You Think It, I'll Say It(49)

“I’m sorry,” Karen said.

“I’m taking it day by day—that old cliché. What about you?”

“Card-carrying spinster,” Karen said cheerfully.

This was a slightly shocking comment. At the volunteer training almost a year earlier, it had appeared that the majority of people there were unmarried women nearing the age when they’d be too old to have children. This fact was so obvious that it seemed unnecessary to discuss it out loud. Plus, it made me nervous, because was this the time in my own life before I found someone to love and had a family and looked back longingly on my youthful freedom? Or was it the beginning of what my life would be like forever? One of the reasons I liked Karen was that she was the first woman I’d met in my short adulthood who wasn’t married but seemed completely unconcerned about it; she was like proof of something.

We were driving north on Connecticut Avenue, and out the window, it was just starting to get dark. Alaina’s and Karen’s voices were like a discussion between guests on a radio program playing in the background.

“And how about you?” Alaina said.

The car was silent for several seconds before I realized she was talking to me. “I don’t have any kids,” I said.

“Are you married?”

In the rearview mirror, we made eye contact.

“No,” I said.

“Frances is a baby,” Karen said. “Guess how old she is.”

Alaina furrowed her brow, as if thinking very hard. “Twenty-four?”

“Twenty-three,” I said.

Karen turned around. “You’re twenty-three? I thought you were twenty-two.”

“I was,” I said. “But then I had a birthday.”

I hadn’t been making a joke, but they both laughed.

“Are you getting school credit for being a volunteer?” Alaina asked.

“No, I’ve graduated.”

“Where do you work?”

Normally, I felt flattered when people asked me questions. With Alaina, I was wary of revealing information. I hesitated, then said, “An environmental organization.”

“What’s it called?”

“It’s on M Street.”

Alaina laughed again. “Does it have a name?”

“The National Conservancy Group.” Before she could ask me another question, I said, “Where do you work?”

“Right now, I’m a free agent. I consult with nonprofits and NGOs on fundraising.”

I wondered if this was a euphemism for being unemployed.

“You get to make your own hours, huh?” Karen said. “I envy you.”

“It’s definitely a perk,” Alaina said.

After Alaina had dropped Karen off and I’d climbed into the front seat, I could not help thinking—I was now alone in an enclosed space with Alaina—that perhaps she was genuinely unbalanced. But if she were violent, I thought, she’d be violent in a crazed rather than a criminal way. She wouldn’t rob me; she’d do something bizarre and pointless, like cutting off my thumb. Neither of us spoke, and in the silence, I imagined her making some creepy, telling remark: Do you ever feel like your eyes are really, really itchy and you just want to scrape at them with a fork?

But when she spoke, what she said was “It’s great that you’re volunteering at your age. That’s really admirable.”

I was almost disappointed. “The kids are fun,” I said.

“Oh, I just want to gobble them up. You know who’s especially sweet is, who’s the little boy with the long eyelashes?”

The question made my ears seize up like when you hear an unexpected noise. “You can stop here,” I said. “At the corner, by that market.” It suddenly seemed imperative that Alaina not know where I lived.

“I’ll wait if you’re picking up stuff. I remember what it’s like to carry groceries on foot.”

“My apartment isn’t far,” I said. She hadn’t yet come to a complete stop, but I’d opened the door and had one leg hanging out. “Thanks for the ride,” I added, and slammed the door.

Without turning around, I could tell that she had not yet driven off. Go, I thought. Get out of here. What was she waiting for? The market door opened automatically, and just before it shut behind me, I finally heard her pull away. For a few minutes, I peered at the street, making sure she didn’t pass by again. Then I walked out empty-handed.



* * *



—

I’d majored in political science at the University of Kansas and spent the summer after my junior year interning for the congressman from the district in Wichita where I’d grown up. I hadn’t socialized much with the other interns, but I’d liked D.C. enough that I’d returned after graduating; the brick rowhouses reminded me of a city in a movie, and even though this was the late nineties, when crime rates were a lot higher than they are now, it didn’t feel unsafe.

In fact, my postgraduation life bore little resemblance to a movie. During the week, I was often so tired after work that I’d go to bed by eight-thirty. Then on Saturdays and Sundays, I’d hurry up and down Connecticut Avenue, to the laundromat and the market and CVS; because I didn’t have a car, I’d load groceries into my backpack, and it would be so heavy that it would make my shoulders ache. Sometimes I’d pass couples eating brunch at the outdoor cafés or inside restaurants with doors that opened onto the sidewalk, and I’d feel a confusion bordering on hostility. Flirting with a guy in a dark bar, at night, when you’d both been drinking—I understood the enticement. But to sit across the table from each other in the daylight, to watch each other’s jaws working over pancakes and scrambled eggs, seemed embarrassing and impossible. The compromises you’d made would be so apparent, I thought, this other person before you with their patches of flaky skin and protruding nose hairs and the drop of syrup on their chin before they wiped it and the boring cheerful complaints you’d make to each other about traffic or current events while the horrible sun hung over you. Wouldn’t you rather be alone, so you could go back to your apartment and use the toilet, or take a nap without someone’s sweaty arm around you? Or maybe you’d just want to sit on your couch and balance your checkbook and not hear another person breathing while they read the newspaper five feet away and looked over every ten or fifteen minutes so that you had to smile back—about nothing!—and periodically utter a term of endearment.