Hard & Smooth & Seemingly Unattached
Your life is full of new things. Two of them are men. One makes his own end tables and works in sustainable energy. The other makes you laugh and you don’t actually understand what he does. More new things: job (analyst, whatever that means), roommate (kooky), city (Oakland), state (California), tax bracket (you don’t understand these either), a lump the size of a blackberry curving along your right breast’s edge. A splashy rug, sturdy bed frame, runty lemon tree with a lopsided trunk.
The man you love used to say that he never knew what you were thinking. He told some lies, but this was not one of them. To counteract this, you start telling everyone exactly what’s on your mind. “No, I’d rather not. Yes, I know. No—no, stop. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear.” But it doesn’t sit right on you, all that openness. After an insurmountable lie, you left the man who never knew what you were thinking. Which is tricky because, unfortunately, he still knows you better than anyone.
Man 1 is wiry and tall with a face you can picture old and wizened. You met him while sitting on your apartment building’s stoop, sketching and drinking coffee. He was walking by, hands shoved deep in his windbreaker pockets. He paused after passing you, turned, and said, “Miss, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look like both the art and the artist this morning, and I don’t mean anything but a compliment by it.”
And you said, “Excuse me?” because it was such a strange little sentence. You wanted to hear it again so you might understand how it could warm your toes and ears at the same time. But he kept on walking.
The next morning, he passed by again. That Friday, he brought you a latte from the hipster café on the corner.
Man 2 is firm built and firm spoken and prone to deadpan one-liners that make you giddy at night and uneasy the next day because of how hard you laughed. You rendezvous in dark bars and bright museum shops. You met him at The Hatch, a two-story dive paneled with black wood three blocks from your place, where you like to draw and order tater tots and pretend you’re in the hull of a pirate ship. One afternoon, he was up there too. He didn’t ogle, just watched your hand flick across the page and reach for fried potato goodness. After a while, he went downstairs. He came back with a dark, creamy beer and set it next to you.
“No pressure,” he said. “Thought you might like it.”
And even though you knew not to take drinks from strangers in bars, it seemed all right at 3pm on a Sunday. The first sip sparkled your mouth in a way you didn’t expect. It reminded you of the coffee yogurt you ate by the case in art school because it was always on sale.
“I do like it,” you told him.
“Lucky guess,” he said.
You found the lump in the shower, three months after all this newness began. You always thought finding a lump would be like something from a horror movie—a third hand lathering your hair in the shower, a body bending like a sapling. But really, it feels like trying to figure out if you know that person across the street. Is it? No. Wait. It might—no. Is it? The man you love used to “help” you self-examine in the shower, the kitchen, your car, his neighbor’s backyard under a blanket like you were teenagers. “Come back,” he’d murmur. “I need to do another check. For safety.” You had reason to leave him (a mutual friend; 2-for-1 daiquiris), but none of these reasons hold meaning when, now, recognition clicks into place.
Your roommate likes baking savory pies and reading palms. She already acts like you have a long, shared history; in reality, you met on Craigslist and she sometimes opens your mail. But you like living with her, especially on the nights when she unearths bottles of wine from the vineyard where she used to work. She pours terribly. Red dribbles run in the lines on her palms (or, as she calls them, her biographies). You’ve never let her touch your hands—don’t want to know what your skin might say—but when you tell her what you’ve found, she grabs your breasts and squeezes.
“May I?” she asks afterward.
You shrug, she pokes, you wince, she presses, you wait. She says, “They feel a little lopsided.”
“Well, they’ve always been like that.”
“I mean,” she pulls away, face creasing with concern. “They seem a little out of sorts.”
You knew you wouldn’t love the job that brought you here—the only things you love are sketching and the man you are no longer with—but you did think you’d at least like it. Unfortunately, it has involved too much PowerPoint to be even remotely likable. Days fill with a pounding sameness. At least you have decent health insurance.
Physician Assistant 1 wears a bright red shirt, a leopard print sweater, and mismatched earrings. The shirt is unbuttoned to her ribcage; you can see her bra. It matches her shirt so perfectly that this might have been an intentional fashion choice, so you don’t say anything. When she tells you to lay back for a breast check, it seems fair—her nipple is basically waving hello.
“Do you normally have sensitivity?” she asks, and yes, you do, you always have, but when she presses on the spot in question, it doesn’t hurt in the usual way. As pain spikes across the hills of your chest, she says, “This is definitely a lump.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Well, it’s everything I’d want a breast lump to be,” she says. “It’s hard, smooth. Seems unattached to anything else. It’s not bumpy or protruding.”
“So I shouldn’t be worried?”
“Well, I know you’re going to worry,” she says. “But I don’t want you to. Not yet.”
She punches notes into a fuzzy computer. The keyboard keeps drifting away from her, an adjustable height lever behaving badly.
“Damn keyboard,” she says, pulling it back towards her.
“I’m only 28.” Your voice balances on a fraying rope. “Is this normal?”
“It’s not necessarily normal, but it’s also not uncommon. We’ll do an ultrasound.”
She looks down at her shirt, still flapping open.
“Ah,” she clucks, closing back up. “Damn button.”
Man 1 is from Dallas, but you wouldn’t know it from his accent, meaning he doesn’t have one. Man 2 is from Sacramento and drives home to see his mom every other Sunday. You think about giving them nicknames based on their hometowns, but neither feels right. Whenever anyone has done that to you—tried to pin you to an associated geography—your indignance is unparalleled. You’ve lived through bitter winters and beachside summers and a whole slew of zip codes. Before this, you lived in a small town in Pennsylvania with the man you love. You called him by his real name, but if you had to give him a place-based nickname now, it would be Burg. “What’s the deal?” you asked once. “It’s all Burgs and Villes out here.” Harrisburg, Mifflinburg, Greensburg, Lewisburg, Lewisville, Coatesville, Meadville, Pottsville, Titusville. You were headed home after a drive-in movie, flying past dark fields dotted with lightning bugs, aftertaste of popcorn salting your tongue. His hand threaded through your hair. And you, in your stupid comfy happiness, forgot to remind him that no names mattered, except the one you were going to share.
“Which one do you like better?” asks your roommate. All answers feel superfluous, like responding to, Do you know what time it is? with, Well, I think it’s Tuesday.
Man 1’s bed is on the floor, which is blue. While he licks and groans and moves too fast, your head tilts back like you’re dunking into a cool pool of water. You forget his name halfway through and run through options until the right one snaps its fingers.
“Do you like that?” Man 1 breathes into the space above your body, eyes wide and matching his beautiful floor.
“You like that,” Man 2 purrs into the back of your neck before he flips you back around to face him. His bed is high off the ground and moves with you, tapping against his bedroom wall, yes, yes, yes, yes.
You like one more than the other, but you want to answer, “Can’t you tell?”
If you’ve been out with Man 2 the night before, there is no way you are meeting Man 1 for his daily morning walk. Not that you make a habit of seeing them back-to-back, especially after you’ve been front-to-front. But things work out that way sometimes.
Physician Assistant 2 has flat hair and no-nonsense eyeliner and doesn’t bother turning around when you take off your shirt. When you were a teenager, you got ultrasounds on your feet to slow ankle swelling brought on by years of track injuries. That physical therapist, a serious woman with gray hair she kept in a cinnamon bun twist, always gave you a little this is gonna be cold before she spread the ultrasound jelly onto your feet. Physician Assistant 2 doesn’t do that. Just squirts the goop and presses her metal wand into you. You both squint at the screen above your head. It looks like pictures you’ve seen of Jupiter, lines of fat swimming round and round.
“I can’t tell,” snaps Physician Assistant 2, like it’s your fault. “You’ll need a mammogram. Or an MRI.”
She swipes a scratchy paper towel across your breast, leaving most of the stuff behind.
“Fine,” you say. "Can we do that now?”
She laughs a little, not in the nice way.
“No, we can’t do it now.”
The next day, Man 1 asks you to dinner. You like the idea of sitting in the kind of place you know he’ll pick.
“How was your week?” he asks over the bread basket.
You can still picture him as an old man, walking slowly around Lake Merritt before going home to garden or refill the bird feeder. You tried to explain this to him once, but it didn’t come out right. You hurt his feelings.
“Honestly,” you say, “it was kind of rough.”
He waits for you to continue. But what else to say?
“I wish you would have called me,” he finally sighs. “I could have been there.”
He reaches across the table for your hand and you want this gesture to pull him into your heart, but it comes off as a little self-pitying, a little sadder for himself than for you.
At work, you come to understand the phrase “bored to tears.” It’s not that there’s nothing to do; there are so many things to do and each one makes you feel more like a machine. At least your coworkers get it. They smile and nod when you pass in the kitchen, instead of asking, “Hey, was that you crying in the bathroom?”
Physician Assistant 1 leaves you a voicemail. They have an MRI appointment in three weeks. Are you available?
A week later, you slump onto a stool next to Man 2 and order a Boilermaker. You have been out with him enough to complain about life, but not enough to do it on the couch in sweatpants. After two quick rounds, you place your forehead on the bar’s edge.
“I’m so bored of myself,” you say into the soft wood.
“I don’t think you’re boring.”
“Trust me,” you say. “I’ve spent more time with me than you have.”
Man 2 starts to speak, stops, wraps his hands around the base of his pint glass and rests his chin on its lip. He’s wearing a cargo jacket with large pockets. You want to stick your hands in all of them.
“Hey,” he says. “You are phenomenal.”
The bar’s counter is sticky, but comfortable. Maybe you’ll live here, paused forever.
“You don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
The man you love used to do that. Declare, not ask. What he said usually sounded right, so it didn’t bother you. But you wonder now—did he do that because you wouldn’t let him dig? And which was more petrifying: what was wriggling in your mind’s dirt, or that he might shovel forever, never finding a thing?
So you tell this man what you’re thinking. You tell him about how gross you feel. About work, about your mind, about your body, about your attitude toward your work and your mind and your body. About how you’re worried that you’re becoming something hard and smooth and seemingly unattached to anything. It makes you want to throw up. Maybe the lump is leaking some nauseating self-pity into your blood. Or maybe you drank the Boilermakers too fast. But you did it. You shared your ugly feelings. Happy?
Man 2, whose name is Monty, uses his pointer finger to slowly raise your head from the bar.
“You know why you remind me of my pinky toe?”
Because I’m hunched and curled over and evolution has rendered me almost completely unnecessary?
“Because I’m going to bang you on every piece of furniture in my house.”
Later, in bed, Monty asks why you don’t call him by his name. Which is tricky, because you thought you were.
“Montgomery is my last name,” he says with a flavor of hurt you’ve never tasted in him. “You thought my first name was Montgomery?”
“It’s why I call you Monty. Montgomery is a lot to lug around. Why didn’t you correct me?”
“Because I thought it was—ah, I don’t know,” he sits up in bed, reaches for his glasses, then stops. “A thing you were doing.”
He presses his thumbs into his tear ducts, then pulls them up along his eyebrows. For a second, it makes him look like someone else. Maybe someone named Monty.
“I can’t keep playing it like this,” he says, eyes shut behind his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I need to know where we stand. I can’t tell—I never know what you’re thinking.”
He opens up his eyes, looks right at you, and his face breaks apart.
“Wait. No. What did I say? What’s—oh no. Oh, please don’t cry.”
When you get home, your roommate’s eyes take up half her face.
“Honey sugar babe, who do I need to kill?” she says, going straight for the wine.
You don’t protest when she leads you out to the balcony, a rickety thing she’s decorated with Christmas lights even though the holidays are nowhere near. To the west, a stripe of sky fades from blue into orange creamsicle between two monster apartment complexes down the street. There’s a little breeze going, enough to razzle your underperforming lemon tree. It smells like burnt meat and something else, a new smell you don’t recognize. When your roommate gently takes your hand and turns the palm up to face her, you don’t protest that either.
“Okay,” she traces a long downward curve with her nail. It chills you quiet, from shoulders to ribs to the backs of your knees. Like jumping into a lake on a scorching day and swimming until black water becomes dead winter.
“Look at this,” she says, fingers light against your skin. “There’s so much here.”
Head, heart, lifelines—that’s the extent of your insight on palm readings. You can’t imagine any of them will be reliable or steady, if that’s even how it works. Maybe the lines will reveal whether the blackberry lump is a quiet squatter or if it’s about to burn down the house. Maybe they will admit that you’re so lonely, you can turn yourself on by licking your own lips. Maybe they’ll say that someone so willing to trade the squirming things she loves for a loose grasp at stability deserves every echo that emptiness lobs back at her. Maybe they’ll explain why you can’t trust a thing but, somehow, you still have a persistent strain of hope. One that makes promises it can’t keep. Hope that is bumpy and mutating. Holding on for life.
Leah Francesca Christianson's (@lfchristianson) work has appeared in Bending Genres Journal, The Evansville Review, TriQuarterly, River Teeth, Sundog Lit, and other publications. She earned a BA from UCLA and an MFA from Miami University, where she was editor-in-chief of Oxford Magazine and received the Jordan Goodman award. She recently completed a novel and is working on a book of hybrid nonfiction.