28. Priya
PRIYA
The grinning started approximately fourteen hours ago and has not stopped and I do not expect it to stop and I am fine with this.
I am fine with being a woman grinning at a steering wheel on Foster Avenue because my body is still humming with the residual warmth of a night that rearranged the furniture of my life and I have not yet figured out where everything goes and I do not care.
The car behind me honks. The light is green. I have been sitting at a green light replaying the moment Margot took off her bra.
She reached behind her back. She unclasped it.
She let it fall. The gesture was—I am searching for the word and the word does not exist in English or any of the languages I have partial access to—the gesture was Margot.
Deliberate. Unhurried. The decision visible in the doing of it, as it always is with her, because she does nothing by accident.
I watched her choose, in real time, to be seen.
By me. The choosing was the sexiest thing about it.
The choosing and her boobs, which were— I am operating a motor vehicle.
I should not be thinking about Margot’s boobs while operating a motor vehicle.
Her nipples hardened in the cool air and she stood in her bedroom and let me look and what came after the looking was—
Another green light. Another honk.
I pull into the parking lot of a grocery store. I put the car in park. I am going to need a minute.
Flashes. Her laugh when I fumbled with the button on her trousers. The sound she made when I touched her—low, unguarded, from somewhere the composure doesn’t reach. Her hand tightening in my hair. Her mouth. Her precision. I am going to think about her precision for the rest of my natural life.
I am 41 years old. I have been in love before.
I have been in bed before. I have never sat in a parking lot unable to operate a vehicle because my body will not stop replaying a single night and my face will not stop grinning and my chest is so full of joy that I have to put my head on the steering wheel and remind myself to breathe.
The boys are at Vikram’s until Tuesday. The house will be quiet, too quiet.
I text Marcus. Two words: Lavender House?
His response arrives in four seconds: Already here. Bring details.
Lavender House is seven minutes from here.
The morning is March bright, the sun that appears after months of grey with the aggressive cheerfulness of a guest who has been absent too long.
The sun is on my face and the window is down and the air smells like wet earth and new growth and I am driving to Lavender House to sit with people who love me and tell them that I am happy.
Happy is not the right word. Happy fits inside a sentence.
What I am is too large for a sentence, requires a paragraph, possibly a chapter, most certainly a footnote longer than even Kim could produce, potentially a geological era.
What I am is: a woman whose body remembers the specific pressure of another woman’s mouth and whose heart remembers the specific expression on that woman’s face when the composure finally gave way and what was underneath was not the analytical Margot or the professional Margot or the defended Margot but just Margot, soft and terrified and reaching and allowing herself to be seen.
I park outside Lavender House. The door is propped open. The lavender hedge is pushing new growth. The smell carries. The fragrance has never smelled so divine. So real.
Marcus is at his table. The chai. The laptop.
He looks up when I walk in and his face does the rapid scan—two seconds—and whatever the scan reveals produces an expression I have never seen on Marcus Wellington’s face.
Not the chart vindication. Not the astrological certainty.
Joy. Uncomplicated, unhidden. He has been watching his friend fall in love for six months, and he is looking at the result and finding it good.
“Tell me everything. No. Wait.” He adjusts his collar. “Tell me the important things and save the details for when I have more chai.”
“Marcus.”
“You are glowing. You are literally incandescent. Sit down.”
I sit. I don’t know where to start. The pierogies seem too early and the morning seems too late and the middle is private; the middle belongs to the lamplight and the bedroom and the room where her composure broke open and I was there to catch what came through. But the edges I can share.
“She made pierogies,” I say.
“From scratch?”
“Her grandmother’s recipe.”
Marcus sets down his chai. “She made you her grandmother’s pierogies.”
“With her hair down.”
“A woman who makes you her grandmother’s recipe with her hair down is a woman who has decided. That is not dinner. That is a declaration of intent.”
“The intent was declared.”
“I can see that.” He looks at me, really looks, the look beneath the chart, the look of a friend who has known me through Dominique and Morgan and the divorce and the years of the boys and the Thursday mornings. “You’re happy.”
“I’m— Marcus, I’m so happy it’s structurally unsound. I don’t think this level of happiness has adequate load-bearing capacity. It’s going to collapse into something embarrassing.”
“Let it collapse. You’ve earned it.”
From the corner armchair, Rowan speaks without looking up from their phone.
“Is this the Comp Lit professor? The one with the blazers?”
Marcus and I both turn. Rowan is in the armchair with Hammertime in the fanny pack on their lap.
They are wearing an oversized mustard velvet blazer with the sleeves shoved to the elbows over a teal t-shirt, which should not work with their black jeans and scuffed boots and should absolutely not work at 11:00 on a Sunday morning, and yet the whole arrangement communicates a person who got dressed with conviction and without a mirror and was right both times.
“How do you know about the blazers?” I ask.
“I notice blazers. She wears them like body armor. I find that very compelling as a choice.” They scratch Hammertime behind the ear.
Hammertime tolerates this with the dignified forbearance of a creature who has decided that physical affection is beneath him but that resistance requires more energy than compliance.
“Also Kim mentioned something in November and I have a good memory for romantic subplots. Occupational hazard.”
“You’re in Creative Writing.”
“I am in Creative Writing and I am telling you, as someone who has workshopped a lot of first kiss scenes and most of them are bad, that the look on your face right now is not the look of someone whose first kiss was bad.” They sit up straighter. “Oh my God. Wait. Did it just happen? Last night?”
“There was a kiss. Before last night. Last night was—”
“Last night was not a kiss.”
“It was not.”
Rowan pulls Hammertime closer—a reflexive hug, like how some people clutch a pillow during a good part of a movie. Hammertime’s face, emerging from the fanny pack, achieves new heights of affronted dignity.
“That’s so good,” they say. The sentence is simple and sincere and the sincerity is the thing about Rowan that catches me: how the chaos parts sometimes, without warning, and what’s underneath is this direct, undefended warmth.
“That’s really, really good. She deserves that.
She looks like she hasn’t been— I don’t know.
” They pause. Consider. “She looks like someone turned the lights off in her a long time ago and someone needs to turn them back on.”
The sentence lands. It lands because it is precisely true and because Rowan delivered it without filtering, the thought arriving fully formed and departing before the social calculation can intervene.
She looks like someone turned the lights off in her a long time ago.
Rowan has spoken to Margot exactly once that I know of—a brief exchange at the colloquium about hedgehog hibernation patterns that Margot received with polite bewilderment—and from that single exchange Rowan saw the thing I have spent six months learning to see.
They settle back with Hammertime. “Anyway. Congratulations. The lights are back on. I can see it from here.”
Bea sets a Calloway on the counter. She does not look at me when she sets it down. She wipes the counter. The slow wipe.
I take the coffee. I drink. Perfect, as always.
I come back to the counter for a warm-up, though the cup is still half-full, just to be near Bea, just to stand at the counter the way I have stood here for years, in the proximity that means: I need you to know something and I don’t know how to start.
Bea pours without comment. She folds the cloth into a neat square. When she looks at me her expression is layered.
The top layer is gladness. Genuine, simple. Bea is glad.
The layer beneath is more complex. A protectiveness.
“She’s okay?” Bea asks. Two words. The simplest possible question.
“She’s okay,” I say. “She stayed.”
Bea’s hands still on the cloth. One second. She knows what stayed means. Bea knows the architecture, knows the pattern of retreat, knows what it costs Margot to remain in a room when leaving is the safer option.
“Good,” Bea says. Softly. “That’s good.”
She goes back to wiping. Then she stops again.
“There are things she hasn’t told you yet,” Bea says. “About before. When she’s ready, she’ll tell you. And when she tells you, you’ll understand things about her you don’t understand yet. Things about why the staying cost what it cost.”
She picks up the cloth. “But that’s hers to give. Not mine.”
I nod. The nodding is an agreement, a contract between me and Bea, written in the language of the counter and the cloth. The contract says: I will wait. I will let her tell me in her own time.
Bea reaches beneath the register. The wooden box with the affirmation cards. She selects one. Sets it on the counter.
Joy is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to dance with it.
I put the card in my pocket beside the first one.
Friday. Margot’s house, for a practical reason that has nothing to do with the impractical feelings coursing through my nervous system every time I am within six feet of this woman.
The reason: I left my reading glasses here. She is at work. She told me where the spare key is—under the third flowerpot from the left on the back porch. The key is exactly where she said it would be. I let myself in.
The house is quiet. I have never been in this house alone. The aloneness changes it. The house without Margot in it is a document I can read without the author present, and the reading tells me things the author might not have chosen to share.
The photographs in the hallway. Sophia at every age.
Margot looking at Sophia with the unguarded expression.
Alone, without Margot watching me look, I can see the progression—the early photos where her face is still learning the expression, the later ones where it has become the truest thing about her.
Thirteen years of Margot learning to love without architecture.
I find the reading glasses on the counter by the stove. I should take them and go.
I do not take them and go.
I make tea. This is not a decision so much as a gravitational event.
My body moves on its own toward her kettle and her mugs and her tea.
I know where things are. Second shelf, left side, rooibos.
First shelf, center, Earl Grey. The mugs from Pat Levin’s pottery.
I reach for the rooibos—afternoon, so rooibos—and my hand goes past the tea shelf to the cabinet above.
I open it.
Three lint rollers on the shelf. Lined up in a row. Identical. The same brand I carry in my bag—the one I bought in November to remove the evidence of Kali before entering the research space, the love letter written in the language of dog hair removal.
Margot has purchased three of the same lint roller and arranged them, precisely, on a shelf in her kitchen.
I stand in her kitchen holding the cabinet open and I cannot speak.
I cannot speak because the lint rollers are the most Margot thing I have ever seen.
They are her way of saying: you are going to be here.
Your dogs are going to be here. The dog hair is going to be here.
I have prepared. Three lint rollers is not a concession to mess.
Three lint rollers is the system expanding to accommodate a variable it has decided to keep.
I close the cabinet. I make the tea. I drink it standing at her counter with the reading glasses in my pocket and the knowledge of the lint rollers in my chest, warm and precise and overwhelming and exactly right.
I do not mention the lint rollers. Some things are better loved than discussed.