10
Have you seen that? the old lady asked, tilting her head toward two large white buildings built to look like a sheep and a dog.
Oh, what are they?
A sheep and a dog, she said.
But what’s inside?
Buildings, she said. They made them to look like animals. It’s funny.
She pulled over in front of a café with a sign that said THE INTERNET. I got out of the car and the old lady said, Good luck, take care, and I didn’t know what I was going to spend any good luck on or what I could care for, but I said, Thank you, because that’s what you do.
A woman was sitting at an old, beige machine while a dial tone droned and hissed and beeped and fractured into static. She glanced at me and smiled. Ambiguously familiar pop music was playing, an excited woman singing like a maniac, an excited maniac, about something exciting, about how good it all was, how good it would always be. The woman hummed along to the music, seeming so content with the static still hissing, the nothing happening. The amount of patience in this country — how long a person could spend happily waiting — maybe this was why I had come here. Not for the isolation, but the place where people can happily do very little, the world’s largest waiting room.
It took a moment for me to remember how to log into my email or what email even was, what any of those words on the screen meant. My boss’s name appeared a few times, which didn’t make any difference to me since I knew I didn’t work there anymore. There were a few emails from Husband: apologies for whatever he had done, demands of apologies from me, apologies for the demands of apologies, demands — again — for some kind of sense to be made of everything, for me to pay him what I owed him, pay him in my time and life, to pay off the hurt I’d done by stealing myself — I was his, he said, I belonged to him, to us, to our future, and didn’t I understand that? How did I not understand that? What had I done with that understanding?
The most recent was only a few minutes old:
I know you’re not at your mother’s, Elyria. I didn’t want to, but I looked through your emails, hoping to figure something out and, well, I don’t know what to say. Call me. Whatever time it is. I am barely ever sleeping now, so you won’t wake me up …
And there was also a two-word note from Mother: Everything okay?
Those words just sat there—everything okay? — as if we understood each other so well that this kind of shorthand was even possible—everything okay? — and I knew that she knew that nothing was okay, that she wasn’t and I wasn’t and we had never been, and I remembered, too, this was also what she had asked, years ago, when I told her over lunch that I was going to marry the professor.
Oh, honey …
And she put a hand on my hand as if I was her honey—
Is everything okay?
The main thing that wasn’t okay in that moment was her hand on my hand, so I took my hand back and I asked her what that was supposed to mean, and I was thinking of how terrible it is that everyone has to be a child of a person, and why would someone want to make more people when it all just leads up to sitting in an expensive midtown restaurant on an overcast Tuesday trying to eat a poached egg that’s gone cold under hollandaise congealed like pale yellow blood, talking about whether anything is okay.
It just seems odd. I mean, Ruby’s professor? Like, her boss? That skinny boy with the big jacket? I mean, sure, get yourself a first ex-husband, whatever, but I just don’t think he’s right for you.
And I knew that it was possible he wasn’t entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage, and I had chosen life in the face of death, this was how the professor said it, that since his mother had died he had been choosing to live every day, and I took this to mean he was just trying to do the best he could do with his life, to pretend to be the better version of himself even if he couldn’t always be that better version of himself, the version that can appropriately adjust to the disappointments of life, and let go of irrevocable losses, and stay awake through entire days without falling asleep in the middle of work or the middle of a subway car or the middle of a sentence.
Everything is okay, I told my mother back then, as someone was taking the plates away (All done?) and she said, again, Oh, honey, and I still wasn’t her honey and I clenched my jaw and she said, It’s depression, honey, you’re just depressed. You just need to have someone give you something. You don’t need to get married, that’s not going to fix anything, believe me, it won’t.
I’m not trying to fix anything.
Oh, honey.
Stop calling me honey.
He doesn’t have anything to do with Ruby anymore and he’s not going to bring her back.
I didn’t ask to bring her back, I said, and this may or may not have been the moment I got up and put on my jacket and Mother said, Oh, I just don’t understand you and your moods, why you can’t just control yourself, or maybe she didn’t say anything right then, maybe she just got out a compact to look at and powder her nose and I knew that’s what she probably did after she wrote that one-line email, that everything okay? She probably looked into a mirror to make sure her nose was still sitting on her face as usual, and I’m not one of those people who think of the right thing to say at the right moment, so that day at the restaurant I didn’t try to explain myself or my moods or my lack of an ability to control myself and that other day I didn’t write her any reply to her one-line email, didn’t tell her anything was okay or not okay.
I paid the woman for the minutes of Internet and she said, Thank you so much, and she seemed to mean it more than the average person.
There was a diner across the road and I went into it and took a whole booth for my little self. I stared at the menu and did not think of my husband. I stared at the tile floor and did not think of where I was or why I was here. A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat, which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger, what things you were going to turn into your body. She asked me if I was traveling by myself and I said I was and she said, Aw, good-onya, brave little one you are, don’t get too lonely, do you?, and I smiled so gently and did not throw the salt shaker across the restaurant.
After a while the old man at the booth beside mine leaned over—
Where are you from?
So I told him where I was from and he asked me where I was going and I said, The South Island ferry, and he said, Today? And I said, Whenever.