Your fancy boyfriend, she said. With his fancy apartment. So much nicer than here.
The truth was that it was a studio, three flights up, just one big room with a futon for both couch and bed and an old clawfoot bathtub in the kitchenette—but it was safe and warm. Ethan’s family wasn’t particularly fancy or rich—his mother was a nursing-home aide, his father an engineer—but they did have connections: his landlord was an old friend of his mother’s from high school and had rented to him at a steep discount; Ethan could afford to wait out the Crisis a long time. The truth was that Domi could have been in her own apartment, too—a much nicer one—if she’d chosen: her father’s electronics company made the innards of half the cell phones and computers in the country; he owned two yachts, a small private plane, houses in London and L.A. and the south of France. One on Park Avenue, too, where Domi had grown up: she’d pointed it out to Margaret one afternoon, and they spat on the sidewalk and fled before her father’s driver could chase them away. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and a month later her father married the Danish au pair and Domi swore that once she left home she’d never speak to him again, and she hadn’t. In college, she’d ripped up his checks and mailed back the pieces.
So that’s it, Domi said, you’re just going to hide out with your rich boyfriend and ignore all this, while the rest of us scrounge?
Margaret’s hands were chapped and raw; a week ago someone had grabbed at her coat, tearing it, hungry for more than she was offering, but she’d gotten away. She had mended the rip with yarn—red, the only color she’d had—and the stitches traced a jagged gash along her collarbone.
Fuck both of you, Domi said, but Margaret didn’t answer. She was already on her way out the door.
* * *
? ? ?
He spoke half a dozen languages fluently, could get by in even more. Not bad for a white boy from Evanston, he’d joke. His parents had both loved traveling, had chosen a different country for each vacation; he’d been to four continents before he was ten years old. He was an only child like Margaret, and this was one of the things that drew them together: the feeling that they were the last twigs on the family tree, grafting themselves together for strength, to forge something new.
How about Cantonese, she’d asked, and he shook his head.
Only a little Mandarin. And not very good Mandarin at that.
And then: We could learn it together. The two of us.
He specialized in etymology: the meanings of things. As a boy he’d played Scrabble and done crosswords with his father; his mother had coached him for the spelling bee. For his birthdays and Christmas, he’d always asked for books. These days, with libraries and stores shuttering, he had nothing to read but the row of dictionaries lined up on the windowsill. The first morning, after they woke, she rose from his bed and crossed the room to look at them. Fat yellow ones for different languages: French, German, Spanish, Arabic, some she didn’t even recognize. Dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit. A sprawling English one the size of a phone book, pages thin as Bible leaves. Slowly she’d traced her fingers along the spines and then turned back to him—both of them still undressed from the night before, their skin burnished to gold in the midmorning sun—in wonder. As if she suddenly recognized him as someone she already knew.
For Ethan, words carried secrets, the stories of how they came to be, all their past selves. He would find the mysterious ways they connected, tracing their family tree back to pinpoint the unlikeliest cousins. It was proof that despite the chaos around them, there was logic and order to the world; there was a system, and that system could be deciphered. She loved this about him, this unshakable belief that the world was a knowable place. That by studying its branches and byways, the tracks it had rutted in the dust, you could understand it. For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the ineffable effable, how they could hover a shape before you for an eyeblink, before it dissolved into the air. And this, in turn, was what he loved about her—her insatiable curiosity about the world, how for her it could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.
Holed up in the apartment, they read, pulling one dictionary or another from the shelf and poring over it, stretched across the futon, one’s head pillowed on the other’s thigh. Reading passages aloud, dissecting meanings, each of them digging: she mining words like precious gems, arranging them around the outlines of the world; he excavating the layers fossilized within. All the traces of people trying to explain the world to themselves, trying to explain themselves to each other. Testify had its roots in the word for three: two sides and a third person, standing by, witnessing. Author originally meant one who grows: someone who nurtured an idea to fruition, harvesting poems, stories, books. Poet, if you traced back far enough, came from the word for to pile up—the earliest, most basic, form of making.
Margaret had laughed at this. That’s me, she said, a piler-up of words.
Krei, she read, meant to separate. To judge. Like a sieve, Ethan said, separating the good from the bad. And thus, krisis: the moment at which a decision is made, for better or for worse.
With one finger she’d traced the delicate line of his sternum, circled the soft hollow at the base of his throat.
So a moment, she said, in which we decide who we are.
Outside there were sirens and shouting, and sometimes gunshots—or were they firecrackers? Waves of unrest rippled state to state like a wildfire, the whole country tinder-dry and eager to burn. In Atlanta, unemployed protesters had set the mayor’s office ablaze; they’d called in the National Guard. Bombs kept going off at statehouses, in subway stations, on the lawns of governors’ mansions. There were emergency meetings and votes and marches and rallies and nothing seemed to change. It can’t go on, people kept saying, in the few spaces where they still dared meet: in the aisle of the grocery store, picking what they could from sparse shelves; in apartment building hallways as neighbors passed and over fences as people raked fallen leaves—any attempt to maintain order and neatness and normalcy in an era that was anything but. It can’t go on, everyone said, but it kept going on.
Inside: Margaret and Ethan drank tea and ate crackers from the cupboard. After her shower, she put on one of his old shirts, washed her dress in the bathtub, hung it over the rod to dry. They closed the windows, then the curtains. They read. They made soup. They made love.
The way he handled her, like butter to be licked off a finger. In bed afterward, her cheek pressed to his back, she had never felt so calm. It felt good: a stretch after weeks spent coiled. One morning, she simply stayed.
* * *
? ? ?
She’d sent Domi a letter when she left: a faltering attempt to say goodbye after their last, worst fight, which had ended with Domi stripping off the jacket Margaret had handed down to her—Take it, I’d rather be naked—and storming out. It was a whole precious sheet, front and back, and afterward she couldn’t remember which things she’d written and which she’d held back, trying to avoid Domi’s wrath, trying to spare Domi pain. All she knew for sure was that Domi never called, never came by, and eventually Margaret stopped waiting.