*
Drinking a margarita out of what looks like a fishbowl and singing three Stevie Nicks songs in a row. Just try to tell me I don’t know how to have a good time.
*
Back outside, a woman bums a light off a man and looks him up and down.
“Your shirt is telling me you live in Brooklyn,” she says.
*
I’m trying to decide if it’s late enough to satisfy my mother or if I should kill another hour getting a foot massage at one of the places on Eighth Street. I enjoy any form of massage that doesn’t require nudity.
I’m looking up to check what street I’m on when a taxi passes. Inside it is Frank. He’s in profile, leaning forward to say something to the driver. It is just a flash. The taxi slides past the green light, and he is gone. It takes everything in me not to drop to all fours and chase the cab across town like a dog let loose.
*
I sit on the PATH train and try not to think about Frank. This is impossible. I try to focus, instead, on listing all the different types of cheese I know off the top of my head. Camembert. Gouda. Swiss. Cheddar. Manchego … Could he really be pining for me? But if he was, why wouldn’t he tell me that Cleo had moved? Maybe he thinks I don’t care? How could he think I don’t care? Provolone. Feta. Stilton. Mozzarella … I didn’t even say goodbye to him the day I left the agency. But he knew how to contact me … Brie. Pecorino. Ricotta. American. He doesn’t think of me, or he would have reached out. This whole thing is in my head. Pepper jack.
*
Not satisfied with my romp into the city, my mother insists I accompany her to her bonsai class. The teacher is dressed like an ancient boy scout, with his socks pulled tight over his knees and shorts cinched at his belly button. His only teaching aid is a piece of paper covered in sketches of variously shaped bonsai held shakily in front of him. He has the tendency to say “This is what we call …” about the most obvious things—This is what we call a leaf—but terms like ramifications and apical bud, apparently, need no additional explanation.
*
“So what did you think?” asks my mother on the drive home. “Bet you’ll never look at a bonsai tree the same way again, eh?”
“This is what we call a waste of my time,” I say, gesturing to the car, this conversation, the state of New Jersey, the entire world.
“And this,” says my mother, gesturing to me, “is what we call an asshole.”
*
My brother Levi comes down from upstate.
“Man, I hate hospitals,” he says, scuffing his heels against the linoleum floors.
“This one’s not so bad,” I say. “The nurses are nice, and they have a TV room.”
“Ellie,” he says, “it’s a dump. Dad deserves better than this.”
I have the urge to punch him swiftly in the neck, but I restrain myself. It was typical Levi, artfully sidestepping any responsibility, then showing up last-minute to offer a thoughtful critique.
“That’s great feedback, Levi,” I say. “You want us to write a Yelp review or something?”
Levi gives me an outraged look.
“Did Mom tell you I got banned from Yelp?” he says. “I specifically told her not to.”
*
I’m reading to my father from one of his dog-eared volumes of collected poems when I stop at a page faintly marked with pencil. He has underlined two stanzas of a Derek Walcott poem very finely, almost tentatively, as though trying not to muss up the page.
Days I have held,
days I have lost,
days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harboring arms.
Next to them is a faded check mark. A restrained little check. My heart.
*
I can’t sleep, so I’m up late watching a documentary about Middle Americans and their battle with crippling methamphetamine addictions. The man currently being interviewed has dry red sores all over his face that he picks at absently, almost tenderly, as he speaks.
“I never had a real birthday,” he says. “No presents or nothing. My parents didn’t care. But on meth I can have a birthday whenever I want. I can have my birthday seven days a week.”
*
Levi is playing his new solo album Table for One, Not by the Window loudly over the speakers in the living room.
“Turn that racket off!” yells my mother.
He turns the volume dial down, not all the way, but enough that the house is no longer vibrating.
“My eardrums, good grief,” says my mother, collapsing onto the eating couch.
“It’s not racket,” says Levi.