Sightings

1

After dinner, the conversation turns to celebrity sightings. The table’s littered with bowls of chocolate-covered almonds and date cookies and glasses of wine and bottles of beer. Someone says he saw Neil Young in a bookstore where he was about to give a reading but that Neil Young left before the reading began, which was a shame because there were only three people there. “A bookstore!” someone else says wonderingly. Her husband says he saw Tom Hanks emerge from a bathroom in a Greek restaurant, and that, despite himself, he blurted out, “You’re Tom Hanks!” He makes much of the fact that he was so dumbstruck, so reduced to a state of inarticulateness that that was all he could think to say, all his intelligence replaced by a greedy need to name. While he’s telling this story she has a growing sense of unease, and that unease makes her quiet. She’s thinking everyone else has so much more to say than she does, and she’s wondering why that is. She’ll start an evening off strong, laughing and joking, speaking, always, of matters other than herself, but engaged nonetheless, curious, lighthearted. As the hours progress, however, she’ll feel herself dropping down inside herself, sinking slowly, silently, to a locked-away chamber. It’s like being underwater, a wavery place of echoes and slanted beams of light. Other people carry on, becoming more boisterous, if anything, while she marvels at their strength and the way their voices warp and billow, slick as soap bubbles. If someone addresses her, which rarely happens when she’s in this state, for others seem to sense her remove, she startles, looks about confusedly, and answers wrongly, not getting at the gist of whatever’s been said. Or sometimes she’ll say something and everyone will laugh and she’ll laugh too, the way you laugh when you fail to disguise how embarrassed you are, and she might never understand, even later, why they laughed. But now, as she listens to her husband, she feels more than her typical discomfort. There’s something else—it’s what he’s saying, though everyone else is going along, nodding and smiling. They’re getting merrily drunk while she nurses her one glass of wine, and of course that’s part of it, part of what happens, how other people move ahead of her, carried along by hilarity. She rises with two other women—Nina and Kimberly—to collect plates and take them to the kitchen. Then they make their way to the living-room couch and curl up companionably. Nina and Kimberly speak easily of the mess and strife of their lives, and she takes comfort in their openness. Nina says her daughter’s in love with a boy who cuts himself, and that she lied to him, her daughter did, and told him she cuts herself too. This was via text, and Nina knows about it because she spied on her daughter’s phone. Her daughter lied to get closer to him but the boy went radio silent, and her daughter panicked and called the police to check on him, and when he showed up at school he was furious with her, absolutely furious. A friend of theirs who’s training to be a family therapist—“Oh, you mean Todd?” Kimberly interrupts excitedly, and Nina says, “Yeah, Todd,” and Kimberly says, “He’s been in so much therapy himself you can tell he’s going to be great,” and turns to her for some reason. “You can tell he’s going to have a line out his door.” Anyway, Nina says, Todd was at their house one night—she was out at the time, she heard about what happened from her husband—and her daughter started asking him these guilty questions, like did you always have to admit to someone when you’d lied to them, and Todd answered that you had to ask yourself whom the admission would help, whom it was for, you or them. Her husband knew she was due home soon, and he taped a sign to the front door telling her not to come in. Nina takes a sip of her beer and asks, “Is that strange? That he thought I shouldn’t come in?” Kimberly shakes her head. “You would’ve started asking questions, is all.” She thinks it’s sort of funny, but she can’t say that.

2

Tangled clumps of hair stick to her shoulders after she showers. Her skin’s chalky with soap scum. She stops shampooing, sleeps in the same black sweats she spends her days in. Freed of the obligations of dressing and grooming, she’ll be more forceful, more forward, she’ll escape the trap of womanhood, which is to be cheerfully, chronically presentable. She pulls on gray Wigwam socks, beat-up boots, and a puffy green vest, and goes for a walk in the park across the street from her house. The park has an innocent end where girls’ softball teams practice doggedly—egged on by the voice of their coach, a large man’s billowing voice full of authority and an autodidact’s singular focus—and a surreptitious end where people have sex and get high and eat fast food, judging by the empty condom wrappers and vape pens and Styrofoam containers scattered around. Kids from the junior high are congregated at a picnic table positioned exactly halfway between the two ends. “Ma’am!” one of them calls to her. “Ma’am!” Just when ignoring him becomes excruciating, her son rounds the corner on his skateboard, his legs obscured by parked cars so it appears he’s floating. Her inquisitor is diverted. He runs to him and asks to try a trick, tries a trick, falls off.

3

She’s the one who saw Tom Hanks, she realizes a few days later. At a Greek restaurant, as her husband said. She was waiting for the women’s bathroom, and it was taking whoever was in there forever, so she pivoted to the men’s and was just about to try the knob when Tom Hanks walked out. All yours, he said, and she felt the little jolt of intimacy that comes from seeing a familiar face—a face that’s familiar to her, that is, as her face is not familiar to him—and also as if they’d shared something, that he’d caught her in this small disobedience and sanctioned it. Thanks, she said. And that was that. She used the bathroom that Tom Hanks had used, washed her hands at the sink where he’d washed his hands, peered into the mirror where he’d presumably peered (when she says a familiar face, she means a looming, too-large familiarity, an abundantly flowered familiarity, a waxy familiarity like the enormous leaves of a tropical plant), and went out to the parking lot where her husband was waiting in the car.

4

Why did she not recognize her own story while it was being told? She knows other people’s stories so well, can recall their humiliations and triumphs as if they were her own.

5

Is she so estranged from herself that she recognizes and accepts only what she’s not? She doesn’t want to burden her friends with this question, and what would they say, anyway? They’d recommend brunch, a hike, a podcast, all good ideas to combat something else, but not this. This is cellular, philosophical. She makes an appointment with a therapist who accepts her insurance. He sits on a couch with two large golden retrievers, one on either side of him, waiting for her to speak. The only sound in the room is the dogs’ panting. The longer he remains silent, the more impatient she gets. This is probably his plan, to incense her into revelation. He grunts as if trying to defecate, and his dogs’ panting picks up speed. Master needs us! she imagines them thinking. She speaks in banalities and he responds in kind. She goes home and makes another appointment, this time with someone who comes recommended, someone she’ll have to pay for out of pocket, a woman who wears a light-blue tuxedo shirt and long shimmering earrings that graze her sharp jaw. Because she’s paying for the session herself, she approaches it with diligence, even jealousy. It seems nice to get to sit and listen to other people’s problems all day—to be confronted with so much derangement the contours of one’s life seem pleasing. The woman’s office is filled with swooping cacti and succulents in clay pots. She tells her what happened, she tells her she wants to probe the nature of selfhood and passivity, the ways in which women apply paternalistic, disciplining structures to their own narra—

5 1/2

But why does she use this language? She doesn’t believe in it. She doesn’t believe she’s accepted that stories only happen to other people. It’s just that those are the only ones she remembers.

6

—in thrall to the idea of the hero’s journey when really their experiences are looser and less—

“Are you afraid to contradict your husband?” the woman interrupts her to ask.

“He doesn’t like it, but I do it all the time,” she says, “and anyway, that’s not the issue, the issue’s that I didn’t realize until days later that he was talking about an experience I’d had. It’s just so weird.” She taps her head. “More like I’m afraid of myself.”

“You pivoted to answer me from another angle,” the woman says. “Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why.”

She pauses. She feels her cheeks go hot. “I guess I like my answers better than your questions,” she says.

7

She spends a little time each day looking for a job. The jobs that appeal to her have titles like Floating Cook, Irrigation Technician, and Building Attendant, jobs where she imagines herself communing intensely with one or two simple objects: stove, bowl, shrub, brush. The best job she ever had was as a security guard at an art museum on a college campus. She knew the rooms that housed the exhibits so well, the humidity controls like miniature seismographs, the carefully allowed light. She looked long into soft groups of people who had themselves gathered to stare. It was a beautiful arrangement.

8

She took turns manning the front desk with the other security guards—a retired policeman, a fire lookout—and it was there that the desire to steal money from the cashbox came over her. At the desk, visitors could make a donation or purchase the few items for sale, calendars and books corresponding to the artists on exhibit. The cashbox was kept in a drawer, with dividers for the bills as if for silverware. She longed to steal one crisp twenty-dollar bill. It seemed obvious that the way to stop herself from becoming a thief was to take just one small thing and not allow it to change her. So she tried, and it worked. The change was so tiny she wouldn’t notice it for years.

9

The fire lookout spent fire season looking out for fires. It’s this simplicity, this repetitive purpose that appeals.

10

The watched pot boils subtly, with a sense of unease in the water.

11

Now she writes articles for the alumni magazine of the college in the town where she lives. Her last assignment was to profile a caterer who’d won a staff appreciation award. This woman told her that when she catered events, she often had to apprehend students trying to smuggle out bottles of champagne under their clothes, and she thought this showed cunning on the part of the caterer, so she included it in the profile. Her editor struck the passage immediately. Of course she knew he would—she’d included it for her own amusement. But the more she thought about it, the more she thought how hard it must be for this middle-aged woman whose son grew up helping her cater events on campus (he’d particularly liked to scrub tables, she said) and was now the same age as the champagne-smuggling students, how hard it must be for her to confront them. It would be to confront the very privilege her son didn’t have, to acknowledge that she, in her capacity of spotter of bottles of champagne, had not been able to give him the chance to become a smuggler of bottles of champagne. Her surveillance had not yielded, then, the chance for her son to be surveilled. Or maybe that made it easier for her to stop them. The students were defiling the places where the woman’s son had liked to scrub tables, back when he was young enough to think scrubbing tables was fun.

12

Waiting outside a dressing room for her son to try on jeans, she sees the cuffs scuffing back and forth. He slings the rejects over the door for her to put back. The jeans are as heavy as bodies.

13

The high school holds its open house. She wants to talk to her son’s math teacher about what class he’d recommend her son take next year, though she’s sure he’ll say the advanced class, and when it’s her turn to talk to him, he does, he says the advanced class, and she feels herself fluff with pride even though she knew that was what he would say. “It’s not so much the precalculus I’m worried about as the calculus later,” she says, because she thinks she has to justify her question, and he assures her calculus just takes a different approach. There are pictures on the wall that look like they’ve been drawn by a very young child. She knows he has a young child, but they’re not in his regular classroom (there was a sign taped to his door directing parents here), so these pictures must not have been drawn by his child. They are garish streaks of color uninterested in the representation of life or living beings. They are great slashing displays of chaos. What incredible generosity, she thinks, to stand talking about children who aren’t yours, surrounded by pictures drawn by children who aren’t yours either.

14

She and her husband meet Paul and Nina for beers. Nina’s late. “Two and a half hours for a hair appointment,” she says ruefully when she arrives. It looks nice, her shiny bob, colored an acquiescent almost blonde. They’re in a converted warehouse where people bring their dogs and kids—there are glass jars of dog biscuits, plastic pouches of punch, a convivial atmosphere, food trucks. She’d decided before they came that she was going to speak about the experience of alienation without accusing her husband directly, that she was going to try to say something for a change, but every time she opens her mouth she’s interrupted. Paul says he got drunk for the first time when he was eleven. Her husband says he started later but then just kept going. The angle of women’s necks as they listen to men speaking. Something poised with religiosity. Nina says all she did as a teenager was bake cookies. There was an urban myth—or suburban myth—that because of ill treatment in a Nordstrom’s café, an aggrieved homemaker had gotten her hands on their top-secret chocolate-chip-cookie recipe and distributed it far and wide, and Nina’s mother was one of the recipients. It called for grating a hunk of baking chocolate into the dough as well as adding chips, and it was pretty damn good, Nina says.

15

“Do you want another beer?” her husband asks, and she surprises herself by saying yes, and as she drinks the second beer she sees the honey of piteous beauty dripping down over them from on high.

16

And she realizes something: her husband did see Tom Hanks. She’d gone out to the car and told him who was in the restaurant, and he hesitated for a minute, maybe wondering if it was worth it, and then he came back in with her to get a glimpse. The restaurant had a grocery attached, so it wasn’t strange to wander around among olive oils and cheese and pastries. And that was what her husband did, pretend to examine the feta and kasseri and kefalograviera until he saw him—Tom Hanks—walk back through the grocery area to rejoin his table. His wife is Greek, but she doesn’t know if his wife was there. She herself speaks enough Greek to say my love and thank you and to your health and come here and glass of water and glass of milk and bird who talks too much, but she can’t ask a question, she can’t order a dish.

17

She raises her glass to make a toast. “She wants to make a toast!” Nina says, and she doesn’t like the way she says she, as if she’s an object come to life, or as if an animal’s done a particularly challenging trick and done it well, completed it with stony compliance in its eyes. If you regarded those eyes carefully, you’d see they have systems beneath them. What does she mean by systems? Tunnels. Some go up, others go down, they meet in places and branch off in others. That’s what she means. A knot, a living knot, a complicated, dazzling, dangerous place where the decisions of the heart are made.

18

“You were going to say?” Nina prompts her.

19

They rush in with toasts of their own.

20

She drives home slowly because of the two beers. (Her husband had four.) Their son is there. He doesn’t crave being alone as much as she did when she was his age, but he doesn’t mind it either. He’s on the couch, watching something on a laptop balanced on a pillow on the coffee table. They go and sit with him. “What’re you watching?” she asks, and he pulls his earbuds out. It’s a bawdy British comedy. His hair’s greasy. “You need to shampoo better. Did you shampoo?” she says. He did shampoo. “Talk to us,” she says, so he tells them about his skate club fundraiser where they sold used decks and taught people how to grip them. “What was the fundraiser for?” her husband asks, and their son shrugs. “You were raising funds for?” he repeats, and says that you can only raise funds for something, you can’t just raise them. “We’ll have to brainstorm what you might—well, first, how much did you—” But what she wanted to say, what she never got the chance to say, was that the other night, driving home past the park, she caught sight of a bird that comes out only after dark. Stately, daunting, hawklike in the headlights. She pulled over, unrolled the window. And another—she felt her chest lift—and another. Totems, signs, miracles, symbols. They mean what you believe.

Read more from Issue 17.2.