“I think,” Michelle said, after we’d climbed into bed and kissed goodnight, “when we’re old, we’ll be together.”
“I can’t even imagine being old,” I said, though I wish I hadn’t.
She was a confident chewer. Sometimes her confidence and strong opinions made her seem arrogant or foolish, and other times they made her seem large, like a sun or meteor or a boulder on a green hill, or an acacia in full bloom off the highway. She was good with maps. She knew how to sew. She was a sultry kisser. In the night, she’d reach over and rest her hand on the top of my head, sometimes give it a little shake.
What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?
Just before the arrival of the ants, we had put a note under the door of the building manager, Ronald Chang, asking if we could have a new refrigerator. He wrote back the following:
Girls. Not broke, don’t fix.
Another time he left this note:
Girls. Someone coming. Pipes.
Another time:
This is clean bug day, girls. Under sink.
We pinned the notes to our refrigerator, which was not broken but was old and small and refused to freeze ice cream.
Ronald Chang lived above us. He had grown up in Shenyang, migrated to the City twenty years earlier, and worked at the Golden Lotus in Chinatown. Was he the owner of the restaurant? We could hear him going in and out of his apartment and up and down the stairs. We could hear his television and his conversations in Cantonese on the telephone. When he saw us he smiled and said hello very loudly, as if he had to speak English at a forceful volume if we were to understand. We often had the feeling that we were not real to him, the way you feel when you are visiting another country. The inhabitants are a little fake, and you think you can do or say whatever you want because you are more or less on a stage set. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he also was not all the way real to us. It took years before the City lived in my bones and I could see myself as a fellow member, a citizen of the City.
Some things I can’t remember. I can’t remember if we had plants in that apartment, or if Michelle liked houseplants. I can’t remember the exact sound of her voice, or where she parted her hair, or what she smelled like. I can remember the bike she rode, a ten-speed Cannondale, yellow, and how she brushed her teeth with baking soda and once used a wet wipe to damp down her hair when we were biking and it was falling in her face.
“Someday I’ll have my own woodworking business,” she said once, and then a week later pondered going to medical school. The second year we lived in the apartment, while she was working construction full time, she signed up for French, astronomy, and pottery classes.
“How are you going to do all that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. A week later she had to drop all three.
She was a dreamer. She was egotistical, romantic, manipulative. I loved her.
In the vacant houses where she helped build kitchen cabinets and lay wooden floors, she often found odd items, like the poetry book with the three arrows pointing down to no rain in Lima since 1940. She would show these items to me and collect them in our large living room closet. The day she told me she didn’t like the neighbor, she had found a long thin piece of wood on which someone had written in black pen:
This is your leg, I love
Your lips, a dove
One shoe
One rack of lamb for you
Two turtle gloves
Etc. all down the wood.
From the same construction site she had already brought home a black leather wallet left behind inside a drawer. A horse head was embossed on the front flap. Someone had left a note in the wallet, written in navy blue eyeliner.
To Jim: I hereby solemnly and gratefully swear to pay back every penny of the $600 I owe you. Have a nice day. Lisa.
Lisa had drawn a symbol next to her name and we couldn’t agree on what it signified. I thought it was a special kind of stylized letter M. Lisa M. But Michelle saw an unclosed heart.
After we disagreed about the wallet, we went to bed and pretended we were sexual strangers. Michelle pulled the sheet over her head, and I could see her breath tent and cave. “What color are my eyelashes?” she asked, which is the kind of question she often asked in the middle of the night. “Michelle, brown. They’re brown. Now go to sleep,” I said.
But they were red brown, like the bark on cedar trees, like California redwoods.
There is something that happens when you live in a nice apartment in a pleasant neighborhood in my city, even in the less sunny neighborhoods. Especially if you grew up queer in an inhospitable place, though you may not have recognized the margins until you left. You start to feel as if you exist in your own separate country—the City is almost an island—and you can do whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. You start to feel as if, for example, you might be able to fly off the ocean cliffs without a glider, or that you could live solely on sprouts and carrot tops, or that you could careen down the hills on your bicycle without a helmet during rush hour. You start to feel, even though you know the feeling is not true and that the laws of the physical universe have not been altered just for you because you live in this fabulous city in this nice apartment, that you cannot be touched by normal human tragedy.
The evening before the ants arrived, someone knocked at our door. The neighbor Michelle didn’t like had lost her rat. We went to help her find it, trolling up and down the stairs and hallway to her apartment, and then down into the basement and laundry room. We went up and down the street. It had misted most of the day and in the dim evening light the street and sidewalk looked black and oily.
“Hey, what color is your rat?” Michelle suddenly asked.
It struck me that she often asked questions I never thought to ask. I had assumed the rat was white and so I had been looking for a white one, but what if the neighbor’s rat was brown or black? I thought it odd that we hadn’t asked before.
“White,” the neighbor said.
“What’s its name?” Michelle asked.
“Whitey,” the neighbor said.
She was quite beautiful, despite decapitation, with bright black eyes and wide, friendly cheekbones.
“Whitey,” Michelle started calling. “Whitey, Whitey, Whitey.”
There was a certain kind of sadness in her voice; I could hear the sadness even though she was loud, which she could be in public; the sadness seemed to drift over the streets and vanish. We circled the building searching in all the interstitial spaces, tamping down the damp weeds and coarse grass beneath stairwells and between buildings with our shoes.
After searching for a long time Michelle threw from her pocket into the street a rock she had collected at her work site. “The rat’s dead,” she said too loudly. I saw the young woman pull her hood further over her face. I remember feeling embarrassed, and angry, not because Michelle was rude, necessarily, but because she felt so at ease saying what we all thought. I felt I had to resist her somehow.
“Rats are resilient,” I said. “They’ve lived in worse situations.”
Michelle clamped her hands over her ears as if she couldn’t bear my point of view, something I’d only seen her do a few times. “Dead dead dead,” she shouted, and stomped off back toward the apartment.
Before she reached the door, she turned around and looked for me. I remember thinking, for a moment, that I would go inside. But then I turned