* * *
I walk from the museum to the train and take it downtown, where I get off and go to a coffee shop I used to go to before I worked full time. I was in grad school for six years—English literature, mid- to late twentieth century, British and American, forgotten or actively discarded female writers: Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Lucia Berlin. There was a time when I thought giving books to other people—showing them their richness, their quiet, secret, temporary safety—could be a useful way to spend one’s life. I spent another five years as a part-time adjunct, waitress, admin assistant. Once, for six months, I wrote quizzes to accompany the bad books put out by an education corporation, but I was fired because I couldn’t keep my sentences short enough.
This—the school, at thirty-four—is the first full-time job of my whole life.
I used to come here almost every day while I wrote my dissertation and to grade papers after. Even a year ago, I came once or twice a week. I know the name of the girl behind the counter because it’s the same as my name, different spelling, and we used to joke about this when she asked my name so she could call it when my coffee was ready. But this time when she asks my name and I tell her and I start to smile, thinking she remembers, she just nods and inputs it into the computer and counts out my change.
I tip her, too much, still smiling, hoping she’ll remember. I find a window seat. I have the same book I never read on the train and I open it and read it: Patrick Modiano, Paris Nocturne. It’s strange and magic; there’s a car crash and then almost nothing happens. I sip my coffee and break off tiny pieces of the cookie that I’ve ordered. My husband texts me, How’s your day?
Okay, I say.
An hour after work ends I pack up my bag. There’s a new group of people on either side of me since I started reading. My coffee’s empty. The cookie’s gone.
* * *
Honey, I hear, as I get in the elevator.
I turn to see our neighbor. Josslyn, I say. She’s my favorite person in the building. She stands close to me and holds my elbow as she asks me questions. She’s in her sixties, could pass for forty. She wears large wool cardigans in bright colors and keeps her tight-curled hair cut close. She has large eyes and I look forward, always, to the next time her rough, warm hands grab hold of me.
How are you? she says.
Shitty, I say.
It is our game, has been for the six years we’ve lived here, to never answer one another’s how are yous with fine, good, okay, you know.
She laughs at me. Me too, she says, as we get off the elevator.
Kiss the girls, she says, as she lets herself into her apartment.
I will, I say, letting myself into mine.
* * *
How was your day? my husband asks as I walk through the door and take off my shoes and he makes dinner. The whole place smells of onions, garlic, a poblano pepper. I hug the children, hold them, kiss them, give them extra from Josslyn. The two-year-old crawls onto my lap to nurse.
Fine, I say.
We give them a bath and eat and put them to bed and watch TV—seldom anything so engaging that we can’t also both do two or three things on our phones or our computers. We climb up to bed.
I read Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, says the main character, of the porcelain dolls at a shop where she once worked, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women.
My husband falls asleep.
* * *
At 4:45 I run along the water and it’s freezing and it starts to rain but I keep running. Rats sit out in the open, on top of benches, on the concrete. One runs overtop my foot and I scream and jump and no one sees.
* * *
On the subway, I see a new picture of Sasha’s sister: she got a dog with her newly live-in boyfriend and there is some pithy caption about this being baby number one.
* * *
I teach my morning class and at the after-lunch staff meeting our principal, who is thirty-one, posts a large yellow box on the smartboard with the number twenty-five inside. Twenty-five of us missed the weekend deliverable of inserting our lesson plans into the task grid established by the CEO the week before. The email we got from our principal as a result of this missed deliverable was long and scolding, bullet pointed. It was written in the tone one might reserve for a small child. All but one of us, our principal tells us, have since turned in the task grid. He posts a second square, this one red, with the number nineteen. And this, he says, his small eyes sharpening, is the number of you who did not reply to my email alerting you to this missed weekend deliverable with contrition and gratitude.
* * *
After the meeting, I go into the classroom where I keep my coat and bag and get them. I’ve already taught my classes. I’m meant to be somewhere, planning, but we have no set office. I go down the escalator and no one sees me leaving. I think if they see me I’ll say I’m going for a late lunch, have to get the children. Now that I’m out here, I have no idea why I’ve stayed in the building all this time.
The subway’s much less crowded in the middle of the day. I have a seat plus room to set both my bags beside me. I read Gayl Jones, Corregidora: generations carrying and passing violences to one another, how hard it is to learn what we don’t know to learn, the specific ways that we might try to cast ourselves anew.
On the bench across from me a woman has laid down a large plastic bag and is asleep.
I get a coffee and a cookie at the coffee shop and read my book for all the other hours that I’m meant to be at work and then I go home on the train.
How was your day? says my husband when I get home as he makes dinner. I hug and kiss our children, nurse the baby. I bathe them and we eat together. Family read? asks the two-year-old when I go to read them books, put them to sleep. I call my husband and we all lie on the baby’s bed together. I read and she sits on me. The four-year-old sits on her dad’s lap and it’s warmer in here than any other place in our apartment, and halfway through the second book I fall asleep. An hour later, I’m still in there, and my husband comes to get me. He helps me free my arm from the two-year-old’s small hands and stands behind me as I climb the ladder up to bed and follows up right after; he wraps his arm around my waist.
* * *
At 4:50 the next morning I pass a man, fully dressed in a too-thin coat, while I run underneath the highway. He smells, up close, like liquor, and as I run by, he screams a high-pitched scream and I sprint until I’ve covered another mile and know for sure he’s far away.
* * *
Sasha’s liked her little sister’s Facebook picture of her dog.
* * *
I teach a night class uptown on Thursdays—I keep the night class even though I mostly know by now I’ll never get a real job from the institution where I teach this night class; I mostly know that real jobs at institutions like this don’t exist anymore. I keep the job because I spent all those years in school and mostly I’ve forgotten what I thought they might be worth. Because it feels good sometimes, pretending, that I got what I set out to get.