There was a month, roughly September into October, that I have never been able to write about straight. I have started this chapter four times and every draft came out crooked, because the month itself was straight, if that makes sense. That month was the one part of the whole story where I was not performing, or not performing much, or performing so well I fooled myself, and telling the difference from inside is the one thing I have never learned to do.
Here is what I can give you. The montage, honestly told, with the poison marked where I can see it in hindsight and left unmarked where I cannot.
Anne took two alarms and was up on the first. This I learned the hard way, sleeping through her first alarm at her apartment and waking to find her already dressed, already coffeed, reading at the kitchen table with her shoes on, like sleep was a meeting she had declined to attend.
Her showers came at night, which I noticed the first time I stayed over, her hair dark and heavy on the pillow, the bathroom fogged and smelling of her cheap good shampoo. At the last farmers market of September she salted her watermelon, one pinch, two, a third for the road, and when I asked about it she said, “My grandfather. Also it’s correct,” and offered me a slice with salt on it as if that were a normal thing to offer a person, and reader, it was.
She ate her pizza crust first. “Best part, first,” she said. “Life is uncertain.”
She took the stairs. Three floors, every day, groceries and all, and when I carried things up for her she stood at the landing and waited, neither grateful nor offended, and I never asked why. The not-asking will matter later. Put a pin in it.
In groups she went quiet. At dinners with Marcus and his people she would go still and pleasant at the edge of the noise, and I, loving her loudly, would fill her silence with stories about her, which she sat through with the patience of weather. Those dinners I have replayed since, and I want to shake the man I was. Not shy, no. Here was a woman conserving herself in a room full of people spending theirs, and I kept introducing her to the spending.
She kept a photograph behind her license. Once she sent me to her wallet for a card, and there it was, a small square tucked where only she would see it every day, a child and a man in front of a porch I did not recognize, and I did not ask. Into the notebook it went instead, safer than a question. Everything seemed safer than a question.
And the watch. Time got checked on her father’s watch, the cracked leather band gone soft and dark, constantly, a quarter-turn of her wrist, more tic than time-telling, and I recorded it, the watch, the band, the tic, and never asked what she was counting.
In October I brought her carnations from the bucket outside the grocery, no occasion, and she stopped on the sidewalk and looked at me the way you look at a person who has unexpectedly passed a test they did not know they were taking. “Most men bring roses,” she said.
“Most men weren’t listening.”
“No,” she said. “They weren’t.” Into a glass on her table they went and lasted three weeks, outliving every bouquet logic said they should.
Item by item, the list grew toward twenty. At her kitchen table, while she slept, I wrote them, neat, numbered, dated, and I felt that same settling in my chest, that order. There was a name for it then, and the name was happiness. Lucy would have called it something else.
Now the dancing, because the dancing is the thing I go back to when I need to prove to myself it was real, that I did not invent the whole month out of loneliness the way I invented other things.
A Saturday, two in the morning, neither of us tired, rain on the windows but the apartment warm. She had taught me to cook that fall, her one serious pedagogical project, and I had burned the tomato sauce so badly the pan never fully recovered, and we had eaten cereal at the counter instead, and she had made her joke. God, I wish I remembered the joke. Something about me and fire, and she laughed at it before she finished it, hand over her mouth, and I stood in her small kitchen with a wooden spoon like a surrender flag and thought, I would burn a hundred pans.
Then the song came on, whatever station she kept low on the radio, and she took the spoon out of my hand and set it in the sink and said, “Dance with me, Eli, before you hurt yourself,” and we danced in her kitchen at two in the morning, badly, her cheek against my collarbone, the cereal bowls still on the counter, and I, who had not danced since a prom I refused to remember, did not step on her feet even once, which I took as a sign. I took everything as a sign. The whole book is right there in that kitchen.
I did not write that one down, not knowing how to number it.
Mid-month, a Friday, we drove down to Williamson. Anne had the house in summary, the scar version, quick and light and short on detail, and she had said, “I want to meet her,” with the flat finality she used on matters she considered settled, and that was that. Out of Columbus at six, the city flattening behind us, and somewhere past Chillicothe the land stood up, ridge after ridge closing over the highway, and Anne watched it the way she read, forehead nearly touching the glass.
“It’s so vertical,” she said.
“You should see it when it’s green.”
“I can’t tell if that’s a promise or a warning.”
“Yes,” I said, and she laughed at that one too, before she was done with it.
Mama met us on the porch, wiping her hands on a dish towel, in the housecoat with the blue roses faded at the cuffs. Mama looked at Anne a long moment, the way she looked at everything, taking the whole measure, and then she said, “Well. Look what Columbus growed,” and held the screen door open, and just like that, the inspection was over and the visit had started.
Managing, that was what I had expected to do all weekend. That was my function in all previous girlfriend-and-family encounters, translating one side to the other, steering conversation off the rocks. There were no rocks. Anne asked my mother how she made the beans, and my mother, who guarded that recipe like a deed, said, “Get your notebook, honey, it’s short,” and Anne said, “I’ll remember,” and did, reciting the steps back an hour later with the salt right, and the two of them looked at each other then with the sudden warmth of women who have both, separately, decided the other one will do.
From the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of tea I had not been asked to hold, I watched my girlfriend and my mother argue gently about whether cornbread wants sugar in it, and something moved in my chest that I could not name and did not examine. That feeling never went in the notebook; it had no number. Two years I have had to think about why the things with numbers were never the things that mattered, and I am no closer to an answer than I was in that doorway.
Next morning Mama made biscuits and Anne was up before me, at the table with her hair pinned loose, and Mama said, “Mornin’, sugar,” like Anne had been coming to that table her whole life.
That afternoon we drove around, Anne in the passenger seat taking it all in. At Third Avenue she made me stop at the used bookshop, the same one, though I did not know yet what that shop was keeping for me. She went in the way she went into everything new, slow, reading the room before the shelves, and the old man behind the counter looked up at her and then at me through the window and nodded once, a small town’s whole verdict in one chin movement. She came out with two cookbooks and a satisfied look. Out the holler road, past the turn where the pavement gives up, I slowed the car, the way you slow at a house where you used to know the people, and she looked down the dirt spur and then at me and, being Anne, did not ask.
“Family land,” I said. “Long story.”
The truth was shorter than the story and uglier: my father’s people, a fight I had inherited without reading the terms, and a road I had not driven past the end of since I was seventeen. All of that stayed where I kept the things with no numbers.
“Mm,” she said, having heard the story anyway, just not from me.
On the porch that evening, Mama sat in her chair with her tea going cold, watching the two of us on the steps, and she did not say whatever it was she was thinking. Once I caught her at it, mid-laugh, her eyes on me and not on Anne, and I raised a hand at her, a boy waving off his mother, and she smiled and let me win it, an argument she could have later.
The phone call came the next Thursday. Buckeyes small talk, weather small talk, and then, in the middle of nothing, my mother said, “You keep writin’ down what she does, Elias.”
My whole body went still in my office chair. “What?”
“I seen your face, son. Memorizin’. You been memorizin’ that girl since the day you brought her down here.” A pause, the sound of her kitchen, the chair with the split seat creaking. “When you gonna ask her why?”
I laughed, made it easy, made it a joke about mothers and their hunches, and she let me, because she had said the true thing and she knew how long true things take to sink in a son like me. “Alright, Mama,” I said. “I hear you.”
“I know you do, baby,” she said, in the voice that meant she knew I did not, not yet, and we said our goodbyes, and I sat there in my window office in Columbus, in the flat light, with the sentence standing in the room like a person.
When you gonna ask her why.
I did not write that one down either.
The party was a week later, some work friend’s place in the Short North, everyone standing around a kitchen island with drinks. The party found me doing the thing I did, holding court with a story about Anne, the salt on the watermelon, the pizza crust, the two alarms, my girl, my material, and Marcus appeared at my elbow with two beers and waited for me to finish.
Marcus walked me out to the little balcony. October had finally turned; the air had edges.
“You keep quotin’ her like she’s somethin’ you read,” he said, quiet, and by October I knew what quiet meant from him. The dropped g’s coming up under the Ohio said I was supposed to listen. “She’s standin’ right there in your stories, doin’ her little tricks. She’s a person, man. She’s in your kitchen. When’s the last time you told a story where she got to be wrong?”
I told him he was being literal. The stories were affection, I told him. A single nod, the objection duly noted, and we went back inside, and I told one more story anyway, because the room wanted one, and I had so many.
That was October. The leaves turned and I did not look up. The list filled toward twenty, every item true, every item a small locked door I had decided to oil instead of open, and I walked around in the golden month with my notebook and my number-order happiness and one witness at home who had already told me the truth down the phone line and watched me wave it off.
Best month of my life, bar none, and I will not have it said, in a book full of my failures, that I failed at the good part. The good part happened. Remember: she never once made it to the end of her own jokes sober-faced. There was dancing at two in the morning in a kitchen that smelled of burnt tomato, her cheek warm through my shirt, and for whole minutes at a time I was exactly where I was, no notebook, no number, no net.
It was real, and it was mine, and I spent it taking notes.