one who moved in just that way, a way that only someone who loved her deeply can share with us. What she did for a living or what brand of clothing she wore or how much money she made are only facts, and not especially relevant. They are demographics. But the “quality of the eternal” in the way she moved was hers alone, and the one closest to her is the one who saw it most urgently. The writer brings that sense of urgency to every word of The Fifth Woman and, generously, shares it with us with searching and scrupulous tenderness.
At one point in the collection, the narrator resolves to “write my own stories about everyday occurrences, like people reading things and thinking things, and stories in which the people and the animals just go on living the way we do, many of us, for a long time.” Death, of course, is an everyday occurrence, one of the most everyday of occurrences, and with The Fifth Woman, the writer fulfills the narrator’s ambition to dwell wholeheartedly in the impossible and heroic task of just going on living in the world as it is. It is a wonderful book.
—Stacey D’Erasmo, 2016
The book I’m reading belonged to my first lover, Michelle. At the top of one page, she has written her name and the date, then three dark arrows pointing down.
The line Michelle is pointing to says that it has not rained in Lima since 1940, but when I think about the statement it seems impossible. I read the line again, and yes, that is what the poet says. She must be making it up, but I think about the people waiting every day for the rain; they wait for the water to enliven everything, to make their world wet and green and soft.
An aberrant heavy cloud rests above my backyard. I can hear Larissa’s contralto voice quaver through the screen door, off-key. She is inside the house cleaning. She makes up songs about her day, or the sky, or something she’s noticed on our street.
The last time I saw Michelle, she was in the middle of the sidewalk outside our old apartment building, balancing on one leg and waving at me. I was already walking down the street away from her. I was walking briskly, happily, thinking about the unexpected November sun and feeling my body move down the street, the concrete under my tennis shoes, the air made even more pleasant by the smell of renegade fall jasmine and ferns from our neighbor’s garden. The sun blew straight at me, and I had to squint through a yellowish haze. There was a moment of blindness, and then I created a frame of darkness all around me, as if I were looking through binoculars. There was a slight change in temperature, a shift in light; the air pressed against my forehead. Michelle called my name, or I turned, sensing something, and then she called my name. She stood on one leg. She was waving.
Earlier that morning we had been counting the ants on the kitchen table. November rains had been making the cold air damp and, until the sun appeared that day, no one had wanted to be outside except for the hard-core bicyclers, like Michelle, and the newly transplanted or visiting Northerners whom you could see wearing short sleeves in the park. Above the table a large window opened to the neighbors’ pastel houses, their palm trees, the sky. We lived on the first floor of a four-unit building, in a one bedroom with a large kitchen/living room; the couch and the table stared at each other across an expanse of red and orange, a rug we’d found at Thrift Mart.
The ants had arrived with the rains, only a few, scattered on the windowsill, trekking up and down the frame, a reckless band of nomads. “Ants,” Michelle had said that first day, staring at the windowsill as if she’d forgotten ants existed. She stood with her foot on a chair like she often did, her hands wrapped around her cereal bowl, drinking her leftover milk. The next day there were considerably more of them and they had traveled to the table. The table leaf on one side was stuck upright and we often forgot to clean thoroughly in the crack. Those first two mornings Michelle washed up the ants, I think, but then it rained again at night and the next day there were more.
The ants on the table that last morning had formed a long line from end to end. On my way to the bathroom I had glanced over and there the ants were, glistening in the sunlight, which was already unusually strong. Now, we watched a stream of them that appeared to be running in a continuous loop over and under the table. Michelle was watching from one side and I was sitting across from her watching from the other side.
“This has become a problem,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. From my angle, the ants appeared as a glint of black, and then a black moving line, bulbous bodies perfectly tuned to each other, a crazy black ribbon as if they were wrapping the table as our gift. “They’re not hurting anything. Seems like they’re pretty happy.”
“Happy?”
“Well, you know.”
She got up and went to the sink and drank a glass of water. Michelle tried very hard to drink as many glasses of water as she could during the day, and she tried very hard to get me to drink as many glasses of water as I could, because we had read articles about how people who drank water lived longer and had more resilient skin and inner organs. Nevertheless, our hearts were not in it—we’d forget that water had anything to do with us, and then one of us would get a headache or feel inexplicably funny and the other would say, usually Michelle to me, have you been drinking water?
After Michelle drank the water she burped, and patted her chest as if she were her own baby. She tied a gold ribbon, left over from last year’s Christmas wrapping, around the bottom of her jeans so they wouldn’t get caught in her bike spokes, and while she did this I looked down at the top of her head, a mop of black hair, and I thought, Michelle is a mop of hair.
I remember that thought, but I can’t remember what we did about the ants that morning. I can’t remember if we washed off the table before we left, or if, when I got home from the hospital and then the morgue later in the day, I washed them off. Had they gone of their own volition?
We had moved to that apartment building in the City two years earlier from the northern Midwest; our neighborhood was in a district that averaged an annual 185 sunny days, though there are many more sunny days in other districts. Of those days only half start out sunny, and very few of them are in November. The City gets twenty inches of rain annually, and 90 percent of those inches in November through March. But it was fog, which sometimes posed convincingly as rain, that blocked the sun more often. We did not know anything about fog when we moved to that part of the City; when we moved to the City we believed that most days were sunny and pleasantly cool everywhere.
But even in our foggy district the weather was benevolent and supportive, compared to the violence of the weather in the Midwest. We could bicycle to the park in our jackets. We could walk outside most any time without thinking seriously about the heat or the cold, the way we were used to thinking about heat and cold, the way heat and cold can form a solid mass at the center of your thinking and then explode. We never listened to the weather reports and forgot for the most part that there was any weather, except for on those few really cold, damp days.
One neighbor in the building Michelle didn’t like. She had appeared early on, outside the building with her girlfriend. A few months later we saw her walking up the stairs without the girlfriend and down the hall past the landlord’s flat. She was a young art major studying somewhere in the City and had a tattoo around her very thin neck, a single thin black decapitation line. She was Chinese, like the landlord, and spoke elegantly in English with almost no accent, but she was quiet and we were quiet and unsure about whom we could talk to or who wanted to be left alone. She never made eye contact; she often wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and her black hair fell over her eyes. “I don’t like her,” Michelle
