Carolyn MikulencakSwallowYou:

When you talk to people, you sound like your mother. It’s not that you just sound like her, you become her. You could be in the middle of a conversation, maybe offering advice, especially when you’re offering advice, and you have to stop because as you talk, you see yourself talking, and as you see yourself talking, you see your mother talking, specifically her mouth as it shapes the words you are saying: make-up has coagulated in fine hairs above her lip, there is a cold sore, freckles. It is very disconcerting.

But you have discovered that most people don’t notice or care that you have stopped talking. People are usually eager to fill in gaps of silence. Especially Jennifer, a neighbor in the apartment above you. She is very easy to talk to in the sense that she will grab hold of a conversation and run with it. She will add all kinds of wild gestures and throaty laughs and even props, like cigarettes that she will stub out when making her point. She has a special knack for making points. 

You often sit on the front stoop with Jennifer and listen to her talk about things like her friend, Barbara, or the elevator. Sometimes she asks how your classes are going, and you always answer with the same fine. You watch the pigeons on the building across the street while she’s talking so that you don’t have to make eye contact, which is difficult for you. The pigeons drop off the ledge and then swoop back up at the last minute like they are just kidding about the whole jumping thing. Larry, your dog, is usually stretched out on the sidewalk at your feet and asleep, his ears periodically twitching with the breeze. He is very peaceful and even dreams, you can see his eyes rolling back and his legs moving in miniature motions of running, until a bird flutters nearby or a plastic bag blows down the street, and then he jumps up, alert, the muscles under his thin skin shaking like he is a kitchen appliance and someone has plugged him in.  Jesus, Edith, Jennifer will say. That dog is uncomfortable in his own skin. And even though she is obviously talking about Larry, you know she means you.  

Jennifer:

You sometimes like to visit Jennifer at the aquarium where she volunteers on Saturdays because it reminds you how she doesn’t get it. You hang out behind the tropical fish tank and watch her scoop up a nurse shark in the touching pool so that the kids can feel its skin. She can talk to kids forever, it seems, kids and tired moms, grandparents, men in shorts, young couples with good hair, and then loners, especially the loners, the ones who appear to be looking at fish but are really trying to make out their own dim reflection on the glass tank. Jennifer’s hands move like spastic stars as she tells them some story, probably something about the elevator. Occasionally you hear snippets from her conversations, melancholic words like bioluminescence and evaporative loss that pop of her mouth like bubblegum. And you are alarmed all over again by how poorly she uses her time here, how she wastes it making small talk with sunburned masses when, in another room, sharks move in slow motion behind thick glass and a jelly fish pulses through water like a tired heartbeat.

You move deliberately through the aquarium: first the Gulf of Mexico, then the Coral Reef, the Amazon, the Mississippi Delta, (you skip the amphibian exhibit, clumsy frogs), and, finally, the glass tunnel that leads through an enormous fish tank. You are reverently aware of how glass holds back gallons and gallons of vertical water and that inside, the fish see you as you see them.

An analogy: you are to fish as air is to water.

And then you think how each fish has a memory of swaying underwater plants, the slow syncopation of deep unseen currents caused by some tropical depression way out in part of the ocean where no people swim with those ridiculous inflatable rafts, and this inspires another analogy that you are to fish as loneliness is to vastness and the loneliness of vastness and the redemption of lonely vastness. And, well, it’s too much to put into words.

This makes you feel better.

Because Jennifer, she is back in the Coral Reef standing beside a shallow petting tank, teetering on high-heels, flapping her arms around with words, a silly, silly penguin.

Larry:

You spend most nights in your apartment rereading Virginia Woolf, who was rumored to be socially awkward. You drink Chamomile tea that your mother left after her last visit, a Super Saver box of 500 tea bags, and listen to the rhythm of Jennifer’s footsteps in the apartment above you. You know she is going out with Luca, the elevator boyfriend, because the noise is more frantic and radiates from the bathroom, diffusing outward and then back again. Her phone usually rings too, an event that inspires a separate flurry of steps into the living room, the inevitable dropping and rolling of things on the way, and then, a few seconds later, the muffled surge of laughter because every person she talks to, every person (except you) is funny.

All the commotion from above makes Larry nervous. He trots back and forth following Jennifer’s steps through your apartment, his ears pointed up. It is a betrayal you try to forgive. He, is, after all, a rescued dog, a great sufferer of separation anxiety. As he moves from the living room to the bathroom to the bedroom to the bathroom his claws tap out a Morse code message of your thoughts on the wooden floor. Thoughts like, Isn’t it just like Jennifer to be at a wild party where people dive into shallow pools? And, Who wears heels to work at an aquarium? And, Haven’t we all heard enough of the elevator story? And, Remember when she said she would—and she didn’t—and she never has—

Other nights, nights when Jennifer sleeps at Luca’s house, Larry’s movement gives you great peace. You sit on the sofa reviewing your Emily Dickinson notes and listen to him lap water out of his bowl in the kitchen. You hear the clinking of his rabies tag hitting against his veterinarian tag hitting against the silver bone tag you had engraved with your phone number. The soft metallic sound reminds you of the delicate wind chimes you imagine would be hanging around Buddhist monasteries. Buddhist monasteries: moderately breezy places with billowing gold fabric and some sort of tropical bird flitting about; Michael continuously walking in through an open doorway, again and again, world without end. Amen.

Michael:

Michael, the produce manager at your grocery store, has the heavy eyelids of the ghost of Christmas past. His hooded eyes make you think he stays up late nights reading. They make you feel he can look at a person, say a girl, and see past all her empty small talk and charming frivolity. You have shared nine words and one contraction with Michael. They have all been extremely successful.

It started with Where’s the watercress? He was sweeping up green beans when you asked, but he paused after the question and turned to look at you slowly and with significance, like the moment was already something remembered. You managed to hold and return his gaze. It was a lengthy exchange, the automatic doors opening and closing twice in the distance behind him before he finally raised his arm and pointed to a wall of lettuce that you already knew was there.

Thank you.

He nodded.

When you returned to the store the next day to buy garlic, he nodded again. You smiled. He held out his hand, which was large and roped with veins.

Michael.

Edith.

Behind you the automatic doors opened and closed, opened and closed.

Your Mom:

Don’t think about your mother at the grocery store. How her pants make a swish-swish sound when she walks down the aisle pushing a cart that spills macaroni boxes and tuna fish cans. Your mother, who stops for every sample and is oblivious of the man behind her waiting to get by. She clogs the produce section to squeeze fresh tomatoes only to buy canned ones. She bumps into cracker displays and small children. Sorry, she says. Whoops! She reaches for the eighteen-roll package of toilet paper, the super saver tea bags and then pays with a check in the express lane. She talks about rain with the check-out girl, the one you hate, even though the line behind her backs into the frozen food aisle, draws a collective sigh, and reaches for a tabloid.

When on Public Transportation:

You have a plan. You don’t remember when you came up with it, but this is what you do. If a girl catches you staring at her on the bus, you don’t turn away, which admits your guilt. Instead, you look intensely at something just over her shoulder, an ad for cell phone plans, say, or a stain on the vinyl upholstery. You scrutinize the thing, whatever it is, as if it had held your attention all along, thereby making the person, whoever she is, feel ridiculous, a fool, for ever thinking that out of all possible things you had chosen to look at her.  

Barbara:

Barbara is an old friend of Jennifer’s from St. Mary Gate of Heaven High School, the one who dove into the wrong end of a swimming pool during a party and broke her neck. Jennifer often complains that Barbara doesn’t go out enough because she is in a wheelchair. They had made plans to attend their high school reunion together, but Barbara called at the last minute in tears and canceled. She hardly ever laughs at Jennifer’s stories anymore, and she claims that Jennifer’s new friends, mostly artists and gay men, are all, in words that Jennifer paraphrased for Barbara, too cool for school. When Jennifer tells you these things, you act sympathetic, but inside your heart feels excited and light, like when you know someone is about to get into a lot of trouble.

The only event that Barbara will reliably leave her house for is the Renaissance Festival, which comes into town for one month every year. Jennifer told you yesterday in the laundry room that Barbara requires they go every weekend during that month and that they wear costumes. Seriously, every year. It’s like the goddamn swallows   returning to Capistrano, Jennifer complained because she hates velvet and crystals. The what?  You asked. –The swallows. —What does that mean? –It means, Edith, that I don’t want to go.

When Talking, or Rather Listening, to Jennifer:

Your voice goes funny and soft. You stop completing your sentences and find it difficult to swallow properly. You question your pronunciation of words. When she comments that Larry runs like a gazelle, you’re struck by how effortlessly she pulled off the word. You order French fries instead of the menu’s pomme frites. You once referred to Jung as the guy who analyzes dreams. Soon you stop talking all together around her. You stare off into the distance like you are distracted by big ideas. When necessary, you offer a well-timed uh-huh or okay that sounds, even to you, like a weed-choked lot between two tall buildings.

Some of Jennifer’s Stories:

There’s the Aunt Melanie with a suggestive gap between her front teeth. Her favorite activity at family parties was trying to get young Jennifer to curse for her friends, all secretaries. Just say goddamn, Jenny. We won’t tell. And Jennifer, dressed in a pink Care Bear nightgown, for godsake, would say it, quietly at first and then louder as they all laughed and smoked cigarettes and drank from lipstick-stained martini glasses.

Jennifer’s father, the idiot, warned her and her sister, Yvonne, that too much television would give them flu. They were not allowed to shower during a thunderstorm because he was sure they’d be electrocuted. Yeah, she says. Mr. Information, that one. Let me tell you. She holds her cigarette loosely between two fingers when she says this, her wrist limp and her arm bent at a ninety degree angle, elbow against shifted hip, in a pose that you are sure you’ve seen on television. When she exhales, she blows smoke up and out the side of her mouth.

Her older brother, a firefighter, taught her and Yvonne to box. You’ve seen the picture: two pigtailed girls, one scrawny, slugging each other over shag carpet in some orange-hued past. That’s me, Bloodless Betty, she calls herself. Because Jennifer is anemic and, as the story goes, once passed out on stage while playing Emily in the middle school production of Our Town. Now she eats pate and foie gras to boost her iron level. And Yvonne takes blood every day as an emergency room nurse who is having an affair with a married oncologist. He takes her to no-tell motels, as Jennifer calls them, finger to shushed lips. He sends her plants like bleeding hearts and wandering jews via UPS for no particular reason.

Jennifer has felt like a star in a Fellini film when, wearing a satin bridesmaid gown, she walked with four drunk groomsmen through a moonlit sugar cane field. She has pedaled her bicycle up hills in the Tuscan countryside at sunset and has stolen and then crashed a boyfriend’s car (Carmine, magician) into a telephone pole. He forgave her. Of course! What else is he going to do?

Jennifer has ridden in a limousine more times than anyone you know.

And maybe her stories are nothing special, but they steal something from you. They make you want to call your ex-boyfriends, both of them, and your childhood friend, Pepper, who once swore you had the most beautiful hair in the whole world. They make you feel embarrassed about all the times you ever felt charming or interesting, like one time at the bar, after several glasses of wine, you actually slipped your phone number to the waiter.

One Night on the Stoop:

You should ask him out!

No thanks.

You should!

I don’t even know him.

Ah, yes, I see, she says and sweeps her forehead dramatically with her hand, brushing away hair that is not really in her eyes. That’s a problem. You only get to know people you already know.

Shut up.

She studies you for a minute, then shakes her head and says, You’re adorable, Edith. I mean, you’re really, really adorable.

She gives this compliment easily. She says it like she has never pored over fashion magazines with a knot in her stomach. Like she has never known despair, a despair that quietly decays everything around it, everything, like a rotten wisdom tooth, until she can’t even be nice to people. Because if Jennifer had ever been jealous, even once, she would not have been able to look at you with such an easy and uncomplicated affection, like you’re a charity project, a puppy, a girl who loves horses.    

The Elevator Story:

You have heard it many times and always with the same wording. Jennifer was once trapped between the 26th and the 27th floor of an office building downtown. Ever since that day, she refuses to use an elevator. You call this an extravagant phobia but she insists that it is real, that she hyperventilated the thirty minutes she was stuck in the elevator and that when it finally lowered and the doors parted, she literally fell out, here she staggers a bit to build tension, gulping air like I had been underwater and here she waves her hands in front of her mouth like she is scooping air in, like she is suffocating. And then, she concludes, I collapsed into the arms of the nearest man. If Luca is around, she will look into his eyes and tilt her head slightly. Sometimes she will rub his back. They are so openly in love with each other that you are pretty sure it is a sham.

In this way, Jennifer claims to be irrationally scared of many things: she takes Xanax to fly on airplanes; she refuses to drive over bridges; she knocks on your door when she needs someone to kill a bee. Her fear is very entertaining; if there’s a crowd of people around Jennifer at a party and they are all laughing, which they always are, chances are she is recounting a time when she was afraid of something.

You suspect, however, that she has never been scared of anything, not really. She is only playing around with the idea of fear, trying it on and accessorizing it like a cocktail dress.

Real fear, you know, is not contained to a specific thing or event and does not always end with a handsome Italian delivery boy. It is vague and always there, like the atmosphere, and it intensifies unexpectedly, like on the day you looked out your mother’s sliding glass door at her yard, all mud and crab grass and chain-linked fence, and knew, without a doubt, that the world is irrevocably ugly.

Michael:

Michael carefully handles ripe avocados. Michael brushes dirt from the caps of portabella mushrooms and investigates their mysterious gills, smells the dark, somnolent odors. Michael smiles as you walk through the automatic door. He is misting lettuce with a thin hose that snakes along the floor and, for a second, you see a rainbow. It is in this second that you decide to ask him out on a date. You act like it is your idea.

You and Jennifer:

You suspect she needs it.

She stops you at the mailbox while you are reading a letter from your mother (cat stationary) and complains about the water pressure and then launches into a story about her grandfather’s banana tree farm in Puerto Rico. She invites you out to dinner only to leave you alone at the table with your Cobb salad while she talks to the hostess, the bartender, the regular who always sits by the window and who distills his own absinthe. Because that is the type of person she knows, a person who, in his spare time, distills absinthe in Eiffel factories in provincial France.

If she sees you and Larry on the front stoop, she comes out with news of Luca, dear Luca whom she is so glad to have met, it was fate really, references the elevator again, and his food delivery business doing well, the entrepreneur. She talks like she is always on a first date, exclamated and confident and suggestively eager. She tells you about her pony-hair boots and the new clownfish (clownfish!) that the aquarium acquired from a diver in Key West. You smile along, feeling smaller and smaller; you nod, saying yeah and uh-huh until you disappear. And you see how she needs your awkwardness to feed her charm, and then her charm creates your awkwardness, and the two of you are like the water cycle in a science textbook, the blocky red and blue arrows showing condensation becoming precipitation evaporating into condensation that precipitates, the relentless of it all.

Capistrano:

Is a mission town in southern California, as in San Juan Capistrano. It has also become a figure of speech, as in Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, my mother and her friends flock to the annual post-Thanksgiving sale at the mall. Or something to that effect. It is, you have to admit, an unwieldy phrase. You had to look it up on the computer. There’s a crumbling church in Capistrano where the birds return every spring to build their nests. People call it a miracle because the swallows’ consistency is something they can depend on unlike love or friendship or basic human kindness. But the real miracle is this: Jennifer doesn’t know the story behind the expression. Sure, she employs the allusion in the right context, but it is an empty phrase for her, hollow, hand-me-down words she tosses around that belie, and you knew it along, you did! you did!, her own basic insincerity.

Over Mangoes:

Ok? You manage to say.

Yeah, ok.

Ok. So, I don’t know, when?

I get off work early on Saturday.

That sounds good. Saturday afternoon. Good.

Saturday then. Do you want to meet here? Like, at two?

Two. That’s great.

Ok.     

Ok.     

In the silence that follows, Michael looks down at your hand, which, to your surprise, has been caressing fruit. Caressing fruit is not something you typically do, and you look at him sheepishly but feel a charged complicity because he smiles and you sense he understands, if not finds endearing, this nervous hand movement.     

So what do you want to do? He asks.

Let’s go the aquarium, you say because you are sure that he, of all people, will get it.  

In Front of Her Apartment Door:

You are waiting to tell her about Michael. As she walks down the hall toward you, you see that her hair is limp and her face haggard. In fact, there is such a plaintive quality to her approaching presence that you feel it like humidity. You wonder if something has happened. A velvet dress with gold filigree embroidery is folded over her arm, and the plastic from the bag it’s wrapped in sticks to her thigh. She’s sweaty from climbing three flights of stairs. She’s tired.

You wait for her to say something first.

What’s up, Edith? 

The question comes out breathy and harassed, and you think this is it and I should have just emailed her, but she smiles, undoing her tone, and says I ran into the fatasses on my way up, talking about the two overweight sisters who live on the first floor and often complain about Larry’s hair on the stairs. She runs the words together so that they sound like a Middle Eastern dish only the two of you understand. It always makes you laugh. It makes you laugh the way you imagine Barbara must have laughed at the pool party, where she only knew Jennifer and was probably only comfortable when Jennifer was repeating some inside joke they had or recounting a story that starred both of them. When Jennifer’s cousin started throwing people into the water, including Barbara, who was wearing a white dress, Jennifer was in the bathroom reapplying lipstick, which now she almost never wears. She came out of the house in time to see Barbara climb out. She watched as Barbara, wringing her hair, looked down at her now transparent dress and then searchingly across the pool for Jennifer, who grabbed a towel from a nearby chair and held it up like a promise I’m on my way, I’ll help you. It could have been another funny story to tell, but Barbara was too self-conscious to wait and dove headfirst back under the cover of water. 

You:

Under dappled light of deep water, you and Michael have nothing to say. You have walked the length of the aquarium and have only talked about obvious things, like fish and produce. You conversed politely like bus companions killing time before the next stop. He told a story that involved the check out girl you knew you disliked and now had a reason. You shared anecdotes about Larry and admired the eels. There was a time (in the Mississippi room, a ground-feeding catfish, two bodies kneel down, arms touch warmly) that you thought things were picking up, but the feeling dissolved upon standing, and you soon found yourself pushing the audio information button to hear about the evolution of amphibious creatures.

So now you stand in the glass tunnel, the end of the line, a fathom of water pressing down on you. You and Michael watch the fish in silence. You begin thinking in analogies: you are to fish as silence is to water; silence is to fish as desperation is to what? To me! To me! And you begin to imagine the prehistoric ocean and the poor limbless fish that first had to slug onto the muddy shore. All that humidity and pressure to get on with life. That first fish must have preferred this, the sink and sway, the blue television light of underwater, and you wonder if Barbara felt that too as she came to rest at the bottom of the pool. After the drama of the dive and the snap of the neck, it must have been a relief just to lay there and watch the bubbles rise to the surface, disappear.

And, since you and Michael have run out of words, you concentrate on a stingray as it wings its way past you. Michael sees it too and opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then doesn’t. You turn toward him, the stingray ascending in the distance, and start to say, yes, it is pretty, isn’t it?, when you see her. There she is at the end of the tunnel, Jennifer. She is talking wildly to an old lady, pointing and nodding and pointing again. She is offering directions, as usual, and it’s not relief you feel, not really, but something more hopeful as you and Michael walk towards her, fish swimming above like birds.