Thomas noticed the boa constrictor draped along a stretch of brick wall. It was lying there festively, like a stretch of holly. He prodded Anne, drawing her attention away from her phone and toward the snake.
Tourists lined up to take pictures with the thing, their shoulders sagging under its coiled weight. They tossed a few dollar bills into the woven basket at the handler’s foot. The handler was looking at his phone too. Every now and then he glanced up to help readjust the snake, but mostly he looked bored. Staring at the boa’s creamy belly, Anne thought of the Britney Spears’ performance, the one where the troubled pop star was wrapped up in a serpent and slicked with sweat and singing about how she couldn’t hold it, couldn’t control it, how she was a slave “4 you.” Anne had watched the music video from her living room floor as a no-nonsense bad-haircut child and thought: I could do that. How hard could it be?
A tourist stopped to flip off the Trump Tower, and Thomas gave him a pitying look, one that said in so many words: and you think that is transgressive? But it seemed to cheer the tourist up and in that way it cheered Anne up too. She was easier to please than Thomas, which was why she knew in her heart of hearts she needed to break up with him, whenever it was she could face her fears of being alone.
It wasn’t the solitary nature of her days that worried her, but what she would do with her body. It had grown accustomed to a glowing warmth on the other side of the bed, an animal need. She knew instinctively that she didn’t have the confidence to draw romance out of strangers. It wasn’t that she was shy so much as fundamentally lacking a necessary faith in her own appeal. She had never managed to be intentional with her flirting—to direct it like a laser beam.
That’s what had surprised her about Thomas. How he had seen Anne and desired her, despite her lack of pretense. She wondered if other people in her life secretly thought she was lucky that he had agreed to be her boyfriend. Most of those times she convinced herself that she was being paranoid. But then there was that one time when she had talked about her misgivings about Thomas with her friend Laura, and Laura had looked at her with disdain.
It’s called settling down for a reason, said Laura. As in, you settle.
But Anne wasn’t sure she was ready to call it quits—to vanquish what she had to give someone else. Thomas only took so much, and then he pushed her affection away the same way a child might push away his plate when he was too full. No more. No thank you.
Anne was a different type of eater. She mostly liked to eat with her hands. A biscuit torn in half and all the fluff removed. A handful of wet leaves plucked from the basin of a wooden salad bowl. She liked to do the dishes, not because she was interested in cleaning, but so she could scrounge what was left on the plate in privacy: knuckles scraping against the pottery, a finger dipping in a vanishing reservoir of sauce.
As they walked through the park, Thomas and Anne were arguing whether or not the Donners really ate someone. Or was it that they had been eaten? That was really, actually transgressive — cannibalism. Anne was deriving all her information from an episode of a history podcast she had recently listened to. The podcast host said maybe nobody got eaten. Thomas was mostly arguing that he didn’t like podcasts. He thought the medium’s emphasis on the anecdotal felt lazy — how could you trust it? Plus, he told her, their predilection for always telling stories about murder was unsavory. Everyone walking around with murder piped into their ears. Wasn’t that symptomatic of some widespread sickness? Wasn’t that alarming?
Anne couldn’t even muster the strength to tell him how boring of a thought that was. It wasn’t alarming. It wasn’t even surprising. To her, it seemed obvious.
◆
In college, Anne had a friend who was notoriously beautiful. She swept across the campus like some angelic apparition. Anne had formulated many ideas about this girl before ever talking to her. But then they had an art history class together and Anne was dismayed to learn that this girl was as good-natured and kind as she was striking. To Anne’s surprise, they became close friends. They were both at ease doing very little, and Anne came to love the sound of her friend’s gentle laugh, the sweet perfume of her sheets when the two of them watched television on a laptop in her bed, the burning feeling of the computer’s humming hard drive on her thighs. Anne’s beautiful friend had grown up with chickens at home and told Anne late one night, when the two of them were powerfully stoned and eating an improvised meal made of a packet of cheese tortellini and Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, that in a bout of impish curiosity she had once fed one of her chickens leftover roast chicken. She watched as the chickens pecked at it enthusiastically, running along the yard excitedly with the threads of meat in their mouth. Even though her friend was young, she knew what she had done was bad.
Anne told everyone this story. Everyone. She found a way to work it into casual conversations at parties, in the cafeteria, or in a feminist film theory class. Later, her friend had confronted her about it. Half-jokingly she asked why Anne had felt the need to share such an unflattering story about her, a story she had told Anne in confidence. Anne felt sorry for her beautiful friend; she was so trusting. Didn’t she know that Anne couldn’t help herself? She wanted to say something ugly about someone beautiful and so she did: she fed her chicken chicken.
After her friend confronted her, Anne felt a shard of guilt form somewhere low in her belly. Before dinner in the library she extensively googled the phenomenon of people feeding their chickens chicken. There were spirited discussion boards, with people gleefully telling each other to ignore the naysayers. One poster’s enthusiastic comment read: My chickens’ favorite food? CHICKEN! There was a dark warning on one of these discussion threads about what could happen if you fed your chicken too much chicken. They would learn to “love the taste” of each other’s flesh and then murder and eat the weakest of the flock.
Anne copied and pasted fragments from these forums into a word document and showed the document to her friend. But it didn’t seem to soothe whatever had been wounded. So Anne offered her something else: she told her beautiful friend a secret from her childhood that she had never told anyone else.
◆
After their encounter with the boa constrictor, Anne and Thomas made their way into the interior of the park. They sat on a rumpled blanket Thomas had stuffed in his closet, one that Anne had had the foresight to grab on her way out of the door. Anne smoothed it out on a muddy patch of grass and pulled out two sandwiches she had gotten from an Italian deli. Vinegar and oil pooled at the edges of the white paper swaddling the squirrel-sized sandwiches.
We could have split one, said Thomas, and Anne reminded him how much better most things tasted the next day.
I don’t understand people, she added. Who are disgusted by leftovers. That’s their own food. They are disgusted by something they ate and enjoyed just a day ago?
I think it’s the idea that it’s been sitting there, said Thomas, and instinctively he wrinkled his nose. And it’s, you know, cold.
Because it’s been refrigerated, Anne said. Through a modern miracle. We use it every day. It’s called refrigeration.
She took a bite. A long strand of tomato rind traveled with her when she pulled away, and she had to take it in her fingers and yank it from her mouth in order to respect the structural integrity of the sandwich. She wiped her fingers on the blanket to try and brush away some of the residue.
Annie, Thomas said brightly. You know — that’s not a picnic blanket.
What do you mean, said Anne.
No, I mean, it’s totally fine. His voice betrayed no annoyance. It’s just — I know you think that’s a picnic blanket and it’s not. It’s a quilt my grandmother made for me when I was thirteen.
Anne looked horrified, and Thomas laughed. It’s alright, he said. You know I don’t care that much about those sorts of things.
Anne glanced down at where her hands had grazed the blanket. There was a streak of something suspiciously yellow that looked like mustard.
Is she dead or alive, Anne asked.
My grandmother?
Yes.
She’s alive. She lives in Connecticut.
This was a slightly better outcome, in terms of her mistake with the blanket.
The two of them decided to walk back to the apartment they shared, a walk close to six miles. It was warm out and they were sweating unapologetically as they chatted. Anne waved her hands explaining some morsel of celebrity gossip with the intensity of an astrophysicist and Thomas gamely listened. When they got home they were too sleepy to contemplate another meal. Anne instead dug around in a carton of ice cream for a frozen nugget of something solid and coated in chocolate, her head in the freezer to cool herself down. Thomas laughed at her, saying: The way you are going after that. You’d think you’re starving.
An old refrain played in Anne’s head: My chicken’s favorite food? CHICKEN.
The two of them brushed their teeth in front of the mirror, both of them spitting just a little bit of blood into the yellowing basin of the sink. When they clambered into bed, she couldn’t help it — she rolled over so that her nose was smushed against the cool plane of his shoulder.
Are you smelling my neck, Thomas asked, already half-asleep.
No, Anne lied.
◆
In the morning, Anne googled the best way to break up with someone. Just to see. And what she saw was lots of stock images of men holding their heads in their hands, and a woman towering over them. Anne had to admit these images turned her on, just a little. There were also a lot of moody pictures of two people with their backs turned to one another. These had less of an erotic tinge. Anne read one article that said you should think of a handful of negative memories in the relationship, and then play them back on a constant loop till you were red-pilled into wanting the other person gone. She screwed up her eyes but she couldn’t think of any—at least nothing dramatic. What was it that Thomas had done that made her so sure she was done? She thought about him picking her up from the airport. She thought of Laura laughing at one of his jokes at a holiday party, the first time she introduced him to her friends. I like the way he asks questions, Laura had said, when the two of them debriefed afterwards. Anne thought it was the best compliment imaginable.
Another article said to have the conversation somewhere private. She thought about her—their—apartment. She loved her—their—apartment. She wanted to keep it after Thomas was gone. To her it was a place of great comfort. She didn’t want the bad energy of a breakup stinking it up. She thought about how dreadful it would be, to have a long, drawn-out and painful conversation, the two of them crying, and then having to just go right to bed in the room next door. It was best for a talk like this to be in a space utterly divorced from their day-to-day life.
There was a chain bakery from Hong Kong some six blocks away from them, where all the slices of cake were wrapped in clear, crinkly plastic. The bakery had the aggressive brightness of a museum exhibition, and the cheery, neutral vibes of a dentist office’s waiting room. She thought it would be a good place for a break-up. The place was always full of teenagers, who chatted in loud voices, utterly unaware of anyone else in the restaurant. In a text message, she confided her plan to Laura, who called her frantically thirty seconds later.
You can’t, gasped Laura. Break up with him in that place. That’s terrible.
It’s going to be terrible anywhere, said Anne. Why not choose a place that’s terrible for it?
Not sure why you are choosing to go about this like it’s a stunt on reality tv, said Laura. Not really sure why you’re breaking up with him anyway.
Pure instinct, said Anne distractedly. She was watching someone struggle to parallel park across the street. The driver jolted in reverse and scraped the corner of someone’s Subaru. I have to go, Anne yelped. Even though she wasn’t at fault, she broke into a run. She ran all the way home.
◆
Just trust me, Anne had said to Thomas just some six months prior. They were staying in a cabin, a rare vacation the two had booked together. A pair of scissors was in one of her hands, a fistful of his hair was in the other.
Ok, he said.
When he looked in the mirror and saw what she had done, he made a face like he was asking a question.
◆
How would she do it. How could she do it? She began to plot the break-up like a murder. She fantasized about it. She committed to keeping it quiet. An air of dramatic irony built around Thomas. Did he know? Could he detect it? Every morning she woke and felt like she was performing some great act of espionage. She was a spy. She was in touch with her feelings. Was he? Maybe that was the problem. How could he be happy, when she was harboring this secret stash of unwieldy thoughts about what it would mean to be alone? She could handle it, as long as she didn’t have to learn about herself. Anne hated to learn about herself.
It wasn’t like she didn’t have alone time. She had plenty of it. Thomas worked late nights at a fancy French restaurant some thirty minutes away. He frequently spent the hours after his shift drinking with his coworkers. In that time, Anne stretched. She took baths, her face down, ass up, listening to the sound of her downstairs neighbor yelling at his children. LISTEN TO ME, her downstairs neighbor cried. WE DO NOT BITE PEOPLE. NO MORE BITING.
Mostly, Anne waited for Thomas to come home, so she could crawl into bed and smell him.
Weeks passed, and those turned into months. Anne and Thomas were no longer sweating on their walks. They were layering up—long underwear, wool socks. The windows of their kitchen fogged up with things simmering on the stove—a burbling pot full of baked beans Thomas strongly objected to. It wasn’t the season to be apart, she reasoned. Spring was full of possibility, and summer was undeniably horny. Winter was a time for waiting it out. She began to think of herself as very patient. One afternoon she lost her mitten, taking a photo on her phone of a snowman with button eyes in front of a KFC, and Thomas went back and looked for it, spending twenty minutes scouring the dirty snow until he found it.
The first big snowstorm hit on a Wednesday in December, and Anne begged Thomas not to go into work. He had a daytime shift—prepping for that evening’s service. It’s crazy, said Anne. No one is going to come to the restaurant in weather like this. She wanted him to stay, so that they could nest. Sit on the couch together. Drink something warm. Thomas said he wanted that too, but he couldn’t just not go to work. Anne understood. I’m being ridiculous, she said, and he chased her around the apartment, Anne squawking appreciatively, because he could tell she wanted attention, and was bored, and needed to roughhouse.
Anne walked through the snow to a nearby park after Thomas had left. She brought with her a boogie board she had bought at a CVS by the beach for five dollars last August. She was so much older than anyone else on the sledding hill. They were children, bundled up, their faces indistinguishable through their many layers of down. She thought it would be in poor form for her adult-sized body to hurtle into that of a small child, and yet they were roaming about the hill in a very chaotic fashion, waddling in their snow pants, weaving about. The sledding hill ended abruptly in an iron-wrought fence. You had really three options: ride with your feet out, scuffing the snow to slow yourself down, or bail before you reached the bottom, or smack into it with a part of yourself less subject to grave injury. Anne opted for the third. She wacked an elbow and swore loudly. She thought about what Thomas would say if she called him from the back of the ambulance and told him how it was she had gotten herself in said predicament.
At the top of the hill were three older children, perhaps in high school. They were lugging something behind them, and when they moved a little, Anne could see that it was a commercial freezer, the kind you might see in a corner store. Along the sides of it were the decals of Italian ices. The children were excited. The freezer didn’t have a lid. One of the boys clambered into it and held the corners with two gloved hands. Another boy got behind him and pushed.
It all happened so fast. The freezer was heavy—it gained traction along the packed snow. It was a difficult thing to steer. There were two younger children toddling along closer to the fence, and the boy in the freezer was now yelling at them to move, and Anne could hear fear in his voice, and she didn’t have time to think—though thinking wasn’t necessarily her strong suit anyways—and so she stood in front of the freezer as it barreled towards the other children, and it met her body with a decisive thump.
She broke her leg. Thomas had to take care of her, as she hobbled up the stairs to her apartment, or groaned her way onto the couch. When people asked Anne how it was that she got hurt, the corner of Thomas’ mouth twitched, as if trying not to smile, and he looked at her kindly, seeking permission, before deferring. I’ll let Anne explain it, he would say. It’s a good story.
Now was not the time she could break up with him. This much was true.
It was a minor fracture, Anne’s broken leg. That’s what the doctors said.
You again, said Laura. With the good luck. Anne didn’t want to push deeper into what was meant by that. She mostly just toddled around, plunging the rubber tips of her crutches into disturbingly grey puddles of melted snow and trash, and then lightly swinging above them, or sometimes, if she was unlucky, into them. Laura was wrong. Anne wasn’t always lucky.
When she finally got her cast off, Thomas threw her a little party to celebrate. The party took place at her—their—neighborhood bar. It was next to a pizza parlor, a good one, owned by a family who loved EMS workers and police officers. They dressed their tiny toddler son like a cop for Halloween, with a full-grown nightstick. You were allowed to bring slices of the pizza into the bar, out in the backyard where there was one section for people to smoke cigarettes and one section where people couldn’t smoke cigarettes, all of which was pointless because everyone smoked cigarettes. There were flying cockroaches the size of small potatoes that flew in and out of the vines that lined the walls, that sometimes landed on a bare thigh or shoulder. Anne hadn’t lived in the city long enough to know whether or not she was insane for returning to a place where this had happened to her more than once. But she thought it was what being a regular was about—this stubborn refusal to acknowledge all the things that were wrong about a place.
Thomas had invited three work friends, and they sat in the corner with him, laughing loudly over a joke that Anne couldn’t quite follow. She knew two of them well, a girl named Angela who always brought a new and strange cheese over to their apartment when she hung out with them, and Matt, a shy man who regularly became increasingly belligerent as he drank.
Have you ever noticed that about him? Anne had asked Thomas once. It’s so strange, it’s like he has this whole other personality.
Annie, said Thomas, sounding confused. He has a drinking problem.
Oh, said Anne. Yes. Right.
But the third person was someone Anne had never met before. Her name was Maggie. She was very stylish, or she was wearing ugly clothes that looked good on a thin person. Anne could never tell the difference. Anne wondered if Maggie was a good dancer. Maggie swayed back and forth when the conversation grew around her, like she was moving to it. Anne saw her smile at Thomas, a smile wide enough to show a pointy canine, not dissimilar in shape to a manicured nail. Anne frowned.
That evening, when the party had broken up, and Anne and Thomas were walking gingerly back to the apartment, Anne had said in her best approximation of casual: I liked Maggie. She’s new to the set, isn’t she?
Yeah, said Thomas. She started working as a server pretty recently. Actually, you’ve probably met her before, haven’t you?
Why, said Anne. How would I have met her?
Because she dates Andrew, said Thomas. The guy who works with Melissa.
Oh, Anne said. She felt cold. She felt disappointed.
That night in bed, when Thomas reached underneath her shirt, and started to tug the waistband of her shorts, Anne stopped him with a firm hand to his wrist. My leg is tender, she lied. I just want to be still right now.
And Thomas said he understood.
Anne thought about Maggie. Her pointy tooth. Her baggy pants. The tightness of her ponytail. Thomas must have found her attractive. Why couldn’t he just admit it? Why couldn’t he show her any of what he desired? He was a good boyfriend. That’s what Anne told herself all the time. Well, he’s such a good boyfriend. And then another voice appeared, that of her beautiful friend from college. One night in the library they were talking about another friend’s girlfriend, who they recognized as unkind, and incapable of giving their friend the kind of support she needed. Yeah, said Anne’s beautiful friend. Well, almost everyone should break up. You know. There are very few people who shouldn’t. It’s just that people are afraid.
Should we break them up? asked Anne.
No, said her beautiful friend. That won’t work. You can’t interfere. It doesn’t help anyone.
Her beautiful friend repeated something that had been told to her: some people never wanted to be alone. You couldn’t reason with these people. You just had to find them someone else to fall in love with.
◆
Anne and Thomas began to hear chewing in their walls. At first it was intermittent — a little ratattatatatatatat. Something small and persistent, almost mechanical in its precision. But then it became a constant drone when the two of them watched television in the living room. They knew it was an animal, because when they tapped on the walls there was a pause, and then minutes later, the sound would resume. They began to feel like they were losing their minds, just a little, pushing themselves up from their worn-in couch with their fists to politely knock on the walls. Hello? Please stop?
Anne and Thomas had developed a rule about this sort of thing: if there was an unwanted visitor in the house, i.e. vermin, one person had to kill it, and the other had to clean it up. This was a truly equitable division of labor because neither could decide which task was worse — they were both bad.
Once Anne had mentioned this to Laura, and Laura had said: well why don’t you just free them if killing them is such a nightmare? Just scoop them into the night!
Anne told Laura if she was a better person, she might consider such an option. But in her mind there was only way forward — complete annihilation.
Every now and then a roach would crawl under their doorway and make the heady journey up the stairs to the hallway. Or they dealt with silverfish, which Anne understood were harmless, and yet she killed them on the basis that she did not like the way they moved. That, and once one had fallen from the ceiling into the glass of water she kept on her nightstand, and she only discovered it when she lifted the cup to her lips, and saw the disintegrating, engorged corpse of the many-legged insect. But mice — or worse — rats, that was something she had no experience in. Thomas had seen them at the restaurant, once had even been tasked with the dubious job of whacking one dead in the basement with the shovel they used to scoop snow from the sidewalk. But Anne was still plotting her eventual journey toward a life without Thomas, which meant that she didn’t want to rely on him for a thing like this, as surely this was exactly the sort of thing she needed to stomach as an independent person, untethered to the emotional support of a partner.
She laid a trap. It was very simple — she bought one from the hardware store, and set it on her kitchen floor, adorned with a simple knob of peanut butter. The next day it was covered in ants. So she went back to the hardware store and bought ant traps, and surrounded the mouse trap with the ant traps. She used another knob of peanut butter. It distressed her to think of the trap peanut bar being the same that she ate on her toast most mornings, so she bought an extra jar, and labelled that HUMAN and the other one BAIT. Thomas told her that was unnecessary. Anne told him that it made her feel better.
Then in the middle of the night, she heard a new sound. It wasn’t the chewing. It was something different, and so much worse. It was a desperate scratching, the sound of something being dragged. Thomas was still fast asleep, having gone to bed far later than her when he returned home from work. He was somewhere deep in a dream, pawing his ear like a napping dog. Anne crept out of her bed and put on a pair of Thomas’ basketball shorts. She tiptoed to the kitchen. To her horror, the trap had worked. A mouse was slowly making his way across the linoleum floor. Just his leg had been snagged, and he was pulling the contraption behind him. Anne felt overwhelmed with adrenaline. She wanted to relieve the mouse of its fear, of its pain. But she didn’t know what to do with it. Deep down, she knew she wasn’t the type who could beat it to death with a shovel. So she filled a large pot of water and put the mouse in the pot and then put a lid on the pot, and then ran out of the room. She crawled back in bed and waited for it to drown. She would make Thomas deal with it in the morning — that was the rule, after all. One to kill it, one to clean it up.
But twenty minutes later, Anne could hear this terrible scratching sound, and when she lifted the lid to the pot, she saw that the mouse had scrabbled fully onto the mousetrap, which was acting as a flotation device. It was like Rose from Titanic. Its leg must’ve been broken. The water in the pot was shallow. Anne took a plastic spatula out from the cupboard and used it to press the body of the mouse down until it stopped moving.
She exhaled one very long and slow breath, as if she were in a yoga class. When she turned around, she jumped. Thomas was watching from the doorway, bleary-eyed, but awake.
Anne, he said. That’s the pot I make stock in.
I think we can clean it, said Anne. Maybe. I don’t know. We might have to throw it out.
No, said Thomas. We don’t need to throw it out.
◆
Two days later Anne scrubbed the bathtub with an unfamiliar sense of vigor, ate an edible, and climbed in. The water was warm. She was listening to the radio on her phone, which she had perched precariously on the windowsill. Thomas peeped his head in, and she beckoned him close to her.
I’m thinking about the mouse still, Anne said.
Don’t think about it too much, said Thomas.
Come sit here, said Anne, gesturing toward the toilet.
And do what? Said Thomas.
Whatever you were going to do, said Anne. Do that. Just do it here.
So Thomas sat on the closed lid of the toilet and typed out a text. His back was very straight, and his hands moved methodically across the tiny keyboard. He frowned a little as he stared into the glow of his phone. Anne burst into peals of uncontrollable laughter.
What, said Thomas bemused.
It’s just — and here she choked a little bit on her words — it’s just you look so officious sitting like that. Like you are CEO of the toilet.
Ok, said Thomas. I’m on my way out now.
Before you do, she said. Bring me a snack.
He came back in with some grapes, which Anne thought was a classic touch. Her hands were submerged in water, so he dangled them above her, her neck reaching to meet them like a seal in a waterpark being fed by its trainer. Next he dropped broken cashews into her open mouth, and then extended a smooth white chip of something that Anne thought must have been cheese. She opened her lips to receive it, and Thomas quickly yanked it out of sight, cracking up.
Anne, that’s soap! He said.
Why would you feed that to me? She asked, indignant.
I just wanted to see if you would, said Thomas. You’re so trusting. Or willing to eat anything. I can’t tell which.
Be gone, said Anne, and even though she knew they were joking, she felt angry. You’ve lost the privilege to be in here and see me naked.
Alright, said Thomas. As you wish.
She was mad at him not because he had tried to feed her soap, but because he had revealed something unflattering about herself that she would rather not be confronted with. The willingness to open her mouth and take what was being offered to her. She did this with samples. She was constantly seeking out little cubes of cheese on toothpicks, yellow and hardened by the open air, or a crumbled-up day-old pastry disguised as a generous offering on behalf of a grocery store. Once Laura had caught her nosing around an Italian deli for some tiny morsel of salami and laughed, not unkindly, at Anne’s persistence.
Do you think it’s hygienic? Laura had asked.
Probably not, said Anne shrugging. But who am I to turn down opportunity when it comes knocking?
◆
When Thomas left, he left his stock pot behind. Anne thought about using it, but then she remembered the mouse, its thudding weight against the perforated spatula, and she put it out on the street, where it filled with rain water, and then eventually disappeared. Thomas was back home, in Minnesota. His mother’s memory loss had advanced, and his father was overwhelmed. Thomas had been talking about wanting to go back there for a while now. He thought the restaurant life might be more tenable—he might even be able to open up a space all his own one day. He also liked to ice skate for fun, a detail that never ceased to shock Anne. One afternoon his father had called him, and they had had a normal conversation, and then his father had let it slip that his mother had been in the hospital, but that Thomas need not worry, she was fine, she just got confused and had walked out of the house and slipped on the driveway, and was a little banged up, but nothing too bad, really, they had gone to the ER out of an abundance of caution because Thomas’ mother would not tell anyone what had happened to her in the twenty minutes she had evaded Thomas’ father’s attention. Then Thomas raised his voice at his father to ask why he hadn’t called him to let him know she was in the hospital and Thomas’s father said very matter of factly: well, you don’t live here. It’s just not practical for us to fill you in, all the time, about everything that happens. Well, what if I did live there, Thomas had countered. And Thomas’ father was silent for a bit, and then said: Only if that’s what you really want.
But Anne and Thomas both thought that was something Thomas’s father had to say. They silently congratulated themselves for being old enough to know not to believe him.
Anne cried so hard when Thomas left. I really wish it wasn’t like this, she said.
I’m sad too, Annie, said Thomas. Of course I am.
Well it’s not too far, said Anne. So I will visit soon. Really soon. And then we can figure it out from here.
Yeah, he said. This is just a temporary leave. To figure out what’s going on at home. To make sure things aren’t too crazy, and then assess what to do going forward.
That’s what she told Laura. They were going to assess. She made it sound like they were Love Accountants. She felt a not-so-discrete smugness about her long-term relationship, that she desperately wished no one was attenuated to. It was embarrassingly, regressively basic, like dieting, like waiting till marriage to have sex.
Well what do you want, asked Laura.
I don’t know yet, said Anne. That’s why we are going to assess.
But Anne never made it out to Minnesota. She and Thomas talked on the phone every night, then three or four times a week, and then once a week. The winnowing happened gradually. They had stopped saying I will see you soon and started saying I miss you. Anne asked Thomas if it was alright to sublet their apartment, since she couldn’t cover the rent alone, and since Thomas had no firm plans to return, he said, of course. Her friend from college Andrea moved in with an inbred bulldog that liked to scoot her anal glands across the length of Anne’s carpet. Anne and Andrea ate dinner most nights together, though they cooked separate meals. Usually one of them would be standing by the stove, with the other eating at the small wooden table that stood in the center of the kitchen, the two of them debriefing their day.
Then Thomas told Anne he wasn’t coming back to New York. She told him she understood. That he needed to be with his family right now. That they couldn’t be together at the moment. She left it open-ended, free of judgment, but with the possibility of a reunion dangling somewhere off in the hazy made-up future. It turned out to be an extension of grace, from her to him, so that he wouldn’t have to say the next part—the hard part—which was that if he had felt differently about her, maybe he would have come back. All this time Anne had been pitying him, for his doting kindness, knowing in her heart of hearts that she was trying desperately to resurrect a feeling inside of herself that she wasn’t sure had ever been there in the first place. But of course, Thomas had his own nexus of indifference swirling inside of him, concealed even more completely than hers. They were just both too cowardly to call the other’s bluff.
A month after they had that phone call, Anne trolled Thomas’ Venmo. He had a terrible quality of not setting his payments to private, something that had bothered her when they were dating. For some reason she thought it was extremely revealing for outsiders to see the money that had exchanged between their hands, items like GROCERIES, NOVEMBER RENT, or DISGUSTING BREAKFAST SANDWICH.
Sure enough, there was his financial history from the last couple of weeks — three payments made back and forth between he and a girl named Becca, all emojis: a frosty beer mug, a tinfoil wrapped burrito, and most damning of all—a lone pink flower. Three payments was too consistent of a number to be coincidence. Anne got to work, typing her name into the search browser, and engaging the special PI skills she had developed for just such a purpose. Becca was younger than Anne. She was mutual friends with both Thomas and his brother, which made Anne think this was someone from the past that Thomas had reconnected with. She found photos of Becca’s college senior art thesis. Anne couldn’t tell if they were good. But Becca was pretty, if very pretty girls were your sort of thing. Anne had to tell herself that Becca had a bad personality. That was the only way to push through.
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Soon Anne would find herself on a date with a man she met on the internet. Anne couldn’t discern whether he was attractive—in this way, he was similar to Becca’s art. She kept looking at him with her head cocked at different angles, like a spaniel, trying to get an honest read of his face. They were sitting at a bar, and they were on their third round of drinks. The bartender placed Anne’s gingerly on the table. It was very full and lapping at the sides of the glass like a great lake. Anne brought her face to it and licked it. Her date laughed. Anne thought of Thomas trying to feed her a sliver of soap, and the horror on his face when she went for it.
By this time, Anne and her date had run through the usual questions you ask someone you are trying to know: what they each did for work, if they had siblings, what sort of things they liked to do for fun, and where they lived in the city.
Her date looked up at her and said in a practiced voice that let her know he had uttered this same sentence before: So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done.
Anne sighed. And then she told him what she had told her beautiful friend in college all those years ago.
When I was in kindergarten, Anne explained, we had this big end of the year project. They did it every year. It was the piece de resistance of kindergarten. It was a magic trick, or like when they show you that video of a baby being born, “the miracle of life,” all rolled up into one. We got an incubator. And then we got these duck eggs. And we watched them for weeks. We learned all about embryos, how they grew. We looked at them with this special light so we could see how they were developing. And then finally, when they hatched, we observed them, and took notes on them, and cared for them. And then when they got big enough, we were allowed to take them home. On the weekends. The teacher couldn’t take them every weekend. And it was like a class pet — you know? It was an honor to host one in your own home, and care for it, and then bring it back. Anyway, I took it home.
And what, her date said.
And I tried to play basketball with it, said Anne. I was five. I tried to play a game of HORSE with it. I bounced the ball for it to catch. Except it just squashed it. And it died.
And that’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, said the date. No, said Anne. Of course not.