2024 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing Runner-Up
Alien Intelligence
by Deirdre Collins
On a weekday—midmorning—Sadie and Jules can practically cruise down the 405. Without traffic, the expansive freeway is a great promenade to the ocean and the pale concrete and faded signage and sun-soaked surrounding city are almost beautiful, in that way that LA is only ever almost beautiful. Everything depends on the light and the frame of mind. But on a weekday, midmorning, they can cruise with the windows of the dented Prius rolled down and the playlist going and find pleasure in the drive itself.
They—Sadie and Jules—had moved to LA in the summer, that summer, and that was the day they visited the aquarium for the first time. Early enough to flip-flop leisurely from the concrete parking structure to the glass-paneled aquarium without yet feeling the heat of a brick oven. He had been volunteering in zoos and aquariums since high school, and she had the occasional visceral need to marvel at something, and that first trip to the aquarium was a break from days spent job hunting for part-time, entry-level, internship-type positions in or adjacent to their aspirational fields.
They bantered with the twenty-something at the ticket kiosk. Jules dropped his zoo volunteer credentials, Sadie flashed a recently expired student ID for good measure, and they were gifted a double discount. A little bit of flirtation helped—their ticket seller grew increasingly coral-colored and toothy behind the glass—though Sadie couldn’t say which of the two of them had more of an effect.
They stepped into the air-conditioning with a shiver. A life-sized blue whale was suspended in the light-filled void above the long, curving atrium, caught in a graceful gliding arc. They wove through the shoals of Angelenos beneath in pursuit of the café at the far end, but a two-story high tank—dominating slice of California kelp forest—caught their eye, and they drifted to right.
Something happens to light when it hits several hundred thousand gallons of water encased in six-inch-thick glass—the tank gleams and sways, keyhole to paradise. The fish take little notice of human voyeurs, and that enhances the effect further. This is some other place, far from the sounds, smells, and sprawl of the constructed, the urban—and yet. The coral is sculpture; the feeding schedule is posted on the wall. Human beings dictate everything from the water chemistry to the scatter of shells across the sandy bottom of the tank. Strange unreal.
They went for their coffee and began an aimless tour.
A sea otter clattered a clam vigorously against the rocks, another corkscrewed through the water, little hands grasping at a plastic toy, and an education specialist floated here and there—back arched, seahorse puffed chest—speaking of tools, target objects, enrichment activities.
—But are they happy? the people asked.
—Well—are you happy? replied the education specialist—minimum wage, no 401k.
Jules and Sadie watched it all intently but continued to talk as they had been talking all day, practically uninterrupted by the shifts from apartment to car to aquarium.
“Total?” she asked.
“Total costs. For everything,” he said.
“Something like $1500… that’s application fees for each school, cost to take the GRE three times, cost to send the test scores to each school, cost of sending transcripts… I guess another $150 for the study materials… yeah, around $1500…”
“Whoa.”
“I just put it all on a credit card.”
“Well… it will be worth it,” he said.
“Unless I don’t get in anywhere,” she said. “That’s the most likely scenario. That’s why people apply to so many programs… even the programs that don’t give any aid at all—”
“—Ugh, I so don’t want to go to grad school,” he said, skipping nervously away from the topic. He skipped every third or fourth step these days.
“I wouldn’t pay for the degree if I got in without a full-funding package,” she said.
“Well—because it’s an art degree. Mine would be done for the purpose of being more hirable. It would be an investment.”
“What would you go for?”
“I dunno. Public…environmental… non-profit-y… stuff,” he said.
“You’ve managed to stay out of debt so far,” Sadie said. “Guard that status.”
“I know. I know.”
They had this conversation several times a week in some form.
“Not that I’ve followed my own advice,” she said, skipping to catch up, as Jules answered—
“Well, people have to be able to follow good advice for it to be good advice.”
The jellyfish in their massive round tanks are ethereal—ghostly, bright, drifting—under the blacklights. She sees deep water—the bioluminescent souls of sea monsters trying to find one another in the dark—and outer space—galaxies drifting in the ever-expanding universe. The jellyfish, more than the rest, appear outside of time.
“These are like art,” Jules said. “Living art. They have to make the tanks round, you know, so that they don’t end up stuck in the corners. They’re meant to drift across oceans, move with the current. They’re one of the oldest forms of animal life.”
“The deep blue sea in a snow globe.”
“It’s the closest most people will ever get,” he said. “Most people don’t get to see much of the world… or even think to look.”
“Let’s find the octopus,” she said. “You know I have a thing for the octopus.”
“I know—what’s that word you love?”
“Uncanny,” she said, unrepentant.
“Uncanny,” he said, rolled his eyes fondly.
“They’re probably the closest we’ll ever come to actual alien life,” Jules said, growing animated as he slipped into aquarist mode. “They can recognize people, solve puzzles and mazes, and invent new hunting strategies…. We usually think of intelligence as belonging to vertebrates, particularly mammals, but the octopus is an invertebrate with three hearts. They have about the same number of neurons as a dog, but unlike a dog, two-thirds of those neurons are in their arms and body instead of being centralized in their brain.”
Sadie gazed into the Giant Pacific Octopus tank, nose to the glass, searching.
“They’re hard to study though,” Jules continued. “Even in captivity, an octopus might participate in experiments one day and then never again, or only cooperate with some scientists but not with others, or literally escape, never to be seen again—”
“—That sounds exactly like trying to get Cara to do her dishes,” Sadie said.
Jules laughed, delighted. “Well—she is an alien intelligence, isn’t she?”
“And I’m the scientist she’s refuses to work with…”
“I’ve seen my share of roommate issues, but this is kind of next level.”
“Sibling relationships are complex,” Sadie said. “And I underestimated what it means to live with a teenager… I feel like she’s turned me into an old nag.”
“What will we do if she never learns to do her dishes?” he asked.
“As long as I keep her alive, my mother will pay the rent for that room. It’s worth it for now,” she said, and they each gave the other a nervous chuckle.
She could not find the octopus in any crease or crevice and stepped back, confused. A small sign explained that the octopus was off exhibit. It had laid eggs and was very close to death.
“Well shit,” Sadie said. “Never mind then.”
“They have a really short lifespan—like three to five years, if even,” Jules said. “They live their whole lives solo except when they mate. The female lays—like—hundreds of thousands of eggs and then literally stops eating to guard the lair. By the time they hatch, she’s basically died of starvation.”
“That’s so bizarre,” Sadie said. “Usually animals that intelligent have longer lifespans, you know? What’s all the knowledge for? She’s not even passing it on to the next generation.”
“Yeah—it would be so much less stressful to be a jellyfish,” Jules said. “All they have to do is drift…”
They found seats in front of the massive tropical reef and sat for the better part of an hour, pointing things out to one another.
“You should look for jobs here,” she told him, and he sighed a long sigh. He’d had a job offer fall through earlier in the month and was back to square one.
“I could intern or volunteer, but I will likely never get a job here no matter what I do. I’ll be part time––at best––in these institutions until I finally give up and do something else.”
“It might cheer you up,” she said, hopeful. “Even if it doesn’t amount to anything— imagine getting to dive in that tank.”
But he was moving steadily toward deflated, unlike aquarium days of their childhood past.
“This place will break my heart,” he said.
“Sometimes I think I’d sell my soul to get into one of these programs,” she said. “But I know I probably shouldn’t.”
“What do you think you’ll do when you don’t get in?”
“I’ll have to write on my own.”
“And therein lies the lesson,” he said, grown more translucent than she’d seen him before now.
“This too shall pass,” she said.
“Most animals live shorter lives than this,” he said.
“We’re really just getting started, though,” she said.
And he froze his face into a wide-eyed look of dawning horror and held it until it grew comical, and she started to laugh at him. He laughed too, but with a different pitch and inflection—manic, a touch of hysteria—and she laughed in sympathy, and he laughed in exhaustion, and they both laughed as she suggested they get something to eat.
*
This morning’s high tide should be ebbing by now, but Pico is gridlock from horizon to horizon. An unwashed Subaru is halfway merged into her lane, waiting for the shiny Tesla to inch forward when the light changes, though the last green light did not result in a single car in this lane clearing the intersection. Big Blue Buses dominate the far-right lane. They should run fifteen minutes apart, but there are three or four queued up bumper-to-bumper. The left turn lane is all pulsing taillights, but the traffic app shows Olympic and Wilshire are equally stalled. The sun is a floodlight to the east, everything radiates white-concrete bright, and once again, Sadie is caught mid-journey, stuck in the middle of a major slowdown in this dingy metropolitan sea.
Write write write—she tapped her thumbs on the wheel—write write write.
When Sadie and the closing team left last night—1 am when she finally set the alarm and turned out the lights—she’d driven home in ten minutes on empty streets. Now that same route would take an hour. Residential backstreets could get her there in thirty minutes, but she needed to get through this intersection first.
The red light turns and turns again and nothing gives way.
Sadie was the assistant manager of a boutique ice cream shop in West Hollywood. She disliked closing shifts—the clubs up and down the block kept everything open late, kept the music pumping as crowds of customers bopped and stumbled into line, demanding waffle cone and occasionally slurring into song or frothy drama. A nightshift would normally have bought her a morning off, but the manager had to be downtown for a meeting—couldn’t be helped—so she would get a real weekend to make up for it. Saturday and Sunday clear—promise.
The yellow flashing light of the tow truck, the empty blue sky, the tap tap tap—write write write—of her thumbs on the wheel. Finally her lane shifted forward.
They only had one ice cream scooper at opening—today, a sleepy, barnacled-faced recent college grad—but they two made quick work of the set-up duties and settled in to wait. The mornings were quiet. Santa Monica Boulevard passed their storefront windows at its leisure—a jogger, a dog walker, the steady flow of cars passing. She kept a little notebook in her apron pocket and let her mind wander across the page now and again…
Something happens to light when it hits several thousand square miles of bleached LA basin—the sun can throw the world into sharp relief, or make the colors pop, or wash out the buildings and the faces of the people, and occasionally, without warning, the sun-soaked city takes on a romantic, dreamy quality. And then, all too quickly, the sun moves one fraction of an inch and becomes harsh and unforgiving.
A scooper—an actor of some potential—kelp forest of hair twists floating all about—would approach, anxious—
—I’m sorry to even ask, but I JUST got a call back and it’s LITERALLY tomorrow. They said we’d have more time to learn the scene and now I don’t know what to do—
—Of course you can go. Of course you should rehearse. It’s just ice cream.
West Hollywood has a significant homeless population. Not the kind of people with witty signs and dogs—this wasn’t the Telegraph Ave of her childhood—no, these people do not get far from the place they slept the night before, if they manage to sleep at all. They lack essential clothing, pad around in bare feet and bare skin, struggle to focus their gaze enough to meet the eye. Sandflies pester them day and night.
Another scooper, a guy with a slightly manic energy—gone somewhat scaley around the eyes, the throat—
—Ahhh fuck. Listen—I’m sorry, I know—it’s just—I’m working two other jobs right now and it’s usually FINE, but my night shift got moved back and I didn’t get home until three last night, and the baby woke up at five—
—Of course you can take your break. Of course you can go get a coffee. It’s JUST ice cream.
On the corner of Hilldale and Santa Monica, there is a man sprawled out on the sidewalk. His face is pressed into the blackened concrete and further obscured by his tattered hood. One of his ashen feet is freshly bloodied, the red shocking and bright in the sunshine. There is another man there to keep the scuttling crabs, the circling vultures at bay. He wears an orange track suit and sits in a folding chair like the ones people bring to children’s soccer games, in a patch of sun with his shopping cart parked next to him. He says hello and good morning to people as they pass and points out the sprawled man, there in the shade, so that no one will trip over him.
—Ummmmm… can I give that pufferfish a free scoop? She is really, really mad…
—Yes, of course you can. And tell her it’s JUST ice cream.
Across the street is a reality television holy site—a restaurant club that was the sometimes set of a TV show about its employees. Occasionally, in the early days, they—Sadie and Jules—had dressed up in their fast-fashion best to find a perch in the outdoor garden bar, share an overpriced generic cocktail, and people-watch. Bosses, patrons, employees—an ecosystem of consumers and producers, Jules would say.
—Heeeey, so that guy who steals pints out of the fridge? He’s back.
A scooper would call to her.
The young man—a well-groomed pelt, retractable claws—would pace, pace, pace outside the big glass windows for a while, tapping, tapping, tapping on himself, on the benches, on the windows. If he noticed them looking, he might pop his head in to wave a cheerful—hello! They would wave back—hello!—and he would carry on, either working himself into a bout of frustrated clattering and stomping, or, in a fleeting moment of daring, slip in the door with a group of customers and—target object—snatch a pint of ice cream from the fridge. They would watch him steal away, then shrug at one another behind the register, because it was only ice cream.
The wave is in her dreams again, in the news again, in the forecast. Sometimes she is out to sea, floating amidst great flocks of sea birds, and the wave passes under her; sometimes she is perched safely at some great height. She does not recognize the city in its wake, that bridge, those far off hills, but she knows that she knows this city. It is a real place. Sometimes she is there on city streets, awestruck, locked in the image of the wave as it towers nearer, a new horizon, now beginning to arc—ocean’s embrace.
This time, it was an older man with white hair and a Hawaiian shirt—starfish print. He looked frustratingly familiar—like a neighbor from childhood, the parent or grandparent of some old friend—and, having either skipped or misunderstood the line, he came to the cash register to tell her, repeatedly, no matter what question she asked him—I would like to be served please.
—Were you in the line, sir?
—Has anyone assisted you yet?
—Well, I don’t have any ice cream in this register, sir. Would you like to step back into line so someone can assist you?
He started to emphasize the syllables condescendingly—I would LIKE to be servED. I would LIKE to be SERVed, PLEASE. I—would—like—to—be—SERVED.
Jackass.
Today would stretch into tonight, as yesterday had stretched into today, but at least tonight’s tutoring session would be the end of her week. As the shift ended, she changed into her good clothes in the staff restroom—fixed her makeup—brushed out her hair. Sometimes, even after changing her clothes, a whiff of sweet waffle cone lingered. A student would sometimes sniff the air curiously, trying to place the scent. Donuts? Cake? At least it wasn’t raw fish or animal dug, like Jules. He came home from his puzzle of shifts—he was up to a seven-day-a-week schedule now, between parttime positions at three animal-care institutions—and went directly into a shower. It couldn’t last.
It was 5:00 pm, the swell was in, but she had time. West Hollywood to Brentwood—she headed due west on Sunset Boulevard into the setting sun and in the houses all around her—in the gleaming terrariums in the hills—were all the known gestures of wealth. Even the towering hedges promise the curious gaze of the passerby some hidden spectacle. The odd gap in the gate let the commuter, the pedestrian, the eager out-of-towner glimpse for one moment a hint of splendor. There was no public street parking in those neighborhoods, and no visible homelessness. Tropical waters were nutrient poor, after all. Thermocline—a steep temperature gradient prevents the layers from mixing. Nutrients sink, the waters grow clear—gorgeous, blue—and there is little life to be found.
First she glided in great schools of gleaming cars, then she crawled, then she inched. In her mirrors, she could see that the thousand-window-streets behind her had caught the rose- and tangerine-tinted light and reflected it back, mid-September spectacle bright, but the traffic was all that mattered now. This was the kind of stopped traffic that brought about senseless rage, then despair; the kind of traffic the GPS could not wrap its circuit boards around; the kind of traffic that had the estimated time simply ticking back, minute by minute, as though she were simply sitting at a traffic light.
At fifteen minutes out, still a few miles of blockage ahead, she called the listed phone number.
—Oh no. No. Dinner is at 7:00pm and she needs to get her full hour in. Full hour or I’m not paying.
—I’m very sorry. No—no—you won’t be charged, of course. I’m close but it’s just stand-still traffic. I don’t know what’s going on today—
—Okay well, if you’re not here at six, we’ll have to reschedule.
At five minutes out, with some rerouting, she was within a mile of the complex but even the little side streets in these residential neighborhoods were bumper-to-bumper, stopped or crawling. She turned up the air conditioning to dry her sweaty hands and armpits and then called again.
—I’m so close, but it’s just not moving an inch.
A sigh on the other end, a pause.
—Oh—well, I’m looking out at Sunset now. It is pretty bad.
The vocal fry on the line was not warmer, but perhaps now convinced.
—I’m sorry, I’ll be just a little while longer. Maybe I’ll just come by and introduce myself, we’ll just talk about her homework schedule, and I’ll explain it all to the agency. You won’t be charged.
A sigh, then:
—I’ll check the news… maybe there was a concert or a tsunami or something…
Finally, Sadie parked the car and walked the last few blocks, just to show her face. When she made it through the locked gate of the complex—no buzzer in sight—the parent was not warm and did not let her through the entryway. They stood there and discussed the situation, no child in sight, while the parent crossed and uncrossed her arms, obscuring Mediterranean architecture and an open floor plan in the darkening room beyond, and Sadie nodded at the appropriate moments. In the expansive bay windows, Sunset Boulevard glowed crimson with brake lights. Red tide—toxic algal bloom. Die-off to follow.
—Stanford might be back on the table—she’s about to make shark of the swim team…
—Oh, sure…
—The history teacher is an absolute fascist… We just need to buckle down and get through this next stretch…
—Oh, I see…
—But she might do another extracurricular, so it’s going to be a time crunch…
—Okay, well…
Sadie walked back to her car, feet slipping in her nice shoes. The congestion was absolute, the streets silent but for the hum of engines, dark but for the columns of harsh headlights that cut strange shapes in the shadows of an otherwise pretty, tree-lined neighborhood. It took ten minutes for the traffic to move enough for her to fully pull her car out from the curb, and nearly an hour and a half to get home. She sat in the dark, listening to the radio for an explanation that never came, while the exhaust of every car in LA County seeped, leached, rained.
On the divider of a major intersection, somewhere on her slow odyssey home, an older woman—ghostly pale, badly bruised, luminescent in the headlights—holds up a cardboard sign that says nothing at all.
*
Now, that day or another day entirely, walking into the apartment—finally—in the neighborhood where they likely gentrifiers—Sadie tripped over a backpack left in the middle of the hall—Cara’s. Venturing in further, she stooped to pick up her boots from where Cara left them scattered across the living room floor. The sink was full of dirty dishes and the trash was overflowing, but there was no other sign of life.
Jules was mostly living upstairs now—his boyfriend had the apartment directly above theirs. Sadie had only intended to be in LA for one year—live with Jules while she applied to grad school, worked, saved up some money. But this was year two.
Sadie pours herself a glass of wine and drinks it too quickly. She heats leftovers and inhales her dinner—something hot with no taste—and puts on a show that she does not watch. She does the dishes, takes the overflowing trash bag carefully out of the trashcan, double bags it, places it by the front door. She checks her email to see a queue of job search listings and tutoring-related updates!—queries!—demands!
She drinks another glass of wine and mulls it over.
I would LIKE to be SERV-ED.
There was no need for all that.
Her most neurotic client—Beverly Hills neurosurgeon—had let her know from their first phone call that there just wasn’t time left on some of these deadlines. That she—Sadie—would just have to do some of the essay writing herself. It couldn’t be helped—
—Well, what are you even offering? What do you even do?
—I’m going teach him how to write—
—Oh, it’s just a marketing exercise—practically everyone—
—Let’s talk about this college list—thirty applications? That’s—
—His grades are not strong. We need to cast a wide net—
—Why don’t I just sit down with—no, just the two of us—no, we’ll—
Finally, she got the high school senior alone—the two of them in wheeled desk chairs, arm to arm at his computer. Him—hunched, sweating teenager—her—pink faced, head-pounding tutor—and then, deep breath, the session began.
What was his favorite class? What was his favorite book? Favorite movie? His favorite teacher in school? What did he like about being in band? What actually excited him about going to college? What did a good life look like? How do people go about achieving that type of life? This English teacher—what did she do well? What poem? Why?
Essay—Whitman’s “The Learned Astronomer” as an introduction to his interest in the hard sciences.
All he wanted was to move away from his asshole classmates. What did he think would be different about a college campus?
Essay—thoughts on the merits of giving up (temporarily or permanently) a childhood, neighborhood-based social circle for an academic community.
One thousand words each. Two-to-three key points per essay. When in doubt, just write shorter sentences. Snap snap, that’s it. Now we have an outline. Take the weekend to sketch it out.
A month later, this neurosurgeon was gifting Sadie absurd, expensive desserts from the various boutiques she must frequent, and cc-ing her on absolutely every email related to her eighteen-year-old son like she’d hired Sadie as a member of staff. And for what? Hadn’t she told her no? Stood firm—refused to write a word?
Sadie went to the fridge and retrieved the silly dessert item of the week—pie-in-a-jar. A gooey, all-American-mess of chocolate, caramel, homemade marshmallows, and expensive reinterpretations of brand-patented cookies. Sadie ate it standing at the kitchen counter, waiting with an eye to the door to see if anyone was coming home.
They would eventually apply to thirty-five institutions of higher education. Three sessions a week for four months… He would eventually get into a private university of decent standing despite his poor GPA and general apathy. He would pay full tuition and would not graduate with student loans. She did not write for him, but he did not write the essays himself. She knew, because she couldn’t get out of that house without being presented with an extravagantly boxed, crème brulée cupcake. A gift-bagged slice of twenty-two-layer matcha chocolate crepe cake. A champagne and strawberry parfait.
She was a college application consultant, an executive function support aide, an aider and abettor, a sellout. For her work, an hourly rate she split with the agency and pie in a jar. Her parttime, hourly rate at the ice cream shop came with more free pints a month than her freezer could reasonably hold. Sweet sticky payment all around.
She rolled her eyes at her own angst—ha.
Pie in a jar. An evening spent in with one’s pie in a jar.
What kind of pie is it?
Self-pity pie.
Self-pity pie—what does that taste like?
Disappointment.
She cracked herself up and let go of her door watch. Nobody was coming home tonight. Cara had an acting class and friends from acting classes. Jules had an upstairs boyfriend.
Sadie tossed the half-eaten pie-in-a-jar in the trash, and the rainbow-macaron birthday cake pop for good measure. She used to bring Tupperware to the college dining hall to steal away snacks for later. Other students lived in their cars and ate from a free pantry. In the summers they camped out in the backyards of friends with parents who would pay the rent, hung hammocks on decks. Most homelessness is unseen. There was salad rotting in its plastic bin and pasta sauce molding in its jar, which she purged as well, and then she wiped down the kitchen counters and gave up for the evening.
She went into the bathroom and scrubbed off her makeup, took a hot shower, moisturized. She came back out to the kitchen and drank another glass of wine. All expensive college-prep tutoring was a form of line cutting. She felt vindictive—line cutters should be ejected from the premises!—and poured another glass to properly indulge in her ugly mood. She was tutoring students into colleges and universities she would never get into—actual skill sets be damned.
Sadie went into the bedroom, but that wasn’t good enough. She and Cara shared this room—twin beds, each on their own side—the symmetry was excruciating. Cara who would skip the college hustle entirely; Cara, a teenager, already devoted to her craft; Cara, without student loans; Cara, jellyfish and alien intelligence. Sadie paced for a while with energy boarding on frantic. Her calves ached from standing during her shift; the rest of her ached for no reason at all. She felt like she was holding in a sound.
She went into the bathroom.
The bathtub is the full length of the right-hand side of the room, a squat little faux-porcelain tub that even she, at 5’4’’, cannot comfortably stretch out in. The glass sliding doors are distorted gray, the same as the little rectangular window high above the tub. The toilet sits tucked in between the tub and the sink, so close that when seated, one’s elbows can easily reach the shower sliding doors on the one side and the sink cabinet on the other. When she opens the creaky door to walk into the bathroom, its path only narrowly misses the sink cabinet corner, and she has to close it behind her to access the shallow closet on the left. There is only one patch of bare wall—across from the toilet, between the bathtub and the closed door, which is laden with half a dozen smelly towels.
She spreads a clean towel on the faded linoleum floor and sits there, cross-legged, against that patch of wall.
So this is it. A room of one’s own.
The bathroom could look cheerful when there was sunshine pouring through the window, but the sun has set, and everything looks dreary and gray. The yellow light from the bare bulb in the ceiling is harsh on the faded, mismatched white paint.
She sits there for quite a while. She wonders what is even wrong with her, exactly. Her thoughts are sticky with wine and despair, and she seriously considers flying into a rage, the kind of rage that could startle and paralyze and shake the foundations of other people. She considers what actions she might take to make that rage known. She’s never imagined herself as an emotionally repressed person before. She’s never held back like this. She is not getting any writing done.
Out the open windows, the neighbors are singing. It was Friday, the Sabbath.
Every city has its sounds—sirens coming, passing, and going away again, marking distances traveled day and night. Her little corner of LA had this Friday sound—voices drifting in through open windows, the singing of prayers. They marked out time, the passing of another week, the gathering of families up and down the street. Jules’s great grandmother had lived in this neighborhood, for a time, a long time ago.
Sadie stretched out her feet in front of her on the bath towel. She looked at the battered nail polish on her toes. It was Cara’s emerald-green polish, several weeks old now, because that was the last time Cara and Sadie had been on good enough terms to be borrowing or sharing $7 bottles of grocery-store nail polish. Because Sadie had questioned—soberly, but with too much passion—the ethics of Cara’s end-of-semester acting assignment. Because she just thought that the method-focus of this particular assignment, which included students from the class wandering the streets of LA dressed up as homeless people, and panhandling, and collecting bits and pieces off the street for costumes, and in a few cases of young-artist-intensity perhaps sleeping outdoors a night or two, or going a day or two without sleep—perhaps that was worth more thought and consideration and hesitation than it was being treated. Perhaps this was not a method assignment, perhaps the doing—the details of scavenged tarps and tip ties and army surplus sleeping bags and shopping carts—were somewhat missing the point if your parents were paying your rent and tuition. Perhaps they’d reached the place where art for art’s sake fails, or something. And because they were on the topic of thought and consideration, a little care toward the home that Cara did have might be a worthy creative exercise, no? Toward the dishes and the trash and the clothing all over the floor—and here was the thing they never tell you—the note she hadn’t lifted from the feminist canon that had so prepared her for so much of what would threaten her time and her writing and her sanity, but which had not prepared her to live with her teenage sister. People do it all out of love. The tidying, the grocery shopping, the whining, anxious phone calls to mother like some housewife who can’t get hubby to come home for dinner. People resign themselves to the care of others out of love. They rage, and long for freedom, and grow bitter, and stay out of love.
Directly above her head—was it that night? Or another?—she heard the sudden rush of water through pipes, and footsteps. They could measure Jules’s anxiety by the number of baths he took in a week, but what would reveal the currents of her own fluctuating internal state?
Sadie washed away the evidence of tears, breathed deeply. She stepped into her flip-flops at the door and took the stairs to 306, using her key to slip in quietly, guessing that only Jules was there.
“Hello?”
She headed towards their room, through the dark living room, but then stopped.
“Hiya,” she called out softly, catching sight of him there.
“Hey.”
He was in the kitchen in his boxer shorts and socks, wiping his face in the dark.
“I got home a little while ago. I thought I’d say hi,” she said.
“I don’t know what’s even wrong with me,” he admitted, wiping his eyes. “I’m just having one of my meltdowns.” He laughed at himself and trembled.
She squeezed his shoulder. His face twisted again. They sat on the floor in his spotless kitchen for a little while, in half darkness, and he spoke softly. He breathed.
“I took a pill. I wish I’d taken it sooner. I felt it coming on earlier, but I thought I was just tired. I thought it was just a bad day,” he said.
She took deep breaths alongside him, calmed herself in the enormity of the LA night, there in the room with them, glinting in the windows. She was back in the wider world.
They sat on the kitchen floor, whispering, until she remembered the bath and went to turn it off. His bathroom was identical to hers—directly above where she had been sitting, where she would sit again before she finally set out of LA on her own.
“Do you want one of these bath bombs?” She called out, spotting the white paper bag scuffed chalky blue, purple, and pink from the spheres of packed salt, oil, powders.
“Yeah. There’s a lavender one, I think.”
She plucked the purple one from the bag and dropped the bomb into the steaming water with a loud plop! It dunked and reemerged to spin slowly like a top, dark purple jets of color beginning to drift out like tentacles. The octopus stretched out across the tub and began to climb up the slick fiberglass sides, writhing in the frothy waters.