Read an Excerpt
I.
A man’s voice swells out from his chest and throat like a bubble, enveloping the first row of seats and expanding until it seems to fill the theater.
“She’s having a seizure.” Again, louder, with more urgency. “She’s having a seizure!”
A girl slumps backward. Her head sinks awkwardly into her neck, jaw slack. But for her face, which is loose, it looks as though she’s doing a dance in her seat. Her shoulders wiggle wildly. The Chinese logograms on her sweatshirt zigzag back and forth, up and down.
A woman sits by her left side, opposite the man whose voice has become so loud.
The woman forces herself to pull the girl close. In the blue light from the man’s cell phone, the girl’s cheeks and forehead are ragged with acne. The woman puts her hands around the girl’s head, tilts it forward, and watches as saliva spools out of the girl’s mouth onto their legs. There is no foam around her lips, and the woman thinks, That is just another cliché.
The woman’s biceps ache, but the girl keeps vibrating. The woman’s lover is there, somewhere to her left with a tub of popcorn in his lap, but now she is part of a new duo: the girl and her own self in an inadvertent posture of care.
In the darkness, the woman can feel a tide of attention turning toward them. The shouting man is on his feet. He wants to know—is anyone a doctor?
Another man strides up the aisle on long legs.
“I’m a neurologist,” he says and steps into their row like a hero boarding a boat.
The movie has started. Discordant theme music fills the theater as the introductory credits roll.
The neurologist reaches across the woman’s body to touch the girl. The woman watches his big watch snag some of the girl’s hair while he thumbs back one eyelid and then the other. The doctor rubs his dry knuckles hard between the girl’s tiny breasts and demands she return to consciousness. Her face and his hands flicker as different shades of green, blue, gold, and gray in the light from the screen.
“Young lady! Young lady! Young lady!”
People cluster around the row, dotting the aisles and leaning over each other. No one offers any suggestions, but the woman can hear them murmuring beneath the noise of the score.
Slowly, the girl rises out of her seizure. Her expression is one of mild disbelief, as though a stranger has just stepped very hard on her foot. She swivels her whole body from left to right to look around. The woman pulls her close, to keep her still, and tucks the hair behind her ears.
The doctor snaps his fingers in the girl’s face.
“Where are your parents? Has this happened to you before? Young lady! Young lady! What is your name?”
But she cannot speak.
The houselights go up and the movie stops midscene. Onscreen the lead actor—a big star, the woman’s favorite—is caught midspeech, his mouth puckered into a fleshy rosette. The woman wishes that this afternoon had not veered off on this trajectory.
Two young people come slowly through the aisles. Their movement is strangely subdued.
“Her English isn’t very good yet,” says the boy, who has almost no accent. “I’m her brother. This is my girlfriend. She didn’t want to sit with us.”
The girlfriend remains silent, her eyes fixed on the back wall.
“Do you want to switch places with me?” the woman says, very tired, unsure if she’s addressing the doctor or the brother. The girl slumps against her, like they’re two weasels in a dug-up nest. The bright lights hurt her eyes, so she shades the girl’s face with her free hand.
“She looks pretty comfortable where she is,” the doctor says, and people laugh. “You get seizures, too?”
The brother nods, smiling. The doctor continues.
“She’s going to have one hell of a headache by the time you guys get to the hospital. Like the worst hangover in your life, right?”
Again, people laugh. The soundproofed walls make everyone sound flat, depthless. The woman would like to leave.
“Are you the mother?” says a person whose T-shirt reads too tired to care.
“No,” says the woman’s lover. “Definitely not.” His hand is hot and big on the back of her neck.
“My mom went to Taipei last year,” the doctor says.
“You’re not the mother?” says someone else.
“I thought she was with her.”
“We’re not.”
“Do you have children?”
“No, we don’t.” The lover ventriloquizes so well, he even sounds a little indignant.
“The ambulance is here.”
“You don’t have any children?”
“I thought for sure she was the mother. I thought for sure you were the mother.”
“No,” the woman says finally. She and the girl and the lover are the only people still in their seats.
The loud man looks profoundly embarrassed. “But thank God for maternal instincts! She was way better about it than I was,” he says and reaches forward to damply grasp the arm she has around the girl’s body. “I’m glad you were here.”
The lover is watching her with a strange expression.
The woman cannot find the words to say that everyone has the wrong idea. She cannot tell them she had come to the movies to escape responsibility and the unseasonable weather, and she cannot tell them that her lover being there is a mistake, that he had decided to come last minute, and that the popcorn and enormous soda belong only to him. She had wanted only the vacant feeling of being in a theater. She had been looking forward to this movie and she had been ready to watch, alone.
II.
The woman enters a grocery store to do the shopping for herself and her old neighbor, who subsists on Social Security and decaf coffee with extra water. Her lover does his own shopping. Every time she passes through the sensitive doorway she is strafed by a profusion of choice and a burst of air-conditioning. Overhead, white asbestos tiles form a second sky, and she blinks against its fluorescence. Everywhere she looks is packed with information.
She usually deals with this overload by buying the same items every two weeks: salad in a cellophane bag, sliced smoked turkey, whole wheat bread, store-brand cheddar cheese, peach-flavored individual yogurts, instant coffee, green apples, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and compunction in the form of skim milk.
She sometimes allows a concession for indulgence’s sake—frozen chicken strips or frozen pizza, for example—and will tuck into it only when she is at home by herself, or when her lover is sound asleep on late nights and she has been awake for hours, when convenience feels like shelter.
Everything she buys herself must either be microwavable or edible raw because the woman does not know how to cook and cannot fathom how other people learn. As with any improvable talent, she believes the capacity is mostly genetic. When she watches her lover cook for them, it is like watching an alchemical preparation.
After too much deliberation, she selects a basket in which someone has left their shopping list. The woman picks it up. The handwriting forms a matrix:
sherry flank steak whipping cream poblano anise radicchio sundried tom.
Everything about the list speaks to self-assuredness—its organization, the precision of each handwritten character, and especially the ingredients themselves. Probably none of them are on sale.
Powered by rumination, the woman wheels her cart through the aisles.
She collects her own items but also looks for the others on the list. She finds the radicchio among the leafy greens and picks one up. The little vegetable is bouncy and firm, asking to be patted, and she cradles it in her hands before reluctantly putting it back.
She finds the poblano, too, with its dolphin’s skin; the steak, presliced and fanned out like an array of tongues on Styrofoam; the tomatoes in their thick jar. Everything seems so friendly, welcoming her into a fraternity of health and good taste with their rawness, their demand for transformation.
She could never place these items in her own basket.
She imagines the radicchio in a bowl on a clean table. Someone she cannot see has sliced it in half, and a television flickers comfortingly in the background. This meal, she knows, will be a light evening supper comprised of many small portions.
Slowly, the rest of the house coalesces. The living room is red like the steak, and like a womb, and like a throat. There is a garden, and all the windows are open to catch the sound of the leaves, which, at night, might whisper the woman’s name in the dark.
Holding this abstract totem in her mind fills the woman with secondhand peace in the vivisecting space of the grocery store. She becomes a happy tourist and then something more—an expatriate from life.
She tries to imagine the author of the list but cannot. She can only think of the detritus they might leave behind: keys and open mail on the table, a purse or a money clip on a low bench near the front door. The sound of jewelry on a tabletop at the end of a long day. The warmth of their body on the toilet seat, a smear of peanut butter or lipstick on the rim of a water glass.
The woman follows their specter from room to room through the liquid floor plan. The floors are blond, the ceilings high and rounded out with shadow.
The woman passes a fresh bundle of cut flowers on the sideboard in the hall. Sweet pea blossoms, ranunculus, hollyhock, dahlia … she has never bought flowers before, for any occasion or any person, and lingers on this image, turning it over in her mind as she would a blossom in her palm, inspecting it from every angle and possibility.
The woman imagines herself emerging from this home every morning, drawn from its substance and not the sentimentality of human intercourse. She would have been a friendly baby, a precocious child, a droll teenager with many admirers, and, finally, an early success.
