Short Walk

Short walk. Theo was twenty and easygoing and so said yes. He could stand to get out more anyways, and it had stopped raining. November, grey, biting cold, forty, fifty minutes, and the pair had stopped to sit on a park bench, still plenty wet, porous wood spitting into the seat of his chinos. His right hand was cold but his left was holding Eliza’s now, and her knee was creeping toward his, and things that happen for the first time always keep you warm enough, so he was not inclined to rush. She was bundled in a sweater and a light overcoat, and wore wide, olive trousers that dipped below her boots and wicked water from the pavement. She had the forethought to wear a hat, though a childish one, with blue and purple stripes and a pom-pom on top. She turned to him and leaned in:

 “Do you want to keep going?”

They had done the loop three times and were back by the headwater of paths that flowed out from her apartment building. The first go-around had been largely silent, punctuated by three or four pizzicato blips of nervous chatter. The second was more talkative, though everything still kept pleasant, fleeting. They had just finished their third, which was back to quietude, but with weightier things discussed: what did they want, where did they see things going with all this. That’s how Eliza always put it: “all this.” He felt they were easing together into a cold pool.

Campusgoers, boys mostly, were filtering along an outer path on their way back from the football game, which was a qualifier or a regional semi-something and had drawn a respectable crowd for such a dreary night. Evidently, they had lost. Each passerby was in his own state of postgame torpor, some drunker, some tireder, some more sorrowful that the revelry had to end. The walkways were half-flooded, and most stepped methodically across the pavement archipelago, from gravel island to island. One in drenched sneakers schlepped unbothered through a wide, dark puddle, like a trenchfooted underworld shade.

Theo did not want to keep going. But he assured Eliza that he would sit for a little while longer or do another lap if she wanted, too. He wasn’t cold, really, not too cold. She looked doubtful. She had been seeing him for two months and had grown used to his fidgety veneer of confidence, his eagerness to please and not to inconvenience. However often she assured him that she was happy in his company, he hadn’t dropped his guard. It had felt at times like she was dating a stray pup stuck in a dogcatcher’s net: hesitant, on edge, but with an embedded sweetness and loyalty. She knew somehow that time would mollify him, and that if they could just settle into each other, he would make for a fine boyfriend. But for now, even in those moments where she thought he might allow himself to relax, the phantom of his wounduppedness bore over him.

She let go of his hand and turned toward the bench’s metal armrest, threading her arm under it and reaching down to the ground, then emerging with a wet clump of yellow mush and green stem. She began to shepherd him in:

 “Did you know that you can make tea out of dandelions?”

 “Can you really?” he said.

 “You roast the roots.”

 “The roots?”

And so they were inside together, he with half a cup still left and she on her third. It was homemade, she said. It was good, he said. The sheer understanding, the perception, the awareness to rip him from his ever-polite doldrums and rescue a moment out from the damned fangs of modesty. To drag him in like driftwood from the sea and to make something of it! And they decided on a fine movie about something and sunk into her couch and did not watch it.

On a spare Sunday last month they had gone to a diner, and feeling suave, he had tried calling her Ellie. It was sudden. He had not done it before, and the words snapped back at him like a rubber band recoiling against his fingers. She instructed him never to call her that, that only her mother called her Ellie. It was automatic how she said it, practiced, clear, not quite mean. She kept on telling him about her shift last weekend, but Theo had already shrunk away all the same, deflated, and began to sulk and to pick sheepishly at a chocolate croissant. She felt for a moment compelled to explain herself or to console him, but instead she stood and walked to the order counter to collect her coffee. He marinated in his discomfort for a moment and, when she returned to their table, he began to apologize. Boys, she knew, had a habit of doing this: testing a limit, flirting with it, and then scampering off, injured or offended, when they were inevitably scolded for it. The one he chose was so minute, though, so silly. Eliza eased back into her side of their booth, smiling. She had learned not to buy into the push-pull too readily. And yet, it was a sign that there was some substrate to him, after all, that however many strata of nervousness there were built up, something different made up his core. She massaged her thumb over taped-down cracks in the vinyl leather cushion and pressed her nail into them, splitting them like a crevasse.

Short walk. A sidewalk, some paths going nowhere in an oval shape, a gazebo, a bench, a bench with a concrete ash tray beside it. In the center, an actual brick shithouse: a roadside rest stop, verily brick, or at least faced with it. They had just pulled off for gas and still had some ways to go. There was no convenience store inside, but she did find a vending machine, erected like a shrine between the men’s and women’s restrooms and flanked by offerings of displays with local maps and never-browsed brochures: “The Hidden Wonders of Dayton.” Candy would give her a headache. Combos reminded her of dog treats. Bugles were fine.

Theo was at the pump still—he never could feel at ease with an auto-shutoff—and Eliza needed at least a few steps before she got back in the car. Eleven hours down, four left. It was clear to both of them that they should have planned to stay the night somewhere, but Theo figured they could knock it out in one day, and while he could admit an error right away, he couldn’t stomach gradually being proven wrong. It wasn’t worth pleading with him to stop and find a hotel. She would put her head down to sleep on the passenger-side window, wake up, and be back home.

She stepped outside again and started to walk back to the car. The leaves were pretty, at least. Browns, reds. She pinched the tinsel corner of her chip bag between her thumb and index, rocking it back and forth as she walked. Theo was sitting in the car when she got back, and she knocked with one knuckle on the passenger window, beckoning him to come with her, which he did. He shuffled ahead of her and, as she began to step up to the curb, offered his hand.

Now, it had been six months of “together” being their descriptor. Eliza was clear that it was not dating, because they didn’t really go on dates anymore, though they did go to dinners together, and took day trips, and made appearances at friends’ parties here and there. To her, the word felt too flimsy. They walked a figure-eight five, six times, holding hands.

On the second lap, he had launched into a rather long story about a day out fishing with his uncle when he was younger. He started abruptly, like a confession: it was his first “real” day out. He had been out before with his uncle to cowponds and on docks at lakes, but this time, his uncle had got a boat with a little motor on the back and a cooler stocked up for the day, and they had set out plenty early. The fog sat low and thick like frosting, and the boat sliced through marsh out toward deep, clear water. His uncle cut the motor, and the boat bobbed. No guppies, only big ones out here, Theo had heard. The two had taken quite some care in setting up, his uncle methodically walking him through each step: thread the line, test the reel, lick the tip of your finger to feel the direction of the wind. And then they had sat out there for only a few minutes longer before the rod he had set out was jittering, its tip leaning in to kiss the water, and he jumped to his feet and pulled, and began to bring in his prize.

It was a turtle. The barb had pierced through its jaw, and it was dripping blood into the boat. He lifted the weighted rod, panicking, and his uncle took the cold, shuddering creature from the end and tried to pull the barb out with needle-nose pliers, without success. His uncle cut the hook into pieces and began to pull the line from the turtle’s mouth, like ripping a tag from a waistband. It flicked red across the boat, speckling his shorts sanguine. When it was done, his plopped the shelled thing, mutilated, back into the lake. He refused to cast his rod again and looked out across the fog for the rest of the morning.

 "That's about it," he said. "Sorry it was long." He turned to Eliza for her approval.

It had been unprovoked, and somewhat out of character for him. She figured for some time as to what it had meant, and she figured it must have meant something to him to have said it at all. So she broke off a piece of herself in exchange—it was only fair—and offered it to him: late in high school, she went on a road trip with some friends. Her first “real” trip. Five of them, they all took turns driving, and after Natasha drove once, the rest of them voted that she wouldn’t drive them again. At one place, they got two hotel rooms with adjoining doors and stayed up all night drinking and laughing. Spoke to every busker in the French Quarter, stopped at every stall at Charleston City Market, sat under every willow in Forsyth Park. Slept in tents one night in a field, and at dusk, twilight was the purplest blanket. On the return trip they had stopped at a motel with a dirt parking lot and wallpaper oily and ambered from smoke, and once it was late enough, they all funnelled into one room and took something Benny had brought with him. It was fun at first, and then it didn’t mesh with her, and when she went to mellow out alone in the dim light of the second room they had rented, her whole abdomen started to cramp. She sat in the bathroom for two hours and miscarried.

She took a breath, as if to pause, but then stopped talking entirely. She slowed her pace, and they both stopped their walk for a moment, and when he turned to look at her, he saw tears budding at her eyelids and flowing down her cheeks.

 “Oh, Jesus, Eliza.”

 “Yeah.”

 “Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

 “Yep, yeah.” Her voice trailed off and she sat on the bench with the concrete ash tray next to it. Theo sat next to her, with distance.

 “I didn’t know that,” he said.

She was disarmed and felt the need to keep curt to protect herself. “Now you do,” she said.

He grabbed his left wrist with his right hand and, raising his arms and tilting his neck back, rested his wrists on his head, looking up. The sky was orange and grey. Someone nearby was burning something. He stayed looking like that for thirty seconds, or a minute even, and neither one exchanged a word. He saw full, bulbous clouds loaf along like cows in a pasture, slogging by with the wind. How many scenes can a child paint with just the sky? How many farm animals, how many fruits, how many flowers? How many cave paintings of hunts, how many warriors and heroes? He saw them as clouds, just as clouds, and wondered if she did, too.

Eliza was more or less still frozen, and so Theo collected himself and tried to thaw her out. He started:

 “You know, I’m glad you told me. Or that you feel like you could tell me.”

 “Yeah.”

 “I’m sorry.”

 “Yeah, I know.”

 “That’s awful.”

 “Yeah.”

Theo pulled his sleeve over his wrist and began to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She was shaking, perhaps from the cold wind. He led her to the car and found her some tissues in the seat pocket, and she thanked him. Then she drank cold water from a thermos and asked him please just to start driving again, so he did. She pushed dashboard buttons and spun knobs until one made the radio go silent.

He figured Eliza would be quiet, and after some time would sleep for the rest of the drive, but after ten or so minutes passed she had gathered herself again, and said:

 “I just went back like nothing had happened. I went back in the other hotel room, and they were all sat criss-cross in a half circle, giggling like idiots, and I sat down on the ugly brown motel carpet next to them and watched Planet Earth until we all finally went to sleep.” She was looking out her window at soybean fields and not really blinking, and her eyes were dripping tears. “In that moment, I was terrified that somehow they knew. Then, eventually, all I wanted was for them to know, to ask about it. I guess I figured something would happen on its own, would just change, and it never did.”

Theo nodded.

 “And of course I had no idea I was going to have a, you know, I was pregnant. It must have been so early on. And it still felt inescapably like my fault.”

Eliza took the first full breath she had taken in the past hour, and her shoulders dropped slightly. It was darker out than before, but her gaze was fixed still on her window and whatever was beyond it. When Theo asked her if she might want to pull over again, she very clearly said no. When she fumbled again with the dials on his dashboard, he reached over to switch to Bluetooth for her and rid the car of its wretched silence.

Short walk. They were on their way back after dinner at a nice restaurant, one of those with an open window toward the kitchen. He had spent the latter half of the meal semi-fixated on an older woman in the back who, perched on a stool, took great care in plucking salt shakers from the front row of one black, plastic food prep bin, filling them with salt, and returning them to the back row of another black, plastic food prep bin beside her. Her movements had a peculiar intentionality to them, like a retired swimmer’s stroke. And Theo’s distraction had paid off in the end—Eliza had said his eyes seemed almost to flash, or perhaps they just caught the light—when because of a tic, or spasm, or some other natural reflex, the woman’s ring finger tapped the chrome top of a shaker behind the one she had reached for, and had sent it careening onto the tired, burnt orange tile of the kitchen, and the shaker’s glass body must have shattered into a hundred prismatic, crystalline pieces, each smaller and sharper than the last, and out of the broken shaker, a pure white pile had to have formed, consisting of thousands and thousands of beads of salt, indistinguishable from one another, imperceptible, uncountable. It had to have. But, from where he was sitting, he saw only the shaker drop from the stainless steel prep counter, and only barely heard the crash.

He was still telling her this as they walked up the stairs toward their apartment. And they stood by the door, then, and she looked at him, expectantly.

 “The keys are in your bag,” she said.

 “Don’t you sometimes wish you could just break open, too?” he asked.

 “Of course, Theo.”

 “Just let it all slip,” he said, futzing with a stuck zipper, checking a second pocket. “All in one go.”

 “Yes, Theo.”

He pushed the key into the lockset and cranked the lever handle open. “At least that way we’d be able to really know each other. But instead, we have to go grain of salt by grain of salt. We have to.”

 “The human condition, baby.”

  “Mhm. You get it.” He walked straight to the bathroom and closed the door, but he kept talking, his voice muffled slightly. “But it sucks, is my point. I mean, nobody’s ever going to do it, find a stranger somewhere and just tell them everything, ever. It would be a miracle for the entire world to all understand each other at that level, and yet it is so obviously absurd a proposition that even I know how unachievable it is.”

Eliza waited until she heard his piss stream peter out in the background before she started to respond. “Did she mean to throw the salt shaker on the ground, Theo?”

 “She didn’t even throw it, really, just knocked into it a bit, and it fell.”

 “Right, it just fell. By accident,” she said.

 “Yeah, by accident.”

 “It has to happen that way. It can’t ever be a logical thing to do: to tell someone everything about yourself. But it does happen, as you know, and every time it happens, it happens in one very particular moment, when whatever cosmic forces align in whatever cosmic way they do. By accident.”

Theo emerged from the bathroom, shaking water from his hands. “Sure, sure,” he said, defeated. “Would be nice, though.”

Short walk. Sunday, work the next day. All mapped on his phone, even though he had been going to the same bakery for the past two months. Zero point seven miles, fourteen minutes, more or less a straight shot except for a prescribed shortcut through Davis Park. It was busy: there was a farmer’s market that day, and children slathered with face paint from one of the booths darted in front of him. Eliza was there already. He had slept in. And as he moved past people on benches, mostly older folks but some younger, too, a sense of melancholy washed over him. He mused: couldn’t he live a thousand thousand lives each day, in every face he passed, the uncountable grains in each of them, still undisturbed?