noticing.
‘You smell,’ I call back.
‘What?’ he says, but I kick out farther. The trees are so tall from this angle, dark, with their hardening summer leaves. The sky is cloudless, and directly above me its deep blue enamel thins and I can see the black of space behind it.
When I get out he watches my body and the water rushing off of it. He’s still on my towel, so I sit on his.
‘You’re not going to swim?’
‘Come here.’
I know how he wants it to go. I stay where I am. A swimmer, a woman with strong mottled arms in a bright-blue bathing cap, cuts a diagonal line across the pond.
‘It’s like there’s this gristle between me and the world,’ he says. ‘I’m trying to work my way through it. I’m just moving really slowly. It’s hard work. It’s tough gristle.’
When my skin is dry and taut I tell him I have to get back. I am the on-call that night.
In his truck I smooth out my skirt. It’s pretty, sage green with small ivory flowers. I know I’ll never wear it again.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he says.
‘I’m not looking at you.’
‘I know.’
He says he can bring me home to Brookline but I say the Sunoco station is fine.
‘Don’t close up,’ he says.
The truck glides along Memorial Drive. I see my path by the river, the geese at the base of the Western Ave. Bridge.
All your life there will be men like this, I think. It sounds a lot like my mother’s voice.
He pulls up next to the marigolds. I tell him not to get out, and he doesn’t. I see his forehead resting on his hands on the steering wheel as I pull my bike out of the back.
I wheel it around to his window and ring my bell out of habit. It is the sound of me coming to his cabin at the end of the day. I want to take that sound and stuff it into a bag with rocks and throw it in the river. He smiles and rests both elbows along the side of his truck. My body is fighting me. If I get closer, he will put his fingers in my hair. I squeeze the handlebars and stay in place.
‘Off you go,’ I say.
I sit on my banana bike as he backs up, shifts, and pulls out. I stay there beside the marigolds on the side of the Sunoco station until his truck disappears around the bend where the river turns west.
I have one writer friend left who’s still writing. Muriel’s been working on a novel set during World War II for as long as I’ve known her. We met here in Cambridge six years ago, in line for the bathroom at the Plough and Stars, and hung out for a while before we both moved away for grad school. We crossed paths once at Bread Loaf, but I would never have known she was back here if I hadn’t overheard one of my customers at Iris talking about her niece Muriel, who was writing a book set in a Jewish internment camp in Oswego, New York. I was refilling their waters and said, Muriel Becker? I got her number from her aunt.
The day after Walden, Muriel takes me to a launch party of a writer she knows. I ride to her place in Porter Square, and we walk up Avon Hill. The houses get fancier the higher we climb, grand Victorians with wide front porches and turrets.
‘I’m spatchcocking my novel,’ she says.
I have no idea what she’s talking about. I often don’t.
‘It’s what my grandmother did to a chicken when she wanted it to roast faster. Basically you cut out the backbone and sort of compress all the pieces in a pan.’ She’s had a good writing day. I can tell by the way her long arms are flying all around. I have not. I’ve been stuck on the same scene for a week. I can’t get my characters down the stairs.
I’ve already told her on the phone about Luke’s visit, but we have to go over it again. I have to reenact on the sidewalk the way he bit my knee. I have to say in a lugubrious voice, ‘I’m just moving so slowly.’ I have to holler the word ‘gristle’ up the street. But my chest is still burning.
‘I’m usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing.’
‘From heartbreak?’
‘Yeah.’ My throat is closing. ‘I can usually get out of