Around her, the neighborhood changed.
Its residents, once her own age, stayed young while she grew older. She was thirty-seven then, and her neighbors above her and on each side were in their twenties. Like her, they mainly worked in tech; but with each year that passed, the ways in which they were fundamentally different from her became more and more obvious. These differences were not caused only by the decade between them—though that certainly contributed—but by some essential shift in tech culture that had occurred sometime not long after she was hired, that stretched the years between them into an eternity. Now twenty-seven-year-olds felt, to Ada, a generation younger. She and her cohort had been introverts, almost to a one; they preferred socializing in pairs, or small groups; they read, they debated; they were at their best when they were not required to speak too much, or for too long. It used to be that this was a trait common to programmers. Now it seemed that there was as much emphasis on being personable and attractive as on being smart.
San Francisco was riddled with them: young people just out of graduate school—or, almost as frequently, autodidacts, college dropouts, prodigies with bright ideas and endless confidence. People who dressed well and spoke easily about their past accomplishments and their aspirations. People who juiced and fasted, who went to the gym in the morning, who counted calories on beta versions of iPhone apps designed by friends. People who wore noticeable socks.
Ada both did and did not try to keep up. In college, for the first time, she had felt pretty: she was told she was with some frequency by people who, she thought, wouldn’t lie to her. Once she had even walked in on a boy in one of her classes lamenting about her attractiveness to a friend: “Did you see that girl Ada today?” the boy had said, and then he had run his hands down his face, pulling at his cheeks as if in pain. “She’s so hot,” he had said, and then blanched when his friend elbowed him roughly, tilting his head in her direction. The whole thing had shocked Ada to her core, made her uncertain of everything she had ever understood about herself and her place in the world. Nothing like that had ever happened again, and she guessed that it was an anomaly, that she had appealed to this particular boy for some particular reason she couldn’t guess. But she did begin to notice that boys, and then men, paid attention to her in ways they hadn’t when she was growing up. She began to understand, and to make certain concessions to, fashion. She had gone through a grunge phase in the early nineties, like most of her cohort; in the late nineties she grew out of it. Now she dressed each day in something like a uniform, minor variations on the theme of jeans and a button-down shirt, or a sweater when the weather called for it. She wore her hair in a low ponytail. She wore low shoes. She did not like to think about her appearance; she spent time avoiding her reflection in storefront windows. Her body, her face—though they had changed since her twenties—had largely held up their end of the deal. She went hiking most weekends, and some days after work. She ate well. She looked, she told herself, fine. Good. But she lacked the knack that many of her colleagues had for dressing themselves in a manner that seemed both beautiful and effortless, expensive and subtle.
To her young neighbors, this style of dress, and of being, came naturally. As she walked down her block, she recognized the laughter of the two young men who lived in the apartment above her, Connor and Caleb—she could not, no matter how hard she tried, remember which was which—and, beneath their voices, the back-and-forth of a ping-pong ball.
“No,” one lamented, and the other said, equally fervently, “Yes.” They were occupying a small patch of sidewalk. Between them was a miniature game table, and at either end of it were cups, half-filled with beer, in diamond formations. Connor—Caleb—raised one to his lips and tilted back his head.
She had to walk past them to get inside.
“Hey,” she said , and they nodded to her politely.
“Work late?” said one.
“Yeah,” said Ada, and she raised her hands in the air on either side of her. What can you do?
“Hey, let us know if we’re being too loud or anything,” said the other.
Ada said, “No, no, not at all,” though it was true that she had heard them through the window several times before, late into the night. Sometimes they had other friends stop by to play as well, and then the noise went from bearable to intolerable. She had bought earplugs to compensate, refusing to fully occupy the stereotype that, in low moments, she thought might accurately apply to her: ancient, cranky misanthrope. Lonely old lady.
She had had boyfriends, of course. Most recently she had been set up with an entrepreneur who had just founded a promising start-up and who, she discovered halfway through their first dinner, was moving to South Africa in six months. They had given it a try and then, as usual, the whole thing ended passively, the two of them canceling on a date that was never rescheduled. She would see him again at a birthday party, a dinner with their mutual friends; both of them would be polite. Her most serious relationship had been with Jim, whom she’d dated for all of her years of grad school in Providence, and for two years after her move across the country, too. It had been Jim she’d thought she’d marry. It had been Jim who faded from her life, slowly and then explosively, one weekend in Chicago, when he announced he’d met someone else.
Ada climbed the three steps at the side of the house that led into her apartment. She had her key in her hand.
Before she put it into the lock, she heard her name called. She turned.
“I forgot to tell you,” said one of the two of them, approaching her, his hands in his back pockets. “Someone was looking for you tonight.”
Ada waited.
“Here? At the house?” she asked, when no other information was produced.
“Yeah.”
“Man? Woman? Did they leave a name?” Ada said.
“Man. No, he didn’t. He said he was a friend. He said he’d stop by again soon.”
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Normal, I guess. Not that old. Brown hair. My height.”
“Okay,” said Ada uncertainly.
“He asked for your number, so I gave it to him. I hope that was okay,” said the boy.
Of course it isn’t, Ada wanted to say. What were you thinking? She had visions of a stalker; some horror-movie villain who was preparing to infiltrate her life.
Instead, predictably, she assured him that it was fine. Be light, she told herself; be easy.
“It’s cool,” said Ada, and she went inside.
It’s cool. The phrase repeated itself in her head shamefully. Those weren’t her words. She was reminded, suddenly, of her first days at Queen of Angels: she hadn’t felt so out of place since then.