Carry the One (33 page)
His train pulled up. He boarded, noticing how humid it was inside the El car, how thick the air was. He stood watching her out the window; he saw that she was looking up, her thoughts broken by the noise. She looked down the track on her side to see if anything was coming, then went back to her book. If she had looked instead through the window of the train, she might have glimpsed his huge, crazy love for her, before he recalibrated his expression, turning down the volume to what was bearable in the give and take between them.
an opposite of iceland
“Have you always lived here?” the client asked, over the music Olivia kept at a medium-high volume, to discourage conversation. Plus she liked this song, “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.”
But this client, a tourist, was aggressively chatty. Chatty clients posed a problem for Olivia.
“No.” Olivia tried to pronounce this so the period was audible.
“You have an accent. I’m trying to pin it down.”
Olivia knew the woman meant the wide-open Midwestern sprawl that still inhabited the corners of her speech.
“Actually, originally,” Olivia said, “I’m from Iceland.” This was usually a reliable closer. Either the client understood that Olivia wasn’t interested in opening up. Or she knew nothing about Iceland, except maybe the airline, maybe Björk.
Iceland was an opposite of this place.
Olivia survived in the over-congenial atmosphere of the salon by steering toward impersonal topics. Movies. Local restaurants. Celebrity marriages and divorces and ridiculous baby names. She had chosen to work in a tourist destination where her clients wouldn’t be regulars, where social adhesion was minimal.
She gave this woman a really great haircut. She looked twice as good as she did coming in here, and she saw this, which was nice. On her way out, she folded a bill, an extremely generous tip, and slipped it into the pocket of Olivia’s jacket.
This was her last appointment of the day. She went around the shop shutting windows. A strong, salted breeze was coming in off the sea, washing through the palms and hibiscus.
Her right foot dragged a little as she tidied up the shop, swept clippings into a neat pile. A small neurological problem; it only came up at the end of long days. Most of the time she could counter it. This was a very upscale salon, and no one wanted to see Igor slogging around, rattling his chains. She had worked hard at creating a professional persona of cool efficiency. She wore only dark clothing—black and subtly different shades of navy. Her hair, which had gone to gray, was bleached up to white and cropped. She had changed her name, Google-proofed herself. She was now Olivia Li.
She saw a documentary a few years back about a couple of the Manson girls. They were old ladies now, still in prison. They’d never get out. Sharon Tate’s sister came to all their parole hearings. One of the Manson chicks said to the interviewer that she had to, at this point, consider the possibility that her life had been a waste.
Olivia was not in that psychological place. Prisons took all sorts of shapes, and she understood she lived in a self-delineated confinement. But this was not punishment, was not about guilt. Guilt, she discovered early on, was the easiest, the simplest response. Much more complicated was living past guilt, bearing the permanence, accommodating the weight of having done something terrible and completely undoable.
Her circumscription was more drawing an invisible line around herself and staying inside that small circle. There was comfort in this.
At the moment, she wasn’t thinking about any of this. Her mind was nearly empty, drained by the hectic day. She was tired and had no plans for the evening beyond fixing a salad, hanging out with her cats.
She shut off the remaining lights, grabbed her bag and her rain poncho and headed out, locking the door behind her. It had rained off and on all day, typical in this place, this season. The rain had stopped for the moment, but it would start again soon. Dark night clouds were just barely holding it back, and the plants and flowers and air were luridly enlivened, as if in apprehension of the whooshing storm to come.
Someone was sitting on the steps, a woman—maybe a girl, Olivia couldn’t tell from behind—talking softly on her cell phone, laughing, picking at little beads on her shoes, beat-up moccasins. In trying to step around her, Olivia slipped a little where the old stone was slick with moss.
Righting herself, she grabbed the girl’s shoulder, clutched the thin, pink and green plaid fabric of her shirt. “Oh. Sorry,” she said.
The girl turned slightly and reached up, held Olivia’s forearm to steady her.
“There. You’re okay now,” she said, then into the phone, “No, I was just talking to someone here.”
acknowledgments
My gratitude:
to Peter Cieply, Sheila Daley, Lyn DelliQuadri, Janet Desaulniers, Mary Kay Kammer, Sara Levine, Judy Markey, Steve McCauley, Ellen McGarrahan, Barbara Mulvanny, Mike Ramsburg, Sarah Terez Rosenblum, and Sharon Sheehe Stark for their sharp readings and excellent criticism
to the Illinois Arts Council for its generous support
to Larry Geni for casting an astronomer’s gaze on the manuscript
to Joy Harris for ninja agentry
to Trish Todd for zen master editing
and to Jessie Ewing for kindness and surprise.
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
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Carol Anshaw
is the author of
Aquamarine, Seven Moves,
and
Lucky in the Corner
. She has received the Ferro-Grumley Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award for Fiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She lives in Chicago. You can visit her website at
www.carolanshaw.com
.
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