American Innovations: Stories (18 page)

I couldn’t refurnish my apartment; I just couldn’t. I decided to rent it out. The first prospective tenant said he was a painter, that he liked the light of my apartment, and then he offered me two hundred dollars less than I was asking. “I can see you’re a person with a rich interior life,” he told me. I suppose he was trying to flatter me as some kind of sponsor of the arts. I’m fine with the arts. But that was not why I agreed to his lower price. I just wanted to cover my property taxes and maintenance fees and have things over and done with.

Myself, I rented a furnished room in a dormitory eleven blocks away. The lessee was a Brooklyn Law School student who was doing something or other in a cold and northern country for a term or two. I could see the Watchtower from the rental room, though I had to lean out the window in order to do so. I went for walks, made smoothies, tried acupuncture, read magazines. I did those things that people do. But the oddness of the furniture crime pressed upon me. Had it changed me? Not that I was so great before, but I had been comfortable with myself, and I had finally escaped an old feeling that I was a failed version of someone—it doesn’t really matter who—else. I knew I was still fundamentally my old reliably me-like version of me. And yet I felt as if the real me were out there somewhere, waiting for my return. I felt wanted by that real me.

Time passed. Not an item of mine—not a lamp a watch a fork a chair an antique ironing board, not a thing—was found at any of the usual fronts where the police, so they said, were accustomed to finding things. I walked back down to the precinct to ask if they had dredged the river. This was misunderstood as a joke. I think this misunderstanding happened because I’m a woman. If I were a man, maybe they would have dredged. Or thought there was something wrong with me for asking.

Though I no longer went to the movies on Tuesdays, some new habits settled in. I, like hundreds or maybe thousands of other people, found myself regularly attending an indoor crafts and antiques market. Some of the merchants there were steady, and some switched in and out. One vendor made exquisite benches out of salvaged wood. Another used old books to make bookshelves. A third sold knit gloves, with the letters for
ANGEL
stitched onto the fingers of one hand and for
DEVIL
stitched onto the fingers of the other. Naturally there was also well-packaged jam. Often it was hard to tell who was running any particular stand, as there were no assigned places where vendors stood, and vendors wandered away from their posts, to visit other vendors, I guess, so one (or I at least) was left with the impression that these things had brought themselves out to the market of their own free will.

Of course I hoped
my
things would turn up. Set themselves out for sale, just like people do, kind of. A normal fantasy, really, given the circumstances. It didn’t happen. Nevertheless, I was often happy there at the market, for spans of time as long as fifteen minutes. I felt like I was thumbing through all the lives I wasn’t leading but might have led. One where I wore dresses that looked like they were made out of doilies and old satin; another where I had a special wood holder for my milk bottles; and a third where I was a typesetter or just collected typesettings. I imagined all the people these objects had owned: short people, and fat people, and people who thought periwinkle was purple, and those who thought of it as blue, and people who blamed their mothers for everything that went wrong in their lives, and people who genuinely liked wearing pearls. Such a crowd.

Each weekend, on my way back from the market to my rented room, I’d pass by an empty lot with three dumpsters on it. The term “dipsy dumpster” then always popped into my head. So I’d think about that term, and then I’d think about how it was a strange term, and I’d wonder where we neighborhood kids had gotten it. Then I’d think about the girl who’d lived across the street from me when I was young, and who had brain damage from being thrown around by an alcoholic dad when she was a baby, and who was beautiful and whose adoptive parents had changed her first name when they got her at age four, and that girl, in addition to saying “dipsy dumpster,” used to say “nekkid” instead of “naked,” which really bothered me, even though we mostly had a great time together. That same little sequence of thoughts ran through my mind each Saturday as I passed those dumpsters. Like a gentle bull within me helplessly charging at the sight of red.

One Saturday—the face of the Watchtower was obscured by fog—as I walked past the dipsy dumpsters, steeled for the predictable memory assault, an unexpected rush of happiness came over me. The happiness arrived earlier than did any perception that might claim responsibility for it. Then, preemptively overjoyed, I noticed my miniature two-tined fork. The pink-handled one. With its slightly melted plastic, and the gold filament mostly missing from the
RAD
part of
COLORADO ROCKIES.
It was just there, on a little side table near the first dumpster. My mom had bought that fork for me when we were on a road trip, I was remembering. The fork hadn’t originally been alone; it had been part of a souvenir set that also included a spoon, a spoon that maybe still persisted somewhere. My mother had bought me that tiny silverware the day after we’d seen enormous sequoia trees. She’d liked my hair that day; she’d set it back in two braids so tight that they gave me a kind of languorous headache. It hadn’t been a particularly important day, that fork-buying day. I don’t know why I’d forgotten it or why I was suddenly remembering it. It was just a pretty nice day. We had been pleased with each other. I really loved that fork.

I stepped toward it. I was debating internally whether or not to touch the little fork, to test her reality in that way. Then I saw, near the middle dumpster, among other things, a blue kitchen stool that had a spackle of yellow paint, a spackle that I recognized with horror. Folded neatly over that stool was a pale blue gingham quilt of mine, the one that had nearly smothered me. Turning just a few degrees, I found myself faced down by my old ironing board. My armchair, my striped cardigan, my old yellow toaster …

I heard voices. Two men were carrying my dining table. The taller one, an orange-haired man with black-rimmed glasses and tight dark jeans, seemed to be the one in charge.

“Nope, it’s not my stuff,” he proclaimed. “I’m just helping. She’s bringing her truck round to load up for the day.”

“This is the dipsy dumpster,” I said. The phrase was assailing me.

“There’s good space here”—he gestured widely—“to pull in for loading.”

“She bought this stuff, or she’s selling it?” I asked Tall, in a voice as gentle as I could muster, one that I hoped came across as tenderly demanding.

The lesser man had walked away; he was gesturing to the taller man to join him. “I guess I’m not the person you should talk to,” Tall said with finality, but standing still, as his companion looked on, irritated, waiting. I wanted Tall to choose me over Lesser. “I think this is what didn’t sell, but I really don’t know.”

“Huh.” So they were unwanted, my things. Excellent. Fortunate. I continued to stand still. Tall also stayed still. Did the vendor—She—look like me? I didn’t ask. Very quietly and calmly I asked instead, “Well, what about … well … do you know … the price of that itty-bitty fork over there?”

Two dollars, he said. I asked after the quilt. He said he believed it was handmade by a coterie—he used that term, “coterie”—of older women in a small town in Louisiana. He believed she was asking $160 but thought I could probably get it for $140.

Lies don’t bother me much; that wasn’t the thing. What saddened me was that these things had tried to make it on their own and had failed. I set myself up, alone, on one of the blue kitchen stools and waited for her. Whoever She was. Whatever truck She might be driving. The Watchtower’s face remained obscured, so I don’t know how time passed, or how much of it did. Time can be the ultimate in fickleness, the ultimate in reliability. A white pickup truck did eventually reverse into the lot. A woman, yes, emerged from the driver’s side. She had lusterless blond hair and prominent teeth, and if She had begun to whinny, it wouldn’t have surprised me much. “Disappointed” is not the right word, but it’s neighborly with it.

“You shouldn’t leave your stuff just out here, like old milk cartons,” I chastened.

She didn’t look grateful for the advice.

I pulled out my checkbook.

“I only take cash,” she informed me chewingly.

“I intend to get lots of things.” More if she had more. She couldn’t take a credit card? But surely she’d wait for me while I ran out to an ATM?

“No. Won’t wait.”

“Really?”

“It’s cash now or cry.”

Maybe I should have been kinder upon our initial introduction. Or meaner. “Were you even in the market today? I was there. Aren’t you here to sell things? Aren’t you a seller? I’m a buyer. Isn’t it exactly me that you spend your life hoping to meet?”

“I need to get home,” she said, shrugging. “I live in New Hampshire.”

“No, you don’t.”

She stared at me. “I’ll probably be back next weekend.” A pause then. “I expect I’ll have more quilts.”

I didn’t hate that woman. I really didn’t. Truth be told, I was gaining some much-needed perspective. Distance, it’s sometimes called. She’s a small potato, I was thinking. If I bide my time, if I quietly observe, if I seek the expertise of others, I can find the man behind it all. Wasn’t that the way it was in the movies? You gathered information patiently. You didn’t pounce right away. I walked into the Seventy-eighth Precinct police station with my just reclaimed fork and pale blue blankie in hand.

A man there, at a desk.

Uniforms make me think of people as things, which is by no means necessarily a denigration.

“What was the vendor’s name?”

She was just out by the dumpsters. I didn’t get her name. She had horse teeth.

The man sighed with genuine emotion. It made his chest heave in, and out, then in and out again, more softly. I hadn’t really been looking at him. But that gentle sigh made me notice him. Tall and softly formidable—tubby, I guess—with a buzz cut and a face that seemed very drawable.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” he murmured without judgment. “Tell me where you live.”

His eyes were beautiful and gray-green. He was, somehow, very
real.
Maybe the uniform contributed to that. He emanated unarticulated hopes and maybe suffering and fear and maybe a great capacity for love, even an ability to love things he had not yet known for years and years. Mister Pretty, I dubbed him. Mister Real Pretty.

“Miss? I was asking for your home address?” A hint of impatience.

My mom—she would have frowned upon my interest in a police officer. Or been far too excited about it. It struck me that I could offer to take him to bed, to that strange bed in my pretend dorm room rental, in my wrong life. They’ve done studies on these things, and they say that most men happily agree to such offers.

“Do you live near here?” I asked, in turn.

He seemed not to hear that, or able to pretend not to have heard it.

“Do these Wanted posters”—I went on—“ever really solve anything? These people, they all look the same.”

“Can we focus, ma’am? Your address.” I didn’t say anything. “Unfortunately, we’ve got loads to do here, and weekends are understaffed, so if we could get these basics filled out as quickly as—”

But when love is real, there’s no such thing as Time. I wasn’t the criminal, was I? I wasn’t Wanted. Mistakes could be made, though. Misidentifications. But one must be treated with respect regardless. I’ve had so many bad ideas in my life. I needed to be a new woman.

I knew I couldn’t give him my address. Not my former address, and certainly not my current one. It would just make it that much easier to find me. Even if this guy in particular was absolutely trustworthy, an angel. Still, things could get … out of his hands. I had just begun to reclaim my life. I held my fork and quilt closer. I would never give my address out again. At no time and at no temperature. And if they somehow got my new address anyhow, I would keep on moving.

“I’m sorry to have taken your time,” I said to that man, with longing, and anger, and regret, and resolve. “I really am so sorry.”

I stepped back out into the salubrious cold. My mom. I knew where she lived. Or used to live. When had we last spoken? Had we argued? She had never even seen that studio where I had lived so happily for a long time. There were so many things that we had in common. Even owned in common, kind of. She might have advice for me. I wouldn’t necessarily have to take it. I could put my hair in braids. I could stay with her awhile.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Willing Davidson provided essential editorial advice for almost all of these stories; I am likewise indebted to Eric Chinski, Carin Besser, Deborah Treisman, Claire Gutierrez, Ben Metcalf, Joanna Yas, and Jared Bland. The literary agent Bill Clegg has also been a wonder. I am furthermore grateful for the support of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin, and the Hald Hovedgaard Danish-American Writers’ Retreat.

ALSO BY RIVKA GALCHEN

Atmospheric Disturbances

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rivka Galchen is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for
The New Yorker
, whose editors selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed
Atmospheric Disturbances
, was published by FSG in 2008.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by Rivka Galchen

All rights reserved

First edition, 2014

These stories previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
Harper’s Magazine
(“Once an Empire”),
The New Yorker
(“The Lost Order,” “The Region of Unlikeness,” “Sticker Shock” as “Appreciation,” “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire,” and “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman”),
Open City
(“Wild Berry Blue”), and
The Walrus
(“Real Estate”).