The Shoebox

She wakes at the crack of dawn every morning, as the first rays of light creep through the curtains and fall across her feet. They play on the ends of her toes for a time, moving slowly, inexorably, and she watches until they reach her ankles—or where she assumes her ankles are, hidden under the comforter that is not quite long enough. She remembers buying it—walking through the store wincing at prices until she found a dull counterpane with an inoffensive colour. Some mornings she thinks about this while she waits, and about how it might be better if she turned it sideways, although the pattern would be off, but most mornings she simply turns over and swings her legs down to the floor, always careful not to disturb him. He doesn't need to wake for a few hours yet. She's seen the advertisements for mattresses that don't transfer motion, and she thinks, indulgently, that they should get one. It's just what they need—in and out at different times—but she's never called the number because she's knows she's just fooling herself.

In the bathroom, she looks at her face in the glass, and where, four or five years ago, she would have smoothed her hair and turned her face this way and that before picking up the toothbrush, now she merely glances, as if to make sure it's still her, before reaching for the paste. Up and down her hand moves, mechanically, following the motions her mother taught her when she was six years old, and then she opens her mouth and brushes in circles, all the while thinking of something else.

She washes her face with cold water, even in winter, and reaches for the clothes that are unfailingly hanging on the hook behind the door. She tries to avoid looking in the mirror while she changes, but some days she just can't help it, and she's never quite as disappointed as she thinks she'll be, which somehow makes it worse.

Running fingers through her tangled hair, she leaves the bathroom and treads on cat feet across the bedroom to the hall beyond. Most mornings he's lying on his back by this time, and she looks back from the door to see his face, frowning in sleep, his dark hair rumpled on the pillow. She wonders what he's dreaming, briefly, perfunctorily, and then she shakes herself and continues to the kitchen.

She makes breakfast—toast, usually, and food in hand, crosses to the front door to collect the newspaper from the landing. She stuffs the plastic wrapping into the bin behind the pantry door, and leaves the paper on the table for him, all but the classifieds, which she rolls up and stuffs into her bag, waiting on the lone chair in the hall. She can't bear to read the rest of the paper—it distracts and depresses her, although she has never been able to say exactly why. She leaves his cereal on the table, too, and checks that the milk is in the fridge door, where he is sure to find it. After this, most days it's time to go.

She leaves him a note on the pillow every morning—nothing special, just what to eat for lunch, or what time she'll be home. She knows he reads them, because he leaves notes of his own, on the backs of hers, lying on his pillow, and she comes home and finds them and puts them in a Gucci shoebox under the sofa that no one, not even he, knows about. Some days she wonders where the box came from, because she doesn't own any Gucci shoes, and she's never known anyone who does.

When she leaves the apartment complex, it's getting bright outside, and she finds that she enjoys having the city sidewalks to herself. Mornings she works in a coffee shop, two or three miles away from home. They don't have a car, and she can't ride a bike—it makes her all black and blue, like the girl in the song, and it would be stolen, anyway—so she has to walk, every morning. She hates her job, to be honest, almost as much as she hates the work she does in the afternoons, sitting behind a window facing dozens of blank-eyed bank patrons—and hence the classifieds in her bag. Each day, she means to read them, to find something for someone like her—a little idealistic, a little jaded, and when she's running the grinder at ten o'clock, sometimes she imagines it will be a little like Ishmael, for someone who wants to save the world, or at least the city—but she never has time to check. When she gets home, she reasons, all the good ones will have been answered already, so it's useless to look, and anyway, she just wants to rest and stop thinking. Some days his notes cheer her up, and others they don't, but she saves them anyway, because they are all she has.

While she's making endless rounds of espressos and lattes, waiting on the suited men and women who are awake at this hour, she breathers in the rich smell of the grounds and thinks about what else she could be doing. When she was in high school, she told everyone she'd end up working in a coffee shop, but this has long since ceased to be amusing. Some days she thinks what she'd like to do is open a restaurant—he could design it, and she could cook her mother's old recipes, the ones she made so well that last summer but is always to tired to start these days. And then some mornings she figures, what she'd really like to do is teach—she's got a degree in English rotting in a drawer in the bedroom, because she was too restless to settle down after she left school—the school where she met him. Too restless . . . and then, sometimes, feeling a little bittersweet, a little self-righteous, she thinks she'd like to have children, one or two of them, but that's not really possible, the way things are these days.

In the afternoons, watching faces queuing at the counters, she imagines that maybe he hasn't gone to work today. Maybe he's waiting at home for a surprise, and when she opens the door she'll see him, smiling, hair combed back from his face like she never sees him anymore. Maybe she'll remember all the reasons why she's supposed to have it so good. Some days, more money passes through her hands than she'll ever have in a lifetime, and she just keeps moving it, from drawer to counter and back again, and doesn't register it at all. When she gets home, late in the afternoon, early in the evening, there's no one there, just a white apartment full of dust and twilight, and willow-the-wisps of dreams. And a note on the pillow, every day.

Today she gets up, brushes her teeth, washes her face, changes her clothes, eats her breakfast. Takes the classifieds, writes a note, walks to work. A car passes her, going east, the mandatory headlights sweeping out the straight road like the do-not-enter sign on a dead-end turnstile—unnecessary. She watches her feet in the dull black slip-ons, one before the other, and she steps on a sidewalk crack deliberately, remembering how she used to leap to avoid them when she was a little girl. For a moment, she's that little girl again, skipping and laughing and pulling on her mother's hand, and then she turns the corner and pushes open the glass door of the café, and she's grown up again, all day clothes and the ID clipped to her sweater, and she hasn't spoken to her mother since the day she left home out the back door with nothing but the clothes on her back and sixty-two dollars in the pocket of her favourite jeans.

Today she thinks about traveling. She'd like to be a writer, she muses, a travel writer, and she'll take him all over the world, to Prague and Saigon, and Addis Ababa, and never set foot in this city again. It's a good life, and thinking about it takes up the morning. Her shift ends at one, and she picks up her bag and goes around the corner to another café. She sits nibbling on a bagel and exploring South American rainforests until it's time to go, and then she takes up her place behind counter number five in the city bank five blocks further on. The plastic numeral raised above the counter hides the nameplate on her desk.

Today she cashes a fifty-dollar check for a man in a tweed jacket, and exchanges a jar full of pennies for ten dollar bills for a woman with a stick five-year-old draped off of one arm. People come and go, and she wonders, idly, what if the man in the suit and cravat had a gun in his pocket? But he doesn't, and he hardly even looks at her, and she turns away with the pink slip of paper in her hand and a smile dying on her lips.

But today is grotesque. Walking home the long way, crossing Madison Avenue on her way to the east bridge, she sees the crowd before she hears the sirens and yelling. She pushes her way to the fringes, wanting to get across, and suddenly she realizes what's going on. A boy is perched on the railing overlooking the black water, and there's a wide berth around him, and police to hold the people back. On one side of her there's a photographer, and on the other a shrieking woman, but for the most part there's just a sea of faces all eager to see what happens next, and she thinks—the first crazy thing she thinks is that it's just like the Simon and Garfunkel song, except there's no one calling to save the life of her child. She feels sick suddenly, and turns away, pushing blindly back, wanting to get away—why can't they just leave him alone?—almost running in her disgust, and she's not even surprised when she hears the sudden hush before she gets more than twenty feet back the way she came.

People start pushing past her again, now that the fun is over, muttering amongst themselves. "Crazy bugger," she hears, and "Kids these days don't know which end is up," and then "What was it he said? There's no point? Jesus, why should there be a point? We all do the same things every single day. There doesn't have to be a goddamn point . . ." and then she stops and nearly doubles over with the sheer ugliness of it all.

His note today is short: I'll be home late tonight. So what, she catches herself thinking, and then she laughs. It sounds strange, echoing in the apartment so long silent, and she's not sure she likes the feeling. She feels like a hyena, or like a pair of wide eyes, just staring and staring at nothing at all. She goes to bed, waking up again much later when he begins to snore beside her, oblivious, of course, to all her troubles. She can't sleep again that night, and she decides that she's never really thought before. She's come to that conclusion before, but this time, she says to herself, this time it's true.

She doesn't wait for the light to reach the bedcovers that morning, but gets up as soon as she can make out the shapes of her feet, setting store by the defiance of daily ritual. She bounces gently on the edge of the bed, hoping he'll wake up and talk to her, not yet confident enough to reach out and shake him up, but he merely rolls over, turning his face away from her. In the bathroom, she looks in the mirror, eying her reflection with ill humour, and changes with the door open, feeling fatalistic and debonair and defiant all at once.

She dances across the carpet to the hall, and refuses to look back at him before heading to the kitchen. She leaves his cereal out, but she can't bring herself to touch the newspaper this morning—in case, just in case—and so she leaves it on the mat and goes back into the bedroom. First she writes: I heard a man die yesterday, and leaves it there, but before she's out the door, she's changed her mind, and she crumples it up and stuffs it in her pocket before scribbling a new note and leaving.

Out on the street, she realizes she's wearing her work clothes. Of course, she's known it all along without actively thinking about it, but she can't go back that way. She can't go back to work today. She stands before the apartment building in indecision, and finally walks west, away from the bank and the café, and the bridge and everything that numbs her and mutes her and wraps her up in thought, and she tries to avoid noticing that this is exactly the way it was the last time.

She spends the day in a park, feeding pigeons with bread she bought somewhere along the way, and suddenly she wonders what she will look like if she grows old here—nametagged and uniformed, grizzled and toothless and feeding birds on crusts of whole wheat bread long since devoured by mold. Maybe they'll call her the bird woman, but nobody will ever buy her bags of crumbs.

His note that night says: You know I love you, her scrawled Do you need me? on the back comparing poorly with his neat print. He hasn't noticed the newspaper, or at least hasn't bothered to remove it, so she leaves it where it is. She feels like Hercule Poirot, gathering evidence for the dramatic finale, and it is all she can do to wait till next morning. But do you need me?

She walks to the local college that day, north now, wearing the jeans and sweatshirt she was wearing the day she left home, and putting her hand into her pocket, pulls out a dollar, still there, after all this time. Fingering the money, she watches the students rush back and forth from class to class, and nobody notices her. She picks up a poster for a philosophy seminar at two o'clock and decides to go. It's about Nietzsche, and she doesn't make it though half an hour, glorifying in her sense of how pretentious the speaker is, because she wants to laugh too much. She turns her back on the little herd of hmms and ahhs and walks home again.

His note reads: What do you mean? She tries to giggle a little for the sake of the thing, but she doesn't really feel like laughing anymore, and she has to admit to herself, reluctantly, that she doesn't even know what it all means, or whether it means anything at all. It troubles her. Two days' papers are lying on the mat. She sleeps worried, confused, feeling lost and futile, and she can't imagine how to answer. She thinks how odd it is that she has all night to decide on a reply, and wonders how the rest of the world has conversations, people responding to one another within a fraction of a second. Maybe, she thinks, it only seems that way to her. Maybe the whole world is living at a speed that seems fast to her because she's living so slowly, and it feels to everyone else like they have all the time they need to decide.

She gets up the next morning and writes slowly, ponderously, deliberately: I might leave. Her elation is almost all gone now, and she feels restless once again, a two-bit forger, a cheap fraud.

In the evening, there are three papers on the mat, and one word on the pillow. Why?

I have to. I need to.

Why need? She smiles a little at that, and in the morning, the note on her pillow says: What do you mean?

He wants to know: You've been saying need a lot lately. Why do you need to? Why does anyone need anything? You know what I think.

It reminds her of the philosophy seminar, useless questions and pointless answers, and "why should there be a goddamn point," and life in general, she adds bitterly, and next morning all the writes is: Why not? She takes something with her when she leaves that morning, and steps out over the pile of newspapers on the doorstep. She has not been to work for nearly a week now. She thinks about adding I'm sorry, but she's sorry for herself, not for him, and she thinks . . . she thinks it wouldn't be fair. She thinks it might be lying, and she's decided, this time, that everything must be true.

That evening, his note will go unanswered, I don't understand lying on the pillow for two days and two nights, as the papers continue to pile up, and the milk goes bad in the fridge because he can't find it, until he trips over the mat on his way out and shuts the door with a bang that brings the neighbors out to cluck sympathetically at the look on his face. Afterwards, they'll retreat into their homes and shut themselves back into their kitchens to muse about how helpless young bachelors these days really are. Then he'll switch them, the papers on the pillow and the note on the mat—in case, just in case—she comes home this time.

She's free that morning, if not for long, with the shoebox under her arm, full of I love you and Eat the leftovers, please and I'll be home late tonight, and since it's not home, and she knows the box better than she knows him, she doesn't think she'll be back anytime soon.