Short story by Brenna Ehrlich
Where Are You, Jen Fissure?
Min’s mother never taught her how to buy a dress for something like this. A first date, sure. Something light blue and slightly long, like shadows before the night comes—as in right when the date should end. Graduation? Something the other girls would never wear—neither Christening gown nor virginal cocktail waitress. Think a fairy on Labor Day weekend. A funeral? Her mother’s own funeral? Her mother just didn’t picture that happening. Or, if she had, she would have left specific instructions—something aside from, "Oh, if I start to go, dear, just let me wander off into the garden and do myself in with the Foxglove," which she actually said quite often.
"What about this one?" Sandi holds up a fake satin dress that looks like a sack. "The uglier the better, right? It’s not like you’d ever want to wear it again…" Spoken just like someone who had only ever had a grandparent die. Min’s mother might not have picked out her daughter’s mourning wear, but she was not the kind of woman who would want her progeny dripping tears on a morbid tent.
Min shakes her head and blinks in the glare of the department store lights, rubs her eyes and pushes all of her gnarled pink hair to the other side of her head.
Sandi sighs. "Well, what’s Lin wearing?" Somewhere a child shrieks in that register only very small children and nightbirds can reach and Sandi flinches, sending a waft of Santal 33, which costs like a million dollars, fluttering off of her trench coat. She does not smell like not soup and strangers’ casseroles, a stench that emanates from Min’s own hoodie.
"I dunno. Probably a hand-stitched frock of fresh black roses with a matching onesie for Rose." Min’s niece was frequently better dressed than Min herself, perhaps because her older sister owned a successful florist/boutique that modeled garments off the various blooms that appeared in its back garden. The whole store made you feel that feeling—you know the one. Like your mom has just finished reading you a fairytale and your bedroom is suffused in moonlight and a dream is creeping into your mind that you know will be good. Min, still in college—working on a never-ending thesis on the 1925 Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin—dressed in her dad’s old pilled ski sweaters and sometimes bought bodega roses when she wanted to feel some inkling of moonlight and good dreams.
"I don’t know if I even want to go," Min says, the words leaping from her throat like frogs. And, quite suddenly, she sits on the cool plastic linoleum floor, letting the truth sink in. Going means ugly black dresses. Going means forcing down funeral food and hugging distant relatives. Going means her mother is dead. "Maybe I can live here now. In Women’s Formal."
Sandi’s eyes widen and she briefly looks around the Filene’s Basement like she’s reached some final ring of hell. The track lighting flickers menacingly overhead as if to complete the effect. "You don’t mean that! I mean, your mother…You don’t want to…"
Min splays her legs out in front of her, a pile of black dresses pooling in her lap like tired phantoms. "She won’t be there," she says to the dresses. "Whatever it is, however many glorious custom arrangements Lin makes, she wouldn’t like it. She liked fuss, lord did she like fuss…Remember that time machine she built for me and…" She trails off.
He hasn’t called. It hits her then. The Sad One. Neighbors and more for eighteen years and he hasn’t called. She swallows, folding that away for later worrying, "Sure, fuss was fun…but she didn’t like…sadness. Why can’t I just remember her the way I want to? Why can’t I just get drunk in the garden and fall asleep in her closet with her shoes?"
Sandi twists her hands, obviously lost for words. People did that a lot now. Stood there looking sad. Murmured. She almost feels bad for Sandi, with her sleek red bob and her lined eyes, her best friend’s tragedy ruining her Saturday afternoon, a brief reprieve from marketing baby products to upscale moms who hated their children. A few months would pass, and she’d get tired of Min crying for no reason. She’d stop inviting her to things she thought Min might ruin. She’d feel bad later, though, when it was her turn to feel tunneled out. Gone. Maybe she’d apologize for not understanding and they could move in together, dress in black, start collecting cats.
Min drags herself to her feet, repelled by the ghoulish adventures of her mind. "OK, I’ll take…" she grabs the top dress from her pile, one that isn’t made of satin and bears no sequins and appears to have armholes "…this one. Let’s go. Don’t wanna be late."
Sandi scoops the rest of the dresses from the floor and drapes them over a rack. "Are you sure you want to…? I mean…You’re not too…upset?"
Min gives a sharp bark of laughter and strides toward the checkout. "Upset" was a word for milk and stomachs. Not this. Certainly not this.
*
The medium turns his face into the candlelight so that it wanes like a moon. "May I come to you next?" he asks, extending a bony hand.
Min wonders if she’s supposed to touch it. It looks waxy, like the tall white tapers in the middle of the room, candles carved into the forms of shapely women and aroused men. Sandi chokes down something that sounds like a nervous laugh and the medium narrows his eyes. The other women are perfectly still, though—they hover, recessed into the dark—and everything smells, way too strongly, of sage.
The medium clears his throat and Min jumps. "Um, yeah, sure," she answers, shifting so that her folding chair squeaks. She feels her phone buzz and buzz in her pocket and winces. Lin had left messages. Tons of messages. About picture frames and food and tablecloths—tablecloths! Who gave one single fuck about tablecloths?
He closes his eyes and starts humming—the marionette lines by his lips cut deep—then snaps his eyes open, rolls his head back. "I see two men. Two men standing on either side of you," he drones, his lips barely moving. Min leans forward so that she can hear him better. She’s not sure what she wants to hear. Something, maybe. Something from her mom explaining why. Why was it time to leave. Now she’s not so sure why she came. When she got the Groupon in her email that morning it seemed like a sign. Now she’s choking on sage.
"Your grandfather. Your father and your grandfather? They passed on. They passed on and they want you to know they are here. They are with you. They want you to take care of yourself, these men. They are worried that you are sad. Are you sad?" His black eyes lock on hers, watering, sympathetic.
Min nods, even though her grandfather and father are still very much alive. Her phone buzzes again. Yes, she’s sad. Maybe something more than sad.
"Yes, they are worried…" the medium’s fingers curl into his palm. "You are with a man they do not like…He will hurt your heart." He taps his chest with a melting taper finger. Nods.
Min frowns. She’s single. Has been since the Sad One left her at the end of their eighteenth summer, when he told her she was too much and too difficult and walked through the pine trees to his little white house. She watched the light in his window far past the point when it blinked out, standing in her yard in her Labor Day weekend fairy dress then went inside and ripped the moonlight dress to shreds while her mother let her, petting her hair and crying tears into her scalp. Why hasn’t he called?
Min’s fingers stiffen as Sandi reaches over and gives them a squeeze and suddenly she feels stupid for being here. She feels stupid for wasting the twenty dollars. She feels stupid for thinking this was any way to say goodbye. But mostly, mostly she just feels angry—at this man with his Groupon and his pile of twenties and his too-calm voice. At this ring of weepy women who probably just want their ex-boyfriends back. Who don’t know how this feels. Who will go to brunch after this and laugh as they get day-drunk on $15 mimosas the size of their heads and fall asleep watching Netflix in a sea of pillows.
A truck rumbles by outside, and in the darkness it sounds like a beast waking up and stretching. The medium turns to the next woman in the circle, rolls his head back and intones in a garish Southern accent, "Your guardian angel…she picked cotton."
"Wait." The word erupts from Min’s mouth. "That’s it?"
The medium’s moony face snaps back toward her, this time less dazed-looking; she sees him checking the Timex on his wrist. "I only see what the spirits want me to see, child…" he says slowly, his eyes ticking back to the girl with the cotton-picking guardian angel and, in turn, his watch.
"But…I mean, what you said is…bullshit!" Min stands up, shaking. Sandi leaps up beside her, puts her hand on Min’s arm.
"Min, let’s just…go get a mimosa or something…"
"No! You’re…you’re…" she glares at the medium’s waxy bald head, his black cowl-neck sweater, the Egyptian symbols tattooed into his skinny arms. "You’re just a fucking vampire! You suck our sadness away and feed us delusion. So that we’re just like you. Always fucking lost. But you have no real answers, do you? No real directions. Do you?"
Min’s chest is heaving and all the girls are looking at her. One girl, her hair piled on her head like a piece of modern art, scowls and crosses her arms. The girl next to her, with the guardian angel, smirks conspiratorially. The medium just blinks, like he’s a sphinx with all the secrets behind his eyes, not colored contacts washing them black.
Min grabs her shopping bag and her purse and Sandi’s arm and steers her friend toward the door. "Oh, yeah?" she says over her shoulder as she bangs open the door to the street. "Ease up on the fucking sage!"
*
Later, that song by ODB blares from the speakers and Mariah sings along. When ODB got out of jail, he was going to do a remix. Min melts into the wooden bench and kicks her feet halfway out of her boots. Her drink is too sweet. Her phone is dead. She wants to sleep, right here on the bench in the dark while Mariah sings about her boyfriend in heaven, but Sandi grabs her hands and pulls her up.
"Do you want to go home?" Sandi yells into her ear, pressing a finger into Min’s earlobe so she can hear better. She pushes a glass of water into Min’s hands.
Min just shakes her head and smiles. The ceiling spins with pretty lights and the water drops to the floor, glass shattering at her feet. Sandi shakes her head and pulls Min forward into all the bodies toward the door, but Min’s face smacks into a man’s plaid chest and she stops and sways. He smiles down at her with a cracked front tooth. He smiles down at her and the lights keep prettily flashing and someone else is singing now and they’re kissing. His mouth tastes like Oriental carpets. One of Min’s boots is gone.
The lights flash some more and she’s sitting down hard on the bathroom floor. Her boot is gone and now her phone is dead and cracked and Sandi is blinking into her face, holding her wrists with chilly fingers and repeating the word "home." The lights are bright and toilets are flushing and girls are asking over and over, "What did you take?"
Then she’s up, up, up and swaying, pushing out the door into the dark again, into the swirling lights. The man with the broken tooth stands outside the door, holding her shoe. He kneels down as she shoves her foot into the boot, and then he slings her over his shoulder and they laugh into the outside even though she’s kind of crying.
*
"That’s Herbert," the man says, stretching so that his ribs strain against his pale skin. He takes a lusty bite of his deli sandwich, mayonnaise spilling onto his navy blue comforter. His bed isn’t a bed, really—it’s the bottom half of a bunk, like something out of a child’s room. "I won him at a school carnival when I was eight. Some ring toss game. He’s lived longer than a lot of my friends."
The turtle knocks its head against the side of the glass tank, marching into nothing.
"What happened to the rest of your bed?" Min asks blurrily, ignoring the sandwich the man had bought for her perched next to the turtle’s tank. He had raved about it being the best in Brooklyn as he ferried her toward his third-floor walkup on the handlebars of his bike. She had laughed then, tossed back her head and felt hungry. Now, sweaty in his flannel sheets, she feels more of a kinship with the turtle who will not die.
"My brother took it, Mike. He lives in L.A.," the man says. Min realizes she can’t remember his name. "I know it’s silly and whatever, but I feel like we’re still together when I’m in here."
Min smirks. "Creepy."
The man laughs. "No, I mean, I miss him, you know?" He slings an arm around Min. "He’s all the way across the country. Now at least he can be here, kind of?"
"That makes sense," Min says.
"He used to tell me stories from the top bunk—mostly about comic book characters and movie characters and whatever. I miss that," the man crumples up his sandwich wrapper, aims at his trashcan and misses. "But I can’t, like, call him now and be like, 'Tell me that one about He-Man again,' right? We can’t do shit like that anymore. We’re old."
Min nods into the pillow. "I guess."
"So, what’s the deal with your family? You miss them much?" the boy asks, his hand skating up her side. Min gives the turtle a last look, thinks for a second that the boy’s hand feels nothing like the Sad One’s, how no one’s ever will, and then pulls his face toward hers.
*
In focus. Out of focus. The ladies wink and toss their hair from the front of the magazines, their "bad bits" obscured by a piece of black plastic. Her mom had jokingly called them that. "Bad bits."
The subway newsstand owner leers at Min as she squints at the sirens with their buoyant breasts, so she turns toward the tracks and watches a rat ford a river of sludge.
The train is really late and Sandi is really worried—at least according to the ten missed calls and twelve texts. The Turtle Man had let her charge her phone, so she knows. She also knows that the Sad One still hasn’t called—even though she’s sure he knows. Lin had posted the news on Facebook. People wrote dumb things underneath the post, but none of them were from the Sad One. That alone makes Min want to cry again. The big, gasping sobs she had let out when Lin had first called her. The ones that tore her chest apart and made her feel like she was really, truly going to die. Was there any evolutionary use to crying? Aside from wearing you out enough so that you could sleep after a tragedy?
A train pulls up, but it’s full of morning commuters and looking at them all packed in there together chest-to-chest makes Min’s already dirty skin itch. She looks down at her shopping bag and back at the sirens on the magazine covers and they wink at her, it seems. "We know where you’ve been…We know we’re you’re going," they trill in her brain and suddenly she can’t breathe the subterranean air anymore. She pushes her way through the throngs of commuters and up the stairs and finds herself topside, panting. She lets her limbs go jelly and half collapses onto a bench.
She breathes in and out like her therapist had suggested. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again her head is less fuzzy and her vision less starry. Now she’s even able to read the writing on the bench: "Jennifer Foster, Attorney at Law," letters marching over a pale face framed with dark straight hair.
*
"She reminds me of you," the Sad One told her when she was sixteen, straddling a lower branch on the magnolia tree in her backyard in black jeans ripped at the knee. "This girl does. You need to listen to this." Then he handed her a tape.
Jen Fissure had dark straight hair like Min’s was when she was younger, according to the tape case bearing her name. Parted in the middle. Serious eyes spaced far apart like a shark’s. But her voice was nothing like Min’s. Fissure’s voice rippled and croaked and careened around like a bouncy ball. Min kept hers low, especially around the Sad One. She was afraid to startle him.
A few years ago he had wandered into her backyard from his, like a deer, but crying. Min’s mother had made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a cup of hot tea—even though it was summer, because she always said tea fixed most things—and they had all sat at the table in silence.
"My mom went to the store," he finally choked out, weeping.
Min had stifled a laugh—it seemed like a strange thing to cry about—but her mom filled his teacup again and nodded. "Where is your mom now?"
The boy’s nose dripped and his eyes watered and he shook his head. "My…mom…went to the store…" he said again, as if they were the only words he knew. Finally, Min’s mom coaxed his number from him, and she called his father out of their earshot, nodding and nodding until she came back to the table and announced he was staying for dinner. Min found out later that the Sad One’s mom had gone to the store a year ago and never came home.
Min’s mom always had a Tupperware box of paints and glitter and string in the greenhouse and she went to get it. Then she grabbed their hands and marched them out to the garden shed.
"We’re going to make a time machine," she said. "And it will only work for us. Any time we want to remember something happy — it will only work for happy things — we can use it to help us."
Min and the boy both nodded as if this made perfect sense then went to work painting knobs and dials in glitter and poster paint on the door to the shed. They worked until dark spilled across the grass like ink and the real deer started whispering out of the forest. Until the fireflies came out and circled them, as if to give them light.
Min could never really get the time machine to work. But the Sad One kept coming back again and again, at first to touch the glittery painted knobs and dials, his eyes closed tight—and then he just came.
"She wasn’t around long enough—Jen," sixteen-year-old Sad One said, back in Min’s initial memory, lying under the tree and looking up at her under hooded eyes. "She was talented as hell though. God, I wish I could have heard her sing."
"Why can’t you?" Min asked, suddenly consumed with jealousy over the women on the tape cover.
"She doesn’t perform anymore," the Sad One said, "She had one hit and then quit. Which makes no sense at all. But it’s kind of beautiful in a way. She left everything perfect. She didn’t mess it all up by going country or finding Jesus or whatever. She just…left."
The Sad One liked girls who burned bright and then evaporated. He liked girls he could never really touch. Min was all too tangible. She looked down at her knees as he talked, covered in scabs and scars. She was always bumping into the world like she couldn’t help marking it with her blood.
He told her how Fissure’s mother died when she was sixteen; the story went that she skipped the funeral all together—instead she hitchhiked from Ohio to the East Coast and started playing at CBGBs and other clubs when she was seventeen. Just her and her guitar. She met her band mate, Lex Motive (a.k.a. John Marshall), smoking outside Mercury Lounge and they got married a week later. Their record came out within a year, and then Fissure evaporated. Motive died a few years later of an overdose after unsuccessfully trying to form his own band, Ulterior Motives.
"Although…I did hear Fissure was, like, a paralegal in the city now. Her name’s really Jen Foster…" the Sad One added. He braided blades of grass together in a long chain with his tan fingers. “But how many paralegals named Jen Foster do you think there are in New York? More than there are blades of grass in this yard." He let his chain fall to the ground. "We should find her someday, though…"
After that, Min bought Jen Fissure’s sole record at the store downtown and listened to it over and over again, until she knew the words better than her own thoughts. She wished she really could be like Jen, someone who made the Sad One happy, someone who had such a talent for disappearing when she wanted to. And then she kind of stopped thinking about her. Not being Jen Fissure was just one of the ways she had disappointed the Sad One, and she didn’t need to keep dwelling on that.
*
Now, here she is again. The address under Jen Foster’s name is somewhere in Ridgewood, Queens. Min isn’t sure where, exactly. There’s an area around there, though, that people call the Cemetery Belt, because of the preponderance of graveyards—and in that area is an address Min knows by heart by now, one that she’s supposed to visit at 2 p.m. today. Min used to love graveyards, mostly because she didn’t really understand what they were. They were just lovely, quiet places with manicured lawns and angels standing sentry. Her mom used to take her to a really old one by their house that overlooked the sea, and once she found a perfect robin’s egg—dried out like nature’s mausoleum. When she finally found out about death, though, she used to sit up at night, frozen in fear, picturing all the pretty tombstones and crying.
She puts Foster’s address into her phone and, without thinking too much about it, calls an Uber. The driver pulls up and she climbs into the backseat wreathed in twinkle lights and plastic flowers. Tiny pieces of paper festoon the insides of the doors, emblazoned with phrases like, "Don’t worry, be happy" and "Everything happens for a reason." Min peels off the "Everything happens for a reason" piece of paper and stares at it, flapping at the end of her pointer finger. Then she crumples it up and shoves it in her purse. It was a sad platitude, sure, but it seemed right somehow.
The city darts by outside the plastic-flower-wreathed windows, rows of tan brick buildings, jutting porches where old men sit in chairs and smoke, the mingled smells of fried chicken and lasagna and spices eddying into the car as it swerves down side streets. Min’s stomach cramps as she realizes she can’t remember the last time she ate. She hadn’t been able to eat much since it happened. Drinking was exceedingly easy, though. The haze and burning of alcohol make it harder to remember why she’s hollow in the first place.
The Uber judders to a stop in front of a low, dun-colored building flanked by a funeral home and a pizza place with sun-bleached paper plates taped in the window advertising dollar slices—a faded sign above a single door reading, "Foster and Associates." Min puts her hand on the door handle, hesitates.
"Miss?" the Uber driver chirps from the front of the car. "Everything is OK?"
Min nods, catching his dark, crinkled eyes in the rearview. Then she clears her throat and opens the door.
You have to ring a bell to gain entry to Foster and Associates, so Min peers through the dingy window, trying to find anyone who looks remotely like the girl with the straight black hair and shark eyes—thirty years faded. All she can see is an empty hallway ringed with doors. The image reminds her of something her mom used to tell her: "If you want to remember something, picture a long hallway with thousands of closed doors. Take that memory, then open the door, and stow it there."
Min had tried it once, when a kindergarten classmate she had a crush on meowed like a cat in the middle of a spelling lesson. That memory is still in her brain behind door number four. There are too many memories of her mother to fit behind a door, though. Memories that can’t be separated from what came before. So, instead of being safely stowed, they pop out of her when she least expects them—as she walks down a sunny street to pick up her laundry or rides the train to school. Memories that make her want to take an axe to all those doors so that they can never close again, so she can sit with her mom in that hallway for eternity.
Min is leaning against the brick exterior of the pizza place, tears rolling down her face, when the door opens and a woman trundles out. Encased in a blue polyester pantsuit, thirty extra pounds, shuffling in black heels—but her grey-streaked black hair neatly parted in the middle, her wide-apart eyes ringed with smudged eyeliner…
Min dashes the tears from her cheeks and fishes a pair of sunglasses from her purse, opens her mouth. But the woman is already shuffling across the street, pushing open the door to a coffee shop called The Cute Cat Café. Min takes a deep breath and follows her, the bell above the door jingling as she enters the tiny shop. "Tiny" might not be the right word, though. Perhaps the space is bigger than it looks. It’s hard to tell, as every surface is covered in ticking cat clocks, all chugging away at different times. Five real cats—one white and four grey tabbies—prowl the carpeted floor, and two more (orange this time) perch on a decaying cat tree in the corner, narrowing their eyes at Min as she stands, taking it all in.
"You hungry?" the woman behind the counter says—skinny, middle-aged, wearing a sweater emblazoned with, surprisingly, a large applique of a poodle. Min blinks, notices that Foster is tucking into a tuna sandwich by the cat tree, the animals ringing her in a strange maypole dance, waiting for her to drop something.
"Well?" the counter woman says, gesturing up at the chalkboard menu.
"Um, just a tea?" Min says, stepping toward the counter, her eyes still on Foster as the woman finally relents and feeds a bit of tuna to the white cat. The others meow indignantly until she doles out bounty to each and every one of them. She’s down to half a sandwich now.
Although the place is empty aside from Foster—and the cats—Min sits at the next table over, staring at her tea. There’s cat hair on the rim of the cup and all of a sudden she feels very hungover. She puts her phone on the table and casts a sidelong glance at the woman, the bags under her eyes, the worn-out shoes.
Min’s mom never wore scuffed shoes—all her heels were polished, standing in a militant line in her closet, arranged by color like couture rainbow. One of her last requests was for a new pair of shoes to wear in the hospital, so Min and Lin had had to go to Bloomingdales and buy some sparkling gold pumps with their mother’s credit card, a diminutive size five. They cost more than Min’s rent.
Somehow, their mother had convinced the doctors to let her wear them in her hospital bed, the sharp gold heels poking out of the scratchy blue sheets, catching on everyone’s purses and bags as they huddled around her when her eyes didn’t open anymore. She had thought she would walk out of the hospital in them, into the sun.
Min blinks and a tear falls on her phone screen, which lights up with a parade of unanswered calls and texts. Messages from friends promising to do "anything I can" and missed calls from her sister, her dad and Sandi. Nothing, of course, from the Sad One. The most recent, from Lin, reads: "Min, it’s almost 2 p.m. You can’t miss this. You know you can’t." Then, as if she didn’t remember—the way you can’t shake a nightmare that wakes you at the witching hour—that address not far from this cat-encrusted café. That address out there among that row of tombstones.
She and Lin had taken a cab the other day to meet with some people, the people who dealt with things like that, and Min’s heart had almost choked her as they soared past miles and miles of tombstones. For some reason, she pictured a million people standing on the grass, a million people instead of stones, staring at her. A million people wondering how they came to be standing in a crowd with nowhere to go.
Foster is finishing up the last of her sandwich now, sharing the crusts with the cats, folding up the wax paper and napkins into a neat pile. Min watches her hands, her grey-streaked black hair swinging into her face, her skinny legs in their sagging tan nylons. She remembers the sun on her face as the Sad One told her that she reminded him of this woman who was so good at melting away, this woman who burned bright for a little while. Who melted away from her family and then from everyone. Foster stands up now, gives the cats a final scratch and turns to go.
"Do you—" Min almost shouts, jumping from her seat. The grey cats scatter, but the white one just sits there, purring. Foster freezes, but doesn’t turn around.
"Do you…" Min swallows, "…do you wish you had stayed?" She doesn’t know which time she’s asking about. She doesn’t know why she’s even asking.
Foster’s shoulders tick a little higher and she takes a shuddering breath. She stands for such a long moment that she starts to look like one of those angels in the graveyard that gave Min nightmares. Then she sighs, turns her head slightly and whispers through clenched teeth, "I’m sorry. I can’t help you."
The cats crowd around the door as it closes behind Foster, leaving Min standing frozen, her tea cold on the table.
The woman at the counter gives a bark of laughter and bustles around the tables to clear Min’s cup.
"What?" Min whirls, fists clenched at her sides. She thinks of the medium with his waxy hands. She thinks of the Turtle Man and his bunk bed. The sirens on the magazine covers. Her mom in her golden shoes, lying in a mahogany box, waiting to disappear forever. After they lowered her down, after someone intoned something about Jesus, everyone would go eat. Everyone would gorge themselves, a reward for grieving, a reward for it not being them in the box. Tears are falling now and now that they’re falling, Min is worried that they’ll never stop.
The counter woman looks slightly alarmed, embarrassed, but she clears her throat and adds, "It’s just…We get at least one of you a month coming in here, asking her things. And…if I could give some advice? Even though I’m not some singer?" Her voice is gentle now, so Min stares at the poodle on her shirt and nods, shrugs.
"Jen, she’s just a woman. She doesn’t have any answers for you. And most people who go looking for other people to solve their problems? They pretty much know what answers they want." The woman stares at Min for a long moment and then kind of shakes her shoulders, leans down to pick up the white cat. "Isn’t that right, Mr. Waffle?"
Min doesn’t wait for Mr. Waffle’s reply, she just scoops up her phone and walks out into the sunshine. Foster is walking through the front door of her office now, the streaked door shutting behind her, sealing her in that hallway of doors. Min tucks away Foster’s dismissal and the counter woman’s words behind doors number twenty and twenty-one in her own hallway, next to the door that holds that memory of the Sad One and the magnolia tree and the time machine, the time machine covered in glitter that her mother made. The one that never seemed to work for her. She barricades those doors in her mind and feels the tears dry on her face, looks down at the swinging shopping bag at her side, filled with a pool of black crepe, wrinkled and covered in subway dust and she knows…she knows…it’s not right. That nothing will be right. That no one could ever teach her, not even her mother, how to shop for this.
Min’s mother never taught her how to buy a dress for something like this. A first date, sure. Something light blue and slightly long, like shadows before the night comes—as in right when the date should end. Graduation? Something the other girls would never wear—neither Christening gown nor virginal cocktail waitress. Think a fairy on Labor Day weekend. A funeral? Her mother’s own funeral? Her mother just didn’t picture that happening. Or, if she had, she would have left specific instructions—something aside from, "Oh, if I start to go, dear, just let me wander off into the garden and do myself in with the Foxglove," which she actually said quite often.
"What about this one?" Sandi holds up a fake satin dress that looks like a sack. "The uglier the better, right? It’s not like you’d ever want to wear it again…" Spoken just like someone who had only ever had a grandparent die. Min’s mother might not have picked out her daughter’s mourning wear, but she was not the kind of woman who would want her progeny dripping tears on a morbid tent.
Min shakes her head and blinks in the glare of the department store lights, rubs her eyes and pushes all of her gnarled pink hair to the other side of her head.
Sandi sighs. "Well, what’s Lin wearing?" Somewhere a child shrieks in that register only very small children and nightbirds can reach and Sandi flinches, sending a waft of Santal 33, which costs like a million dollars, fluttering off of her trench coat. She does not smell like not soup and strangers’ casseroles, a stench that emanates from Min’s own hoodie.
"I dunno. Probably a hand-stitched frock of fresh black roses with a matching onesie for Rose." Min’s niece was frequently better dressed than Min herself, perhaps because her older sister owned a successful florist/boutique that modeled garments off the various blooms that appeared in its back garden. The whole store made you feel that feeling—you know the one. Like your mom has just finished reading you a fairytale and your bedroom is suffused in moonlight and a dream is creeping into your mind that you know will be good. Min, still in college—working on a never-ending thesis on the 1925 Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin—dressed in her dad’s old pilled ski sweaters and sometimes bought bodega roses when she wanted to feel some inkling of moonlight and good dreams.
"I don’t know if I even want to go," Min says, the words leaping from her throat like frogs. And, quite suddenly, she sits on the cool plastic linoleum floor, letting the truth sink in. Going means ugly black dresses. Going means forcing down funeral food and hugging distant relatives. Going means her mother is dead. "Maybe I can live here now. In Women’s Formal."
Sandi’s eyes widen and she briefly looks around the Filene’s Basement like she’s reached some final ring of hell. The track lighting flickers menacingly overhead as if to complete the effect. "You don’t mean that! I mean, your mother…You don’t want to…"
Min splays her legs out in front of her, a pile of black dresses pooling in her lap like tired phantoms. "She won’t be there," she says to the dresses. "Whatever it is, however many glorious custom arrangements Lin makes, she wouldn’t like it. She liked fuss, lord did she like fuss…Remember that time machine she built for me and…" She trails off.
He hasn’t called. It hits her then. The Sad One. Neighbors and more for eighteen years and he hasn’t called. She swallows, folding that away for later worrying, "Sure, fuss was fun…but she didn’t like…sadness. Why can’t I just remember her the way I want to? Why can’t I just get drunk in the garden and fall asleep in her closet with her shoes?"
Sandi twists her hands, obviously lost for words. People did that a lot now. Stood there looking sad. Murmured. She almost feels bad for Sandi, with her sleek red bob and her lined eyes, her best friend’s tragedy ruining her Saturday afternoon, a brief reprieve from marketing baby products to upscale moms who hated their children. A few months would pass, and she’d get tired of Min crying for no reason. She’d stop inviting her to things she thought Min might ruin. She’d feel bad later, though, when it was her turn to feel tunneled out. Gone. Maybe she’d apologize for not understanding and they could move in together, dress in black, start collecting cats.
Min drags herself to her feet, repelled by the ghoulish adventures of her mind. "OK, I’ll take…" she grabs the top dress from her pile, one that isn’t made of satin and bears no sequins and appears to have armholes "…this one. Let’s go. Don’t wanna be late."
Sandi scoops the rest of the dresses from the floor and drapes them over a rack. "Are you sure you want to…? I mean…You’re not too…upset?"
Min gives a sharp bark of laughter and strides toward the checkout. "Upset" was a word for milk and stomachs. Not this. Certainly not this.
*
The medium turns his face into the candlelight so that it wanes like a moon. "May I come to you next?" he asks, extending a bony hand.
Min wonders if she’s supposed to touch it. It looks waxy, like the tall white tapers in the middle of the room, candles carved into the forms of shapely women and aroused men. Sandi chokes down something that sounds like a nervous laugh and the medium narrows his eyes. The other women are perfectly still, though—they hover, recessed into the dark—and everything smells, way too strongly, of sage.
The medium clears his throat and Min jumps. "Um, yeah, sure," she answers, shifting so that her folding chair squeaks. She feels her phone buzz and buzz in her pocket and winces. Lin had left messages. Tons of messages. About picture frames and food and tablecloths—tablecloths! Who gave one single fuck about tablecloths?
He closes his eyes and starts humming—the marionette lines by his lips cut deep—then snaps his eyes open, rolls his head back. "I see two men. Two men standing on either side of you," he drones, his lips barely moving. Min leans forward so that she can hear him better. She’s not sure what she wants to hear. Something, maybe. Something from her mom explaining why. Why was it time to leave. Now she’s not so sure why she came. When she got the Groupon in her email that morning it seemed like a sign. Now she’s choking on sage.
"Your grandfather. Your father and your grandfather? They passed on. They passed on and they want you to know they are here. They are with you. They want you to take care of yourself, these men. They are worried that you are sad. Are you sad?" His black eyes lock on hers, watering, sympathetic.
Min nods, even though her grandfather and father are still very much alive. Her phone buzzes again. Yes, she’s sad. Maybe something more than sad.
"Yes, they are worried…" the medium’s fingers curl into his palm. "You are with a man they do not like…He will hurt your heart." He taps his chest with a melting taper finger. Nods.
Min frowns. She’s single. Has been since the Sad One left her at the end of their eighteenth summer, when he told her she was too much and too difficult and walked through the pine trees to his little white house. She watched the light in his window far past the point when it blinked out, standing in her yard in her Labor Day weekend fairy dress then went inside and ripped the moonlight dress to shreds while her mother let her, petting her hair and crying tears into her scalp. Why hasn’t he called?
Min’s fingers stiffen as Sandi reaches over and gives them a squeeze and suddenly she feels stupid for being here. She feels stupid for wasting the twenty dollars. She feels stupid for thinking this was any way to say goodbye. But mostly, mostly she just feels angry—at this man with his Groupon and his pile of twenties and his too-calm voice. At this ring of weepy women who probably just want their ex-boyfriends back. Who don’t know how this feels. Who will go to brunch after this and laugh as they get day-drunk on $15 mimosas the size of their heads and fall asleep watching Netflix in a sea of pillows.
A truck rumbles by outside, and in the darkness it sounds like a beast waking up and stretching. The medium turns to the next woman in the circle, rolls his head back and intones in a garish Southern accent, "Your guardian angel…she picked cotton."
"Wait." The word erupts from Min’s mouth. "That’s it?"
The medium’s moony face snaps back toward her, this time less dazed-looking; she sees him checking the Timex on his wrist. "I only see what the spirits want me to see, child…" he says slowly, his eyes ticking back to the girl with the cotton-picking guardian angel and, in turn, his watch.
"But…I mean, what you said is…bullshit!" Min stands up, shaking. Sandi leaps up beside her, puts her hand on Min’s arm.
"Min, let’s just…go get a mimosa or something…"
"No! You’re…you’re…" she glares at the medium’s waxy bald head, his black cowl-neck sweater, the Egyptian symbols tattooed into his skinny arms. "You’re just a fucking vampire! You suck our sadness away and feed us delusion. So that we’re just like you. Always fucking lost. But you have no real answers, do you? No real directions. Do you?"
Min’s chest is heaving and all the girls are looking at her. One girl, her hair piled on her head like a piece of modern art, scowls and crosses her arms. The girl next to her, with the guardian angel, smirks conspiratorially. The medium just blinks, like he’s a sphinx with all the secrets behind his eyes, not colored contacts washing them black.
Min grabs her shopping bag and her purse and Sandi’s arm and steers her friend toward the door. "Oh, yeah?" she says over her shoulder as she bangs open the door to the street. "Ease up on the fucking sage!"
*
Later, that song by ODB blares from the speakers and Mariah sings along. When ODB got out of jail, he was going to do a remix. Min melts into the wooden bench and kicks her feet halfway out of her boots. Her drink is too sweet. Her phone is dead. She wants to sleep, right here on the bench in the dark while Mariah sings about her boyfriend in heaven, but Sandi grabs her hands and pulls her up.
"Do you want to go home?" Sandi yells into her ear, pressing a finger into Min’s earlobe so she can hear better. She pushes a glass of water into Min’s hands.
Min just shakes her head and smiles. The ceiling spins with pretty lights and the water drops to the floor, glass shattering at her feet. Sandi shakes her head and pulls Min forward into all the bodies toward the door, but Min’s face smacks into a man’s plaid chest and she stops and sways. He smiles down at her with a cracked front tooth. He smiles down at her and the lights keep prettily flashing and someone else is singing now and they’re kissing. His mouth tastes like Oriental carpets. One of Min’s boots is gone.
The lights flash some more and she’s sitting down hard on the bathroom floor. Her boot is gone and now her phone is dead and cracked and Sandi is blinking into her face, holding her wrists with chilly fingers and repeating the word "home." The lights are bright and toilets are flushing and girls are asking over and over, "What did you take?"
Then she’s up, up, up and swaying, pushing out the door into the dark again, into the swirling lights. The man with the broken tooth stands outside the door, holding her shoe. He kneels down as she shoves her foot into the boot, and then he slings her over his shoulder and they laugh into the outside even though she’s kind of crying.
*
"That’s Herbert," the man says, stretching so that his ribs strain against his pale skin. He takes a lusty bite of his deli sandwich, mayonnaise spilling onto his navy blue comforter. His bed isn’t a bed, really—it’s the bottom half of a bunk, like something out of a child’s room. "I won him at a school carnival when I was eight. Some ring toss game. He’s lived longer than a lot of my friends."
The turtle knocks its head against the side of the glass tank, marching into nothing.
"What happened to the rest of your bed?" Min asks blurrily, ignoring the sandwich the man had bought for her perched next to the turtle’s tank. He had raved about it being the best in Brooklyn as he ferried her toward his third-floor walkup on the handlebars of his bike. She had laughed then, tossed back her head and felt hungry. Now, sweaty in his flannel sheets, she feels more of a kinship with the turtle who will not die.
"My brother took it, Mike. He lives in L.A.," the man says. Min realizes she can’t remember his name. "I know it’s silly and whatever, but I feel like we’re still together when I’m in here."
Min smirks. "Creepy."
The man laughs. "No, I mean, I miss him, you know?" He slings an arm around Min. "He’s all the way across the country. Now at least he can be here, kind of?"
"That makes sense," Min says.
"He used to tell me stories from the top bunk—mostly about comic book characters and movie characters and whatever. I miss that," the man crumples up his sandwich wrapper, aims at his trashcan and misses. "But I can’t, like, call him now and be like, 'Tell me that one about He-Man again,' right? We can’t do shit like that anymore. We’re old."
Min nods into the pillow. "I guess."
"So, what’s the deal with your family? You miss them much?" the boy asks, his hand skating up her side. Min gives the turtle a last look, thinks for a second that the boy’s hand feels nothing like the Sad One’s, how no one’s ever will, and then pulls his face toward hers.
*
In focus. Out of focus. The ladies wink and toss their hair from the front of the magazines, their "bad bits" obscured by a piece of black plastic. Her mom had jokingly called them that. "Bad bits."
The subway newsstand owner leers at Min as she squints at the sirens with their buoyant breasts, so she turns toward the tracks and watches a rat ford a river of sludge.
The train is really late and Sandi is really worried—at least according to the ten missed calls and twelve texts. The Turtle Man had let her charge her phone, so she knows. She also knows that the Sad One still hasn’t called—even though she’s sure he knows. Lin had posted the news on Facebook. People wrote dumb things underneath the post, but none of them were from the Sad One. That alone makes Min want to cry again. The big, gasping sobs she had let out when Lin had first called her. The ones that tore her chest apart and made her feel like she was really, truly going to die. Was there any evolutionary use to crying? Aside from wearing you out enough so that you could sleep after a tragedy?
A train pulls up, but it’s full of morning commuters and looking at them all packed in there together chest-to-chest makes Min’s already dirty skin itch. She looks down at her shopping bag and back at the sirens on the magazine covers and they wink at her, it seems. "We know where you’ve been…We know we’re you’re going," they trill in her brain and suddenly she can’t breathe the subterranean air anymore. She pushes her way through the throngs of commuters and up the stairs and finds herself topside, panting. She lets her limbs go jelly and half collapses onto a bench.
She breathes in and out like her therapist had suggested. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again her head is less fuzzy and her vision less starry. Now she’s even able to read the writing on the bench: "Jennifer Foster, Attorney at Law," letters marching over a pale face framed with dark straight hair.
*
"She reminds me of you," the Sad One told her when she was sixteen, straddling a lower branch on the magnolia tree in her backyard in black jeans ripped at the knee. "This girl does. You need to listen to this." Then he handed her a tape.
Jen Fissure had dark straight hair like Min’s was when she was younger, according to the tape case bearing her name. Parted in the middle. Serious eyes spaced far apart like a shark’s. But her voice was nothing like Min’s. Fissure’s voice rippled and croaked and careened around like a bouncy ball. Min kept hers low, especially around the Sad One. She was afraid to startle him.
A few years ago he had wandered into her backyard from his, like a deer, but crying. Min’s mother had made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a cup of hot tea—even though it was summer, because she always said tea fixed most things—and they had all sat at the table in silence.
"My mom went to the store," he finally choked out, weeping.
Min had stifled a laugh—it seemed like a strange thing to cry about—but her mom filled his teacup again and nodded. "Where is your mom now?"
The boy’s nose dripped and his eyes watered and he shook his head. "My…mom…went to the store…" he said again, as if they were the only words he knew. Finally, Min’s mom coaxed his number from him, and she called his father out of their earshot, nodding and nodding until she came back to the table and announced he was staying for dinner. Min found out later that the Sad One’s mom had gone to the store a year ago and never came home.
Min’s mom always had a Tupperware box of paints and glitter and string in the greenhouse and she went to get it. Then she grabbed their hands and marched them out to the garden shed.
"We’re going to make a time machine," she said. "And it will only work for us. Any time we want to remember something happy — it will only work for happy things — we can use it to help us."
Min and the boy both nodded as if this made perfect sense then went to work painting knobs and dials in glitter and poster paint on the door to the shed. They worked until dark spilled across the grass like ink and the real deer started whispering out of the forest. Until the fireflies came out and circled them, as if to give them light.
Min could never really get the time machine to work. But the Sad One kept coming back again and again, at first to touch the glittery painted knobs and dials, his eyes closed tight—and then he just came.
"She wasn’t around long enough—Jen," sixteen-year-old Sad One said, back in Min’s initial memory, lying under the tree and looking up at her under hooded eyes. "She was talented as hell though. God, I wish I could have heard her sing."
"Why can’t you?" Min asked, suddenly consumed with jealousy over the women on the tape cover.
"She doesn’t perform anymore," the Sad One said, "She had one hit and then quit. Which makes no sense at all. But it’s kind of beautiful in a way. She left everything perfect. She didn’t mess it all up by going country or finding Jesus or whatever. She just…left."
The Sad One liked girls who burned bright and then evaporated. He liked girls he could never really touch. Min was all too tangible. She looked down at her knees as he talked, covered in scabs and scars. She was always bumping into the world like she couldn’t help marking it with her blood.
He told her how Fissure’s mother died when she was sixteen; the story went that she skipped the funeral all together—instead she hitchhiked from Ohio to the East Coast and started playing at CBGBs and other clubs when she was seventeen. Just her and her guitar. She met her band mate, Lex Motive (a.k.a. John Marshall), smoking outside Mercury Lounge and they got married a week later. Their record came out within a year, and then Fissure evaporated. Motive died a few years later of an overdose after unsuccessfully trying to form his own band, Ulterior Motives.
"Although…I did hear Fissure was, like, a paralegal in the city now. Her name’s really Jen Foster…" the Sad One added. He braided blades of grass together in a long chain with his tan fingers. “But how many paralegals named Jen Foster do you think there are in New York? More than there are blades of grass in this yard." He let his chain fall to the ground. "We should find her someday, though…"
After that, Min bought Jen Fissure’s sole record at the store downtown and listened to it over and over again, until she knew the words better than her own thoughts. She wished she really could be like Jen, someone who made the Sad One happy, someone who had such a talent for disappearing when she wanted to. And then she kind of stopped thinking about her. Not being Jen Fissure was just one of the ways she had disappointed the Sad One, and she didn’t need to keep dwelling on that.
*
Now, here she is again. The address under Jen Foster’s name is somewhere in Ridgewood, Queens. Min isn’t sure where, exactly. There’s an area around there, though, that people call the Cemetery Belt, because of the preponderance of graveyards—and in that area is an address Min knows by heart by now, one that she’s supposed to visit at 2 p.m. today. Min used to love graveyards, mostly because she didn’t really understand what they were. They were just lovely, quiet places with manicured lawns and angels standing sentry. Her mom used to take her to a really old one by their house that overlooked the sea, and once she found a perfect robin’s egg—dried out like nature’s mausoleum. When she finally found out about death, though, she used to sit up at night, frozen in fear, picturing all the pretty tombstones and crying.
She puts Foster’s address into her phone and, without thinking too much about it, calls an Uber. The driver pulls up and she climbs into the backseat wreathed in twinkle lights and plastic flowers. Tiny pieces of paper festoon the insides of the doors, emblazoned with phrases like, "Don’t worry, be happy" and "Everything happens for a reason." Min peels off the "Everything happens for a reason" piece of paper and stares at it, flapping at the end of her pointer finger. Then she crumples it up and shoves it in her purse. It was a sad platitude, sure, but it seemed right somehow.
The city darts by outside the plastic-flower-wreathed windows, rows of tan brick buildings, jutting porches where old men sit in chairs and smoke, the mingled smells of fried chicken and lasagna and spices eddying into the car as it swerves down side streets. Min’s stomach cramps as she realizes she can’t remember the last time she ate. She hadn’t been able to eat much since it happened. Drinking was exceedingly easy, though. The haze and burning of alcohol make it harder to remember why she’s hollow in the first place.
The Uber judders to a stop in front of a low, dun-colored building flanked by a funeral home and a pizza place with sun-bleached paper plates taped in the window advertising dollar slices—a faded sign above a single door reading, "Foster and Associates." Min puts her hand on the door handle, hesitates.
"Miss?" the Uber driver chirps from the front of the car. "Everything is OK?"
Min nods, catching his dark, crinkled eyes in the rearview. Then she clears her throat and opens the door.
You have to ring a bell to gain entry to Foster and Associates, so Min peers through the dingy window, trying to find anyone who looks remotely like the girl with the straight black hair and shark eyes—thirty years faded. All she can see is an empty hallway ringed with doors. The image reminds her of something her mom used to tell her: "If you want to remember something, picture a long hallway with thousands of closed doors. Take that memory, then open the door, and stow it there."
Min had tried it once, when a kindergarten classmate she had a crush on meowed like a cat in the middle of a spelling lesson. That memory is still in her brain behind door number four. There are too many memories of her mother to fit behind a door, though. Memories that can’t be separated from what came before. So, instead of being safely stowed, they pop out of her when she least expects them—as she walks down a sunny street to pick up her laundry or rides the train to school. Memories that make her want to take an axe to all those doors so that they can never close again, so she can sit with her mom in that hallway for eternity.
Min is leaning against the brick exterior of the pizza place, tears rolling down her face, when the door opens and a woman trundles out. Encased in a blue polyester pantsuit, thirty extra pounds, shuffling in black heels—but her grey-streaked black hair neatly parted in the middle, her wide-apart eyes ringed with smudged eyeliner…
Min dashes the tears from her cheeks and fishes a pair of sunglasses from her purse, opens her mouth. But the woman is already shuffling across the street, pushing open the door to a coffee shop called The Cute Cat Café. Min takes a deep breath and follows her, the bell above the door jingling as she enters the tiny shop. "Tiny" might not be the right word, though. Perhaps the space is bigger than it looks. It’s hard to tell, as every surface is covered in ticking cat clocks, all chugging away at different times. Five real cats—one white and four grey tabbies—prowl the carpeted floor, and two more (orange this time) perch on a decaying cat tree in the corner, narrowing their eyes at Min as she stands, taking it all in.
"You hungry?" the woman behind the counter says—skinny, middle-aged, wearing a sweater emblazoned with, surprisingly, a large applique of a poodle. Min blinks, notices that Foster is tucking into a tuna sandwich by the cat tree, the animals ringing her in a strange maypole dance, waiting for her to drop something.
"Well?" the counter woman says, gesturing up at the chalkboard menu.
"Um, just a tea?" Min says, stepping toward the counter, her eyes still on Foster as the woman finally relents and feeds a bit of tuna to the white cat. The others meow indignantly until she doles out bounty to each and every one of them. She’s down to half a sandwich now.
Although the place is empty aside from Foster—and the cats—Min sits at the next table over, staring at her tea. There’s cat hair on the rim of the cup and all of a sudden she feels very hungover. She puts her phone on the table and casts a sidelong glance at the woman, the bags under her eyes, the worn-out shoes.
Min’s mom never wore scuffed shoes—all her heels were polished, standing in a militant line in her closet, arranged by color like couture rainbow. One of her last requests was for a new pair of shoes to wear in the hospital, so Min and Lin had had to go to Bloomingdales and buy some sparkling gold pumps with their mother’s credit card, a diminutive size five. They cost more than Min’s rent.
Somehow, their mother had convinced the doctors to let her wear them in her hospital bed, the sharp gold heels poking out of the scratchy blue sheets, catching on everyone’s purses and bags as they huddled around her when her eyes didn’t open anymore. She had thought she would walk out of the hospital in them, into the sun.
Min blinks and a tear falls on her phone screen, which lights up with a parade of unanswered calls and texts. Messages from friends promising to do "anything I can" and missed calls from her sister, her dad and Sandi. Nothing, of course, from the Sad One. The most recent, from Lin, reads: "Min, it’s almost 2 p.m. You can’t miss this. You know you can’t." Then, as if she didn’t remember—the way you can’t shake a nightmare that wakes you at the witching hour—that address not far from this cat-encrusted café. That address out there among that row of tombstones.
She and Lin had taken a cab the other day to meet with some people, the people who dealt with things like that, and Min’s heart had almost choked her as they soared past miles and miles of tombstones. For some reason, she pictured a million people standing on the grass, a million people instead of stones, staring at her. A million people wondering how they came to be standing in a crowd with nowhere to go.
Foster is finishing up the last of her sandwich now, sharing the crusts with the cats, folding up the wax paper and napkins into a neat pile. Min watches her hands, her grey-streaked black hair swinging into her face, her skinny legs in their sagging tan nylons. She remembers the sun on her face as the Sad One told her that she reminded him of this woman who was so good at melting away, this woman who burned bright for a little while. Who melted away from her family and then from everyone. Foster stands up now, gives the cats a final scratch and turns to go.
"Do you—" Min almost shouts, jumping from her seat. The grey cats scatter, but the white one just sits there, purring. Foster freezes, but doesn’t turn around.
"Do you…" Min swallows, "…do you wish you had stayed?" She doesn’t know which time she’s asking about. She doesn’t know why she’s even asking.
Foster’s shoulders tick a little higher and she takes a shuddering breath. She stands for such a long moment that she starts to look like one of those angels in the graveyard that gave Min nightmares. Then she sighs, turns her head slightly and whispers through clenched teeth, "I’m sorry. I can’t help you."
The cats crowd around the door as it closes behind Foster, leaving Min standing frozen, her tea cold on the table.
The woman at the counter gives a bark of laughter and bustles around the tables to clear Min’s cup.
"What?" Min whirls, fists clenched at her sides. She thinks of the medium with his waxy hands. She thinks of the Turtle Man and his bunk bed. The sirens on the magazine covers. Her mom in her golden shoes, lying in a mahogany box, waiting to disappear forever. After they lowered her down, after someone intoned something about Jesus, everyone would go eat. Everyone would gorge themselves, a reward for grieving, a reward for it not being them in the box. Tears are falling now and now that they’re falling, Min is worried that they’ll never stop.
The counter woman looks slightly alarmed, embarrassed, but she clears her throat and adds, "It’s just…We get at least one of you a month coming in here, asking her things. And…if I could give some advice? Even though I’m not some singer?" Her voice is gentle now, so Min stares at the poodle on her shirt and nods, shrugs.
"Jen, she’s just a woman. She doesn’t have any answers for you. And most people who go looking for other people to solve their problems? They pretty much know what answers they want." The woman stares at Min for a long moment and then kind of shakes her shoulders, leans down to pick up the white cat. "Isn’t that right, Mr. Waffle?"
Min doesn’t wait for Mr. Waffle’s reply, she just scoops up her phone and walks out into the sunshine. Foster is walking through the front door of her office now, the streaked door shutting behind her, sealing her in that hallway of doors. Min tucks away Foster’s dismissal and the counter woman’s words behind doors number twenty and twenty-one in her own hallway, next to the door that holds that memory of the Sad One and the magnolia tree and the time machine, the time machine covered in glitter that her mother made. The one that never seemed to work for her. She barricades those doors in her mind and feels the tears dry on her face, looks down at the swinging shopping bag at her side, filled with a pool of black crepe, wrinkled and covered in subway dust and she knows…she knows…it’s not right. That nothing will be right. That no one could ever teach her, not even her mother, how to shop for this.
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Brenna Ehrlich is the director of content and culture (indie and rock) at TIDAL. She's also the author of PLACID GIRL and STUFF HIPSTERS HATE, and has had short stories published in Cease, Cows, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Anon magazine, Impose magazine and Beyond Books. Her other writing credits include a weekly column on Internet etiquette for CNN and articles for Rolling Stone, Bandcamp, Mashable, Heeb magazine, Broadly, Brooklyn Magazine and Nylon.
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