Short Story: “Holding a Battledore”

Note: This story, heavily autobiographical, is the sixth and last in the Haters and Losers cycle.

It was the era of one’s expertise, the century of Obama. The most popular anime in the West was Shingeki no Kyojin and there was still some hope that the Arab Spring might stick the landing. Nicholas Zussman, soon to go into his seventh semester at UMass Amherst and tenth and hopefully final semester of college overall, walked the streets of Hakodate without much care; the personal crises that had beset him in previous years and the terror about the state of the world that would beset him in years to come were, at the moment, nearing the end of what would turn out to be an approximately eighteen-month-long period of equilibrium. No longer did he feel affronted and insecure about his beliefs about the world and about how to behave; not yet did he realize the various hypocrisies and repressions that he had developed to make up for the loss of the affronts and insecurities. Not yet had his relative comfort in his own moral standards given way to ever-stricter philosophy and theology; or, at least, that process had not yet reached its apogee. He knew enough Japanese to have gotten around well enough for the past five weeks and to have been interpreting, as best he could, for his parents, who were with him; Professor Williams would, he hoped, be more or less pleased with him when he got back, even though he had not been doing this through a formal study-abroad program like he had been encouraged to.

            Nicholas, if he was being honest with himself, which on this subject at least he usually was, fervently doubted that he would be able to take a whole year or even a whole semester in Japan, cut off from association in common time with his parents and with his close friends in places like New York and Michigan. Today and tomorrow he was going to spend some time with his friend Sarah, who had been spending the past year at Hokudai and would be returning to America shortly after him to take up her own last year at UMass. They had had a couple of friendly but strained interactions in their first year in the Japanese major; in their second year they had become better acquainted, and they had stayed in touch over the course of Sarah’s time in Sapporo. They had planned this excursion entirely via Facebook message because Nicholas did not have a phone that he could use in Japan; he would just have to trust her bus to arrive in Hakodate when she had said it would.

 ❦

“Watch this with us,” one of his parents had said once, while they were sitting watching a war movie with his ailing grandfather.

            Nicholas’s grandfather had succumbed to Alzheimer’s a few days after the end of Nicholas’s first semester at UMass. The funeral arrangements were difficult because it was scant days before Christmas; eventually they had the funeral over a week after the death, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents; Nicholas had not gone, because it had coincided with his first time ever hosting a certain close friend at his house. He felt a persistent moral anxiety about not having gone even now almost three years later. He supposed he would always feel it.

            They had sat there in his grandfather’s den and watched the movie together. It was one of a few movies about either war or old age that he watched at least part of with his grandfather during his last illness, and watching them was always an oddly arcane task. There was some precise intellectual or emotional connection that Nicholas found himself wanting to make in these instances, and he was never quite able to make it. He would have loved to be able to say, in later years, that the reason he had become a Japanese major was a desire to establish his grandfather’s past, in the Pacific, more firmly as something to be worked from and built upon and (in peacetime) transcended. But in later years, and even now, peace had become more fragile again, and besides, the real reason had had more to do with a girl he had liked at fourteen and a book he had read at sixteen. The book had included repeated references to an instrument called a “battledore” that characters posed with in New Year’s Eve photos. He had looked this up once and discovered that a battledore was a type of antiquated badminton racket; this, regrettably, had reminded him of his one or two experiences being told to play badminton in PE when he was in middle and high school, but the word appealed to him anyway. He was all the same not interested in Japan because of the word “battledore.” He never knew quite what to say when people asked him why he was studying Japanese. Maybe it had something to do with how different it was from English. Studying it made him feel like he was putting a great deal of faith in the possibility of world understanding.

            Shortly after his time in Japan Nicholas would learn that his grandfather had actually acquired a samurai sword at some point during, presumably, his wartime service. The sword ended up living in his family’s attic for the most part.

  ❦

Nicholas and Sarah, when they met up, took the Hakodate streetcars here and there. They were going to go look for a beach to swim at but when they got there the tide had risen almost halfway up the sea-wall. Nicholas exploded in a moment of frustration; irritability, during the period of his late adolescence and very early twenties that he spent not being medicated, was a common problem for him. Later in the evening they hauled ass across the city on foot to be in time for a trip up the ropeway to the top of Mount Hakodate.

            “This is supposed to be one of the three best ‘views of a city from a mountaintop’ in the world,” said Nicholas as he and Sarah pressed through a crowd on the highest level of the mountaintop’s observation turret.

            “I wish it were easier to actually see it,” said Sarah, who was short. Fortunately within a few minutes they managed to press their way forward to a railing. The city spread out fan-shaped before them, spreading along both sides of the hammerhead peninsula of which the mountain was the end. The stars in the dusky sky had fallen to the earth and now shone up back at the heavens. Nicholas would normally consider this insolent; tonight he considered it revealing.

            “The other great views are supposed to be Hong Kong and Naples,” said Nicholas, who was unsure what else to say or do about beauty, other than pointing and clicking.

            In later years he would dimly remember Sarah having said something in response to this, but he was never sure what.

            Earlier that day they had been in a bookstore looking at manga. Nicholas had bought a volume of one, which he hoped to be able to take home and puzzle through later because it was a volume with whose plot he was already more or less familiar by means of English fan translations. The volume would, however, float through time unread until he lost interest in the series. They had gone to a restaurant, a Lucky Pierrot, one of more than a dozen of this chain in Hakodate even though there were none anywhere else, with a friend of Sarah’s who had accompanied her from Sapporo. Lucky Pierrot did burgers and curry and things like that and Nicholas had been to another location of it, further from the station and closer to the harbor, several times with his father since arriving in the city. He had developed a taste for a curry that he would later figure out was probably made with shiokara; he would be glad, once he figured this out, that he had developed a taste for it before he had known what shiokara was, because now his taste could inform his opinion of shiokara rather than having preordained thoughts on shiokara averting his taste. Speaking in a more general sense, he had at least managed to cultivate a deliberate and practiced, yet sincere, neutrality on the subject of nattō.

            Each Lucky Pierrot in Hakodate had a different theme to its décor. The one near the harbor (“Lucy Pierrot—Bay Area,” it was called) had a circus theme—understandable, since the logo was a clown. The one near the station had something like a roaring twenties speakeasy theme, but with a faint fifties greaser diner twist to it that Nicholas could not quite place, account for, or accept. In later days his memory would sometimes place this Lucky Pierrot elsewhere in Hakodate, near the old Goryōkaku fort, for example, and yet on further and more careful remembrance he recalled that it had in fact been some cooler-energied, probably ostensibly higher-end place where they had stopped to eat after visiting Goryōkaku. They had had salad and a conversation that he enjoyed and found meaningful at the time but did not long remember. He would kick himself for “not having gotten enough” out of his time in Japan in general, further on down the road—he had not gone here, he had not done that, he had defaulted to working with a concierge’s limited English rather than soldiering on with his Japanese all over yonder. It was part of the top-heavy and constantly teetering nature of his happiness, of the equilibrium in which he had temporarily found himself and which he foolishly pretend could, or for that matter should, last forever. Yet he would always keep firmly in mind the logo of Lucky Pierrot. He knew that some hack writer or psychologist might judge him for this and take it as a sign of psychic “brandedness.” For once he didn’t care. He made good memories here.

            He kept getting the shiokara curries partially because he did not eat red meat and partially because he wanted to eat Japanese food while he was in Japan, to the greatest extent possible. From time to time he wondered if this was voyeuristic, or touristy rather than pilgrimwise. The taste—sticky, salty, pungent, but feinting at and seeking to remind one of sweetness—appealed to him immediately, and grew on him as his time in Hakodate went on. He had it at least once a day.

  ❦

A few evenings ago, while out with his father, Nicholas had seen a young woman in a duffel coat and newsboy hat cranking out “Country Roads” on a hand organ that spewed downy feathers and bubbles. She had been standing at the edge of a pedestrian streetway by some old redbrick warehouses, which had shops and restaurants in them now, on the edge of the harbor. When Nicholas had taken some video of her with his camera she had seemed a little uncomfortable and possibly even shamefaced, even though she was the one out here in the late summer evening playing this music. It was possible to envision her as a being akin to one of the late-summer fireflies in the book that he loved. It was possible to envision the feathers and bubbles as entities pertaining to the refraction index of the wind and the clouds. It was not a feeling that he had had before. He had laid hold of it for only a moment. He knew that the song was much-loved in Japan, but something about it still seemed a little more playful than he would have thought apposite.

            He guessed it was a good thing, that being the case, that it was not really his opinion that mattered here. He did not want to reduce his own status in his own or anybody else’s eyes, but he wanted to want that. A history of taking actions to make himself impressive would eventually have to all fall down so that a future of self-surrender and sacrifice could take its place. Being here was one way of making himself impressive and humiliating himself at the same time; his height was much remarked-upon, in furtive remarks that the people making them assumed that he as a foreigner could not understand; some of these remarks were impressed or a little frightened and some were obviously derisive. These remarks he would turn into stories, anecdotes about traveling in a country his stature in which would always have been and perhaps ought always to have been athrill with ambiguities.

            There were two young women staying at the same bed and breakfast, which styled itself a bed and breakfast rather than a ryokan, as Nicholas and his father. These young women were Japanese, traveling around the country after some time spent abroad in America, studying at a certain West Coast university. In these women one might have seen a partial answer to Nicholas’s own questions about his status in Japan. They could speak to one another in two languages, but there was not necessarily much about which to talk—less, perhaps, than with the middle-aged obasan who had woken up Nicholas and his parents at seven o’ clock sharp every morning for a feverishly prepared breakfast at the ryokan in which they had stayed near Aomori. The question of his stature in Japan was the question of his stature with people like that, in the same way in which the question of these younger women’s stature in America would have been the question of their stature with people like his aunts and uncle.

            Nicholas was prone to this sort of pontificating and these sorts of attempts to deduce moral and political meaning from his everyday experiences rather than believing in and delighting in the flow of events as they in fact overtook him. A few times in Hakodate, and more before in Aomori and in Kyōto, he had been able to take a step back and let experiences and happinesses flow through his hands as if letting a pearl necklace fall to the floor: On a train ride, a day trip to Nara; snoozing on another train, going over the mountains of Ōu; looking out over Lake Towada from the passenger’s window of a rental car doing a circumnavigation thereof; watching fireflies in a little marsh above a reservoir in the deep blue part of the evening next to the cab driver who had ferried his family thence. The moment at the top of the mountain with Sarah had been a moment like this. He tried as much as possible to savor moments like this and make them the clear, core, cogent parts of the way he understood himself, but had not lived much (in ways that were positive) and in the future he would have too much fear for the world to carry on a love affair with it. He was just at the beginning of trying to live within limits that both he himself and the world were imposing on him. Even future periods spent doubting his religious beliefs, or having agonizing bizarre adventures over his relationship with gender, or what you will, were in their ways attempts to accept limits.

❦

He kept beating himself up for not having been to that fucking funeral. Most of the time he did not think much about it but occasionally it would come roaring back into his head as a betrayal. There had been things not to care for about his grandfather but over the years of his long last illness Nicholas had grown a ferocious fondness for him, hard to explain. “Yeah, apparently he was in the Pacific for three years or so,” he said to Sarah at one point in their two days exploring the city together.

            “Did he know you were majoring in Japanese?” she asked.

            “I’m not sure. I only transferred to UMass half a year before he died so I don’t know how much of it he was able to internalize. I hope he knew that. I’d tell him sometimes and he was always interested to hear it.”
            “That would have been on breaks from our first semester.”

            “Yes. I don’t remember our first semester having gone very well.” Sarah shrugged. “Remember that time I hurt my leg in that game Terayama-sensei had us play?” Nicholas asked.

            “Yeah, I do,” said Sarah, glancing up at the ceiling of the trolley, the trolley that was bedecked for an anniversary year. “I think that’s the first thing I remember about you, actually.”

            “I think you’re not the only one in our major who remembers that about me. There are also probably a few who’ve dropped out of the major. Didn’t Mary say it has the highest attrition rate on campus—like, higher than chemical engineering?”

            “I’ve heard that from a lot of people,” said Sarah. “Come to think of it, you and I aren’t the sorts of people who’d make ‘ideal’ Japanese majors, are we?”

            “By which you mean we’re weebs,” said Nicholas who had become interested in Japan through a girl he had liked at fourteen who had had the word “anime” in her email address.

            “Put it however you like,” said Sarah.

            Nicholas had earlier in the summer lost touch with that girl, Nora, but he did not know yet at the time that he had lost touch with her. His family was preparing, once they got back from Japan, to start the process of moving away from where they had been living for the past decade—near where Nora lived—and rapidly and speedily he would lose touch with quite a few of the people had been to middle and high school with. It did not help that Nora did not have a Facebook. Very charitably and helpfully he might have spent some time wishing that whether or not you were “in touch with” another person did not revolve, these days, so much around online contact. He kept Nora’s phone number, as he remembered it, in years to come. He kept the address of the ryokan in Aomori, too, and his father kept the immigrant owners of an Indian restaurant in Ōdate as Skype contacts.

            He tried to stay in touch with these people in much the same way that he tried to stay in touch with his family in Cape Cod, but the family in Cape Cod was reaching out to him as well so with them he had more success. He had developed a liking for seaside towns during visits to Cape Cod as a child; Hakodate, so much like what he had heard said about San Francisco, for him was also a sort of overgrown Hyannis or Chatham. One New Year’s Eve in Chatham he had had a horrible fight with his mother; in Hakodate he had much less strenuous arguments with his father about where to go to dinner or when to go to sleep. He could take the trolley around Hakodate by himself using a daily pass in which he had written his name and the date “8/13/25,” the “25” referring not to the Anni Domini but to the Heisei Era. This was an improvement over Cape Cod, which he had never actually driven around himself and would not get the chance to drive around himself for another several years. In Cape Cod all he could do was to ask to be chauffeured, something that he had sometimes, in his middle and later teens, wondered whether he should maybe find a little more embarrassing than he did. He certainly found it embarrassing now, looking back.

            On Cape Cod his aunt and uncle lived in a house overlooking a large pond along a tidal river. He could see fancier houses across the pond; in one of them they left their lights on throughout the night. Coming into Hakodate on the train from Aomori he had seen the city itself spread out white and gleaming from across the bay—white and shining, yes, in the distance, too far out and too far behind the glass of the train windows to be smelled or heard. Here was a city that, after his father had had a health scare in Hachinohe the previous week, the doctor at the Hachinohe hospital had had him understand to be bigger, with more amenities and more to do, in those respects perhaps safer, a safer city in which to be sick. He did not know about hospitals on Cape Cod; the entire Cape’s population was less than that of Hakodate, except in the heightened weekends of high summer in which he and his mother had never liked to visit it anyway. He knew there was one in Hyannis. He had never spent much time in Hyannis. He had gotten a Jerusalem Bible with full plate illustrations by Salvador Dali at a used bookstore in Hyannis.

            “You definitely do want to look back at what brought you here, sitting here,” said Sarah on the trolley. “Now that we’re going into our last year.”

            “Yes,” said Nicholas, “even if you were able to come here earlier than I was and for longer.”

            Sarah shrugged. “Do you think you would have had a good time with a year at Hokudai?”

            “There are people I would have missed terribly.”

            “For me too,” said Sarah (referring, potentially, to her girlfriend, all about whom she would tell Nicholas that night as they were schlepping back across the city from the tide-submerged evening beach).

            Normally Nicholas was proud not to feel a need to be entirely like his friends.

❦

Traveling around northern Japan required a lot of hauling luggage around; laundry was an occasional necessity, and Nicholas and his parents had at least two large pieces of luggage each. His mother had actually left Japan before the arrival in Hakodate to return to America to manage the move out of their current house, but he kept thinking of her as somehow still there and he kept wondering what she would think of all the places he and his father were going together. A period of frustration in Hirosaki, a city that he liked not nearly as much as he had expected to, had led to a meltdown and discussion of the possibility of returning home early; but he had turned things around, partially out of the firm hope and desire of seeing another friend in Japan—he had seen another UMass friend, Alba, in Kyōto a little less than a month ago. At one point Nicholas and his father sent his mother some pictures from a public garden that proudly displayed Lythrum salicaria, purple loosestrife, as a characteristically Japanese flower; all three were used to thinking of loosestrife as an undesirable, invasive weed, albeit a pretty one, and had a hard time thinking of this as a place in which it was native and beloved. Later Nicholas would find out that loosestrife was considered one of the premiere biological pest control success stories. By the time he learned that, by which he had long since been ensconced in the United States again, it was hard to go back to thinking of it as pestilential.

            Japan had not afforded Nicholas any opportunity for religious practice, primarily because he had not been trying hard enough to make and keep it a priority. In Hakodate there was a certain intersection, on the lower slopes of the mountain looking down over the harbor towards the station, where there was on each corner a house of worship of a different denomination: A Roman Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, an Anglican church, and (next to a teahouse) a Pure Land Buddhist temple. The first two of these had been founded in the 1860s and 1870s as missionary parishes for the conversion of the people of the raw frontier city and for the benefit of French and Russian soldiers, diplomats, and dignitaries. The Anglican church had a shorter history and a vastly more modern style of architecture. The Pure Land temple was difficult to find out much about.

            There were also great old houses and ambassadorial buildings executed in beautiful Victorian styles in the neighborhoods along the slope, beautiful so differently from the Edo-period townhouse that Nicholas remembered from his week in Kyōto. He and Sarah looked at a few of these on their perambulations throughout the city but did not go inside. Though he thought briefly that he might like to live in a house like that, he decided eventually that it would be too high and mighty, too grandiloquent and authoritative. The bricks and white-trimmed façade of the old Russian consulate, in particular, radiated a feeling of coiled but somehow still kinetic forcefulness.

            “Buildings like that impress me but they also kind of give me the creeps,” he said. “It’s like they have an orbit you get sucked into.”

❦

They went to a junk shop near the harbor while they were in Hakodate. Nicholas in after years couldn’t remember what if anything Sarah had bought, but he remembered his own purchases very clearly. There was a blue-and-white matryoshka for his mother, which put him in mind of the Russian on the public signs and the forceful Russian consulate up on the slopes. There was a little metal cross, with vague ornamentations at the end of each arm—one of the wires of which the cross was made flaring out to either side at each end; this also reminded him of the consulate, and of the Orthodox church at that intersection, even though it was a Latin cross. And there was a little wooden figurine of a Hokkaidō bear.

            He also saw a battledore in the junk shop. It turned out that the Japanese word was “hanetsuki.” It was small, obviously ornamental, and had a painting of small birds eating berries on it. It would appear—so he learned—that Japanese people oftentimes still posed with ornamental battledores in New Year’s Eve photos, even though actually playing the game associated with them had fallen out of custom after the war. He thought of his grandfather coming as an avenger over the sea to stop war criminals and mass rapists from playing battledore and shuttlecock. It was an unexpectedly repellent thing to think about. He did not get the battledore; he decided that the matryoshka, and the cross, and the bear would make a better set of purchases.

            From a house near the junk shop he could hear someone playing one of last year’s Taylor Swift singles. He bopped his head a little to the beat, half-consciously.

❦

The next day he and Sarah looked around a bookstore and squeezed in a tiny bit of window-shopping in a department store before Sarah and her friend had to get on the bus back to Sapporo. They also went to an onsen. Nicholas had been in onsen before, in Aomori, but it had been in a very small ryokan indeed and he had always gone in the middle of the night and been the only one there. At the onsen in Hakodate that they went to he would have to be around a number of other people in variously more or less entire states of undress. If it had been with family members or close friends, or if he had been more acclimated to Japan, he probably would not have had a problem with this; but as it was, the prospect frightened him a little, and he spent the time that Sarah and her friend were in the onsen sitting in a vestibule reading an old copy of Hesperides that he had picked up at a used bookstore just before coming to Japan. He had been toting it around more than any of his books of Japanese poems and stories because it was a durable old clothbound hardcover while the others were trade paperbacks. In after years he would look back on the opportunities that he had had to buy materials from the Edo period and the Meiji era in used bookstores in cities like Kyōto and Hirosaki. It would be a subject of significant regret for him, as would be not trying out this onsen.

            He saw off Sarah and her friend at the station and then took the trolley back to Jūjigai, the closest stop to his and his father’s bread and breakfast. He hit the computer for a few hours—a pastime that had not yet reached its apogee of being a problematic time-suck for him—before it was time to go out for dinner, at Lucky Pierrot again. He had had one non-Lucky Pierrot dinner in Hakodate; it had been at a German-style restaurant and beer hall in or near the redbrick warehouses. Already he could barely remember what he had eaten there; he liked to think it had been a mix of the local and the universal, like a hot soft pretzel with some squid, or flying fish roe with sauerkraut on the side. But for now there was Lucky Pierrot and there was shiokara curry over rice. He ate the curry then and walked to a convenience store later, late at night, to get an ice cream bar. The convenience stores had been a fixture for him since he had been in Japan; the best had been in Kyōto, but there had been good ones in Hirosaki, Ōdate, Hachinohe, and now Hakodate too. His memory flashed back to the hotel in Ōdate where he and his father had stayed for a few days. It was decorated in a style that had probably been impressive thirty or forty years ago and retained some capacity to impress now, and in its lobby there had been a little coffee and tea bar. He wasn’t sure he would be able, if he were asked, to explain what about this moment reminded him of that place, nor what about future moments would remind him, often and again, of Hakodate.

❦

The following day Nicholas and his father left the city for Morioka by way of Aomori. The train bound for Aomori went widdershins around the bay, and it was out of the port side of the car that he watched the gleaming buildings of Hakodate disappear from sight.

Short Story: “Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan”

2008. A moment in spring, a fifteenth birthday party, walking along train tracks.

            It was in a small town, in New Jersey, and only a few people showed. All boys—they had female friends who could not make it—and all of an age to gossip, the crude way boys are liable to gossip, about friends who were absent. A hookup, a breakup (both truer than not), an abortion (scandalous; scurrilous; likely untrue; judgment withheld), rumors of bisexuality (true, but still mildly titillating in those days). The train track ran under the main street. On that main street they had, a few minutes before, stopped in a drugstore to buy candy bars.

            They ascend from the train tracks back to street level and lope towards the McDonalds at the edge of town, across an often-busy highway; they’ll have to dodge cars to get there, but these boys are fifteen to seventeen, and overbold. The spring weather is balmy here, more or less, and they sweat a little as they walk through the sunny afternoon.

            It was at this time still the case that being a “nerd” meant something, even in a high school of mostly “nerds.” YouTube was still fairly new and flash animation was not yet centralized on only a few main websites. Nerd comedy in particular was not centralized. Opinions on the merits of different videos, different websites, and different styles of this nerd comedy were exchanged, sometimes vociferously. The big band at this point is Paramore; boys like it too. The boy whose birthday it is has someone constrained familiarity with the music scene. He knows a little more about movies and TV. His friends do not live nearby, he does not yet have social media (although he does use LiveJournal), and he spends most of his free time reading. Ten or fifteen years later he will look back on all the reading and be sick of no longer reading so much.

            They get to the McDonalds; unable to buy much, and unwilling, at least in some cases, to gorge themselves on French fries right after the candy bars, they take the tiny plastic cups meant for ketchup and use them to take shots of soda from the soda fountain. Nobody stops them. People may or may not be looking at them. Their metabolisms can take it. The birthday boy will end up a little pudgy in his twenties and excoriate himself for it without surcease or mercy.

            There’s something to glory in in this afternoon. At one time, later, it will be said that this was a very normal day for these boys to have. One of them, at the least, will find meaning in that, and a little happiness, a store to draw from going forward into a later adolescence racked with self-sabotage and trauma. He will lack common sense and be overburdened with romance and mental fever for the rest of his minority. There will be a personal history for him to create. He will sometimes, almost, rise to that task.

Short Story: “A Portrait of Rachel”

At almost twenty-seven years old, Marie Boisjoli had still not entirely outgrown the social dynamics of late adolescence. She had a tendency to default to pithy, doctrinaire opinions of the environments of her youth—high school as a place that could have been a contender in her esteem if certain things had been very different; her first college roundly demonized; UMass Amherst, at least as it had been five years ago, as a flawed wonderland that might have been practically perfect in every way had she only been a couple of years older and wiser when she was there. She had not rediscovered the Catholicism of her childhood until after she had graduated, and now overlaid on the social dynamics of the standard Millennial extended adolescence was the spiritual perspicacity, consisting in tumult, of the short sharp adolescence of a hundred years ago or more. She lived in an artist’s loft in North Adams and skateboarded to Mass.

            When Marie had decided to do a minor in studio arts with an aim towards becoming a professional painter, Shelby P., a friend from high school with whom she had rekindled her acquaintance and conviviality at UMass, had said “Why would you do that, Marie? Someone like you could do something with a much better chance of being remunerative.”

            “Like what? Orgo chem? I’ve seen the way people’s brains get blown out when they do orgo chem. And I’m familiar with how things work in CommColl.”

            “Your brain will get blown out eventually no matter what you do.”

            Shelby P. had said many cheerful things along those general lines since she had resurfaced in Marie’s life. The pessimism was bracing and even clarifying in some situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about the possibility of dating or marrying the wrong person or somebody to whom she would later turn out not to be attracted, but completely unhelpful in many other situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about whether she would be able to date or get married at all. Marie had only been on one date since deciding a couple of years ago not to date people who didn’t share her religious beliefs. It had been with a man much older than her who had expressed a distaste for “Millennial artiste types” and tried to walk it back by claiming that Marie was different from the others. She obviously had not trusted his ability to establish this even to her satisfaction, much less his own, after only knowing her for an hour and a quarter, so she had left the date (at an Indian restaurant in Williamstown) early and had had to be talked into sending him an “it’s not you, it’s me” text instead of just cutting him off without warning. The text had literally said, in those exact words, “it’s not you; it’s me”—Marie thought that at the very least he deserved better than a comma splice—to communicate her lack of interest in felicities in breaking this off with him.

            Ever since that point, Marie’s life had mostly been filled with taking commissions. She had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done—she had nothing against doing this; it was just that she didn’t want to jump through the hoops required to convince the people asking for the pictures that she had any real knack for or interest in them. Instead, she took commissions for public murals and things of that nature, sometimes things as simple and unartistic as handywoman painting jobs for private homes, and tried to make the larger and more sporadic lumps of money that she got this way last for as long as she could. She had a deal with her parents for help with rent for her loft in return for coming home and doing some social and emotional heavy lifting around the holidays, a deal that had worked out well for the most part for the two and a half years so far that she had been living here, but she tried to pay for as many of her other needs on her own as she could. She didn’t have much trouble with food and clothes, but medical expenses were occasionally tricky. She didn’t have any car payments because she drove a rusty Ford a year younger than she was that still worked fine but that was so hellaciously ugly to look at that it had been hers for well under three thousand dollars. She only drove it occasionally and, other than home for the holidays, never any further than Pittsfield in one direction or Bennington in the other. For painting gigs that were further afield she took the bus or hitchhiked.

            One winter’s evening, a few days before the coldest night of the year, things started to change. Marie got home to her loft and checked the messages on the land line; she had people call the land line for business calls, partly as a hipster affectation and partly because when she was out and about she didn’t want whatever she was doing to be interrupted by her work. (When she went out for work, she gave her cell number to the person for whom she was doing the job, with a firm request that they not call that number again after the job was finished and not give it to anybody else. Once or twice people had broken the promises that they had made to that effect, but they had had more or less valid reasons for doing so.) There were four messages, of which she assumed, based on past proportions of experience, at least three were liable to be telemarketers or people calling from charitable causes she had donated five dollars to five years ago.

            This time, instead, they were all from one person, who introduced herself as Rachel Kellner, lived in Shutesbury just northeast of Amherst, and wanted her portrait painted.

            “I’d appreciate it if you could do it in a more or less traditional and at least semi-formal style, but I’m not going to be picky,” Rachel said in one of the messages. “I know that you mostly do murals and house painting these days but I have a friend who’s a professor in the UMass art department who said I should give you a call. Rick Stafford. Do you remember him?” Of course Marie remembered Professor Rick. He had taught her both figure drawing and color theory in that horrible semester when she had taken twenty-one credits to get a jump start on her minor. She had thought highly of him and was glad to know that he remembered her. Why he thought that she would make a good formal portraitist on the basis of figure drawing and color theory alone Marie wasn’t sure, but probably some of her other professors had communicated her progress to him after that semester.

            Marie made a point of not googling her clients if she hadn’t heard of them or couldn’t place their names on her own, but she was sure that she had at least heard the name Rachel Kellner somewhere before. She had a vague sense that it had been in some sixties counterculture context that she had heard it, and the voice on the phone had definitely been that of an agéd woman. Shelby P. knew a thing or two about the culture of the sixties but the real expert among Marie’s group of friends was a guy called Phil McCourt whom she had met and briefly almost-dated during her first semester at UMass. After taking a shower she called him up and asked if he knew anything about this Kellner person.

            It turned out that Rachel Kellner had been a Joan Baez-type ingénue folk singer early on in the sixties folk revival whose voice had been destroyed by smoking after a few years and who had briefly resurfaced as a producer for some B-plus-list New Wave bands in the mid-eighties. She would be about seventy-six now. Phil had had no idea that she lived in Western Mass. He did a little more research for Marie—he didn’t have the same compunctions about googling her clients that she did—and found out that in between, and after, her stints in the public eye she had languished in obscurity as a pharmacist and been almost-famous in science fiction circles as a matriarch of the Star Trek: Voyager fan base.

            “She lives in Shutesbury, she said?” he asked Marie over the phone the evening after she got the calls from Rachel (she had instructed Marie in the calls to think of her as Rachel).

            “Yeah,” said Marie. “Don’t google her address, okay? I don’t want you to be a creeper any more than I wanna be one.”

            “Relax; I wasn’t going to. I was just wondering—are you gonna be okay getting there with your car?”

            Marie had given this some thought earlier in the day. Phil was right in his implied assumption that she wasn’t likely to be able to get to Shutesbury by public transit. There was no easy combination of routes to take to even get from North Adams to Amherst, unless she wanted to spend all day getting there and get a hotel room for as long as she was doing the portrait, an option for which she really didn’t have the money right now. Then there was getting from Amherst to Shutesbury, for which there did not seem to exist any public transit at all. It seemed there was not any way around her car braving the Hoosac Range and the Cold River’s ungracious curves. She told Phil that she was sure things would be fine; she wasn’t actually as sure of this as she wished she could be, but all the roads that she would take were reasonably well-traveled as far as she knew until the last leg of the trip, when she turned off Route 116 up something called Bull Hill Road. She could probably stay on well-traveled routes longer if she went down through Amherst, then up the Shays Highway from Pelham, but if her car was going to have trouble anyway then it might be best to keep the route as short as she could.

            “I don’t drive a very good car,” she told Rachel over the phone the next day. “Do you have somewhere I could stay if I need to stay overnight, like a fold-out sofa or something?”

            “Wow. I haven’t hosted in a long time now,” said Rachel. “I don’t have a fold-out but my couch should still be deep enough to sleep on depending on your body type. How big are you?”

            “Five-seven, a hundred and thirty-five pounds or so?” said Marie. She had taught herself, she thought more or less correctly, to resent questions like this, but Rachel had a more valid reason for asking than most so she answered anyway despite the queasy feeling that she got.

            “God, I wish that were me,” said Rachel. “I’m five-four and a hundred and seventyish. But, well, I’m old, and after a certain age you actually look younger if you’re fat, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Yeah, I think my couch will serve you just fine. Don’t feel the need to disguise anything when you paint me, by the way, the weight or the age or anything else; I want a ‘warts and all’ portrait. Did you see that episode of The Crown?”

            “I don’t watch much TV,” said Marie. “But, yeah, as long as you have a sofa I can use if I need to and a driveway big enough for me to park in, it should be fine. My time is flexible, and I’m guessing you’re retired?” Rachel made an affirmative but not particularly happy noise. “So I can come over whenever you’ll have me.”

            They arranged for a time, a time that was coming quickly. Marie would have to set out only a little bit after midday to be sure of getting to Shutesbury before it started getting dark. Even though the afternoons were getting lighter, they were still well within the part of the year in which they carried a sort of lingering premature senescence that suddenly collapsed into night, inevitably before one would have expected it. Rachel offered to burn some incense for her safe travels. Marie was not sure what to make of that; from somebody her own age it would have been manifestly dead serious or close to it, but it was hard to know just how seriously somebody like Rachel did or did not take ideas like that. If Rachel had just been a folk revival ingénue, or had just been a New Wave impresario, that would have been one thing, and Marie would have had something or other to go by, but the fact that her life had taken so many apparent twists and turns complicated matters. In the end Marie told her to feel perfectly free to burn some incense if she thought that that would help. Marie would, she said, reserve judgment on whether or not she herself thought it might.

            The appointed day and time arrived and Marie set out with her art supplies in the back seat and two changes of clothes in the trunk, plus a hopelessly stretched-out old t-shirt to sleep in. Tomorrow was Sunday; she might have to go to Mass at the UMass Newman Center again. She had not been there in a long time; the last time she had been there, she had been unserious about her faith and only putting in a token appearance on Maundy Thursday because she thought that it might look bad to some super-senior whom she wanted to like her if she didn’t. She wondered how the old place was; she wondered if it would be any less flat and unappealing to her now. The design of the place architecturally and liturgically, she remembered, left things to be desired, but in recent months she had finally made her peace with the relative insignificance of that compared to the sincerity with which the Mass was approached, which obviously would depend upon the priest. She doubted good old Father John was still there, and, indeed, looking it up, it appeared to be someone else now. All in all she had high but nervous hopes.

            She got to Shutesbury just as the sun was westering and the bare trees beginning to cast their shadows more heavily than before. She pulled into the short but sinuous driveway at Rachel’s A-frame set back modestly into the woods and parked next to a beaten-up old Subaru. The tree line melted back from the road to encompass it like a bezel. There were a couple of chickens strutting around the narrow and scantily snow-dusted lawn.

            Marie strode confidently up to the house with her box of charcoals in one hand and her easel in the other. She would be taking some studies on a sketchpad that she carried in the same box as the charcoals before, either tomorrow if she stayed over or some other day if she decided to leave after dark after all, breaking out the canvas frames and acrylic paints that she had left in the trunk of the Ford. Rachel had specified that she wanted to be painted in acrylic, possibly as a gesture to the difficulty that Marie was already going to face in getting this commission done. The idea that it was inherently and significantly easier to do good, serious paintings in acrylics than in oils was a myth as far as Marie was concerned, but she couldn’t blame a layperson for believing it, and for all she knew there might be other, fabulously well-thought-out reasons for Rachel to prefer acrylics to which Marie was not privy.

            There was no doorbell—it looked like one might have been there at one time, but if so, Rachel had removed it to make room for a mezuzah—so Marie knocked on the door harder and harder until Rachel answered it. She would appear to have been taking a nap; she was in a nightgown that swept the floor around her and had a sleep mask pushed haphazardly up over her forehead. Her hair was snow-white but beautifully lustrous and the lines on her face were fine and shallow, maybe because of the pudge on her cheeks. “Marie!” she said. “Good to see you; come on in!” She was acting as if their phone correspondence had extended and metamorphosed into a long acquaintanceship; perhaps, in the weird stretches and compressions of time that Marie had heard were for many people a part of old age, that was how it felt. Marie said a few polite words and Rachel led her into the house. In addition to the chickens a dog was in evidence; there was a dog bed with lots of fur shed in it and more moderate amounts of fur shed on most of the other upholstered surfaces in the living room. It looked like there was a kitchen behind this room; one other room on this floor, which looked like an addition to the house off to the left, not readily visible from the driveway; and a screen door that led to an enclosed porch on the other side of the kitchen. The living room had a pellet stove opposite the couch on which Marie guessed she was going to be sleeping. The bathroom must be upstairs.

            “I sure hope you like seitan because we’re going to be having a lot of it tonight,” said Rachel. “I cooked a ton of it up the other day with some mushroom and eggplant and dijon mustard. Of course, none of it’s fresh, but I got it from cold storage at a farm up in Montague so it can’t be nearly as bad as if I’d just gotten it at the supermarket. You okay with that?”

            “Yes, that’s absolutely all right,” said Marie. “It—can I ask, do you drive, Rachel?”

            “Yes, of course I drive; the Subaru’s out there in the driveway, isn’t it?; I live alone and it’s not like I can get around and get done what I need to get done on foot, living out here.” She waved her hand. “At my age there are only a few places I really know how to get to, though; some would say you get stuck in a rut after a while. I would have said that at your age. Now I just say I’ve become set in my ways.”

            They made more small talk of this kind—Marie told Rachel a little bit about her church and Rachel told Marie a little bit about her most recent synagogue. Then Rachel showed Marie around the living room. The pellet stove was burning, though not exactly crackling hot. Next to it was a stack of books with titles ranging from The Trump Prophecies to Zowie! It’s YAOI and from The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World to Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Marie decided to suspend judgment on Rachel’s reading habits, especially since she suspected that the books’ placement next to the pellet stove might be suggestive of something.

            “That half-wit dog is still upstairs, I guess,” said Rachel. “Normally she sleeps in that dog bed over there but she comes into my room to sleep with me every few days or so. I was taking a nap before you got here, if you couldn’t tell.”

            “I could tell,” said Marie. “—Rachel, can I ask if you have any kids or grandkids who visit?” She hoped that her concern for a seventy-six-year-old woman living alone in a place like this wasn’t too obvious to Rachel. It probably, regrettably, was.

            “I have kids, yes, but we don’t see much of one another,” said Rachel, “which is a shame. Love was free in the sixties but then the cold light of day hit and we all found out that you really do get what you pay for. I’m guessing your generation is realizing much the same thing.”

            Marie considered cautiously how she wanted to respond to this. The psycho-spiritual consensus, which she had heard from both friends and her therapist late in high school and in college, had been that casual sex was fine and potentially even psychosexually clarifying every now and then, but was the sort of thing best not made a habit of. That had been the standard to which she had held herself, generally successfully, until the last four or five years. She had heard that it was technically a more restrained standard than those of the last couple of generations when they had been young adults. “We’ve realized it,” she eventually said, “but I think I’ve probably realized it more than most people.”

            “Could you talk to people at your church about it, maybe?” suggested Rachel.

            Marie rolled her eyes. “Why would people at my church understand…you know what? Never mind. Do you mind if I do some hand and face studies starting in a few minutes? You won’t need to get dressed up for that and I’d like to get it out of the way while there’s still a combination of indoor and outdoor light. It won’t take too long but you will have to sit very still.”

            “Don’t a lot of artists do these kinds of studies from photographs these days?”

            “Some do, yeah, but I’m not one of them. I’d be more willing to do it for your face than for your hands if we end up having to do it; I do have a pretty good Nikon in my car, and hands are trickier to do studies of than faces.”

            “I can believe it. I know my hands have given me a lot more trouble than my face has over the years.”

            “Yes,” said Marie. “Well. In any case. I’ll take my stuff out and then let’s begin, shall we?”

 ❦

Rachel sat admirably still, much stiller than Marie had gone into the day afraid that she was going to. Her concept of an eccentric elderly woman, as a general sort or type or condition of person, could not accommodate an image of this kind of stillness. There was a grandeur to her even in her nightgown with her sleep mask now hanging around her neck.

            At one point Marie paused in the middle of a study of Rachel’s left hand from the right to go to the bathroom. Rachel directed her into the room off to the left, the extension not readily visible from the drive. “There’s a shower in there, a sink, and a bidet,” she said. “If you have to do number two then you’ll have to use the outhouse. It’s up a path about forty feet into the trees. I hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”

            “Not in particular,” said Marie, and went to the outhouse. When she got back, the dog, an Irish setter that she could tell had the characteristics typical of her breed, was lolling with her head sprawled across Rachel’s outstretched feet and her long pink tongue trailing along the floor.

            “This is Rosanna,” said Rachel. “Marie, say hi to Rosie; Rosie, say hi to Marie.”

            “Hi, Rosie,” said Marie. She squatted down to run her hand through the setter’s fur. The fur was silky but did not smell very good. Rosie did not seem ill-served or poorly taken care of, only old and unwell. She wondered how long Marie had had her. She looked at least ten years old—from this angle Marie could suddenly see quite a bit of silver around her muzzle—but with some more-than-residual happiness overlaid on the stupidity. Rosie reached up to lick Marie’s hand, then clambered to her feet.

            “Rosie, shake,” said Rachel, and Rosie proffered her paw for shaking, then lumbered back upstairs. “Dumb as a box of hammers but Lord do I love her,” said Rachel.

            Marie asked something she had been wanting to ask for a while now. “I don’t do much research on my clients,” she said, “so I have to ask—what New Wave band was it, exactly, that you were a producer for?”

            “Mostly Eyes in Their Last Extremity and Tinúviel,” said Rachel, “but I did some work with Patrick Morkan and His Horse right before I retired again. It was a weird world to come back into, twenty years after being the girl who used to be the future of American songwriting.” Marie decided not to pursue the possibility that Rachel might be exaggerating her accomplishments. She was saying this hieratically rather than conversationally.

            This attitude continued when they talked more about Rachel’s past over their seitan dinner. Her tone of voice was technically casual and conversational, but Marie had a hard time shaking the feeling that this tone was itself being dispensed, dolloped out, from some source deep beneath the sea or in a cavern deep in the earth. Rachel had cooked the seitan skillfully and it held the flavor of the mustard very well; the same flavor was a little less thoroughly in evidence in the mushrooms and eggplant, so the dish as a whole tasted a little uneven, but by no means bad. Gradually Marie came to suspect that she was on the verge of being chosen for something. It was not a comfortable feeling, especially since she had already been chosen to be Rachel Kellner’s portraitist, surely an honor worth at least a little more than Marie had assumed at first. She wondered how Rachel would have treated another portraitist, someone older maybe, or male. She liked to imagine it would have been different enough to make it worth comparing notes.

            “Before I started singing in the Village I was in my high school glee club,” Rachel said after dinner with the apparent expectation that this should somehow be reflected in the eventual portrait of her, “and, later, a holiday season sales clerk at a middle-end department store in uptown Manhattan.”

            “Are you a New York City native?” asked Marie.

            “Yes. You could hear it in my speaking voice until about 1982. You?”

            “No,” said Marie, who was disoriented enough to interpret this question as an insinuation that she was also from New York, “I’ve only ever been to the city a couple of times and only ever on day trips. My family’s from Central Mass.”

            “Boisjoli, is that a French Canadian name?” Marie nodded. “During my pharmacist days I would take trips up to Montreal to see Leonard Cohen sometimes before he was Leonard Cohen.” As Marie looked at her while she said this, a shadow played over her opening and closing jaw in a way that she would probably not be able to get any sketches or studies of but might want to try to include or at least allude to somehow in the final painting. “Anyway, it’s a much easier name to wrap your teeth around than Tanizaki or Buxtehude or the other names you encounter all over the place in a place like New York.” This statement, which escaped a firm verdict of being racist mostly because of Rachel’s less-than-invidious tone of voice in saying it, was nevertheless a much more reactive and closed-off sentiment than Marie would have expected from someone with Rachel’s life, septuagenarian or not, but it would have been an abdication of professional virtues and standards for Marie to say so out loud.

            “Rachel, can I ask what your politics are?” asked Marie, who figured it was at least slightly more acceptable to broach this if she did so as a question.

            “My politics are exactly what you’d expect. My opinion of the way those have been put into place is what’s different. Like I said, you really do get what you pay for.” Marie motioned for Rachel to turn her head a little to the left so Marie could get in a sketch of the way a curlicue of her hair fell over her temple. “I dabbled in saying I was ‘politically neutral’ but I realized that that just made me sound complicit rather than wise. I’d love to say it took the Iraq War or something of that sort for me to realize that but, actually, it was Star Trek: Voyager fandom.”

            “May I ask what aspects of Star Trek: Voyager fandom?” asked Marie, who had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done.

            “You don’t know me well enough to ask that question. Let’s just say nobody was focusing enough on our common enemy.”

            “And who was the common enemy?”

            “The people who wrote Star Trek: Voyager. How did you like your seitan? You seemed to be enjoying it but you didn’t actually say.”

            “I liked it pretty well, thank you.”

            Such was the rest of their evening. At a little after nine, Rachel went out to feed the chickens and make sure they had come in from the cold; Rosie ran around the little yard for a little bit while Rachel was out there, barking at the cold and the dark and nothing else in particular, then ran back in just as enthusiastically and flopped down in the dog bed in the living room. Marie, who had already been to the bidet a couple of times since dinner by this point, took the opportunity to take her leave and make her way to the outhouse again when Rachel came back in. The tree-line now was tense, less gracious, and encompassed rather than embracing. The trees that poked up against the long-since-descended night were weird and harshly lit from the lights inside the A-frame, their branches shooting jaggedly up like lighting shooting from the ground up into the sky. Marie decided to stay outside for a few minutes, shivering, with a feeling of defiance that had suddenly and not really explicably come over her. She had no desire to defy her subject, but something about the world in which her subject lived felt stultifying and possibly oppressive despite its countercultural self-presentation.

            When she got back inside, Rachel looked liable to get ready to go back to sleep; when Marie asked, she said that she was doing just that. “I know people your age tend to prefer to stay up later,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry if there’s not that much around to entertain you. I don’t have a TV, just a laptop, or I’d give you my Netflix password.”

            “That’s okay,” said Marie. “I brought reading material. And I can watch Netflix on my phone if I really need to.”

            “Do you get reception out here?”

            “Yeah, like one bar.”

            “Okay.” Rachel shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m sure Rosie’d like it if you could rub her belly a little too. Good night! I’ll try not to wake you up if I come down early.”

            Marie had mostly good but strange and tumultuous dreams on the sofa that night. In one, she was back at a concert in Fenway Park that she had not attended, but had heard from a couple of blocks away, when she had visited friends in Boston about three and a half years ago. The music took shape and color and the notes swarmed around her like friends and enemies. In another dream she was at her first college again talking to a boy whom she had liked from afar while she was there. He was frustrated with her, with the person she had become. He had been a few years older than her—he would not be in any sense a boy any more, really—but a boy he was in the dream nevertheless. She woke up frustrated with him, and with herself. She wondered what Lewis was doing these days. The last she had heard of him had been when she had made an ill-judged remark about his sister over email while he was away in Costa Rica. He had never spoken to her again after coming back.

            The last dream that Marie had, or at least the last one that she remembered upon waking, was of going home for the holidays as a middle-aged woman with a husband and several young children. This one was tumultuous because midway through the dream she realized that the person sitting at the head of the table for the Christmas Eve dinner was not her father but Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Musk told everybody at the table that the world was at a crossroads. Marie took his word for it.

            In the morning, she woke up before Rachel was downstairs, but definitely not before she was awake; she was laughing at something that she was presumably either reading or watching on her laptop. Marie called up the stairs that she was awake and waited for Rachel to come on down. She did not have to wait long; Rachel came down, exchanged polite words, and hopped in the shower. Breakfast, Marie guessed, could wait.

 ❦

After breakfast, they got back to sitting and sketching. Rachel was even chattier this morning than she had been last night. She and Marie discussed “Boisjoli” a little more and Marie mentioned that she had been to both Québec City and the South of France on Spring Break trips—the first in high school, the second when at UMass. Rachel grilled Marie on her impressions of France and Marie, who liked some aspects of French culture but could not stand others, went on a gut instinct that she could be honest with Rachel and got into some depth about it. Rachel developed this weird sneering expression but then settled back into affability and reasonableness.

            Out of the blue she asked Marie if she wanted children and Marie evaded the question rather than giving Rachel the “yes” that she desperately wanted to give. She did not want to get her own or anybody else’s hopes up. Rachel called very small children “anklebiters.” It turned out that she had four of them, by three different fathers, the first of whom she had been married to before his death from some disease about which she was maddeningly vague and the other two of whom she had had loving and sincere but in the final analysis transient relationships with in her late thirties. They had all gravitated towards either Florida or South Carolina, a part of the country that seemed to have a weird gravitational pull on a certain type of person that Marie had noticed several times before in conversations with other people.

            “Some people just can’t stand some stern weather,” said Rachel. “I dabbled in feeling that way myself at one time.” Marie felt this odd and fierce fondness for the way she said that she had dabbled in it, as if it had been a feeling that she could control and deliberately cultivate. Maybe it had been. In that case she definitely hadn’t had the inveterate, physical lapsed constitution in the face of cold that she knew a lot of other people did. Marie had heard from several acquaintances that humans simply had not evolved for this kind of weather, and she could believe it, but she would not have been willing to give up the changes of the seasons for anything, even though this winter being colder and wetter than the last two made it hard for her to get to Mass some Sundays.

            She took four or five pictures apiece of Rachel’s face from five different angles—from the front, full profiles from both sides, and three-quarters profiles from both sides. She used flash, she disabled flash, she put the camera on automatic and let the flash do what it may. She filled up half of her sketchpad with charcoals of Rachel’s hands and a few studies of the way the light hit her face and clothing that the camera couldn’t capture. Rachel wanted a portrait sitting down, from the knees up, with her hands folded in her lap—a more traditional posture than Marie, before meeting her, would have expected from someone with her background and profile.

            “Should I break out the easel?” she asked, finally.

            “Sure,” said Rachel. “Do you think you can finish today?”

            Marie raised her eyebrows. “Do you expect me to finish today?”

            “I’m not sure what to expect. What should I?”

            “You should expect that I’ll be able to get the basic strokes in today, ask you to approve the basic concept of the painting, then leave either later today or tomorrow morning and finish the painting from the sketches and photos I have when I get back to North Adams. I can drive it over to you or ship it to you at some later point and you can pay me the rest of my commission then. Does that sound okay to you?”

            “Sure,” said Rachel, noncommittally but accommodatingly. “By the way, and there’s no reason I really need to ask this so feel free to tell me I’m overstepping my bounds, but shouldn’t you have gone to Mass this morning?”

            “Oh, shit,” said Marie. “Is there anywhere around here that does Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening Masses?”

            “How should I know? I think the Newman Center at UMass might. You went there, didn’t you?”

            “Sure did,” said Marie. “I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

 ❦

They spent the rest of the day discussing the painting together—Rachel wanted a non-naturalistic color scheme for her clothing but wanted her features and hair to be true-to-life, all while not caring very strongly about the lighting and the placement of elements, which Marie thought was a confusing set of prescriptions—and Marie executed as much of it as she could before the sun went down. Then she arranged to spend one more night here—she would take a shower after getting back from Mass—and drove into Amherst, planning to go to the seven o’ clock Mass and then have a late dinner at one of the restaurants on North Pleasant Street.

            She found the Newman Center changed, but not much. The priest was new, and the vaguely unpleasant feeling that she had in the past gotten when she would go to Mass here had lessened considerably, probably due more to changes within her own self-concept than to any changes in the Newman Center. She was not sure how bad some of her sins were so she took communion without having asked for confession before Mass. Then she went to a Tibetan restaurant, of all things, in Amherst Center and had an uncharacteristically sumptuous dinner of boiled bread, dumplings, and a saucy potato dish, paid for with a check that she wrote in anticipation of the down payment going through on her commission like Rachel had promised her before her arrival.

            She drove back to Shutesbury with her high beams on for the whole way once she got out of North Amherst—there were a couple of cars that she passed but she forgot to turn the high beams off when she passed them; one of them honked at her. When she got back she finally familiarized herself with the bathroom, which she had used only very briefly and diffidently earlier in the day, for long enough to take a shower.

            “How was Mass?” asked Rachel.

            Marie shrugged, but she felt like doing more than shrugging. The shower was a peace and a comfort, her third of the night so far. The night wore on and got colder. Rachel put more wood pellets in the stove and snuggled up with Rosie.

Short Story: “A Dog’s Faith”

Note: This story is written, in a strictly limited way, from the point of view of a character who is being a bad friend to somebody in a sensitive situation (questioning one’s gender identity). Due to the writing style, the narration reflects this character’s viewpoints rather than my own. I feel the need to clarify this from the get-go because I know that there are people who find my own approach to issues of sexuality and gender validating or even inspiring, and I do not want to create a nasty surprise or the appearance of betrayal as these readers encounter Hayley Weingarten’s less-than-generous behavior around those topics.

1. 

Hayley Weingarten secretly liked to think of herself as a good person, secretly because she did not want to be thought of as the sort of person who self-identified as a good person. She was sixteen and had never done anything particularly wrong in her life, unlike some. She went to church and youth group, she did well in school, and her classmates liked her; one of the “popular crowd,” she was nevertheless spiritually and culturally out of step with the rest of that group. She never had to be told to take Buster for a walk; only seldom did she have to be told to sweep the kitchen before going to bed or to cook dinner with Dad every Tuesday and Friday.

            Her twin sister Bethany was in the Abstinence Club. Bethany was in fact abstinent as far as Hayley knew. There were those in the Abstinence Club who weren’t—Hayley could think of three pregnancies that she knew of, one for each year she had been in high school so far. The first girl had had an abortion because her parents told her she was “the exception that proved the rule”; the second girl had miscarried relatively early in the going but still told the school about it and damn the opprobrium (Hayley respected her for it); the third girl was going to have her baby any day now and had dealt with all sorts of horrifying social brutality ever since the beginning of the school year (Hayley loved her for it). She supposed this abysmal track record was less because the purity culture people were uniquely hypocritical and more because being in the club put a target on your back for school lotharios like Ryan Rappaport and Jacen Calvert. Hayley had herself kissed Ryan Rappaport at a party once, but nothing more had come of it and the next week she had stomped on his foot for reading her notes over her shoulder in math class.

            Hayley’s pastor, Pastor Dave, liked the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and brought it up at least once every couple of months since the congregation had voted to secede from the Disciples of Christ and thus from having to use the Revised Common Lectionary. Every time Pastor Dave brought up this parable, Hayley felt a thrill of uncertainty about her life. She liked feeling these thrills more than she liked the glib certainties of her time outside of church. This was part of the reason why she was so punctilious about getting to church every week.

            One time Hayley and her best friend, Charlotte Rice (whom some called “Charizard,” much to her delight), went to the Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom with Charlotte’s goth cousin from the city Amelia Greenberg. Amelia wore this bizarre bathing suit with strips zigzagging all up and down her sides. Hayley spent half the day being concerned about Amelia’s tan lines and the other half racking her brain trying to figure out why Amelia’s suit came across as lewder than her own even though it covered more. “Have some of the Living Water, Charizard,” Hayley said to Charlotte, splashing her in the lazy river. Amelia, whose mother was something called a baalat teshuva, ignored her.

            Another time one of Amelia’s goth friends, Gwendolyn Fisher, stayed over with Amelia at Charlotte’s house and invited Hayley over to watch something called Crimson Peak. Hayley kept wondering what Pastor Dave would think of the movie if he were here with them, but she enjoyed it anyway.

            And still another time, Hayley and her other best friend, Lara Fielding, who was a senior, went on a medium-to-long-distance car journey to an abandoned insane asylum (by this point Hayley had started to suspect that Amelia Greenberg was rubbing off on her). They had only just gotten there when an alarm on Hayley’s phone went off and reminded her that she had to hightail it back home so she could take Buster to the vet for his regular checkup. When she eventually got him to the vet, about five minutes late, the news was not to Buster’s advantage.

            “Buster has liver failure and he has three weeks to live,” said Dr. Chandler.

            “Liver failure isn’t necessarily fatal for dogs, though, is it?” asked Hayley, trying not to freak. “I’ve seen special dog food for such dogs as this at Wegman’s.”

            “I’m sorry that you have to be here to hear this news by yourself, Hayley, but, while it wouldn’t have been fatal if we’d caught it sooner, the timing here seems to have been incredibly bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if Buster’s problems had started within a week or two after his last checkup. If we’d rescheduled that one to be even slightly later, I probably would have been able to catch it in time. As it is…” Dr. Chandler drummed the table gently with her callused fingers. “All I can say is keep him comfortable. If you want to make another appointment to have him put to sleep in a couple of weeks, then, I mean, be my guest, but you don’t have to; if you don’t let him overextend himself he could be reasonably comfortable until close to the end.”

            “I’d rather he die at home, thank you,” said Hayley as politely as she could muster.

            When she got home, she went straight up to her room without telling Mom, Dad, or either of her siblings what was the matter. Her younger brother Josh found her up there when he went to check on her halfway through dinner, over two hours later. She had her fingers knotted in Buster’s tangled fur and her head resting on his big belly, listening to his breathing.

            “We’ll leave a pork chop in the fridge for you if you want to heat it up later,” Josh said gently.

            “Thanks.”

            “Do you want me to leave this light on or…?”

            “No. Turn it off, please. Thanks.”

            Josh turned out the light and left the room. He left the door open the tiniest crack. By eight-thirty Hayley was sound asleep.

            She woke up to seventeen text messages from Lara. The first said:

Lara YESTERDAY 8:55 PM: Hayley, I don’t mean to freak you out but I’ve been giving this some thought for a few months now and I think I might be trans.

Hayley couldn’t deal with this right now. She skimmed through the rest. Lara clearly need help and/or support, and she certainly did not want to leave such an important suspicion to the tender mercies of Pastor Dave, but dealing with Buster was going to be enough of an emotional lift for her for at least the next month or two.

            Never having been sure what exactly to make of “the trans issue” (Hayley thought of all controversial subjects as “the X issue” regardless of whom she knew personally whom they affected), she noted the time—a little before five—and sent Lara one text in response before going back to sleep.

Hayley TODAY 4:52 AM: Not that I don’t sympathize, but is there any particular reason you didn’t bring this up on the road trip?

The possibility that Lara had just started thinking about this since midafternoon yesterday did occur to Hayley, but she would rather not entertain the possibility because she didn’t like to think of Lara lying to her about something like this.

            About three hours after this, her parents came and woke her up. Buster by this point could tell that Hayley was upset, and had started intermittently licking her hand, warm comfort in the half-sleep of morning. She held on to him in a world where there was no Lara and no liver failure. It had been less than a day and already her collapse was almost entire. If she was lucky this meant that she would bounce back from it faster than usual too.

            “Hayley, honey, wake up,” Mom said, sympathetically but reproachfully. “It’s time for church. –and then maybe you can tell us what’s wrong?”

            “Yeah,” Hayley grunted. She got up and pulled off yesterday’s clothes as soon as Mom closed the door. She had not showered, nor had she changed into her nightclothes, nor had she brushed her teeth, nor had she had anything to eat since lunch yesterday. She hoped church would cheer her up at least a little, but she did not think so, and she felt bad for hoping so; that was not what church was for.

            Church did in fact cheer her up at least a little; the music was a little more ceremonious than usual, for one thing. Hayley had a private taste for the rote and ritualized that she could normally only feed on Sundays where she visited the black Baptist church two towns over with her friend Amanda Harwell, but today the music ministry had sprung for “When I survey the wondrous Cross” and “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” so she could get some of it right here at home. The sermon was on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, which had always given Hayley a spine-tingling feeling, a feeling that she had only just recently started to like. She guessed Amelia Greenberg really was rubbing off on her.

            For the rest of the day she did in fact hang out with Lara. Lara, apparently, had taken Hayley on the road trip partially in order to talk about this with her; she had been hoping that Hayley would come up with some sort of Christian rationale for putting her concerns and questions to rest. When Hayley had had to hurry home, though, Lara had driven around for a while by herself and then, looking for some more information on her phone, had decided that there was more to this than she had thought or than she had wanted Hayley to tell her that there was. She had been alarmed, almost frightened, and had decided to tell Hayley before anybody else because she thought that, after the day that they had spent together and after Lara’s own ulterior motives for that day, Hayley deserved to know. She had texted Hayley at around the same time in the evening that she normally did, and had freaked out after not getting a response and kept texting her until she gave up for the evening.

            Such was Lara’s account. Hayley was inclined to take her word for it and apologized for not being there to help her through this. She told her about Buster, but Lara still seemed hurt.

            “Hasn’t Buster been having health problems for a while now?”
            “Yes, but you…when your pet gets a death sentence, you don’t just walk it off just because the pet was already sick or old.”

            Lara looked like she was about to shoot back some rejoinder but instead she let her hands fall to her sides and said “I know. I’m sorry.”

            “Anyway,” said Hayley, as businesslike as she could, “all I feel like I can say for right now is that if you think there’s something to this then it’s totally not my place to contradict you, but, like, I think you might want to wait a little while before making some sort of sudden move here. Because your thoughts here about this, about the likelihood of this, changed pretty radically during one day.”

            “I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. I thought I told you so.”

            “Yes, but had you been going back and forth on it?”

            “Not really. I was just going back and forth on it today.”

            Hayley racked her brains for something that she could say that would be of help. What she came out with was an unbearable cliché but she said it anyway. “‘I praise you,’” she said, “‘for I am wonderfully and fearfully made.’”

            “Thanks,” Lara said unironically after a few seconds of silence. “Can you maybe go ahead and think through how you feel about this a little more before we talk about it again?”

            “Of course I can,” said Hayley, and squeezed Lara’s hand, feeling for a split second firmer and more stable than she was.

2.

Hayley’s first line of attack was talking to her biology teacher, Mrs. Ryder. Mrs. Ryder was about thirty, and Hayley guessed that she counted as “a Millennial,” but she had her life much more together than the media kept bloviating that people that age did or were supposed to. Until late last school year she had been Miss McCarthy; her then-boyfriend and now husband was somebody named Charles who was an accountant in one of the small cities to the north. She had long, pin-straight brown hair and her faculty bio page listed “split ends” as one of her dislikes.

            “I don’t think I’m the best person to be discussing this with,” Mrs. Ryder said, leaning back in her chair and fidgeting with a pencil as Hayley stood supplicant before her desk. “With a lot of these ‘identity things,’ as you call them, there isn’t a whole lot of reliable research being done on biological etiologies because the subjects are so politicized. That’s what makes them identity things.”

            “There are biological, uh, etiologies for homosexuality though, aren’t there?” asked Hayley.

            “There are more firmly established correlations with certain traits that are known to be biological, yes,” said Mrs. Ryder. “It’s possible that these things are epigenetic rather than genetic, or possibly a combination of biological and environmental factors. I don’t think there are comparable studies that have been done on transgender subjects, mostly for ethical reasons; it’s hard to find control groups if all the people you’re studying are undergoing some sort of hormone treatment.”

            Mrs. Ryder seemed to be implying here that she thought that there were people who went through transition who really should not, and that seemed reasonable to Hayley; hadn’t she heard rumors that the Stantons recently considered putting their son on puberty blockers after he said he had a crush on a boy? But April Hooper had been kicked out of the GSA for trying to start a discussion about incident, and April was unpleasant and bigoted enough on a whole host of issues that Hayley could believe that she had had it coming. She hardly thought that Mrs. Ryder was comparable.

            “All right,” said Hayley. “Thanks for listening.”

            “Before you go,” said Mrs. Ryder as Hayley turned to leave, “we need to discuss one of the marginalia that you wrote on your evolutionary development quiz.” Hayley made a little questioning sound in her throat. “You wrote ‘but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to believe this’ next to your answer on question thirteen. I gave you full credit, but I just wanted to check in with you about this—you do know that there’s no ‘supposed’ about believing things, don’t you?”

            “Oh, but there is,” said Hayley.

            Hayley’s next order of business was to get Buster some of the special dog food to see if she could prolong his life or at least prolong his comfort for any longer than Dr. Chandler had said. He enjoyed the car ride over to Hannaford with her (she didn’t have time to make a trip to Wegman’s on a school night). She did not know if he would enjoy a similar car ride again. For several minutes after getting the dog food and before driving home she just sat there with her hands knotted in his fur again, gently kissing him over and over again on his upturned head as he gave long slow laps underneath her chin. Then she drove home, playing one of her old indie rock CDs at what she would normally consider a too-low volume and nursing the holes in her heart and mind with one of the prayers that her youth minister, Dan, had taught her. “Lord, please pour out Your goodness and mercy on my head as You anointed King David’s head with oil…

            “Oh fuck you,” Hayley blurted out as somebody cut her off pulling into her neighborhood. She honked her horn hard, and a girl she recognized from the halls and from the one meeting of the Abstinence Club that she had attended last year glanced at her apologetically across the intersection.

            The next day this girl approached her between second and third period. “You’re Hayley Weingarten, right?”

            “Yeah. Didn’t you cut me off at Hemlock and Hawthorn last night?”

            “I did, yeah, sorry.” The girl proffered her hand. A purity ring flashed on her next-to-last finger. Weren’t those things supposed to go on the left hand? “Teresa Russo. Nice to formally meet you.” Hayley noted with some envy, another sin to pile on top of last night’s swearing, that Teresa was wearing a t-shirt for some mid-2000s anime that, paired with the rest of her outfit, she somehow managed to make look chic.

            “Is there anything in particular that you want?” Hayley asked as politely as she could under the circumstances.

            “Just to apologize and to tell you that your friend Lara Fielding seems pissed at you for some reason. I overheard her crap-talking you to Jacen Calvert. I dunno why.”

            “Jacen ‘CE’ Calvert? Seriously?”

            “On the other hand I think she might have some angle,” Teresa mused. She ran a hand through her obnoxiously thick, fine hair. “She’s probably trying to take herself off Jacen’s hit list or something.”

            “Oh. Well, in that case I can’t say I blame her.” Hayley doubted that this was actually true but it also did not seem like Teresa was misleading her on purpose or trying to spare her feelings. This girl was too good-natured for the Abstinence Club. She was also probably too good-natured to be a teen driver. The reason why Lara might actually be mad at her, of course, did not really bear thinking about, at least not yet. Hayley still had research and prayer to do.

            Hayley did not think about Lara for the rest of the school day, but when she got home she started researching Christian perspectives on this other than the Stantons’, which was self-evidently (at least assuming April Hooper wasn’t full of it) appalling, and Pastor Dave’s, which she was going to leave in reserve as a last resort. She had a taste for greater systematization than the usual Evangelical internet bickering provided, so first of all she looked up what the Catholic Church had to say about this. The first thing that she found was an infuriated headline from a couple of years ago that read: “POPE FRANCIS COMPARES TRANSGENDER PEOPLE TO ATOMIC BOMBS.” She was next to dead positive that this was excessive hyperbole on the headline’s part, and if not, it certainly was on Pope Francis’s; she opened the article in a new tab, bookmarked it, closed it, and moved on. The second thing that she found was that something called the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which Benedict XVI had apparently led before becoming pope, had decided a while back that a specific transgender man in Spain, and possibly transgender people in general, were not suitable candidates to be godparents. (Hayley thought about her own godparents and had to confess that she had no idea what the problem was.) The third thing that she found was that Pope Francis had said—more recently than the atomic bombs thing—that trans people should be fully welcomed in the Catholic Church. But she knew enough about Pope Francis to know that when he said that about a person or a class of people it did not necessarily mean that he approved of them.

Hayley TODAY at 5:45 PM: Hey, are any of your Ab Club friends Catholic?

Bethany TODAY at 5:47 PM: i think terri russo is? idk, sorry, i’m not as into the ab club as i used to be

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: good, they’re haters and losers (as our ~esteemed president~ would say).

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: Terri seems okay, though; I ran into her in the hall today and we chatted for a few minutes. Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 5:49 PM: np

Bethany TODAY at 5:54 PM: why do u ask?

Hayley TODAY at 5:57 PM: It’s nothing, I just had a question about Catholicism and wanted to ask somebody we know instead of just going to the Church of the Transverberation and asking a stranger

Bethany TODAY at 5:58 PM: makes sense

Bethany TODAY at 6:00 PM: ill text u her #

Hayley TODAY at 6:02 PM: Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 6:08 PM: np

Hayley spent about an hour and a half doing homework and the rest of the evening after that trying to figure out how to ask Teresa (or “Terri,” evidently) about this without outing Lara. Was it “outing” if the person being outed didn’t know for sure? Either way, it was still a dick move. Eventually she decided to pull the old “asking for a friend move,” let Terri suspect what she may, and explain in person if Terri questioned her.

            She sent a text right before she went to bed, and woke up to Terri’s reply (how early did this girl get up in the morning?! About quarter of six, apparently).

Hayley YESTERDAY at 11:14 PM: Hey, it’s Hayley Weingarten. I got your number from my sister Bethany. I wanted to know if you know anything about the Catholic Church’s positions on transgender issues; I have a friend who’s, I guess the term would be questioning.

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: I’m not really an expert on that, I hoope your friend is okay though! Want me to pray for them?

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: *hope

Hayley texted Terri to yes, please pray for Lara, then went down to breakfast.

            “I know I don’t have any chores this week ‘cause of the situation with Buster,” she said over breakfast, “but Dad, I was thinking I could help you with dinner tonight anyway?”

            “Actually,” said Mr. Weingarten, “your mother’s cooking tonight. I have to work late.”

            “I’d be happy to have your help, Hayley, as long as you’re okay with pork chops again,” Mrs. Weingarten said.

            Hayley shrugged. “Sure,” she said. At this point Buster came downstairs and started begging. Hayley didn’t have the heart to withhold just a little bit of egg white from him.

            The rest of Hayley’s week, which was the last week before spring break, was mostly centered on Buster. Terri accosted her on Thursday to let her know that she was praying for Lara (Terri did not know it was Lara, so she was just praying for “Hayley’s friend”), and Lara told her later the same day that her feelings were still veering rapidly back and forth and that she had not told anybody else yet. Hayley wondered what that might have to do with the strange incident with Jacen. Jacen himself had started to look at her with an odd glint in his eye, less predatory than judgmental, as if Jacen had any room to judge anyone.

            Buster got worse, but still seemed in good spirits, although it might just be that Hayley wanted desperately to believe that he was. Hayley tried not to think too much about Lara or Terri or Jacen or anybody else when she was with him; she was taking him for two walks a day now, one before school and one after. She knew that it would by no means avail him as she wished it would, but she believed that he deserved at least this much time for joy squeezed into his life before the end. Still he sensed her upset; he kissed her to sleep every night, and woke her up by nuzzling her in the morning. His eyes, deep brown, got deeper and darker, as if he was passing out past the breakers of some shallow twilit sea; when he looked at her, she felt, uncomfortably, as if one eye saw her and the other eye saw the hereafter. Once or twice each day he would whimper piteously for a few minutes and then fall silent, but other than that he was his usual gamboling woofing self, which arrested Hayley’s grief and made it harder for her to accept what she knew intellectually was bound to happen soon. By the time the last bell rang on Saturday, confusion had set in; she knew that she was ignoring Lara, and not only Lara but Charlotte and her other friends too, but she figured they knew, from her or from one another, what was going on, and in any event Lara had asked her to give her some more time on her own before bringing to her what she called her “findings.”

            Finally spring break came and Hayley could devote her whole day to Buster. After service on Sunday she asked Pastor Dave to meet about Buster at some point during the week; he asked her if she wanted advice or comfort, and she told him that she was getting all the practical advice she needed from Dr. Chandler and from her family. “Mostly at this point I just wanna be told that things’ll be all right,” she said.

            “All right,” said Pastor Dave, clapping his hands down on his bejeaned knees as he sat, in a posture oddly close to being prim, across his office from Hayley. “That I can do.”

            “Thank you,” said Hayley, and scheduled a meeting with Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, before the youth group’s Bible study that she sometimes went to. She would have to figure out how to avoid the youth group after the meeting because she really did not feel like getting dragged into fellowshipping with them right now. Maybe in a month or two she would be more inclined towards that sort of enforced joviality again.

            She went for four walks with Buster on Monday and three on Tuesday. She worried that she was tiring him out too much, and Dr. Chandler was noncommittal when she called to ask her whether that might be the case, but she figured that Buster was enjoying himself and would not get to enjoy himself for very much longer, so it was, to her at least, worth their while. She kept cycling back around to that over and over again, that simple brute and brutish fact of the impending absence of Buster. She had been away from Buster for a week or two before—a family vacation to Ireland when she was eleven, a school trip to the nation’s capital over spring break last year. Both of those times somebody had been there to watch Buster and call or email her to give updates on how he was feeling and tell him anything cute or funny that he had done that day. The voyage on which Buster was now embarking would never return to port and he would need to go alone. Hayley had had Buster since he was newly whelped and she was newly four; there had been life before him, but she remembered it only in minuscule snatches, like still snapshots, playing blocks with Bethany or pouring sand on Charlotte’s head in the daycare playground. One of her earliest elaborated memories was of watching Buster eating, sitting there in a row with the rest of John Conway’s Rottweiler mix’s litter, and pointing a stubby little four-year-old finger to him and saying “That one.”

            “He doesn’t have an immortal soul,” she asked Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, “does he?” The question tasted flat and fake in her mouth.

            “Hayley,” said Pastor Dave, “have you ever read Lewis’s The Great Divorce?”

            “I can’t say I have,” said Hayley. “I’ve read some Lewis, but not that one.”

            “It’s a tour of heaven and hell. It’s like The Divine Comedy except instead of Virgil there’s a Victorian writer named George MacDonald. Anyway, in The Great Divorce there’s a character who comes from heaven to try to talk to her husband in hell. Her name is Sarah Smith and she has this whole train of animals following after her, because the love that she had for them, so to speak, hallowed them and brought them up to heaven with her in the form of the feelings that she had towards them. So even though Buster doesn’t have an immortal soul in the same way that you and I do, your love for him might mean that he’s with you in heaven in some way when you get there—according to Lewis, anyway. Does that help at all?”

            “To an extent. You’ve told me in the past that in heaven nobody would want to see anything but God. I’d interpret that to mean that I shouldn’t care.”

            “Well, don’t interpret it that way. I mean, you’re going to want to see your human loved ones in heaven, right? Even if you’re all focusing on God together, I’m sure you’ll be glad that they’re there. I don’t see any reason why God wouldn’t show you Buster again if you wanted to see him too.”

            “Okay. That does help. Thank you.”

            Hayley went from Pastor Dave’s office to the church library to look for The Great Divorce. She found it wedged in between The Weight of Glory and something called Letters to Malcolm, and checked it out for two weeks. She bumped into Dan in the parking lot, started to make some excuses but then decided to be honest with him about the situation and about why she wouldn’t be at youth group for a while, then went home and started reading. When she eventually got to “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them,” she gently shut the book and opened Code Name Verity, which Ms. O’Hare was having them read for their historical fiction unit in English. The book was by any imaginable objective metric way more depressing than The Great Divorce, but she realized as she was reading it that she was using it as a perverse form of escape from the Buster situation, itself almost a welcome distraction from the Lara situation. She felt unkind towards herself for thinking of her dog’s impending demise as a welcome distraction from anything. Her head and heart hurt too much to stay awake, and she lay down to drift off through the dusk.

3. 

To say that Hayley had a long day on the first Monday after spring break would be to say that cutting one’s own head off is awkward. Apparently over break Lara had come to the decision to start telling people about her musings and questionings. Hayley spent half the day trying to get the Ryans and Jacens of the school (Jacen having turned on Lara again) to lay off of her and half the day remonstrating with Lara to keep thinking things through carefully before spreading this like wildfire. “You’re going to get a lot of unthinking attacks and a lot of uncritical support,” she said. “I don’t think either of those things are what you need right now.”

            But Lara seemed to want the unthinking attacks and uncritical support. She had always been comfortable in extremes. In seventh grade she had written a piece of expository writing for history class that seemed to excuse Stalin; when she was told to edit the piece to be more morally responsible, she had said that Stalin was worse than Hitler and there had been no good reason to ally with him at all. In freshman year she had gone from thinking Taylor Swift was a maggot breeding in the body cavities of the dead to thinking she was the best female act ever, and last year she had gone back. She had gone from thinking people who liked exploring abandoned insane asylums were overly-gothic lurid creeps to dragging Hayley to one the other weekend, even if she had had an ulterior motive for so doing. So she would, apparently, rather deal with Ryan and Jacen, or with Rick Neville and Autumn Baker-Noel, than with Hayley. Hayley tried not to find this too offensive or too personally hurtful.

            Over the first half of that week Buster’s health kept declining, but it was a managed decline. He was only in the mood for one walk a day, on which Hayley took him punctiliously every day first thing after school. She called Dr. Chandler and she said that probably his other systems were starting to fail. On Wednesday she squeezed in a short appointment in which Dr. Chandler gave Buster a twice-over and gave him about a week.

            “That’s…what, four days more than your last estimate?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Is it okay if I count those extra four days as a victory?”

            “It’s more than okay. Honestly, I’m not sure that Buster’s physically in any better shape than I thought he was; what’s been keeping him going this long appears to be his love for you.” Hayley wondered how that fit in with what Pastor Dave and C.S. Lewis had said about how Buster might or might not fare in the world to come. She did not see any use in bringing that question up with Dr. Chandler, who she was pretty sure was an agnostic, possibly an atheist. “You know, if it helps,” Dr. Chandler said, “I do believe that people and animals that we love can outlive themselves, so to speak, in the form of the love that we have for them.” She got up and looked out the window over the parking lot; probably she was trying to be mildly, but perhaps only mildly, dramatic. “I would say the same thing to a farm family with a beloved cow,” she said, “or a marine biologist who was very much attached to a whale.”

            Oh. Perhaps there wasn’t so much daylight between Dr. Chandler and Pastor Dave after all. Hayley nuzzled Buster, and smiled a secret smile into his fur.

            On Thursday she ran into Terri Russo again. Some of the same people who were attacking Lara were attacking Terri, apparently.

            “Why?”                                                                                       

            “Just bog-standard racist abuse about my Mexican mom.” Terri shrugged. “I’m used to it by now.”

            “I didn’t realize you were Latina,” said Hayley. She did not want to say so directly, but Terri looked pretty white to her.

            “It’s okay,” said Terri. “I look pretty white to most people. My mom is one of those high-status Mexicans whose ancestry is mostly European anyway. She met my dad when he was studying abroad in Monterrey in college.”

            “What’d your dad go to college for?”

            “Well, Spanish.” Terri laughed a silvery laugh. “I’m thinking of doing pre-med. I had pretty bad tonsillitis when I was a kid and had to be in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for a while, so I kinda wanna be an ear, nose, and throat doctor.”

            “Did you live in Philadelphia?”

            “Until I was ten, yeah. There’s some things I miss but I actually like parts of small-town living better so I don’t mind it up here.” Hayley wasn’t actually sure if she would consider where they lived “small-town” or “the suburbs.” It was an interesting question. “What about you? Do you have any ideas for college?”

            “Don’t tell anyone I said this…”

            “Of course not…”

            “…but I’m not sure college is right for me. I’m sure I’ll end up doing it, just because it’s the only way you can really get ahead comfortably in this country anymore, but if I didn’t feel the need to do it then I’m not convinced I would think to do it on my own.”

            “That’s fair. Would you want to get married straight out of high school if that were still a thing?”

            “I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t really wanna come across as one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types but…I think there might be a part of me that I don’t really feed or pay much attention to that actually is one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types.” Hayley laughed a little. “Don’t hold it against me?”

            “I won’t. Don’t worry.” Terri leaned against her locker with a similar sort of restrained drama to her posture that Hayley yesterday had seen in Dr. Chandler. “By the way, your friend wants to talk to you. I’m not sure why but it seemed urgent.”

            “Thanks,” said Hayley. “Which friend?” She was pretty sure this was Lara, but she wanted to make sure.

            “Charizard Rice,” said Terri.

            “Crap,” said Hayley. “I’ll see you later.” She skittered off to talk to Charlotte before the next period started.

            She found Charlotte sitting with her arms folded in the woodshop, her back to the jigsaw. There was a sour expression on her face and Hayley was reminded immediately, without Charlotte having to say anything, of her many and various blowings-off of Charlotte over the past couple of weeks.

            “I’m sorry,” she said before Charlotte could say anything.

            “I accept your apology,” said Charlotte thickly, “but could you not at least have told me that all this stuff was going on for you? Like, the thing with Lara is one thing”—Hayley took as neutral a mental note as she could of the fact that Charlotte was still calling her Lara, as opposed to using her last name like some people had started to—“but could you not at least have told me about Buster being sick?”

            “Buster is dying, not sick,” said Hayley.

            “I know that. I had to hear it from Bethany of all people.” Charlotte leaned forward on her stool. “Hayley, I accept your apology, but I have to say I’m pretty damn pissed. We were going to go grab dinner together at Red Papaya at some point over break, remember? And then ice cream at Carlton’s. You could have at least explained to me what was going on. I know you’ve been blowing off youth group too and that’s fine, I get that, and I’m pretty sure Dan gets it, even. But for crying out loud, Hayley, we’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”

            “I know. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

            “Give me a few weeks and I’m pretty sure I can,” said Charlotte. “We’ve had these fights before.”

            And they had. In fourth grade Charlotte had copied off Hayley’s pop math quiz and they had both gotten detention even though Charlotte had been looking over Hayley’s shoulder without Hayley’s knowledge. They had not spoken for about two weeks after detention ended. In the summer before seventh grade Hayley had yoinked one of Charlotte’s CDs because she was envious that Charlotte got to play it over and over again while Hayley had to wait until her birthday, which was in about three weeks, to get it. That time they had been on the outs until Hayley’s birthday party, at which she had given it back with a tearful apology. (That time, Pastor Dave had actually consented to hear a confession of sin to make Hayley feel better, even though only God could take away her sin.) This was not new, and they were more mature now. Hayley had the utmost trust in Charlotte and in their friendship as they left that room.

            On Friday and over the weekend she realized that the same could not be said of her friendship with Lara or with any of her other friends. Lara started telling people that Hayley was holding up her process by not having gotten back to her yet. On Monday Hayley found a note in her locker that Lara had apparently left there last Wednesday and that Hayley had for whatever reason not seen until now; it had fallen through the grate on her locker down, somehow, towards the back of it, behind her schoolbooks and where she kept her thermos.

Hey, I’m ready to talk about things with you. What have you been finding out? What are your own feelings? –Fielding

Things came to a head on Tuesday of the second week after spring break. Hayley made some time to take a walk around the school tennis courts with Lara during their lunch hour. The tennis courts were not yet in frequent use because the delayed and rainy spring, and there were only a few brave people out practicing their serves. They spoke in low, hushed voices.

            “I still don’t really know what to make of things,” said Hayley. “I’ve been so preoccupied with this thing with Buster, you know.” Lara nodded understandingly. “To be honest, I do still think of you as Lara. I don’t have to anymore if you don’t want me to, but it’ll take some time for me to stop. And I’ll need to figure out how I should think of you on my own. It’d have to be something we’re both comfortable with.”

            “I understand.”

            “I might need to talk to Pastor Dave or at least Dan about it. Although I’ve been trying to avoid discussing it with them because I don’t wanna rock the boat.”

            “It seems to me like you’ve been trying to avoid discussing it period,” said Lara waspishly.

            “I mean,” said Hayley, “I guess I have. And I’m sorry for that, I know this is important to you. But like I told you last week I really think you should give this a little more time yourself. You can’t make these decisions rashly.”

            “Isn’t that just for your own comfort, though?” asked Lara. “I mean, I’m comfortable with this.”

            “You were going back and forth on this as recently as spring break! Look, I’ve got two more days or so with my dog, and then I really want to discuss this a little more with you before either of us comes to any conclusions. I want to discuss it a little more with you, and I do want to discuss it with Pastor Dave or Dan, and I’m sorry about that but I can’t just switch a flip—sorry, I mean I can’t just flip a switch in my brain that—that—”

Lara stared at her for a few seconds, then muttered “Give me a break” in a bizarrely apologetic tone of voice and started walking away. She walked right onto one of the tennis courts and started talking to a girl whom Hayley recognized as Autumn Baker-Noel—one of the popular group to whom she had been closer last semester.

            For the rest of the day Autumn Baker-Noel and the other popular people, with whom Hayley had never exactly been as thick as thieves but among whose number she was aware that much of the rest of the school for whatever reason saw her, avoided her and in some cases glared at her. Given Autumn’s political views and the clout that she held with the rest of them and that Lara had recently begun to hold with her, Hayley was not surprised. And yet it felt odd to have something like a decisive break with these people to whom she had given so little thought anyway over the past month or two. It was as if, upon finding out that she had unexpectedly inherited a small fortune, she had immediately had to spend it all on a sudden health crisis.

            “Sorry to see what’s going on with your friend Fielding,” said Terri to her at the end of the day. The fact that Terri was calling Lara, Fielding, somehow felt like a criticism of and a vindication of Hayley at the same time.

            Hayley shrugged. “It’s going to take a while to sink in. Besides, these are my last days with my dog. I’d do well to take more of my cues from him than from anyone else.”

            “I haven’t met your dog,” said Terri, which seemed like a statement of the obvious to Hayley. “Would you like to introduce us before it’s too late?”

            “Sure. I’m cooking with my dad tonight so it’d be good to have someone over to appreciate it. Do you have any dietary needs?”

            “Not any needs, but I don’t really like seafood besides white fish, and I’m not really crazy about spicy food. Heresy for someone with a Mexican mom, I know.”

            “You’re in luck; we’re cooking up some trout and throwing it in a stew with vegetables and pasta.”

            “Sounds great.” They had to part ways soon, Terri to the school bus and Hayley to her car. “Oh, by the way! You and Charizard Rice are besties, right?”

            “Not at the moment, but I have hope that we will be again. Why?”

            “Nothing, it’s just, my priest knows her cousin Amelia’s mom through this Catholic-Jewish dialogue group they’re in, so I could get in touch with Amelia if you’d like to spend more time with her sometime. I think I once overheard something about you going to Great Escape together?”

            “Sounds great,” threw back Hayley. “I’ll text you my address right now. Do you have a bike or something so you can come over in, say, two and a half hours?”

            “Yep, I have a three-speed bike. See you then.”

            Terri got on the bus and Hayley drove home to spend one of her last nights with Buster.

4. 

Buster started moaning and howling at all hours around midnight on Wednesday night. When Hayley wrapped him in a towel and started giving him some water with an eye dropper, he started feeling a little better. He lingered through Thursday and gave up the ghost in the wee hours of Friday morning, just as Hayley had made up her mind to skip school tomorrow and make an emergency appointment to have Dr. Chandler put him to sleep.

            They buried Buster in the back yard on Saturday. Other than Mom, Dad, Bethany, and Josh, Terri showed up, as did Charlotte, willing to make an overture towards Hayley but now unsure about restoring their old closeness after having heard a possibly exaggerated version of the conversation with Lara (or Fielding) from someone in Autumn’s circle. Terri had loved the dinner on Tuesday and asked if they could make it a weekly thing. Hayley was too inarticulate from tears to say yes right away—homework and other things might get in the way—but she made it clear that she thought it was a nice idea.

            “You’re welcome to sit in on Mass at Transverb sometime,” Terri said to her quietly. “Although I understand that you probably shouldn’t take communion.”

            “And you’re welcome at my Oak Lawn youth group when I start going again,” Hayley managed to say back, “although you might not like it if you’re not up for arguing over whether Stranger Things is ‘more Christian’ than Westworld.”

            “Oh, you bet I have my opinions on that,” said Terri.

            “Great,” said Hayley. “See you there.”

            She did feel badly about Lara (or Fielding). She would be following things assiduously. She would need, moreover, to cling harder to the Gospel now. She was not sure how to feel about that.

Fielding TODAY at 4:44 PM: Hayley Weingarten and Terri Russo are friends now

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: yeah I know

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: what about it?

Fielding TODAY at 4:48 PM: nothing, I’m just glad H. has someone drama-free to be friends with now

Rick TODAY at 4:52 PM: Is it really “drama-free” though? Terri’s in Ab Club, isn’t she? I thought Hayley hated those people.

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: she does but I don’t think terri’s crazy aobu thtem either

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *abut them

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *ABOUT them, sry

Autumn TODAY at 4:55 PM: anyway I guess I’m happy for them?

Fielding TODAY at 4:57 PM: yeah, things have worked out pretty conveniently for Hayley from the looks of it

Fielding TODAY at 4:58 PM: even though I don’t think anybody else really likes her very much now (which is reasonable tbh)

Fielding TODAY at 4:59 PM: it kind of pisses me off honestly that the timing here was so bad. What with her dog I mean

Autumn TODAY at 5:00 PM: don’t let it get to you. these things happen.

Fielding TODAY at 5:00 PM: thx

Short story: “Strategy of Tension”

One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.

            Rosie’s current short story was inspired by something she was reading in her coursework about “Operation Gladio,” a NATO stay-behind operation that had been meant to keep Italy in the Western Bloc, ideally with a deeply entrenched center-right government (only some of which had gone according to plan), during the Cold War. The preexisting literary chronicler of this history in Italy par excellence was Umberto Eco, who had been dead for several years but who appeared as a character in Rosie’s short story through the conceit that the British novelist Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and for all Becky knew possibly of Nights at the Circus as well, was contacting him via Ouija board. Waters, as she appeared as a character in the context of Rosie’s story, was exploring a departure from her usual subject matter, which was apparently woebegone British lesbians of past generations, to write a political thriller about a series of unfortunate events in the late 1970s in which Aldo Moro, an Italian political leader who had forged a power-sharing agreement between the Catholic center-right and the Italian Communist Party, had been kidnapped by Marxist hardliners, then abandoned to his captors by the rest of the Italian political establishment. At some point in this series of events a professor at the University of Bologna, Romano Prodi, himself a future Prime Minister of Italy, claimed to have contacted a then-recently-deceased politician named Giorgio La Pira in a séance and obtained from him the address where the Marxist hardliners were holding Moro. Such was the subject matter of Waters and Eco’s book in the context of Rosie’s story.

            Gorging herself on metafiction like this as she did, it was a miracle, Becky thought, that Rosie had time to go to class and do her research on top of these stories and her musical pursuits.

            “La Pira might be a saint one of these days, you know,” Jerry said to Rosie at one point.

            Jerry, Becky’s other roommate, was in full Yirmiyahu Polen. Like Rosie, he was a New Jerseyite by birth and to a certain extent by temperament, but at the time that the three of them had met at UMass he and his family had been living in the Amherst area for about three years and his parents had become heavily involved with a group that styled itself “Ethical Warrior Activists.” Certain other people involved with Ethical Warrior Activists—not Jerry’s parents—drove around a truck festooned with bumper stickers that said things like “Jesus Hearts Wikileaks” and “Hearing Crazy Voices? Turn Off Fox News,” the first of which had aged poorly in relation to the second. Jerry’s birth name was Jeremy; he had changed it to Yirmiyahu, which was the Hebrew form of Jeremiah, to follow through on a promise made to a Chabadnik rabbi over vodka shots on Purim. To this day he was perpetually mildly astonished that somebody named Rebekah Zylberberg was not actually Jewish. He had come to Rome a year and a half after Becky and Rosie, to work for some sort of think tank focusing on Christian-Jewish reconciliation. His music taste extended to “Video Killed the Radio Star” and some but not all music from early-2000s Japanese video games. He voted absentee at his parents’ address and had voted for Ted Cruz in the last Massachusetts presidential primary, then been a Hillary Clinton-Evan McMullin swing voter in November.

            About three days into Rosie’s work on her Sarah Waters Umberto Eco story, she suddenly asked Becky and Jerry to show her how to make a recipe for a sort of fish stew that they had found in a Sephardic Jewish cookbook earlier in the year and more or less regularly made for themselves, Rosie, and on a couple of occasions Rosie’s other friends ever since. They got the fish from a grocery store in Ostia whose regular clientele included seventy-year-old Communist Refoundation Party voters with full beards and man buns, svelte drag queens in lacy black minidresses and six-inch stilettos, and, on one occasion, the distracting lead singer from the band Lacuna Coil. The fish was made with a sauce that had a tomato base and several spices that in American cooking would have been associated with sweet fall flavors like apple and pumpkin. All three of them just called it “the tomato and cinnamon fish” rather than whatever the cookbook called it. Becky and Jerry had memorized the recipe very quickly and now felt comfortable making their own minor alterations to it, some of which they were happy to teach to Rosie if she wanted.

            “Okay, Rosie,” said Becky to Rosie, “at this point you just let it simmer and stir it intermittently. It’s supposed to cook down into a thicker sauce than it is currently. And we should be cooking the fish at the same time, ideally, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if we leave that for later in the process.”

            “Do we add any more seasoning?” asked Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “it’s supposed to taste mostly like the tomatoes and cinnamon. Trust us on this; the flavor combination is better than it sounds.”

            “I know. I’ve had it numbers of times. It’s just that I associate cinnamon mostly with these Christmas cookies my mom’s cousin makes,” said Rosie.

            “Yes, I think all of us have that mom’s cousin who makes Christmas cookies somewhere in our family tree,” said Becky. “Except Jerry—”

            “I do have an aunt on my dad’s side who always overdoes it with the blintzes on Shavuot,” Jerry said. He had, for this project, furnished the recipe, but was currently lounging on the couch in the living room into which the kitchen opened in a natural manner, listening to Billy Bragg, to whom somebody in his think tank (of all people) had recently introduced him, on those earbuds that Becky could never get to sit in her ears properly. “By the way,” he went on, shouting over the music as if the others could hear it too, “did you know that Rosie is in love?”

            “Jerry!” snapped Rosie in a way that confirmed it. She turned to Becky and there was a slight flush rising on her cheeks, visibly spreading over the course of seconds.

            Becky was not too surprised, but she was a little more surprised than she thought she probably should have been. It was a rare thing for Rosie to express strong emotions other than feminist outrage, thirst for love in the abstract without any particular object or target, and something that bore the same surface resemblance to religious ecstasy that dolphins bore to certain smaller and more docile sharks.

            “It’s with Maddalena,” said Rosie. “Maddalena Galluccio.”

            “Yes, I knew which Maddalena,” said Becky fatuously. “How many Maddalenas do we know?”

            This made things stranger, she thought to herself as she continued explaining the stirring and simmering to Rosie. Maddalena Galluccio was a little younger than them; she had just graduated with a baccalaureate in music and dance from some university in Abruzzo earlier this year, then moved to Rome to hack it in the arts scene here, a program of life that had not gone as planned so far in part because she self-described as a “bad Catholic” and made sure everyone knew it. Like many bad Catholics, Maddalena had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of the sanctity of human life; also like more bad Catholics than was commonly supposed, she had apparently been an intense supporter of the center-right coalition at the last election. The idea of Rosie being in love with Maddalena was in and of itself unsurprising and felt what Becky’s junior-year medieval lit professor might have called “behovely,” but it was behovely in the same way as were songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town played in a Polish fusion restaurant. It was a complete mystery to Becky whether or not Maddalena had any interest in women.

            It was while eating the tomato and cinnamon fish for dinner with Roman artichokes and hazelnut candy later that evening that it became clear to Becky from context that Jerry had some pretty fond feelings for Maddalena Galluccio also, and had probably brought up Rosie’s feelings in order to castigate his own.

            “What do you find so appealing about Maddalena, Rosie?” Becky asked as they ate the fish.

            “She just intrigues me,” said Rosie. “She’s an Italian original; I don’t think I could find her even in Seaside Heights.”

            “That’s racist,” said Becky archly.

            “Maybe so but I do feel that only she could be the way she is. Anybody who’s had a weird enough childhood and is afraid of their parents in just the right way can be a Rosie or a Jerry or a Becky, but it takes a special kind of person to be a Maddalena.”

            “If you say so.”

            “The first time I ever really noticed Maddalena,” Jerry cut in, “was that incident with Pedro a couple months ago. Do you remember that, Becky?”

            “All too well,” said Becky.

            “Surely ‘Pietro’?” said Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “his name is Pedro. I think he’s from Valencia. He’s a year older than Maddalena and first met her when she hiked the Camino de Santiago when she was twenty. I think they online dated for a while but the relationship didn’t survive the transition to meatspace when he moved to Rome. I actually wasn’t privy to what exactly happened with the two of them and Jerry, though, only that Jerry went out to Maddalena’s apartment late at night and came back muttering something about how attempting to attribute emotional significance to performing mitzvot is a form of idolatry. I think it behooves Jerry to give us the details.”

            “Well, there’s not a whole lot to tell,” said Jerry. “Maddalena and Pedro were both at a party somewhere near the Piazza Barberini and Maddalena had a little too much to drink and looked like she might hook up with this guy who looked a lot older than her and seemed aggressive. Pedro got really concerned for her so he roofied her.”

            “Oh God,” said Rosie with a revolted look on her face.

            “Hold on,” said Becky. “I’m interested in this ‘so’. He got concerned for her so he roofied her? Is ‘so’ really the word you want here, Jerry?”

            “Yes, actually,” said Jerry. “He took her back to her own apartment, put her to bed fully clothed, then sat in her kitchen and made himself an Aperol spritz and sat there nursing it like Humphrey Bogart while he waited for her to come to. At a certain point I came over because I’d arranged to watch a movie with her that night; she’d made two commitments for the same night, or something. I didn’t know her well yet at that point. She came to and Pedro explained the situation to her.”

            “And how did Maddalena, uh, react to this, this…you know,” said Rosie, so confused and disgusted that abstract nouns failed her.

            “She was a lot calmer and more philosophical about it than I would have expected, personally,” said Jerry. “She acted a little like she was a noble lady and she was giving us an audience.”

            “Oh, God,” said Rosie again.

            “We ended up watching a Rossellini movie and eating jam sandwiches,” said Jerry.

            “Oh,” said Rosie.

 ❦

At this point something in the living room moved, possibly in a draught, in such a way that Jerry’s phone started playing, out of nowhere, a song that he had paused before dinner.

In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded

By the resumption of nuclear testing, and he is reminded

That Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell

At the first hurdle.

“Oh, sorry,” muttered Jerry, and went to the living room to turn his phone off.

            “This fish really is very good,” Rosie said to Becky while he was gone. “Not to be self-aggrandizing or anything but I think I did a really good job for my first try.”

            “I do too,” said Becky. “The spices in the sauce actually ended up really well-balanced.”

 ❦

“I know you’re not as stoked for L’Italia del Treno as I am, but will you watch it with me when it airs?” Jerry asked Becky over lunch the next day while, as was supposed, Rosie was reading a book for one of her assignments.

            “Stop saying ‘stoked’ and ‘L’Italia del Treno’ in the same sentence,” said Becky. “It’s making me crazy.”

            “Well, will you?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Rosie wants you to tell Maddalena she has feelings for her,” said Jerry a couple of minutes later, with a forkful of puttanesca halfway from his plate to his mouth. A caper slid down to the bottom of a trailing bit of spaghetti and then dropped gently off back onto the plate. “Don’t ask me why.” He took the bite, then another. Becky looked down at her strangozzi alla norcina, a recipe that she had picked up on a weeklong trip to Orvieto with some classmates last summer, with the sudden, unaccountable, barely even excusable, more than slightly queasy feeling that she would move heaven and earth and give up love and sex and morality alike for a milkshake and fries.

            “Rosie,” called Becky, “Rosie!”

            “She’s out,” said Jerry. “I think she’s telling some of her IR friends about that short story she’s writing. I don’t think any of them know who Sarah Waters is but they know Umberto Eco and they definitely know Romano Prodi.”

            “‘Umberto Eco I know, and Romano Prodi I know, but who is Sarah Waters to me?’” snowcloned Becky.

            “I actually read some of that book Fingersmith the other day,” Jerry said. “It’s pretty good, although I wouldn’t recommend it to Maddalena.”

            Becky set down her fork, took a gulp of wine, and said, not doing much to hide her frustration, “Why the Christ is everything in our lives about Maddalena these days?”

            “Maddalena’s an intriguing person.”

            “Maddalena is a berlusconiana. Maybe she should read Fingersmith and then we can see what she makes of Rosie’s short story. Think of it as a Rorschach test for the twenty-two-year-old soul.”

            “Eat your strangozzi, Becky,” said Jerry.

            “Anyway,” Becky said, “I think I’ll give Maddalena a call this evening after my evening class and explain…parts of the situation to her. I’m pretty sure I do have her contact info in my phone somewhere. Do you think that would be a good idea?” Jerry nodded. He seemed a little too enthusiastic about being able to nod at this, an enthusiasm that Becky made a mental note to make a mental note of, but did not actually make a mental note of and had forgotten within thirty seconds. “Do you know if Maddalena is into women?” Becky asked.

            “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Jerry, “but I think it’s better to go straight to the horse’s mouth for these things. So to speak.” Becky wasn’t sure what was “so to speak” about it, since she guessed Maddalena could be considered a little funny-looking, but not in a John Kerry Sarah Jessica Parker “why the long face?” sort of way.

            This conversation petered off, and Becky did not think about it again until she actually did call Maddalena, at about quarter of ten that night. Maddalena’s phone rang seven times—at each time from the fourth onwards Becky kept expecting it to go to voicemail—but finally Maddalena picked up, and Becky could immediately hear that she was at a party, probably a hipster party given that a song that Becky could place as being by either MGMT or Metric was blasting so loudly that Maddalena had to shout.

            “Pronto?” shouted Maddalena.

            “Buona sera; sono Rebekah Zylberberg. Posso parlare con Maddalena Galluccio, per favore?”

            “Sono Maddalena Galluccio. Scusi—” There was a moment of pure, unadulterated hipster music as Maddalena seemed to move through a crowd to a somewhat quieter place, maybe a coatroom of some sort. “Mi dispiace. La musica è più forte. Lei chi è?”

            “Rebekah Zylberberg, un’amica di Rosaria Distano e Yirmiyahu Polen. Vorrei parlare in inglese, per favore.”

            “Sorry,” said Maddalena after a moment. “Of course. Yes, I remember you now; you are their roommate, right?”

            “Yes, that’s me. Can I ask if you’re at a party, Maddalena? I hear music playing pretty loud; is it Metric? MGMT?”

            “It’s Metric.”

            “Okay.”

            “I don’t think Metric and MGMT sound much alike. Do you?”

            “Okay.”

            “Yes, I am at a party. Why do you ask?”

            “Nothing, it’s just…” Becky sighed and steeled herself for what was for to come. “My roommate Rosie, Rosaria Distano, has a crush on you, it seems like,” she said. “She wanted me to get in touch with you and let you know.”

            Maddalena was silent for about ten seconds, then said, in a placid, contemplative tone of voice, “I’m sorry, but I’m not very interested in women in that way. Besides, shouldn’t someone who is almost twenty-seven years old be past the point of having her friends confess for her?”

            “Okay,” said Becky. Then something overtook her, spiritually speaking, and she said “Did Rosie ever tell you about the short stories she writes?”
            “Not in so many words, no,” said Maddalena, whatever that meant. “Why?”
            “Well, because she’s writing one right now that has—do you know who Sarah Waters is?”

            “No; should I?”

            “That’s for you to decide. You know who Umberto Eco was, though?”

            “Yes, of course; I have a couple of volumes of that history of philosophy that he co-edited sitting on my bookcase at home in Castrovalva. I—you know what?” she asked. “I think I would rather hear about Rosie’s short stories from Rosie, if that is okay with you.”

            “That’s fine with me, of course,” said Becky. “Now—listen, I’d sort of like to get to know you better, since Rosie and Jerry are both so fond of you.” She let this imply what it may. “Would you like to grab dinner tomorrow?”

            “Tomorrow? Sure; it is a Saturday night and I don’t believe I’ll be doing anything. I know a place in the Jewish Ghetto if you’re interested.”

            “Sure. Text me the name of the restaurant and name your best time and I’ll see you there.”

 ❦

They met at the restaurant, which was in a square with the grandiloquent name Piazza delle Cinque Scole Sinagoghe del Ghetto di Roma già Via del Progresso, and sat around for about five minutes looking over the menus after dismissing a smiling waiter who was trying to help them and seemed to love his job.

            “I like this place because it gets a number of totally nondeserved bad reviews online,” Maddalena said. “I don’t know why—maybe the people reviewing it are antisemites or maybe they have just been to much better restaurants elsewhere—but I like it here, it is one of my favorite restaurants in Rome, and there are usually not too many tourists, although on some nights there are.”

            “Isn’t the seventy-fifth anniversary of that Under the Pope’s Windows thing coming up this coming week?” Becky asked.

            “Yes, very much so, it is,” said Maddalena, “and I do sort of wonder, you know, how the Pope might react. It is such a black mark on his predecessor, even if it’s overblown by some histori—sorry, is this making you uncomfortable?”

            “Huh? No,” said Becky. “My Jewish great-grandfather actually had pretty good experiences with the Church during the War. But of course I’m aware that that’s far from universal. Speaking of the Pope,” she said after a stage-managed pause of only a couple of seconds, “what is this ‘spaghetti papali Francesco’ stuff? It’s an interesting thing for a restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto to be serving.”

            “It has ham and parmesan,” said Maddalena. “So it’s doubly not kosher. Triply, even, if they named it after the Pope.” She furrowed her brow as if trying to remember something, then said, with a fluttering giggle, “Don’t tell Jerry!”

            “I won’t,” said Becky. “Anyway, I think I’ll get this baccalà lasagna; that sounds interesting. You?”

            “Puttanesca, probably, for the primo piatto. Let’s split some of the artichokes.”

            “Yes, let’s.”

            “I don’t mean to lead Rosie into delusion or too much romance about what I am like,” said Maddalena when the artichokes got there. “I don’t want to be thought of as a shrinking flower because I am Catholic; honestly I would probably be the hugest slut if enough guys were ever interested.”

            “You mean,” said Becky with the same feeling overtaking her as when she had asked Maddalena about Rosie’s stories, “other than Jerry?”

            Maddalena was silent for almost half a minute before Becky made an inquiring sound in her throat and she finally answered. “Is Jerry also interested in me, then?” she asked.

            “Yes,” said Becky, remembering what she had said so dismissively to Jerry about this young lady the day before. “I think he started to be interested in you around that incident with Pedro and the roofies.” This was calculated to instantiate some sort of feeling in Maddalena, but Becky did not want to admit to herself what feeling that was.

            “I see,” said Maddalena, and then changed the subject to a rambling, unevenly-told story about something she had seen or done or read or danced in high school at whatever bumfuck nowheresville in the Apennines she was from. Becky tried to imagine Maddalena at an American high school, perhaps one in small-town Texas or somewhere like that. She was certain, in a flash, that she would have been one of those rarest and dearest creatures in creation, a cheerleader with an IEP.

            It was at this point that Becky realized that she felt, suddenly, the first stirrings of a sexual attraction to Maddalena of her very own. It was not like how she had felt attraction before; there was in fact something high-school about it; it felt off, like a store brand; it made her feel disproportionate, like a majorette. She listened to Maddalena talk excitedly about a vacation she would be going on in a couple of weeks—on whose dime neither of them seemed quite sure—and then their primi got there.

 ❦

“Maddalena,” Rosie said dramatically, sitting in her favorite chair with her legs at a bizarre angle and a hand flung over her eyes. “You will be in sunlight soon.”

            “She’s going on vacation,” said Becky.

            “Your twisting is done—you have the last thread of my heart.”

            “She’s literally going on vacation. It’s not even that far away. She’s going to spend a week half-conscious in a bikini on some beach in Tunisia, alone, and then she will be back in Rome and you can talk to her then.”

            “Oh, let me be dramatic,” said Rosie, and nursed her cappuccino. “She told me you told her about my story, by the way. And she told Jerry you reminded her of the roofie incident. Why exactly do you do these things to us, Becky?”

            “I’m not doing anything ‘to’ you. I didn’t think it would kill you or her to be told about or reminded of those things, geez. Besides, they’re relevant subjects if either of you want her to date you. They were to have come up sooner or later.”

            “Yeah, on my watch.” Rosie sighed. “It’s whatever. It’s just that this story is very personal to me, and…I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

            “Why this of all stories is ‘very personal to you’? No, I guess I don’t understand, and—” Becky cut herself short. She was trying to be humane and equanimous. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Besides, I think she is after all a little too young for you, anyway.”

            “Maybe so,” said Rosie. “And she’s a far-right Forza Italia fingersmith. But, you know, I love her anyway.” Becky immediately caught the allusion to the, in their circles, semi-set phrase far-right Tory wanker and now was not sure whether she had much more desire or much less desire to read Sarah Waters than she had had before.

            “It’s not the first time a friend of Berlusconi’s has taken an extended leave in Tunisia,” said Jerry, which Rosie laughed at and which went over Becky’s head. “Anyway, did she say anything about—?”

            “She said to take it up with her yourself,” snapped Becky. “She told both of you to take all this stuff up with her yourselves and she’ll decide what to make of it and what to think of you—of us—then.”

            “Becky,” said Rosie, softly enough that Becky could almost believe she was trying not to stir shit, “do you want Maddalena to think highly of us?”

            “Sure I do,” said Becky. She turned the question, and other potential answers to it, over in her head for a little while, then gave up on it and went over to where Jerry was fiddling with his phone trying to expand his musical horizons again. It seemed to be the same Billy Bragg song as before.

It’s a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll

From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

If no one out there understands

Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

“I’m going out,” Rosie said suddenly, frustratedly. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back mid-afternoon.”

            “Okay,” said Jerry placidly, much as Maddalena would say things placidly. “Have fun.”

            “I’m sure I will,” said Rosie. “You too.” Becky was not sure of the clusivity of this “you too”; she suspected, but as yet it was only a suspicion, that she might be excluded from it more specifically than she would have liked. Rosie left with a jangle of keys and a thud of her thick boots on the staircase. Becky flopped down into the chair in which Rosie had been sprawled and crossed her legs at the ankles.

            “So now what?” asked Becky.

            “What do you mean ‘now what’?” said Jerry, pausing the music. “We wait for Rosie to get back. I’m not going to continue this whole thing with you without her. Sorry to disappoint you if you expected me to.”

            “You’re being uncharacteristically snippy,” said Becky. “You sound a little like her. –I’m sorry,” she said, finally, before Jerry could say anything, then apologized again for not letting him speak.

            “I think I understand what’s going on here,” said Jerry without explaining what that might be. “I’m gonna call Pedro. Might be good to touch base with him again.”

            “Pedro? The Pedro who roofied Maddalena to keep her from having sex with someone?”

            “I mean, in the situation at hand, it was…” Jerry sighed. “Actually, you know what? No. No, it was still inappropriate; you’re right.”

            “I didn’t say anything.”

            “I could tell what you were going to say, and you would have been right.”

            “I’m just saying that if it’s a strong male friendship you’re after then there are much better people out there than this Pedro guy seems to be. Do you even know if you have anything in common with him other than being involved in that, uh, incident?”

            “Look, we all have fondnesses for people we’re not proud of having,” said Jerry. “You’re right that, that it’s…but yeah. You’re right. I’m going to call him anyway, though; there’s probably something in that situation from back then that’s worth repairing that’d be easier to repair talking to him than to Maddalena.”

            “I’m sure that’s true,” said Becky, who developed the sureness that it was true that she was claiming as she was saying the sentence claiming that she was sure that it was true. “Okay, yeah, why don’t you call Pedro?” She could not help but feel, and be unable to shake the feeling, that she was enabling him in something. It was not so much the fact that he was going to call Pedro that bothered her as the fact that he was going to call Pedro, to lead with the same proud-to-be-an-American, hey-ya over-intimacy with which she had led with Maddalena thirty-six hours ago.

            “I think I will,” Jerry said, “this afternoon.” Something in his voice sounded foggy, as if the idea had some sort of implication or connotation that he had not considered and did not want to. Becky contemplated the obvious but did not want to decide on it before Jerry did. Jerry, she suspected, might never decide on it, nor, maybe, should he. In spite of this, she did not feel the need to force something. She would also not tell herself what she would be forcing. Maybe Rosie and her tastes had rubbed off on Becky less than Becky had thought or hoped.

            “Jerry,” Becky asked, “where is Rosie going, anyway? Did she have some sort of power brunch?”

            Jerry boggled. “She’s at the canonization,” he said, and Becky swallowed something in her throat that had more power over her than it ever had before.

❦

This is the second in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.

Short Story: “Finger Food”

It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.

            “Why are you wearing a dress shirt and tie to eat dinner by yourself anyway?” she asked. “Did you come here wanting to impress a stranger?”

            “Business partner stood me up,” said Thad vaguely, wanting anything but to get into the situation with Jason in front of this woman. “Well, are you?” he asked. She raised her long, thick eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Impressed,” he said. “Are you impressed?”

            She stopped trying not to laugh. “I would have been impressed if it weren’t for the salsa verde,” she said.

❦

Over the next few months, and especially when they finally did start dating, Thad learned a lot about Zewditu that distinguished her very sharply from Noriko, and his present with her from his past with Noriko, in his mind. Zewditu was from Ethiopia but had grown up in Washington, DC; Noriko was from Fukuoka and had not left Fukuoka for any length of time until she had come to Boston for graduate school, at which point the winters had descended upon her with almost mechanical ferocity; she had always said during winter that she could never get warm, even in the unseasonable and in the context of world history deeply frightening January and February heat waves of the past two years. He had not been through a winter with Zewditu yet, but she told him that she liked the cold; it distinguished her adulthood from her childhood. And yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that she did not like Ethiopia or being Ethiopian. She listened to Ethiopian pop music, which Thad had not known existed, and took him to Ethiopian restaurants where he somewhat queasily watched her munch away at elaborate dishes with her fingers no more self-consciously than she had eaten the chips and salsa, or than she had eaten burgers and fries on the day they had driven out to the Five Guys in Framingham. Noriko had always been finicky and even when she ate sushi she was always very careful to use chopsticks; it had actually not been until Thad had seen some sort of video about sushi etiquette online that he realized that there were Japanese people, lots of them, who thought that using utensils with some kinds of sushi was a faux pas.

            Noriko was a Japanese Anglican, rare as hen’s teeth, and once she got started you could never shut her up about the self-righteous liberalism of North American Anglicans or the hidebound conservatism of other Asian and African ones. It had taken her and Thad longer than most young couples these days to sleep together but once they had started they had proceeded more or less as normal for their age, although Noriko made it very clear to him that she would choose motherhood if she got pregnant. (She had made, on a few occasions, nonspecific allusions to a miscarriage suffered after a hectic argument with her parents about an accidental pregnancy when she had been in her late teens.) Zewditu, by contrast, even though circumstances in her childhood had led her to be militantly secular as an adult in a way that made Thad vaguely but distinctly uncomfortable, had said outright on their first real date that she had no plans to “put out” any time soon, refused to use hormonal contraception if and when she did, and had never had a very high sex drive anyway. “You have two hands. Pick one of them and use it,” she had said when Thad expressed concern that infrequent sex might lead to an insufficiently close relationship. He tried to imagine Noriko ever encouraging him to masturbate and realized very soon that he could not under any circumstances.

            “He’s dating Noriko Kisui,” he had heard his friends say in awed tones for the first few weeks of his and Noriko’s relationship. They had been similarly awed when it had become manifest to them that breaking up after two and a half years together had been his idea, that her solution to the problem of their divergent career paths had been to get married so that their employers could not justify separating them as easily. He had actually been entirely willing to entertain the idea of marrying her; he had only broken up with her instead because he had an unshakeable suspicion that the real reason why she was suggesting it was to ratify or authenticate her guilt over having had a sexual relationship with him for the past two years, a suspicion that even if false would probably poison their marriage at the root. He had never heard “He’s dating Zewditu Gebremeskel” said in the same tones, and although he really did not mind this, he wondered, and worried for Zewditu’s sake, about the possibility that the reason had too much to do with her bushy eyebrows and jutting jawline.

            Zewditu was a cheaper date than Noriko. In addition to the Five Guys, which she had insisted on going to because it was near one of her bicycle touring friends’ house, she liked walking around Brookline and especially “people-watching” in Coolidge Corner.

            “Honestly,” she said to Thad one warm September day as they were sitting at the Coolidge Corner T station, “I am a little surprised that you didn’t marry her, you know.”

            “Why?” asked Thad, who was not sure that he wanted this brought up right now, especially since before today he had not seen Noriko (he still saw her socially) in more than a week and he and Zewditu had not discussed her at length in almost a month. “I just wasn’t sure she wanted it for good reasons.”

            “I know,” said Zewditu. “But, still, it’s not like it would have taken too much of your time and energy. Just go down to the courthouse and bing-bang-boom, you’re married. I guess she might have insisted on an Anglican church wedding, but even though my knowledge of Episcopalian weddings is rusty I can’t imagine they’re as much of sticklers for discernment as the Catholics or the Orthodox. It’s easy enough to get married these days and there are so few irreversible consequences of doing it that it really does surprise me that you didn’t just go for it.”

            “Do you think it would have been a good thing?”

            “For you? I don’t know; I don’t know Noriko.” Zewditu feel silent for a few moments, then suddenly grasped his hand tightly and turned to him with a wide-eyed, solemn expression. “I am glad you didn’t, you know,” she said. “I am glad you’re with me.”

            This was the sort of conversation he might well have had with Noriko as well. It had taken her longer to open up to him, but once she had, the acidity and incisiveness that was in Zewditu now had been in Noriko also. It was probable that, if their positions had been reversed, if Thad had been first with Zewditu and then with Noriko, then Noriko’s reassurance that she was glad that he was with her now would have come in a somewhat subtler form. She had always harbored a little bit of pride in her harsh tendencies. Thad had never been sure what to make of it or how to feel about it, other than that it definitely neither impressed nor appalled him. As with Zewditu, he had worried then that it was mostly the way Noriko looked that made his friends so awed that he was dating her.

            And what did he himself bring to either of these women? People said he was funny and he understood clothing and makeup, but Noriko had cared about clothing and makeup and Zewditu did not. He had some interest in “trends” and was also stably and almost impressively employed, but Zewditu cared about those things and Noriko had not. The interest in “nerdy” girls that he had had in high school and early in college, girls who had shared the interests that he had had at that time, had given way to his relationships, as a grown man who thought of himself as boring and consoled himself with the fact that it was not his job or his destiny to entertain people, with women who were “nerdy” mostly about things like classic big band music and, in Zewditu’s case, aerobic exercise.

            On this subject, when after a certain point Zewditu had a bit of a crack-up and had to change careers, she found work at a bike shop out in the suburbs in very short order, to the point where Thad had to wonder, at least idly, whether she might have had this bike shop in mind in case something like this happened to begin with. The next time they were together—in his apartment, listening to Gene Krupa at her suggestion—he asked her when and how she had gotten so into bikes.

            “I’ve just never met somebody as passionate about bikes as you, especially somebody who lives in the city.”

            “Really? Don’t more people in cities bike?”

            “I mean the sort of bike touring that you’re really into, not just biking to work. It’s interesting. I kinda like it.” Thad was saying this as someone who himself biked to work when the weather was good for it but didn’t get much use out of his bike otherwise.

            “Well, it’s something I grew up with, obviously,” said Zewditu archly. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. When you think Ethiopia do you not think bike touring?” She grinned anarchically and tilted her chin up a little.

            Zewditu wanted the people who worked at the bike shop and the people who were its customers to call her Judy. She said that the idea that Zewditu was the Amharic form of Judith was a common misconception—Thad had been surprised at first that any misconception about cognates of the name Zewditu was “common” but Zewditu had told him that there had been an Ethiopian empress with her name in the early twentieth century—but she asked people to call her it anyway so as to smooth over some of the possible clashes of culture or understanding that might otherwise befall her in the bike shop.

            “There aren’t too many people your age named Judy anyway,” he said to her.

            “There are some. I’m taking a chance on Newton people being less snooty about someone who’s named like a grandmother than about someone who’s named like a famine victim.”

            “I don’t think they’d’ve been snooty. They might’ve patronized you or pitied you.”

            “That’s another consideration that I have, yes.” Zewditu flopped down on the couch. “Is your work still going okay, Thad? I remember that the last time we discussed this there were some problems but you thought they should be dealt with without too much difficulty. How has that been going?” She turned that probing gaze on him again, and her lips quirked downwards a little. He did not know how he wanted to answer. The truth was that he was almost burnt out. He had, a few years ago, before his current career had begun, done some time as a substitute teacher for the Boston Public Schools, and had subbed mostly for paraprofessionals at the elementary school level. Chanting “I hear talking, I hear talking; I SHOULD NOT! I SHOULD NOT!” at seven-year-olds whom he did not recognize had not been the best job in the world but he found himself pining for it as his current job got further and further out of his ability to adjudicate or see the point of.

            Thinking of his stint in the public education system reminded him of that old Simpsons episode with the “Skinner and the Superintendent” skit (Skinner, with his crazy explanations! The superintendent’s gonna need his medication when he hears Skinner’s lame exaggerations! There’ll be trouble in town tonight!). His own schooling had been private from third grade up through college. There was a certain dirtbag style that he had picked up as a sub that he genuinely felt he had been lacking before, lacking as one lacked something that one should have rather than something that one should not, and he thought that it was this dirtbag style that had appealed first to Noriko, who envied it, and then to Zewditu, who shared it. (Or was it Noriko who shared it and Zewditu who envied it? His preconceptions of them, which might be mildly racist for all he knew, meant that he had a hard time telling.)

            One time he had asked Zewditu if there were any other sports that she was into besides bike touring and she had talked for half an hour about figure skating. Zewditu called hockey rinks “honky rinks,” which Thad strongly suspected was a Simpsons allusion of her very own, but she did like figure skating. He tried to get her to watch I, Tonya with him but she refused because she had heard that the movie took liberties with the music in some of the Historical Tonya Harding’s routines, so instead he had let her show him several hours’ worth of actual early-nineties skating routines on YouTube, all with elaborate running commentary on people whom he recognized no better than the seven-year-olds. “Nancy and Tonya were actually more similar than people think. Both were power-driven skaters rather than artists. Both were huge bitches.” “Surya kept getting underscored because of racism but there was some drama between her coach and her parents too, although part of that could also have been due to racism.” “You might recognize Brian because he’s a recurring character in South Park. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I’ve only seen one episode of South Park in my life.” She had these sorts of comments about everyone other than Kristi Yamaguchi, whom she seemed to hero-worship.

            She had two photographs hanging in her living room; Noriko had had one, of a Japanese Christian leader in the early twentieth century named Toyohiko Kagawa. Zewditu’s were of Vincenzo Nibali, who was an Italian bike racer, and an Ethiopian feminist activist named Bogaletch Gebre. Thad watched some videos of Vincenzo Nibali and had to say that he did see the appeal. He tried to watch some videos of Bogaletch Gebre too but found the subject matter too upsetting, which he was worried made him a little pathetic and unhelpful but which Zewditu said actually reflected pretty well on him. Of videos of Toyohiko Kagawa he had found none but he did still have on his bookshelf a short collection of Kagawa’s meditations on the Bible or on Christian doctrine or on something of that nature, things that Thad did not spend much time thinking about and that Zewditu held in patient but unapologetic contempt and that for Noriko been of supreme importance and well worth every scintilla of attention that one might give them.

            Trying to watch I, Tonya with Zewditu had been after it came out on digital media. When it had been in theaters he had seen it with Noriko, just a couple of months before the breakup. They had gone to the Regal Fenway because it had nice seats and a good selection of snacks and was a quicker ride in along the Green Line than the Tremont Street movie theater was. Neither Thad nor Noriko cared about any sport nearly as much as Zewditu cared about bike touring, bike racing, and figure skating, but Noriko wanted to see the movie anyway, and they had both ended up enjoying it. Somehow it had dripped out of Thad’s mind afterwards. He did not remember much of most movies that he saw anymore. Books stuck a little more firmly in his thoughts and recollections, but not by much, certainly not by as much as he would have wished. In any case he would often remember that something would be “relevant” to Zewditu or to Noriko, or even to Jason or one of his other male friends, but not remember why, beyond very general strokes. I, Tonya was about figure skating so Zewditu would like it. The Remains of the Day was about a butler so Jason, whose great-grandfather had been a butler to some minor Vanderbilt or Vanderbilt-adjacent person, would like it. The Old Man and the Sea was about fishing so Cousin Colin would like it. He was always trying to connect with people this way, but he could barely remember with what he was doing the connecting.

            Zewditu got him to go on a bike tour with her. A couple of days before they left Boston—he had taken a week off, and they were going to try to get up to the Lake Winnipesaukee area before leaving the bikes with a friend of Zewditu’s up there and taking a bus back—he had lunch with Noriko to catch up after hearing that she had started dating someone named Johannes. He did not find out much about Johannes other than that he was Catholic and that Noriko felt more comfortable living her life to his specifications than she had living her life to Thad’s, but he did find out a lot about Noriko. Not least of what he found out was that Noriko had seen herself as “living her life to his specifications,” something that horrified and ashamed him to think about but that he did not know how to dispute if that had really been what she had wanted to do. He wondered if Zewditu lived life to anybody’s specifications. He did not think that she did, but he would not have thought that Noriko did either. Was it something particular about or typical to being a woman, he wondered? He guessed it was; he thought he liked women who were past that, but did he really? Was he even able to say what he liked?

            The other thing that he noticed about Noriko was that she was much more annoyingly religious than he had remembered. She kept talking about things as “providential” or as being about “grace in the world,” grace that came down from on high and lent a sort of significance that she refused to define and claimed not to be able to understand herself to everything that she felt or thought or said or did or was. They were eating at a crappy little restaurant near South Station, a restaurant all the crappier for its strenuous avoidance of the normal aesthetics of crappiness, and she kept saying that everything he was doing with his food was convincing her that there was something important and delightful about the world that was happening to and through both of them. He would pour a few potato chips out onto his napkin before eating any of them. She would say that this was beautiful and spectacular. He would glance up at her with wide, surprised eyes, with his mouth full of second-rate parfait. She would pick imperiously at her salad with the fork with which she was judiciously eating it and, with laughter lines rocketing outward from below her eyes, say that part of her did still envy the people who got to have his graces in their lives every day. He was not sure if she was being sarcastic when she said this, nor was he sure if she thought that “his graces” were really his graces, really things that could be associated with or attributed to him except through at least partly uncalled-for conflation and oversimplifying. She was using the fork on her sandwich also, a characteristically Noriko touch that he realized with a start that he had missed for many months and did not miss anymore.

            “I’m surprised she wouldn’t watch it with you but I’m glad you and she are sharing your interests,” she said at one point, which got Thad to wondering what interests, exactly, it was that he really had to share with Zewditu. “Have you talked to her about your time as a sub? I always really liked the stories you’d tell me about that. That ‘I hear talking’ one was hysterical! I think she’d really like it.

            “I’m interested that it keeps coming up that she’s so sporty,” Noriko went on. “I know I was never really into sports until very recently, but in the past few months I’ve started fencing, just for fun. It wasn’t actually Johannes who got me into it but Kayla—remember Kayla? From the gym I did aerobics at for five seconds?” Thad nodded with recollection whose strength surprised him. “It’s something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but my knees weren’t good enough because of that injury. I’m better able to take the bouncing around now.”

            The injury was a story that, as far as Thad knew, Noriko had pretty much always enjoyed telling. She had been about seven or eight and playing some Japanese variant of duck-duck-goose that she had never really succeeded in explaining to his satisfaction. Something had gone awry and she had ended up chasing a boy her age halfway across the playground and into a thick stand of camphor trees; they had come across a protruding root, he had jumped over it, and she had missed it, caught her foot under it, and fallen on her face with a twisted knee. Such was the story that she had told so many times. This time, over this lunch, she supplied the further knowledge, hitherto unrevealed to him, that this had been the same boy as in the pregnancy a decade later. She volunteered also, and almost convinced Thad that it was related, and succeeded in convincing him that it was important, that she had at that time been strongly leaning towards the name Hikari.

            “Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bike trip,” Noriko said. “I’m not sure if it’s something I would go for personally but maybe if my knees keep holding up after I’ve been fencing for a while I’ll look into biking or running. I think it’s great that Zewditu is sharing so much with you.”

            “It feels a little weird to have this shared with me,” said Thad. “I don’t really know what to make of it, especially since she’s a pretty closed-off person otherwise. She doesn’t seem like she’d make a good shoulder to cry on after a bad day.”

            “And do you think I would have made a good shoulder to cry on, looking back on things?” asked Noriko. She asked it sharply and forcefully, with her forehead wrinkled and her lips slightly curled, but it was clear to Thad after long years of knowing her that it was a sincere question.

            “Honestly, no, I’m not sure I do,” said Thad. “I don’t think I would have either,” he added, to dig himself out of the hole a little, but from the at-peace look that pooled over Noriko’s face he got the distinct feeling that the hole was as deep in her eyes as in his own.

            “Maybe she’s sharing herself more fully with you than you think,” said Noriko.

 ❦

This comment came back to his mind a week later as they sat in a diner in Belknap County munching on poutine after the second-to-last day of biking. They had come up through winsome woods trending towards redness. Their bikes were locked up outside and Zewditu had her jacket tied by the sleeves around her broad, sweat-flecked shoulders. She was chewing more primly than usual, possibly because she had just been ranting at him about the concept of “ethical non-monogamy” and wanted to play the role of propriety some more. (“Ethics are morals for people who think Eliezer Yudkowsky has original insights,” she had said, whatever that meant.) On the table between them was a heavily dog-eared and marked-up copy of selected Zora Neale Hurston essays that Zewditu had been rereading on the road. Thad aspired to understand Zewditu’s political opinions someday.

            “I think I’d like to spend a day or two with Rick and Cara if that’s okay with you,” Zewditu was saying in between bites of poutine, wiping gravy from her hand with a coarse paper napkin.

            “Separate beds, I’m assuming?” said Thad.

            “Separate sleeping bags, yeah. We packed them for a reason. I don’t know that Rick and Cara have a guest room. They live in one of those A-frames you sometimes see thrown up around the edges of ponds in the woods. They’ve been married for longer than we’ve been alive and have been bicycle enthusiasts for longer still than that. They have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in academe.

            “If we did have kids, you know,” she said, completely without sneer, “I’d want them to have one foot in the real world.”

            “I would too,” said Thad. “If we did.”

            “If we might,” said Zewditu with a faint smile.

            He looked at her munching on her poutine again. The hand that she had once told him to use felt still and numb on the tabletop. For the first time he was filled with love for the woman sitting across from him.

❦

This is the first in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.