Luster Read online

  5

  In the morning, there is a text from Eric. It says, I’ll be home in four days. and I have a surprise. I don’t text him back because just as I’m sitting up in bed and noting the film on my teeth, I hear the unmistakable sound of someone doing Tae Bo downstairs and remember where I am. I remember Rebecca asking me to return her husband, and now that I have slept more than four hours, I feel less inclined to honor this request.

  * * *

  Just as my mother might crank Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir on Friday nights when my sole purpose was to sterilize the bathroom, Rebecca is another passive-aggressive alarm clock, her obedient clapping along to Billy Blanks a signal that it is no longer acceptable to sleep. But for once I’ve slept enough; I am delighted my body is still capable of issuing its own dopamine. Then I see my wilted sneakers in the corner and remember that I should be embarrassed. I try to find something wrong with the place, but I look around and it is pristine. Not beautiful, but carefully considered. On my bedside table, there is a bar of soap in the shape of a rose, a new toothbrush, sweatpants, and a T-shirt that says Hudson Valley Tulip Festival. I take a moment to pretend the room is mine. I press my face into the memory foam, and when I come up for air, Akila is standing in the doorway. Us being kinfolk notwithstanding, it is hard for me to empathize with a child whose footsteps are nearly undetectable. I did not even hear her open the door. Like her mother’s, her silence is aggressive in its ease, and even though I usually have a hard time interacting with people’s children, her shamelessness emboldens me, and I take a moment to really look at her, her shiny brown cheeks, her soft frown and Adventure Time nightshirt, her towering hair and balled fists. Because once upon a time my weird adolescent breasts were subject to the dissection of aunties everywhere, my BMI always a hot topic among the Jamaican deaconesses in our SDA church, I would like to mind my business when it comes to the subject of Akila’s hair. However, it is a massive, two-foot condemnation of her limp-haired parents, who had clearly made some previous effort that did not pan out.

  “You’re the girlfriend,” she says with no ire or judgment, which somehow makes it worse. I want to get out of bed, but sometime during the night I shed all my clothes. My underwear is on the floor between us, inside out. I am the adult here. I have bills. I am not slavering under the weight of my pituitary gland. But to demand that she respect me is so ludicrous that I can’t get the words out of my mouth.

  “Yeah,” I say, and she frowns and shuts my door. In the shower, the water pressure is excellent. I feel an unexpected reverence for my new toiletries. I use the soap but try not to smooth any of the dimples that constitute the petals. I use the toothbrush and relish the stiff bristles, the gross baking soda notes of their geriatric toothpaste, which is an appropriate departure from the sweet Peppa Pig brand I prefer. I can’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth, and so, in this moment, I feel like a responsible person. I put on the sweatpants and T-shirt Rebecca laid out for me and decide that the only way I can repay her charity or leave this place with any semblance of dignity is to touch nothing and be as scarce as possible.

  * * *

  I restore the room to its original form and listen to the suburban quiet, the soft hybrid hum, the monastic baying of land-protecting dogs, the laughter of clear-skinned kids, a chorus of perpetually unlatched screen doors, and all the bugs, trying in earnest to fuck before they die. The calm is killing my peristalsis, but more pressing is my access to the Wi-Fi, so I go downstairs and Rebecca is there doing push-ups. She glances at me but doesn’t say anything, and in fact seems to be angry, though maybe that’s just what she looks like when she works out. I stand there in hopes that she might give me an opening, but the intensity of her focus is so keen, so uncomfortable to watch, that I retreat to the kitchen, where Akila is eating a bowl of cornflakes. She ignores me and I try to ignore her, but I don’t know where they keep the cups.

  “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 Pärt. 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.

  * * *

  I take the train to my storage locker and grab a couple of paintbrushes, an osmotic suppository, an assorted collection of old Forever 21 basics, and an old tube of cyan. On the trip back, it occurs to me that I might not be able to get inside the house. I wonder if it was presumptuous to leave a note, if I was meant to attend dinner and am now late. For most of my life, I have not had to tell anyone where I planned to be. I could walk the length of Broadway without a face. I could perish in a fire and have no one realize until a firefighter came across my teeth in the ash. I walk from the station, and when I get to the house, I stand on the porch and enjoy the dense, late August air. It feels strange that only three months earlier, Eric pointed out my comma splice. I knock on the door and when no one answers, I go ahead and just walk inside. I pass by Akila’s room and she is sitting at her vanity, struggling to pull a comb through her hair.

  “Start from the ends,” I say, and she gets up and closes her door. I retreat to the guest room and extract an eggshell from my sock. I delete the delivery app, retrieve the cyan, and start laying the foundation for a self-portrait, but every time something is wrong. Rebecca materializes in the doorway wearing a robe, long in the neck and the legs and indivisible from the silk.

  “That dog has been at it all day,” she says softly, and it feels like she means to be speaking to someone else. The way she is inclined toward me, waiting for a response, is what you do when there is already an established conversation, one that is developed enough to be open-ended. I was more comfortable when she was ignoring me. When I thought she regretted inviting me to stay.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say, and she frowns.

  “I need your help with something,” she says, and I follow her down the hallway into their bedroom. I try to appear less acquainted than I am, but I know she is watching me. I feel the recognition open on my face, though the lights are low, and there is newspaper all over the floor. She gives me one end of a fitted sheet. “Would you believe I’ve been trying to do this for half an hour?” she says, and no, I don’t believe her. I look down at their bed and I think about them together, and it is not terrible because I want him to myself, but because all my thoughts of them in bed are mundane, of the late-night TV and morning breath and the sleepy, automatic spoon. After an initial struggle, we synchronize and decide the best course of action is to stuff the mattress upward into the sheet.

  “You haven’t told him I’m here,” I say, and she lies down in the middle of the bed, spreads her arms and legs like a starfish.

  “It hasn’t really come up.”

  * * *

  The next morning Eric texts me, three days. not even going to guess what it is? I don’t respond because I would like to avoid the awkwardness of upstaging whatever the surprise actually is, and because the tenor of this question, his unsubtle displeasure at my lack of response, is a moment I want to savor. In my few years of dating, I have received a number of gifts from men. Gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets. I don’t ever take it personally, but with Eric it’s different. He knows what I used to do to my dolls. He knows that I let my second-grade crush pull three of my baby teeth. And so even if he gifted me airport whiskey, I would have to take it personally.

  “I have an interview,” I say to Rebecca after I get an email from the clown academy. I haven’t prepared, but their “about us” page is informative and carefully laid-back, full of words like moxie and disruption and Anakin, the office dog. Rebecca is hunched over an orchid in the kitchen with a pair of silver shears. When she looks over at me I’m surprised to find she’s wearing glasses.

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” she says, turning back to the orchid, the lenses of her glasses opaque with sun. She looks like a mad scientist, craned and tentative, the curved blades of the shears monstrous against the orchid’s long, willowy stem.

  “I just wanted you to know I’ll be out of your hair soon,” I say as she lops one of the bigger flowers off the stem.

  “Goddamnit,” she says, putting down the shears. “What are you talking to me about?”

  “I have a job interview,” I say, and now that she’s looking directly at me, I know there’s no reason I needed to share this with her, even though, weirdly, I was hoping she would be excited, that she would see how temporary this is and maybe never tell Eric I was here. Because there is no scenario in which telling him about this goes well. I have used her soap and left skin cells on her guest sheets, so it is maybe uncharitable to call Rebecca’s hospitality a trap, and yet now we have a secret. Now I have also seen his wife and daughter in different stages of undress, screwed with the division of church and state, making any credible alternate reality impossible. To confess terrible things to each other online is easy, almost hypothetical. To be unemployed and wearing his wife’s jeans is concrete. When the doorbell rings, Rebecca slips off her glasses and goes to answer the door. She returns with a boy who is holding a stack of books.

  “This is Pradeep,” she says, as he smoothes his polo, sits down at the kitchen table. She doesn’t introduce us. She calls for Akila, once, twice. When Akila doesn’t come down, Rebecca runs upstairs and leaves us alone together. He doesn’t look at me. He sets down an iced coffee, opens up three dog-eared books, and arranges them in a row. I didn’t like teenage boys even when I was a teenager myself,
but I am desperate for him to like me, even as his belted khakis are bumming me out. He finishes his coffee and then extends the empty cup.

  “Could you throw this out?” he says without looking at me, as Akila comes down the stairs wearing a wig, a green one this time. Rebecca is close on her heels looking wrung-out, but I notice that she has put on mascara and let down her hair.