Ana tried to picture Ruth at a job interview. No one in here possessed a sense of humor, so what was it that got her hired?
“Mmm,” said Ana. Ruth rose, mumbling, and something in that incomprehensible sound prompted Ana to say: “I’ll talk to him, though. Maybe next month you can come by. When we’re more settled.”
Ruth nodded, walked out, leaving Ana to her window. Then suddenly she reappeared: “I could, like, babysit for you or something if you needed it. You know, if you need any help or anything.”
Ana smiled, surprised.
“Thanks, Ruth,” she said. “That’s very sweet.”
Ana watched Ruth shuffle out into the hum of the office and wait for two people to pass. When there was enough space between them and her, she trailed behind like a footman, head bowed.
Ana remembered that she and Ruth had almost entered each other’s lives once. Though it had occurred nearly a year ago, she could recall it vividly because it was one of those times when she and James had been clawing toward parenthood.
She had walked a long time that day, looking for a place to eat, past the smoky glass of Ki, glancing at its leather banquettes and ceiling of long, narrow lamps dangling like shining knives. She had recognized a group of associates, with Christian at the center. Usually they waited until after work. But she sensed in these younger ones a retro dream, a wish to return to the three-martini lunches and sharp suits of the old days. The corporate credit card that Ana kept tucked behind her driver’s license, unused, was at the front of their wallets, ready for the draw.
She had gone farther than usual, away from Bay Street, rejecting the subterranean food courts, past the high-end sushi restaurant where the counter was surrounded by a river, and the sashimi rode past in a little boat, and you could reach out your hand and pluck whatever you wanted.
Off King Street, on a quieter one-way street crowded with delivery vans and bicycle couriers, a man approached. Noting his tank top, Ana thought: Is it that warm out today? But then she saw that he was muttering to himself, his face covered in deep, bloody acne, his fingernails running up and down his arm like he was doing scales. She tried to decide which way to go, and bobbed and weaved. He mirrored her and then stopped abruptly, face-to-face, smelling like urine. He shot her a fuck-you look.
Ana pulled her coat tight around her and walked away quickly. She felt the man’s eyes on her back, watching her like she was a celebrity. She turned into the next restaurant she saw, a sushi place with a ring of half-dead Christmas lights around the window. As soon as she set foot inside, she knew it was a bad idea. The room was almost empty; only a couple of teenagers, possibly cutting school (undiscriminating diners; cheap), sat together in the window. A smell overwhelmed her, something chemical, treacherous. A waitress swarmed her with unidentifiable Asian chatter, ushered her to a table with a hand on Ana’s back. Ana found herself seated in a booth, looking at a greasy menu, a dollop of something red crusted to the center of the photograph of a Hockey Sushi Box.
Ana tried to relax. She liked her lunch hour, waited for its arrival, mourned its conclusion. Most people in her office didn’t take lunch. They ate out of Styrofoam boxes at their desks. But Ana went out a few days a week, speaking to no one, reveling in her anonymity. Often she would stop at the kitchen store or the storage store and peruse the towers of large plastic containers. She sometimes bought something small, the Portofino Office Storage Box in olive, with the faux-leather grained top. She had a stack of these boxes in different sizes and colors—chocolate, cranberry, pastel floral—in a wedding cake shape on a shelf next to her desk at work. Sometimes, while on the phone with other lawyers, she surprised herself by noticing that as she talked, she was stroking the boxes, so beautiful she couldn’t bear to put anything inside them.
In the restaurant, she had pulled out an old issue of The New Yorker that Sarah had dug out for her. She was halfway through a story on Raymond Carver and his editor that Sarah had insisted she read, saying, “Oh, Ana, you would love this.” But as she read about Carver, too drunk to notice his editor thieving his words, she couldn’t fathom why Sarah had recommended it. She often seemed to hold an image of Ana that was entirely foreign to Ana’s own conception of herself. Sarah had told Ana when they first met that she thought Ana looked like a figure skater. Even James had no idea what this meant.
But Ana couldn’t concentrate on the story. She had been pulled back to the meeting of the previous evening, and the blond, quivering woman in the Chinese slippers who had told them she would “set things in motion.” Uncharacteristically, James had arranged the meeting, calling people who knew people for recommendations and booking the appointment. Ana rushed to be on time after a long meeting and met him outside the agency doors. She was still red-faced from her sprint when she learned that, yes, they were good candidates for international adoption. The white woman in the Chinese slippers told them this while sitting beneath a giant oil painting of the Great Wall of China. Now they had to find a social worker who would come by the house and interview them. Several meetings for several thousand dollars. And then, if they passed, it was back to the agency, and a series of courses on cultural sensitivity, and several thousand more dollars. And then their names at the bottom of a long scroll that could take years to wash up on the shores of China.
Ana drank tea and ate her flavorless sushi, prying apart the upcoming invasion. “It’s bullshit,” James had said. “But we have to do it.” He was determined, and with James, that was significant. Still, it was Ana who had spent the years before being opened and scraped. Now she would have to do it again, but in her own house.
Ana had paid her bill and stepped outside.
As soon as she reentered the human stream on King Street, Ana recognized Ruth. She was smoking, walking slowly, her cardigan buttoned properly. If Ana walked as slowly as this girl, it would look like she was stalking her. She wanted to cross the street, to ignore her, to make her vanish, but it seemed impossible not to be found out. She walked at her normal pace and was quickly next to her. She said: “Hello, Ruth.”
“Oh!” said Ruth, putting her cigarette behind her back, as if her mother had snuck up behind her at school.
“Did you have lunch out?”
Ruth shook her head. “I can’t really afford it. I just went for a smoke.”
Ana recognized the phrasing as something rural and coarse. She sounded like Ana’s distant cousins, who said things like: “I’m going to the can.”
“It is a nice day,” said Ana. “How are you doing anyway? How do you find it in the office?” Ana had a flash of altruism, pictured herself as the kind of lawyer who might take the girl in, mentor her. She had been to a few of these events in the past, wearing a pink ribbon for charity and walking a few miles with other women lawyers. Everyone’s legs looked pale in their shorts, and they all seemed embarrassed. Ana had not been able to stop herself from beginning to jog, slowly at first, and then running. The walking women were far behind when Ana finished the course before anyone else and left quickly.
Another time, at a luncheon called “Women Lawyers: A Dialogue About Transformative Leadership,” she had sat at a table with a group of married associates, mother lawyers she had rarely seen on the fifteenth floor. They exchanged numbers about outsourcing: who delivers dry cleaning, emergency nanny agencies, car services that drive children to music lessons. At one point, one of them looked up from typing into her phone and said: “Okay, who do I hire to screw my husband?” Everybody laughed.
One statistic lodged in Ana’s head from that afternoon: For every ten male lawyers at her firm, there was one-half a woman. Ana pictured that half-woman lawyer, sliming along the hallway on her stumpy torso.