My life is ruled by dual forces: I have perfect facial recognition, and people forget me. I've always been forgettable. My eyes and ears and nose, not to mention my size and hair color, are unremarkable. I'm the girl everyone vaguely knows. I'm affable at parties and complimentary—great sweater, love the hair—but keep few friends, abstain from prattle, shirk social media, am slow to trust.
The extent of my PFR is simple: If I see you in a check-out line or at the neighborhood café, I remember you. A conscious scan and you're lodged in my occipital lobe forever. (Psych major.) In this world of forgetters, I know I'm the exception. I just wish others had better recall.
Sometimes I double back, though. What if I were bolder, brusquer, bristled at the edges? The Cynical Janes and Garrulous Leilas—nobody forgets them. But this size ten? This slightly shorter than average, flat-chested brunette? This underemployed, 3.4 GPA, matinee-movie-going, arm-crosser at concerts?
Well.
I could usually ignore my PFR, but it became all the more goading when my mother left town two months ago. She moved to Georgia with a man I'd never met.
"Ruthie, babe, my joints—they're like the floors of our old house."
Which house? Not counting the single-wide trailer of toddlerhood or the supposed colonial mansion of my time in the womb, we'd lived in a total of twenty-one.
"Who's the man, Mom?"
She sidestepped, talked instead about shabby hip flexors. Last I knew, she was biking twenty miles a day. Now bursitis?
"Would you listen to this. I'm the old broad I used to make fun of." My mother had an affected New York accent, perhaps because she'd once wanted to live there, perhaps because she watched a lot of Law & Order.
"What happened to our pact, Mom?"
"Pacts, schmacts," she said.
After we'd both had some sour relationships, we agreed no men for a year. I don't have sob stories. It came down to needing more: adventures and intellectual stimulation and spontaneous romantic larks and long, difficult hikes. I loved hiking, but I didn't hike alone. I didn't do Netflix on the couch. I didn't do cliché dates, walking around lakes with ice cream or blockbusters at the megaplex. I got called high maintenance, hard to please, intense. So, what? Who wasn't?
Just as I was getting used to not having my mother around, my best friend Tamara called me and told me Michelle, our mutual college friend, died of congestive heart failure. She'd had an enlarged heart—something no one, not even her closest friends, had known about. We'd had three years of real friendship in college, late-night talks of The Powers That Be and manic mothers, but senior year, when she started drinking to black-out statures and stockpiling venereal diseases, I kept a distance. I tried to cultivate a life of minimal drama. The distance gutted me. Aside from my mother, she'd been the closest friend I ever had.
After hearing the news, Tamara and I met and drank Michelle's favorite drink, Red-headed Sluts—cranberry juice and vodka—at The Dubliner along the new light rail corridor in Saint Paul. Outside, it was fifty degrees and drizzling. The so-called girl gang had frequented the pub in college. I'd gone a few times, but it depressed me—the faux-Irish accents, the couple with matching flannels, the bathroom pungent with menstruation and onion.
"Here's to Michelle," Tamara said.
"Immaculate Perception," I said, an old joke among the three of us, and we downed our drinks.
I knew I should have been sad, but I didn't feel all that sad. It was as if someone else put an arm out for me, holding would-be grief at arm's length. More, I was sad for Tamara. She had stayed close to Michelle, and she was also moving, coincidentally, despite my gushing protests, to San Francisco the next day.
"Don't go," I said, grabbing her hand. "Don't go, my dear. Please." I was fretful of the need of needing company.
"Your Sinatra needs work," she said.
"I swoon."
"I swoon, too," she said, shaking her head. It was our pet phrase. On dateless weekends, we'd gorge on bacon and buttery popcorn. She'd stir the salt, slap her ass (which I'd always been jealous of), and say, "You sure you can live with this JELL-O if we stay single?" And I'd say, "I swoon," and cue the movie. If I was having a shitty day, she'd text: Hey, girl. I swoon. Or some variation. Swoonzies. Swoony moony. Full swoon tonight.
At the Dubliner, we talked about the shock of Michelle, shared a few memories, and when there was a lull I said, "Did I tell you my mom left?"
She squinted. "You mentioned a beau. Didn't see that coming?"
"Yeah," I said. "I guess."
She squinted again and looked over at the specials board: Tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons.
"Why you got to be like this?" she said. She made an inward smack from the corner of her mouth.
Hurt flashed over me like a spotlight and all I could do was squint into it and say, "I'm sorry, I know, I know. I just—you know we had a hard time, me and Michelle."
"You have a hard time."
We sat in silence for a while.
She shrugged, bra strap falling from her shoulder, then tilted her head toward the pool table, which had just opened up.
We had one more drink and she kissed me, quick and dry like sisters, at the jukebox. It was something we often did when we drank too much or talked make-out logistics before (her) big dates. It was innocent for Tam. But for me? Sometimes I just wondered if she was the only good person I'd ever had in my life, purely good, who didn't treat me like shit one minute and compliment me the next, who, if it were up to me, would just stay single forever, as I would, living in the apartment next to mine.
We took the light rail back to my apartment. She dozed on my shoulder. I thought of Michelle. After college, with each success I had—new job, travel, better apartment—Michelle would appear personally hurt. She offered me weed, coke, third or fourth drinks at parties, and I declined. I let our friendship drift, no real hard feelings. "Don't judge me," she slurred one night. For what? Her mottled skin? The dark circles under her eyes? I had signed up for a half marathon and was working an okay job at a research institute. Meanwhile, she waited tables at a punk bar in uptown and eventually "sold out" to a big suburban restaurant to make more tips. For the past five years, that's where she'd been as far as I knew, serving up ribs and Diet Cokes, smoking weed, accumulating resentment. Word had it she'd gotten into Comic-Con, cosplay, and her boyfriend was a Dungeon Master.
Tamara continued to be the glue between us. She worked for fancy ad agencies, so she could hold her liquor, and Michelle was, like so many who drink a lot in college and just keep on drinking, a functioning alcoholic. I had strict rules about alcohol—only with friends, never more than two. It's odd, watching someone slip away from their best self and not being able—or not knowing how—to say anything.
So, I sent birthday texts.
"A challenge," Tam said at the airport the next morning. She held up a finger. "One phone number. Add one phone number to your contacts."
She had probably, like me, envisioned hibernation, chocolate, endless mess, bad movies.
"I hate this," I said.
"You think you don't need anybody, but—" she looked at me square in the eyes, "you do. And more than just one."
I broke. I'd do anything she said. All I'd ever wanted was to be taken care of, and here she was, taking care of me—and leaving. I hugged her again.
"And it's sad if you let yourself feel that it's sad."
I stared.
"Michelle."
I bit my cheek as hard as I could, which was all I could do to not erupt in an embarrassing display of hot gushing tears.
"Swoon," she said. I would see her at Michelle's funeral in a few days, I told myself. No need to panic.
"Swoon," I said.
On the drive back to my apartment, I had to pull over because I couldn't see through the tears. I felt myself tilting out of balance, as if one side were going limp or shedding pounds. Tamara had opened me like a matryoshka, until I bore secrets and disappointments, secrets I'd kept even from myself.
People: I didn't want to want them but felt a stirring, nonetheless. When I finally forced myself to merge back onto the freeway, I made a resolve to reintroduce myself to everyone I recognized.
I called my mother for the third time that week. It was Friday. Laughter from the street floated up through the open window of my studio apartment. The ringing switched to voicemail. She and her new man sang, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in a cappella. For the first time, I felt like I not only didn't know everything about my mother; I knew nothing. She'd replaced me with a paramour. I didn't blame her. My own sex life? Let's just say I blushed pretty hard the other day when my favorite FedEx driver with the chiseled calves knocked at my door for a signature and handed me a package that read Goodvibrations.com on the return address.
Growing up, my mother was addicted to nursing addicted men back to sobriety (or talking them down from the rope), but these men always left her bruised, temporarily unavailable. I'd walk into a room and throw an object. She'd stay numb for weeks, sometimes months. I'd beg her to eat. Sometimes, she'd rise in the middle of the night from the couch, and I'd hear her cat-clawing at Tupperware containers, the desperate scritch of the pried lid accompanied by listless sighing. I'd find her shoving leftover pasta I'd made the night before into her mouth with her hands. Eventually, she would warm back into civilization. She'd grow restless, find a new job, or we'd just up and move. "This place isn't the right fit," she'd say. I learned to drive a U-Haul at fourteen so she could sleep. She sermonized about women's choices and self-governance. Secretly, though, she craved the passenger seat. Motion might have been her only real comfort. When she was stable, she could be dogmatic in her campaigns for control. She re-cleaned everything I cleaned, always following after me with a dish rag, a broom, a better, boxier fold of the laundry. Mostly, though, I parented her. We flitted between the Midwest of her youth and the Pacific Northwest of my longing. Occasionally, when the men were really bad, when the bruising was beyond emotional, we'd flee south. We both had a weak spot for buttery grits, biscuits, and braised greens.
I begged my co-workers for their shifts and worked doubles all weekend, trying to avoid my own resolve and propensity to spiral. I valeted at the Elm & Inn, part five-star restaurant, part boutique hotel. After getting laid off from the research institute, I worked as a teacher's aide but grew tired of it and since worked service jobs—restaurants, hotels, cleaning agencies, coffee shops. What I loved about valeting? The rush. A couple would amble from the restaurant, and as they would grope for their ticket — "Brian, come on, honey, you're drunk. He's drunk, I apologize"—I would lift off, legs burning their pleasing burn.
After the doubles I had a rare two days off, so I drove to a new coffee shop across town. There were others in my neighborhood, but I cleaved to privacy, mystery, control. Gotta let go, Tamara said in my head. I told her I missed her, parked and, as I was walking up, spotted Sheena Esposito, staring at me blankly from the shop window as she stirred her coffee. We'd been teacher's aides together seven years prior, bonding over our mutual love of Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings and crossword puzzles. When I saw her coming out of the coffee shop, I thought of my resolve, so I forced a wave, two fingers, like a lazy cab hail. The walk sign lit up and I crossed the street.
Sheena had punkified, her denim jacket edged with metal studs, patches of bands announced in crosshatched typescript. She'd let her thick black brows go wild, but her face still made me ache with envy. She was half-Lebanese, had flawless skin and the faintest dimple on her chin. She looked at me, looked away. Her eyes: there was something about them. They'd curdled. Raising my voice in public always made me feel uncomfortable, so I waved again—two arms this time—as I stepped up onto the sidewalk. We were fifteen feet away from one another. She looked away, looked at me, looked away, looked at me, then gave me the placid nod you might give a stranger and finally turned the opposite way toward the bus stop.
I walked Lyndale Avenue. A record store pulsed. A bike messenger swerved around a parking car. I passed a French bakery where I worked for a short stint a few years ago and felt pulled in as if by a current. I squinted over the pile of baguettes and through the windows of the doors to the kitchen. A girl with six facial piercings approached me.
"Just one?" she said.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"How many?"
Servers whizzed around, dropping checks and chatting about daily specials. Gone were the little silver clips with the white numbers clustered by the register. They had changed from counter to table service. I had the sudden sense that time had slipped out from under me, like a sheet kicked off in the night.
The server asked if I was okay, and I asked if they still did to-go orders. She rolled her eyes and said yes. When I asked for the almond financier, she said they didn't make them anymore. I said okay, and we stared at each other, frozen. I questioned my resolve to reintroduce myself to my forgetters, imagining all variety of embarrassing conversations. I thought of Michelle, my mother, Tamara. I let myself fantasize about moving to San Francisco—sleeping on Tamara's couch, she being annoyed that I still hadn't found a job, cereal stuck in my neck creases—but cut the sequence short. I didn't want to be someone's project, as my mother had been mine. When I had decided on Summit University in Saint Paul—it seemed a quaint place with reasonable rent, a place where I could burrow— she finally, for the first time in her life, settled down. Eight blocks away. Claiming, despite Summit being an all-women's college, that I needed "feminine support."
The pierced girl shoved a menu in front of me and said I could order at the bar. I asked the bartender for his favorite pastry and walked down to the lake. When I opened the box, I didn't know what I was looking at. Something with apricot or passion fruit custard filling.
Powdered sugar speckled my shirt. Runners chattered on the path. I was exhausted. I dozed in damp leaves.
I walked the lake path for a while after I came to. I searched my phone for playlists with "Happy" and "Mellow" in the titles. My EarPods crackled and cut out, then quit completely. I followed a narrow path down to the shore and set them on an overflowing waste bin. I got annoyed with all the commotion. The early showers had given way to sunshine and seventy-four degrees. Contact never felt so far away.
I heard the rubbery chirp of skidding tires behind me and the galloping laughter of boyhood, so I veered off the asphalt and onto the dirt path. "Dozer!" someone yelled behind me. When I turned, it was not a hoard of young boys but two men around my age, cruising along in spandex and aerodynamic helmets, one of them whizzing past and repeating, "Dozer!" He braked hard, unclipped his cleats, and clomped back, propping up his sunglasses. Wispy red hair, cleft chin—Adam. "Dozer! How's it going, dude? Been a while."
"Adam," I said. "How'd you recognize me?"
He laughed and pointed to my sweatshirt, which said "Dozer" on the back. It was a nickname from a mixed-gender lacrosse league four years ago. I was angry, full contact, earning the nickname Bulldozer and eventually, it's diminutive.
"Martens never forget," he said, deadpan, saluting and then holding a hand to his heart. We were the Saint Paul Martens. That was my last real sustained contact with Michelle. She'd wanted something. Effort maybe? Proof that she was better than me at something?
"You live around here?" Adam said.
"No," I said. "Yeah. Kind of." I was baffled, a little shaken.
"You good?" he said.
"It's just weird," I said. "People always say I look different. Or they don't recognize me. I don't know, it's nothing. I'm just—hard day at work," I lied.
"I hear that," he said. His friend popped him on the shoulder. "Anyway, big miles today, gotta fly." He clipped one cleat back into his pedal and said, "And, you know. People are assholes." At that, he was off, but not before shouting, "Go, Martens!"
On the walk back to my car I saw a jogger I knew traveling in the opposite direction on the path. Roy, from the fancy cocktail place where they lit orange peels on fire. Working service jobs had been a curse. For years I'd been seeing clients and customers throughout the city: Jake, cappuccino to go; Margaret, who flew in from Vancouver once a month for work and used her company card to upgrade to the corner suite; Katie, big house by the lake with three kids; Jerome and Janice, espresso and latte, one now, one later. On and on the lists went, the people, their persnickety requests, their catalogues of desire.
My PFR had almost always been an inconvenience, a party trick, a letdown, but now that it turned on me, I understood the want to be forgetful. Anonymity had that blessed reassurance: it required nothing beyond tidy hellos and goodbyes, no strings, no memories needing to be parsed. But now an entire galaxy of potential connections swirled around me, and I couldn't seem to grab ahold of any of them nor conjure the will to try harder.
At work a few days later, an SUV jerked to a sudden stop and swayed for a good thirty seconds until, finally, two guys and a girl spilled out. I recognized them immediately as college acquaintances. The girl was Jocelyn, someone I'd admired from across the room at parties. She was tall, curvy, elegant, had jagging blonde highlights, lips like two little loaves, reptilian green eyes. From my vantage, we had nothing in common. The two guys had always been part of her entourage. They beamed with salesman auras—slick hair, squalls of cologne.
"Hi, guys," I said, forcing enthusiasm. Jocelyn gave a flat "hi" as she twisted the fob from her key ring. The salesmen smiled. The tall one on Jocelyn's elbow held out his keys.
"Take mine," he said.
After two days of hiding in my apartment alone, I felt recharged, so I just started right in, "Crazy, right? It's a temporary gig, and it's kind of a boy's club, but it's fun—and the money's good. Anyway, what have you guys been up to?"
I hated how fake I sounded.
They exchanged puzzled looks. The tall one still held out the keys. I plucked off the black baseball cap, which accentuated my athletic shoulders, shaking out my hair and saying, "This one's on me. How are you guys?" emphasizing are in that way of old friends. How are you?
A nest of wrinkles fixed between Jocelyn's eyes. She looked momentarily less beautiful, slightly ugly even, like a wicked stepsister. "Do I know you?" she said, flicking her hand and looking up and away.
I started to explain, but she must not have heard me and instead turned to the short guy and said, "Do I know her?" Then I noticed their black hole pupils. They were stoned out of their minds. Was it mushrooms?
The short one shrugged and linked arms with Jocelyn.
"What the hell was that?" Greg, my co-worker, came up behind me. He wore electrician's tape around both thumbs from batting cage blisters, claiming they trumped Band-Aids. "Plus, they don't freak out ze guests."
"I swear I knew them," I said.
"Shit happens all the time. You see so many people every night. After a while everyone looks familiar. We're just flies to them. Ooh! Here comes a Jag. Ever drive a Jag? Dibs. You grab that Beamer coming up behind."
As I walked around the car, I watched Jocelyn through the window as she checked in with the hostess. Same tanned legs, same swivel of her head as she walked. One contact: it seemed like such a simple mission. One single contact. Why was it so hard? I texted Tam that I missed her, but she didn't text back, busy as she probably was with her new life.
That night, two customers left complaints in our How'd We Do? email survey. We read them at the end of the night on the company iPad in the dark under the awning, eager for more than just an exchange of keys and a five-dollar handshake. The first read: "The chick valet mixed up our cars and we wound up waiting for ten minutes in the fucking rain!" The other read: "Get rid of the awky lesbo. She's slowing you down."
It wasn't the first time I'd been called a lesbian. It didn't bother me, but I didn't understand it. Was it my broad shoulders? My low voice? Or the fact that I was a woman working a typically male job? The "slowing you down" bit made my mouth itch, though. All the world's assholes seemed to come out of the woodwork exactly when you needed them to stay in hiding. Rumor was, back when the company had paper comments, people gushed compliments.
My car only started sometimes, and tonight was a choking, heaving no. I went across the street to the gas station, bought an electrolyte drink and a banana, took them down as I sat on the curb, then tied my jacket around my waist, and ran the four miles home.
On the phone, Tam whittled me down and made me feel inarticulate.
"You're just grieving, you're muddled, you're…" she yawned, and made a crunching noise, maybe snacking on chips. "You're feeling sorry for yourself." When I didn't respond she said, "We all go through this."
We all. Here I was thinking I was set apart, if even just slightly.
"I'm so lonely," I said.
She let out a slow breath. "Um, darling dear?"
"Yeah?"
"You're, like, the ninetieth percentile—of lonely. Can you please get off your ass and try something for me?"
I felt my shell hardening. Or softening? I couldn't really tell. "Sure," I finally said.
"Go get some goddamn numbers in your phone! And stop thinking so hard about everything and everyone. No one is perfect and people will let you down. Connections are connections. We need lots, we are social animals, and anyone saying otherwise is lying to themselves. What exactly do you have to lose? Douche one and douche two, no offense."
It's what she called my co-workers. We went for post-shift drinks, and they talked about role-playing games and whether any of the clientele that night had been "fuckable."
I wanted to ask her about San Francisco and the new job, which she'd started right away, but didn't want to hear about how great it was.
"I'm good, by the way. But please. Stop brooding."
When I didn't say anything again, she said, "See you in a few days, my dear," and hung up.
The next morning, I looked for jobs in San Francisco. I looked for apartments. I scrolled through old photos of me and Tamara until I felt sick. I tried to shake it off by looking up citywide get-togethers: Spanish-speaking clubs, book clubs, Bridge clubs, bowling leagues. Every time I imagined walking into those settings, I imagined the floor going out from under me. First interactions and get-to-know-yous felt so manufactured, and there was nothing I hated more than the work of attempting to reveal oneself. The posturing, the peacocking, the insincerity, the white lies and pretenses. I wanted life to happen organically, but so far this was proving a tall order.
Tamara had told me, before we hung up the night before, that she wouldn't talk to me until I had that new number in my contacts, and the one thing I clung to was the possibility of making her proud. I forced myself to walk to the diner down the road from my apartment, resolved to talk to Patrick—I remembered from his name tag. Patrick was in his fifties and had a scarred face. I thought he might remember my weekly order—short stack, extra blueberries—and we could make small talk. Alas, there was no sign of him, and another server came, so I ordered and slumped into the daily crossword.
The coffee had begun to clear my sinuses when a young couple sat down in the booth adjacent. The man had clumpy dreadlocks with orange-dipped ends, jutting cheekbones, and a dark soul patch. Under the accessories—wallet chain, leather wristbands, oversized military jacket—he could've been a model. He looked so familiar, but I couldn't place him. I ate my pancakes slowly, as if meditating, holding a wedge in my mouth and pressing my tongue to it, the syrup dripping down the back of my throat. The server dropped the check, and as I reached for my purse, the mystery boy's name came to me: Lauren. My mother and I had taken him in during our brief stint in the Black Hills some thirteen-plus years ago. By that time, we'd both been drinking coffee by the gallon, and we met him in one of those cafés that smelled of smoldering panini grease. He was a few years older than me and had dropped out of school. The owner of the coffee shop had been letting him sleep in the back room but had reached his limit.
I sent Tamara a reaching text: Help.
A minute later she sent back: heading into a meeting txt when you get that #!
An image of her sashaying through her new office, charming new co-workers, wit rolling off her red turtleneck, misted my view. I returned to the crossword. 26 down, six letters for "Wasn't selfish." I thought selfless, I thought altruistic, I thought Tamara. I wrote in her name, then scribbled over the whole puzzle. I rehearsed what I would say to Lauren in my head. I tried to get the server's attention for a refill, but she was busy with new customers. I'd paid, gotten change, was essential as a water stain. I grabbed my purse and, without thinking, turned and went right up to Lauren's table, but as I opened my mouth, I didn't see Lauren and the girl he'd come in with, but a middle-aged couple staring out the window and tapping their fingers. I'd brooded for too long and missed them. They had already left. The woman looked over, said, "Oh, great, I'll have the pancakes. Short stack, extra blueberries, please." I was so dumbstruck and without thinking, played along, saying, "Sure thing," then turned to the man. "And for you?"
At Michelle's funeral, I had to reintroduce myself to all my old friends, which wasn't so bad at first, but by the fifth time, I was exasperated, sobbing on my knees in the cramped bathroom stall of Jasper Lutheran Church, ashamed that I felt ashamed instead of the grief I was supposed to be feeling.
One night, shortly after graduating, Tamara was playing with her art banjo band at a bar uptown. Michelle was there, and she'd invited me over for a round of Red-headed Sluts.
I said, "No, no, thanks."
Michelle ordered me one anyway and thrust it into my hand.
I declined again, blamed work and being a lightweight. In those days, I was front-desking the early shift at a hotel.
She called me a killjoy and went off on how I was always quietly judging her and how I thought I was so perfect, and she said, "Fine, whatever," and dumped the drink on the floor, splattering my boots. The old crew—Shan, Elise, and the two Bobs—laughed into their palms. I stared at the line of tap handles above the bar, not knowing how to react. Michelle leaned over the bar and snatched a towel and tossed it toward me. "God," she said, rolling her eyes. "You're so sensitive."
I scuttled to the restroom and sat on the toilet for ten minutes. I had an undying loyalty to Tamara, even then, so I pinched a smile through her set, sipping flat soda water from a corner booth. I wound up donating the boots to Goodwill. That was nine Augusts ago.
Since then, Michelle and I had had a dozen fake interactions at parties. I pitied her for whatever caused her to suddenly bully her own friends. (There were other stories, far worse than mine.) Every time we hung out, I kept hoping for the old Michelle, but she proved a growing shrewdness in her ability to spot and expose flaws.
I went to the funeral in part as a farewell to the old days, an homage to the True Michelle I believed still lived on somewhere. I also went for Tamara, who'd flown in that morning and was leaving later that night.
When I gathered myself up from the church bathroom stall, I went into the foyer and pried Tamara from the swarm of people giving her sniveling hugs and asking her about The Big Move. A line of Jasper Lutheran's past priests brooded from frames at our shoulders as we paced down the endless hall. We ducked into a nursery that contained a dizzying funk of Band-Aids, diapers, and vinegar.
"Honest," I said. "I haven't changed much, have I?" My hair had gotten its first few shocks of grey after turning thirty-two the previous week, and I had a new emergence of lines raked across my forehead.
"Changed from when?"
I scanned over her shoulder. "Nobody recognizes me, Tam. Ever. I'm constantly re—"
"Oh, my God," she said. "Stop being so grudge-y."
I felt a sting like a lemony pucker at the corner of my mouth. "It's like I've been blocked from the directory." I wanted to blab and cuff our hands together.
My forgetters wore newly padded, domesticized bodies, but bore unmistakable ticks, dispositions, postures. They were so easy to recognize. Why wasn't I? I'd studied old photos (not that there were many) but still I didn't understand. I've always been told I "look familiar." New acquaintances would say, I swear I've met you or You remind me of so and so or God, you look just like my friend, Jessica. It was always fucking Jessica.
Tamara dabbed her mascara and said, "Girl, you need to grow a backbone."
"I know. I know," I said.
She blew her nose, hugged me. Our stomachs pressed together. "I swoon," she said.
"I love you," I said. I felt weak. I'd always let our pet phrase stand in for everything approximate.
She released me, blinked away tears, and said, "Did you get that number yet?"
I looked down. We hugged again. I wanted to curl up inside her.
Freddy Gunnick, track star of our brother college and now a seller of healthy pizza crusts, came up behind us and tapped Tamara on the shoulder. He said, "I'd better get one of those hugs before they're gone."
They embraced. Tamara jerked with grief. I went to the coffee cart in the corner of the foyer, put cream in a Styrofoam cup, and pretended to stir.
Tamara went to give condolences to Michelle's family, and I was left with Freddy, who slouched against the wall by the framed priests, checking his phone. Mourners sniffled all around the foyer, side-hugging and solemnly nodding. I suppressed the urge to flee, skip the burial, blubber along to Sharon Van Etten on the four-hour drive back to Saint Paul. But some other urge stole over me: a need to be touched. A hug or tender handshake I could later, after Tamara's creamy oatmeal smell dissolved from my apartment, pull out like a file of Comforting Memories. I leaned into Freddy for a hug. He patted my shoulder.
"Sucks," I said. It felt good. I'd let myself dissolve into someone else, however briefly. My fingers tingled.
He looked straight at me, adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, and said, "Not to be insensitive, but is Tamara single?"
I'd always been her tandem—Oh, right, you're Tamara's friend.
I straightened and said, "She lives in San Francisco now." And then I added, just to throw the whole thing into the confusion it already embodied: "And she's engaged."
A hush fell over the foyer. The casket was being wheeled out by Michelle's many uncles and three best friends—Reinhardt, Sarah, and Nat—on whose futons I'd slept off countless hangovers. I wanted to be upset, to chase after Freddy and say, "Ruth! My name is Ruth!" But the swinging door got away from one of Michelle's uncles and banged against a corner of the casket, and I felt the room shrink away, my feet sloshed in fresh concrete.
The phone rang and rang. Again with "Baby, It's Cold Outside." I tried again, then again, over and over until my ear hurt, and finally I gave up. I texted Tamara a long story about my mother and then deleted it.
At work that night, I dropped keys, fumbled with tips, almost got flattened by a Lexus after gawking at a patron when he told a dumb joke. (We were supposed to laugh. We were always supposed to laugh.) Greg took me aside and asked me if I was okay. The black tape on his thumbs had dirtied at the edges and began to peel. He kept saying, "Troy and I can handle this. Go home." Just when I'd think about taking him up on the offer, three cars would pull in at once. Couples would burst from the restaurant and thrust tickets at us. I kept telling Greg no, no I'll be fine.
I dropped a metallic blue Fiat into first gear. As I rounded the corner, a cat darted out into the street. It wasn't the bump that startled me, but the sound. A mangled, throaty snarl, frightened and angry. An expression shot from my mouth, a whole separate soul taking over my body. If I stopped to ring doorbells and find the cat's owner, I'd delay the patrons at the Elm. More delay, less tips. Less tips, unhappy Greg—and maybe a few harsh surveys. Enough of them, and we were fired. Last month, a curly-headed college kid only lasted a week after three bad surveys claiming "untidy appearance." I needed those positive surveys, angled for them night after night because now more than ever, I needed plain and simple recognition for plain and simple tasks. More than anything, I needed to talk and talk and be told I was okay, to be coddled and held and made to feel irreplaceable. I thought of Adam from a few days ago at the lake and longed for him to come find me. My mind whirled. I couldn't focus. I tried to slow my thoughts and get back to the task. Move your feet, move your feet, I told myself. A cat's a cat, it's no big thing, but I slowed and got out of the car. I looked at the sodden lump, the pancaked neck, the seeping guts, and thought of what Tam had said, ninetieth percentile, and felt myself growing so very old and wrinkled and ceaselessly pained and complaining, verifiably erasing myself.
A beautiful couple who could've been models pushed a stroller, but other than that the block was empty. Freeway traffic trilled a few blocks away. Domesticity, smells of yeast and sweet-roasted meats. I told the cat I was sorry and got back in the car. I parked it in our lot and ran back to the Elm & Inn, two, three, four more times, over and over until the rush finally died down and we drew straws for first cut. I drew shortest, relieved, and walked down to the corner where I'd hit the cat. Still no sign of anyone.
Here was this life, however little, however lame, left in the street to decay, and no one to claim it, no one to mourn its death nor say its name one last time. I took off my coat and laid it down, then found two large sticks and winced, looking away as I flipped the body of the cat onto my coat and wrapped it up. I tied the arms of the coat into a knot around the carcass and picked it up, breathing from my mouth to avoid the stink, calling out, is there anyone looking for a cat? Did anyone lose a pet? I'm so sorry.
After covering the neighborhood in the near dark, I walked across the cycling bridge to Loring Park. Maybe I'd see one of my forgetters? The strip of businesses expanded and contracted with the light and heat of merrymaking. Claes Oldenburg's Spoonbridge and Cherry stood stoically gleaming on the other side of the freeway. I passed twenty-thirty-forty-fifty-sixty-somethings spilling from bars, dolled up and woozy. I set the coat on the sidewalk and opened up the arms. I wanted people to mourn this animal loss. Passersby shrieked and plugged up their noses. Some cursed. Others laughed, saying, what is this, fucking performance art? I kept asking if this was anyone's cat, but no one claimed it. I saw no one I knew. Recognized no one. I stood there for half an hour, maybe longer.
Maybe my forgetters were fewer than I thought. I wished I could meet everyone for the first time all over again, erase alien years, apologize to Michelle. I wished I could wipe my memory clean. Maybe I wasn't disappearing at all. Maybe I'd already done that. Maybe I was a mere mirage, a shadow of what I used to be, whoever—whatever—that was. I kept calling for the cat, the cat's owner, blinking into the bright downtown lights. I was so transfixed on finding someone that I barely noticed the woman in her sixties beside me holding her arm out, reaching for me.
"Honey, what's wrong? Is there someone I can call to pick you up?"
"No," I said. "I don't know. This cat, it's—"
"Yes. Poor thing," she said. "But you can't just leave it here on the sidewalk. Let's go, come on. Where does it need to go? Is it yours? No? Okay, well. Animal control, yes? Is that who we're supposed to contact?"
"I don't know," I said. "I think so."
"I'll call, but in the meantime, let's get this thing out of here."
I told her the story, and I told her about my job and Greg and all the people I recognized. I told her about my PFR and Michelle and Tamara. I told her about my mother leaving and her new boyfriend.
"That's a lot, honey. That's a lot." She hollered at her family, who were waiting by the car parked at a meter across the street, saying she'd be right there. She wrapped the arms of the jacket back around the cat, picked it up and marched it behind the building, satin dress, heels and all.
She came back, said she called and left a message for animal control. "They'll find it," she said, flicking a wrist. She asked for my address, sending a request for a car on her phone and sat with me until it came, and then she hugged me and said, "A cat may have nine lives, dear, but we have the, um—oh, shit what is it?—Penny! Pen!" She called over to her family, sitting in the car with the windows down now. A young brunette woman about my age stuck her head out of the window.
"Oversoul, Mom! Oversoul!" the woman shouted. Everyone in the car laughed.
When I looked at the woman beside me blankly, she said, "They make fun of me. My short-term memory's shot. Anyway, the Emerson thing, the Buddhist thing. The Oversoul. Look it up when you get home, dear. I'm terrible at explaining things."
She pulled a receipt from her purse and wrote a phone number on the back.
"Text me when you get home safely, okay?"
I nodded and threw my arms around her neck.
In the car, I looked up "Oversoul" on my phone. I learned, through the haze of blurred vision and my half-cracked screen, that it meant rebirth, karma, essence, breath, and, according to the Transcendentalists, connection to all beings.
I took a picture of the scrawled number, my new contact, and sent it to Tamara. Then I texted the woman whose name I hadn't even caught, saying, I made it. Thank you.
