“Hey!” I griped. “I was watching that,” I said as she tossed the remote control to the mod plaid chair.
“Can you come here for a minute?” she asked, leaving the room without waiting for me to respond. And so I set my popcorn aside and followed her into the kitchen, where her cabinet door was ajar. It didn’t look like a mess to me. I could hardly tell a thing had been moved. The dill weed was right where it needed to be, between the cumin and the fennel seed. Alphabetical order.
“Did you touch my food?” she asked with a strange tremor to her voice that I’d never heard before.
And I said, “Just a little dill weed.” And, “I’m sorry, Esther,” when I saw how upset she’d suddenly become. It wasn’t like Esther to become upset, and so I was taken aback. “I’ll buy you more,” I promised as her face turned red, as red as a field of poppies, so that I thought smoke might come out of her ears like steam from a train engine. She was mad.
She marched to the open cabinet and said, “The dill weed goes here,” as she lifted and lowered the dill weed container into the exact same spot I’d left it. “And the peanut flour goes here,” she said, doing the very same thing with the bag of flour so that when she dropped it to the cabinet shelf, flour sprayed everywhere.
I hadn’t touched the flour. I thought to tell her that—to tell Esther I never touched the flour, not once, not one single time—but I saw now that she wasn’t in the mood for a rational discussion on peanut flour.
Then Esther said, “Now look what you’ve done. Look what you’ve done, Quinn. Look at the mess you made,” meaning the pinpricks of flour that dotted the countertops, and she tromped out of the room, leaving me to clean a mess she made in response to my bogus mess.
You live and learn, I told myself, and the next day I bought my own damn dill weed.
*
I return home from the coffee shop, walking down the worn hallway to my apartment. The carpeting is frayed and tattered, a henna color to mask the mud and dirt and other gunk we carry in on the soles of our shoes. The walls are scuffed. One of the corridor lightbulbs has burned out, making the walkway dim. It’s dreary. Not dirty or dangerous or any of those things that urban dwellings can sometimes be, but just dreary. Used. Overused. Like a tissue that no longer has any usable parts. The hallways need new paint, new carpeting, a little tender loving care.
Though if it wasn’t for the homeliness of the walk-up corridor, I wouldn’t quite appreciate the hominess of Esther’s and my space. Snug and comfy, cozy and warm.
As I slide my key in the keyhole and turn the door’s handle, there’s a part of me expecting to see Esther on the other side of the steel pane, making dinner in her favorite button-back sweater and a pair of jeans. The smells that greet me are delectable and divine. Either the TV is on—The Food Network—or the stereo, some kind of folksy acoustic thing emanating from the three-piece, overpriced speakers with Esther singing along, her legato and range even more impressive than the voice on the stereo that’s getting paid to sing.
If the radiator hasn’t kicked into high gear, Esther will greet me at the door with my timeworn fleece and a pair of slippers. Because that’s Esther. Saint Esther. The kind of roommate who greets me at the door, who makes me dinner, who would bring me coffee and bagels every single day of the week if I asked her to.
But Esther’s not there and I’m more than a bit discouraged to say the least.
And so, without Esther, I find my fleece myself. I find my slippers. I turn the stereo on.
I ravage the freezer for something to eat, settling on a frozen pizza jam-packed with pork fat and mechanically separated chicken beef. I’m not known for my healthy eating habits, but rather one who likes to indulge on fatty, greasy things—and ice cream. It’s an act of rebellion, naturally, a way to get back at my mother for years and years worth of Shake ’n Bake chicken, Hamburger Helper casserole and the unvarying mound of mixed frozen vegetables (lukewarm): the peas, the corn, the cut green beans. She’d always make me sit at the table until I’d finished my meal. Didn’t matter if I was eight or eighteen.
The first thing I did upon moving in with Esther: splurge at the grocery store on everything my mother never wanted me to eat. I asserted my independence; I took control. I claimed a kitchen cabinet and a freezer shelf as my own in Esther’s and my passé kitchen, loading them with potato chips and Oreo cookies, enough frozen pizzas to feed a football team.
Until, of course, Esther helped me see the error of my ways.
Esther is a good cook, the very best, the kind who can make things like cauliflower and asparagus taste good, or even better than good. She makes them taste delicious. She searches for recipes online; she follows cooking blogs. But me? I don’t cook. And Esther isn’t here to do it for me. So I find a baking sheet and slather it with cooking spray.
As my pizza cooks I wander into Esther’s bedroom. It’s dark as I go in, and so I flip on a table lamp that sits on the edge of her desk. The room comes to life, and there it is again, that fish—the Dalmatian Molly—pleading with me for food. I see it in its beady black eyes: Feed me. I sprinkle in a small handful of flakes and start pulling at desk and dresser drawers at random. While yesterday’s search was a simple reconnaissance mission, this one is the real deal. A strip search. A no-holds-barred search. It’s more intelligence gathering than a fishing expedition (no pun intended).
And as I pull and pluck papers at random from inside the drawers, I realize the fish and I have a little something in common: Esther has abandoned the both of us. She’s cast us aside and left us both for dead.
What I find is doodles. Restaurant menus. An essay on adaptive response, and another on dyspraxia. Jottings on kinesthesia with words like hand-eye coordination and body awareness inscribed on the lines of the notebook paper in Esther’s script. A greeting card from her great-aunt Lucille. The lyrics for a church hymn. Post-it notes with reminders like Pick up dry cleaning and Get milk. An arbitrary phone number. A box of contacts, colored contacts, that makes me stop dead in my tracks.
I stop and inspect the packaging. They’re blue, brilliant blue, as the box says. And I picture Esther’s cherubic face, one brown eye and one blue, a physical mark that proved she was special. Chosen.
Does that mean...? I wonder, and Could it be...?
Is Esther’s one blue eye an imposter?
No, I tell myself. No. It can’t be.
But maybe.
But there are other things I find, too. Things that leave me equally as confused. Handouts on grieving, the grieving process, the seven stages of grief. I try to convince myself that this has something to do with her getting her occupational therapy degree—if Esther was sad, wouldn’t I have known?—and that this isn’t real life. Not Esther’s life, anyway. Someone else’s life. But that belief only lasts so long. From the piles of paper a card falls to my lap, a monochromatic card with a monogram on the front, a name, address and phone number on the rear. It’s a business card for a doctor. Licensed Psychologist, it reads. I pick up that card and stare at it for a good three minutes, making sure it doesn’t read podiatrist, pulmonologist, pediatrician. Some other kind of doctor that starts with a p. But no. It says psychologist. Esther was sad. Esther is sad. She’s grieving, and I didn’t know a thing about it.
But why, I wonder, why is Esther sad?
And what else hasn’t she been telling me?