Madeleine can see the body floating there. Just beneath the velvety surface of the Seine, it floats. The shadows of the ancient buildings ink a temporary tattoo of early evening on the lapping waves of the river, on the stone walkway and its stairs that lead to the water’s edge. People are scrambling across the cobbled embankment. The body is floating in the current, an underwater hummingbird filled with artful stasis. The body is floating in the current and people are scrambling, flocking en masse. Madeleine is not. She is frozen. Madeleine is frozen, watching the body beneath the water. It is just inches beneath the water. People are now scrambling from the embankment to an elegantly carved stone bridge. People are scrambling; Madeleine cannot move. In the background, the sirens begin their high-low keening. The sirens swirl. The sirens rise and fall, a score for the wave of people who are scrambling to save the body. The sirens wail, a score for Madeleine, statuesque in the window of her mother’s French boutique.
Underwater, the body is weightless. It floats very near the slick moss of the concrete riverbank. It floats in the chilled slow moving river, and it doesn’t flow anywhere quickly. It simply drifts, drifts in its own kind of peace. It is entirely unaware of the commotion it causes, the commotion that roils the banks of the river. When the wind blows, when the branches of the riverside trees shift, waning light cuts through the mere inches of murky water that separate the body from air. The light sheds those gallons of water; the light displaces them. The light shows a leg one moment, shimmering and pale. The light displays pure, unblemished skin. The light reveals what is most definitely a girl, her slender pixie feet closest to the surface, her torso pointing down into the furtive depths. She’s floating and flowing and drifting, so slowly, gracefully, her torso pointing down.
“Dear God!” an American tourist, husky and balding, exclaims to his petite wife. The shutter of his camera clicks. The shutter clicks and clicks.
To be sure, there is a sense of urgency, a thick sense that a clock is being raced. Madeleine can feel the adrenaline running through the crush of people. It fills her, too. Madeleine feels that human emotion, the ache those people must feel. Madeleine can feel the shock of the men, their tailored navy blazers thrown to the ground, as they skitter along the water’s edge, following the body inch by inch. The sun is falling and it will take a sharp eye to keep the girl from disappearing into darkness. Yes, Madeleine knows a form of this feeling, the feeling of wanting so badly to save something, desperately, at all costs. And as soon as she recognizes the feeling as that which these strangers following the girl must feel, as soon as she puts her finger upon that feeling, it is replaced. That distinct feeling is replaced with an overwhelming sense of futility!
The girl has been under too long. The people that are fumbling down to the embankment, the people that are shouting to their friends, the people that are pointing—the tourists with their flashbulbs popping—they are not jumping into the water. And Madeleine thinks, with relief, that soon the people will have to realize the body is just a body. Madeleine hopes they will stop imagining it a sinking girl. She isn’t named Greta. They won’t call her Rebecca. She is an “it.” It is just a body form. Madeleine wants them to realize the girl, whoever she is to them, is no more. Beneath the waves is just this thing. Beneath the waves, this thing falling heels over head through the night, this thing twisting and somersaulting in the current, it is just a thing. Madeleine wants them to understand.
And yet they all keep following the girl down the Seine.
Madeleine wants to tell them all. She does. She wants to rip open the shop door and run down to the water’s edge. She wants to tear down to the water’s edge, screaming bloody awful. She is moments from doing it. She is moments from racing to the water, her long sapphire scarf flying behind her like the streamers of a kite. She would grab that gentleman, the one on his belly now, the one whose ankles his friends are supporting, the one who is on his belly with his arms outstretched, the one who is reaching, reaching for the arm of the dead thing. She would race to that man, her hair wild, her silk dress drenched with wind, and she would pull him back in. She wants to pull him back in, pull him back in and press her small finger to his lips. She would stop him screaming for help. She would silence him, and at that moment she would quiet those sirens, too. It would be still, then. Quiet as the riverbed bottom.
“It’s not a girl,” she would whisper in her best English. “It is not a girl. And none of this matters.”
That’s exactly what she would say. That’s exactly what Madeleine wants to say. But she is frozen. She cannot. And then, as sudden as a sneeze, she is laughing. With her hand at her slender side, she is laughing. The laugh comes crashing down. Oh, what has she done? She can’t ever tell them.
And so, below her, down the embankment in front of her mother’s dress shop, the people will continue their frenzied panic. The people will scream. The sirens will wail. The man, the one on his belly, the one anchored by the strong arms of several American friends, that man may reach the body; he may grab it and pull “the girl” to dry land, pull her to some sort of safety. But Madeleine decides she simply cannot tell them.
With a click of her high heels, Madeleine finds herself once more. She smoothes her dress down at her sides. She calms her alarmed expression, tucks it away. And she steps outside. She locks the shop up tight, noting the stiff orange placard hanging from the shop door, noting the plywood board beneath it that reads Cessons nos activités in cursive purple paint. Madeleine frowns at this particular sign. She frowns at the sign and further pushes the commotion from her mind. Her keys jingle. She places them in her purse. And off the stoop, she walks. She walks and her footsteps echo out into the narrow street. She walks away. She walks away and the dress shop, its window display eerily empty of its mannequin model, recedes as well, simply fading into black.
Inspired by “In My Sleep, Falling Through The Night,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
Helen and Betty are not asleep in the attic. They are listening to the rain. They are listening to the rushing sound of water and it is keeping them up. They are two little girls, sisters—Helen is six and Betty is eight—and they cannot sleep because of the persistent rushing sound of so much water. It angrily punches the wooden beams, clawing for the insulation underneath. The drops want to shatter like bullets through the roof and shower over the girls’ heads. The water washes down the one window at the far end of the attic and reminds Betty of an advertisement for a front-loading washing machine that she once saw on television. The only thing that’s missing is a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to tumble, in simulation, over and over, past the window as well. Betty is eight years old and she doesn’t expect a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to go tumbling past the window in the attic, but maybe. The power is out. It is night and when the lightning flashes, Betty can see that it is just rainwater sloshing against the windowpane; there’s no laundry.
The small tattered AM/FM radio that the girls have beside their mattress came from the dusty space behind their mother’s shoeboxes at the top of the closet. It now sits on the floor keeping them company. Their favorite station, the one with all of the popular music, stopped broadcasting earlier in the day, but they’ve managed to bring up something else, the tinny voice of a woman softly singing. The girls don’t know what this faraway woman is singing, but they at least have something to listen to besides the rain. They are not used to sleeping in the attic.
Their mother is somewhere downstairs. Their father is somewhere out in the rain. He’s packing sandbags together, one on top of the other, building a wall of sandbags, one on top of the other, somewhere out in the rain.
A strong flash of lightning makes daylight appear in the attic. The light attacks the dark corner where the little girls lie. It exposes old cardboard boxes, a playpen covered in cobwebs, a bookshelf stocked with a cookbooks, old yellowing yellow National Geographic magazines, and a pink pair of rollerblades Betty hasn’t used in years. There is a stroller missing a wheel and a box that says MARTIN’S in faded red permanent marker. There is a ragged sheet covering a microwave and a weight bench without weights. The lightning exposes these things in a magical flare before bursting out like a blown light bulb.
“What if it never stops raining?” Helen, still small like a figurine, asks her older sister. The woman on the radio is not singing anymore. Her voice is suddenly lost somewhere in a dark waterfall of quiet static.
Betty thinks for a moment. In the blackness, on the mattress that her mother took from her bed and hauled, wrestling inch by inch, down the hall and up the retractable ladder to the attic, Betty lie thinking. And Betty doesn’t know the answer. She’s been wondering herself: What if it doesn’t stop raining? This has never happened before. What if it is like this forever?
“I think our house might float away, Helen,” Betty says, finally. “You’ve heard of houseboats haven’t you?”
Helen says yes, even though she has never heard of a houseboat. Helen says yes anyway. And then she pictures their house, two stories and tan as an almond, sailing on top of a lake. She pictures it cutting through the water and she imagines her mother, wearing a shiny emerald green one-piece bathing suit, on skis behind the house. She imagines her mother being pulled along behind the house, the water spraying, the water spraying in a mist and her mother laughing, holding onto a cord with one hand and waving with the other.
“Well, our house will be a houseboat if it keeps raining, Helen.”
Betty scoots along the mattress closer to her sister, pulling the nubby blanket up around their shoulders. The rain is flying sideways into the window at the end of the room. It sounds like impatient fingers on a desk or lots of gunshots from an old western movie.
Betty continues: “It could rain that much. Or, it might not. But if it does, one morning we might wake up for school and everything will be floating on the water. All the other houses will be boats too and so it wouldn’t be so bad, Helen.”
“But then why is Daddy piling all of those bags of sand? If we’re just gonna float up on a houseboat, why?”
Betty doesn’t know. She pictures the sandbags her father is out stacking. She envisions each one, imagines how heavy they are, like the lumpy sacks of potatoes that her mother buys from the market to make stew. She thinks of them underwater. What purpose could they serve?
“Um. Well, just think about it. If our house is a boat and we float around during the day, we’ll need to know where to park it again at night, right? That’s what those bags of sand are for. They’ll mark where our house belongs.” This makes sense to Helen. So, Betty continues: “But don’t worry about that anyways. What’s really neat is that I think we’ll look out the window and it’ll be like the pool next door to Grandma’s house. The whole town will be like a beautiful blue swimming pool and I bet Mom would let us dive off the roof and the roof will be like the diving board at the Y and Dad will build us a ladder so that we can climb up the side of the house and get back in.”
Betty isn’t exactly sure that it will be like a swimming pool. She is eight and she doesn’t know. But that sounds possible to her.
“I’m really excited about it,” she says. “How fun will it be to stand on the roof and look down and see our yard underneath the water? We can do races to the fire hydrant and we could swim down through the peach tree. It will be like seaweed.”
The lightning comes again. In the flash, Betty sees, through the fine strands of blond hair covering her sister’s face, that Helen’s eyes are closed. Helen is sleeping. Helen has fallen asleep and Betty decides to hush up. She puts her arm around her sister and snuggles in beside her tiny pajama-clad body. She closes her own eyes. She thinks about which bathing suit she would want to put on in the morning. She pictures herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, the one with the matching tank top, the one that her mother got her last year for the Fourth of July barbecue. Then Betty imagines herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, swimming in circles around the house, and doing cannonballs out of her upstairs bedroom window. Betty smiles and soon she too falls asleep, dreaming about a happy new world, a world underwater.
Inspired by “Above Flood Stage,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Some people saw a fin. Some people did not. Everyone saw the girl. Everyone remembers the girl.
Bonnie and Barbara are twins, born just thirty seconds apart and identical in a carbon copy way. When Barbara picks up the beige receiver of the telephone in the hallway, people often say, “Well hello, Bonnie!” When Bonnie raises her hand in geometry, sure of the answer, her teacher smiles expectantly and calls out, “Barbara, do you want to solve the equation?” Walking side by side down the street, Bonnie and Barbara appear as if a polished mirror, like those in the changing room at Sears and Roebuck, were hanging between them. And yes, twins grow up; twins grow up and they grow apart, but at sixteen years apiece—thirty-two years combined—Bonnie and Barbara are remarkably matched. Today they are swimming fast, clean breaststrokes parallel to one another, beyond the breakers. Orange buoys bob beside them, drop-off markers tipping and tumbling in their wake, slick with salt water and radiant with abundant sunshine.
Children on shore carry red pails full of ocean water, red pails full of sand. Bonnie and Barbara’s mother, bent over a cooler, is pouring lemonade into a tumbler the color of the sky. The sour liquid makes the ice cubes crack. Casey Dubois, last year’s senior high prom queen, is on her boyfriend’s shoulders in waist-deep water. Waves are hitting him square in the chest. Casey’s blousy black and white two-piece flaps in the July air. Other sunbathers are splashing. Everyone else is splashing, splashing. And just then Bonnie and Barbara are sailing past. Bonnie and Barbara are identical fishes swimming past, and then—in the space and span of one single gasp of salted ocean air—the sync of their strokes suddenly snaps out of place. At once, Barbara is trailing.
Barbara is trailing Bonnie in the blue-green water. Barbara is just a stroke behind. Both girls are competitive swimmers yet people have called Bonnie a dolphin. It’s just a nickname, but it bothers her twin. It bothers Barbara just a little and it makes Bonnie blush. Bonnie’s fair cheeks turn pink when they compliment her form, saying, “Oh Bonnie, we’re not sure if you’re a teenager or a dolphin.” People don’t comment on Barbara looking like any sort of porpoise. People haven’t commented on Barbara’s swimming at all. Barbara can sing, though. She sang a tune by the Supremes at a talent show recently. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. It wasn’t just her parents standing, either—it was the whole audience. The whole audience was standing, standing and clapping. Someone asked, “Oh Barbara, where’d you get such soul?” And Barbara’s fair cheeks were just a shade pinker than usual.
Ten seconds. The commotion empties every white, sun-bleached lounge chair. Everyone is rushing toward the water, toward the bubbles, the gurgling, the arms and the wild screams. The empty chairs, left behind, are wooden, slatted, and covered in abandoned towels. The towels are blue; the towels are fuchsia, teal, red, purple, and green. From above, from the sky, the beach looks like a gumball machine. Every single body on that sandy white sand beach is ankle deep in ocean water, breath caught in their throats, salty air burning on stuck tongues. People are not sure what they are seeing, hearing. Not yet. The sunbathers and the swimmers, interrupting the blue-white-blue-green color of the crashing ocean waves, wear swimsuits in the same color assortment as the towels on the empty chairs, and they also look like gumballs in a gumball machine. They look like chewy, sugary things.
Twenty seconds. People see a girl. People see one girl. Then, people see another girl. Or, the same girl? The water erupts: Silver, sunlight, glints of white, splashes of red, crimson. What is that? Casey Dubois is on shore. She is counting the seconds in her mind, her hand over her mouth. She isn’t aware that she’s counting or that the counting has turned the corner, now, becoming a countdown. She’s just counting: Nine, eight, seven, six… Pale arms are reaching for the sky…five, four…a foot breaks through a wave…three, two, one… Two heads appear on the surface, one no longer wearing a black bathing cap. The heads bob toward shore, one slowly towing the other.
“Not Bonnie!” screams the twins’ mother.
“Was it Barbara?” someone asks.
These questions and comments ripple across the sand.
The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Five minutes after it began, two girls sprawled, eyes closed, on land amongst the crowd. Their mother and Casey Dubois and strangers in rainbow colors hovered over them, frozen, unsure. And Bonnie and Barbara—whichever was which—tried simply and desperately to steady their breath, to breathe in sync once more. A small, wide-eyed boy stepped out of the crowd, closer, only to have his mother pull him back into the mass, yank him away while trying not to look herself. A siren’s wail drifted in then, stirring the stillness, rousing the gathering anew. But the identical girls only lay close on the sand, unmoving and identical still, but for the one that now seeped life, a part missing, a part removed in an instant, one hot summer day on Long Island.
Inspired by “Long Island, Summer, 1964,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
The note reads, “Dear Dad: I don’t like you. At all. And I never asked you to come visit. Dolly.”
Dolly picked up her father at the Greyhound bus station. It was late afternoon. The parking lot was heavy with cars, some silent, others with their engines coolly purring, and yet others with their insides revving like a dog’s tail might wildly wag. On the damp sidewalk in front of the bus station, perfumed young ladies milled while waiting beneath a portico. Among them, a little girl in pigtails carried a stuffed toy baby at her side. There was loose stitching near the threadbare thing’s hip. Dolly could see cotton batting sticking out of this unprotected wound.
The sky was charged. The sky was electric. It had rained that afternoon and the rain could come again, and worse. As the ancient clock tower struck five o’clock, several more cars arrived and even more people began to assemble outside of their vehicles. They held gifts. One man held flowers, a vibrant purple. The women were smoothing their dresses, their skirts, their flyaway hair. These people were excited, each eagerly awaiting an arrival. Dolly stayed in her car. She stayed locked inside her car and she stared at the little girl, the one with the yellow pigtails, the one with the well-worn toy hanging limp at her side. Dolly stared and she thrummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She thrummed her fingers and simply waited, staring.
By the time Dolly and her father arrived back at her modest two-bedroom apartment the sun had set. It was indeed raining again, a hard rain that punished the pavement. It was raining a torrent in the gutters that sounded like a box of nails emptied over and over onto a concrete floor. Dolly flipped on the entryway light and pointed to the bathroom at the dark end of the hall. Her father disappeared into it quietly. He went inside and Dolly heard the lock click. Then, as the shower spit water, its old pipes wavering behind the blue tile wall, Dolly left her apartment once more.
Dolly walked through the rain to the supermarket. She walked all the way there and then she roamed the aisles of the supermarket. She picked up boxes of cereal, pretended to examine the nutritional content, then placed them neatly back on the shelf. She stopped in the middle of the freezer section. She stood right in the middle of those well-lit cases and she pored over the weekly circular. She saw coupons for discounted lemons and discounted frozen pizzas and discounted potato chips that she could get on sale. She clutched the sticky red handle of her shopping basket and she moved like molasses and quicksand down each lane of the supermarket. She was in no hurry. She put a loaf of white bread into the basket. She selected a six-pack of toilet paper. She oscillated between which color of toothbrush—blue or green—she should purchase before walking away from the display without either one. If she was doing these things she wasn’t thinking about her father. If she was staring at plastic soda pop bottles, noting their fizzy bubbles of carbonation, she wasn’t thinking about how her father had just arrived in a cough of exhaust. She didn’t want to think about his face, a face from the foggy past of her little girl childhood. If she was checking for the best expiration date on a sweaty gallon of milk, she wasn’t thinking about how they had the same pointed nose, the same ginger hair color, the same DNA coursing beneath their fair skin.
When she could delay it no longer, Dolly returned home. Dolly returned home and she brought a swimming pool’s worth of water with her. Gallons belched from her ruined leather shoes as she walked down the hallway toward her front door. She dripped. From every inch of her she dripped.
And that’s when she heard it: thunderous bass and a misshaped symphony of voices. First it was just bass. Then, it was the voices. Both rose. Both fell. Both rose and both fell with a tumbling vibration. It all came from behind Dolly’s front door.
“Dolls, you remember the gang!”
Her father said this as she came into the apartment. His hair was slicked back, gleaming. Filling her living room was a similar sort of slicked back company, though less gleaming. A blonde woman brushed her chest dangerous close to her father’s arm. The woman’s lipstick was too red, her skin too pale. Dolly noted a smudge of the red on the woman’s front tooth.
“Dad?” The words formed, yet beneath the din they were simply drops in the ocean. Dolly’s mouth was only moving for show. Her paper sack, soggy and ragged, slid from her hands and burst open upon the floor.
“We’re celebrating!”
The blond woman howled this. She raised a pink party cup toward the ceiling. She raised it high. She raised the cup high and then brought it low. She took a giant swallow before smearing her lips upon the fresh shaven cheek of Dolly’s father. The party cup fell from the woman’s hand then. It fell down to the floor, the floor already covered in so many other cups just like it. Green cups, blue cups, red, yellow, and purple cups lay scattered like fall leaves all over the living room floor.
“Here’s to Charlie!” A stranger to Dolly’s left thrust his blue plastic cup toward the ceiling. Foamy beer slipped over its edge.
“Here, here!” another voice boomed.
The man beside Dolly drunkenly elbowed her in the ribs: “Sixteen years we knew he didn’t do nothing wrong. We didn’t never gave up! Tonight’s a good night, little lady!”
“Charlie!” The blond woman is shrieking. Her father has his face planted deep within the curve of her chest. Dolly clamped her eyes shut to the sight, to the noise. When she opened them, her father was somehow standing beside her.
“It’s just a little celebration, Dol,” he said. “I’m free. Finally. It’s a big deal.”
And since Dolly could barely hear these words, since she could barely form conscious thoughts. She just stared at her father. She stared at that man and found herself slowly receding, drifting away out of the room, down the hallway, into her bedroom. The door slammed. The door slammed like her heart slammed in her chest, and Dolly crumpled to the safety of the floor.
* * * *
The note reads, “Dear Dad: I don’t like you. At all. And I never asked you to come visit. Dolly.”
In the blue morning light of dawn, the nervous light of a new day still fledgling, Dolly sits with the note she’s just written. She sits in the corner of her bedroom and she studies it. It’s short. She wrote it without thinking. It didn’t even say what she’d really intended; the note didn’t even tell her father that she wanted him to leave. It didn’t say all of the things that she’d thought to say over all those years. Instead the message was blunt, choppy. Her handwriting was blunt and choppy, too. Each letter was set apart, and she was oddly proud of how strong and tall her capital letters seemed to stand. She was oddly proud of the bold black ink. Every letter stood firm, but then, curiously, she’d signed her name in cursive, like an old woman might sign a check at the grocery store. Dolly never writes in cursive. She likes how it looks now, however. Set beside the strong, tall capitals, the curves of her name announce themselves. The curves of her name are flippant, carefree. The curves of her name represent the girl she imagines she wants to be.
Dolly folds the note in half. She folds the note in half horizontally and then in half once more, vertically. She creases the edges of the note with calm fingertips. The folds are secure. Her message is secure inside, held by walls of crisp white paper. Dolly is left with a small square the size of an old floppy disk. Dolly palms the note, shifting it around in her hands, running her fingers along its edges. It is a razor blade. She makes her bed.
It is quiet in the hallway of Dolly’s modest two-bedroom apartment. It is still, unmoving. The door to the guest bedroom is closed. The bedroom door is closed and Dolly knows her father is asleep, just inches away on the other side. She holds the note tightly now, clutching it in her right hand. A deep breath could send it under the door. A deep breath could send the message. But as she leans down close to the floor, her breath is stopped. Her hand is stalled. There is already a note there.
The note reads, “Dear Dolly: I have missed you so much. So much. And I’m so grateful that you have let me come visit. Dad.”
There are fresh flowers on the kitchen table. A black plastic trash bag beside the front door is all that remains of last night’s welcoming party. And so Dolly is standing in the center of her spotless living room. She is standing in the center of her spotless living room tearing her small note into tiny pieces. She shreds the paper with her bare hands, each tear smaller than the next. Each tear obliterates the message inside. And the pieces, merely flecks of simple paper, sprinkle down from her hands to the floor. The pieces fall and scatter around her. They fall and they scatter. They scatter like one hundred party cups left behind by uninvited guests.
Inspired by “Uninvited Guests,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
Edison is new to the city. He’s new to this town, new to his tiny second floor studio, new to his neighbors who slam their doors and cuss at one another about silly things like taking out the trash and putting a new roll of toilet paper on the dispenser. He came from the country. He came from far away, from a farm, from a place where the sounds outside his front door came from nature, from roosters and the wind and gnarled tree branches.
This is all new for Edison. All new.
It’s summer in the city, humid and sticky. The day seems to hang here, thick and fussy with noise, fuzzy like static cling. The night hangs the same only darker.
Edison’s little apartment, all the way up one story above the busy avenue, didn’t come with much and it did not come with an air-conditioning system. It came with a closet of a kitchen and a closet of a bathroom and a closet of a closet with hardly any space. In the heat, he opens the window and lets the garbled city air pour in. It pours in, filling his tiny space like a cup set under a faucet. It pours in. This city is not at all like the country; it’s not at all like where Edison once lived. Nothing is the same. Here, everything is concrete. Everything is metal, steel, glass. In the city, life crashes off these surfaces. It raises a true racket. The city is pretty darn loud. It’s so loud that Edison can’t hear nature, not the nature that he’s used to. He cannot hear roosters. He cannot hear the wind or gnarled tree branches scratching the itchy bricks of the old buildings.
Edison tried to hear these things on his first night. He closed his eyes, scrunched them tight, but he couldn’t hear any of those things. He couldn’t hear anything familiar. What he could hear was traffic: The constant honking of angry cab drivers, the wailing adult sirens of red and white flashing ambulances, the throbbing growl of motorbikes. And then, surprisingly, he could hear something else. He could hear something else he couldn’t remember ever having heard before: He could hear life. Real life. In the city, people were living.
In between the din, most often in the slow fade of sunset, when the city begins to gradually slip into its bedclothes, Edison can hear—so clearly—the conversations of diners at the restaurant on the ground floor of his building. One floor above the avenue, the voices rise. Buffeted on the stilling weeknight air, the voices rise. Through the dark striped awning that covers the dining patio, the stories rise.
“I’m so tired of being veggie, Deb.” It’s a female voice. Sweet-sounding. Edison imagines her with teardrop earrings. Recently he passed a newsstand and a glossy model on a magazine cover, pouty and frail, wore teardrop earrings. Those are the earrings he imagines on this woman, just because. “I woke up last night dying for a cheeseburger.”
“No! You cannot, Lydia!”
“I know. I know it’s sick. I’m disgusting. But I’ve been thinking about it so much lately. I feel bad because I saw that video. You know, the one with the cows, and I mean I just—I do imagine the cow faces, so I can’t. I want to.”
“Every meat patty has eyes and a face and a mother,” the other girl says, as if reading from a manual.
“Carol said the exact same thing. But I’ve been dreaming about cheeseburgers, waking up thinking about cheeseburgers and—“
A male voice: “Hi there, have you ladies decided what you’d—“
“—Spinach salads,” the second girl, Deb, interrupts.
Edison props a smallish, tattered blue armchair beside the window for these conversations, as if setting up for a night of television. The smell of fried food folds itself through the four-foot gap of the open window. Onions, garlic, and other scents Edison cannot place waft in.
“Well, I just found out my parents smoke pot. As in, the present.”
It’s a male voice. Edison pictures a college-aged man. A fork clinks on a plate. The boy is maybe a freshman at the university. Edison wonders and fills in the blanks. The boy is wearing a polo, and his dining companion laughs at the start of the story. It’s a girl.
“You’re hysterical,” she says. “How do you know?”
“My mom was all bent out of shape because she thought my brother came to Easter dinner stoned.”
The girl is laughing some more.
“Then she goes: ‘It’s not as if your father and I don’t. But this was Easter.’”
“Wow. I love it.”
Edison imagines her with blonde hair, long blonde hair. At this point, she’s tucking it back behind her ears, tidying what shook loose when she laughed.
“…And she was all, ‘What do you think we do when we’re with Bob Perkins?’ She says, ‘Bob Perkins and your father are crazy when they are together! Always smoking.’”
“Bob Perkins?” The girl is laughing again. The boy is laughing for the first time.
A different night. Another boy, perhaps a man. He’s in his thirties Edison decides. He is wearing a button-down shirt. He probably likes cats, flosses every night before bed. Edison imagines these things. He gives faces to the voices that crawl into his room. He imagines he knows them, that they’re his friends.
“Tell me a secret.”
She purses her lips, “I date new people mainly to look in their medicine cabinets.” Her admission is met with silence. And then laughter. Both of them laughing. He is reaching for her hand; she is letting him take it.
Edison lets out a held breath. He smiles. He spends a lot of time in his small apartment, but Edison is doing just fine. He feels like the cramped apartment is holding him, cradling him and filling up his life. Once he had so much space, and now he has so much less. There is simplicity in that. Even though the world here is so much more complex and fast and loud, for Edison who has so little, it actually seems easier. For Edison the city is getting easier.
Inspired by “Restaurant Noise,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
