Errands
By Hayley Jean Clark
Painting by Eunnam Hong @eunnamhong
Today at work I walked in on Sarah in the work bathroom adjusting her outfit in the full-length mirror, she jumped when I opened the door. I found myself thinking less of her, even less than normal. It’s not that I don’t tug at my hair and smudge my makeup in the bathroom, it was that she flinched and smiled sheepishly at me in the reflection. Once she regained her composure she asked if I was coming later, it’s her birthday party tonight. I was glib and said that I might stop by, even though I had already decided to attend.
I haven’t gone out in a while, but just long enough to successfully trick myself into thinking that I have fun at parties sometimes. Based on the email addresses copied on the invitation it would be a pleasant enough mix of soft conversation targets, nominally interesting people, and intriguing unknowns. I wasn’t sure what to wear, but I would try to strike my balance of nice and approachable. I imagined saying “I think I paid $5 for this,” a “Thanks” with tight lips, “It’s actually my grandmother’s.”
It’s late summer and blisters are forming on both of my sweaty feet straining against the single strap of leather forming my shoe. The wood sandals are supposed to be a classic model, one worn for decades. I’m not sure how they got this far. Perhaps they were walked through history by thinner-footed people. I am walking slowly down a block that smells of blood and metal from the open-air markets. Summer has never been my favorite. Damp flesh forces everyone into indignity. Joining the masses, I left the house wearing barely anything, and once in public, I felt self-conscious, particularly because of the weight that’s collected in my midsection since my breakup with Kevin.
While walking around, I pass a store that I like to go to and search for an excuse to go in, perhaps I would buy Sarah a gift. The store sells perfumes, candles, and soaps all made by nuns, allegedly. It’s usually populated with falsely tan, mirthless rich people and gay men who are so toned it looks like the tightness of their physique causes them physical discomfort. I buy gifts here regularly, everyone thinks their gift is special but I shop with my eyes closed. If it’s above $50, I put it down and try again. I once bought a friend a giant feather duster and she said, This is so me. That was lucky. I’m doing the same thing for Sarah. Blind selection takes a while because everything is sort of expensive. It is nice that these nuns have found a way to sell indulgences to the secular, wouldn’t want them to go out of business. While eyeing some incense, I remembered a video I recently watched of the largest censer in the world, in a cathedral somewhere. The censer was about 4 feet wide and chained to the ceiling. Members of the clergy pulled on a long rope to swing it across the cathedral with the arc of a clumsy pendulum, wildly trailing incense over the congregation, looking like it might snap off at any moment and crush a cluster of the god-fearing congregation, supplicant faces and limbs squashed by the gleaming ball.
The aisles are dizzying, cluttered. In an aisle of perfume bottles, I begin to feel overwhelmed. I find perfume notes inscrutable and frequently humiliate myself trying to understand them. In this tradition, I spray a terrible peppery musk perfume that smells exactly like my grandmother’s, which came in a purple heart-shaped bottle with a gold metal cap. My grandmother was a mean woman and now I smell like one, too. I end up buying Sarah a room spray that is supposed to smell like freesias. No one has ever seen a freesia, but I’m sure Sarah will like it.
I approach the register and put the items on the counter: the air freshener and a beautifully packaged licorice flavored toothpaste that is described on the packaging as “singular.” The shop girl asks if that will be all. She isn’t wearing makeup except for chapstick and dense fan-like fake eyelashes. The corner of the lash affixed to her right eye is unglued and twitches with each blink as she rings up the items. Funny how this neat, efficient person could so easily be made to look foolish—two millimeters of lash glue makes all the difference. Another woman undone by vanity; such small spaces for error. I did not inquire after Band-Aids for my blisters.
I start walking down the street with the goods made by nuns and picture them slicing up blocks of soap, distilling herbs in solution with creased, peaceful faces in the Tuscan countryside. Gossiping, complaining, repressing homoerotic fantasies. I wonder if lesbian affairs between nuns actually happen—it’s an obvious thing to think they do and hard to believe they don’t. It seems lately that the most obvious, ridiculous thing that can happen happens all the time, everywhere and without much hesitation, as if ordained. Nuns aroused by their fellow nuns’ soft touch and gentle prayers seems obvious, but it doesn’t matter. Obviousness circles back and creates shame, a well-tread erotic line for us all to tread, faithfully, just as the nuns.
***
I suppose I was buying the gift to smooth things over with Sarah, I can tell she’s growing resentful. She mixed up my lunch order on Tuesday. The more she vies for my friendship, the more I want to be cruel to her. My desk is behind hers and over my monitor I can often see her long, messy braids of thin hair swishing across her back, wearing another odds-and-ends thrift store outfit. I watch her as she texts and shops online, sometimes reading a zine or chapbook, oblivious to the fact that the rest of us are actually working or at least pretending to be. Guests arrive at the door, the men perk up a bit and the tidy working women regard her with tight suspicious smiles. She wears a lot of silly eye makeup, turquoise zig-zags and rhinestones, but neglects to put on concealer, brazenly displaying her pimples and dark eye circles from chronic hangovers. She is the kind of girl who can pull this off, a few things off here and there do nothing to injure her charm.
We work at an advertising company that paints murals and street art posing as clever ads for all sorts of things—luxury goods, new albums, frozen vegan chicken, complicated speakers. Sarah is an administrative assistant and majored in poetry and art history at a liberal arts school in Vermont. I work in human resources and went to a state school, a good one, majoring in psychology with a minor in economics. Natural enemies, I suppose. She started a couple of months ago, right out of college. It almost goes without saying, but she is bad at her job. No organizational skills to speak of and the concept of initiative is totally foreign but everyone finds her so chipper and cute that there are no consequences aside from firm reminders. As I’d imagine is the case with most poets, her mistakes are sort of charming if you aren’t immediately inconvenienced by them. She couldn’t load the copy machine and one time she accidentally ordered 20 cases of champagne instead of 10 for a work event. The delivery guy refused to take it back so she spent the afternoon pacing around the office, distraught, looking for places to store it. She ended up taking a few cases home, which I’m sure she bragged to her friends about.
I am only two years her senior, but I feel much older than her. I often advise Sarah on her romantic life and friendships, at her insistence. She asks, Can I sit here? Then holds me hostage for 30 minutes at minimum, asking So what do you think I should do? Isn’t that so fucked up? I know it’s her reflex to share personal information to endear herself to other girls and create a common bond. Here, I give you something, then you give me something and we have a pact. I wonder when she will stop trying. While I don’t want to actually be her friend, I do want her to want my approval. I try not to be too harsh and even mete out compliments, holding a piece of meat just above her nose. Once I even stopped by one of her poetry readings at one of those gross bars stocked with people dedicated to rote forms of rebellion. Sloppy clothing, facial piercings, bad haircuts.
The thing that bothers me about Sarah the most is that she’s able to operate on charming, girlish instinct without a second thought, one that I could see in popular girls in high school and college but could never replicate convincingly. They were able to tap into some current that I wasn’t. Always knowing how to sling their belt without having to study, a certain natural genius. Pure mimicry fails. For all my scheming and planning, memorizing all the right references and looking the part, here I was being undermined by this guileless idiot who couldn’t even keep track of her office keys. Sarah didn’t try to optimize herself in different settings, she was always pleasantly girlish, without strategy. Even despite her unsubstantial lightness, there was an authenticity to how she was that pulled people toward her. Magnetic in her naïveté and sweet sincerity. Sometimes I look at her and think Don’t you want to hang it all up? Surrender your puerile fantasy of urban youth just as I have done? But I know she is the one who is better off. Even in her comparative state of squalor, she is happy.
***
After buying the gift I stop for lunch and have a messy pile of vegetables, crouching on a stool and low table on the sidewalk. Eating helped remove some of the agitation stirred up by the heat and I started to feel less on edge. After a while I realized I had been staring off, thinking about a couple I had heard of who had gone bathing in a hot spring in the middle of a forest in one of those mountain states and suddenly the water got hot and they were boiled. I don’t know if they ended up okay. I almost hope they had been boiled alive, not because I wish them ill, even though I don’t really like whimsical-adventure types, but it’s funny to imagine two adults fully boiled. Their eyes white and yellow, sticky like those of a whole branzino stuffed with lemon and herbs served at middling restaurants. Skin pink, presuming they were the kind of white people who went swimming in unmarked hot springs in the middle of the forest and were boiled, a delicate snack for God, a giant, or whoever comes first. You’d think they’d have gotten out before they got to the stage where they could be described as “boiled,” in any case. I threw out the remains of my salad, walking away feeling accomplished.
I walk for a few blocks, heading back to my bike and see a girl across the street I’d rather not interact with. I’d feel ambivalent about speaking to her even in a good mood, so I quickly walk toward a Japanese store that I like which is fatefully positioned just down the block. I used to live with her and she’s not horrible or anything, just one of those serious, mousy girls who went to a women’s college with a bad habit of cornering people at parties with airless monologues about austerity or palm oil, sometimes managing to bring up both. While we lived together, she would fill up half the freezer with compost and agitate within the household to try to get me and our other roommate to go to protests with her, saying how important it was that we, in abstract terms, “do the work”. She always has a blank expression when speaking and appears to be looking at something on her foot or just over your left shoulder. I find this unnerving.
The Japanese store has a lot of boring clothing, but they’re mostly known for their simple homewares, which I have a lot of. I like living in a white box because I am afraid of buying the wrong thing, the thing that will give away that I am unwittingly a loser with no taste. My strategy is to signal nothing at all. The idea is that I will be beyond reproach if I ensconce myself in shades of ivory, chalk, cream. A lot of people feel this way, though it seems gray is the most dominant these days. All apartments staged on real estate websites appear in gray varieties, they must come here. Gray towels, gray case to hide a toilet wand, gray doormat, stopping at nothing. Anyway, we’re all on the same page.
In the middle of the store they had stacked vast, neat towers of small plastic containers, things that promise to reduce clutter but instead create more of it, unless you’re disciplined. I am the type of person who likes to containerize things in pleasing little white transparent boxes. This impulse is part of what drove Kevin to move out, I think. The organizing got to be too much for him. I used to wake up at noon as he did, and I also liked to sit on the curb while he graffitied a moving van, but now I just sort grain into jars and contemplate for months whether the landlord would fine me if I put wallpaper up. The suburban habits that I had once longed to escape were now creeping back in, cleverly disguised with fashionable, almost cosmopolitan taste.
Almost three years into dating Kevin I could no longer avoid admitting to myself that graffiti no longer amused me, it is not really countercultural or brave, just a phoned in interest to prevent dumb guys from being too idle, along with other “beatnik” urban traditions of skateboarding and DJ-ing, things Kevin also did, yet the ranks of this sort are multiplying all the same. It’s not that I care if there are new ways of being transgressive. What I find sad is that they don’t seem particularly aware that they are re-enacting a dead lifestyle. I try to respect the optimism and ultimately I’m the fool for expecting humility.
In college, before I came to my senses, I used to want approval from that set and secured it in Kevin. Even as my resentment grew, Kevin held out. This was because he didn’t think much of himself and wasn’t nakedly ambitious, despite the fact that he was successful by some standard. He kept himself in shape, engaging with all these transient viral workout routines. The last one involved doing complicated sets of low-impact exercises, which he referred to as “longevity training.” He refused to use microwaves and ate mostly vegetarian. He didn’t do drugs or even drink very much. His ears and nails were always clean. He was represented by a moderately well-respected skateboard brand, which brought him a lot of sneakers and no money.
***
As fate would have it, the blank-faced girl walks into the store, which makes total sense ultimately. She’s always wearing drapey, anonymous knits. I crouch behind a rack of makeup sponges and wait until I see her sturdy leather foot and downy-haired ankle shuffle past, then I break for an exit. Once outside, I was tempted to jog toward my bike a few blocks to make sure I was safe. Standing on a corner, panting, I see one of my company’s recently completed murals high up on the side of a building. It is 15’ tall and depicts a famous model’s face, wearing a large pair of terrible pink sunglasses, studded with pink pearls. Her nose is crooked and her neck looks stiff, looking more like a bad piece of fan art that celebrities share out of guilt than a million dollar advertisement. I smirk, thinking about all the tense marketing and PR women at their computers day after day, with full-face grimaces strong enough to break through countless rounds of botox, working with an officiousness better suited to the Pentagon to bring this atrocity to life. This failure of a mural will definitely be the primary topic of conversation on Monday. I think about texting the other office girls to see what time they would get to Sarah’s party. They are my only allies, imperfect as they are. Even though I know some of them also found Sarah ridiculous, they concealed this in her presence. Enabling her by saying Oh I love you too!! Or oh wow that guy sucks, that’s so crazy, you shouldn’t put up with that.
More and more of my life was dedicated to working. I was good at my job and I found myself working harder to stave off ennui and avoid the fact that I was giving up on my life of doing something vaguely creative. There’s only so much pretending that can be done when you have to say the word vibe 70 times a week to get a client on board. My efforts were rewarded with raises and I only wanted more. This was my destiny. This was what my parents wanted for me and, reluctantly, I liked it. I liked being good at it and regretfully admitted to myself that it was the only thing that gave me purpose lately. I enjoyed paying for the expensive gym I only went to twice a month, buying new shoes at full price, getting my acne scars lasered off, and eating $25 lukewarm sushi lunches three times a week. Without Kevin around, I was free to work and consume uncritically. He was always pressuring me to do things and get out more, like starting a ceramics class or cycling so I could ride with him to the beach. I could tell he didn’t approve of my spending habits on all these things and I would say, Classes are just another type of consumerism, it’s no better, which would stump him and he would say Huh, yeah I guess you’re right. Whatever, you can’t just sit there. Idiot.
The only structure I have aside from work is shopping. I have an elaborate rotation. Apps, saved searches, feeds, search terms, bookmarks. Small clocks, velvet underwear, espadrilles, little cups for soft-boiled eggs, many vitamins with dubious effects on health outcomes, stem-cell face cream. Dryly cycling through all, hoping that through one purchase I can believe in my future. A nice jacket may give my life form, the shape of a future I can’t otherwise imagine. I have no project. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Kevin probably didn’t care that I had dressed so neatly and well, he probably liked it better when I bought my clothes at Army surplus stores and thrift bins as he does, like Sarah does. That’s probably the type of girl he is looking for now.
***
It got a bit darker out. The sky was sunny with hearty American white clouds on one side; the other side was doing its best to appear menacing. Unchaining my bike, I went east toward home, away from the storm front. Usually, I feel that there is a threat behind me anyway and it’s nice for once to not have to invent one. The languorous conditions promoted by the heat did not spare the cars, hunkered in traffic silent and resigned. I almost wished they would honk, it was sad to see them so down.
Gliding through the streets, I felt a subtle lift in mood knowing I would soon be able to wash off the grime and indignities of the day in my freshly caulked shower, which was finally accomplished after I bought caulk myself and cornered the building super, insisting that he do it immediately. This was my first act of independence after Kevin moved out. Every time I complained about the disintegrated caulking, he said that I shouldn’t bother the super, that he would just have his friend Stu do it for us. Stu, a noise musician-cum-handyman, owed him a favor. He always had friends like that, all from South Jersey. Favors are not a particularly liquid form of a currency and you can’t demand redemption, not politely, and we were both polite, Kevin due to apathy, and I due to a preference for passive aggression. As a result, the task lay unfinished and showering became a daily appointment for me to think about how much I hated Kevin. He suffered from a general directionlessness and always needed to be given orders. I hated his gentleness and hunched shoulders, his lack of assertion and pronounced brow ridge. Strange how I once held all of these qualities in esteem, all the distinctions I once loved were now lightning rods for resentment.
My jaw clenched as I thought about all this. The agitation blurred my vision as I pedaled quickly through the stalled traffic. The storm coalescing from behind rumbled meekly, but I was already close to home. I rounded the corner without heeding the stoplight or looking carefully—something I did frequently due to the congenital arrogance all cyclists have. Then I was struck on the elbow.
I staggered off of my bike and had to do a clumsy set of hops to stabilize myself again. How humiliating it is to be hit squarely in the elbow. It didn’t feel broken, which made the injury feel more absurd. I wish it had broken, then I could have had a few weeks off of work and collected sympathy from friends and family. But no, I was just standing with a soon-to-be bruised elbow being yelled at by the squat, pebbly complected owner of a large black SUV.
The package from the nuns had fallen from my basket. The freesia room spray had shattered. Perhaps I won’t go to the party, I might text Kevin. Or, I could do nothing.
Hayley Jean Clark is a writer living in Manhattan
