market had had a sale and we were Midwesterners and sick of eating regular salads.
“You don’t know her,” I said.
“That’s true,” she said. “I don’t know her and I don’t like her.”
I fell silent. The light in the room was artificial; the windows were black and it was raining. What a wind bellowed outside! And what a great job the windows did keeping the wind and rain out. That apartment did a great job at many things, but was expensive for two midtwenties women with mediocre-paying jobs, which is why we stayed home a lot.
“I’ll tell you why,” Michelle continued. “I don’t trust people who wear hoods or floppy hats.”
I can see now that Michelle probably wanted me to fight with her, something I hadn’t done for a long time, perhaps because I had grown tired of it or perhaps the weather had made me complacent. I chewed on a carrot top and set down my bowl. “People hide for a reason,” I said. “Your favorite poet hid in her bedroom and drawing rooms.”
“I may not have liked her,” Michelle said, “in person.”
Later that evening, Michelle and I pretended the rug was a lake or a pool and we were synchronized swimmers. Michelle had performed on a high school synchronized swimming team called the Aqua Belles. She put on music, classical, and we got into position and pointed our toes and tucked into a tub or a half tub. We rolled onto our backs and shimmied in opposite directions; we linked our feet above us in a bridge and then dropped dramatically under the imaginary surface.
“I think,” Michelle said, after we’d climbed into bed and kissed goodnight, “when we’re old, we’ll be together.”
“I can’t even imagine being old,” I said, though I wish I hadn’t.
She was a confident chewer. Sometimes her confidence and strong opinions made her seem arrogant or foolish, and other times they made her seem large, like a sun or meteor or a boulder on a green hill, or an acacia in full bloom off the highway. She was good with maps. She knew how to sew. She was a sultry kisser. In the night, she’d reach over and rest her hand on the top of my head, sometimes give it a little shake.
What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?
Just before the arrival of the ants, we had put a note under the door of the building manager, Ronald Chang, asking if we could have a new refrigerator. He wrote back the following:
Girls. Not broke, don’t fix.
Another time he left this note:
Girls. Someone coming. Pipes.
Another time:
This is clean bug day, girls. Under sink.
We pinned the notes to our refrigerator, which was not broken but was old and small and refused to freeze ice cream.
Ronald Chang lived above us. He had grown up in Shenyang, migrated to the City twenty years earlier, and worked at the Golden Lotus in Chinatown. Was he the owner of the restaurant? We could hear him going in and out of his apartment and up and down the stairs. We could hear his television and his conversations in Cantonese on the telephone. When he saw us he smiled and said hello very loudly, as if he had to speak English at a forceful volume if we were to understand. We often had the feeling that we were not real to him, the way you feel when you are visiting another country. The inhabitants are a little fake, and you think you can do or say whatever you want because you are more or less on a stage set. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he also was not all the way real to us. It took years before the City lived in my bones and I could see myself as a fellow member, a citizen of the City.
Some things I can’t remember. I can’t remember if we had plants in that apartment, or if Michelle liked houseplants. I can’t remember the exact sound of her voice, or where she parted her hair, or what she smelled like. I can remember the bike she rode, a ten-speed Cannondale, yellow, and how she brushed her teeth with baking soda and once used a wet wipe to damp down her hair when we were biking and it was falling in her face.
“Someday I’ll have my own woodworking business,” she said once, and then a week later pondered going to medical school. The second year we lived in the apartment, while she was working construction full time, she signed up for French, astronomy, and pottery classes.
“How are you going to do all that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. A week later she had to drop all three.
She was a dreamer. She was egotistical, romantic, manipulative. I loved her.
In the vacant houses where she helped build kitchen cabinets and lay wooden floors, she often found odd items, like the poetry book with the three arrows pointing down to no rain in Lima since 1940. She would show these items to me and collect them in our large living room closet. The day she told me she didn’t like the neighbor, she had found a long thin piece of wood on which someone had written in black pen:
This is your leg, I love
Your lips, a dove
One shoe
One rack of lamb for you
Two turtle gloves
Etc. all down the wood.
From the same construction site she had already brought home a black leather wallet left behind inside a drawer. A horse head was embossed on the front flap. Someone had left a note in the wallet, written in navy blue eyeliner.
To Jim: I hereby solemnly and gratefully swear to pay back every penny of the $600 I owe you. Have a nice day. Lisa.
Lisa had drawn a symbol next to her name and we couldn’t agree on what it signified. I thought it was a special kind of stylized letter M. Lisa M. But Michelle saw an unclosed heart.
After we disagreed about the wallet, we went to bed and pretended we were sexual strangers. Michelle pulled the sheet over her head, and I could see her breath tent and cave. “What color are my eyelashes?” she asked, which is the kind of question she often asked in the middle of the night. “Michelle, brown. They’re brown. Now go to sleep,” I said.
But they were red brown, like the bark on cedar trees, like California redwoods.
There is something that happens when you live in a nice apartment in a pleasant neighborhood in my city, even in the less sunny neighborhoods. Especially if you grew up queer in an inhospitable place, though you may not have recognized the margins until you left. You start to feel as if you exist in your own separate country—the City is almost an island—and you can do whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. You start to feel as if, for example, you might be able to fly off the ocean cliffs without a glider, or that you could live solely on sprouts and carrot tops, or that you could careen down the hills on your bicycle without a helmet during rush hour. You start to feel, even though you know the feeling is not true and that the laws of the physical universe have not been altered just for you because you live in this fabulous city in this nice apartment, that you cannot be touched by normal human tragedy.
The evening before the ants arrived, someone knocked at our door. The neighbor Michelle didn’t like had lost her rat. We went to help her find it, trolling up and down the stairs and hallway to her apartment, and
