After Jack had left the blue house in Enterprise Hills, taking along with him the organic cotton sheets on which they had so often slept together and the expensive French press that had been an un-wedding gift from friends, Allie had breathing room. For the first time in months that felt like years, she had time to think. And what she thought at first was: Never again. Never waste her time like that again, ever. Never wake up in the purplish black of the night, allowing the one street lamp to pierce her retinas and further scramble her blue-light-fried cerebrum, to listen to anyone’s anxious soliloquies on global warming, as she had listened to Jack’s. Never again, never endure the faint grassy odor of sweat, the prodding of knee and ankle bones, under the percale duvet. Never live with another human, another body—as if her own body weren’t trouble enough.
What had possessed her to do it? Her salary had supported them both. And Jack hadn’t been much help, either—rising out of bed at noon, frying up some sort of garlicky vegetable skillet in the kitchen, going for a bike ride without showering afterward, then retiring to the sheets with a book until it was time for Allie to walk in from work. The leisure of it had appealed to her in the early days, when a wave of delight and relief would pass through her on seeing his relaxed form there in the covers, when she would drop her things and her clothes and join him. Afterward, he might go for a run while she made dinner, and then he would leave her to deal with the dishes.
“I’m going to write,” he’d say, but would instead read news articles on the Internet for several hours at a stretch, muttering under his breath at the words on the screen—“idiots, fascists, criminals”—until long after Allie had put down her knitting and her earbuds and gone to bed.
He swore to her whenever she raised the question that, at some point while she slept every night, he sent in flurries of submissions to journals, toiled away at drafts of chapbooks, planned to make his mark. One day, he swore, she would see.
“Can I see?” she would ask.
“The work is in progress,” he would reply, sadly shaking his head.
She rose again at six; she was on the interstate to Charleston by seven, driving east, to arrive before the interns did. In her first weeks she had striven to arrive before Janet, the director, whose job Allie wanted. Before long, Allie had understood that Janet would never arrive before ten no matter what, and never at all on Fridays. Janet scarcely cared what happened in the office; Janet didn’t really have to care. Caring was what she paid Allie to do.
Both women were in their late twenties, but so far no friendship had grown up between them. Allie had made overtures; Janet had smiled and said thank you but had not really seemed to know what to do with the book Allie proffered or with the hand-painted mug with sachets of lavender tea. Her hands cupped the gifts awkwardly, as if unused to grasping things on their own.
What could Janet really need from Allie, what could they hold in common? Janet’s family owned vacation homes, plural, on Myrtle Beach and Isle of Palms. Green Spaces South was her parents’ philanthropic outlet, their “passion project,” Janet liked to say. The only passions Allie could detect in Janet aimed at girls’ nights out, weekend flights to Atlanta or Nashville, interpersonal drama within her circle of friends and the strictly limited pool of men they condescended to date.
On these topics Janet held forth at length, during office hours, on her cell phone behind the closed door, in the front parlor—not quietly enough to prevent Allie from overhearing. Janet’s true work at Green Spaces was to manifest occasionally at fundraising galas: gown and heels, hair and golden shoulders, surrounded by a cluster of equally golden, unapproachable women.
Allie maintained the office, hired and fired cleaners and handymen, suppliers of coffee and houseplants and printer paper, editors and graphic designers for pamphlets and posters and annual reports. She met with lawyers on current regulations and with lobbyists on new, stricter ones. Allie helped schools and scout groups submit project proposals. Allie kept the files in crisp order. Allie made the interns put down their phones and do work.
Even as Allie sweated for promotion, she wondered what kind of chance she had. Janet’s parents were major donors to Green Spaces: the Beauregards, a gracious and personally temperate couple Allie had met exactly once, at a benefit dinner. Over spinach salad, in dim shadow outside a ring of candlelight, Allie had gleaned that they worried—correctly—that Janet lacked direction and purpose. They felt better about their daughter’s life and their own if they could tell their friends that Janet headed a branch office, never mind whether Janet was suited for the work.
The Beauregards felt more justified in their square footage, in their yearly budget, in their travel plans, in their chef and housekeeper, when they were making a difference. By giving some small percentage away, they felt they earned the right to keep what had been passed on to them. Allie saw all this in the yellow candlelight gleaming on the carefully maintained smile of Janet’s mother, the little gold line of light darting between the two bone-china front teeth.
Allie too, in her way, was trying to earn by giving. All she had to give, though, was her competence. Was it possible that she had reached her level, that she should remain there, rest content? If the organization were to pay Allie three times more, confer a fancy title, what would she do differently, do better, than she did right now? She would remain a good manager only. She would never be as capable or comfortable in Janet’s world as Janet was in it or as Allie was in her own. Allie would never be able to trade as Janet did on the commodities of good looks, good humor, impeccable grooming, dismissive wit. Allie was not beautiful. With great effort she could be made presentable in the kinds of rooms where Janet shone. She had made an effort before the benefit. Still Janet’s parents had not seen Allie at all except as a sort of distant echo of Janet, a receptacle for their thoughts about Janet.
Allie was clever but not with the sago-palm quality, lush but cutting, valued most highly in Janet’s circles. Allie’s cleverness was valued for its reliable invisibility. Without it no substance to Janet’s glamour, no justification. Allie ran her fingertips over the satin of her evening bag, the tulle of her skirt, and considered quitting. Find somewhere else, somewhere better, to work: why not? Who needed this?
“You should quit,” Jack had said, as Allie had curled into the sheets later that night, resting against his body. “I’m serious. They don’t deserve you. The capitalist bastards.”
Allie had at that time found Jack’s political angst amusing rather than worrying. She had laughed. “They have no self-awareness. You know Janet drives this glossy new chartreuse Prius? And on the back she’s stuck this hideous bumper sticker? Blue with gold text. ‘Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.’”
Jack writhed in an ecstasy of irritation. “She thinks owning a hybrid makes her a virgin martyr. All the time she’s screwing the whole planet. In more ways than one.” If only he had not gone on to add, “Look at me: I don’t drive at all,” Allie could, maybe, have felt as comforted as he had meant her to.
Well, now he was gone. If only he had had more to show for his sacrifices; if only they had not fought endlessly over the trivial duties and desires of their days and nights. If only. Oh well.
In this broad June morning, in its humidity heavy as the box of papers she bore in her arms, Allie wove her way under the Spanish moss, under the wrought-iron balustrade, through the newly installed swinging glass door printed with a live oak and the words Green Spaces South—Tomorrow’s Glory, Today’s Gift in arching serif font Allie had chosen herself. Over glossy pine floors, past brass fittings and white wainscoting, into the gray-and-white working monotony of the back half of the building, Allie passed. Not for her the front parlor, not for her the reception room with its foliage, its tapestried sofas, its sepia pineapple prints in mahogany frames, its ivory textured wallpaper soft as a blanket. From time to time Allie met visitors there—mostly the lawyers and lobbyists—but most of the time it was Janet’s kingdom, while Allie sent the interns out to serve her and her visitors with trays of water and coffee.
Allie’s own desk in the former servant’s quarters was a pressed-wood monstrosity from the 1970s, warped from the second drawer to the footboard from when the last hurricane had flooded the building three years ago. She had refused to have it replaced, although Janet had offered, because it still worked and Allie hated to think of it sitting in a landfill. The floor had been redone at that time, though, so that it no longer creaked at each step or smelled of mildew as it had when Allie first started.
“Long overdue,” Janet had insisted, as Allie wrinkled her nose at the smell of the offgassing carpet.
Allie had insisted, too, over Janet’s protests, on bringing back all the same furnishings she had inherited from the previous office manager: metal file cabinets, stacks of decades-old bankers’ boxes, a second industrial desk in the corner where an intern sometimes sat in a folding chair. In the back room, too, Allie had rescued a set of wicker deck furniture cushioned in nautical stripes and strung with cowrie shells, which no one else in the building had wanted to claim, which Janet had called “hideous” but Allie found nostalgic.
“If you want it you can have it,” Janet had shrugged, wrinkling her nose in her turn.
On the corkboard above the desk Allie had hung a photograph she had taken on a hike not long after she and Jack had moved together from Raleigh to Charleston. Along a boardwalk trail over wetlands, she had stepped into a clearing beside a long low pond, almost the size of a lake. Cream iris flags had leapt toward her like spatters of paint out of wild grasses. Overhead, a row of cumulus clouds the color of unpainted canvas yawned between the watercolor blue above and, beneath, the deep blue of a coming storm. Their bellies had been a deeper golden-grey like the unbleached wool of sheep. In the foreground, low over the indigo water, swept a white egret.
The photograph did no justice either to her memory of the moment or to the light already betrayed by the flattening effect of the phone camera lens. Yet she hung it anyway, an aide-memoire, a focal point, a window into a place where time flowed differently.
“An order to restructure? What kind of restructuring? Whose order?”
Janet, seated in the wicker chair, looked much farther downmarket than she looked when seated in the commodore’s chair in the front parlor. Now her hair’s texture and exact shade of yellow reminded Allie of a potato chip: Allie obscurely wanted to bite it.
“Oh, nothing you need to worry about for now.” Janet’s voice was breezy, beachy. This irritated Allie, who wanted details. “Just moving some seats around. Maybe, you know” (Janet cast her eyes around the room) “revamping some offices, overhauling some roles. When the dust settles will be plenty of time to talk it all over.”
It wasn’t plenty of time. The following week Allie knocked on the frame of Janet’s open door; when Janet murmured “Yes?”, Allie held up the slip of paper that had come in with the mail, in a plain business envelope, bearing Allie’s name in someone’s assistant’s perky hand-printing.
“You expect me to be able to read that from here?” Janet went on—not bothering, as usual, to extend to Allie the elaborate courtesy she expected to be handled with herself.
“You don’t recognize it?” Allie struggled to hold control of her voice.
“’Fraid not.”
“‘We at Green Spaces Corporate work hard to support our branch offices, which do the vital field projects,’ blah blah blah, things they say but don’t mean… ‘We regret to inform you that due to recent feedback and budget cuts, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate. Your. Position.” Allie shook the letter once, hard, and it snapped in her hand like a flag in the wind. “I am this office. Where will you find someone to do everything I do? At the salary I do it at?”
Janet was unmoved. “Actually, remember my friend Sabine? Who interned last year? Recent graduate? Needs to gain some experience, is willing to volunteer her time, is asking a buck a year for tax reasons. This is a nonprofit, it’s not like the office is made of money, you know? If you needed more money you should have been looking for new work anyway, a long time ago.”
Allie swallowed tears. “But I love—”
“Yeah, everyone loves something. You get bad advice for just that reason. People want their work to affirm them. But work isn’t built for that, you know? Work isn’t made to be loved. It won’t love you back. My advice? You want to be loved, get a dog.”
Janet set her latte down—a disposable cup, Allie couldn’t help noticing—on Allie’s geode coaster. The hollow at the bottom of the cup sounded a crisp tap on the surface. Behind and above Janet’s yellow head, on top of a metal file tower, the Phalaenopsis euro, which Allie had carefully watered every other Friday for years, nodded in the breath of the air conditioner vent. Allie kept her eyes focused on the petals of the orchid. The lines blurred, wavered, but by force of will she kept the image sharp.
Later that week Allie was to remember the color of the orchid, the exact magenta pink of its petals, when the color appeared before her again, this time in two straight small wet lines: an equals sign tipped on its elbow, a pair of towers destined for destruction, or rather the twin lights shooting high into the fog in commemoration of a way of life that had had its glories, true, but could no longer, in view of the situation, be sustained.
She called Jack the next evening. He told her he was sitting on the balcony at his new place in Nashville. A faint twang of guitar strings sounded in the background. He’d been trying to write lyrics, he said.
He sounded surprised to hear from her, still more surprised to be told what she was telling him. “What do I want you to do? Why ask me? I would have thought that was up to you.”
“Well, it’s yours too. Ours.”
“Nothing is ‘ours’ anymore.”
“This is.”
“Well, I’ll give you my share in it.”
Allie counted silently to ten. Jack waited.
“Meaning I’m on my own with this,” Allie interpreted, correctly.
“You’re strong. I believe in you,” Jack said at length.
Allie hung up. She knew this kind of support, knew exactly what it was worth.
She found a new job right away, an administrative assistant position at a trendy dentist’s office in downtown Charleston, a place with its walls painted black like a club’s, the same trance music jittering from the speakers. She had quit by the following Monday: it had taken only a few days to figure out that the office was scamming patients, charging for treatments it hadn’t delivered, recommending expensive superfluous work, administering “laser therapy” that was hardly more than flashing lights and theater. That week Allie put the blue house in Enterprise Hills on the market. She sent out handfuls of applications, set up some interviews, and, working against a sense of heaviness in her muscles and her skull, followed up ads in the Post and Courier to find a studio apartment for herself.
The new place, a loft over the garage of a dandelion-yellow Victorian gingerbread place off St. John’s Avenue, was owned and the main house occupied by an energetic grandmotherly woman, an illustrator of children’s books, delighted to be bringing in the modest rent Allie could offer.
“As long as you don’t put meat scraps in the compost, darling, we’ll be fine,” Violet said, smiling as she tucked Allie’s white envelope with the small security deposit into her apron pocket.
Allie wondered if Violet might make a good confidante. The children’s books, the quaint house, the sweet garden, led her to pigeonhole Violet as a sentimentalist: fresh rosebuds, doilies, Lady Grey tea, that kind of thing. Then Allie invited her over for a drink. Violet smiled and asked for whiskey on the rocks. Allie learned that Violet had worked for more than two dozen publishers since retiring from her day job in administration at a charter school. Violet had had no family of her own, had saved up considerably and invested wisely, had become familiar with contract law in the process of learning to ask for what her work was worth. Her warmth, her triumph, washed over Allie like a wave, pulled her low.
Allie’s loss of the Green Spaces job came bubbling up out of her before she could think. Next, in a rush like a wave of nausea, out tumbled the truth of her pregnancy: worse and worse, Allie thought; no way will she let me live here now.
Then it emerged that Violet had been a volunteer doorway guard at a downtown clinic in Atlanta in the early eighties, when Allie herself had been only a small girl. Violet had given up the work after a few years of it, not so much, Violet quickly assured Allie, from a change of heart as from a lack of time.
“I’m not here to tell you what to do,” Violet confirmed; Allie heard a false note in Violet’s voice but couldn’t have said why.
“I wish someone would,” Allie admitted. Violet looked puzzled and offended; Allie then described Jack’s indifference and self-indulgence, his unearned sense of wu wei. Sympathy and irritation replaced Violet’s confusion.
“In general men tend to be useless,” Violet asseverated. Thinking of Jack and only of Jack, Allie couldn’t but agree.
“What do you want to do?” Violet persisted, and together the women sketched out a plan. Allie could keep the apartment at low rent for up to a year after the birth: “It isn’t as though I need the money, darling.” Allie would do light gardening and odd jobs, saving Violet “just boatloads, in this old rattletrap: you can’t imagine what I pay a year to contractors.” They could share cooking sometimes, she suggested, “although you don’t have to if you don’t want.” Mainly, Violet would let her stay and would charge only nominal rent.
“You’ll have time to figure things out,” Violet comforted her, “plenty of time.”
Not fourteen days later Allie began to bleed. At first it felt like a relief; she thought she might let things run their course. Yet she never felt cramps. The flow simply continued, a red line through her days. When she mentioned it at her next checkup, the midwife’s eyes went wide.
“No, it’s okay,” Allie said. “If it won’t live, it won’t. That’s just nature. It happens sometimes. I’m not worried about it.”
“I’m worried about you,” the nurse said. “Hemhorraging isn’t a non-issue. Let’s get it checked out.”
Allie checked herself into the hospital. A blood clot had formed in her cervix, placing pressure on the placenta. The consulting doctor recommended a simple procedure that would heal Allie and make sure the baby—she said baby—was saved, if that was what Allie wanted.
Was it what she wanted?, she asked Allie. Her mouth formed a flat line, communicating no emotion, no slant.
Allie felt small, irrelevant. Who and what was she, she asked herself, to be wanting things, not wanting things? She asked the doctor how urgently the decision needed to be made. The doctor’s eyes narrowed, and she sighed.
“Obviously, the sooner the better,” the doctor said.
Allie asked again: how soon? Meaning, not saying: If I take time to think will I die? Will my thinking have killed me and the little amphibian too? She laid her hands flat on the strange blanket, its breath-mint color, its cotton pilled from many washings, to wait for the answer.
There was time, the doctor told her, but not much. They would leave the room, would come back in a couple of hours: doctor first, technician after, like a hawk followed through the marsh by an egret.
Allie’s eyes slid closed. She lay there she had no idea how long, not awake, not sleeping, aware of the room, aware of cold air on her cheeks, a loop of plastic on her wrist, faint beeps, the spinning alienation of a strange bed in a strange city—Charleston wasn’t her hometown; her hometown was the place she had left with Jack, a nowhere between Raleigh and Richmond off I-85 in the shadow of old-growth pine forest: the Walmart-and-Lowe’s side of town, the Jack-in-the-Box and Checkers side, the mall side; not the fountain-garden, stone-walled subdivision, green golf course side.
Was there a way from the wrong side to the right side for her; would there ever be? Did she have the sides marked out correctly on the map in her mind? Did the map in her mind match the map in fact? On which side of the map, anyone’s map, lay the pool in which the little creature swam between her hipbones?
Allie didn’t remember sleeping, but when she woke her head felt clear. The doctor looked the question at Allie, and Allie smiled.
“I want it.”
Allie’s body became an exoplanet, an unfamiliar world. She developed capacities she wasn’t sure how to classify: subhuman, superhuman, inhuman? She could smell microbiomes; she could taste insincerity. She could hear, like a radio transmission, what to eat when; could feel the proteins sliding into her bloodstream, building the mysterious presence. She had thought a host organism should seem defeated, overthrown, consumed. Now she felt surprise at her unthought-of power. A lioness, an apex predator—shaping the web, yes, but beneficently, splendidly. Tautness and softness counterbalanced themselves in her. There formed in her an estuary, a quiet habitat, a whole ecosystem.
The little creature grew slowly out of its tadpole tail, out of its alien elongation, into mammalian recognizance. In Allie’s dreams the birth took place bloodlessly: little creature transposing itself through her abdominal wall; paranormal, painless caesarean. Sometimes it emerged already five or six years old. Sometimes it sported scales or talons. One time a tawny griffin slid forth, seven pounds, perfectly formed, with velvet paws and small white wings.
In another dream the child, this time human, was stolen from her and she leapt into the driver’s seat of a car to find it; when she caught the kidnapper, a hairy convict dressed in only the lower half of a prison jumpsuit, she branded him on his bare chest with a red cattle iron and woke to a smell of sizzling flesh that was really only the smell of Violet’s coffeepot. The villain’s scream became, for a moment, her own until she rose from the water of sleep.
All summer Allie trimmed azaleas and hydrangeas, thinned daffodil bulbs, spread mulch, planted impatiens. One August day, it was already too hot to work by ten. The heat shortened Allie’s breath, hobbled her steps. A tightening of muscle began at her left hipbone and spread around her pelvis. She parked the wheelbarrow under the fire escape, letting the work-rounded ends of the wooden handles slide one after the other out of her sweat-slick palms. The tightness receded, then returned, spreading from her sacrum into both hips, down her thighs and away.
She sat in the shade of the spreading oak for a moment, in a folding camp chair left there by Violet for the purpose, but the weight of her belly pushed her backward into the chair at an awkward angle. Her discomfort rose sharply. She stood again and walked in little circles.
She wanted her room, her bed, but couldn’t face the thought of the stairs. Her belly seemed to weigh half again as much as the rest of her body. A pulse of fear like a shadow of hawk’s wings passed over her. She made her way to Violet’s screen door, avoided the place where the wire mesh cutout had begun to fray at the edge. The black plastic latch gave at her touch. Allie swung the inner door open.
The kitchen, at midmorning, lay full of greyish gloom. Light filtered through a lace-lined window over the sink; a cloud passed, darkening it, as Allie entered. Once her eyes adjusted, Allie noticed Violet’s sink cluttered with last night’s dinner dishes, this morning’s teacup and pinwheel plate on the counter. The coffeepot sat cold at the side of the range. Otherwise there was no sign of Violet: she must be working.
Allie walked around to the back office: turquoise walls, rolltop desk, typewriter, Macintosh with large monitor; easel, paint jars, pastels; landslide of art books, newspapers, periodicals, old printer’s proofs, new sketch pads. No Violet. The vintage pickup truck and the bicycle nestled side by side in the gravel drive. She must be upstairs.
But at this hour Violet was almost always working. Images from television, of elder women in billowing nightgowns being hoisted on gurneys, filled Allie’s head. She passed through the living room—fringed drapes, velveteen upholstery, polished wood, porcelain behind glass—grasped the newel post, fixed her foot in the center of the carpet runner, and began to pull herself up the stairs.
Seven steps on each passage, one turn at the landing, yet Allie had to stop four times in the process: how absurd. She had heard a contraction described as a pain or a stab but what it really felt like was an exercise, an exercise without end. The center of her body had become a runner’s calf or a gymnast’s arm; the muscle had cramped but the cramp was everything and as soon as it left it came back again, endlessly back, until Allie was no longer even a single muscle being strengthened by use but a rag being wrung out again and again, hot and limp and motionless.
When she reached the top she found herself at the end of a long hallway. She had been upstairs in Violet’s house once before, when Violet had been giving her vintage sheets to be remade into receiving blankets. The whole of her life refashioning itself around this weight, this ache.
The curtains here, substantial in drape and heft, were made to cocoon sleep or illness. Illness—but Violet was so healthy, so active. Surely she was all right. Still, Allie had to find her. Allie seemed to be stepping now through thick mud, though the pine boards shone with polish and breathed a faint scent of oil soap. This was absurd, absurd. Allie had to laugh, and did so, loudly. The sharp bark rang down the corridor, and Allie fell to her hands and knees.
She heard the warm splash before she felt it. The warmth on her thighs seemed to be coming from somewhere else. Her fingertips pointed toward Violet’s bedroom door, the door at the end of the hall, but that was as far as Allie could advance. It was through her fingertips that she felt the vibration in the floorboards, the vibration of footsteps, of the door opening and then slamming again, of the old rotary dial jangling, the shrillness of its demand, the urgency.
“Yes, please, it’s my tenant”—Violet was fine, then, but how about this tenant? It was as if Allie had never heard the word before, couldn’t recall its meaning—and then she could hear nothing at all because of the noise, a sound like a kettle whistling, but the coffeepot had been cold; a train coming, but the tracks were miles away; a noise that stretched on and on, higher and higher and swallowed her, was her, subsumed her body and all its sensations: she burst, a pop and a surge like nothing she had imagined, and then she heard a little thud, and a wail like a crow’s call, and then silence.
Allie felt a wave of relief like breath after a brush with drowning. Instinctively she reached down. Where—? Where was—? She felt a tug.
Violet, in jeans and t-shirt, knelt behind her. Violet held something violet in her hands. Violet said, “I’m so sorry.” Violet handed her, tenderly, a little something wrapped in a towel. A little wet slippery something with eyes and a nose and a mouth like a doll’s, but indigo blue as the egret’s lake. A little body which, all the while the EMTs were turning and lifting and hooking up tubes and wires and loading her and it—her and her—on to the gurney, into the ambulance—she held and held and held, repeating over and over, until her throat and tongue ran dry, Please let her be okay, please let her be okay, please let her be okay, pressing the little body close and closer to her until they gently pulled it away and even then reaching out as if holding the little body still, as if not knowing what on earth else, any longer, her hands and arms were for.
