heavy cookbook she didn’t realize had been leaning on the can fell over, and as it fell off the shelf, it took out both a plastic jar of applesauce and a big canister of rice. The applesauce hit the floor and split down the side, splattering across the bottom of the stove, the floor, and the legs of the kitchen chairs and table. And the top came off the canister of rice, which formed a pile in front of the stove—mixed with applesauce, of course—but as it fell, it tumbled and spun, spraying dry rice across the kitchen floor and into the hallway.
Once all the noise stopped, once everything stopped moving, Evvie stood and looked around. There was rice under the stove and inside the burners. There was applesauce on the undersides of the kitchen chairs. There were nails and screws covered with applesauce spilled all over her floor. She walked, dazed, toward her bathroom to see how far the rice went, and there were grains of it even in there. She looked around her kitchen, and she dropped her chin to her chest.
She started to cry, but she could barely breathe. She tried to ignore it and grabbed the roll of paper towels and walked toward the stove, slipping on rice under her feet. She kneeled on her kitchen floor and started to mop up piles of rice and muck, but she had to go get the trash can first, and she wasn’t sure if she should try to pick out the screws and the nails or throw them away, and oh God, there was rice that had fallen into the drawer at the bottom of the stove that was open an inch, and she’d have to take out all the pots and lids, which would all have rice in them, and the stove was too heavy to move.
On her knees, on her floor, in the house she’d never wanted, she couldn’t catch her breath. She felt like she was floating above herself, observing this woman on the floor who was sobbing, and then wailing, and then this woman on her knees on the floor was screaming. Part of Evvie was watching and thinking, What is happening, am I having a panic attack, am I crazy, am I dying? And part of her gulped air into her lungs and made it into this sound over and over again, a sound she’d never heard herself make before. Whatever was angrier than crying and much bigger than yelling and felt more like a seizure than a shout, that’s what this sound was, and even as she was still making it, it registered: Thank God I am the only person who will ever see myself like this. Thank God, thank God.
She had no idea how long it went on. She knew enough to be terrified a neighbor would hear; she was steeled for a knock on the door from someone who thought she was being murdered. If she’d heard herself from inside someone else’s house, she would have called the police. She heard her own words in what barely seemed to be her voice: I can’t do this and What did I do? and I break everything. Several times, the last one. Everything. Everything, I break everything. She was making this sound, nearly howling these words, and she could hear it, but she couldn’t stop it. She passed through long minutes when she couldn’t imagine how it would ever end except with her emptied out or inside out or reduced to a stick figure that stood for a person who had once existed.
But it ended, for the same reason arm-wrestling matches and overtime games come to an end: there is only so much. Finally, finally, she felt the process reverse. That terrifying sound turned back into raw sobbing, and then to ordinary crying, and then she took a breath, and another, and another. Slowly, she stood, brushing the rice off her bare knees, which were now covered in painful, pebbly red marks. She went into the bathroom and flipped on the light. Her eyes were swollen in a way she’d never seen before. Her throat felt raw and her ears were ringing. She ran cold water on a cloth and held it over her face, breathing in, feeling the cool water on her lips and smelling her laundry detergent.
She felt strangely loosened, like she’d run a mile or gotten a massage. It was like she’d drained herself so utterly that nothing