Quarantine: Stories (11 page)

Mind the deer, dear.

T
his is the note my boyfriend leaves me a week before he leaves me. We are both writers and clever with words. I am more clever than he is. When his
dear john
letter comes it is full of clichés.

Carson means it. Not the
dear john
letter; the
mind the deer, dear
one. I am a terrible driver, and the road I travel is famous for errant deer. A co-worker—already on probation with her insurance company for having had three accidents (all no-fault) in as many years—struck one. She is still in the hospital recovering, and her car insurance has been canceled. I believe my boyfriend is genuinely concerned for me, and that to him I am, if nothing else, at least dear.

The
dear john
letter, on the other hand, he doesn’t mean. I am certain of that. What he means is meaner and more true.

W
e meet eight years earlier at a Halloween party in Park Slope. I go with my friend Jeff, who knows no one but the hostess, and I know no one but Jeff.

Jeff is six feet four; he is the Jolly Green Giant. I am Peter Pan.

The hostess is busy, and Jeff and I hover by the drinks. Carson looks lost and introduces himself. His costume confuses us. A clover? A pool table? Moss?

He says, “I am a lawn.” He wears a sign that says, “Keep Off!”

He asks Jeff what he is supposed to be, and Jeff tells him. Carson turns to me and says, “That must make you Sprout,” referring to the giant’s diminutive sidekick. I don’t correct him.

We continue to talk, and after a while Jeff says, “It’s not easy being green,” and we all agree.

We clump together like three wet leaves by a river. We drink too much. Carson is funny and sad, and I like him for it.

Toward the end of the night, after Jeff realizes we want to be alone and excuses himself early, I tell Carson I want to bury myself in him. He removes his sign and asks, “Front yard or back?”

I say, “I don’t care.” I whisper in his ear, “Plant me.”

W
ithin a few months, we decide to move in together, as much out of economic necessity as anything else. Rents are outrageous. We find a place in Brooklyn that is still cheap.

Around the same time, my friend Sangeeta decides she has had it with New York. She is going to try San Francisco. Her last night, Carson and I help her with some last-minute packing.

She offers us a 31" TV, which she hasn’t managed to sell, but just as we’re leaving, someone who has seen an ad in the paper calls. So Sangeeta gives us a hanging fern, which her landlord had given her six years before when she first moved in. He told her it needed a lot of love. “Promise you’ll love it,” she says.

She never named it, so Carson and I decide to call it “Krishna” because of its bluish fronds, which we think are beautiful, though Sangeeta says it may mean he’s sick.

The three of us take the subway back to our new apartment, where Carson and I are going to cook Sangeeta a farewell dinner. While we are waiting for the train, Carson holds the plant up to the subway light. Turning it around, he says, “Look how beautiful you are!” He says to us, “Isn’t he the most beautiful plant you’ve ever seen?”

Carson holds the plant in front of him by its hanger and starts spinning around, saying, “Whee!” The fern’s fronds splay out. Together they look like a carnival ride.

I say, “Be careful. You’re so rough. You’ll hurt him.”

Sangeeta sings, “Carson is the father and Parag is the mother.”

I have been helping her pack almost every day for a week, and last night, tired and grateful and a bit delirious, she thanked me profusely and told me, “If Carson and you are still together, and when the time is right and I am settled in my life and you are settled in yours and everyone is happy, I will give you a baby.” I wasn’t sure I wanted a baby. I might have preferred a gift certificate to Bloomingdale’s. Remembering it’s the thought that counts, I told her thanks. Sangeeta said it didn’t matter which one of us donated the sperm, but she recommended Carson, since he is white and she is Indian, like me. That way, the baby would look more like the one Carson and I would have if we could make one on our own. “Plus,” she said, “halfies are so pretty.”

I haven’t mentioned any of this to Carson.

When Carson stops spinning, he is dizzy and looks like he might fall over. I take him by the shoulders, and I cover his mouth with mine. I think this will steady him. Instead, it makes him swoon.

A week before, in our new neighborhood, just one subway stop away, we were chased down the block by some boys from the barrio shouting, “Faggots! We’re going to kill you faggots!”

They didn’t catch us, though they easily could have. I was wearing clogs.

Now, waiting for the train, holding Krishna between us, Carson and I kiss, oblivious of the boys. We are scared of them. But we understand they have fears of their own.

In the coming months, the neighborhood will change. The bodegas will be replaced by boutiques and bistros. Rents will rise. The boys from the barrio will be priced out of the neighborhood. Not long after, we will, too.

A
fter a couple of years of living together in Brooklyn, we meet a painter from out of town, who tells us lofts in Troy are cheap. We are tired of the starving part of being starving artists. So we move, not realizing that upstate we will continue to starve, just in different ways. Still, for the first time in our lives we own cars, live in a house with an upstairs and downstairs, end the month with a little left over. And we still write, though after a while our new starvation starves that, too.

Carson, who has always done odd jobs, becomes a baker’s apprentice. He goes to work very early in the morning, before I wake up, and returns home a little after noon. When I come home from my job, there are muffins on the kitchen counter (seconds from the bakery, misshapen and crumbly). Upstairs, he is lying in bed, smelling like yeast.

I am an office assistant, which was my job in New York and the work I have done my entire post-college life, which isn’t so long. I am not very good at it.

Part of the reason I am bad at my job is that I am fundamentally opposed to multitasking. I have been reading the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn, who says that to be happy you must do one thing at a time. He says, do the dishes to do the dishes, not to have them done. The goal isn’t to have clean dishes in the cupboards; it is to be present in the moment, to feel the water on your hands, the smooth surfaces of the ceramic bowl as you caress it. Doing the dishes shouldn’t be a chore, he says, it should be a joy.

He says, think of washing the bowl as bathing a baby. Treat everything you touch as though it were a baby: with attention and care.

I try to apply this principle to my most dreaded task at work: photocopying. I try
caring
about the things I copy. I imagine the leaves of paper as little babies I feed through the Xerox machine. And the papers the machine delivers on the other side are babies, too. They proliferate in ever-increasing quantities: ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, five hundred. I place the copies in people’s mailboxes so that they can find them later, when they finish their afternoon meetings or the next morning when they check their mail. Surprise! There’s a baby in your mailbox! The mailroom, where the Xerox machine is housed, is full of babies of all different colors—lavender, cherry, orange, chartreuse—sliding in and out of the copy machine, peeking out of mail slots, crying because they have been left on the counter or need to be changed.

So many babies.

I start avoiding the mailroom. My boss finds other ways to get her copying done. I am not worried about losing my job. We are more or less resigned to one another, which I am beginning to think is the way most relationships work.

C
arson thinks I am crazy.

I can’t disagree.

I have a habit of calling him from work in the afternoon, when I know he will be home from the bakery trying to sleep. It is bad enough that I wake him, but to make matters worse, I often have nothing to say. I only want to hear his voice. And since I have nothing to say, I meow. In the silence, I listen to him breathe. I meow for a full minute, maybe two. Then I hang up.

The co-worker who sits in the cubicle next to mine once poked his head in and said, “Is there a little pussycat in here?” He is large, in body and voice; he looks and sounds like a bulldog.

I scowl at him.

Soon we develop an unspoken understanding that we will pretend we cannot hear each other’s private conversations. In truth, the walls are so thin we can hear everything: the sound of papers shuffling from inbox to outbox, chair wheels scooting across the carpet, rubber bands straining to keep things together. We nod our heads amiably when we pass each other in the hallway and joke when we intersect in the restroom, as though he does not know I meow into the telephone, and I do not know that he is cheating on his wife.

In the same way, we pretend we cannot hear the staff accountant, whose cubicle is on the other side of ours, and with whom we both share a wall. Her four-year-old son is fighting leukemia, and between clicks of her calculator and computer keyboard, we can hear her cry. When we visit her in her cubicle, we are careful not to say, “How is your son?” because if the news were good we would already know. But rather, we say, “Wan-Chen, would you please cut this check, and mail it to the address listed on the W–9 form?” We do this not because we don’t care, but because we know numbers are safe and knowable; we see how they comfort and numb her.

I
make bizarre grocery lists. I replace cereal with surreal, Glad bags with sad bags, coffee with sneezy, lettuce with let’s. The words stray further and further from what is really meant. My lists become so coded that Carson, pulling them off the fridge on the way to the store, cannot read them. He returns with shopping bags full of wrong products.

He shows me the list, and says, pointing, “How can anyone understand this?”

I shrug. No one can. There are days even I can’t.

Our house shares a driveway with the house next door. Our neighbor’s boyfriend, who visits his girlfriend frequently but doesn’t live with her, often parks his car in such a way that it blocks mine. Never Carson’s, only mine.

In the morning, after Carson has already left for the bakery, I walk across the lawn, knock on the neighbor’s door, and ask to speak with her boyfriend. I say to him, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I need to go to work. Could you please move your car?” The first few times I am polite and gracious, but as time goes on I become more and more annoyed with the daily nuisance. I become shorter in my words and tone: “Move your car, please.” I get tired of looking at them—my neighbor, whose name I can’t remember, with her stub nose and chewed nails, and her unemployed boyfriend, with the gut and the crazy eyes, both of them still in their pajamas, angry at me for waking them—so, if I notice his car in the driveway the night before, I knock on her door and slip a note in the letter slot saying, “Neighbor’s boyfriend: please move your car.” Then, rethinking my tone and not wanting to be so curt, I replace “please” with “s’il vous plaît.” Sometimes I print it on my computer using fancy fonts and graphics, and sometimes, in addition to putting the notes in the letter slot, I put them on his car, under the wipers and taped to the driver’s side window: “Move your car, s’il vous plaît.” And because I think
s’il vous plaît
sounds a little like
Sylvia Plath
, I change it to, “Move your car, Sylvia Plath.” No one is listening to me, so why waste words? I shorten it even further to simply, “Sylvia Plath.” Finally, the notes devolve into a single exclamation, duplicated a hundred times, in the mail slot, taped to the car, under the windshield wipers: “Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia!”

Carson sees the signs and says, “What the hell are you doing? What must the neighbors think?” I say, “The neighbors don’t care. At least I’m amused.”

One morning I wake up and Carson has left his car keys on the kitchen counter with a note:

Sylvia dear, for God’s sake, use mine. Love, Ted.

From then on, Carson lets me use his car, while he takes the bus to work.

I think it’s sweet. I am grateful for the sacrifice, even feel a little guilty, but not too guilty, because Carson’s bus ride to work is much shorter than mine would be.

But I wonder about Carson’s note. Had he forgotten that Ted Hughes was no martyr; that he was not a faithful husband, would not have signed a letter “love” and meant it; that, after Sylvia’s suicide, women picketed his poetry readings, claiming murder? Perhaps Carson confused him with Leonard Woolf.

O
ne day, after returning from the grocery store frustrated, a particularly cryptic grocery list in hand, Carson asks me why I act this way, why I play these games with words.

I can’t think of an answer right away. I say, “You’re a writer, you tell me.”