The Visit

My cousin hadn’t ever visited me or called me on the telephone before, but I did have her number stored, thankfully. At least I saved her the discomfort of having to describe herself to her own kin—“it’s Charlotte. Charlotte, the daughter of your mother’s brother?” I must have picked up at the last possible second, trying to remember as much about her life as I could. Baltimore, Philly, a pregnancy scare, I think, and something about real estate…. Our family wasn’t close-knit.

Turns out it didn’t matter what I was able to reference. She was short, unexpressive, kept cutting off questions that could have led to a conversation. She wanted to know if I still lived in Brooklyn and whether I talked to my parents very often. I do and I didn’t. What about our grandparents? I knew they were down in Florida now, but that was about it. She’d been there recently, she said, and they don’t live together anymore; I found this odd and intriguing but she jumped right to asking whether I lived with anyone. I told her no, “though there’s a girl—woman—that stays with me a lot.”

“I understand,” she said, but I was sure she did not.

“I’d like to come up there,” she said then, “with my boy-man.” It was the only joke she made. “We have an air mattress.”

Somehow I agreed. Sure, I said, when were you thinking? Like this was normal for us.

It was the start of summer and I wasn’t busy. I had recently quit a gainful job as an office manager at a small law firm in the Empire State Building, a bunch of German expats with American wives. The day before I gave notice the managing partner, Walter, called me into his office and told me to pick up his Maserati from the shop while a pornographic video played on his laptop. He was sitting in his leather Queen Anne high-back chair, thick arms resting on the wings, in front of a portrait of some German cavalry, imperious like him, though Walter looked like he could hardly mount a toilet. The screen wasn’t facing me but I could see the woman’s large, swinging breasts reflected in his black eyes; his face was placid, no flush of embarrassment or even excitement, like the porn was just a backdrop, too familiar to stimulate.

I knew Walter’s wife Linda from a small, intimate writing group; she’d helped me get the job. She was a petite woman, didn’t look at all like the women in his porn; in fact Walter had once brought up the size of her breasts to me—just me, I guess because I knew her and could corroborate. “Small, perky tits, no?” It was the same way he asked for confirmation of some mundane, unsolicited observation he’d make about one of the impressionist paintings that hung around the office: “short, quick brushstrokes, no?” He had them shipped in from an art dealer in Germany and had me ship them back if he felt they were too “minor.” He was a piece of shit. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Linda.

Funny thing is that none of this was the last straw for me. It was when I got back to the office and handed him the keys to his Maserati and he said, “bet that was a treat, wasn’t it?”—like I’d been dying for the privilege of being his chauffeur—that I decided to call it quits. My ethics are warped, self-absorbed, revolve around personal slights, I’ll admit.

The next day, when I told Walter I was leaving, he was sitting in the same spot behind that mammoth captain’s desk, his absurd antique tripod telescope taking up much of the space where work could be done, facing his view of downtown Manhattan. He closed his laptop and looked at me with that same placid face, almost sincerely. “What could I have done better?” he said. I flinched. Maybe his ethics were warped, too.

I missed some things about it—wandering around the high, deserted levels, creeping into empty offices with nothing but a floor plan on an easel. Eating my sandwiches on the ground, sitting pretzel-style before a floor-to-ceiling window. I studied a lot of old Lewis Hine photography then, drawn to the sturdy immigrant workers who built the place in their caps and overalls, flying high, bolting beams, avoiding death—mostly. What would they say about the work of a man like Walter, a man like me, enjoying the fruits of their labor? That job made me feel weak and guilty. It was the easiest money I ever made.

After I left I started writing a story about Evelyn McHale, a young woman who jumped from the 86th floor in 1947 and landed in surprisingly pristine condition on top of a limousine. Splashed across the cover of Life Magazine—“The Most Beautiful Suicide”—and memorialized by Andy Warhol. She had a legacy. I thought I’d keep it going and imagined her brief life with her fiancé, the effect the event had on him, on bystanders and artists, how that compared to the note she left: “I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me,” she wrote, an impossible request. “I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.” I read parts of this story at a new, larger writing group I joined in Gowanus that met in a warehouse prop shop owned by one of the organizers. (I’d left the other group behind to save face—mine or Linda’s, I’m not sure.) The chapters were too long, the other writers said, and the story spanned too many years and characters for its weak foundation. Was it a story or a novella? “Your protagonist is a stereotype, less a woman than a prop for male scrutiny,” said one of the younger women, too seriously for the setting, I thought. A large, plastic model of a fetus in the womb loomed on a shelf above her bushy curls.

“So then it’ll be a hit, right?” One woman chuckled, staring at her feet. A handsome gay guy in his fifties rolled his eyes so far around I could hear them go. Can’t win ‘em all.

To save money I avoided buying things like toilet paper and barely used my own bathroom to take a shit; someplace was always open. My critic from the group—Carol was her name—ended up meeting with me privately to discuss what we were reading, how to write across gender…once she discovered I wasn’t such a terrible misogynist we began a sweet affair. She didn’t mind the lack of amenities and would stay the night in my studio without leaving a trace or asking for anything besides a glass of water. Sometimes before we made love she took a swig from a flask she kept in her purse. She crept her way into the story, of course, and my Evelyn started to sound like her, aloof in her analysis, alone with her intellect, saying things like “observing or partaking, there was little joy in this lonely, urban life.”

I read some of Carol’s stuff and it was great, very cerebral––twenty-four hours in the mind of an acquiescent, ordinary man dealing with a crisis or two perspectives of the same city block on a Saturday afternoon—so I thought she’d like the direction I’d taken. But when I read her the revision Carol said it still didn’t work, that it seemed affected, which I reacted to much like her acquiescent, ordinary man, with fumbled excuses for my deficiencies and no solutions to address them. She looked at me sympathetically then but said very little before making love to me unlike she had before—more kissing, finger-tracing—and scuttling off to her nighttime gig as an usher at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I lay there in my Murphy bed, disappointed and depleted, tasting her flask whiskey on my breath, when my cousin called.

I had guests coming now, so I bit the bullet and bought supplies. I felt suddenly that I needed to make a good impression, and my anxiety about this grew as the date approached. None of my family members had visited me before. I wouldn’t have thought Charlotte would be the first, and I had no sense of what she liked or disliked. Did she like coffee or tea, for example. What kind of milk––from a cow or a nut? Would she be offended by the artful nudes pinned on my living room wall? Did she like to walk and talk or sit quietly somewhere busy? Would she roll her eyes when I asked her to leave her shoes outside the front door? Did she watch reality television? Did she compost?

They were touring the Northeast, she said; New York would be their first stop on the way to New England and eventually Canada. I didn’t know she had a long-term boyfriend because she wasn’t online and, as I mentioned, we’d never talked on the phone. It took me the course of an entire run to remember the last time we’d seen each other.

In the few days before Charlotte was supposed to arrive, I didn’t meet up with anyone. Sometimes the calendar was empty like this, though I didn’t do it on purpose. In fact I said yes to most invitations. But then some days I would realize that I hadn’t spoken for many hours when I found myself longing to say “excuse me” to a stranger on the street. I preferred to say it like “excuse me”––pointedly––because someone stopped short in front of me or was walking in a drunken zigzag. Much better than an apologetic “excuse me,” when I myself am the nuisance. Though sometimes either will do.

Around the time I quit Walter’s firm I had also started to wake up abnormally early, so I took long walks in the pale, windy mornings when, it turned out, not many people were out and about. I picked things up that were left at the bottom of stoops and porch steps and put them in my Key Food tote bag, lingering a little to see if the proprietor would catch me rummaging and have something to say. But it was usually too early for that.

The day before Charlotte was supposed to arrive I had a particularly fruitful morning walk, finding a stack of old Life magazines sitting precariously on a single brick and a vintage, framed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof poster, starring Elizabeth Taylor. The Life magazines reminded me of Evelyn McHale. The poster reminded me of my brother, who had once played the character Brick in a high school production of the play that I suspected my entire family had come to see, including Charlotte, her parents, and our grandparents. But I couldn’t say for sure. I sent pictures of these items to Carol but she didn’t respond. I hadn’t spoken to her in five days, since I told her I had family coming.

I replaced the artful nudes on my living room wall with the poster of Elizabeth Taylor in a slip and spent many hours flipping through the Life magazines, thinking I could turn my story about Evelyn McHale into a collection of speculative pieces based on iconic photography of the mid-20th-century. I could see that appealing to Carol. Or to someone.

It was during this barely hopeful reverie that my buzzer buzzed. “Hello?” I asked. The sound of my voice surprised me. “It’s me, Charlotte,” said another surprising voice. She was a day early. “You’re a day early!” I said before I could catch myself. Excuse me!

“Be right down!” I added.

My building had an elevator but I barely used it––it tended to stop a couple of inches below or above the desired floor and that seemed not to bode well. I ran down the windowless stairwell and didn’t have time to convince myself for certain that I was right about the timeline. Those days on my empty calendar had run together, so pale and windy, one after another––they blew me along. My landlord had recently returned a check to me with the date circled; I’d written the previous year. Wishful thinking.

I wondered if I should drop it, though if she really was a day early and didn’t bother to warn me, that seemed to deserve an explanation. Was Charlotte a defensive person? Did she clam up when asked probing questions?

Charlotte was alone, looking out at the few passersby on the street. Her long black hair was tied in a loose ponytail that rested on a black JanSport backpack and she held onto the extended handle of a small, black suitcase, which she rolled back and forth, back and forth. God knows why but I remember I had the impulse to chop off her hair, like some disturbed local menace whose face you’d see tacked to phone poles.

“Hi, cous,” she said once she turned my way.

“Hi! Is it Wednesday the 27th?” I couldn’t resist.

“I thought so.”

Anyway, there was much else to address.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Had she told me his name? I couldn’t remember––I was supposed to have another day to gather these thoughts.

“Can I come in?”

“Oh, of course, let’s go upstairs.”

I led us to the staircase.

“What floor are you on?”

“The fifth.”
“And there’s no elevator? Is that even legal?”

We crammed into the tight space draped in drop cloths and I breathed in her warm traveler’s scent, mixed with an herbal perfume, like a sage scented candle.

“God, it’s been a while,” she said. “When was the last time?”

This I remembered. “I was thinking about that, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it. My senior year of high school we all went to Uncle Bernie’s wedding, didn’t we? In Florida?” Bernie was our grandfather’s brother who had remarried late in life, with just as much fanfare as a first wedding.

We got to my floor and the elevator stopped. I stared at the doors, but they didn’t open. The elevator attempted to settle itself again, shake loose from a snag, perhaps. “What’s going on?” Charlotte said, like I was a technician. “I don’t know,” I replied sharply, “I don’t use this thing.” Immediately my body was on high alert, in flight with nowhere to go, which did nothing but create a series of positive feedback loops, like an overheated circuit about to blow a breaker.

I quickly assessed the degree to which Charlotte would be able to offer any words of comfort for my racing heart. I found in her skeptical eyes the annoyed presence of a person unwilling to play mother––this is your home, why are you losing your shit? Thankfully I never had to hear her say this because the elevator unstuck itself and began to move again to the floor below, where one of my anonymous neighbors stood waiting for the doors to open, not expecting me to come spilling out of them gripping my chest like I was under cardiac arrest.

Charlotte acted like nothing had happened. “Bernie’s wedding,” she said as I led the way to the staircase. “That’s right.” She said some more about her memory of the event but I was too busy berating myself for my budding claustrophobia to concentrate on her words. “Do you remember that?” she asked as I fumbled for my keys. I dropped them on the speckled laminate outside my door before getting a grip.

“I don’t!” I said, which was probably true anyway.

She looked around the apartment with a blank expression. I saw the Life magazines scattered on the floor and only then realized how dingy they were, how brown with water stains. I had pages from the Times splayed on chairs. On my kitchen table were cut up pieces of odd job advertisements––the kind you’d find on coffee shop cork boards––and portions of my old resumés and cover letters, arranged for a possible collage. The place looked a mess, the lair of a paper hoarder, one who can fall asleep in the space between the discarded clothing littering the bedspread. I wondered if this was how it looked to Carol when she’d been over, and why I hadn’t seen then the resemblance of all my found objects to trash.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to clean up.”

“How long have you lived here?” She put her backpack and suitcase in a corner, sat on one of my kitchen stools, and began to undo and redo her long ponytail.

“Just over a year,” I said. I was surprised to find that her face was familiar. I wouldn’t say she looked like me exactly, but there were references to shared roots: a perpetually furrowed brow, a strong chin and jaw. She wore a hamsa necklace on which I could make out a faint inscription in Hebrew. This was also familiar to me, but I couldn’t determine why––the “hand of Miriam,” my memory told me, but it didn’t ask if I wanted a little more context. Charlotte began to fidget with it, so I diverted my attention to the table, gathering up the scraps, and the floor, piling the magazines by the door, determined to show I could part with some of this accumulated litter and make room for an air mattress. Just then I remembered––

“So, where’s Dylan?” I asked.

“We got in a fight on our way here,” she said flatly. “He’s staying with a friend who lives in Queens. He just dropped me off.”

“Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

I didn’t know if I should probe any further. I didn’t know if I believed her either. My first reaction, I have to admit, was that he didn’t exist. She began to circle the apartment, looking at the books on my shelves and the art on my wall. Looking for something to do, I filled a pot with water to boil.

“You don’t have any pictures,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“There are no photos anywhere.”

There were many photos on the walls, framed and unframed, close-ups and scenes of New Yorkers, mostly black and white, stuff I’d collected.

“I mean of family and friends,” she added, seeing my confusion.

I didn’t think this was significant, but maybe it was. It’s not like they were squirreled away, I just didn’t have any, there were no albums in my closet.

“I guess you’re right. I’ve never thought about that.”

“Do you talk to your brother at all?” she asked, looking at Elizabeth Taylor. “Doesn’t he live in New York?”

“He does, yeah, on the Upper West Side. I haven’t seen him in a while, though.”

“He didn’t answer any of my calls or texts,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, he’s not the best at keeping in touch.”

“Nobody in our family is,” she said.

It was odd, the way that line struck me. It was disparaging, but somehow a more intimate conception of my relatives than I’d heard in years––just the simple fact of a shared attribute, even an attribute that kept us all apart.

“Here,” she said, reaching into the front of her backpack. She brought out her wallet and from within one of its pockets produced a miniature photograph of a family assembled around two older people, who were seated. Our family, our grandparents. We were all wearing matching sweatshirts, branded for their 50th wedding anniversary, and smiling. Our smiles were not matching, though––mine looked embarrassed, my brother’s intense, barely upturned, and Charlotte’s sort of empty, her head tilted. My grandma’s was wide, with many teeth showing, though in my mind that’s not how I would have pictured her; she was always turning away, her eyes darting around rooms and her hands searching for their next endeavor. The photo was disconcerting.

“You can keep that if you want,” she said.

“No, that's okay,” I said. “Maybe this is why I don’t have any family photos. There’s something eerie about them to me.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

“I don’t know what I was feeling at the time that was taken, so it seems fake.” Charlotte squinted at me. “Like the photo is trying to force me to remember it a certain way?”

I’d rather look at people I don’t know, scenes I wasn’t there for, things about which I can make up whatever story I want, without adhering to a rubric of what may have actually happened. Photos were the reason I’d stayed in bad relationships for too long. It was too easy to believe the story they told, and whenever I took the time to review a year or so of moments captured on my phone, the effect obscured the harsher reality of the uncaptured moments in between.

“Well, how do you remember our childhood?” Our childhood, she said, like it was something we had in common. I couldn’t admit that when I thought of my childhood, I didn’t think of her. We lived an hour apart. Her father was a grade-A asshole who yelled for no reason and was strict about traditions. He was never satisfied with the way my parents conducted the Jewish holidays, which was already strict enough for me, so we must have stopped merging our break-fasts and seders early on. These things came to me during Charlotte’s stay; she didn’t put the photograph back in her wallet, she let it sit out on the corner of my kitchen table. Every time I looked at it I remembered a little bit more, but it was very generalized at first, with no flashes of specific incidents.

I said “I must not think about it very often,” to which she answered, “Aren’t you a writer? Isn’t that what all writers write about––their childhoods?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a writer,” I said.

“Then what would you say?”

“That I’m trying to be a writer. What about you?”

“What am I trying to be?”

“Sure,” I said. The boiling water began to screech miserably. I poured out two mugs of lemon ginger tea.

“I’m trying to be a better person,” she said, looking into the tall mirror that lay against the wall next to my bed, tucking in and then untucking her black t-shirt from her jeans. “And to make money.” With the second objective her face changed, like she was appraising her reflection anew with arched eyebrows, and I couldn’t tell if she was commenting on those two things being incompatible.

“Do you have a job?” I asked. She turned to me and looked like I’d asked about her sex life.

“Do you?” she said.

“I’m looking, I’m…applying.” I passed her a mug of lemon ginger tea. She inhaled its scent happily, but it was too hot to drink. If I had wanted a photograph of that day, it would have been of this moment, her smelling the lemony steam, me knowing I’d gotten one thing right, however unrepresentative, however much discomfort lay on either side of the frame.

“Dylan is a colorist, he does really well for himself,” she said. “Gets a lot of commercial work. Did you see that Pepsi commercial, the one from the Super Bowl that got right-wingers all upset because it had those two guys making out? He worked on that, made it look especially sexy. He can make footage look any way you want it to look, really.”

“Oh wow,” I said. I had no knowledge of this commercial from five months ago. “That’s cool. I just worked for a law firm for a while as their office manager but now I’m trying to get a job in teaching.”

I hadn’t said this out loud to anyone, had barely recognized it in myself as a fully formed desire. I didn’t have a plan after quitting Walter’s, but I’d always been able to find a new job before, and getting up very early every day the past few weeks had felt like work. Combined with the twenty-six tabs open on my browser at all times, I’d had the vague sense that I was doing a kind of diligent observational research. Having Charlotte there, though, made it all fall to pieces. I needed to find something. I couldn’t afford to buy her lunch. I had no partner’s success to tout instead of my own. Charlotte took a shower then and I continued to clean up, resolving to ask for more details about Dylan and their fight, considering there were certain practicalities that couldn’t be ignored. Assuming Dylan was real, he had the air mattress.

But my resolution faltered and I couldn’t bring myself to ask much more of her, nervous as I was that she would once again turn it on me––“do you?” she’d said. “Do you have a job?” Do you know where you’ll sleep, once your money runs out? So I didn’t push it and she ended up on my couch, which was the natural thing to have done, anyway.

I asked her what she liked to eat, naming the contents of my fridge, and she said she wasn’t picky, it all sounded good. This was a relief, as I was anticipating some food sensitivity or latent allergy, universal symptoms of the twenty-first century person, it seemed to me––not necessarily the sensitivities, but the naming and cataloguing of them. But Charlotte accepted my thrown-together dinner with its unavoidable gluten and dairy without any objections and offered to clean up, too, before suggesting we find something to watch. She wasn’t picky about that either, so after watching twenty minutes of trailers and agreeing on the paralyzing effect of having too many options, we settled on a documentary about migratory birds. Her company at this point felt natural. She didn’t draw attention to the fact that we didn’t know each other well, and I wondered if this was a defining feature of family, an unspoken attachment that was felt in spite of being unearned.

“I would hate that,” she said at one point during the movie. “Being tracked wherever I go, implanted with a chip for someone else’s study.” I felt like this was a signal, but of what I didn’t know.

While we got ready for bed she became more talkative, like she was unloading information in order to better prepare for an unencumbered sleep. She told me she’d been down to visit our grandmother in Fort Lauderdale, who was living on her own now, assisted every day by a home health aid, but her mind was still very sharp, Charlotte said. Sharp enough to know she wanted a divorce from our grandfather this late in life. “I’m really proud of her,” she said. “I talk to her almost every day. You don’t really talk to her, right?” she said. It was obvious she already knew the answer, that it must have been a topic of discussion, the negligence of the other grandchildren. “Grandma and grandpa are getting a divorce?” I asked, after spitting out my toothpaste.

“Yup, and it’s a long time coming.” She lay flat on the couch, staring up at the crumbling popcorn ceiling.

“You really don’t remember at Bernie’s wedding?” she asked, referencing the thing I’d pretended to hear.

“Tell me again,” I said, tucking myself neatly under my covers, having pushed the clothes into my closet.

“It was the worst party I’ve ever been to,” she said. “Grandpa stormed out of the reception when Bernie didn’t let him make a speech. And then apparently he punched a hole in the wall of the hotel’s bathroom. And your dad and my dad got into a terrible fight about something your dad said to me when he didn’t think my dad was in earshot.”

“What did he say to you?” I asked.

“He said my dad hadn’t fallen far from the tree. And that if I wasn’t careful my mother would end up just like grandma.”

“Like her how?’

“I think he said…muzzled? It was some unusual word.”

“How old were you?”

“I was fifteen, I think. Yeah, that sounds right.”

“Jesus, what a thing to lay on a teenager.”

“Your dad was right, though. Not that any of you were any better,” she added. “You boys were all bullies.”

I swallowed my surprise and remorse without making a sound. I’d never punched a hole in a wall, that much I knew, but beyond that I wasn’t prepared to defend or explain myself about a time to which she clearly devoted much more thought than I did. There was no end to my capacity for forgetting.

The next day Charlotte slept in while I went for one of my early walks. She didn’t stir in response to my fumbling around. When I grabbed my keys I saw the photo that she’d left on the corner of the kitchen table. I couldn’t picture the events of Bernie’s wedding or the 50th anniversary depicted in the photo––which had been years earlier––but as I walked my mind wandered into visions of Charlotte as a younger person, shrouded in a strange and watchful silence, as well as certain images of her home, which I visited no more than sporadically. She’d had a large, square basement with two garden level windows and a drafty, empty space in the center of the room. It was barely finished, with some combination of carpeting and bare cement. We were relegated to spending time there alone, sometimes sitting on a tired, brown sofa that had too many cushions. It was noisy upstairs, but quiet where we were. Quiet and fuzzy.

I looked for Help Wanted signs in windows instead of household leftovers on stoops, comparing the options to a hypothetical job at one of the many charter schools in the area that always wanted data analysts and math teachers with good people skills. There was one sign in curlicue type in the window of a restaurant that sold brisket pastrami sandwiches, hand twisted bagels, and various Jewish pastries I’d never heard of––I imagined I’d gain fifteen pounds in two weeks and eventually adopt a dog that would happily snuggle my love handles at the end of long days on my feet, for which I would spoil her with gourmet, small-batch jerky sticks purchased with the leftover tips I hadn’t already spent on a gym membership I didn’t use.

I couldn’t work at a restaurant again.

There was also a plant shop looking for help. I’d purchased plants before, kept about fifty percent of them alive, and had even successfully made use of the word “loam” in conversation. I imagined telling tens of thousands of hapless new arrivals that, yes, unfortunately all plants need at least some sunlight.

Evelyn McHale was a bookkeeper for an engraving company on Pearl Street in Manhattan. I hadn’t ever considered that engraving could warrant its own business but with a few simple steps, I’d learned from one of my twenty-six browser tabs, I could have my engraving operation up and running. All I needed was a laser system with the right wattage, some design software, and the ability to follow instructions. Becoming an entrepreneur was like answering your own Help Wanted ad.

Evelyn’s fiancé Barry became an engineer and died unmarried in Florida. I didn’t have any bookkeepers or engineers in my family, though I did have some amateur mechanics. My dad was a commercial airline pilot who liked to be known as the neighborhood fixer, offering to solve people’s problems with their junky cars; my mom was an elementary school teacher. Her brother, Charlotte’s father, was a small-time personal injury lawyer and Charlotte’s mother, if memory serves, worked for the city of Baltimore. Our grandpa was an ophthalmologist and our grandma ran a small preschool. I imagined myself on a gameshow, unable to introduce myself past my first name, or in an obituary, as one who “hopped around a lot,” who “may have been a bully as a child.”

I couldn’t resist taking home an old, matte black computer monitor I passed on the sidewalk with a sticky note attached to its square screen that just read “Good.” Back at the apartment I found that Charlotte had replaced herself on the sofa with her own note, saying Dylan had picked her up for a day of sightseeing and would I choose a favorite place for us all to eat dinner downtown? I didn’t know what she meant by downtown, and would have thought someone with a real estate license would be more particular about neighborhoods. I was pretty sure that was the credential she’d earned, and would ask her about the housing stock in Philadelphia (Baltimore?) at dinner.

I spent the remainder of the day writing cover letters on my new, old monitor and applying to jobs at schools that, judging by their photos online, only admitted very happy children. I called Carol and she appeared at first to answer, but all I heard was wind buffeting the microphone before it cut off. She must be averse to something serious, I decided, and avoiding any suggestion that she integrate with other people in my life.

I picked a Korean place in Soho that I’d been to once with a good friend who had since left the city, a place where dishes were shared and people were so busy talking about how good everything tasted that they forgot to kvetch or boast about their weeks. It was fifteen minutes past the reservation time and Charlotte and Dylan still hadn’t shown up. The restaurant wouldn’t seat me without my entire party, so I stood outside, watching people through the glass, passing around their plates. I thought of a seder, then, of my own family passing around the parsley and the horseradish and the matzah. I was sitting next to Charlotte, always handing something off to her that she passed right along to whoever was on the other side, never adding to her own plate. When I was done reading my paragraphs from the Haggadah aloud, she was the one to pick up where I left off. She struggled with some words and skipped over others. I inhaled through my teeth, embarrassed for her. As the youngest, she was meant to sing the four questions, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t. My uncle berated her and I sat very still, before taking over for her as the next youngest, reciting through my dry mouth and stomach ache. As I spoke Charlotte got smaller and smaller next to me until she disappeared into her chair.

“Hi, cous,” she said from behind me.

Once again she was alone.

“Dylan ended up feeling really sick,” she said. “I think it was the tacos we had for lunch, from a cart. He went to stay at his friend’s place again.”

So we ate just the two of us at a small table between two large parties, ordering entrees that we kept to ourselves. She told me about her meandering day, from the Empire State Building to Central Park to the Museum of Modern Art, sprinkling in some of “Dylan’s” reactions to the city among her own, and I nodded along to her tall tale. I didn’t ask her about real estate, hesitant as I was to draw out more falsehoods. We rode the subway together back to my place. She was quick to give up her seat to a hunched woman in a loose, floral frock, after which they smiled at each other shyly and intermittently for the rest of the ride. I remembered, witnessing Charlotte share this fleeting flirtation with an old lady, that we’d called her “Shy Charlotte,” my brother and father and I––a benign nickname, I must have thought at the time, but repeated many times over until it rendered her a caricature, strange and watchful and silent, better recognized than the real thing.

Charlotte stayed for a week, but it seemed like longer, since every day brought with it some revelation, and the progressive blossoming of my memory brought on by her presence added years to the visit. Having her there made me look at my life across a distance, like a historian with enough remove from his era of interest. It struck me as unlikely that much of this remembering was only of memories, as opposed to the events themselves, as I had not thought of these incidents since they occurred.

On a walk in Prospect Park, Charlotte stopped to stare at a chipmunk chowing down on a whole acorn and told a disturbing story of a time we visited my grandparents’ house. She recounted it with such detail that I nearly lost hold of my surroundings, transported as I was by her description. It was the two of us alone again, but younger, and instead of the quiet dark of her basement we shared the grounds of an overgrown backyard, which Charlotte described as bleeding into the thicker woods behind; this made sense of my memory of an unfenced wilderness once you pushed open the screen door. “We would collect and catalog the bugs we found when we were there,” she said, “like monarch butterflies, pill bugs, caterpillars.” She remembered it was always very sunny on these days but there was so much tree cover that the light seemed bright green, as if it came from the leaves themselves. We spent whole afternoons doing this with intense focus, counting as we went, shouting out to each other the number of creatures we’d found––“thirty-two! Thirty-three! Your favorite were the butterflies,” she said, “you used to love putting them in jars and then letting them go before we left.” The time she remembered most clearly, the last time we did this, it was late, the sun must have been setting because it shone as if from inside the forest; we were both very tired and grandpa was frustrated because our parents were late to pick us up, and grandma wasn’t home for some reason to start making dinner. We could hear him repeating “where in the fuck is everybody?” from inside the house but we were too caught up admiring our collection at the bottom of the porch steps to care, and then we saw a rodent creeping its way toward us, like it was drawn to a buffet we’d set out for it. It was a small rat or a big mouse. “We were both trying to stay so still to see what would happen, to keep ourselves from scaring it away,” she said. At this point I remembered what was about to happen. “We didn’t notice grandpa creeping up behind us quietly, and I screamed when he darted into view and smashed the rat with a metal shovel, leaving us to stare at a flattened mound of bloody guts and fur.” At this point the chipmunk appeared to look directly at us and then sprint away, disturbed as I was by this airing of indiscriminate violence against its distant kin. “Grandpa said, ‘Stop attracting vermin into my house, do you hear me?’ I don’t think we moved again until someone came to get us.”

“We didn’t,” I said. “We just stared at that dead animal.”

“You weren’t the same with me after that,” she said. “We weren’t the ‘two youngest’ anymore. I think you hated seeing me cry.” For the rest of the walk we were quiet, though at one point she pointed to a big brown butterfly with what looked like eyes on its wings; she tapped me on the arm, a fast rap with two of her fingers, like she wanted to be sure I didn’t miss it, even though she could see I was already looking.

My usual life also continued on that week, but in unpredictable ways that made it feel foreign to me. These changes seemed linked, too, to this person who’d penetrated my daily routines. I showed up to a meeting of my Gowanus writing group, only to find the prop shop closed for a day of “reinvention––stay tuned!” I waited for thirty whole minutes to see if Carol might come, too, but it appeared I was the only one so uninformed. I began to get calls from Linda, the wife of my former boss, who’d been a friend, the kind of friend that a 25-year-age difference will allow, which is to say it was a somewhat ironic friendship, aware at every moment of its own unlikelihood. The first call came when I was staring at my phone, considering calling my mother to corroborate some of Charlotte’s claims. There appeared Linda’s name, and in my surprise I accidentally answered and then quickly hung up. That night, following one of my creepier impulses, I “swung by” the Brooklyn Academy of Music in an attempt to “run into” Carol, but she didn’t seem to be working, though it was a Saturday, one of her usual shifts. I approached one of the friendlier looking female ushers. “Do you know if Carol is working?” I asked, and her appearance changed quickly, the friendly face a mask, it turned out. “Carol hasn’t shown up for a week,” she said, rubbing her palms against the outside of her pockets. “Nobody’s been able to get in touch with her, she just went AWOL.”

“Oh, really?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “But I’m filling in for her right now.” She put her mask back on and said in a higher pitch, “Do you have a ticket?”

This news made my stomach drop and my mixed-up mind churned out the image of Carol splayed dead on the roof of a black, 1947 Cadillac limousine at the foot of the Empire State Building, her ankles gently crossed, a note left behind with her whiskey flask, “he is much better off without me.” But this terrible phantasm receded after I texted Carol, Are you around for a drink? I was stood up by our entire writing group and need a pick-me-up, and I saw, for a moment at least, the three shaded dots that confirmed she was still with us––if not with me, specifically.

The second call from Linda came when Charlotte and I were on the subway, making our way to the beach at Coney Island, a trip she’d suggested bright and early on her final day with me. She did not make any excuses for Dylan that morning, she just said, “I want something deep-fried and I want to feel like a fish at a feeding ground,” both of which I assured her I could deliver.

We were above ground in a pleasantly uncrowded subway car when Linda appeared on my phone again. Morbid fascination, that’s all I can call it, led me to answer. “Hello, are you there?” she said when I hesitated.

“Yes, hi Linda, how are you?” Charlotte slid closer to me. We had been enjoying the spacious, empty bench, staring out at the sprawl, but now she wanted to hear my call, like she had a sixth sense for controversy.

“I’m not good! Not very good! I’ve been trying to call,” she said. “You never told me you quit Walter’s firm, and now––well––something terrible has happened!”

“Oh no, what is it?” I said. Shy Charlotte angled her ear toward the speaker and I gave my phone the slightest tilt to show she was invited to do so.

“The other partners, they just up and left! They started their own firm, took most of Walter’s clients with them! I hate to ask, but I’m just at the end of my rope here––do you know anything about this?” I remembered a couple of tipsy nights with the other lawyers, sharing our disgust at Walter’s ways.

“Do you know why they did this?”

How he billed clients for my work at an associate’s rate.

“Did they say anything about it to you?”

How he flirted indiscriminately with the few young, female interns he hired, daughters of friends and clients.

“I’m so sorry, Linda, I didn’t know. They didn’t say anything about it to me.” This was true, though I could have shared the countless reasons that I wasn’t surprised. But it sounded like she was in a car, and I had the distinct impression that Walter was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Maserati, right beside her.

“Okay, well, I just had to ask,” she said. “We’re completely floored, we don’t know what to do! Everything he’s built, gone in a minute!”

“I’m so sorry Linda, but I––I have to go, I’m actually with family right now.”

“Oh! Alright, well, if you can think of anything, will you let us know? Please?”

“Yes, yes, I will––good luck, Linda.” I hung up.

“What was that about?” Charlotte asked.

“Just another bully,” I said, “unused to things not going his way.” She looked at me for an unsettling moment but said nothing more, returning instead to the window. It was like I’d put my finger on a pulse and felt it beating, but it was weak and soon subsided.

We went to the beach. She’d chosen an eccentric outfit, jean cutoff shorts and a satin, short-sleeved button down, covered in neon shapes, over her purple one-piece, with brown leather Dr. Marten’s Oxfords on her feet. She undid her ponytail and let her obscenely long, black hair drape all over her shoulders and back.

“Do you remember when we all went to Panama City Beach?” I asked her. “I think it was in middle school.”

“Of course,” she said.

“You wore leather shoes on the beach there, too,” I said.

“Mhmm, I wore those shoes to death. You all laughed and laughed. Said I looked like a homeless person. It didn’t help that I hardly spoke back then––I could never think of a comeback.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Thank you,” she replied. “If only adults knew how to apologize to children,” she said, looking around at all the stark raving families, “and not just to each other.” She took off her Oxfords, her shorts, her satin shirt and went swimming in the teeming waters, a purple splash among foamy splatters. Afterward we ate funnel cakes and walked the boardwalk. I told her about Walter watching porn at work. I told her about Carol disappearing from her job at the theater. She was not easily surprised by the characters of my life, and seemed to have a great capacity for understanding, or at least guessing at, the motives that drove people to become their messy selves. At one point, while she hypothesized about what leads a woman to suddenly abandon a lover, a bike whizzed by on her right and cut in front of her, dangerously close, so I grabbed her left wrist and pulled her aside, to which she responded with a violent tug in the opposite direction. She was much more flustered by my pulling than the bike’s whizzing. She stopped walking and said, very seriously, “don’t do that,” while encircling her wrist with her other hand and rubbing it back and forth, back and forth, a protective circular motion. We were sitting on the couch again, then, in her basement. She was making that same protective motion in the murky silence, while I played some muted video game on the television, ignoring the red marks on her wrists and the dazed, vacant expression in her eyes, feigning ignorance––she was just watching me play. But upstairs I’d seen her dad grab her when she wasn’t listening, wasn’t looking, didn’t catch on fast enough to a demand, and shake her with maniacal force. Go play downstairs, then, if you can’t even help out your mother. So we did.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I completely forgot.”

“It’s okay.” She tossed the rest of her funnel cake into a nearby trash can.

“Did he do that a lot?” I asked.

“Of course he did it a lot. If you saw it? But we don’t need to talk about it.”

So we didn’t. Charlotte stayed one more night. While I napped she went out and bought the ingredients for potato leek soup, something she said grandma taught her to make on her recent trip there. It cooked quickly and we ate heaping bowls of it, savoring each spoonful, thanking grandma for the easy feast.

The next morning, I was awakened by the sound of her zipping up the small, black suitcase, but I quickly closed my eyes again and pretended to sleep. I must not have wanted to interrupt her, or was waiting to see if she would wake me up. I thought she was about to, thought I could sense her presence looming above me for a moment. But once she didn’t, it was too late to change my approach, and she had gone. I suppose I could have opened my door and called after her, but even now that seems dramatic. She left another one of her notes, explaining that she had to leave in a hurry because Dylan wanted to get to Acadia National Park by the afternoon. It was so nice to get to know you again, she wrote. I wondered if she really would go to Acadia. Maybe she had a snowbird’s apartment rented up there in Ellsworth, some place with a plastic lobster on the bathroom wall and whoopie pies waiting in the fridge. I hoped so––Charlotte could get a tour of kitsch up the East Coast, from the fruits of my Brooklyn stooping to Maine’s candy-striped tourist trappings.

I slept in later that morning than I had in many months, and when I finally got out of bed at eleven thirty and checked my phone, I saw that I’d missed two calls from my mother, whom I hadn’t spoken to in just as long. I decided to clean myself up and get properly dressed before I called her back, so that I wouldn’t appear groggy and could project the confidence of a son dressed in light, summer pants and a well-fitted t-shirt.

“Hi mom,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

“Really? Well, here I am.” She sounded drained.

“You won’t believe this but I’ve just had a week-long visit with Charlotte.”

“What? Charlotte’s in New York? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why? I don’t disagree, but why do you say so?”

“Because she was just in Florida last week––anyway, son, I’m calling with some sad news, some really terrible news.”

Was I supposed to say, What is it? “What is it?”

“Your grandma passed away last night.”

I was already sweating in my light, summer pants and well-fitted t-shirt, so I put her on speaker and took them off. I lay down on my bed in just my underwear, no longer concerned with how I sounded.

“But mom,” I said, “I wanted to call you to ask you about their divorce.”

“What? Whose divorce?”

“Grandma and grandpa’s? Charlotte told me they were living in separate places and they recently got divorced. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What a ridiculous idea.”

“So they didn’t?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, I don’t know, mom, old people do it every day….”

“Charlotte stayed with your grandparents for a few days, helped take care of some things. Big fat help it sounds like she was, that girl has always lived on another planet.” The line went quiet for a few seconds.

“God, I didn’t realize how quickly things were deteriorating,” she said. “It was much worse than I thought.”

“How did she die?”

“She had a massive heart attack! She’d been complaining of weakness and was having trouble getting around their apartment, but she had an appointment next week…it’s just awful. But how could I have known?” She sounded defensive, deflecting nonexistent blame, which was something she did.

This is the death of your mother, I thought––you will only experience this once. Though she may have had a version of this conversation many times already. It made me shiver to wonder how far down I was on the list.

“And what did Charlotte say about divorce? Why would she think that? God, I wish I hadn’t left them alone for so long, who knows how your cousin might have upset her! She just showed up out of the blue, by the way, asking to stay in their guest bedroom, can you imagine? Not even a phone call beforehand. That would give anyone a heart attack, let alone an eighty-six-year-old lady!”

“I don’t think that’s it, mom. I don’t think Charlotte gave grandma a heart attack.”

Two days later I flew down for the funeral, which took place in a large, conservative synagogue in Fort Lauderdale with a main hall that dwarfed the few of us congregated at the front for the service. At this gathering, at least, my grandpa was allowed to make a speech. He spoke gruffly about his lifelong companion, her loyalty and commitment to family. He gestured occasionally to the posterboard picture of her on an easel two steps below him––which had her smiling wide, many teeth showing––like the blown-up photo was her in the flesh. It was better than an open casket. If I had any affinity for tradition, it was for the Jewish funerary rites, which I’d always found superior, more dignified, or as close to dignified as death can get––swift and discreet for the deceased, at least.

Charlotte’s dad gripped the podium too tightly with his ham hands and talked about his mother’s love of card games and travel and his parents’ long-lasting marriage, an example to live by. My brother was there, looking intense as usual, using all of the many muscles required to frown, and occasionally glancing at me sideways in a way meant to communicate that he didn’t buy a word of it.

This might be stating the obvious, but Charlotte wasn’t there. No, she would have been in Maine or Canada by then, but I felt her absence like a physical presence, since no one took the chair to my right. They all skipped over it until everyone was seated and there was a conspicuous gap in the front row, where the youngest should have been, next to me. It made me think of them together. Two missing ladies, the family’s bookends, sharing fantasies during grandma’s final days: one finally divorced, the other on a lively lovers’ road trip. I imagined them getting to say goodbye, and not just on a note––poor grandma grinning at shy Charlotte, both appearing somehow happy in their delusions. This picture would serve as my goodbye, too, my own little fantasy. I’d tuck it in my wallet if I could.

When I got back to New York City, I got a job as a math teacher for grades three to five at a school called United Achievers and once again had to wear a suit every day to work, this time to impress the very happy children. I would stay there for quite some time until a series of personal slights by an officious vice principal was simply too egregious to stand any longer, and I hopped off. I had to live up to my obituary. By that point I hadn’t seen Charlotte in many years, but I decided it was my turn to call, find out where she lived, and go find her there.