you learn anything new? my mother asked there, that day, in the front seat of her car.
Nope, Mom. Nothing.
But I did, didn’t I? I learned how much the job sucked.
And then my mother and I drove home, where I was forced to listen to the parental figures go on and on about how Madison was oh so smart, about how Madison aced another exam, about how Madison had already been accepted to some smarty-pants college, while I’d picked one based on the simple fact that it was cheap and they’d actually accepted me as opposed to the mass of rejections I received following a poor performance on my SAT.
I had to get out. I was feeling suffocated, smothered. I couldn’t breathe.
And that’s when it happened. I was riding the Metra home from work when I flipped open to the classifieds and saw the ad in the Reader. Esther’s ad, a beacon in a dark night sky. I’d looked for apartments before, but my entry-level job barely paid minimum wage, and though I tried cutting corners—studio apartments, garden apartments, apartments on the south side—the simple fact was that I couldn’t afford an apartment in Chicago all on my own. And an apartment outside of Chicago was out of the question because then not only would I need an apartment, I’d also need a car, some mode of transportation to drive me to and from the train station rather than mother dearest.
Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train.
I was sold! I called immediately and we made arrangements to meet.
The day I was to meet Esther for the first time, I mentally prepared myself for a meeting with Jennifer Jason Leigh. Truth be told, Madison had psyched me out with the whole Single White Female bit. To make matters worse, I watched the movie before our meeting, watched as Jennifer Jason Leigh, aka Hedy, turned all psycho or whatnot, assuaged only in the fact that, as the one moving into Esther’s apartment, I was in fact the Jennifer Jason Leigh in our situation, and she the charming Bridget Fonda.
And indeed she was charming.
Esther was running late that day, held up at work by a coworker who’d called in sick. She phoned as I was heading to the apartment, and we made plans to meet instead at a bookshop on Clark, where I soon found out she worked. Just a part-time gig while she finished up a master’s degree in occupational therapy, she said. She was a singer, too, the type who performed on occasion at one of the local bars. “Just something to pay the bills,” she said, though in time I would come to learn it was more than that. Esther had a secret craving to be the next Joni Mitchell.
“What’s an occupational therapist?” I asked as she led me through the stacks of books to a quieter spot in back and we sat on blood-orange poufs meant for children’s story time, apologizing for dragging me down to the bookshop and veering me away from our original plan. It was a Saturday; the shop was full of cosmopolites, browsing the shelves, picking their books. They looked smart, every single one of them, as did Esther, though in a cool, contemporary sort of way. She was doe-eyed and polite, but possessed traces of an inner devil, be it the sterling silver nose stud or the gradient hair. I liked that about Esther right away. Dressed in a cozy cardigan and cargo pant ensemble, Esther was cool.
“We help people learn how to care for themselves. People with disabilities, delays, injuries. The elderly. It’s like rehab, self-help and psychiatry all rolled into one.”
Her teeth were aligned successively inside her mouth, a brilliant white. Her eyes were heterochromatic—one brown, one blue—something I’d never before seen. She wore glasses that day, though I learned later they were only for show, a prop for her role as book salesman. She said they made her look smart. But Esther didn’t need faux glasses to look smart; she already was.
The day we met, she asked me about my job and whether or not I’d be able to afford my half of the rent. That was Esther’s only qualification, that I pay my own way. “I can,” I promised her, showing my latest paycheck as proof. Five-fifty a month I could do. Five-fifty a month for a bedroom of my own in a walk-up apartment on Chicago’s north side. She took me there, down the street from the bookshop, just as soon as she finished reading to the tiny tots who pilfered from us the blood-orange poufs. I listened to her as she read aloud, taking on the voice of a bear and a cow and a duck, her voice pacifying and sweet. She was meticulous in the details, from the way she made sure the little ones were attentive and quiet, to the way she turned the pages of the oversize book so all could see. Even I found myself perched on the floor, listening to the tale. She was enchanting.
In the walk-up apartment, Esther showed to me the space that could be my room if I so chose.
She never said what happened to the person who used to live there in the room before me, the room I would soon inhabit, though in the weeks that followed I found vestiges of his or her existence in the compact closet in the large bedroom: an indecipherable name etched into the wall with pencil, a fragment of a photograph abandoned on the vacant floor of a hollow room so that all that remained on the glossy image was a wisp of Esther’s shadowy hair.
The scrap of photo I did away with after I moved in, but there was nothing I could do to fix the closet wall. I knew it was Esther’s hair in the photograph because, like the heterochromatic eyes, she had hair like I’d never before seen, the way she bleached it from bottom to top to get a gradual fade, dark brown on top, blond at the bottom. The tear line on the picture was telling, too, the barbed white of the photo paper, the image gone—all but Esther.
I didn’t toss the photo, but rather handed it to Esther with the words, “I think this is yours,” as I unpacked my belongings and moved in. That was nearly a year ago. She’d snatched it from my hand and threw it away, an act that meant nothing to me at the time.
But now I can’t help but wonder if it should have meant something. Though what, I’m not so sure.
I wait for hours for the girl to return—trying hard to stare through the window coverings of Dr. Giles’s cottage office—but she doesn’t show. I consider sneaking into that space between Ingrid and Dr. Giles’s home, standing on tiptoes to try and see in. I contemplate a return visit to Ingrid’s home—feigning I forgot something, that I needed something—to try and catch a glimpse from her kitchen window. I imagine that Pearl is in there, in Dr. Giles’s cottage, doing what people do in a shrink’s office: sitting on a sofa, spilling her guts to a man who gets his kicks listening to other people’s problems. But then the time goes by—thirty minutes, an hour, two hours—until I tell myself it’s been too long for her to be in there, chatting it up with Dr. Giles. No psychiatry appointment lasts two hours. Or do they? I’m not one to know.
In time, I give up. She’s not in there, I tell myself. But of course I’m not sure. I can only guess.
In the middle of the afternoon, I go home. I retrace the steps I made this morning, down the streets of town, past the small stores that are closing up shop for the night, flipping Open signs to Closed, locking the doors. I’m tired; my feet hurt. My head swims with the image of that girl at the window, here one minute, gone the next.
The streets are paved with setts, rectangular granite blocks like cobblestones. The two restaurants remain open, but the boutique stores—the cutesy one with baby stuff in the front window and the one that carries nothing other than novelty items and a poor selection of cheesy, overpriced greeting cards—will soon close. The streets are sleepy, the gray sky contemplating rain. To the side of the road, there’s a big, black crow feasting on a rabbit carcass: roadkill. Everyone gets a little desperate this time of year. A squirrel scampers across a telephone wire, praying the crow doesn’t see. Down the street a group of preteen boys in shorts and T-shirts walk home, as if unaffected by the cold. The sound of their laughter cuts through the autumn air. One of them puffs on the end of a smoke; he can’t be older than twelve or thirteen.
I pull my hood up over my head. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my pants and walk quickly, head down, through town, past the carousel, and to the beach.
The