Erin only left for Indo-Burma two days ago, but it feels longer, and Maggie is fixated on counting the time until her return. Twelve days and fourteen hours. Who knew falling in love with a brown stranger would spur such an excursion? Erin is always falling in love, but not like this. Her love is typically of the banal kind: a waiter who looked good in tight jeans, a large donor at a fundraiser who supported a cause she could see herself believing in, a groomsman at a wedding she photographed for. She has never married and there is no mystery as to why. Erin flutters through love like a hummingbird outside a pane of glass, investigating its own reflection, then flying off after losing interest. But, as sisters, and neighbors, Maggie relies on her. Erin grocery shops for her. Buys her the nightly Numbers ticket. When Erin sold the house their grandmother bequeathed to her, the house with a leaky roof, mangy carpets, large rodents, the house Maggie was living in, Erin was the one who set Maggie up in the subsidized artist lofts: the old Lawrence mills that overlook the Merrimack River. The apartments have style, Maggie would admit: bricked walls, exposed ceilings, oblong windows. She has a view of a minor league baseball stadium with an alligator mascot always dancing out front with happy children, strip of grass where college students throw frisbees and, in the warm spring and waning days of their semester, show their bellies to the sun.
Erin’s current photo target: the sarus crane. Largest flying bird. Cambodia, with Narith, professor at the university. Maggie thinks he is handsome and unexpectedly imposing. For an Asian. Narith came to Erin’s a few weeks ago, and after opting out of dinner, which he promised without irony would be “authentic”, Maggie was coaxed into stepping next door for cards and wine. He dealt cards quickly and though Maggie had no stake in the game, she didn’t appreciate the speed in which he slid the cards across the table. There was just no reason for that. She had a glass of wine and tried to learn the rules. Six cards and you collected tricks. The wine settled her nerves but also made her sleepy. Erin laughed a lot and pretended to understand the game.
“Don’t get discouraged,” Narith told Maggie, after she came in last the first two games. “It’s all just for fun. Your turn to deal.” After so many years living in Lowell, with its large Cambodian refugee population, Maggie wanted Narith to be more like the most humble, the newly-arrived, But he wasn’t. He spoke English confidently, fluently. He wore a cardigan over a buttoned white shirt. He sported an outsized silver watch. He held Erin’s hand and looked her in the eyes when he spoke. Maggie went to use the bathroom before her turn to deal and snuck out to her place and fell asleep reading the previous day’s newspaper.
She emails Erin at eight and when she doesn’t respond Maggie looks up the time zone difference. Twelve hours exactly. Easy enough. She decides Erin and Narith are clutching each other on a tuk-tuk, tipsy from dinner, laughing, ignoring the burnt oil smell from the motorcycle’s overworked exhaust, a salmon-colored sun setting on their backs, Erin’s black hair wild in the wind. Maggie waters the Snake Plant on her computer desk and tells it it looks perky today.
She goes into the pantry and takes out the brown sugar bag to massage it. She doesn’t like it to get crispy. If the bag completely hardened, there’d be no saving it. The pantry is dark, the light from the sole window never really can reach it, and the motion sensor strip that came with the apartment has long been out of batteries. Once, she tried to fidget with the thing but it looked so fragile. High-tech, like it belonged in the Space Station. She didn’t want to break it. She brings the bag out into the kitchen and rubs her hands over it, enjoys the smooth texture between her fingers, the way the sugar simply comes together and how easily it falls apart. Briefly, she thinks of Erin and Narith again—their obvious haste and, because of Erin’s history, fragility—but closes her eyes and shakes it out. Her cheeks wiggle. She stands at the window and watches the river.
After a steady week of cold rain, the water rushes underneath the Aiken Street bridge, churning over jagged rocks. Most of the time the rocks are easily visible, but not this morning. She remembers just a week before, the Fire and Rescue team were out there in the middle of the night, State trooper helicopters circled the mills, and they ran their searchlights over the rocks. She figured it was a homeless person from Tent City, a crude row of blue-tarped huts beyond the bridge. Huddled in her blanket, she watched their valiant effort. Oh, what a view! What excitement! But when they lowered the stretcher basket from the helicopter she came away from the window and fell easily back to sleep. She thinks to herself: now, what were you thinking?
At her computer, she rubs the brown sugar. A few new emails, spam mostly. No Erin. But one is a response to her response to a Craigslist post. To supplement her SSDI, she occasionally stalks the writing gig jobs. Last week, because it was Christmas season, she took a job addressing two-hundred holiday cards to clients of this fancy law firm in Boston. They overnighted her a box of cards and emailed her a document on how to address each one. It was quite easy and she found it intriguing. The cards were gorgeous as well. A drawn Boston Harbor skyline at night, fat snowflakes falling in the forefront, the moon looming over the buildings as if to say, “I watch over you and you look up to me.” After the first dozen or so, she began to role-play, pretended to be a paralegal that specialized in mergers and launched into adlibs: Glad we were able to do the impossible! Such tenacity! Happy Holidays! We did it, she had thought, as she glided her pen over the glossy card. We did it.
Subject line: In desperate. Need of love letter to save relationship. Sloppy, she thinks. She opens the email and it is a one sentence rant. Grammatically atrocious. The salient points being her husband is a jealous man and tired from work but still going out all hours of the night. She believes the number of pairs of underwear he owns are dwindling. The woman is desperate. Young, most likely. Nothing bores Maggie more than young people, nor angers her more than people who are desperate and know so. She doesn’t think this client will have much in terms of wealth, not that she is rich herself, but she doesn’t want to invest in the whole caboodle of what this woman will come with. The despair, hope for love, the naivety love even exists, how she’ll have to make her cynicism logical for this girl, and over email! Erin would accuse her of fashioning an idea of the girl before hearing her out; she’d accuse her of avoiding the client because she’d have to face her own history of love, or lack of it. Maggie wouldn’t have a damn clue how to save a relationship. Sure, she can pen a love letter, jot down some details of the lover from a return email: what’s his name? what’s he do for work? How long have you loved him? What have you done wrong? But then she’ll be fancying the very notion that this girl has love in which to save.
Maggie skims through the rest of her emails but they are all spam. She decides to work on a poem. Lowell had made the artist lofts in an attempt to bring art back to the city. But there weren’t enough artists. The housing committee lowered the standards, allowed anyone in with a portfolio. A man down the hall spray paints sport team logos on poster boards with stencils. Another does watercolor paintings of the backs of people’s heads. Erin is a photographer, though her portfolio actually met the initial standard. Erin thought Maggie should take up painting, but Maggie remembered liking poetry. So, Maggie writes poems but they all come out as dialogue between historical figures. James Monroe and wife Elizabeth. Henry VII and a dying young Arthur. She has them discuss meals, how their fruits grow, the weather. She imagines Monroe as a great theologian and lover. He uses exclamation points. He is her most tasteful, yet simple figure. “Dear Elizabeth, hot/breads keep you from falling/In France, they know not of these!” She’s published four poems, all from the Monroe and Elizabeth chapbook she used as her portfolio. Not big magazines: Crush Press. Morningstar Glory Review. Pi: Online, and Blithe.
Seeing her name on a website, Maggie Loring, above a creation of her own, gives her a satisfaction she hasn’t experienced since being a young girl.
But with success comes rejection, Erin says. Lately, Maggie’s submissions have all been rejected. Just last month, she wrote on her Be Positive whiteboard on the fridge: “The slaves are tired/as I!” She intends to strengthen her poetry skills. But all Erin’s been able to find at the used book store is Bishop and Pound; Maggie doesn’t understand any of it. If she were to be a poet, she wants to be understood quite easily. When she feels stupid reading poetry, she becomes angry at herself, mostly for wasting years watching television (something she doesn’t do much anymore, save the news), but also for not paying attention to her studies. A dreamer. Always a dreamer! But what was she supposed to do? Live in reality? Her father drank himself to death at thirty-nine. Her mother was “sick” in a way Maggie didn’t understand as a child but, oh, how she understands soulfully now: always tired, when there’s no reason to be. No thinking of the past, she thinks, and decides to respond to the love-stricken girl on Craigslist:
Dear In Desperate,
I find myself intrigued by your post. I am a writer, of sorts, and my expertise in this area could pull you from the abyss in which you feel you have descended into. There is nothing worse than having a suspicion that the man you love is…
Maggie stops, opens a new tab, searches cheating thesaurus. She likes deceiving, but not enough. Clicks on deceiving. Betray. Disappoint. Swindle. Back to email.
…cheating. Oh, how terrible! Such a thing can derail a life! The thing is, which, quite frankly, may make this endeavor difficult if not impossible for myself, is that I don’t know enough details. I don’t know how you speak, and how, specifically, you speak to your husband. This needs to not come off as plagiarism, a Cyrano and Christian scenario…
Maggie pauses. She phones Erin. Again, no answer. But this time, Maggie leaves a voicemail, describing, at length, how she is in the process of rescuing a marriage; a despondent young girl and her swindling husband are at odds over something, she doesn’t quite know all the details yet, but she’s in the process of getting to the bottom of it. The voicemail cuts her off.
[deletes ‘a Cyrano and Christian scenario’]…your husband must believe it to be you. Genuinely. So, please, at your convenience, provide me more details. Hold back nothing. I do believe I can help you.
Best,
M.L
P.S Please provide compensation details as well.
Maggie microwaves a mug full of water and makes a cup of tea. She likes black tea with three spoonfuls of sugar. She wishes she had fresh baked muffins. She misses Erin and decides while blowing on the liquid that she wholeheartedly dislikes Narith and will voice this to Erin. Maggie plays with the tassel on her nightgown. The tea is too hot to sip so she lay back on the sofa, closes her eyes, thinks of the women who worked in the very room she relaxes in, their tired hands, sore backs, jammed fingers, hair pulled through gears. How awful. Terrible. Their labor! And all of it to send their brothers to college. Maybe she should write a mill girl poem, she thinks. A chapbook of them. Title it…what? She can almost hear the machinery, the moving belts. Can almost taste the cotton filaments, layer of dust on her tongue, the heat! She remembers a field trip to the mills as a young girl, how the guide chose a classmate to stand at a machine, climb underneath it, explained they wanted women and children because they were small and could fit more workers in a room. She feels suffocated. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. She said it in her head but her chest is heavy like someone is sitting on it. Can’t breathe! Oh, title: The Tired, The Suffocated.
She is startled awake by a loud knock at the door. She puts a hand to her forehead, runs through multiple reasons as to why there is a person at her door without being buzzed into the building. Francisco, the site manager? He would’ve handed out notices for inspections. A delivery? She hasn’t ordered anything.
“Hello?” from outside the door. A man. Deep voice she doesn’t recognize. Maggie stands up and moves quietly to the door. She feels light-headed, like she’s just awoken from a nap. Had she dozed off?
“Are you okay? Hello?”
Even though the door is locked, she is terrified. She wants to scream out for Erin, but also wants to cry. Who is this man? She puts the sleeve tassel into her mouth and bites down hard. Through the peephole, she can see a man, also looking into the peephole, which makes it hard to determine who he is. She hurries her face from the hole and presses her ear to the door.
“I’m not trying to be a bother. I heard screaming. It’s Victor, from down the hall. I paint the canals. I’ve worked with your sister, Erin.”
She can feel the vibration of his voice on her cheek and it is pacifying. Her body loosens, but she isn’t ready to speak. A ding. Sound alert from her computer. An email. She runs her finger around the peephole a few times clockwise, but slowly.
“Maggie?”
His voice vibration again. She is frozen between Victor and the freshly arrived email. When she moved in last summer, there was Open Loft Day. Artists were mandated to display their work in their apartments, leave their doors open from 1 pm until 5 pm. Erin blew up a few of Maggie’s published poems, a few unpublished. She put the cardboard posters on display in the apartment. Maggie stayed in her bedroom, listened to visitors mingle in her living room. Two bought work, others spoke to each other carefully, not knowing who the artist among the crowd may be, marveled at the complexity of all the artists in the building, saying they weren’t ready to show their own, but this event had made them feel reassured in their decisions. Maggie heard someone say “decisions,” plural, and she wondered how someone could lump the entire range of their decisions into one. She mentioned it to Erin, and Erin said, “You key in on certain things most people don’t. It’s petty when you do that. They were probably making conversation. Something you should try doing.” Maggie felt hurt by Erin’s demeanor, most likely angry Maggie couldn’t stand by her own work, so Maggie agreed to go to one loft—just one!—and it was three doors down from them. There were snacks and drinks on a nicely arranged table. Maggie feigned liking the wine, filled a plate with cheese, and shadowed Erin over to a wonderful painting of the Lower Locks canals. Water color. Greys and reds, what looked like stone steps in the foreground, bricked buildings in the background, water rushing through the stone. But Maggie focused on a figure in the distance, a lone black bird in a chromatic white sky, high above the buildings, the industry, and she felt connected with the bird. Erin introduced herself. His name was Victor. American. He was handsome, had a receding hairline that exposed his face in a noble way. His arms were quite hairy.
She told Erin the painting was marvelous.
Erin said to the man, “My sister thinks the painting is marvelous.”
“Thank you,” he said; his hands met at his waist and he did a half-bow.
Maggie wanted to ask him what the bird symbolized but she became even more nervous when she noticed he positioned himself to give her his full attention. She put her wine glass and plate of cheese down on a nearby coffee table and hurried back to her apartment, leaving Erin to most likely explain her strangeness to Victor.
“Last try, Maggie. I’m very worried. I’m inclined to get help.”
“I’m fine,” she says. It came out louder than she expected. She clears her throat and says it again, this time in a more normal volume.
“Sure?”
He went from scary to irritating quickly.
“Yes. Yes. Bad dreams. I have bad dreams.”
He gives a knock-knock with his knuckles but Maggie figures it isn’t really a knock to come in but more of a nervous tick that he does.
“Okay. Have a good one. Tell Erin to call me when she gets back.”
Gets back? Had Erin designated Victor as her watchdog while she was gone?
She doesn’t like the bad moods napping gives her so she does this thing she’d read about in a magazine once that is supposed to resettle you back into equilibrium. She outstretches her arms, follows her left index finger to her nose, then her right index finger to her nose, and then blinks ten times. It doesn’t work. She needs Erin, but Erin is impossibly far away. She checks her email.
“M.L—-Thank for soooo sooo much for answering me. I’m at my whits end. It doesn’t help that its snowing here in Maine. It never stops snowing. My husband Ben he always smells like this lotion or shampoo and it isn’t mine I know this bc I use Pert and it has no smell at all I hate when I can smell my hair I like it natural. Ben smells of something like a kind of fruit or smoothy and I think I know why. You guessed it. Hes cheating on me. Probably again. Last time it was obvious but hes a weasel and I let him off but now I want to know how to catch him and fix him. We’ve been married two years. I’m 23 and he’s 35 but he still BMXs so that’s cool. I always believed marriage was forever and I hate failing. Last month I sold the most monthly tanning plans at Bare Bottom than anyone else. I used to not even try but Crystal was going to fire me I know bc I looked at her text messages she doesn’t lock her phone like Ben anyways this is what’s going on. I thought a love letter would be a perfect way to show I’m not giving up but maybe you could write it angry like so he gets the picture that I ain’t going to just wait around all night. Maybe tell him that I’m going to start going out again girls nights. My cousin Angela she always is getting into it lost her kid last summer Ollie was sweet but he’s honestly better off without Angela so being with her will scare Ben. He’s jealous. Really jealous. Say me and Angela are doing drinks from now on whenever he doesn’t answer his phone. Say its at The Pearl. He’ll know. Also I know my spelling is real bad or whatever so copy that. What do you think? This is something you could do? I see you want money but to be honest I’m broke even though I sold SIX tanning plans last month I don’t get paid until next Thursday. Is there something I can do for you? If not I’ll pay you just not right now. Sincerly Heartbroken”
Maggie reads the email again, concentrating on the rhythm. Written fast, but there is something sing-song about it. She wonders if she could use it as a prose poem, a look into the distraught mind of a dumb wife. Young. No parents. Poor thing. No, not poor thing. She can’t pay, and it seems like a lost cause. She is picturing the girl trying to eat a microwaved hot dog with a plastic knife, drag heavy bags into a laundromat. She tries to think of something the girl could do for her. Nothing is coming because she doesn’t give it much thought. Her phone rings. Erin.
“Hello?”
“What’s with the email? You’re a marriage counselor now?”
Maggie feels relief with Erin’s voice. She sits down on the couch and crosses her legs at the knees. “Poor thing,” she says and is worried she won’t articulate the entire situation well. “Just in a mess of it.”
Erin says, “I can’t wait to hear it all. Craigslist gig?”
“Yes. Money is up in the air.” Maggie looks at the time on her computer. 3:10 pm.
“I love how busy you’ve been. Really.”
Maggie nods in agreement but Erin doesn’t sound right. She sounds manufactured, like commercial actors.
“Listen. Narith has spring break and we are going to stay an extra week. He feels so at home here. Plus, my shots aren’t landing too well yet.”
Oh. Maggie stands and starts pacing the oval coffee table. She circles it and fast forwards her week alone in her head. She feels sick. “A week?”
“Mag, you should see him. He’s so happy here.” Stop it, Maggie hears, but it’s playful.
Maggie feels like she’s daydreaming. “I don’t like it one bit,” she says. “He’s making you stay there. You need to get home. What is it with this man? Who does he think he is? Oh, Christ. Oh, Erin I just don’t like any of it.”
“Narith isn’t making me do anything. Get a grip. Seriously. This’ll be good for you. Be a big girl for a week.”
Maggie can tell Erin is drunk. Or has been drinking. She chastises. Maggie doesn’t say anything, digs her toes into the carpet.
“It’s a friggin week, Mag. You make me so tired. I’m exhausted. I need this. Please.”
Outside, the sky looks cold, like winter has strangled the bright hues from it, stifled the rainbow under a great heavy pillow, left it with trickled out, muted greys. Gunmetal sky; nickel snow banks.
“I don’t like him. He’s smug and he’s just going to break your heart and then I’ll have to listen to it. You have awfully bad taste. Always have.”
Erin laughs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Man, I’ve put up with this for too long. Talk tomorrow.”
Erin hangs up and Maggie waits to see the call fade from her screen. She goes to the pantry and massages the brown sugar. It feels heavier now, like a different bag altogether. Maggie eyes the computer across the apartment. The screensaver bounces a photo of a seahorse across its borders, the golden horse frozen in a teal ocean. Fake, Maggie thinks. That photo is not real.
Before she can appreciate Erin’s terseness, her phone rings again. It’s Erin.
“Hello?”
There are muffled noises, like Erin dropped the phone and is trying to pick it up.
“Erin?” More scuffling and then, “Easy. No, I know. But take it easy.”
It is Erin’s voice, but distant. Distant like the many times she’d pocket-dialed Maggie by accident. Most of the time, Erin was driving, singing along to that goth girl she liked, all about happy endings and skater boys. It is quite juvenile and melodramatic but so is Erin. Erin sounds aggravated, directing her tone towards Narith, not Maggie.
“Narith. I know. Come on.”
Maggie feels intrusive but far away and also still angry at her sister. She understands this is most likely sex she is listening in on, her sister’s sex, but she can’t help but hold the phone tight to her ear. Any form of Erin right now soothes her. There she is, ready to reply to Heartbroken, ready to heat yesterday’s carrot ginger soup, ready to salvage what is a squandering of a day, no poems, no reading, no bath, just a wink of a nap and a visit from Victor who, most likely, is planning on calling Erin, telling her about Maggie’s terror dream of suffocating mill girls and the heat. When she thinks of heat she thinks of burning tongues or her electric blanket, or the heat from leaning over a pot, an iron, the computer fan on sleepless nights where she can’t find the right turns of phrase. I fast for you to pen/me, Oh John/nearest are you to my heart/A good night to you/my fire is out. Her sister’s distress has her nightgown balled in her fist; her toes curled in the carpet. Easy, Narith. He grunts and Maggie thinks of his large watch pressing against Erin’s belly.
But the tussle soon ends. Their intercourse sounds as though it has settled into something more plain, and Maggie places the phone down on the computer table so she can still hear if Erin were to scream. Poor choices, Erin. Never the right one. She opens a reply email to Heartbroken:
“I won’t be able to help you. I have lived a solitary life, somewhat, and the only love I’ve known is of the domestic type: my late grandmother, and my beloved sister. I know not what makes a woman destroy her pride for a man, and I don’t think I ever will. To the contrary, I believe my life has been successful because I haven’t fallen from Eve’s grace. Forgive me, because I know you are in turmoil, but if I were to give any advice at all to you, it would be this: leave. Take your things, take your pride, take your life, and leave your sorry husband. Things will never be better for you if you stay with him. You will suffer from regret, terrible regret, from choosing to be trapped. There is freedom in isolation; you will rarely grieve, rarely cry, irritation will be but self-imposed; you may, say, forget to bathe, fall asleep with the teapot on, find that you’ve allowed creamer to expire. I hope you find happiness. I hope you-
Maggie stops typing. She has the impulse to delete the email, forget the girl exists. There’s a false note in her writing and she thinks of Elizabeth Monroe and the genuineness that she conveys in her letters. Properly spousal yet full of numinous beauty. As if an animal, Erin moans loudly. Maggie hangs up and goes to the window. The grey clouds are now white like ginned cotton. The water seems to have settled. Some boys cross the bridge, not on the sidewalk, but on the wrong side of the pedestrian rails. Cars come dangerously close to them and Maggie can hear their faint horns. A man throws his hand out the window. The boys turn and taunt the passing cars. Maggie wants to call out to them, to correct them, and she can see her breath forming on the window. Brown speckled seagulls rest on the metal truss arch. There’s activity and shadows. There’s people, so many people. Maggie chews the nightgown tassel, wipes away the condensation on the window. She thinks of women and men in their eternal exertion. Maybe only a few have figured it out. And besides, who really understands what happens out there?