Some Possible Solutions Read online

  10.

  The Guy Who Calls Me Baby doesn’t come out very often, but when he does, I feel shy around him, like a new bride.

  He seems like the kind of guy with whom the metaphor of a boxing ring would resonate. So to please him I say: “We’re like boxers in a boxing ring.”

  And he says (maybe to please me, who knows): “Yeah, baby, that’s just it.”

  11.

  In second grade we made leprechaun traps for St. Patrick’s Day. We placed those little golden balls they use to decorate cakes inside our traps and left the traps on our desks. The next morning all the golden balls were gone but no one had caught a leprechaun. I can’t remember what the purpose of this lesson was, Ms. Kroll, but I remember the witchy sound of your long fingernail scratching your scalp. It was exciting to make the traps and disappointing to find them empty, but overall it was a time of belief.

  “Look!” I choose to say now, to The Guy Who Just Bought Another Round, “there’s a leprechaun scaling the wall of ivy!

  “Oh bummer,” I say, “sorry, you missed it.”

  12.

  He says, “I desire you.” He means, “Every night I dream of other women.”

  She says, “I desire you.” She means, “I want to get accidentally pregnant.”

  13.

  Maybe thirteen should be left blank, like those buildings with no thirteenth floor. That’s another thing, I get more superstitious by the year. In a few decades I’ll be wearing garlic around my neck.

  14.

  My husband is having trouble sleeping. I think he’s thinking about sex.

  He tells me that when he does finally manage to sleep, he dreams that everyone in his family hates him except for his one weird cousin.

  15.

  I crouch on the bed, massaging The Guy Who Thinks I Don’t Know How to Use the Word Renovate Properly. Doing this reminds me of working with clay, slowly squeezing until something grows from nothing. Not that I’ve ever worked with clay. Not that I’ve ever made a bowl that could hold anything.

  16.

  You may say: “We really ought to renovate the bathroom.” You may not say: “We need to renovate our thinking about this problem.”

  17.

  In a hotel room in Cincinnati, someone’s ninety-year-old grandmother is falling in the bathtub and snapping three small ribs.

  In Pakistan the waters that have already risen are rising more. I’m sorry, but it’s pretty much just the babies I think of. I’m only interested in statistics about how many infants have drowned. As soon as I know that, then I’ll be able to properly mourn.

  18.

  So many bombs shattering across the globe, yet it was private grief that kept them up at night.

  19.

  He said: “Please don’t put things in third person past tense. Just because it’s third person past tense doesn’t mean it’s a story. It’s not as though third person past tense will protect you.”

  She said: “He said, Please don’t put things in third person past tense, and then she said, He said please don’t put things in third person past tense.”

  20.

  I’ve thrown up three times since I’ve known him:

  (1) The night before he proposed, in Guatemala, black bean soup/Montezuma’s revenge.

  (2) The night before the miscarriage and the apartment closing, which happened, impossibly, to fall on the same day. The baby fell into a toilet designed by a designer to conserve water. He said: “If by ‘baby’ you mean ‘minuscule bundle of cells,’ then I’ll let the above sentence slide.”

  (3) Last week, for no reason at all, after eating Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream, which is quite an orange color if I do say so myself. Of course I was thinking about the invisible baby the whole time, and the way it would be three months old by now, and the way my grief exceeded his by so much, and the way I don’t want to be filled with vitriol, a word thank God I learned when I was studying for a standardized test. God it was so hot the night of the Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream Sickness, and my beloved was so good to me that night, so exceedingly patient.

  21.

  Our friends admire our marriage and ask us for advice.

  When I think about the phrase “hitch our wagons” it almost makes me cry because it is so beautiful, so accurate, so beautiful.

  22.

  Once something I wrote made the judge of a contest indignant. He wrote, “This is something that this woman should share with her husband alone, if with anyone, and probably not even with him.”

  23.

  He’s always called me his “Little Try-er.” He says: “You are always try, try, trying to make things good.” This is both a compliment and an insult.

  24.

  Lightbulbs make me feel peaceful these days, as do water glasses.

  Wikipedia makes me feel safe and newspapers make me feel guilty.

  Facebook makes me want to change my life and Twitter makes me want to stay the way I am.

  25.

  The person with whom I used to have the joke about never saying I love you to anyone else recently told me: “You would have been happy no matter who you married. You always loved everyone. I mean that as a compliment.”

  We had not seen each other for many years. We were walking the hills of San Francisco that day and truly everything seemed possible.

  26.

  The Guy Who Has Urges Impossible to Satisfy comes up to the bar and grabs my ass. He’s very predictable but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t scare me.

  At night, together, in bed, sleepless, we’re more in the same boat than we’ve been in a long time.

  Boat, that’s good too, a helpful image. But when I try to picture it what I see is fog, a wooden boat with old oars, the desperate expressions on our faces.

  27.

  “I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster,” he says four times in a row, just like that, and I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious.

  28.

  He says, “You are like, you are like, you are like a glass of cold water that I drink from every morning.”

  He’s always coming up with these extremely useful metaphors. He’s the best decision I ever made.

  He says, “Why are you always saying that language falls short?”

  29.

  On nights when I can’t sleep I dream that our apartment is way larger than I ever realized. It has nooks and crannies and lofts I never knew about. In fact, there is a section of our apartment where an entire forest could be planted!

  30.

  I had this plan that I would be happier this year than ever before. That day by day, twig by twig, I would construct my inner nest, and meanwhile my skin would be better than ever and my patience would be infinite and I’d be able to talk easily with strangers, and maybe even would finally learn how to whistle, and wouldn’t be scared of driving.

  If only that famous person hadn’t written me to say: Happiness in marriage is an illusion. Jesus Christ, who puts that kind of thing in an email?

  31.

  When he pointed at me and shouted, “You!” I couldn’t tell if I was being singled out for love or scorn.

  32.

  “All I want is X,” he says. “That’s all. Just X.”

  “X,” I say. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Please,” he says, “stop calling me that.”

  I wonder if it’s a technical thing, hitching your wagons, something involving rope and a metal loop, or if it’s merely a turn of phrase.

  You’ve just got to disconnect your happiness from my happiness, okay? Okay?

  33.

  What’s with this feeling of dread? Two weeks ago I wrote an email to an old friend proclaiming my transcendent happiness, or at least the promise of it.

  Seven fireflies, a pink evening, whatever, there was cause for confidence, and there still is, hello, it’s not as though we’re doomed.

  34.

  We turn the air conditioner off.

  We turn the air conditio
ner on.

  We close the door.

  We open the door.

  We think of our parents and their deaths.

  We think of our children and their births.

  It is hot yet I need hot milk. I understand that it’s disgusting to drink milk intended for the young of a different species, yet I can never get enough of it.

  35.

  “You’re being so nice to me right now,” The Girl with the Hot Milk says. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank YOU,” The Guy Standing by the Air Conditioner says.

  “Oh,” she says, “oh, I hope we’re always this nice to each other.”

  36.

  In the grocery store I see a woman with an infant. She reminds me of me. She’s even got a zit where I’ve got a zit. When I approach her, she smiles.

  “Hey there,” she says.

  Why am I not surprised to see milk, limes, a jar of golden balls in her cart?

  “What’s your baby’s name?” I say, realizing as I say it that my voice sounds ferocious, as though it’s been ages since I used it in polite company.

  But the young woman just winks at me. “You know what,” she says, “I haven’t even given her a name yet.”

  R

  This one day my sister and I were walking in the park when something happened. We saw or felt or heard or smelled or sensed something we’d never seen or felt or heard or smelled or sensed before. Due to our inexperience with this kind of experience, we had no vocabulary for it, though we tried.

  “Soft,” my sister said.

  “Powerful,” I suggested.

  “Perfume-y,” my sister attempted.

  “Redolent of dirt,” I embellished.

  “What does ‘redolent’ mean?”

  She was a less devoted student of the Internet, and thus still ignorant.

  The park stretched before us and behind us. From this vantage, I could hardly believe in the city that smushed up against its concrete borders. The park’s groves had been planted with precision, yet at this time of year the variety in the leaves’ shades of orange and pink lent them a satisfying randomness.

  In any case, this thing my sister and I encountered in the park changed the park. The park was always utterly still, its gleaming lawns green and unmoving, its groves brilliant and still, its ponds still and green with algae, clouds of purple asters hovering still and silent. Sure, there were bits of movement here and there—a white swan stroking its way through the black water, or a squirrel with a singed tail moving ratlike toward an overflowing garbage bin. A handful of birds taking flight from a chokecherry bush; an abandoned eighth-of-a-sandwich moving wondrously on the backs of a thousand cooperative ants. But other than these few gestures provided by the innocently exuberant creatures of the park, who seemed to exist in complete ignorance of the raging city beyond, there was never any movement in the park. People, yes, of course; dogs, yes; a hired dog-walker with a herd of pure breeds; packs of children. Beyond these living beings, though, nothing in the park had ever moved or been moved. We had always cherished this stillness.

  Until the moment in question. At which time everything in the park moved at once, in the same sequence of swirls and sways. Every blade of grass; every leaf; every twig; every aster; every discarded candy wrapper. For as far as our eyes could see, every single thing pressed toward our faces, and then away from our faces, and then to our right, and then to our left, again and again in repeating patterns, right, forward, leftish, backward, left, rightish, et cetera.

  It was midday on a Wednesday (we were ungainfully employed as nighttime dancers) and the park was empty; no one else to witness this odd phenomenon, or to accuse us of insanity. We were partly terrified by the absence of others and partly grateful for it. I reached out for my sister’s hand and/or she reached out for mine. We stood, absorbing this thing and searching for words.

  “Pretty,” she said.

  “Disconcerting,” I said.

  This thing—you could feel it all over your skin.

  “Fresh,” she said. “Nice.”

  “Creepy,” I proposed. “Aggressive.”

  I looked at my sister and she looked at me. We were identical twins; I emerged into the world six minutes before she did. I observed that this thing was capable of lifting her hair (identical to my hair—originally dullish brown but now long, coppery, curly with hair extensions), twisting and tugging and twining it around her arms and neck, around my arms and neck. It’s amazing what synthetic hair will do for one’s beauty; we are not very pretty but with our hair we give the impression of very pretty, which is far more important. Anyhow, the effect this thing had on our hair was quite an appealing one.

  I observed that my sister’s squinty eyes squinted even further against the force of this thing that was moving the park, so I knew my squinty eyes were squinting too.

  “Goldeny,” Roo offered.

  “Colorless,” I countered. “Invisible.”

  * * *

  Back in our room we got on the Internet to search. Roo sat on my lap. She weighed three pounds less than I did, which gave her the right. I told her what to type and she typed. Something that causes movement in the park, which yielded only information about movies screened in the park in the summertime.

  “I wish we’d gone to those,” I said. We were always missing out on things.

  Roo ignored me and kept typing. She typed her words: Soft, Goldeny, Perfume-y, Nice, Pretty, et cetera, which yielded, obviously, nothing relevant. Then she tried mine, misremembering “Redolent” as Redundant. Colorless, she tried. Creepy. Again, nothing. I shifted my knees because my legs were falling asleep, which made Roo slip off my lap and gash her head against the corner of the metal table.

  I felt terrible.

  “No big deal,” Roo said calmly.

  “Oh god,” I said, looking at the blood, “oh god.”

  “Just keep searching!” Roo ordered. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  I searched distractedly while listening to her rustling around in our bathroom, dabbing blood with toilet paper, hunting for Band-Aids in our nasty, chaotic drawers. I knew what she was doing as well as if I was in there with her. Pawing through rubber bands and scrunchies and hairpins sticky with spilled hair spray and old fluoride rinse. Mildew green between the pink tiles under her bare feet. The bowl of the toilet stained a permanent pale brown. The smell of a sour bathmat and cigar smoke from downstairs.

  Halfheartedly, sick at heart to think of Roo finding only dismembered Band-Aids in those drawers, I typed trees swaying, which got us where we needed to go.

  Roo emerged with a bejeweled butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead, a Band-Aid designed for the little girls we’d once been in this very room; a Band-Aid that would go over extremely well tonight because in order to disguise the Band-Aid on the forehead we’d have to place a matching Band-Aid on each nipple.

  I read: “The perceptible natural movement of the air, especially in the form of a current of air blowing from a particular direction.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Roo said, excited, jumping on the bed, throwing a pillow. “Exactly!”

  “Wind,” I announced.

  * * *

  The next morning (or rather, the next noon, since we were not allowed to come down to breakfast until we’d spent exactly nine hours in our room, for Sleep is essential to beauty; we were supposed to sleep precisely eight hours every night, plus a half-hour to put ourselves down and a half-hour to wake ourselves up, rules indifferent to our restlessness, our desire to go out into the ever-brightening day that we could sense on the other side of our miserly window), Mrs. Penelope was quite distressed to learn what we had encountered in the park. She threw the spatula across the room, where it left an eggy smear on the wall.

  “For crying out loud,” she said. She was an erratic, moody woman who vacillated between playing the role of tender mother and fierce madame. We were unsure which version we preferred. On days when she resembled a mother she seemed to weigh ten pounds more than she di
d on the madame days. Today was a madame day. We could tell by her slimming all-black outfit and the faux emeralds in her earlobes, and by the undercooked eggs and burnt toast. Mrs. Penelope the Mother would never make such mistakes. We were the only girls at the table, the last breakfast shift. The novelty of the butterfly Band-Aids had meant that Roo was tied up till nearly 3 a.m., and since we never left the place except together, I had to wait shivering in sequins on the busted couch in the back room, a spring screwing itself into my thigh as I tried and failed to recall the series of sensations created on the skin by the thing we’d encountered in the park.

  Since all the other girls had been fed, there was no one to witness the things Mrs. Penelope the Lady said to me and especially to Roo about first of all making up such lies about wind in the park when wind had obviously not been seen or felt or anything in the two decades since the city got climate-controlled, and where the hell would such a wind come from, where would a lovely little wind like the one we described arise from in a region that was covered in concrete, for crying out loud, now get, time for your constitutional, and she was ranting us right out the door, and as we passed the enormous jug we deposited into it as usual everything we’d made last night, because the front door wouldn’t open until money was inserted. The sight of our coins and bills shut her up and joyfully she squirted us with expensive perfume as we stumbled down the concrete steps onto the narrow strip of sidewalk alongside the six-lane street.

  We walked thirteen blocks to get to the park. We had heard rumors from other, less coveted girls that in the morning, when the sun was coming up, all the cars in the streets looked sleek and beautiful, but by the time we were released into the day the light had become flat and dull and the cars just looked gray to us.

  Yet now we had something more than cars on our minds. We walked along silently, thinking the same thoughts. We did not linger outside the bodega as we usually did, gazing at the dusty rows of candy and packaged doughnuts. Even the dark, dank, concealing clothing we had to wear to the park—wool skirts that went down to our ankles above heavy, practical shoes and shirts that buttoned up to our necks beneath navy blue sweaters—did not seem quite as oppressive as usual.