Rhoda went to bed certain that she would get the call in the morning, and so her nighttime preparations were both entirely normal, and tinged with an otherworldly and melancholy anticipation. She turned on the TV, she ate a dinner of banana muffins broken apart in a bowl and covered with pink sugar-free yogurt, remembering how she and her roommate ate the same meal for a week years ago, watching the ice storm pass over their heads.
Her roommate, Lee, had been very good with privacy. She had never entered Rhoda’s room, and Rhoda had never entered hers. They had been roommates for sixty years. Neither had ever married; both had escaped the Chancellor’s notice. Lee had bought her a refrigerator magnet in the ’80s that said “I’m a great housekeeper. I just sweep the room with a glance.” Two weeks ago, Lee had fallen and broken her hip. While in the hospital, she finally admitted the new heaviness of her head. And now she was dying, or rather, now other people knew she was dying, with a tumour on her brain so large that her eyes were being slowly forced from their sockets. Soon the apartment would fill with flowers. And there was this feeling (which Rhoda had had all day) of being scrutinized, somehow, as if in these last moments of Lee’s life, she must do her best to be as groomed and composed as possible.
So Rhoda had showered and set her hair and made certain to eat with a straight back. She did not touch her face. Once she swore at a game show host but then she quickly apologized. She felt so convinced of spectral presences that she was embarrassed when she noticed that she had not fully rubbed in her night cream and her cheeks were streaked white. She spent ten minutes facing the sink before turning on the tap. When she lay down in bed she did so in a way and at an angle that she thought could only be evaluated as modest. Rhoda had always had the smaller room, the result of an unspoken pact. Her bed was as narrow as a nun’s or prisoner’s: perhaps two feet wide and five and a half feet long.
I would be happy to see you, or anyone. I will accept visitors at any time of the day, or the night. I step in the shower, and I sit down.
The china in her cabinet rattled once when the upstairs neighbour’s washing machine got stuck in the spin cycle. When the radio spoke briefly of sex, she fell asleep. A noiseless wind pressed against her door.
For weeks, the radio has been talking about the drought that will soon hit the Town. And when Rhoda wakes up she feels that she has barged in on some imaginary concerned citizen’s forum being held by her bedroom furniture. Every object seems to offer silent rebuke. Her bureau appears more fully driven into the corner, as if it too were retreating from her. Rhoda reflects on her own use of water, on washing Lee’s shoulders and back. She knows when Lee’s birthday is, but not how old she is turning.
Rhoda knows the Town was formed on top of a vast, untouchable underground lake. Many Townspeople had died trying to reach that lake: their antennas would pick up the hiss and rush of the fresh, mineral-rich water tumbling over and over on itself, observed by no one and beholden to no pattern of being. As a child, she dreamed of finally reaching it, of pushing through a burst of white static into the suspension, into a new form of light falling like liquid swords on her face. Now, nothing brings Rhoda more comfort than knowing that no one will ever reach that world, the deep and secret heart of that lake, ungathered, unseen, all that water running miles below.