NEEDLESS TO SAY
I’M IN THE SHOWER TRYING to shape a piece of my hair on the wall into an M. My hair’s long, but it won’t hold the letter’s turns. It looks more like a snake essing toward the end of the stall, where it might eventually flatline or curl into something unrecognizable. I used to do this with Emily when we were younger. I’d put my hair on the tile when she was going in after me, and later she would come into my room with a towel around her head and say, I love Eric Barnes too, or, You’re not fat, picking up the conversation as though I’d spoken aloud. We’d sit on my bed, pulling threads from the seams of my quilt, and I’d tell her what I wasn’t able to before. But those talks only lasted a few seasons at best, and there have been so many seasons since then.
SORRY, EM , I’m trying to spell out, because I know she’s feeling down, but it looks more like SORRIES, and I think about just scrapping the whole thing. I want my meaning to be clear.
Part of the problem is that this is my sister’s house. She wants me to act a certain way in it. Wash the dishes after I’ve cooked, keep my feet off the coffee table. Emily is younger than I am, but at some point she seemed to pass me by. Getting degrees, getting married. Our older sister, Joan, is more or less out of the picture, and I guess Emily felt like she had to fill the gap with regards to leadership and adult progress. But it doesn’t bother me. I kind of like being taken care of.
The other part is that Emily’s husband, Will, used to live in this house. That is, until six months ago, when he caught her having an emotional affair with the manager of a La Quinta a few towns over. She’s the manager of a La Quinta here, and the two of them met at some regional what-have-you conference. At least that’s what our cousin Stacy told me. Stacy is no stranger to gossip, so if she knows something, then it’s safe to say that everyone else knows it or will know it very soon. Needless to say, it was disappointing to hear this kind of thing secondhand.
Anyway, Will ended things and took half their stuff with him to some resort town in Arizona, a place where they probably still have a few real quintas hanging about, so now Emily needs me. That’s what Stacy said. She was the one who suggested I move in, help out around the house. Provide moral support. I’ve decided I’m more of a seen-and-not-heard moral supporter, like someone bidding on a silent auction. Emily doesn’t talk about Will, and I don’t like to mention sore subjects if I can avoid them.
If I had to put a name on it, I’d say Emily just seems distracted. That is, she concentrates very intensely on things that aren’t Will. She moves around the house with a focus so acute as to eliminate the thought of anything but the task before her. She scrubs the kitchen backsplash until the enamel starts to wear; she eats apples like she’s punishing them for ever having existed. The socks I leave on the living room floor get her very focused indeed. And she’s always on the phone with work. Our parents left us a nice amount of money when they died, which made employment, how shall I say, optional. So it still surprises me when she leaves the house in the afternoons wearing a blazer and chunky black shoes, or when I hear her talking about a “perfect sell,” which I first heard as perfect cell—C-E-L-L—as though all the hotel rooms were cells, like in a prison. How odd, I thought. Those manager types sure are cold! But a perfect sell—S-E-L-L—is when all the rooms (or cells) are full. That’s her goal every night, filling the rooms up with people.
Ours is a shitty college town, and I can’t imagine anyone coming in on a Tuesday to check out the pool hall on Main or the bowling alley across from the twenty-four-hour laundromat, let alone enough people to fill an eighty-four-room La Quinta every night. But somehow she does it. She cares very intensely about certain things, which also seems to be part of the problem. She cares so much, and it sets her up for some real disappointment. I, on the other hand, take pleasure in life’s smallest details. For example, I’m really proud of some other things I accomplished in the bathroom this morning. So proud that I was thinking of leaving some evidence behind for Emily, but her sense of humor has been off as of late, and I’m trying to be sensitive.
After showering, I go for a walk. It’s only eleven, but already the heat is serious, so I stay in the shade and move as slowly as I can without stalling out. I like to make my time outside the house last.
I turn onto the street behind the grade school and a squirrel bursts out from a pile of cut grass. Motherfucker, I hiss, my body tensing with reflex. The squirrel immediately scurries off like it just grabbed my wallet. Come back, little squirrely, I say, but the damn thing has already disappeared. This town is filled with squirrels. They were imported some hundred years ago from England, and now the town is overrun. I can’t drive to get a gallon of milk without hitting one, almost hitting one, or seeing the poor, bloody result of someone else having hit one. Their bodies lie out flat in the road, their gray, puffy tails quivering in the breeze like a flag casting a warning.
The library’s automatic doors open before me like welcoming arms. I love it here—the return slot with its tiny rubber conveyer belt, the weekend book sale, the take-no-prisoners air-conditioning. And the librarians, whose sole civic duty seems to be to act nice to me. They know my name and ask me how my day is going, what is new in my life. I tell them, Oh, fine, Oh, nothing. And then I do my loop around the whole place. New music, new movies. I go upstairs to the magazine racks, ascending the wide blond steps. The light comes in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I step into it, enjoying the feeling of being in a place of beauty and importance. I check all the new issue covers—glistening pictures of cakes and shiny, famous faces and cartoons of animals in business suits. The weeklies, the monthlies, it all helps me mark the time. Like going to work, like it’s all something the town needs me to keep an eye on.
Sometimes I’ll chat up the young man at circulation. The library has automatic checkout stations, but I figure he must get bored just standing behind the desk waiting for someone’s card to mess up. That and I like looking at his face. Everything about him is angular yet soft—his linen shirt is tucked into his khaki pants and his brown hair falls over his eyes. Refined, but not too refined, like someone who attended prep school on scholarship. I’d put him around my age, but sometimes he scolds me for keeping a particular book or movie too long, and it makes him seem older. I like it when he tsk-tsks me.
Hey, Claire, he says.
Hi, Thomas.
He shifts my stack of books across the counter and gets to rubbing them over the magnetic plate.
How are you all doing? I ask. Super busy?
Well, the summers always are, but we handle it all right. He smiles and then shifts his gaze to his computer screen.
I’m not really doing too much these days, I continue. Well, my sister—I’m taking care of my sister.
Oh, dear, is she all right? The concern in his voice takes me aback.
Oh, yeah, she’s okay. Just a little psychic malady. Nothing a little sun and St.-John’s-wort won’t fix. It keeps me busy, but I have some free time too.
I then hint to him how good I am at organizing other people’s stuff and how it might be fun to work at the li brary myself, since I’m here so often, and, no, I don’t actually have a library degree, but I do own a couple of different pairs of glasses, several pairs of dark-colored tights, and slip-on shoes that don’t make a whole lot of noise when I walk in them. So, you know.
You’re too funny, Claire, he says, shaking his head. He slides the stack of books back to me over the counter. Which do you think you’ll read first?