Luster(26)
“Where do you keep the cups?” I ask, in a small voice that surprises me. Akila sighs and slogs to the cabinet, reaches past all the normal glasses for a mug with a faded Captain Planet logo. I rinse it out, fiddle with a long-armed contraption attached to the tap, and fill the cup to the brim. I would like to forget our earlier interaction, but something about her general tween ennui won’t let me shake that these years I have over her are mostly fraudulent and that I’ve seen her father’s penis. However, I am so stunned by the clarity of the water that I briefly forget she is there while I go for seconds and thirds. When I ask for the Wi-Fi password, she points to the fridge. Between pictures of Eric in Greece and Akila in a sunflower costume is a note that says deeppurple. I type it into my phone and look at the picture of Akila again, the long yellow petals around her small, miserable face. I notice Akila is wearing a Superman tee.
“You like Superman?” I say, in that terrible small voice. “I like Superman.”
“No one likes Superman,” she says with an exasperated disdain that somehow brightens her face. Thankfully, Rebecca sweeps into the kitchen cradling what I assume is the family cat. It jumps out of her arms and darts through a doggy door, and aside from my awe that this round tabby is an outside cat, I feel a pang of recognition to find that this is the cat I saw during that first night, curled around Eric’s leg.
“Fine, go,” Rebecca says, opening the freezer, leaning inside. It makes me think of my own mother during the first years we lived in Latham, the way she was always too warm. The way a foot of snow would fall and glaze under freezing rain, and she would take the car and do doughnuts in the Walmart parking lot. Even sober, she was always sweating and keen on activities that made it worse, QVC tapes for capoeira, judo, and diaphragmatic circles. Rebecca withdraws from the freezer, guzzles a quart of water, and picks up the box of cornflakes.
“Make sure you go for a run today. At least a mile, okay?” she says as Akila slinks out of the room. Rebecca grabs a yogurt, looks at me, and then exits without another word. Back up in the guest room I plug the Wi-Fi password into my laptop and apply for more jobs. I open my perimeter, apply for a proofreading position at a gun magazine in Staten Island, a secretarial position at a clown school in Jersey City.
* * *
I go back down to the kitchen and Rebecca is putting on her shoes. When she sees me, she startles, then quickly regains herself. She tells me she is going out for groceries, and that feels odd. There is no reason I should know where she goes, but it is one of the more unfortunate results of our cohabitation. I already feel the pressure to overinform, to promise her that I am looking for work, and now, to make some sort of noise before I enter a room. I can tell she feels it, too, the absurdity of having to be accountable to me. She takes a moment to show me where they keep the bottled water and vitamins. As she does this, it almost feels as if she is angry with me. She opens the pantry, says, if you need, and throws the door closed. When she is gone, I walk around the house and familiarize myself. I find the light switches and take some time getting to know the sleek, high-tech kitchen and all its smooth, blinking dials. I can’t seem to get used to the feel of carpet, and in each room I am always aware of it between my toes. As I am looking through the cookbooks, Akila comes in from a run. She does not acknowledge me. She takes a soda from the fridge, checks the calories, and puts it back.
“How was your run?”
“I don’t know. Weird.”
“Weird?” I say, and she picks up an apple, considers it for a while.
“People stare at me. When I go outside.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, sometimes when I’m running or riding my bike, and I’ll turn around and see one of the neighbors watching me.”
“You should tell your parents,” I say, and she puts down the apple, gives me a hard look.
“No. I don’t want them to think— I’ve only been here for two years.”
“This is your home.”
“Yeah, well, I had three homes before this one,” she says, which seems impossible. She seems too young.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve. Basically thirteen. And you’re like, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And you don’t have your own place?”
“No, not anymore,” I say, and her face softens.
“You should have a backup plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, for when this thing with my dad ends.”
I go out to get some fresh air and try not to think about what Akila said. The neighborhood is fragrant and alien, all the hamlets in Maplewood bracketed in soft, emerald grass. Every half mile, there seems to be a golf course, with some improbable fauna, cranes and hare, circling little white carts along the fairways. There is a brief sunshower that curls my hair. A bird that is not a pigeon. An old white woman watching me through a slit in her blinds. I check my bank account, and my automatic student loan withdrawal has left me with thirty dollars. I leave a note on the fridge and hop on the bus and walk around Irvington, where my map shows the most demand. By demand, I mean maybe two delivery requests come in per hour. There is no bike share, so I have to go by foot. Then, halfway through my first delivery, the customer cancels.
A large order of pierogi comes in behind it. This is a relief, but when I arrive at the restaurant, the owner tells me a joke while I’m looking for the prepaid card and is insulted when I don’t laugh. After this, no amount of friendliness can remedy what I’ve done, and she keeps making heavily accented remarks about “the app,” which I think is a general screed about millennials, until she points at me and says, Obama, which is not by itself cause for alarm, but cause for me to look around the place, note all the ruddy Eastern European men, and want to get out of there. Pierogi in tow, I jog the two miles to my destination and find that the driveway itself is another half mile long. When my customer comes to the door, he extends his hand, and it is so soft as to be almost textureless. I realize he is Dr. Havermans, Park Slope’s preeminent dermatologist, whose lo-fi ads have papered R, Q, and M trains since 1995. He is shorter in real life, with dark rings around his eyes, but I’ve never met a famous person before and when he asks if I want to come inside of course my answer is yes. He gives me three hundred dollars and asks me to take off my shoes, and I pocket the money and do what I have to do. And what I have to do is crush tomatoes and raw eggs with my feet while he listens to Arvo P?rt. He sends me on my way with a seaweed face cream, and in the grand scheme of things this is not even close to the worst thing I’ve done for money, but it makes me feel out of sorts all the same.