Leaving Soon

She will not go to her next-door neighbor’s funeral, even though he was young and died of too-soon-sickness. How could she say goodbye if she’d never really said hello? It would be like going to an acquaintance’s going-away party because the night was free and the music loud. Because listen: “I’ll miss you,” only sounds genuine if it’s replacing “Don’t go— you are someone I could’ve loved.” She didn’t know him well enough, doesn’t want to be like all those other girls in cheap black veils, extracting tragedies like bees on cracked soda cans. Besides. She has had enough sadnesses of her own. She couldn’t get the cancer to kill her, just to leave a violet mark. Eventually, every lover will ask where the scar came from. “Surgery." She tells them surgery, but only if their eyes are a watered-down green. “Bitten by a shark,” she says, if she expects them to leave as soon as the sheets untangle.

The Lovelier Girl

On our third date, Ralph told me that he was often lonely.

I was going to tease him as I had on our first date, when he told me that his fortune came from being the CEO of the largest North American toilet paper company.

“Don’t laugh, we’re developing a line of paper towels and baby wipes as well,” he had said, shaking a finger.

“As if that makes it okay!”

But really, as a failed actress with overdue student loans, who was I to judge the man who was buying me duck confit on a bed of wilted greens? So when he told me that he was a lonely man, and frequently, too, I nodded solemnly.

“I know about lonely.”

“The young don’t know about lonely.” He smiled. I smiled back. We were always smiling in these foolish circles.

“Oh sure they do." I had turned twenty-three that summer. “Children are the loneliest things. And teenagers? God, do you remember how awful it was to be one of those?”

“Sure, I remember.” He looked into his gin and tonic, squeezed the already pulpy lime. He was fifty-seven and it was my job to make him feel young. I waited for him to call me over the next few days, and when he didn’t, I realized that maybe I was bad at dating older men. But my loans from theater school were past due and I’d already applied for forbearance, and he was a handsome man, so I wrote to him on the website we’d met on.

“Loneliness is going through the trouble of dividing boxed recipes into quarters in order to produce a single pancake.”

He called me.

I hadn’t expected the invitation to move into his Beacon Hill townhouse so soon after meeting, not really, but he insisted. He paid the rent of my old apartment for the whole month of August, and I didn’t renew lease. My new home was decorated by his ex-wife, some blonde woman with a forehead Botoxed into submission who had moved to the suburbs after their divorce. Though her brocade and cream tastes weren’t exactly mine, the apartment was beautiful, and I hoped it was something I could try on for awhile, like a mink coat.

Nothing about living with Ralph was remarkable, not exactly. He was quieter than he had been on our first dates, now that he had me. I soon figured out that he was the type who only fought for things he was about to lose. He was different than other boyfriends I’d had. He never clung to me in his sleep, never called me baby. Before he left for work at eight every morning he would push the hair from my face to tell me that my breakfast was in the kitchen. I’d finally get up around noon to find a calcified egg-white omelet or cold toast, shiny with gelled butter.

I always looked forward to his return from the office. He normally had already eaten dinner, so I kept a lot of desserts in the house. Ralph liked pastries with tangy centers and sorbet more than ice cream—he had a respiratory condition (Nothing for you to worry about!) and the dairy produced too much mucus. Sometimes he would tell me about humorous mishaps at the toilet paper factory or something he had heard on NPR. I liked the stories about his childhood most, like how he and his little friend once snuck up behind a man on the street and shouted ‘Stick ‘em up!’ and were reprimanded because there was a war going on overseas.

Frequently, Ralph and I would not converse at all. He would come home to his favorite chair and study full of books (a lot of Dostoevsky, some pop-history) and read until dark. The only times he seemed to need me were dinners out with buyers and their wives. It’s okay, I told myself. This is how secure, happy people are. This is how people who’ve been in love a long time are, though we’d only been together four months. The couples who run out of things to say to each other have love to shake their hallways, but we don’t even have that! I used to whine in the dark of our bedroom, syncopated to Ralph’s raspy snoring. I hardly knew him-- all I had was the litany I had learned by living with him. The cheap Pert Plus and expensive cologne. The order in which he unpacked his coat pockets when he returned home. The way he looked at me when I descend the staircase wearing an emerald dress before his business cocktail parties. Like that was it, the point of everything.

I first saw the woman with the dog on a what was a very desperate day for me. I had just bombed an audition and was regretting moving to Boston in the first place. In LA it was still sunny and in the sixties. On the way home from the Theatre District I stopped on Newbury Street to buy something sensible, but ended up weighed down by bright pink bags and bone-China dinnerware from Chanel. Nearly back to our apartment on Chestnut Street, I slipped on the salt meant to fight the first snowfall of the season, and dropped the box of Chanel. All of the teacups cracked and I shouldn’t have bought them in the first place, his ex-wife had left a perfectly lovely set from Ralph Lauren, so, flustered, I left it and didn’t look back. I was sitting on the steps of our apartment, nursing a cigarette and trying not to weep when I saw her. She had been walking swiftly, but stood to let her little dog sniff around a tree trunk grown from the cobble stone. She wore a tailored black coat. Everything around her was dark and wintery, but she held the sunspot of a peeled clementine in her raw hands, and I wanted to be her friend.

In spite of the cold, I took long walks around Beacon Hill everyday, learning the side streets, sometimes seeing the same families and couples. We’d all smile at each other once we recognized that we were neighbors, but I didn’t know what to do after that. When I asked Ralph about friends who lived nearby he said that people had this idea that they were living in a neighborhood, but really it was still just Boston. People don’t make friends on the street.

“You don’t like, uh, whaser name, Julie? Herb’s wife?” Ralph asked. “I thought you two were having a nice time at the nondenominational holiday party.”

“Well, she’s all right, I guess.”

“Shouldn’t you be used to this? I thought people in LA all lived in people shaped bubbles to stay away from the smog.”

“No, no. It was beautiful and soulless and I would have stayed if I’d gotten the part of the kooky best friend of a teenager who just discovered she’s immortal.”

It was the last of the rejections I could handle. So I packed my things and transplanted myself to Boston because New York was too expensive. My mother’s house in Indiana with the cross-stitched pillow singing ‘Home Is Where the Heart Is’ couldn’t bring me back. People will say that the midwest is America’s heartland, but I know better. Our traveling ancestors shed all of the old world as they ambled toward the Pacific. Only, the wanderlust led not to new frontiers, but to a waking Americana dream, surrounded by billboards and palm trees. I got off the plane feeling that the city was strangely familiar, visited hundreds of times in Hollywood movies or my own suburban strip-malls, even though I’d never seen mountains or sea in my life.

“Any auditions lately?”

The truth was that with Christmas blooming like a hurricane, I had traded the rejection of auditions for the Prudential Shops with their understated frosted pine trees and silver bells. This shopping wasn’t like it used to be, in my previous life in JC Penney’s with my mother—all of her coupons and red tag items. I was no longer stroking polyester like a pervert, reeking of three different Clinique samples or snapping security tags off of cubic zirconia earrings.

This was shopping in museum-like rooms, void of any clothing. The salesgirls would look at you with elevator eyes, then pull out pieces from some secret room, suited to your exact taste. This was shopping without digging into necklines to check prices. This was shopping where anything could be mine. It made me feel delirious and uncontrollably alive.

“Buy what you want,” Ralph had said when he handed me a heavy black Amex with my name etched in silver. “Buy whatever will make you happy.”

So he must have seen the shopping bags folded and tucked into the pantry, must have known that the walk-in closet and maple armoire were nearly over-flowing, and yet he still asked if there was room in the shopping list to be an actress.

“I auditioned for The Little Dog Laughed this morning," I lied. "But I don’t think I got it. They wanted someone older. I did a little shopping, too. “

“Get anything nice?”

“A few things. Thank you.”

“Sia, you don’t have to thank me every time.”

“I know.”

The next couple of times I saw the woman with the dog I realized it was more than coincidence, that we were neighbors and that she was not just a tourist with beautiful coats and sherpa boots. She was always with her dog, and I was always outside to smoke, which I considered as much as a responsibility as a pet who needed fresh air no matter the weather. Whenever I saw her I would stamp out my cigarette quickly. I could only smoke light menthols, or white grape cigars, something I found vaguely shameful. The same type of shame I was sure the woman with the dog felt about her blond hair sprouting from dark roots. Those roots, that inability to schedule salon visits fastidiously, let me know that she and I were women who were new to money. That if we were to meet we would save each other from these frigid waters, or at least, understand one another.

But whenever I seemed able to swallow my shyness, and was ready to talk to her with a planned comment about the weather, she was already gone, the French bulldog trotting in stride with her Louboutins.

The breeder’s house was warm and filled with the sound of mewing puppies.

“You can’t even smell them right? Doesn’t it not smell like dog in here?” I kept asking Ralph.

“If I were to be blindfolded and asked if I were in a house with dogs, I’d say yes. But I guess it’s not bad.”

The breeder was a slightly plump woman who was able to make her living off selling French bulldogs and afford a nice Cape house. She asked Ralph and I not to interact with the puppies until they finished nursing off of their mother, a black and white one named Lula. I could barely contain myself and had to hold onto the crook of Ralph’s elbow to keep from jumping up and down.

“I want the runt of the litter,” I said to the breeder while trying to distinguish which puppy was smallest as they squirmed on their mother’s underbelly. I wanted to rescue the one no else would.

“So did the last two girls who were here, ma'am,” she said. “Everyone wants something to fit in their purse. But keep in mind that these are bulldogs!”

“Yes, but they are French.” I relaxed my face into what I hoped was a neutrally cruel expression.

“Right, well. Do you and your dad live in an apartment or a house?”

It wasn’t the first time someone had assumed that Ralph, with his salt and pepper hair and slack face, was my father. Each time there was a spell of uncomfortable silence, both of us hoping the other would rush in to explain.

“He’s my boyfriend, actually, and we live in an apartment with a lot of space. It’s near the Common.”

“Oh. Yeah, so, they are small dogs but that doesn't mean they don't need plenty of exercise. They'll fatten up on you if you don't walk them.”

When the four puppies unlatched I sat down on the floor and held each one in rotation. They all looked basically the same—black bat ears and white bodies, two girls and two boys. Their stubby legs were too short for their thick bodies and they reminded me of crawling babies. I couldn’t pick one, but Ralph said that, no, we could not take all four. That would come to around eight thousand dollars, are you kidding me? Ralph suggested that he and I sit across the room from the puppies. Which ever one came to me first would be our puppy. I sang, and Ralph whistled, and the boy with the smallest amount of black on his ears wandered forward. I named him Bean.

Our dogs met before we did. They ran at each other, pushing their flat snouts together, pulling the woman and I close, tethered by leather leashes.

"Sorry, he's just a puppy," I said.

"Oh, he's adorable. How old?" said the woman.

I told her the number of months like a mother of a real baby. As the dogs circled us, tangling us in the leashes, I learned that her name was Aspen, yes, like the resort, and her dog's name was Finnegan, yes like the Wake.

"Finnegan's so cute. He's one of the reasons I wanted this breed."

"Someone once told me that it's the breed of Beacon Hill. Everyone has one."

We talked for a while longer before we admitted that we were neighbors. She'd seen me around, too. I pointed to my house, and she pointed to hers, and we smiled. It's a rare thing when little orbits collide, and it’s true : people don’t make friends off the street. But I was feeling crazy – not in a Come-to-my-apartment-so-I-can-cut-you-into-tiny-bits crazy, but in a This-is-random-but-would-you-like-to-come-over-for-a-cup-of-coffee kind of crazy. I felt a rush of giddiness when she said Sure.

I’ve never been very good at having guests over to my house, even for brief visits. After my father moved out, my mother stopped entertaining family friends at our house, so I suppose I never learned the necessary skills. I always find myself giving visitors tours—This is the living room, and this is the hallway and this is my favorite place to watch the sunset. I nearly began such a tour for Aspen but then I realized she would likely be unimpressed with Ralph’s Italian espresso machine or even the closet-sized fireplace. Unsure of what else to do, I said, “Let me give you an art tour,” and we shuffled along the apartment’s walls.

The door to Ralph’s study was open and Aspen poked her head in.

“Is that your diploma there? USC?”

“Oh, gosh it’s so embarrassing—my boyfriend hung it up because I told him how proud my mother is of it. I’m the first to graduate in my family. My mom went for a little while, but lost her scholarships. She had a taste for premium Colombian stuff.”

“It was the seventies?”

“Early eighties.”

She looked closer at my diploma before we both left the study. “I didn’t think that Sia would be your real name.”

“Well, yeah.”

She laughed. “A lot of women here change their name. You know Apple Benson? She lives on Pinckney. My real name’s Anne, but a friend took me to Aspen when we were sixteen, and we told our ski instructor and all the boys we met that I was Aspen making a pilgrimage to Aspen. Anyways. What is your oven doing?” she asked me when I took her to the kitchen to see the Lichtenstein which Ralph felt was too contemporary for anywhere else.

“It’s cleaning itself.”

“What?”

“It’s a self-cleaning oven.”

“Wouldn’t your maid do a better job than a lot of heat?”

It was moments like that that I knew I would always be separate from her, no matter what type of friends we became. Later, on our dog walks, shopping trips, and early, cocktail-heavy dinners she would tell me the details of her life's history. The New England upbringing. The ballet lessons in the winter and dusty horse shows in the summer. The boys from the wrong side of the tracks. All this before the recession and the sale of her father's business and the resurfacing of her mother's drinking. How her husband placed her back where she belonged. She was fun to talk to, and told her stories well, her voice somehow always sounding as if she had just eaten a delicious piece of candy. And I should have understood her fully, but I couldn't. We had left through the same door, but had always lived in different houses.

Aspen's husband worked as a corporate lawyer in the Financial District, and since they'd gotten married three years ago, her only job was to get pregnant. He was a wonderful man, busy with work, preoccupied by small hobbies. He liked to solder.

"He's had the same damn toaster for over a decade," Aspen told me.

Prior to getting married, Aspen was a dental student. She met her husband in the seafood restaurant where he worked as a waiter to pay for Harvard Law. She wrote her number on the check and she fell in love with him because he told her she was funny before he told her she was beautiful.

"I used to always sing that song to him. You know the one, 'You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, I picked you out, I shook you up and turned you around into something new.' God, it drove him crazy."

On our walks to exercise our Frenchies, Aspen would sometimes pull me into baby boutiques where were would coo over all the soft pastel. Aspen would lazily buy some gender neutral item, or a bulky developmental toy for when the nonexistent baby grew into a toddler.

"Where do you keep all this stuff?" I once asked when we were drunk at a posh bar. I had been to her townhouse-- it was modern and uncluttered, so I imagined a secret nursery overflowing with collected organic cotton blankets or plastic bibs.

"It sort of cycles through with the in verto. I usually end up donating everything when the eggs don't stick," she said, digging through the cavern of her purse for lipstick. Beautiful men kept offering to buy us drinks. Each one I had to turn down stung like a certain kind of death.

"The people at Goodwill used to love me," Aspen continued. "But I haven't tried as much lately."

"Why not? You don't want a little snot-ball love-bug?"

"I guess I do. But maybe it's not worth all the trouble? It's started to feel like something that's being done to me. All that prodding. The new ‘lie back and think of London,’ for sure. What about you? You and Ralph having kids?"

"We're not-- I mean, he's not. We haven't thought that far ahead. I want a baby. But."

“So what about, well, sleeping with him?” Aspen giggled. “Can I ask that?”

I laughed too. Another overpriced lychee gin martini sweat in my hand.

“What can I possibly say? I don't want to tell you that it grosses me out, or that he's just so old, you know?”

“And yet you just did!” We both howled with laughter and told the bartender to bring another round.

“You know what, though, I'm happy. I am!” I said. “But there are times that I feel like I’m wasting my talents. Like a lesbian who’s really good at deep throat.”

Aspen covered her mouth in shock before cracking into a terse smile. I had to keep in mind that she had to maintain a certain aura. It was bad enough that she had befriended a gold digger while trying to stay involved with the Hill House charities. I was always doing this, saying things with a manic vigor, uncontrollably seeking some warm glow of spotlight. I couldn’t help myself.

“You’re passionate,” a boyfriend once said to me, a little out of breath, a little bewildered. I laughed at him until he apologized. I felt naked, like he had discovered something about me I hadn’t yet had a name for.

“Do you think I’m awful for dating Ralph? I mean, because of our age difference?” I asked her, a little serious now.

“It’s certainly not unheard of. Hey, to each his own, right?”

I knew she was trying to think of something else to talk about, but I pressed on.

“It’s not like he doesn’t mean a lot to me. He really does! I just, I never expected this. I’m not this type of girl.”

“What type?” Aspen asked, and I wondered if she was just trying to make me say it out loud. Gold Digger. Whore. Harlot, if you wanted to be archaic about it.

I had a roommate in college who I confessed everything to on the nights that I’d come home smelling less like me and more like the people I’d danced with. Across the room in her own twin extra long, she’d listen to my drunken warbles about boys with sticky beer lips or men who pocketed their wedding rings, took me into the nightclub bathroom.

“Hey, listen, it’s okay,” she’d whisper, hearing some lamentation in my voice I didn’t even know was there. “We do these things.” And I wanted to believe so badly that she meant we, not just as in she and I, but as in a collective. The things we do when we’re lonely and want to be saved.

I let my eyes glaze over on the martini glass cradled in Aspen’s thin fingers. A bird’s nest held in wintertime twigs.

“The type who needs someone to pass time with,” I said.

Her teeth were the brightest thing about her face, as her eyes were rather brown and she used smokey eyeshadow no matter the occasion. But her teeth—they reminded me of baseball. It’s strange, but I dreamed of knocking them out with a hard pitch, dismanteling her jaw. Isn’t that what we all want for women with perfect bone structure? I imagined collecting the fallen little pearls for myself. Part of my preoccupation with her mouth may have come from how rarely she flashed her baking-soda white teeth. Though she told me she once had her wild days, she was now a woman who gave closed mouth smiles, whose laughter had limits. I never asked Aspen her age, but placed her at thirty, based on a story she told me about sleeping with a man she met in Florence on the night of the new millennium. He was one of those men who weave rainbow threads into tourists' hair on the street, a gypsy, but just so charming.

Does it seem like Aspen was my great, true love story? It would, except that I never forgot an important rule: you cannot both want to possess and want to be someone. I was jealous of her—green streaks of it flarring not in my eyes, but along my shoulder blades. An aching. Any love I felt for my friend was a sort of time-travel love—she was who I hoped I’d one day become, a poised woman who knew when to just shut up already.

I remember that Ralph told he had cystic fibrosis on exactly February fifth only because my mother had called me the night before to talk about the Colts winning the Super Bowl and why didn't I watch, didn't I miss home? That Monday morning when I woke up I did not expect to see Ralph sitting in the kitchen, looking at his hands.

I stood at the doorway for a full minute, watching him. I wish now I had stood there longer, stayed in that time where my problems were not problems. I do that now. I freeze myself for as long as possible, refusing to move forward. In the back of taxis, letting the meter run. In the bathroom, a foot perched above steaming water until my muscles ache. In bed until the sun arches shadows across the floor.

But then I sat down across from him. “Baby, why aren’t you at work?’

“Do you want anything to eat?”

“No, I’m okay. Do you want anything?”

“I went to my doctor this morning. I have a lung infection,” Ralph said. He wouldn't give me much more information than that. I would find out the rest later that night through my own research. The lungs filling with fluid. The organ failure. The salty taste of his skin which I should have realized long ago was a sign of genetic disease he was hiding from me. He kept his mask nebuliser and various orange-bottled antiobiotics, and at work. Such great lengths! His secretary knew more about him than I did!

“Listen, Sia, I want you to know that you’ll be taken care of. Even if we don’t get married in time, I want to make sure that you get the money.”

“Please, don’t say that. I don’t want the money. I don’t need it. I’d marry you.”

Ralph smiled at me like I was a sweet little fool.

“Come on, now. It’s yours.”

“I really would marry you. You’ve never asked.” I began to weep and covered my face with my hands.

“You’re too young to get married. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry for crying,” I said. We sat there for a while, not touching, just looking at each other across the kitchen table, the space between our faces growing soupy and sad. He was looking at me like he was surprised I was a thing that could cry. He was looking at me like I was a child who’d just scraped her knee after falling from her bike. That I’d heal quickly and go on like it’d never happened. Meet a nice, young man.

“Sia, the doctors told me that I have no more than five years left. They can make me comfortable, but there is no way of stopping the fluid from filling my lungs. You don’t have to be there for that, Sia. I’m lucky. Most CF patients don’t live past fifty.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? You never, ever told me.”

He rubbed his eyes, hard, and said he didn’t want to tell me until it became absolutely necessary. I went to the refrigerator to get him a bottle of water we import from the Amazonian rain forest. I thought of Ralph drowning inside of his own body. I imagined it would sound the same as putting a moonshell up to your ear: hollow and rushing. I loved him more in that instant than I had ever loved anything. I once met a woman who told me that it wasn’t love—it was me getting exactly what I wanted. I threw my drink at her.

“Sia, are you listing to me? You’ll get all the money, but I won’t let you be my nurse. You’re too young.”

I opened the bottle for him with a crack, and set it on the table before him. I pulled on my winter coat, and took Bean’s leash from where it hung on the wall. I pretended I couldn’t hear him when he said my name again.

“I’m talking Bean for a walk,” I said, though I had already shut the door.

Since adopting Bean, I have watched a lot of inspirational dog movies. These movies are all the same, really. A person gets a mischievous dog, and sometimes they are happy about it, and sometimes they are not, but either way they must potty train the dog. The dog will be bad at learning to pee on a certain square or newspaper, and it may slobber on everything, or demolish feather pillows at worst, but at best, it will solve crimes or win basketball games.

I liked to watch these movies with Bean cuddled by my side. I liked to think it encouraged him to learn to pee on certain squares of paper, even if he didn’t have the ability to win townspeople’s hearts or become a sled dog with a distinctive personality.

There always comes a point in the inspirational dog story when the little boy or girl must cast out their pet. Once Bean and I got to the edge of the park I checked that his sweater was on securely before gently dropping him into the foot tall snow. He looked up at me and cocked his head.

“Go on! Leave me alone!” I nodded to the distance in front of us. It was blindingly cold, the sky violet though it couldn't have been past noon— aside from a few skaters scraping the ice on Frog Pond, no one was lingering. Bean tried to move through the thick gray, the texture more like wet sand than powder. Soon he discovered that the way to move was to burrow, and in lightly packed areas he was able to bound and hop. He looked really happy. I tried to sneak away but he came after me.

“No!” I shouted like the child actors in those movies. “Go on, git! Can’t you see that I don’t want you any more!” Bean sat down in the snow. I backed away, and he stayed sitting. When I turned and walked a few feet, I heard the jingle of his collar.

“You heard me! I don’t want you!” I turned and ran until I knew he wouldn’t catch me.

A few mornings later when Aspen opened her front door and saw that I did not have Bean with me, her face fell. It was the same reaction Ralph had had, before he attempted to console me.

“Where’s Bean?” She was already in her coat, Finnegan at her side, so she shut the door behind her and we began our walk sans Bean.

“He ran away. I’ve bee searching for days.”

“Oh my God, are you ok?” She put her hand on my shoulder, and pulled so that we both stood frozen on Chestnut Street. I had been regretting throwing Bean out the way I had for the past few days, but in that moment with Aspen the weight of how terrible everything was became very real.

Sometimes, when I think of Bean, I still wonder why I did it. The best I can figure is that I thought I was casting out all of my nice things before the universe could. You can’t miss what was never yours.

“I just want him to come back. That’s all I want.”

“Well, we can make flyers. Did you go to the police? Maybe someone stole him. Frenchies are so valuable. How did you lose him?”

I told her that we were in the park and that I let him off the leash because he looked so delighted, but then his white fur became lost in the snow. She nodded, but said nothing. As we walked her dog along I felt that our connective tissue was unraveling.

The last time I saw her it could have been months or weeks later, I couldn’t know. The snow had melted and I was no longer wearing sweaters and wool coats. I was sitting on the street curb outside of the hospital, smoking a cigarette, when I saw her walking down the street with Finnegan. I looked at my shoes, hoping maybe she hadn’t seen me. A pair of buttery leather heels appeared directly in front of my sneakers, and when I looked up her face shielded me from the sun.

“Hello stranger,” I said like they do in movies, but she looked just the same. I was the one who looked different—my hospital pallor, my easy sweatpants. Aspen asked how I was, how Ralph was, if we had gotten the fruit basket from Spain, if the seedless blood oranges were divine, why I hadn’t called. She smiled at me and I tried to smile back but I thought of Ralph and I in restaurants and how we smiled at each other like it was the only thing.

“Did you ever find Bean?”

“Who? Oh, oh, Bean. No. I hope a nice family found him. A nice, Beacon Hill family.” I put my hand in front of Finnegan’s snout and he licked my fingers.

“Lucky we live near such a good hospital. Really good reputation, I hear,” she said. I nodded. She and I used to complain about the sirens we could hear as we sat in her kitchen, drinking lemon tea. For the rent we pay! I missed when we lived in a neighborhood where the hospital was just another building.

We said our goodbyes, and I promised to call her. I watched her and the little dog walk down the street, toward the river, and for a moment I let myself think of how the pair will fill the hours until her husband comes home at eight. Back inside, I took the stairs from the lobby because the elevator is slow, and I did not want the love of my life to wake up and think he was alone.

Cover Letter For Submissions

Michelle Cheever once won Seventeen Magazine's Fiction Contest, just like Lorrie Moore! Except, Cheever got second place, and Moore won first. The year the contests occurred were different as well.

Cheever is a senior Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College, and is excited to graduate so that professors will stop being disappointed when they find out she's not related to the John Cheever.

Aside from an apparent love for name-dropping, Michelle Cheever enjoys procrasti-baking, looking like people's exgirlfriends, and the idea of tea.

Her story in the Emerson Review was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Thank you for your consideration.

*

Quirky, right??!! I really doubt that it's an okay cover letter, but I'm sure that if I have any marketability as a writer, 3/4 of if is derived from the fact that I have Zooey Dechanel bangs, etc., et al.

Oh here's an alternative one, my friends helped with:

You may find that Cheever is skilled at dialogue. This is probably because sometimes she has conversations and remembers what they were like.

Automat

I have been taking a yoga class for grief, loss, and bereavement for a month now. The class is taught by a woman named Teal, though I have my doubts that that is her real name. She calls us her bean sprouts.

"Bean sprouts," she'll say, "fold in to child's pose from down-dog. This is your center, this is your rest. Whenever you need to collect yourself go into child's pose."

And all seven of us mourners push ourselves into the studio's polished wood floor until we look like wet pebbles.

"When you're ready, bean sprouts, rise into sun salutation. Open your chest. Imagine the sun in front of you, now take it inside you with your breathe and the sweep of your arms. Exhale. Now let it go. Let it go."

Here is where the woman who lost her baby will cry. She is always the first. It's quiet crying, sharp breathes now and then, but I notice because I look around at the others, no matter how many times Teal tells me not to. The woman who lost her baby wears the nicest yoga clothes and dislikes me because I wear stained button downs. I have the money for clothes like hers but I don't see the point in seventy dollar pants to stretch in. I'm the youngest and prettiest in the room, anyway.

"Lower yourself to the floor, inch by inch, vertebrae by vertebrae, until you are flat on your back," Teal says. She lowers the lights and her voice melts in to a wispy trance.

"You are in an ocean. It is clean and blue and you are floating. You're not afraid of going under. You can get your hair wet." A lot of the women in this room have extensions or get daily blow-outs, so I can imagine this is legitimately frightening to them.

"It is just you out in this turquoise, but you are not afraid. In this single moment you are at peace and you have no want for anything other than to be exactly as you are." At this point I am certain she is making it up as she goes along.

"In this water you are at peace because you are forgiven. An ocean of forgiveness, a limitless supply. You can let go here, give it to the ocean." Everyone in the room is crying. We're all innocent, crying babies in a dark yoga studio, lying on the floor, shaking in our shared grief, and loving each other because we're lost things. Oops! Where did I misplace all these people?

I mean, they are crying. I am not crying. I have not cried yet.

"Let go," Teal has said to me. "You have to let the ocean out through your eyes."

I like the sound of it, but I think if I were to, I’d die.

I tell my girlfriend that I don’t think I will take the class anymore.

"Why not? I think it's good for you. I think it's really helping."

"It's not," I say.

"Oh," she says.

She is still upset with me because I didn't let her come to the funeral. My family still thinks she is just my roommate. When I told her she couldn't come she said this was just like that episode of Six Feet Under. She is always doing that. Watching a lot of television and then telling me our lives are just like it.

Sometimes I humor her. "Which one?"

"The one where Nathaniel won't let the gay cop he's life-partnered with come to the funeral."

"Well, you're not a cop."

"No, I'm not." And she touches me and I am so hollow. I could break apart under her fingertips.

Tonight there is one man in the class. He is here because his wife died in a plane crash. A famous one. All of the women are attracted to him because he is sad and hasn't shaved his face in a long time and they want to rescue him. But I am certain that he will be mine because I am the most beautiful girl in the class and because I want him the least. After class we both linger on our yoga mats, talking about music. When everyone is gone we start kissing because we're alone and it's dark and it makes sense.

He carries me into the locker room like I am a child, and places me on the granite counter in front of the mirror. There are travel-sized hairdryers where sinks should be-- this is the ladies locker room. We are kissing in a wet way that sounds like crying and his hands are moving everywhere. We make love lovelessly and it's nice. I like this, taking things that are not mine and hiding them inside my body.

When nothing more is going to happen we pull our clothes from the heap. We walk together to the subway station and discover we take the same train. There is a woman sitting on the yellow line with her legs dangling over the edge, right where the trains skims by. He and I had been talking about how strange the money system is in Prague, how a cup of milk tea and a scone costs five hundred koruna, but seeing her I fall quiet. I feel sick until an official tells the woman she cannot sit there. Two weeks passed before anyone knew my mother was dead. Depending on which resident you ask, the apartment complex either smelled sweet, like rotten fruit, or like cat litter, but never both. One of her neighbors told me that my mother gave everyone an alibi-- said she was going to Spain for some sunshine.

He gets off the subway at his stop and I get off at mine. Though it is dark out, black trees and buildings smacked against a lavender sky, I do not want to go home quite yet. The only shop open on my street is a Goodwill so I buy three paintings, none of which I like or will ever hang up. One is of a flower I have never heard of, 'meadow fleabane'; another is of a little boats rowed out too far. The third is of a girl wearing a green coat in a restaurant soon to be shut down for the night. She is drinking coffee from a white cup and sits near the radiator. I don't like her. She's one of those girls who never takes their coat off when they get places. They always think of leaving.

The paintings are heavy and bulky, so I go home. Inside, I hear the laugh-track of a sitcom, and my girlfriend is on the couch, not laughing. I fold myself into her, under the throw-blanket, and it is so warm and she is so soft. She pushes her head onto the top of mine so she can see the television.

"You smell bad, you beautiful thing," she says to me. It's true. I am the most beautiful girl a lot of people have ever seen. I start kissing her and we have a sleepy sort of sex, like usual. I probably would have preferred for her to have brushed my long hair instead. She didn't even bother taking my jacket off.

I almost tell her that I slept with a man. I know that she can smell him on me, but can't place it. I almost tell her, but I then think of the girl in the painting and where she will go when the restaurant closes for the night. I do not want to wonder where she will walk to while pastries dry to crust in glass cases.

dinner plates turning clean white under sinkwater,

unmade beds as ladders walked across to new cities.

here are the words, and here are the lists,

the stories I don’t want to be in

but keep hearing on the radio.