“Have you heard from Toad?” asks Naomi.
“Absolutely nothing,” she tells her friends. “Which is fine.” It was, and it had even beentrue… until yesterday, when a letter from their lawyer, now only Toad’s lawyer, she guesses, arrived in her parents’ mailbox. Clemence had left her cellphone in Seattle—it was on Toad’s family plan, anyway—so mail was the only way he could get in touch. She had a new number now, and her mother had called to tell her about the envelope, and Clemence can’t get that envelope out of her mind, the image of it stacked atop a pile of bills and takeout flyers on the counter by the phone, nondescript and portentous at once.
“Aclean break is the best thing for both of us,” she tells her friends firmly. Which is also what Clemence has been telling herself, the chief appeal of a clean break from her point of view being that she won’t have to keep atoning for her sins for the rest of her life. Those sins a means to an end, it is true, this end specifically—it feels like she’s dug her own tunnel out of jail—but now she doesn’t want to pursue this conversation any further, and her friends have intuited as much, moving on from her love life to another fraught topic: Naomi’s parents, who’d recently returned to Japan after a four-week stay.
Naomi explains, “My mother set me up three times while she was here—twice with people she’d met in the elevator and another time with a guy who was working at Starbucks.”
“And how did that work out?” asks Jillian.
“Not great,” Naomi answers. “Especially since neither of the elevator guys knew what was happening. Ithink they thought she was kidnapping them, but they were way too polite to protest, which is the first sign that they weren’t my type.”
“What about Starbucks guy?”
Naomi shrugs. “He brought me a muffin. It was even fresh. So that was something. But my mother was disappointed. She’d thought he was at least a student, doing his PhD, but he was just really into coffee, so she dismissed him, and now my parents are gone, and so are the dates, and my life and my place are my own again.”
Clemence says, “See? That’s exactly it. It’s luxurious.”
Jillian says, “Nothing about your flat is luxurious.”
“It’s an existential kind of luxury,” says Clemence. “Marriage was my prison, and now I’m free of it.” It sounds like she’s being melodramatic but she isn’t.
Four
In the mornings, Clemence bathes in the tub, taking her time, the water lukewarm because the hot always runs out before it’s managed to fill the bottom, let alone become deep enough to soak in. She reaches for the chipped blue jug, which sits on the floor beside a mat whose blue is almost matching, and fills it from the tap, the water cool now, then setting the jug down while she lathers her hair. In her old life, washing her hair was the closest Clemence ever came to meditation, her mind taking her to surprising places in the shower’s rush, and, as the cliché goes, she had most of her best ideas there. The shower had been an escape from her life, but now that Clemence’s entire life is escape, the bath holds something different, a chance to go deeper into the moment.
Here Iam washing my hair in my bathtub, she thinks, working up the lather, a vision fulfilled. So satisfying just to have an idea and then bring it to reality. Picking upthe jug again and pouring the water over her head, not so cold after all, her face to the ceiling with her eyes closed, and she’s imagining how she looks with her body arched, her wet hair straight and falling halfway down her back. She feels the water like a caress, responding with arousal, slipping down into the tub so that the water touches more of her, and then she touches herself, her breasts loose and full in her hands, her nipples hard, and she squeezes them gently, awed by their abundance.
She likes her body, the way it feels. The softness of her stomach now, its roundness, her delicious flesh, erotically charged, it seems, but perhaps just because her hand is travelling farther down between her legs, and she starts touching herself, using her other hand to hold the weight of her breasts, and then to touch herself all over, because she’s feeling really hot and all this could be finished in an instant if she wanted it to be. But she doesn’t. She wants to linger here in the tension of in-between, letting the sensations inside her rise and rise, pulling them back from the brink, until she can’t anymore, and besides, her hand might cramp, and so she moves her other hand inside her, filling her completely, and she’s not in control of the sensations, because her senses have taken over, and it’s like ripples, or shock waves, one after the other, and she can feel it on her fingers, her muscles throbbing, as she comes and comes and comes.
Clemence has never masturbated so much in her life, not even when she was a horny teenager reading smutty novels under the covers. The habit had fallen off once she and Toad got together, because she didn’t have thetime or place for it, and figured that marriage should have supplanted the urge, which it did, for a while. Plus, Toad had said it wasn’t fair, that if Clemence was feeling randy then she should be having sex with him, and soon that dried up her sexual desire altogether.
But now it’s back, and it’s like a thrice-daily thing, part of her routine like brushing her teeth, and yes, washing her hair, and she swears it’s improving her skin, though that could be the result of a lot of things, in particular her new propensity for oily fish. Clemence actually has a glow, even in the strange unflattering light of her bathroom. She pauses to admire her face in the mirror once she’s drained the tub and risen to wrap a towel around her body. Aface she’s been learning not to take for granted, or to pick apart for supposed flaws—her nose is a little bit too large, but she has decided it’s distinguished, and she has large green eyes whose lack of symmetry is only apparent if you look closely. Impeccable eyebrows—she’d been out of fashion for many years while everybody else was plucking, and now all their brows are sad and sparse while her thick ones are desirable. She’s got nice lips, full and pink, and she blows a kiss at her reflection before bending to towel her hair dry one more time, and she knows it will dry tidily, a nice flip only a little wonky on one side.
Clemence had left most of her wardrobe behind when she fled Toad, all the clothes she’d worn to the office and didn’t need anymore. What’s left, she keeps in a cardboard box under the daybed, which isn’t fancy, but does the job, and every time she starts to see the bottom of thebox, she knows it’s time to do laundry. There is a laundromat around the corner and down the street, though she’s going to visit her parents today, so she’ll bring the dirty clothes along and do it there, saving a handful of change in the process. It’s not difficult to choose what to wear from the few clean items left—she picks a gingham sundress that Toad used to complain looked like a tablecloth you’d bring to a picnic.
Clemence has returned to the city she grew up in after more than a decade away, and there are benefits to this—the extortionate rents here are slightly less extortionate than in Seattle, access to laundry at her parents’, and Saturday brunch with her dearest friends like it’s no big thing. But it also means that her plans for a fresh start are complicated by all the people who’ve known her forever, vividly recalling every ridiculous person she’s ever been, including the teenager claiming to be vegetarian, the drunk girl falling into a puddle of her own urine on her twentieth birthday, or the earnest young woman signing up for a lifetime with a man named Toad. Who was actually Todd, but nobody called him that, a joke whose punchline you kept waiting for, but it never came. “Toad” was even the name he used professionally, which would make it easy to search for online, just to see what her ex was up to, but Clemence didn’t want to. Not yet.
She’d always assumed that her parents had liked Toad, but Clemence realizes now that her marriage had been like her stint with vegetarianism—mostly a power struggle and a way to assert her independence from the family. After they were engaged, Roger and Bonnie spenta lot of time asking if Clemence was really sure, and at the wedding, as she and her father had danced to some saccharine song by Paul Simon (not even “Slip Slidin’ Away,” although, in retrospect it should have been), he’d whispered in her ear, “Any time you want to come home, you know we’re here for you. No questions asked.” Which had upset Clemence at the time, leading to a distance that stretched well beyond geography for a while, but maybe her parents had the long view and she’d been too young to realize because, when the time came, it had been the greatest gift to know she’d have a soft place to land.
She’d stayed with her parents for a few weeks after she got back in April, but soon it was too much. Clemence’s old room was where Bonnie kept her treadmill now, and she’d be knocking every morning far too early, suited up and earbuds in, raring to go. Plus Clemence’s sisters were always coming by with their own kids, and it was like living in the middle of a circus. So when Naomi finally invited her downtown, Clemence accepted the offer with gratitude—moving out would mean her family home could be a retreat rather than a sentence. And now her sister Grace was picking her up within the hour, and they’d all head back up to the suburbs together.
“I’ll be waiting outside,” Clemence had told Grace, knowing she’d be late, inevitable with three-year-old twins to wrangle, but also that Grace would be determined to check out where Clemence was living—no doubt their parents had charged her with scoping out the scene. And Clemence might have been able to hold her off, except when the car rolls up, Juniper has to pee,and so the whole troop files inside and upstairs, Grace and her wife, Allison, Juniper hopping while clutching her crotch, and her brother Jarvis who decides he has to go, too, just for the heck of it.
“It’s actually not bad?” says Grace tentatively, looking around. Clemence had tidied up because she knew her sister would finagle her way inside. She always did. “Abit small, and that’s not really a kitchen, but still.”
“And the neighbourhood is changing,” Allison calls out from the bathroom, where she’s been helping the kids. “That new café, and the cheese shop.”
“Always a sign that I’ll be priced out soon and have to move again,” Clemence says, trying to herd everyone back out the door. “But there’s still a safe injection site just down the block and plenty of petty crime, so I’m not worried yet.”
Grace ignores this. “I’m kind of relieved,” she says, following Clemence out onto the landing. “From the outside, you can’t tell, but your place is almost nice.”
They meet Mrs. Yeung on the way back downstairs—her unit was on the main floor, from which she monitored all comings and goings. “We’re just heading out,” Clemence tells her. “This is my sister,” she says, introducing the family, feeling like her landlady might like her better if she knew Clemence had people who loved her, that she was not simply a sad specimen who had turned up at the door with a couple of hastily packed boxes.
In typical fashion, however, Grace, refuses to play her part, certainly making an impression, but one that’s farfrom excellent, as she spies a parking enforcement officer placing a ticket on her windshield. She takes off out the door, across the porch, and down the steps, shrieking expletives. Grace, as it turns out, has parked in front of a fire hydrant.
“Which was hidden in a fucking bush,” she rants, all the way out of the city and up the highway toward the suburban streets where their parents live, where everyone can park anywhere. “Imean, did you see it? Ididn’t see it.”
Clemence listens from the back seat where she’s wedged in between the twins who are strapped into their giant car seats, because apparently children require car seats until they’re old enough to vote now. The car seats seem more suited to space travel than a trip up the highway, aerodynamic, except for all the plastic and metal edges that are stabbing Clemence on both sides, which would be uncomfortable enough, but also Juniper has already vomited twice.
