job you don’t hate.
Right, sure. What lengths would she go to to stay in Texas? At what point did you cut and run? And how many more times could she upend her life?
Tessa monologued for a bit about various friends’ housing situations. Women who’d gone on living with exes and their new girlfriends. People who’d moved to tiny houses in Maine. Serial house sitters who leapfrogged between furnished apartments every few months. They keep finding academics who have exotic pets with special needs. There was a parrot that would count down from a hundred when the lights went out. A rabbit that ate veggie broth through an infant’s bottle. Colleen, Hila, Diana. Faces she’d still know on sight. If you stayed in place, the names stayed the same. You knew how to write about home and you weren’t tempted to leave, because you never had.
Anyway, people work it out. Be glad it’s cheaper to live down there.
Later, when she learned about Tessa’s living situation, Edith would be glad she had not said I never should have left. Did she understand already that Tess was living with someone she loved? Were there subtle cues? Or was she sufficiently clear-eyed to know that coming back would never be the right thing?
After bulgogi and a bottle of wine, the night converged on Adam and Michael’s. Edith lost track of how many cigarettes she’d had, her chest faintly tight with sky-colored smoke. We really shoulda known you were a girl, Tessa said. I mean how many dykes did you hook up with in college?
Present company excluded? Only two. Ellie came out after.
She counts. A fairy-tale number of queer girls, baffled by your charming face. Tessa cupped Edith’s jaw. There was a wild moment where she thought Tess might kiss her. They kept walking.
It’s nice to think that, whatever—
Girls could tell you were one of us? Tessa lit another cigarette. She’d given up her coin flips. Your “female soul”?
Okay, well, when you say it like that it sounds stupid. She wanted to ask, What was it? What drew them together, a girl and a girl in disguise? She wasn’t sure she could bear an answer.
Tessa threw the door open. Hello, dear ones! She stomped ash and rock salt from her boots. After many years at sea, I’ve returned.
Cigarette, Teresa. Adam and Michael on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them, Vertigo on the paused TV. Tessa tossed her cigarette back through the door. They shed their coats, they smelled of cold. Adam lifted the bowl and Tessa fell into its place. Edith didn’t know where to sit.
We’re still a little loopy from dinner.
This is pretty standard for her, Michael said.
What did you guys get up to today? Adam offered popcorn and Tessa took a fistful. The TV could wait. Kim Novak marking the tree ring where she was born, the tree ring where she died. The character her character plays, the trick of it all.
What didn’t we get up to. Tessa told it in a way that exceeded the day’s plainness. All they’d really done was get food and coffee and smoke and talk and talk and talk. It was a miracle to be around people you’d known for so long. The well of experience and interrelation, the sheer fact of years. A smaller piece in the shared narrative of their lives.
Don’t let me forget to show you, Michael said, I did a new sketch of Tamara for Killer Car Lesbians.
Killer Car Lesbians is their tabletop game, Adam said.
The three stats are “kills” and “lesbian” and “car.”
Edith nodded like she understood. She could have watched for hours from her wingback chair—all they had, all they knew. There was more chat. There was a show at the Museum of Fine Arts they decided to go to, a series of fakes and reproductions. Michael popped more popcorn on the stove.
How’s your piece on Sondheim coming? Tessa asked Adam.
Oh, slow.
You’re also writing about Sondheim?
And Lee Edelman. Into the Woods, reproductive futurity. Wait, are you?
Sort of.
My influence, Tessa said, is boundless. She tossed a puff of popcorn into her mouth.
Isn’t it maddening how little she’ll tell us about her book?
You forget, I had two years of living with her to get used to it. Michael returned, a second bowl piled high. Aw, look at our beautiful little gay circle.
Come sit on the couch, Edith, Michael said. We can squeeze.
We won’t have to. Estrogen hasn’t made your ass any less skinny.
You can’t say that! Boys, Tessa’s hate-criming me.
Now girls, Adam said in his most paternal voice. Don’t fight.
Buzzed and exhausted, Edith only half-watched Vertigo. Her parents had shown it to her as a child. They’d tried to inculcate a love of classic Hollywood that mostly meant she got Gossip Girl’s references to Audrey Hepburn movies. She’d rewatched it with Valerie in Alabama. They’d lain awake, inventing a modern retelling: a man becomes obsessed with buying a trans woman surgeries until she looks like his dead wife. It ends with her killing him, escaping with her hot lesbian lover. To be played by Gina Gershon, Valerie insisted, circa 1995.
The central threads eluded her. Kim Novak came back from the dead with a different name—a twin? a doppelgänger? She was a living doll for Jimmy Stewart’s obsession. He dyed her hair and gave her clothes to make her again into the woman he loved. Retreading all the ugly steps of the past, up the steps of the bell tower. Her scream as she tumbled to the earth.
*
Edith woke before her alarm, groggy but not hungover. A scrap of lyrics she couldn’t quite identify circling in her head. There was popcorn salt beneath her nails and rheum in her eyes. The living room and sleeper sofa swept by passing headlights. People who went to church, or had small children, or brunch plans. She’d been nodding off by the end of the movie last night. In and out of the red-hued nightmare. She didn’t normally do so much in a week as she had in one day.
Into sweatpants, into the kitchen. Eggs, flour, baking soda, milk. Nothing extravagant—not a blueberry or a chocolate chip. Only pancakes: bog-standard and fluffy. When was the last time she’d made breakfast?
Still that scrap of lyrics: “Oh, if life were made of moments, even now and then a bad one . . . but if life were only moments, then you’d never know you had one.” Sondheim, but not Merrily. Google pinned it as Into the Woods. She felt guilty to have not named it unassisted.
There was the post-drunken sense that she’d done something to embarrass herself. Had she said something to Tessa? Made a joke that didn’t land? Was it the slumber-party shame of passing out first? Tess and Adam lifted her from the couch by the arms and legs, jerking her awake. Edith had told her to stay, and there’d been some kind of sadness, some kind of smile. Tessa had said they were getting too old for sleeping on couches, or she’d said nothing.
Ridiculous. Pancakes could be an apology. Not for that in particular, but a blanket statement of sorriness.
She read a plot summary of Vertigo while she cooked. Jimmy Stewart’s friend hired Kim Novak to pretend to be his wife, pretend to be crazy or possessed or both. He hired Jimmy Stewart to follow her, to testify to her craziness, so that when the man killed his real wife—tossed her from the bell tower—no one would guess it was murder. Naturally Stewart and Novak fall in love. Kim Novak shows back up, bad things happen. The girl dies at the end. Et cetera.
Dragged back into a part you’d given up playing, that woman you’d been hired to die as—how did you live with being someone else’s ghost?
Had she said something about Val? Was that the source of this shame? She knew that she should talk to her friends about it, but what was left to say? Yes, it was a shame their friend had died. Yes, she missed Val every time she woke. But she’d missed Val plenty of times while she was still alive; you couldn’t go on nursing the hole someone had left in your life. You had to forget about them, a little more each day. This was why you wrote: exorcise the past in private. Spit it out into the world fully processed. No longer hers to deal with; hers to deal with forever.
Edith stopped cooking long enough to eat two pancakes, then two more, skimming her copy of The Odyssey while she ate. She’d been starving.