The survivalists, p.14
The Survivalists, page 14
For a few glorious seconds she mentally carried out the last plan. She got the imaginary guns she hadn’t found in their bedroom out of it and locked the two of them in while cops searched the rest of the house because some neighbor with X-ray vision had seen all the guns through the walls and called in backup. She and Aaron waited under the bed until Aaron gave her the all-clear and she got the two of them out of there, to a spacious apartment that could fit one coffee roaster and zero weapons. They’d think about having fingernail clippers, and Aretha would come down against the ones with blades.
Except she’d gone on a gun run with Brittany and James, and it was exciting. She slowed her walk. She rifled back through her memories of herself, from the seven-year-old too terrified to not do her homework to the thirteen-year-old who stood a reasonable distance outside the candy store while her friends shoplifted, terrified that placing a single finger on a gummy worm would mark her as a potential criminal, to the eighteen-year-old who didn’t drink for half of freshman year, since it was illegal, to the law student who sat in class, happy to divide the world between the purity of the law and the nothingness of opposing it. The world shifted back towards normality. The restaurant windows no longer glared at her for having roommates with guns. She could walk at a pace that didn’t make her think of seniors determined to finish their seven a.m. mall loops. She remembered everything about their trip to Pennsylvania. Grabbing the doorjamb while Brittany whipped the car down the road like it was a racetrack. The gun bag poking her leg. Was it a crime that after thirty-two years of following the rules, she wanted to feel something?
Aretha made it to the block that held her and Nia’s favorite diner. Nia was so prim and proper and well-manneredly rich, with her family money and her long waiting list of people dying for her therapy. She loved Nia, but Nia had no idea how it might feel to throw life’s rules in the garbage because they weren’t working for you. She had grown up rich, and went to college, and done what her rich parents did, and found fulfillment in that.
She entered the diner. Nia sat in the furthest-back booth, with her afro freshly picked out, and a sweater that covered a shirt with a collar so crisply ironed it looked like she might try to break a window with it. Her vape stuck up at its usual angle, which meant that the sweater had forced it into her bra. They hugged. Aretha put on her best calm face and thought heavily about trying weed again. Maybe right in the middle of the restaurant. If she got high enough she could forget about the part of herself that looked forward to the gun runs of the future. Her rational side understood that there was no excitement in cruising down Jersey highways and zero thrill in watching a couple of guns poke the side of a duffel bag and even less of a charge in picturing whatever the hell the people they sold guns to might do with them.
They both ordered French toast. Cold-weather food for the coldest of days. For the first time, brunch felt interminable instead of luxuriously slow. What the fuck was the point of brunch? What about ordering fifteen dollars of egg-covered bread was going to make her feel alive? The diner’s orange carpet was tacky, and the people who sat in every direction went on forever about their boring lives of work and home and bars and hangovers so bad they just had to tell someone about them. Their waiter came to drop off silverware. The voices around their table rose in volume as people got more animated in their retellings of the dull stories of their weeks. The silence between Aretha and Nia threatened to turn infinite. Nia looked at her. Aretha fought the urge to look away.
“You first,” Aretha said.
Nia looked amused.
“I bought a rubber tree,” she said.
“What? I thought you’d never give in to plants.”
“This is what happens when you spend two hours a week listening to a plant lady. I was walking past this plant store on the way home, and one of the rubber trees got me.”
“Got you?”
“You know. I had that feeling people probably have with babies, only with some leaves in a pot.”
She whipped out her phone and showed it to Aretha, who saw the rubber tree resting in Nia’s kitchen with its branches extended towards the sun, like a handshake, and wondered how she’d let so much time go between trips to Nia’s apartment that Nia had gotten into plants. She used to spend a couple weekend days a month there, trying on heels and dresses and pants Nia didn’t feel like owning anymore, since they were the same size, or getting ready to go out, or giving up on going out because the weather outside was shit and waiting for delivery pizza on Nia’s couch, or on the floor in front of the nonoperational fireplace she kept stocked with a fake log that felt convincing anyway.
“The heat,” Nia would say, waving her hand at the log.
“It’s so hot,” Aretha would say, moving a couple inches closer to the AA-batteried glow.
Instead of just going over to Nia’s, like a normal person, she’d let herself get sucked into Gunland. She loved their diner, but if she could have traded the food that would show up in half an hour for an afternoon on Nia’s couch, she would have done so happily.
“Is the rubber tree a lot of work?” she asked Nia, as the kind of person who thought plants were only a hair less complicated than brain surgery.
“No. I water it once a week, fertilize it once a month, and plan to give it a hearty trim next year at around this time. Then it’ll spit more leaves out at me.”
“Can I come see it sometime?”
“Sure, but since when are you into plants?”
“I’m not not into them.”
Nia took Aretha through that week’s set of unbelievable clients. The welder who came to talk about why he gave up on ballroom dancing and his mother. The food blogger who came to talk about her distant, professional axe-throwing boyfriend and her mother. Her personal favorite, the plant-growing lawyer who came to obsess about her distant plants and her mother. Aretha listened while kicking herself for not just saying she was into plants, even if it wasn’t true. Being into plants might have set her on a more sane path than the one she’d taken a couple of steps down.
“Thank god my mother’s dead, so I don’t have to talk about her,” Aretha said.
“That’s never fucking stopped anyone else,” Nia said.
The plant-growing lawyer was worried she wouldn’t make partner. Aretha felt relieved that someone else out there was suffering in one of the exact same ways she was before she remembered that she’d stopped worrying about making partner somewhere around the gun run. Oh, she still wanted to do it, but her trip from terror at getting trapped in a car in Pennsylvania and her almost immediate swing to excitement over the illegalness of what they’d done had grayed out her reaction to work. She traveled her usual loop between her office and conference rooms and waited for the acts she performed for pay to feel exciting again.
She picked up a pro bono litigation case about a prisoner whose prison had stopped feeding him. She coached her new, chiller self into winning three case law competitions in a row. She put on a convincing performance of fake camaraderie with Mum by having lunch with her once a week, an act she used to hate and now didn’t mind, once it became clear they were going to bitch about things Aretha had always wanted someone else at work to bitch about with. The hours. The nonexistence of female partners. The signs that one partner was going through a divorce: sudden weight loss, hastily acquired orange fake tan.
“You could probably use some plants,” Nia said back at their table. “I think, even though plant woman talks about her plants like they’re kids who don’t call home, that there’s something about lawyers and plants that works out. You’re all stressed, and they don’t have anything to do with all your briefs and arguments. They work on another corner of your brain. Start with a couple of succulents.”
“I’m not as stressed about work as I used to be.”
“The new man?”
“You could say that.”
“How is your coffeehead?”
Aretha saw all the coffeeheads in bits and pieces. Aaron pouring her a half-inch of coffee on his last new roast Tuesday night and telling her about the time when he, a brand-new bartender who had no idea what a Sex on the Beach was, mixed someone a rum and Coke. Aaron texting her from Brazil, where he’d accidentally eaten the banana leaf that came with a plate of fish. Her calling him “my leafy greens,” and promising to have the recommended three to five servings a day of him when he got back.
And Brittany and James swinging their arms around for backyard training exercises, in ways that would intimidate no one who didn’t know they owned too many guns.
“Are you OK?” Nia said.
“Never better,” Aretha said.
She thought of the hum of the roasting machine going off in the background while she and Aaron took a rare mutually free Saturday morning a couple of weekends ago to sit in bed and talk about pancake recipes. Ah, pancake recipes. A cheaper way to re-create the brunch experience that also took out the part of brunch where Aretha had to leave the house for further rounds of Nia questioning. She imagined making pancakes with Aaron. Her making batter, flipping them better than she’d ever done before as a serial pancake burner. Him cheering her on while he fried up bacon and held one of the mugs of coffee that doubled as his third hand. Him handing her the gun in his holster and telling her to flip with it, spatula-style. Her deciding that flipping pancakes with a gun was hot.
“You’re doing it again,” Nia said.
“No, I’m not.”
The guns in Brittany’s closet rose up in her head, trying to freak her out, but Brittany’s voice rose up in her head, to tell her not to fear them. The house walls took their place, reminding her that they seemed to be developing bigger cracks than she remembered them having when she moved in. But who’s to say she remembered correctly? She worked late enough to hallucinate up cracks in walls, and imaginary mice, and pancakes flipped by guns, and ominous shadows cast by their decidedly un-ominous living room couch, a green velvet number that matched the retro quality of Aaron’s T-shirt collection and the Roots and TV on the Radio and Beach House posters he’d tacked up in their bedroom. He’d picked up the couch while the other two took a rare recreational trip out to a gun range in Jersey for target practice.
“It’s about coffee, but it’s about the look, too,” he’d said, pointing out the art deco touches of the coffee bag design after he put the couch in place.
Aretha saw it after he explained it to her: the vaguely ’50s quality to the gun-toting, coffee-carrying man. The Miami house that the bag man had to defend and the 2.5 kids and the picket-fence feel of the life she’d imagined he was defending, reunited with the violence that brought bag man to life. Really, it was art.
“They’re all doing well,” Aretha said.
“Well, that took you forever. Did you ever figure out if they’re the armed kind of survivalists?” Nia said.
The whole room floated. Spun. Wobbled on its axis. Aretha could open her mouth and answer the question, but she wasn’t sure if words would come out. Maybe just air, like a fish.
“You know, I have no idea,” she said, looking at her phone. “Shoot, I’ve got to go call someone at work. Next week, same time?”
“Sure,” Nia said. “Are you OK?”
“Just fine.”
Aretha left three-quarters of her French toast on the table to congeal when she got up and promptly forgot that she’d ever been hungry in the first place. She couldn’t eat anyway, since her stomach seemed to be made out of ocean waves that kept crashing into whatever qualified as shore. She left the restaurant and hurried down the sidewalk to the Vanderbilt house, the refrigerator door to her magnet self. On the other side of the front door her stomach waves stopped.
When she got up to her bedroom she googled the history of the house, as the last background check she planned to run on the bunch of them, as a farewell thank-you to Google, her eternal ally, who couldn’t help her any further down the path she’d chosen. Built in 1896, renovated in 1950, home to a Broadway actress and ten different sets of musicians before the gang had moved in to make coffee. A brownstone among brownstones that looked just like it: faded red brick, floor-to-ceiling windows that looked like eyes stretched open with a toothpick. Framed by the sky above and restaurants below, and buildings that resembled it in all directions. Only a hair back from Atlantic Avenue and its murmuring sound of nonstop medium-to-heavy traffic. Big enough that four people could practically have their own existences in it, even if two of them had chosen to stick together. She went up to the bedroom and sat on the bed and looked out the window and watched a blue jay pick at what was left of a leaf.
Her stomach rumbled. She went down to the kitchen for cereal. Half Froot Loops and half bran flakes, for balance. James came down from his room to chew sullenly through a Life Preserver, but for the first time since she’d moved in, he looked at her between bites. She looked back at him. Was this it? The magical moment when he started talking to her, and they became friends? But he didn’t follow the look with any words, so she didn’t say anything either. They both just sat at the table for a while, chewing and taking up space, until he broke the silence.
“You ever thought about being more of a part of the house?” he said, sitting back and crossing his arms in a by-house-I-mean-empire kind of way.
She’d answer a real question if he asked her one, but she hated this kind of fucking around.
“I’m terrible at jiujitsu,” she said, waiting him out.
“What we do in the backyard isn’t really jiujitsu. It’s a mix of jiujitsu, Krav Maga, muay Thai . . .”
“Right. Brittany told me.”
Their fucking martial arts gumbo.
“I’m not a coffee pro, either,” she said. “I can’t roast anything for you.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“Go on.”
“I need to run an errand and was wondering if you could help me with it.”
“What is it?”
“I think you know what it is.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You know when you took that little trip to Pennsylvania with us?”
“Yeah, I do,” she said.
“We need to take another trip like that.”
“OK.”
“I know you’re probably scared,” he said, “but . . .”
“What the hell would I be scared of?”
She put her right fist on the table to back herself up. James blinked at her for a few seconds. If he didn’t understand the feeling in the air, she did. There’s a point in a deposition when the mood shifts if the lawyer’s doing a good job, right after they ask the question and right before the other person gives the bad answer that they know they were backed into giving but can’t find a way around. Aretha couldn’t believe this feeling had set in because she’d agreed to go on another gun run, but James had the right look of surprise on his face.
Aretha got up and walked upstairs, to the bedrooms, where she spotted Brittany spackling a wall.
“The walls are OK, right?” Aretha said.
Brittany gave her a look, the latest in a series of Brittany looks, all of which meant the same as the ones before it, yet somehow conveying a small range of levels of disdain.
“I’m prepared, Aretha. For whatever.”
Aretha kept walking until she reached her bedroom. She shut the door, thought better of it, got up, opened the door, put on socks, and marched down to the living room to chill on its couch in her socks. She wasn’t afraid of these people. This was her fucking house too. She put her feet up on the couch and lay down on it the long way to take up as much space as possible. For the first time in months, her head was clear. She pulled out her phone and read through Aaron’s cheerful texts from Colombia. The people were great! The houses colorful! The arepas warm! He was having an absolutely fantastic time wandering around the countryside in a slightly less ridiculous-looking hat! She responded to his texts with a brightness that came from knowing she would no longer be bored during his trips. She would work, and she would ride in cars with Brittany and James and see what came of that. She was a lawyer who wanted to see what lay on the other side of the law.
At work she looked at people, because they no longer scared her. Everyone who passed in front of her got a forceful round of eye contact. Work, where force worked out. She was meaner to the plaintiffs’ attorneys and crueler to the document reviewers, asking them to go faster and faster until she could see them twitch. The trick as a woman in the law was to be mean enough to get everyone to snap back by doing things for you immediately but not mean enough to be called a bitch. That week she congratulated herself for walking right down the center line.
At home, to reinforce this feeling of newfound inner toughness, she splayed herself all over the house purely to take up space. She lounged on every couch. She lay lengthwise on the floor of the roasting room, closed her eyes, and breathed in its smell. She put on her yoga pants and yoga shirts and went down to the living room to do something completely ridiculous in them: yoga. She did all the yoga she could remember from the single yoga class she took a couple of years ago. Downward-facing dog, up-dog, half-pigeon, pigeon. She flexed her arms and legs and felt them gathering strength. She switched her cereal mix from half Froot Loops and half bran flakes to all bran flakes, and her soy milk to almond milk. The warmth from exercising control over all the things she could control grew inside her. She could power a small room with it. Maybe even a whole house.
An axe-throwing bar opened up neighborhoods away from the house, and she spent her Tuesday nights there, drinking limeades, throwing axes, and feeling even more like a person who’d just decided gun runs were exciting. At home alone under the dark bar lights, with a cold glass spitting dew into her drinking hand that she’d wipe off before she sent axe after axe flying towards the target. She felt the floor quake under her feet when they landed, and a rush not unlike the one that came from winning a case, especially if she imagined each axe as a round of sex with Aaron. Watch-the-world-bend-to-my-will-just-like-the-ground-an-axe-hits sex. Maybe-we’re-conquering-the-world-just-by-fucking-each-other sex. Thank-god-I-found-a-way-to-spend-a-couple-hours-drinking-alone-because-I-feel-bad-about-doing-it-in-front-of-a-sober-person sex. On Tuesdays, he roasted beans late, so she’d come home from the axe bar and they’d have all the sex she’d already had with him in her head, and then they’d pass out together. And then she’d wake up and go to work and wait for James to summon her. But he did not.
