Laura Perkins lives in Wyoming. Her writing has appeared in The Southeast Review, failbetter, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere.
There is yellow in the water. I see it when I stretch my glass towards the overhead light. The fluorescent bulb catches the pale urine glow, particles glittering in capture. “Look,” I say to my cubicle neighbor, Claudia, who waits behind me to fill up her water bottle. Only then do I realize this may be an unkindness. I can’t be the only one who holds my breath when sunbeams reveal dust motes, who keeps the lights low wherever I go.
“You’re wasting water,” Claudia says. She reaches past me and turns off the faucet. Her silver watch indents the thick skin around her wrist. Her forearms are freckled, hairless, the skin scaled around the elbow despite the mango-scented lotion she’s always smearing up her arms. Greasy evidence left to slick every surface she touches.
“Look at this.” I shake the glass again. The flecks inside riot like a swarm of gnats. She squints as if it isn’t obvious.
“I’ve got eight minutes left for break. What?”
“The color. It’s yellow.”
She stares at it. This close, I notice that her eyes are uneven, the right slightly higher up than the left. My arm gets tired from holding the glass. I set it on the counter. The color looks almost normal out of the light.
“It looks fine to me. Maybe a little yellow. So?”
“So, that means the pipes are bad. That’s probably lead.”
I’m not sure if this is true. I don’t know how to tell if there is lead in water. When I moved into my apartment, my landlord explained that there may or may not be lead in the pipes, and there may or may not be lead paint on the walls. He doesn’t know for sure, but due to the age of the home, it is possible, maybe even probable, and anyway, he isn’t liable as long as he informed me. He handed me some paperwork that I threw away without reading. It feels possible, sometimes, that ignorance will save me.
“Then don’t drink it,” Claudia says. She shifts her water bottle under the faucet and flips the nozzle to full. A gunk of dark eye makeup has settled into her tear ducts. That is what Claudia buys with the money she makes here—makeup, clothes. Her husband works for the railroad and earns enough for both of them. Everything she makes is extra. Most of what she buys she gets here. We work at a call center for a retail store. Even with the ten percent off employee discount I can’t afford anything, but Claudia spends her days shopping. I see her while she’s on the phone with customers, the separate window she keeps up for browsing.
“But they should fix it,” I say. “We need safe water while we work. It’s the least they can do.”
She gives me a smile that is familiar, the look that says I’m too young and that is why I bother; my resentment dismissed as immaturity. I’m twenty-eight, not young at all, but most people here think so because I’m not married, because I don’t have kids. They think I’m still waiting on the edge of everything real that’s supposed to happen to me.
“So call OSHA.”
I don’t want to call OSHA. I just want to talk shit about this place. That’s the only benefit of working a job like this, I thought, but everyone else is happy to be here. They’re pleased making eleven dollars an hour. They brag about how much sick time they’ve accrued. They pretend it’s a hardship when they are forced to use their vacation time, as if there is an undercover boss poised to give them a bonus if they prove their dedication, as if this place is in the habit of giving anyone anything they deserve.
We have a meeting after we get back from break. Lydia, our boss, is waiting in the conference room. She’s wearing a white pantsuit. Chunky rings on her narrow fingers. Her teeth enamel is nearly translucent from the bleach strips she applies between phone calls.
She tells us about this show she saw on Netflix the night before. The host did experiments with people passing by on the street. They instructed one person to stand and frown for five minutes, and another to smile for five minutes. “Out of a hundred people,” Lydia says, “all the smilers reported feeling happier than the frowners. Isn’t that so interesting? So that’s why I’m telling you all to smile around the office. When you’re on a difficult call with a customer? Smile! Try it. Smile until you trick your brain into feeling happier. It really works.”
. . .
Three months ago, my sister Shelby and I broke up with our boyfriends at the same time. Ryan, her boyfriend of two years, slapped her during an argument. It made her feel crazy. “I wanted to rake my fingernails down his skin,” Shel told me later, on the phone. “I wanted to peel him, Kate.”
Soon after, I left Paul. He never hit me. We broke up because when I said that we should break up, he went to our bedroom and pulled an armful of his clothes from the closet. Hangers broke, littering bright plastic shards onto the carpet. I watched him pack for a while. Then I went into the living room to pretend to watch television, claiming my beagle-mix, Bert, by looping his collar with my fingers. Paul already has a new girlfriend, this sporty-looking girl named Nicole. When I’m bored I scroll through her Instagram and like all the pictures she posts of them together. She’s blonde, of course.
I text Shel when I’m out of work.
Want to hang out?
I work the late shift so it’s dark as I drive home. Traffic lights flash yellow at every intersection. Cheyenne dies at ten o’clock but not as much as it used to, the way it did when we were kids and every noise dropped off once darkness hit. Then we could sneak out, sometimes, Shel and I, into a world that felt carved for us. There was never anyone around. Now the streets go quieter but there are still trucks driving alongside me, blasting their mufflers as they accelerate through every stretch of straight road. All the untouched land has been smoothed over, rebuilt into neatly spaced homes that are different shadings of the same design. It’s been like this for years now, but certain corners of town are still a surprise. I’m not used to these filled in spaces.
I stop at my mom’s on the way home. Her windows are the only light on the block. I park on the lawn. There is no space in the driveway. Her old Honda sits there on flat tires. It hasn’t moved for months. Leaves have drifted into the broken back window and cover the seats like gilded fur. I realize I should call someone to haul it away for her. I make a mental note to look into that tomorrow and feel so good that it almost doesn’t matter that I know I’ll forget.
Her house smells skunky with the bad weed Mom buys from a friend. She started doing it a year ago to help with her back pain. Now she’s high nearly all the time, but I don’t mind. She’s nicer when she’s stoned. We get along better now that she forgets most of what I say.
An infomercial plays on TV. A trim brunette woman runs from one counter to the other shouting about chicken.
“I need to get one of these little counter ovens,” Mom says. She’s dressed in the pink pajama set Shel got her two Christmases ago, a stain at the knee. Her hair is wild in the back. After she left my dad, she cut it down to the scalp and dyed what remained a bright brassy red. Now it is gray at the roots. I’m not sure if she’s letting it go or if she hasn’t noticed. “They’re amazing.”
I sit and watch the infomercial with her for a while. When I was a kid, we used to stay up watching infomercials at a low volume so as not to wake my dad, addicted to the idea that one small thing could change a life. Sometimes I have the urge to ask her if she is lonely living here by herself, but I never do. I’m afraid of what I would be obligated to do if she said yes.
“Want some?” She holds out her vape pen.
“Can’t. I have the route.”
“I forgot.” She crinkles her lips around the pen and draws deep. “We should just win the lottery.”
“I’ll get tickets on my way home.” We know tickets are a waste of money, but they’re a small waste; two dollars to spend the week hoping.
“Have you heard from Shel? She said she was going to call you, but she always forgets your shifts.” She pauses, her attention drawn by the television. We watch chicken defrost in seconds, the meat sweating and swelling and darkening until done. “Don’t be mad.”
“Why would I be mad?”
“Just don’t be,” she says. “You get kind of judgey sometimes.”
“About what?”
“She’ll tell you. Don’t ask me.” She raises the remote and turns up the volume. This is how she tells me she wants me to leave. Twelve years ago, she left our dad for the last time. He beat her a couple of times a year but that wasn’t as bad as the rules, she’s said since. No noise after six because that was when he went to bed. Dinner no later than four-thirty, and the meal was the same thing every night—venison from a deer he killed himself, a can of vegetables, a potato side. Rules about what she could say, how she dressed, the people she spoke to, how she raised us. After that, she didn’t like living with anyone else, even Shel and me. I pretend she needs someone to check up on her, but mostly I think I’m trying to assuage the future guilt I’ll feel if someday she ends up dead and it’s a neighbor who finds her.
I had hoped to run into Shel, but her car is gone. She moved in with Mom after splitting up with Ryan. Shel sleeps on the couch when she isn’t picking up extra waitressing shifts. A few weeks ago, I floated the idea of us moving in together. I waited until Mom was out of the room. “No,” Shelby said, so easily that I found myself without argument. She shifted the plush gray blanket from her lap to the couch cushion beside her, smoothing it carefully with her slim fingers, and told me that sisters can’t move back in together. That the thing with Mom is temporary. If we lived together, she said, we would never stop living together. “And I want to get married someday, Katie.”
Before I leave, Mom tucks an edible gummy into my hand, folding my fingers over it. “For later,” she says.
. . .
Paul works in IT for the local school district. It keeps him busy. He is always working or on call, but he makes so much money that the hours don’t bother him. When we moved in together four years ago, we agreed to split our bills in half, change included. This was our understanding of romance: a clean arithmetic. Neither of us knows anything about the inner workings of healthy relationships. Paul’s parents divorced when he was twelve after fighting for years. It was the fighting that held them together, he told me during one of those late night conversations, after sex, when whatever you tell the person in bed beside you lacks the permanence of the day-said thing. After living that way for so long, they didn’t know how else to be, and he was afraid he didn’t either. It’s a language we had to learn on the spot, fumbling disparate phrases until we approximated fluency.
Since he moved out, I’ve had to take up a newspaper route to make up for his share of the rent.
I stop by the apartment to let Bert out. He scratches at the door when he hears me coming. He’s chewed on the table leg again. Bits of pale pulpy wood stick to the dark lining of his gums. I let him outside to pee and straighten up and fix the water bowl he’s turned over and then let him inside again. He jumps at my legs. I scratch his ears, but I’m in a hurry and I have to go, so I give him some peanut butter in a Kong toy to distract him so he doesn’t notice that I’ve left until I’m already gone. He isn’t used to being home alone.
My car is still warm when I drive to pick up my newspaper bundles.
Cars line up along the warehouse, tails of exhaust curling upwards. I park in line and turn off the engine. I dial the number I was given on my first day, key in my route number, and listen to the automated message telling us that the newspapers are late again. I try not to think of the hours ahead of me, the diminishing space for sleep, for anything else I want to do. It takes me an hour-and-a-half to get through the route on a good weather day, two hours when it is windy, and at least three if there is snow. My goal every morning is to get home by five a.m. so that I can take care of Bert, eat something, get to sleep by six, then wake up by twelve to get ready for the call center. I scroll through Nicole’s Instagram while I wait. There is a new picture of her standing behind Paul, her thin arms looped around his neck. Their heads tilt towards each other, connected at the temples. I press Like.
It isn’t until three-thirty that my newspapers are ready. I pick up the stack and fold them in my car, sacrificing quality for speed, crinkling the pages badly, forgoing the shiny inserts. I drive to my route, steering with my knees while I continue to fold and bag. I pull over at the first house on my route to finish.
This neighborhood is filled with houses that look like castles. Their lawns are green all year round, the roads paved smooth. On my second night delivering, a silver SUV followed me for three blocks before the driver realized I was the new paper girl. He is the leader of the neighborhood watch. I didn’t realize that until later, after I hid in a carport to call the police, my keys clenched blade-out between my fingers. He told the cops that he saw my car, with its creaky engine and taped passenger window, and saw me, in dark clothes, creeping from lawn to lawn. He assumed that I was a burglar. “An honest mistake,” the cops said later.
I bundle my papers in my canvas bag until my shoulders ache from the weight. I step out into the cold thin air of early morning and get started. The bag is so heavy that I have to think of the near future, after I get rid of some weight, after it lessens. It is the same way I got through dentist appointments or long road trips as a kid—by reminding myself that soon it will be over, soon I will be done.
Shelby texts me when I’m halfway through the route.
You free tonight for dinner? My treat
I wonder where she got the money.
I text back yes and pocket my phone. I pick up a realtor’s ad for a neighboring house on my way to the next part of my route. I like to look at the glossy pictures of the bedrooms, the fenced backyards, the walk-in showers. While I walk, I calculate the mortgage. I picture winning the lottery and buying it. The way the realtor would look at me when I say I’m paying in cash. I tuck it into my canvas bag when I’m done. My trunk is full of flyers for houses I will never buy.
. . .
There is a slim hour before I go to bed and after Paul wakes up for the day. Sometimes I text him. I’m alone, I tell him. I’m lonely. I send him pictures: my ankles crossed. My knee. Bare and pale in the low light of my apartment, which I keep so dim that I don’t have to see anything I don’t want to. I watch the messages change from Delivered to Read and know that he’s waiting. I can picture him in some apartment across town, hiding in the bathroom, pretending to get ready for work. His broad body hunched over the phone. Dark hair frizzed on one side from sleeping. Sometimes three dots appear, but whatever he types he erases. The messages don’t come until I send the other pictures: pictures of my nipples, my underwear. My legs falling open. My fingers drifting upwards. We’ve had sex three times since we broke up. Once in my apartment and twice in his car, around a scatter of Starbucks cups that must have been left there by Nicole, because Paul hates any coffee that isn’t sugarless and plain. They rattled as he moved behind me and I stared at them and wished that I felt worse than I did, which is bad but not enough to put an end to it. I think I want to ruin him. “You can’t do this anymore,” he said after the last time, “you have to stop,” but he didn’t mean it. He’s working himself up to meaning it. Someday he will. He’ll tell me to stop and I’ll know that this time it’s real.
I don’t know what that will feel like.
. . .
Shel picks a restaurant I’ve never been to. It is so empty that there is a waiter for each table with some to spare. They linger in the dark hallway between the bathrooms and kitchen, rolling silverware and trying not to make eye contact with customers. The host seats us in a booth in a dim corner of the room. There is a row of televisions behind the bar. Most play ESPN or Fox News at a low volume. One is tuned to the Home Shopping Network. A heavy woman on-screen holds a teacup that is too small for drinking. She is grinning so hard that her eyes have reduced to slits, her cheeks swollen like a plastic surgery victim.
Shel slides in the booth across from me. She smells like grease from work. She’s still wearing her pink uniform under her jacket, which she holds closed with her hands, hunching her shoulders against the air conditioning. The lamp overhead makes a mosquito hum and flickers. She glances at it and then away, and we both agree, silently, to pretend not to notice it.
“How’s work?” she asks.
I tell her about Lydia’s speech. My impression of my boss is so good that I wish Shelby had met her once so she could fully appreciate it. I used to do it for Paul, who knew Lydia from tagging along with me to the annual holiday party. It made him laugh. I wonder if I’ll ever know anyone as well as I know him. Five years we spent studying each other’s lives, as if preparing for an exam that never happened. I have so much information in my mind that is useless now. Or not useless, but not of any use to me.
“Isn’t that insane?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you think that’s true? I mean, kind of. Like you can kind of control what your mind thinks. Right? You don’t have to choose to be miserable.”
“I don’t think people choose that.”
Shel nods. “They do. They choose to see the bad in everything. Being happy is kind of a choice. It’s an action. Right? It isn’t something that just happens to you.”
The waiter brings us our menus. Shelby tells me to order whatever I want. “No limit,” she says. The most expensive item here is thirty dollars, but for us that’s a lot.
“Did you get a big tip or something?” I ask.
Shel tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair is a lighter shade of brown than mine, as fine as a baby’s. “No. I’m thinking of quitting, actually.”
“Do you have something else lined up?”
We’re interrupted again. Shelby picks something from the menu. I order the same thing. I watch Shelby, the way she spreads her hands against the surface of the table, fanning her fingers, her eyes aimed at her fingernails.
“Not yet,” she says once the waiter has left. It’s too quiet in the restaurant. There is only one other family here, a couple and two young children, on the opposite side of the room. Shelby squares herself and looks up at me. She folds her hands against her side. “I was thinking of going back to school, maybe. I could finish my degree. Then I could start teaching. I think I’ve decided that what I’d like to teach is first grade, or maybe second. That would be kind of perfect. Don’t you think? Kindergarten is too young. First or second—or third I don’t think would be too bad. They know how to behave already, but they still like you, they like school.”
She pinches the loose strand of hair between her fingers and tugs down hard. The ends go slick with the oil from her fingers.
“How are you going to afford it? Take out more loans?”
Shelby unravels her utensils. She tears a corner of her napkin and begins to pluck it apart, piling artificial snow. “For once I wish I could say I want to do something without somebody asking me how I’m going to afford it. Mom did the same thing. Why is this family so money obsessed?”
“We don’t have any.” I purse my lips and exhale. Napkin confetti flies over her. Shelby plucks a piece from the damp crease of her bottom lip. “What’s going on?”
“How’s your painting going?”
“Don’t change the subject,” I say, because I don’t want to answer. I haven’t made anything in weeks. My paints are drying out in the back of my closet. Sometimes I take out my easel and stare at it before folding it up again. I’m too tired to paint.
“What?” I say.
Shel looks around. She’s looking anywhere but at me.
“So I’ve been talking to Ryan.”
I know where this is going. I look away from her. The spare waiters are still lingering in the hallway, taking an inordinate amount of time rolling silverware to avoid being asked to do more. The last time we went out together, after our breakups, Mom joined us. To celebrate, we said, three single women in the world. This temporary feeble pride we had in ourselves. I can see that now. As kids, Shelby and I used to lie on our stomachs with our noses pressed close, our pinkies latched together, making promises about the kind of men we’d choose. How different they would be from our dad. How different we would be from our mom. How maybe we wouldn’t choose anyone. “I’d rather be alone,” Shel said, or maybe I did. I can’t remember. And it doesn’t matter. We didn’t mean it. Back then we didn’t know anything about how living feels.
“Don’t be mad,” Shelby says.
“I’m not mad.” I’m not sure if I’m telling the truth. “Is it just because of the money?”
Ryan works for the state department. He designs highways and makes more per paycheck than I do in six months.
“That’s rude. That’s fucking rude, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not.
After a while, the waiter brings us our food. He sets it in front of us and then waits as if hoping we’ll give him something else to do. He leaves when neither of us look at him.
“Look at this,” Shelby says. She kicks off one white sneaker. The elastic of her sock is slack, a fabric melt along the back of her heel. A gray imprint of the curve of her feet stains the bottom. She tugs the sock off her foot slowly. It hangs limp from her fingers. She drapes it on the table with care, like meat on a griddle. She angles her foot so it catches the flickering light overhead. Her heel is flushed. The back of her foot is broken open and raw, a blister seeping. Her small toe is turned in, swollen. The nail is dark. It looks like it might fall off.
After she is satisfied that I’ve gotten a good look, she pulls her sock back on. She slides her foot into her shoe. She takes care in double-tying the laces.
“They need to change this lightbulb,” I say when she faces me again. I can’t think of anything else.
. . .
When I get home, I take the edible my mom gave me. Bert knocked over the trash can while I was gone. I let him outside and clean it up while I wait for the weed to kick in. I should take Bert on a walk, but it’s late and I’m tired and walking alone in the dark scares me. I fix him more peanut butter and try to ignore how fat he’s getting.
I entertain the idea of getting out my paints and trying to work on something. Instead, I sit on the couch and turn on the TV.
There was a time that people considered me talented; a time when I thought talent was enough. There is a painter that I follow on YouTube. He creates videos about his art. He talks about how art must be the most important priority in one’s life. He is impatient, settled into this life he’s made for himself. If you love it enough, he says, you’ll find the time for it, as if it is a doorway that can be muscled through if enough force is applied. “Hustle,” he says. “Make the time—even if it is only thirty minutes, even if it is only five,” but what can one accomplish in five minutes? Five minutes isn’t enough to become truly good at something. Five allotted minutes renders something a hobby. It is easy to let a hobby slip away.
I flip channels until I land on the shopping network. The same woman from earlier is on screen, her dark hair piled high on her head, grinning back at me as she holds up a small decorative penguin. It is useless, but part of me has always wanted to be able to fill my house with useless things, beautiful clutter that I buy only because I want to, with no real purpose at all.
My phone buzzes. A text from Shel.
Still mad at me?
“Call now,” the woman on TV says. “Don’t wait until it’s too late! You wouldn’t want to lose these beauties, would you?” I turn off the sound and watch her mouth move.
I pull up Paul’s number. I open my legs and take off my underwear and take a picture and send it without editing. I take another of my breasts. Pictures of my elbow, my chin, the pink zig-zagging line of my scalp. I’m doing it in the wrong order, I know. I take pictures of the doorway to our apartment, of Bert’s collar, the couch armchair. The edible begins to kick in as I wait for his response, any response. He keeps his phone on at night. It is part superstition, a belief that if he has his phone turned on in case of emergency, no emergency will happen. I picture him rolling over in bed and picking up the phone. I picture him seeing my name on screen. I wait for the three dots to appear. Bert nudges my arm with his cold wet nose. I pet him without looking. He was our compromise. We’re too young for kids, I told Paul. I was afraid that having kids would use up every part of me. I thought, then, that there would be other uses, other ways for me to be in the world.
On the TV, the woman holds up the penguins for the camera zoom. She grins at the audience. I can see my pinhole reflection in the darkness of her hair. I practice grinning in return. My cheeks strain until it hurts, until I can see both rows of my teeth. I wait for something to happen.
