Creature (3 page)

I want to make another costume for myself. I want to perform another thing on a wall, like truth, but I don’t know what truth looks like—I haven’t experienced it yet.

I remember a moment in winter when snow was stuck to the grass, intimately. One light thing moved through something that was solid, darker. In that moment, someone had asked me to help host a festival of literature.

“Yes,” I had said.

“It will be about memory.”

I was admiring what was underfoot.

Sometimes I forget the names of books, the ones I like the most. My memory is bad, and I’m also ashamed of what I think about literature—I can only open up to a few people in this way. I work in a bookstore, so this isn’t a good quality.

After work, I walk home in the dark. Sometimes on the way I stop at a gourmet food shop, knowing I don’t belong there, and yet feeling that I do. I buy a small jar of something, like pumpkin butter, and I have a friend, a cousin, who likes to come over after she’s finished working at the hotel. She’s young and so working at the hotel doesn’t bother her. I am already too old to be able to work at a hotel, though I did work at one once, and I am only a few years older than her. We come from a long line of women who have worked in hotels.

I clean my apartment until it’s immaculate so that it feels like a good place to be, a kind of nest for when my cousin comes to visit. A place safe from this rich city, though we play at a certain kind of richness. Once I slapped my cousin so hard she fell down. It was because of something that had happened in our family, and I know now I was wrong. She forgave me. In our family we are good at that.

When I was a child I thought no one had experienced the world like I had. I would sit next to the ocean and think, no one knows the ocean like I do. No one has ever been this close to it. I didn’t actually say these things in my mind, I just knew them to be true. My connection to the ocean; my walk through the tropical night. If I walked long enough I came to farmland.

One night when I was working in the bookstore my cousin called to tell me she had hurt herself at the hotel.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I cut myself with a pair of scissors. One of the customers left them under a towel on the bathroom floor. I didn’t know the scissors were there. Now my hand won’t stop bleeding.”

“Clarice, tell your manager. Don’t just let your hand bleed.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him.”

“There must be a first aid kit at the hotel.”

“There is. I’ve seen it. Once I had to get a band aid for someone.”

“How bad is your hand?”

“Not that bad. It just startled me. I didn’t know I was going to get cut when I picked up the towel.”

“Should I come get you?”

“When your shift is over.”

At nine o’clock, after I had closed out my register and put the money in the safe, I left the store and headed north toward the hotel. It was a cold night and I crossed my arms in front of me, trying to keep my body warmth close. The streets were dark until I got to the one the hotel was on. Then everything was bright. My cousin was standing out front, cradling one hand in another. She was wearing a puffy beige coat that came down to her knees, a coat I had never seen before.

“Are you okay?”

“One of the other maids wrapped my hand for me. It isn’t bleeding anymore.”

I looked at Clarice’s hands. The one on top looked thick under its thin glove. “Do you need stitches?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Let’s take the bus tonight.”

The bus was bright too. We went to the back row and spread ourselves out over four seats. No one else was riding, but after a few stops two people got on, and then every few minutes a few more. One woman was wearing a coat like Clarice’s, except that it was falling apart.

When we got into my apartment, Clarice leaned against the kitchen wall and stayed there.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m okay. It just feels good to stand here.”

I made up a bed for Clarice on the couch, and then climbed into my own bed. I could hear the music she turned on in the living room, but it sounded very far away. She must have only wanted to hear it quietly. I lay in bed, listening. I fell asleep. Then it was time to go to the bookstore. When I got up, Clarice was already gone.

It didn’t take long to see her again. That night we were less tired, and we decided to eat at a nice restaurant, one that serves crepes. Clarice went on and on about her injury and about one of the other maids, and I recounted my time as a child when I had visited the tropics.

“I am on someone’s farm,” I said. “You can imagine how strange a farm seems, especially when it is tropical. The air is so warm that I don’t need to wear a flannel shirt or a sweater. It’s so beautiful I don’t want to go to sleep.” Clarice stared at me. Because we were cousins we could go on and on about things that other people would ignore or object to. “I was an only child,” I said. “Clarice, is it funny the way I talk about these things? It must be boring.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“It was my consciousness I was aware of. I was always looking at things, like my own body. When I was walking I would touch my body in amazement because I could walk. I would touch the muscles in my legs.”

“I know you were an only child,” Clarice said.

“It means something to me.”

“What does it mean?”

I paused. Then I went on. “I was alone more of the time. I was alone much more than you were.”

“That’s true. When I was growing up, I was always with my brother.”

“What’s it like having a brother?”

“Can’t you imagine it?”

“I guess I did see you together. You seemed tense.”

Clarice stared down at her soup. Then she ate some of it. Her orange soup. “I don’t think I told you, but last week I saw a performance.”

“Do you go to performances?”

“One of the other maids took me.”

“What was it like?”

“There were four dancers, and it seemed like they didn’t actually know how to dance.”

“You don’t really know what dancing looks like, do you?”

“Not contemporary dance, but I know what ballet looks like.”

After that conversation, I think we both needed a break from each other. I spent a whole day reading a book in my kitchen. I knew I would never be able to talk to anyone about it. I washed the dishes. While I was doing that, I finished the conversation in my mind that I had had with Clarice.

“What were you doing on the farm?” she asked me.

“I had gone there because of the ocean. Also, I am an only child.”

“What does being an only child have to do with it?”

“You find you must do what you want.”

“Do you? I don’t know very much about only children.”

“We’re very aware of everything, and also sometimes afraid.”

I made myself stop the conversation. I sat down at the table and started reading again so that the words I read would fill my mind.

The next morning I went to work and it didn’t stop raining. In between shelving books I would stand in front of the large windows and stare out at the parking lot. People came and went, running from their cars to our store, or sometimes to another store across the street.

“Don’t forget where you are,” the assistant manager said to me.

The hours crept slowly by. When a customer asked me a question I answered it quickly so I could be alone again.

One customer got angry with me because I was reading when she walked up to the cash register, and I didn’t notice her. She said to one of the other employees that it didn’t even seem as if I cared about books. I thought this was odd because I had been holding a book and looking down at it when she saw me. But in a way she was right—I didn’t care.

At the hotel, Clarice found a piece of something that looked like a miniscule rock or a piece of gray coral. She took it to a natural food store because she wasn’t sure how else she could find out what it was. It wasn’t food, but people who worked in a store like this might know.

“It’s a fulgurite,” she later told me. We were on the bus again, it was night, and I felt like we could have been anywhere.

“How do you know?”

“The food store. And then I looked it up online. It’s formed when lightning hits sand.”

“Everything in this city is so ugly that I can’t focus on my life.”

“There are things here that are beautiful.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Our friendship, for one thing.”

“But we’re cousins.”

“Okay, then our family.”

She dragged me along to an old brownstone that is owned by the historical society. In one room, a glass pitcher had been placed in a clear glass box and set on top of a pedestal along with four small cups. “Is this hand blown?” I asked.

“Everything in this room is hand blown.”

What were all of these hand blown things here for? What were we supposed to think about when we looked at them? Next we walked into a bedroom. There was a bed with a green and red bedspread on top of it, and a wooden headboard against pink and white wallpaper from another time. Above the bed was a painting. “Snow scene of a courtesan holding an umbrella being ferried across the Sumida River by a porter,” Clarice read out loud. In the painting, the porter wore something that covered his head and face, like a dust mop made out of soft straw. The brown river water surrounded the boat, moving toward it in little waves.

“Do you like this place because a rich family once lived here?” I asked her. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.

“No, I just like it.”

“Why?”

“What does it matter to you?”

Out on the balcony of the house, Clarice’s open coat billowed around her in the wind. She had gone out there to take a break from me, and I watched her looking at the city, an ugly city that seemed to have no end.

We have gotten into the habit of inviting other couples to our house to play cards, and once they are here they stay for a long time. I am always surprised by it. At five
A.M
. one would expect to be in bed, sleeping. They relax here, maybe too much. It might be that they feel relaxed by how close we are to the ocean.

In the afternoons everything happens that can’t happen at night. Time. Food. A toy horse that races across the living room floor when my neighbor comes to visit with her children. We sit on the terrace ever so tensely. Almost transparent, like the tip of a plant.

For a long time I couldn’t get settled in life. I remember this constantly. I think about it on the terrace. I would see a dog and think it was a cat. Then something got bigger. My personality.

In between visits from the couples, and the neighbor and her children, my husband and I work in our studies. My husband’s study is filled with tropical plants, which he keeps warm in the winters with fluorescent lights. My study is filled with books and dust. I like working when I know he is also working. I hear him watering his plants, and smoking. Sometimes I’m extremely frustrated when I write, and in other moments I am extremely scared. I never knew it was possible to be scared while working on a story.

One night in my study I felt I was supposed to write about our house. I had never before seen our house as a strange thing. I looked at the clothes in my closet. I knew that this was writing, to look at those clothes. Later, when the couples arrived, I was distant from them.

Tonight it seems like fall, but it isn’t. In the kitchen my husband is making a very involved salad. We sit talking about our work, and eating, and I drip olive oil onto my blouse, accidentally.

“Your face is flushed,” my husband says.

Something croaks loudly at the window, startling me.

I will never write a novel. I will never write about the couples. I will
know
the couples. I will know myself.

“What’s wrong?” my husband asks.

“There’s always someone here. When am I supposed to write?”

After dinner I go into one of the rooms of the house. Sitting in a chair, an antique, I feel—enormous. My personality. Mixed with fall.

My husband is calling me from somewhere upstairs. It sounds as if he is in a hallway. I get interested in my own breath, which doesn’t happen very often. The curtain moves, and I like the way it matches something inside me. But I know that a curtain shouldn’t match me, and that I shouldn’t like it.

Morning arrives and I drag myself out of bed hours after my husband has gotten up. The room is cold and airy, but I don’t care: today there’s something nice about it. I want to air out my mind. I find a pair of pale yellow tights in one of the drawers of our dresser.

“You idiot,” I say to them.

But I go outside wearing the yellow tights all the same and find my neighbor’s daughter playing with a huge stuffed animal on our terrace.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A rhinoceros,” says Sylvie. She’s wearing a black leotard and tutu, and grabbing onto the banister she pulls herself along it. She doesn’t look like she’s dancing, but she does seem to be enjoying herself.

I ask her, because I do want to know, “Is that dancing?” and she says that it is, that she learned it the day before in her ballet class. “It’s
not
dancing,” I tell her and she doesn’t respond. Just like with the couples, I’m surprised at how long this “dancing” can go on, but I try to stay present.

It’s the kind of morning that’s more like an evening it’s so dark outside. A newspaper blows along the street. I feel something towards it. A tree limb sways up and down in the breeze.

Outside I can see my past. Here is where I stood with a friend and talked about a movie. Here is the exact moment I knew I wanted to write. Here’s the bed I slept in with someone I once loved. Here is the weather when I had bronchitis. Here is the emotion when I said goodbye.

That night I drink five glasses of wine, even though I usually only drink one. With five glasses of wine, I begin to admire my life. All these attractive couples are around me. How did it happen?

“I made lentil soup,” I hear one of the men say, as he deals cards around a table. It makes me realize I have no idea what the couples do when they are not at our house.