Rate Your Happiness
For a few moments, Louise had been sure that she was dying, that a valve or a vein in her body had gotten clogged or burst and she was going to expire right there in the back of the plane, pathetic and dehydrated, travelling alone, hurtling through the air somewhere high above the Midwest, and during those queasy moments that seemed to be her last, Louise didn’t think of her parents, who would survive her, and she didn’t think of her brother, in Montana with his ranch and several children, or of her sister, in Miami, and she didn’t even think of her plentiful minor and major regrets; instead, Louise thought of her small, dark apartment back in Manhattan, how dirty it was right now, how full of humiliating artifacts, like that brochure from a “skin rejuvenation” clinic she’d hidden in the bathroom, and the several worn romance novels stowed under the bed, and the fridge full of decaying takeout in Styrofoam clamshells, as she’d been going through a tough time, a long tough time, and Louise thought of the situation with Diana, how their relationship, if you could even call it that, had accelerated rapidly during the first month but then lost inertia and turned weird, and yet Louise knew that, if she really did die, Diana would retroactively make their whole thing sound a lot more serious than it had been, and relish telling everyone, for the rest of her life, that her girlfriend, Louise, had tragically died on a flight to San Francisco, and Diana would probably start talking about grief all the time and join more than one support group for young widows, and she would add a third day to her biweekly therapy sessions, and maybe she’d even wear a veil—it wasn’t out of the question—a little vintage veil and pillbox hat, and, dear God, she was so beautiful, which made their moody little relationship even more upsetting, even more of a letdown. All of this passed quickly through Louise’s mind as she gripped a headrest in the last row, on her way to the bathroom, trying to stay on her feet as her vision tunnelled, as her knees softened, as a cord of drool dripped from the corner of her mouth.
She fell into a woman in a wool cardigan who reacted in time to calmly lower Louise to the floor of the galley kitchen. After alerting a flight attendant, the woman vanished into the rest room to avoid further entanglement. The last thing Louise saw before losing consciousness was this woman’s face, wrinkled in an unapologetic way, old, shamelessly old, defiantly so. It seemed there were fewer and fewer of these faces around.
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“Are there any medical professionals on the plane?”
The airline’s policy stipulated that flight attendants no longer ask only if there was a doctor on board when a passenger passed out, as passengers were often passing out, much more often than most people realized. Now they would accept anyone who could take a pulse. Fewer and fewer availed themselves. They had their noise-cancelling headphones and their prestige television; the possibility of lawsuits frightened off the most qualified. Veterinarians volunteered in disproportionate numbers.
Louise was out for no more than two minutes, and by the time she came to she’d been propped up against a beverage cart, and some man was kneeling at her side.
He was taking her blood pressure when he saw Louise’s eyelids flutter open. He dabbed at the sweat on her brow with a cocktail napkin and pushed a lock of hair out of her face, tucking it carefully behind her ear.
“Are you with me?”
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She nodded.
“What’s your name, honey?”
“Louise.”
“Louise? Well, where’s Thelma?”
He was trying to lighten the mood, but her eyes indicated an unlightenable mood, so he retreated. “I’m just being silly. I’m just being awful. My name is Bruce.”
She became aware of the oxygen mask on her face, a cool whisper spilling its way up her nose. Louise focussed everything there. She’d passed out because she’d run out of oxygen and now she was being refilled. Awful. Did he really say awful?
“And what year is it, my friend?”
“2025.”
“What month?”
It took her a moment. “December.”
Her voice was weak and muffled by the mask, but Bruce had leaned in close.
“Who’s the President?”
She didn’t want to say. She hated all Presidents. She shut her eyes.
“Do you take any medications?”
“No.”
“No meds. All right. And did you have any breakfast today?”
“Yes.” Louise always ate breakfast. “Toast.”
“Toast? That’s all?”
“Toast and an egg.”
Maybe it had been the egg. How long had that egg been in the fridge? Could have been months, really. What was wrong with her, she wondered, both generally and specifically? What was wrong with her body? Why had everything with Diana gotten so strange? Louise was still too weak to move, but she began to cry. Bruce elevated her legs on a life jacket and wiped away the tears while two flight attendants stared down at her with vacant impatience. One of them was mechanically eating a packet of pretzels.
“Are you in any pain?”
“Some.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“Can you rate the pain on a scale of one to ten?”
She thought for a moment.
“No.”
“With zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life?”
“No.”
Bruce frowned at her, then turned to ask the flight attendants if she’d hit her head in the fall, but the flight attendants hadn’t seen it happen. The one eating the pretzels ate her last pretzel, then crushed the little metallic bag in her fist.
By then, Louise had regained enough oxygen to ask a question of her own. “Are you with the airline?”
“No, honey. I’m a nurse. I just happened to be on the plane.”
“On the plane?”
“We’re on a plane.”
She knew that. She didn’t want him to think she didn’t know that.
“Yes.”
Louise stared up at Bruce with the sincere yet dazed seriousness of a terminally ill child. No one was paying him to do this. It was so wild what people would just do.
She thanked him, then told the flight attendants that she was very sorry for the trouble. No one responded to Louise, but Bruce smiled an almost imperceptible smile.
“The airline,” she stammered, “the airline should give him a free ticket.”
“That’s not our policy,” one of the flight attendants said.
Twenty minutes after hitting the floor, Louise had enough energy to stand and return to her seat, but she was still pale, so the flight attendants arranged to have Bruce moved to the seat next to hers.
Once she was vertical, shame and anxiety arrived; she was not an adorable and delicate child who deserved the care of helpful grownups but, rather, a 1099-receiving adult with the kind of health insurance that didn’t cover anything, and would certainly not reimburse her for expenses incurred out of state if she, as she had been advised, sought medical attention upon landing.
After Bruce had stowed his personal item and settled in beside her, and had been given an extra tomato juice for his service, he looked through the films and TV shows available for in-flight entertainment, but nothing appealed. He glanced at his phone, then put it away. He drank down his can of juice in one go, opened and closed the flight map, reclined his seat slightly, then pushed it upright again.
“How’s that reading now?” Bruce checked the number on the oxygen monitor still clipped to Louise’s finger. “Ninety-five. That’s good.”
Louise apologized for having interrupted his flight, but Bruce insisted that he was happy to help, that it was no problem at all. He did not admit that he’d been a little disappointed that it was such a minor issue, and not something exciting, something like an aneurysm, which would have required an emergency landing. He liked to make a difference in people’s lives, a big difference, and to do so at all times, if possible.
“Where do you work for real?” She wasn’t especially in the mood to talk, but sensed that he was.
“Mount Sinai. Upper East.”
At which point she remembered that her father had a friend named Bruce, a nurse who worked at Mount Sinai, someone she’d never met but whom he’d mentioned, on and off, for a few years, during his erratic visits to the city.
What compelled Louise to ask Bruce if he knew anyone named Harry from New Orleans? What compelled her to say his last name and his profession, and to confess that this man was her father?
Bruce was visibly shocked, and Louise smiled, nodding. “Yes, he’s my dad, yes.”
The recent deprivation of oxygen to her brain had perhaps washed away her good sense, as her father was not a topic of conversation she enjoyed, nor had it ever been a good idea to associate herself with him, as she knew he had a habit of betraying friends and lovers—it was never clear who was who—and leaving them with resentments, debts, and unresolved issues. Her father moved through the world like a cruise ship, promising a gaudy good time, a break from reality, yet he mainly left waste and hangovers in his wake.
“What are the odds! How is Harry doing?”
“He’s fine.”
“That’s good. Still in Alaska?”
Harry had never lived in Alaska, but it sounded like something he might have told people.
“Still there.”
Why had she brought him up? Why? Now she had joined herself to Bruce with the bruised intimacy of family.
“You’re the designer, aren’t you? Like, high fashion or something?”
It would have been a stretch to call her tiny label with a cult following high fashion, but she had quit the industry years ago now, tired of the instability and the long hours, tired of the fashion people and the Fashion Weeks and the everything. After a brief stint in marketing, she’d had a mild nervous breakdown and tried to pivot to an even more impossible career in acting, but that hadn’t panned out either, so then it was costume design, but there was something so lonely about making clothes for fictional worlds, and, after two other false starts, she’d ended up narrating audiobooks, specifically murder mysteries, and now she’d developed enough of a reputation to enjoy steady work, and there were even listeners who sought out her particular voice reading those brutal stories.
“That’s crazy,” Bruce said, to each turn in her career history. “That’s literally crazy. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” Though he made this last declaration with almost no affect at all.
To change the subject, Louise asked question after question about his life as a nurse, about his habits, his schedules, and how he stayed up for so long, and whether he had ever considered doing anything else.
“For, like, five minutes I wanted to be a journalist, but Dad told me that it was impractical, that I had to study something real, like plumbing, or carpentry, or nursing.”
Bruce’s father had been dead for ten years, but Bruce still teared up when he spoke of him. The tears came and stood alert in his eyes, looked out at the world, then retreated.
No one had ever suggested to Louise that she do something practical, but she didn’t let herself consider why that might have been.
“How’s it reading now?” He checked the oxygen monitor again. “Ninety-six. That’s good.”
At this, the two strangers returned to a parallel silence for the rest of the flight, both of them thinking about their fathers while trying to think of something else.
The moment they hit the ground, Louise sent Diana a text—“fainted during the flight for some reason. got hooked up to an oxygen tank. maybe I’m dying lol”—and watched her phone for a while, waiting for a panicked response, but nothing came.
When Bruce asked where in the city she was staying, Louise was grateful to have a reason to stop monitoring her phone. It turned out that they were going to the same neighborhood—“What are the chances! What a small world!”—so they shared a cab, and it was only then, only once Louise had regained her color and reëntered the more natural light of the world, that Bruce could see it.
“You look so much like your dad.”
“People say that sometimes.”
“And you don’t like it?”
“Well, I don’t mind it—I really don’t—but I don’t see it.”
But of course she did mind, and she did see. That was just the problem. Big, sad, stupid eyes that gave everything away, that bulged when he was angry, when she was angry, though they both tried not to be so angry, tried and tried with mixed results. Harry had once been angry about the indignities of the world (Ronald Reagan, the degradation of the Louisiana wetlands, the AIDS crisis), but as he’d gotten older he became angrier about his own tragedies: that his wife had left him, that his father had been a scammer, that everyone always abandoned him, that even the dogs he’d adopted had fled.
For Louise, it had been the opposite. She’d first been angry about her parents, her heartbreaks, her missed opportunities, but in recent years it had shifted, and now she was unmanageably pissed about corporate control of the government, tax-supported genocide, ICE raids, and the way people boarding trains always tried to muscle their way on before the people exiting could get off. These were communal angers, though she took them all so personally, and the fire of her fury fed endlessly on the era.
“I don’t know . . . what Harry . . . told you about me. . . .”
Bruce was blushing. It had taken every shred of his limited courage to bring up Harry again. “Well, Harry and I were very close, and I cared for him very much. And the thing is, I don’t really know what happened, for him, on his side. But, if he called, I’d be happy to hear his voice. You can tell him that. I wish him the best, I—I really do.”
She looked out the window.
“Do you talk to your dad much?”
“Not really.”
“Does that bother you?”
They were in San Francisco proper now, their cab surrounded by white cars—driverless cars, covered in cameras—that all belonged to the same company. Each carried one passenger in the back seat, all of them busy on their phones.
“No.”
Bruce wanted to give her advice, to say it was important to have a relationship with your father, but he stopped himself. There was nothing particularly paternal about Harry; he’d seemed to Bruce something like a little boy who’d lost his mother in the grocery store but was trying to play it off like he was simply there on his own, just doing a little shopping.
The cab arrived at Bruce’s stop first, and he asked if she wanted to meet up for coffee that week—“Sure, of course”—though Louise wasn’t so sure. They exchanged phone numbers, and as the cab pulled away she unthinkingly found and played the last voice note her father had sent her, two years prior, which she had saved and never replied to:
The recording ended, and the cab-driver acted as if he hadn’t heard it. They arrived, silently, at Joan and Lynn’s address, and the driver got out to lift her luggage from the trunk. Her friends were waiting on the sidewalk, smiling and holding hands. They opened their arms and embraced her.
That evening, as Louise sat at the counter in her friends’ kitchen, watching Joan cook and waiting for Lynn to get off a work call, a response finally arrived from Diana: three exclamation points, and no actual words. This was unusual, as Diana often communicated in paragraph-long texts, or in voice messages that Louise had to play on double speed only to discover that they contained no real information at all.
She stared at the “!!!” for a while, waiting for the rest of the text to arrive, or perhaps for Diana to call, or at least for an “omg baby are you ok?!” But nothing came. Diana might have lost signal on the subway, or in an elevator, or maybe she’d dropped her phone down a sidewalk grate again.
Joan and Lynn’s eldest daughter, the ten-year-old, climbed onto the barstool beside Louise.
“Long time no see, lady.”
The child was speaking like a baby gangster, yet earnestly. Louise tried to engage her with the secret handshake they’d come up with on her last visit, but the effort failed.
“Kid stuff,” the eldest daughter said.
“That’s your aunt Lou,” Joan shouted without looking up from her cutting board. Neither Joan nor Lynn had any sisters, so all their friends were deemed aunts.
“I know,” the child said.
Louise had always felt unsure of how to interact with the eldest daughter. She possessed an abnormal calm. As a toddler, she’d never cared for peekaboo, displayed little interest in toys, and, from the moment she could stand up, she’d station herself at her parents’ bookshelf, as if reading the titles and making little judgments about her mothers’ taste.
“You’re getting so tall!”
“I’ve never been able to figure out why adults find it necessary to point out the increasing height of a child.”
The eldest daughter stared squarely at Louise, waiting on a rebuttal for a few moments before she gave up, took an eight-hundred-page fantasy novel from the counter, and retreated to a reading nook built into one of the window recesses.
The younger daughter had arrived with foreknowledge of the role her older sister had already claimed. She took the other route in turn, spending all six years of her life wearing a perpetual grin and giggling through almost everything she said. Earlier that year she had decided that she would wear only pink and yellow—down to her socks, underwear, and pajamas—and that she would like to be referred to as Sprinkles. Her parents had complied without question.
“Are you still dating the same woman?” Lynn had ended her call and immediately made a pair of pastis cocktails, a particular blend that she and Louise had invented in college. That everyone else found the drink too bitter to tolerate was part of the appeal.
“Diana?”
“Is she the model?”
“No, that ended a while ago.”
“Lemme see a picture.”
Diana had set her own best selfie as Louise’s lock screen—smiling, her hair blown back, the Manhattan skyline behind her.
“I thought this one was the model.”
“Diana’s a publicist.”
“And how’s it going?”
“Her work?”
“Obviously not—I mean the relationship.”
At that moment, Sprinkles ran into the room, laughing as she handed Louise a bouquet of slightly wilted dandelions she’d picked in the park that morning, then ran away.
Unaccustomed to living with someone like Sprinkles, Louise was nearly moved to tears by this delivery of weeds, but Lynn had barely noticed. When Louise hung out with her friends who’d become parents, she always wondered if they were paying either too much or too little attention to their children—but maybe it was impossible to pay exactly the right amount of attention to a child. Maybe that was just the problem.
“I mean, is it serious, or what?”
Louise took a long sip of her drink. “I don’t know.”
One of the issues with Diana, Louise explained, was that she had this habit of nonchalantly telling anyone—strangers on the subway, her dog-walker, bartenders—the most dramatic things that had ever happened to her, and maybe that was fine, but she really did seem to enjoy shocking people. Her older brother had been murdered when she was nine, and Diana brought it up a lot.
“Well, that does seem like a pretty big trauma, right?”
“Except it was actually a half brother and she’d met him only once, and she didn’t even find out about it until she was, like, fifteen or something.”
“Maybe it feels normal to her to be so forthcoming,” Lynn offered.
“See, that’s the problem.”
“What’s the problem?” Joan asked, settling in beside them with a glass of white wine.
“Diana. She’s—I don’t know, I think she’s too dramatic. Everything is either the best or worst thing that’s ever happened to her. Nothing’s just normal.”
Joan and Lynn were staring at Louise with entirely blank expressions. Was she being ungenerous? A self-hating woman? She could never be sure.
“I don’t know. I wonder if I’m the right person for Diana.”
“But are you happy when you’re with her?” Joan asked.
“I guess sometimes I am.”
Louise touched her phone screen to look at the picture of Diana again—gorgeous Diana smiling into the wind, all that thick hair billowing. She had sent no further texts about the fainting incident.
“Well that’s something, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t be happy all the time. But sometimes is good.”
“I guess so.”
Louise didn’t want to admit it to her friends, but, for some time now, she had been trying to work up the courage to break things off, while always getting sucked in deeper. She’d met Diana’s mother accidentally, and she’d rationalized making Diana a copy of her keys by telling herself that it was simply more convenient this way, and somehow they were planning a trip to Greece in the summer, as Diana was friends with a Greek shipping heiress whose family owned several homes. But Louise changed the subject. Talking about Diana only reminded her of the radio silence. It was one thing to always be on the verge of breaking up, but it was quite another to be ignored after a near-death experience.
Dinner was a delicate salad that Joan had made from thirty-seven dollars’ worth of farmers’-market produce, and a fresh pasta from an extraordinarily expensive local business that the residents of the Lower Haight enthusiastically supported. There was no kid-friendly option for the girls; there never was. Instead, they had the same meal as their parents, dining at a child-size table in a corner of the kitchen. Once they’d finished, the children cleared their dishes and wiped their table down with a spray bottle and sponge. Louise couldn’t help but watch them, amazed by their coöperation and efficiency, but Joan and Lynn continued, you might say, to ignore their children.
That night, just as she was falling asleep, Louise was visited by an image that occasionally haunted her, something she’d seen late one night, years earlier, on a trip through a rural corner of Oaxaca. Hundreds of ants on a concrete porch had lifted the corpse of a cockroach as if they were going to carry it home for dinner, but their communication must have broken down, because instead of hauling the roach away, they spun it in a circle while Louise filmed the scene with her phone.
Louise got out of bed, groped her way across the dark room, found her phone tethered to the charger, then scrolled back through her photos to find the grainy twenty-seven-second video of the ants. She watched it twice, checked Diana’s profile for any activity (there was none), considered texting her, refused her own suggestion to do so, then got back in bed.
A message from Diana had come in overnight: “out DANCING call u tmrrw.” Louise mentally drafted and rejected possible replies as she ate pancakes with the eldest daughter, but sent nothing.
“Do you have a cellphone?”
Louise started to get it out, assuming the girl wanted to show her something.
“No, I don’t want to see it. But you should get rid of it.”
“Well, I mean, your moms have cellphones.”
Louise sometimes felt like a little sister in the presence of the eldest daughter, engaged in endless attempts to earn her favor.
“I’ve spoken to Lynn and Joan about the issue, but they’re too far gone.” She put her fork down. “It’s actually really sad if you think about it.”
“So you’re one of those anti-tech kids.”
“I might be the only one.”
“Well, Lynn has a pretty complicated job, so it might be hard to—”
“She has three phones. Did you know that?”
“Work, personal, and . . . ”
“Two work phones. That tells you something, doesn’t it?”
“Momma Lynn is very busy,” Louise said, and again the eldest daughter deployed that withering stare. She shouldn’t have said “Momma,” though Lynn and Joan referred to themselves this way. The eldest daughter stood and put her plate and fork in the dishwasher.
“We agree on a lot of things, philosophically, Lynn and I. But she’s been weakened by techno-optimism.”
Aunt Lou felt a moment of real terror for this child, a fear that she would never be able to accept the world as it was, that she might have the makings of a domestic terrorist, a demagogue, a far-right podcaster, or worse. It was an aunt’s job to assess a niece like this, wasn’t it? She could see the potential personality flaws in the girls and love them without the warping furor of maternity.
At the same time, Louise felt an angry presence inside herself, a need to tell the girl that it was Lynn’s techno-optimism that paid for her cushy Bay Area life—her private school, her fresh pasta, her renovated duplex. But, instead, she just smiled at the back of the eldest daughter’s head as she left the room.
It wasn’t that Louise hated San Francisco, but it was impossible not to notice, while in San Francisco, that it was absolutely full of things she hated. Alone on a walk through the city, she narrated her hatred to herself. Someone was always pitching their startup to someone else, and people were always on a jog, but almost no one was ever walking to a particular destination, and those not jogging were isolated in their hermetically sealed S.U.V.s, forever trying to park. There was a blithe, mildly stoned look in everyone’s eyes, and most of the women were dressed like gnomes while all the men appeared ergonomically outfitted to climb a cliff face but were instead commuting to their office jobs.
The driverless cars were the newest hateable thing. Louise crossed in front of one as it idled at a stop sign, then she stopped for a moment in the center of the intersection to stare into all its cameras. The passenger in the back eventually looked up from her phone, noticed Louise, and locked eyes with this bewildered-looking woman blocking the crosswalk. Louise then hurried to the curb and turned to watch the car whirr away.
A decade ago, back when she could still hold the eldest daughter with one arm, Louise hadn’t possessed or desired a smartphone. It had been easy for her to declare at the time that she’d never get one, never be so enslaved, but then she’d started freelancing for a company that had made it impossible to get into the corporate headquarters without scanning a QR code, and she’d caved, humiliated, though no one seemed to remember her previously staunch refusal. She’d left that job after a few months but kept the phone, and now it was in her back pocket, pressed against her ass as she waited for it to vibrate.
After two hours of walking and hating, Louise arrived at Union Square and took a break on a bench equipped with spikes that made it impossible for someone to lie down. She felt the sun on her face and watched people walking through the open plaza.
In the middle of the square, a man was frantically running around, carrying a microphone and what looked like a large gilded frame. A few people were filming him with their phones; some were trying to get away from him while others struggled to get closer. He wore a bright-orange suit and a purple tie, a costume that only added to Louise’s confusion. Soon, enough of a crowd had formed around him that he was no longer visible.
“What are the chances!”
Louise turned to see where the voice had come from, but he was right in front of her, emerging from the throng. It was Bruce.
“Imagine that!” He sat on the bench beside her, on the other side of a spike, then went in for a one-armed hug.
She asked if he knew what was going on with that crowd, that man, and Bruce said it was the Rate Your Happiness guy.
“The what?”
“The influencer? He asks people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s sort of interesting. I watched him for a little while. But you! What about you? How are you feeling? Have you seen a doctor?”
She had already forgotten about the fainting, and it was only then that she realized she hadn’t even told Joan or Lynn about it, though she would tell them that night over dinner, as a backstory to explain how she’d run into Bruce and spent most of the afternoon with him, how they’d walked around the city for a while, then impulsively stopped in a crystal store, where Bruce had cried, all of a sudden, just started crying the moment he found out that Louise and Harry hadn’t spoken in two years.
“That would have been around the time I got his postcard from Alaska.” The young man behind a glass case full of obsidian offered Bruce a tissue. “He said he’d moved there and that he was thinking of me, but there was no return address, and when I tried to call him, someone told me it was the wrong number.”
So he had, maybe, moved to Alaska.
“Do you think something’s happened to him?”
Louise had always assumed that her sister or brother would call if anything serious occurred. They were still in touch with him, as far as she knew.
“I’ll ask my sister.”
“Oh, would you? Oh, gosh, I’d love to hear from him. I hadn’t realized how much I—I hadn’t realized, you know, how worried I’ve been.”
Then Bruce told her that the whole situation reminded him of something from his favorite novel, a title that Louise had heard of but never read. Bruce recited several lines from it, from memory, right there in the crystal store, and the boy behind the counter applauded him at the end. But as Louise recounted the scene to her friends that evening, all she remembered was the last line: “So much shines in absence—whereas presence, high and lonesome, can tire.”
Lynn, frustrated not to know the source, began searching for it on her phone, but nothing came up. Louise must have gotten the quote wrong and couldn’t remember the book title, so she promised Lynn that she would text Bruce about it, but she didn’t really mean it and was already hoping that Bruce would forget about her and fail to get in touch again.
“High and lonesome,” he’d said in the crystal store. “Don’t you love that? Doesn’t that seem true?”
A few days later, Joan and Lynn loaded the girls and Louise into their van to go for a hike in the park right across the Golden Gate Bridge. Schools were closed for the holidays, and the weather was still unseasonably mild, so thousands of other well-resourced families were on their way to do the same thing. The traffic was heavy, especially where each car had to wait its turn to enter the one-lane tunnel into the Headlands.
“It feels like we’re commuting to work,” the eldest daughter said, and no one responded except for Sprinkles, who giggled to herself and said, “Work,” then giggled again.
As soon as they’d arrived, and parked, and set out on the trail, the sheer force of nature did seem worth the trouble. They all fell into a satisfied silence for a while, until the eldest daughter gave a speech about how ridiculous it was that they’d driven all the way out here when they could have walked through the park near their house and seen the same ocean.
Once the group reached Rodeo Beach, however, even the eldest daughter seemed to silently agree that it was a perfect day, a perfect plan. Joan rolled two enormous blankets out across the stony sand and asked Louise when she’d last visited the Headlands. Louise said that she’d never been here, that they’d always said they’d take her someday, but the weather had never coöperated.
“But I know we came once, yes, at least once,” Lynn said. “A couple years ago?”
“It was seven years ago, because I was three,” the eldest daughter declared, without looking up from her Jane Austen novel. “We watched a vulture eating a dead pelican, and Aunt Lou threw up.”
“What? I don’t think I ever—”
“No, you totally did. Right there on the beach.”
There it was again, that little-sister feeling.
“How do you not remember that?”
The eldest daughter put her book down as she asked this, and Louise thought Joan or Lynn might reprimand their child for her tone, which was pandering and barbed, but when she looked to her friends they were staring out at the ocean. Sprinkles was balancing a few stones atop one another with great concentration.
“I mean, I’m just curious,” the eldest daughter said, her voice veering meaner and meaner. “If it happened to you, then why don’t you remember it?”
“Well, I’m . . . ” But Louise really didn’t have a reason.
“I read somewhere that people with bad memories are actually happier, in the long run,” Joan offered.
This reminded Louise of the Rate Your Happiness guy—had they ever heard of him? Lynn had seen his videos, and her company had even worked with him once on sponsored content. She thought the whole thing was ridiculous, because basically everyone he asked said eight or nine, and whenever someone said something lower, he’d grill them about it until they changed their answer.
Their cellphones didn’t really work in the Headlands, but one of Lynn’s work phones was tethered to a satellite, so she was able to stream a few of the influencer’s posts, which were edited together at a breakneck speed, squeezing a dozen micro-interviews into a single minute. The newest one had been uploaded just hours earlier, and Louise, despite herself, searched for her face in the background. She wasn’t there.
“Can we turn the phones off, please? We’re supposed to be bonding as a family.”
And all the adults obeyed the eldest daughter.
On the hike back out to the car, the trails were even more crowded, and, as another group approached them on a narrow part of the path, Louise noticed the old woman from the plane, the woman in the wool cardigan, the last face she’d seen before passing out. The old woman’s face lit with recognition, and what, indeed, were the chances of this? Once they were closer, however, her expression turned quite serious, and she reached out and took Louise by the shoulders.
“Your father—” she said, pinning her reddened eyes on Louise.
“My what?”
“Your father and I think it would be best if you asked for a prenuptial—”
The woman’s daughter intervened before she could continue. “Sorry about that.” The daughter peeled her mother’s hands away from Louise. “She’s here, but she’s not here.”
Lynn and Joan and their girls were several paces ahead, and had seen nothing. Louise considered telling them what had happened, the wild coincidence of it, but then she remembered that the woman on the plane had had gray hair and this woman only had gray roots. So it wasn’t a story after all. She kept it to herself.
Louise didn’t hear from Diana, or from Bruce, for several days, and she assumed that that was it, that they must both have given up on the Louise situation, but on the last full day of her trip, as she was leaving the duplex for a walk, she nearly ran into Bruce on the sidewalk.
“We have to stop meeting like this.” He was cradling a large rabbit as if it were a baby.
“What the—”
“Oh, this is Elmo. Well, St. Elmo Rattlesnake Jumper Cables Lancaster-Johnson.”
He smiled at her, then added that Elmo was his friends’ pet and he was taking him for a bath at the vet down the street.
“Walk with me, talk with me,” Bruce said, as if referencing some old bit that they shared. They walked together, first to the vet, then aimlessly, giving each other reports of their time in San Francisco, making the usual complaints that New Yorkers make about the West Coast. They scowled together at the driverless cars, and Bruce made jokes about his friends’ polycule.
“I mean, the sheer optimism of the whole thing. The logistics. Where do they even get the energy?”
Louise genuinely laughed at this, so maybe they weren’t so different, she and Bruce, and maybe they could, as a team, solve all their troubles and traumas with her dad, with his Harry. In a lull in the conversation, she thought of asking him if he and her dad had been boyfriends or something, but she couldn’t get the phrasing right in her head, and before she could say anything Bruce interrupted her thoughts.
“You look sad.”
“Compared to what?”
This question came out reflexively, with real accusation, and Louise recognized her tone as belonging to the eldest daughter.
“Oh, never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. I know how tiring a vacation can be.”
A cold silence passed between them, during which they kept walking down a charming little street, past all its charming little architecture, and when they came upon a clapboard sign advertising an open house they agreed, almost without speaking, to go in, to consider an apartment for sale in a city they both openly disdained.
A real-estate agent with a huge, demented smile stood at the entrance, handing out her card, which was printed with a portrait of her that looked much the same as she did in that moment—toothy grin, big hair. “Welcome, welcome,” she said. “Welcome.” And the welcomes kept coming out of her, compulsive and hopeful and for no one in particular.
Bruce and Louise made their rounds through this two-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bathroom-plus-office-nook “opportunity.” The finishes were nice, but the ceilings felt low, and it was unnecessary for either of them to say this aloud.
Louise’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Diana.
She’d been meaning to call, Diana explained, but so many things kept getting in the way. Louise said nothing in reply.
“Are you there? Where are you?”
“I’m looking at an apartment with Bruce.”
“A what? An apartment? And who is Bruce?”
“My friend? My friend Bruce?”
Louise made eye contact with Bruce as she said his name, and he seemed glad to be called her friend instead of merely the nurse who happened to respond to her minor vasovagal emergency on the plane and who was coincidentally an erstwhile acquaintance of her estranged father. It was nice, instead, to be a friend.
“Are you moving there? Why are you looking at an apartment?”
“Why not?”
Again Louise recognized the voice of the eldest daughter rising from her own throat.
“So, is this an O.K. time to talk?”
“I don’t think so.”
Just then the lights in the apartment flicked off and on, then off again, leaving them in the dark, so Louise hung up. She could tell that Diana was about to end things with her, but Louise had other problems, big problems, or maybe a million small ones. Low blood pressure. Anemia. Something with her dad. Maybe Bruce was her problem now, too. She wasn’t sure what to do about any of it.
The real-estate agent was frantically laughing and telling everyone not to panic, not to worry, that she’d get it all sorted out, but the crowd took this as their cue to leave, and, out in the street, Bruce said that he had to be going, had to pick up Elmo. They hugged goodbye.
“If you do check in with your sister or something, if you find out how Harry’s doing . . . well, let me know. Or tell him that you met me, if that feels right, or have your sister tell him that I said hello or, well, whatever feels right. And text me or call, if you’re comfortable with that. If you want to.”
She watched Bruce walk away from her, down the tree-lined street. She watched him with pointed attention, as if Bruce were someone she had loved enormously, a great love of her life whom mere circumstance had kept her from loving completely.
Louise continued her walk alone, and as dusk began to fall she felt an uptick in the ambient menace of the city, a real sense of mayhem. None of the streetlights were working, and the driverless cars were stalled everywhere. Passengers were abandoning them, like rats scuttling off a sinking ship, and people stood on the sidewalks, looking at their phones, or looking at the city, frowning, desperate. “What are we supposed to do—walk there? Walk two whole miles?”
But Louise, untroubled by their troubles, was having a conversation with Diana in her head.
“What about Halloween—what was that all about? Weren’t we in love, at least a little, at least right then?” But the imaginary Diana didn’t have anything to say in return; she pushed a lock of her hair behind one ear and looked out into the distance. “You know, you were the last thing I thought about before I died,” Louise told her.
“But you didn’t die,” the imaginary Diana corrected.
“I mean, when I thought I was about to die.”
But maybe she really was dying, because how would she know, because why had she passed out on the plane to begin with, and why did Bruce think that she looked sad? Without quite realizing it, she had walked into a high-end cosmetics store, full of mirrors reflecting back her bulging eyes and the bags beneath them.
A very pretty clerk with a motionless face approached her, but Louise just nodded and got her phone out to call her sister.
“Did something happen to Dad? Is he in Alaska?”
Many things, she was somehow surprised to learn from Jolene, had happened to her father.
“We decided not to say anything until you asked.”
“Well, I’m asking now.”
Her father had indeed moved to Alaska, first to a cabin with some kind of cat-sitting deal for a forest firefighter he’d met somewhere, but then he’d tried to stay for good, had gotten into a vague investment opportunity that didn’t go as he’d hoped. He’d gone broke, again, and then he’d had a mild stroke and was now stuck there. Luckily, the firefighter was back, and he was, it seemed, taking care of Harry, more or less.
Louise didn’t say much as her sister gave this report. She occupied herself with rubbing various serums and creams into her face, hoping they’d take immediate effect.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Louise said, defeated by the present.
“Well, I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Jolene said, lying. “But if you keep ignoring him you’ll regret it. You will.”
“I’m not ignoring him,” Louise corrected. “We’re ignoring each other. It’s mutual.”
Then the lights went out in the store, and one of the clerks shrieked in the dark, and another told her to remain calm. Outside, the street was now clogged with driverless cars, their high beams on, in confusion, in paralysis, lacking any traffic lights to tell them what to do. How natural it is to fail, to fail to decide, to remain in meaningless motion, like all those ants with their cockroach corpse, or like all of us; how active and yet inert life felt in this entirely too modern world.
Louise returned to the street with real intent, finally carrying her contradictory desires with total clarity, and a pilfered tube of eye serum in her pocket, something that promised to illuminate her from within. ♦
This is drawn from “My Stalkers.”