“Hm,” she says and flips through a few more pages noncommittally. Then, more to the desk than to me, she says: “How . . . interesting.” But the way Nora’s voice goes down at the end and not up in praise is how I know she doesn’t really think it is interesting. And how I know that I’m not going to get a showing at this gallery, either.
* * *
When I step back out into the midday June heat, I nearly run smack into two guys linked arm in arm. The one in man sandals and teal gingham shorts pulls the other back to let me pass. “I’m so sorry,” I say, as my hand goes to my stomach, a protective mother’s instinct for the fetus currently residing there, then I scoot around the men and out onto the street. Dodging in and out of other well-dressed tourists, I pass a chocolatier, an olive oil boutique and a store that sells nothing but spices. Seventeen kinds of salt! I whispered to Harrison when we, too, were another one of those tourist couples five months ago, and ducked in to look around. I never knew there was more than one. Having known me and my lack of culinary skills for the better part of eight years, this did not surprise him.
On Mechanic Street, the cell in my shoulder bag vibrates and I dig it out. A text from Harrison.
How’d it go?
I scroll through my gifs until I find a picture of an army tank and text it back.
That bad? Did you wear the lucky dress?
I hold the phone at arm’s length, making sure my prize possession—a yellow wrap dress I scored at a thrift store and was wearing the night I met Harrison—is in the frame and press send. Not so lucky, I guess.
I slip the phone into the front pocket of my portfolio case, exchanging it for my car keys. Then I unlock the door to my Toyota, get in, turn the key and start the fifteen-minute trek home.
Five months ago, Harrison and I decided to move to this tiny town on a whim, which sounds like something I would do, but not Harrison. It was January, in Philadelphia, and it was snowing. Again. The kind of cold, wet snow that seeps into your clothes and your bones and makes you want to never leave your apartment, and if you do, makes you feel like you’re never going to be warm again.
“Let’s get out of here,” Harrison said one Friday afternoon, when he got home from an extra-long shift at the hospital. He had had a tough few weeks, long hours on top of losing an eight-year-old boy during a routine emergency appendectomy. He didn’t talk about it much—he never does—but I could tell it affected him.
“And go where?” I asked.
“Anywhere but here,” he said.
Harrison is not the spontaneous type, so I immediately agreed. We drove north on 95 and ended up in Hope Springs, a tiny town west of the Delaware River. It was full of more antique stores and art galleries than any town needs, and I was drunk on its charm, and the way that the snow, for some mysterious reason, didn’t quite feel so wet and cold and was piled up in pretty white mounds alongside the road instead of the gray, slushy heaps we were accustomed to. By Sunday, when we were packing up to leave, and dreading the drive back to the city, and I said, “I wish we could live here,” which is what I say every time we go on vacation anywhere, Harrison said, “We can.”
Then he said he’d been thinking about it for months—how the city hospital was so stressful and how maybe at a smaller hospital he could scale back, breathe a little—so why not now and why not in Hope Springs. And maybe it was because I had just had my second miscarriage and my first huge career failure and all of those things happened in Philadelphia and not in Hope Springs, or maybe because I really was convinced that the snow here was less cold and less wet and more beautiful, or maybe because the name of the town, Hope Springs, suddenly seemed significant, like an omen, but I said, “OK.” And though it took a few months of interviews and tying up loose ends in Philadelphia, that’s how we ended up moving from the apartment we’d lived in together for seven years and living here.
Two right angles of white picket fencing flank our driveway, which is the only way I know where to turn, since everything on the two-lane road that runs past our house looks exactly the same—green and tree-lined. I pull the car between them and roll slowly over the gravel until the stone house comes into view. It’s a renovated three-bedroom farmhouse from the 1800s, so it has that great mix of old-world charm and a Sub-Zero fridge. The studio—a detached one-car garage behind the house—has windows on all four sides. Amazing light. That’s what sold me on it. Or maybe it was simply the idea of having my own studio, instead of a one-hundred-square-foot den that also held a TV, a small bookcase and a futon, all flecked with hardened bits of acrylic paint, shellac, egg yolk (from an ill-advised DIY tempera phase) and various other substances from my artistic endeavors over the years.
The futon. Where, in my early twenties, I ate countless bowls of buttered noodles and slices of Nutella toast and watched reruns of Family Feud and then, in my late twenties, made furious love to Harrison on his all-too-short breaks home from his surgical residence shifts at Thomas Jefferson. Harrison convinced me to give the futon to charity when we moved—It’s starting to smell, he said, gently, as if he were trying to talk me into euthanizing a beloved pet whose quality of life had deteriorated. And now instead of turning the car off and going into my studio to paint, which is what I should do, I have the sudden urge to turn my rusted Corolla around and drive to every single Goodwill store between here and Philadelphia until I find the futon and bring it home.
* * *
“Sorry I’m late,” Harrison says when he walks through the front door that evening around nine, even though it’s the third time that week he’s gotten home past dark. Harrison’s one of only four general surgeons on staff at the Fordham hospital, which serves not only the eight thousand residents of Fordham, but many of the surrounding smaller towns, including Hope Springs. Though he said a smaller hospital would mean a slower pace, lately it’s seemed like the opposite is true. He tosses his keys on top of an overturned cardboard box in the foyer that serves as our entry table, since I haven’t gotten around to buying one.
Harrison leans over the back of the butter-yellow sofa I’m sitting on—one of the few new things I have managed to purchase for the house. I offer him my cheek and he kisses it, his full beard (also new since we moved here) scratching my face.
“Did your day get any better?” he asks.
“Not really.”
He heads toward the kitchen, where I hear the fridge door open and then the muffled pop of a beer bottle being unscrewed. When he reappears in the doorframe, the beer’s turned up at his lips. He takes three deep mouthfuls, pausing to swallow in between.
“I think I’m killing the tomatoes,” I say. The house came with a large vegetable and herb garden that hadn’t been tended to since the previous owner moved out. I planned to care for it, starting with weeding, but then realized I couldn’t exactly tell what was a weed and what was a plant. And then the irrigation system stopped working. And rabbits or rodents or bugs started having their share until each leaf (on plants and weeds) looked like Swiss cheese. And I realized that gardening actually takes a concerted effort and I have no idea what I’m doing.