Home
Harris only looks older around the eyes, and who cares about that?
He’s standing by the bed, watching her as she packs for her trip. Mira knows without glancing up at him that each eye has drooped at the corner, a little kangaroo pouch of defeat.
“It’s not like it’s my home,” she says. “It’s no one’s home.” Packing is futile, she thinks. It’s been six years. Her skirts sit higher on her hips now, and she wears shoes that are leather amalgamations of sneakers and Mary Janes. Mira has never been able to find a hairstylist she likes in Washburn, and she dyes her hair from a box, at home, over the sink.
“But you lived there,” says Harris. “You had a garden.”
“I had a potted jalapeno plant,” she says to her suitcase, imagining already how she will wave good-bye to Harris from the other side of the security line at Washburn’s tiny airport. He’ll be standing by the glass-encased mountain lion next to the water fountain, waving. He’ll still be standing there when she turns her back to find a seat at one of the two boarding gates. Harris would say that he revels in kitsch — a lawyer next to a mountain lion! How improbable! — but there’s a line as sticky as sap between kitsch and nostalgia, and Mira knows he’ll be feeling sentimental as he waves her off.
“And a tomato. I think you had a tomato plant.”
Harris had lived there, too, of course. He still gets the Times delivered to their door on Sundays and keeps up with one or two coworkers from his old firm, but otherwise, he says, the only thing he misses is a pastrami sandwich. Mira has been more vocal about what she does and does not miss. She misses: her old desk, the roof of her apartment building, the dog park at 9 a.m. She does not miss: her old boss, her apartment’s galley kitchen, the dog park at 9 p.m.
Cities
She left the city, Mira likes to say, just when things were starting to calcify. They had all been playing hopscotch for the past decade — new job, new borough, new lover — and choices were beginning to be made. People were deciding to stay. They were buying one-bedrooms in Queens, calling themselves homesteaders and optimistically listing the Afghan restaurants on their new block. They were arguing against graduate school, finding reasons to love advertising, pharmaceuticals. What had always been a lark was now a concession.
Mira and Harris, who had been dating for over a year at that point, watched the Hasidic mothers hefting strollers up the grimy stairs of the subway, faces shining with sweat and resignation, and decided to go. And, with a flair for the dramatic that they hadn’t recognized in one another before, they decided to go west. If they were going to leave the city, they said, they might as well leave it unconditionally.
Even so, it has always concerned Mira how she and Harris chose Washburn. They could have gone anywhere. West was a country, a cruise ship. Every corner of its landscape was equally promising. She vaguely remembers that Oregon had been alluring for the relative proximity to the ocean, mountains, and desert. Washburn was in the middle of the state, bracketed by all three geographies and yet, somehow, claimed by none of them. Also, Harris had visited Washburn once when he was eight. A college friend of his father’s had lived there, and they had visited because, as Harris remembered only after he and Mira had moved in, his father’s friend had recently lost his wife. Is this how people choose their homes, Mira has since wondered: by chance and imprecision?
When she lived in the city, Mira remembers, everyone had moved there because they had been driven to. There was a longing associated with the city that, she knows now, was propelled by the same stories that eventually drove people away.
Hotels
The conference Mira is attending is in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and is note-worthy only for its concision. The keynote speaker has been delayed in Dallas; there is a breakout group discussion; they eat a mild lunch of baked chicken and rice pilaf; there is another, shorter, breakout group discussion; they are dismissed. Mira had expected more, of course, but is not particularly disappointed.
She knows that she could get to the city one day earlier than planned, but she doesn’t want to waste the free hotel room in Elizabeth. Besides, Denise and Josh surely have plans. Denise and Josh are the only kinds of friends she has kept. She and Denise have left one another lengthy, informative voice messages over the years. They are expecting her tomorrow for a visit of one day and one night, not too much to ask of old friends. Still, she doesn’t want to push it. Mira eats dinner at the Italian restaurant that’s adjacent to the hotel and then, propped up by pillows under a taupe bedspread, she watches a movie about a young girl who has been kidnapped by pirates and who, with pluck and the help of a smart-mouthed parrot, escapes.
Neighbors
Though they are quite happy in Washburn, she and Harris occasionally throw dinner parties to remind their friends and colleagues of their urban pedigree. They serve things that Mira vaguely remembers being impressed by at the after-hours three-star restaurants that she used to frequent: rillette, roulade. The dishes never look or taste as she remembers, but she pretends they do and their guests, cowed, say complimentary things. They do not consider themselves to be particularly snobbish, and say as much to one another as they dry the dishes and put away the French press after everyone has left. They are just trying, as Mira once told Gayle, to stave off the inevitability of deviled eggs and pineapple upside-down cake.
“But I love pineapple upside-down cake,” Gayle had said. “It’s so moist.”
Gayle, who is Mira’s best friend in town, also lived in the city for a time. It’s the only thing she and Mira have in common, and in Washburn, it is enough. Gayle likes to talk about the day she left Manhattan, clothes spilling out the window of her Saab, a canary in the passenger seat. “As I drove over the Verrazano Bridge,” she says, “I looked at the city in my rearview mirror and had the physical sensation that I was saving my own life.”
For the sake of their friendship, Mira has never told Gayle that she wouldn’t have been able to see Manhattan in her rearview on that particular bridge.
Gayle and Harris work at the same law office. They do not work on the weekends, and they are each home by 6 every evening. That, as Harris likes to point out to Mira, is reason enough to have left. Mira, who writes grants for a small non-profit in town and has the same hours as she did in a similar job in the city, is not entirely convinced.
She is glad, however, to be rid of the social obligations that seemed constantly to back her days and evenings into corners: if not an actual obligation, then the threat of one impending or, worse, forgotten. There had been a certain shameful relief in releasing herself from friendships that had always been so vital. After a while, it just seemed silly to keep in touch with people with whom she no longer shares the same governor. Mira has begun to see her life as a collection of zippered pockets out of which, whenever she likes, she can pull a restaurant, evening at Coney Island, city sidewalk. Then, having smiled at the thing in recognition, she can zip it back in. It’s so much easier than email.
Roads
She does not get an early start in the morning. Why bother? Even those who haven’t lived in the city know not to hit the tunnels before 10. Mira commends herself for her foresight. She’s not a very good city driver, anyway. She eats a stale butterhorn in the lobby of the hotel, smiling awkwardly at one or two women whom she thinks she might have seen at the conference.
It’s as she is driving toward the Holland Tunnel that she sees the sign for IKEA. Yellow letters on the side of a royal blue building, a startling but not unpleasant combination. She has never been to IKEA. (All of the furniture in the home that she and Harris own came from Toldy’s, the only furniture store in Washburn. The comforting result is that, no matter whose house they are in, they are able to sit on their own couch.) Mira turns her blinker on, and slowly floats over to the exit. She isn’t planning on buying anything, but she has a vague notion that she will at least collect jokes that she can then share with Harris, proving to him that they aren’t missing out on something wonderful and timely. She was going to arrive in New York too early, anyway (Denise had said in her latest message that they could meet for lunch near the apartment), and Mira doesn’t relish the idea of trying to find a parking spot that she will have to vacate every thirty minutes for the next six hours. And what would they talk about, anyway?
When she first enters the store, Mira’s not impressed. The entryway does not lend itself to a spirit of congenial consumerism. She feels as though she has entered a Kmart — the same stale air, the same flooding desire to grab the item she needs as quickly as possible and get out. Banks of shopping carts hedge her in; there is a giant container of what look like yellow diaper bags near her elbow. Mira picks up a short pencil and sheet of paper from a display that announces “Start Here!” She grabs a map of the store, surprised to see that it is more cavernous on paper than it appeared from the road. She slings a diaper bag awkwardly over her shoulder, and marches forward.
Living Rooms
It is early yet, and the store is not particularly crowded. Even so, she’s almost immediately disoriented. Where are the aisles, the informative placards announcing what she will find on side A, what she will find on side B? Gayle has always spoken with reverence of the Swedish meatballs, but Mira sees no freezer section. Instead, she walks through a series of living rooms that are completely realized, each one stylishly appointed with its own palette, its own accent rug. Mira moves through each display, testing the couches, naming the styles. White-on-White Beach Rental. Sultry Condo. Danish Lumberjack. She tries to place Harris in each room, costuming him in a white linen jacket in one, a tweed coat in another, but the picture in her mind is too large and unwieldy. He just won’t fit. These are small living rooms, smaller by far than the vast, unmanageable Great Room in their own home. What is so great about a Great Room, Mira asks herself. Is it supposed to make one feel justified about one’s impulse purchases? Just because there’s room for both a Boston fern and a gun case doesn’t mean one should have both — or does it? Perhaps she should feel smug about the Boston fern. After all, not everyone has room for such a lumbering plant. There must be many of its kind that can’t find accommodating homes. Perhaps she should feel the same way about the gun case.
And anyway, none of these couches would work in their home. They are too small; she would have to stack them together, end-to-end, like grey and white dominoes. There’s a word for what she’s imagining, Mira knows, but it seems to be just out of reach.
When Mira and Harris bought their home, they did so with a sense of good-natured irony. A ranch! They loved the word, and imagined how their friends in the city might react: with worry, of course, but also pride, envy, pictures of spurs and hay bales dancing in their heads. Mira and Harris! A ranch! Of course, it wasn’t that kind of ranch. It was a ranch style. The kind of ranch that Mira had, in fact, grown up in, with a long low profile and ugly, bleached rocks rimming the fireplace and front door. For a while, three years at least, Mira and Harris reveled in the sheer implausibility of their home. And then Mira woke up one day in a house that had been built in the ‘50s.
Sectionals. That’s it.
Has she been in this one already? Mira sits on a couch and contemplates the room she’s in. There is a desk kitty-corner from the couch — an architect’s desk, she thinks. It is cluttered with pencil holders. Plastic pencil holders. A bright-red desk lamp. A grey vase. Mira stands and moves toward the desk.
Gayle calls on her cell. “Where are you? What are you looking at?”
Mira picks up the vase in one hand. “Anything and everything,” she says. She can imagine the Harris who lives here. He fits things to scale, is cognizant of emergency exits. He is not a particularly inspired lover, though he is eager to learn. He looks just like her Harris, though perhaps with better shoes and less hair. The vase in her hand is surprisingly light.
“Well, I’m burning with envy,” says Gayle. Mira can hear her sigh on the other side of the country. “Will you do one thing for me? Will you go to Café Herman and order toast with avocado and cracked pepper? Will you eat it in my honor?”
“Don’t you eat that at home?” asks Mira. Grey, she decides, is a color with possibility. She could wrap a room around this vase.
“Mira,” says Gayle. “You know it’s not the same. Now go frolic aimlessly! Sit in Sheep’s Meadow and wait for the Mojito man to pedal by! Drink a ginger martini at the lawyers’ bar in Midtown! Get dumplings from the cart on Lafayette!”
“My cab is here,” says Mira.
“I demand a smuggled dumpling,” says Gayle, laughing. Mira imagines her twirling a pencil between forefinger and thumb, dropping it flatly on her desk at work. “Hide it in your hair if you must. But bring me a dumpling.”
“Gotta go,” says Mira, snapping the phone shut. The lawyers’ bar? She thinks she might head over to Kitchens.
Neighbors
The store is more crowded now than it was when she first came in. A few families wander awkwardly through the living rooms and offices, but retreat toward the food court (a mysterious room that Mira has yet to see, indicated only by blue signs with arrows and pictographs of knives, forks) when their children get too close to the white couches. For the most part, Mira is surrounded by individuals with diaper bags and small handcarts, and she takes pleasure in the communal isolation.
She’s passing by the front entrance again, Kitchens straight ahead, when she sees a blue bus pull up with a jolt and hiss. The bus doors open, and the New Yorkers come streaming out like a long grey ribbon. Mira knows they are the New Yorkers because of their haircuts, and because they all appear to be the exact age that she was when she left. They come with tote bags, leather purses, wallet chains. Their faces are set in determined pursuit. A few are laughing with one another, but as they near the sliding glass entrance doors, they walk more quickly and step in front of one another, grape-vining their way through the store in a careful, measured hustle.
Mira does not follow them. She does not want to overhear their conversations, watch them pick out items of indiscernible function, smiling secretly to themselves. She knows that she will want those items, too, after the New Yorkers have touched them, and that she will buy them without ever knowing what they do, or what room they should be placed in.
Kitchens
Instead, she walks through Kitchens, marveling at the white cabinets, the sleek drawer pulls that remind her of sporting accessories. (Bobsleds! Hang gliders!) Mira keeps her gaze at countertop level, unwilling to look up. She could accidentally make eye contact with a New Yorker, and then what would she do?
They sometimes talk about the fear that drove them as far from their friends and corner bodegas as possible. The fear of being always too close, of finding excuses to traipse into the city for a weekend, upsetting their friends’ plans and feeling all the while as though they were wedging chairs into the end of a dinner table that was already too full. They don’t call it fear, of course; they call it foresight. They say theirs was an act of self-preservation. But Mira knows what it really is.
Bedrooms
She wanders through the store without purpose, looking only at her map when she finds herself surrounded by things that she would never, ever want. This happens only once, in Automotive Accessories, a section about as big as her car and which, Mira guesses, is a newer, chancier addition to the store. She maneuvers easily out of that area, landing happily in Bedrooms. Mira walks from room to room, touching the comforters, adjusting the curtains.
She stops in a room that has been decorated in shades of pale green and chartreuse. The curtains in this room drape elegantly over a large black and white photograph of the Midtown skyline. There’s a small desk in the corner, big enough for a child, really, and a mattress on the ground with what appears to be grass cuttings decoratively printed on the duvet. Upon closer inspection, Mira sees that the bed does have a frame; the mattress nestles snugly in a small walnut box. She puts down her purse and diaper bag and lowers herself to the bed.
The mattress is firm and a little thin. It is so low to the ground that when Mira sits, her knees graze her chin. Still, she likes sitting like this. She feels vulnerable and delicate. Mira slides up the bed and swings her legs onto it, kicking off her shoes. She lies down. So this is what it feels like to be twenty-three, she thinks. There is no Harris living here. Maybe as an overnight guest, but then only once or twice. The Harris who visits this room meets his dates online. He says it’s because he’s a busy guy, lots going on in the world of an editorial assistant, but really, he’s just shy, can’t figure out how else to meet someone who also desires a family, a co-op, something small but suitable in the mid ‘70s, east side. Only from the safety of this thin mattress, once he and his date are sweaty and relaxed, will he admit that he belongs to an improv group. You should come watch sometime, he might say, biting his lower lip. I’m good for a cheap laugh. Mira moves around awkwardly. The mattress is not nearly as comfortable when she’s on her back.
“At least you took your shoes off. Lots of people don’t.” A young woman in a blue IKEA vest is standing above her. She has stringy black hair that has been pulled into a ponytail so tight that it looks like she has cornrows. Her eyeliner is thick and dramatic.
Mira brings her hand up to shield her eyes, as though she is blinking into the sun. “This is a very nice bed,” she says. “It would fit easily into my apartment.”
“Yeah, it’s great for that.” The IKEA girl smiles down. “Careful you don’t fall asleep.”
Mira shifts, propping herself up on her elbows. “I might like to buy the bed frame and get my own mattress,” she says. “This one isn’t quite right.”
“We’ve got some others,” says the girl, “but you have to get one here. They’re custom-made.”
“I don’t care about that.” Mira frowns. “I just want a better mattress.”
The girl shakes her head at Mira sadly. “Yeah,” she sighs. “But only our mattresses fit in our frames. If you don’t get one here, everything else will be too big.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Mira, sitting up and sliding her feet back into her shoes. “What if I want a regular-sized bed?” She slaps the mattress and stands up. “Why would I want a small one?”
“For an apartment,” says the IKEA girl. “For a studio or a share. That’s why people shop here.” She eyes Mira carefully. It is clear that the girl thinks she’s an imposter. “People with big houses can afford big beds.”
“Well, I still think it’s ridiculous.”
“Look, if you want a big bed, there’s a Crate and Barrel about a mile away.”
This is a challenge, Mira knows.
“Where is the mattress section?” she asks. “I would like to see what you have available.”
The girl waves her hand about vaguely. “We don’t have a section. The mattresses are on the beds. You just have to try them all out.”
“Thank you,” says Mira stiffly. “I think I will.” She walks to the next sample room, which is done up in shades of red and black. A bachelor pad. A large, flat-screen TV is propped at the foot of the bed on a long, low credenza. The lighting is steely and bright. Mira sits on the bed, patting it with a look of studied concentration. The Harris who lives here has condoms stashed in each room of his apartment: in hollow books, in metal tins. He does not care for opera, though he has season tickets. He thinks children make fine accessories, and enjoys being an uncle for two or three days a year. He never returns her calls. The IKEA girl walks by, glancing in her direction. Mira stays in the room until the girl has passed, and then she gets up quickly and moves toward Bathrooms.
Bathrooms
It’s even more labyrinthine than the other areas she’s been in. This is due, in part, to the frosted glass shower doors that jut out haphazardly from fake walls. How would anyone know which door to choose? Mira imagines a house of bathrooms just like these. Some doors would reveal real shower stalls, full bottles of shampoo, a French body scrub, a washcloth hanging on a demure rod. Some doors would reveal walls. The joke would be funny, she thinks, for five minutes, more or less. And then someone would have to go on and live there.
Still, this area provides good cover, in case the strident mattress girl comes looking for her.
Gayle would understand Bathrooms. She would immerse herself in the maze of doors and medicine cabinets, pairing beveled glass with frosted, cornflower blue tiles with cobalt ones. She would emerge triumphant, because that’s what Gayle does. Gayle’s enthusiasm for all things — door handles, pineapple upside-down cake, the city — is exhausting. It is, Mira has always thought, not very New York. She knows many things about Gayle’s life in New York: where she lived (Murray Hill), where she went dancing (Toledo), her ideal date (ice cream, Brooklyn Bridge, an off-Broadway play). She doesn’t know, however, why Gayle moved there from Cincinnati, where she had just finished law school, and what it was that made her finally leave. She always delivers the line about saving her own life in the same voice that she uses when she’s convincing Mira to buy another disappointing dress or skirt. Mira’s friendship with Gayle is beginning to remind her of her mother’s friendships: an office building’s windowless skeleton, all steel and fortification, but curtains? Crown molding? Forget about it.
Denise, she remembers now, used to call Mira after every party. One, two, three in the morning. And Mira would answer, breathless, every time, ready to disassemble the evening’s crisis or victory.
When did Harris become her only true friend? And why didn’t she see that coming?
Accessories
She eats a cinnamon roll in the food court, a cold space next to the exit with round white tables and flimsy chairs that she hasn’t seen in any of the displays. During her late lunch, Mira consults her map. Two o’clock already, and there are so many sections left to visit, rooms that she missed in the areas she already passed through, she’s sure of it. For one thing, she hasn’t even seen where they keep the dishware. She reminds herself that she wasn’t going to buy anything — but if she happens to see the perfect plates for their next dinner party, what can she do? She sets down the sticky remnants of her cinnamon roll, wipes her hands on a flimsy napkin. There’s no time to lose.
She follows the signs to Home Accessories, a vast, cavernous space that she somehow missed during her previous tour. This section seems to be more crowded than the others, but Mira soon realizes that it’s a result of the mirrors propped up in lines in the middle of the room. Chrome, gold, white wood, beech wood: the mirrors are meant to be hung on the insides of closet doors or next to a stand-alone shower. Mira walks slowly down the rows, glancing stealthily.
She looks different now, she knows. Of course she does! Harris too! But Mira has aged in the way that women in every town and city in America but one age: forthrightly.
She would still be beautiful if she lived in the city. Denise is probably lithe and angular. She will have aged a few months, maybe a year to Mira’s six. Denise will not say anything about how Mira looks, but her silence will be the most unflattering reflection. What will they talk about, if not how well they each look? Josh will have aged around the eyes. Perhaps they will talk about that.
Surrounding the mirrors are large bins and shelving units, filled with all of the accessories that one would need for a spare, inviting studio. Picture frames, salad bowls, coasters, wall hangings. Plain white ceramic plates, not quite what she was imagining. Mira shakes her head, disappointed. (And what would Denise think of these dinner parties, anyway? What would she do if she saw Mira’s bright placemats, the collection of mismatched salt-and-pepper shakers that she keeps in the gun case? Would she laugh, as Mira might hope? An eggplant and a windmill! How improbable! Or would she cross her arms over her chest and tilt her head, smiling opaquely in the name of friendship?)
But never mind that, look at the vases! There are so many vases in shades of grey that Mira has a hard time differentiating between them. But of course they fulfill different functions. A daisy would fit perfectly in this small, squat one. This leanly tapered vase was made for the occasional dried lavender frond. And this little square one would look lovely with a floating flower.
There is, of course, no reason why a person shouldn’t have this many vases. The only necessity is enough shelving to hold them all. Mira pictures their Great Room in Washburn. Slowly, she begins to empty it in her mind: first the photos, then the credenza. She tosses the Boston fern (surprisingly light!) out the front door, and shimmies the gun case into the hall. She pulls the cushions off the couch and unscrews its legs. She asks Harris, politely, to stand in the bathroom. She sweeps away the ancient coffee table with its wide, thick books on mid-century architecture and obscure photographers. She moves things aside, sets them in the kitchen, vacuums them up with a giant imaginary Dustbuster, until all she’s left with is a large, rectangular room with a brownish carpet that has always reminded her of the floor of a daycare center’s jumbled playroom. I need to add something here, she thinks. Mira sets down the vase and heads toward Rugs. Her phone is ringing in the pocket of her skirt, and she ignores it.
Neighbors
She first notices the woman in Rugs. Mira glances at her sideways while flipping through the heavy samples. None of them are quite right. In the corner of her eye, she catches a flash of marbled black, like a water-stained presidential photo. The woman’s jacket is thin and useless, but Mira thinks it curves around her body snugly. She wears thick-rimmed black glasses, and Mira isn’t sure, but she thinks she catches the glare of chain metal hanging out of the side pocket of her dark, skinny jeans. The woman walks out of the room and toward an area that Mira hasn’t visited, and Mira follows.
The woman’s shoes are tarnished silver flats of a sort that no one is able to wear for long periods of time, and they whisper incoherently as she drifts from accessory to accessory in Office Supplies. Mira’s shoes, in contrast, slap the linoleum with shameful vigor. Mira wonders with a thrill when the woman will hear, and will turn to see who is following her. But the woman doesn’t turn. She picks up a white, ceramic bowl with five holes decorating the rim, and looks at it before confidently placing it in her basket. When she passes, Mira, too, picks up the bowl. It appears to be an ill-conceived planter, or perhaps the beginning of a colander. She sticks her fingers through the holes and waggles them at one another. Then, she slips the bowl into her open purse, leaving the diaper bag on the shelf.
The woman heads toward Kitchens, and even though she’s already been there, Mira follows. She checks her watch. It’s almost five o’clock. Rush hour. She will have to wait until the traffic in and out of the city has abated. Denise and Josh don’t eat at six, like everyone in Washburn. They’ll be happy enough if she arrives by eight-thirty. They will probably be relieved. Fewer hours to catch one another up on lives that are as unidentifiable as wilted greens.
She continues to shadow the woman throughout the store, looking critically at objects as soon as the woman in black has assessed them (a flimsy metal shelving unit, a tall, curving floor lamp that yawns over a futon), turning quickly when she thinks that the woman is about to take notice of her. But the woman never does. She makes small check marks on the sheet of paper that she carries with her (the very same piece of paper as Mira’s!), and floats from area to area, looking, Mira guesses, for objects that will fit in her own Harris’s home office: a cacophony of steel, reclaimed wood, and objects in varying shades of blue. This woman’s Harris wears $200 tennis shoes with his suits. He never calls the woman in black my wife; he refers to her only as his squeeze. In private, sitting at their breakfast bar, he might call her Duck, or Ma Fleur. He spends long hours at the café around the corner from their loft, cheerfully enduring a series of business meetings with slim, young, chiseled women for whom he feels absolutely no attraction.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
Bedrooms
Mira snaps her head to the right. The woman has led her back to Bedrooms. The mattress girl stands next to her, slightly in front, blocking Mira’s view of the woman in black.
“Oh,” says Mira, craning her neck. The woman has paused in a bedroom, and is holding a throw pillow up to the light of the bedside lamp. “I didn’t know you could come full circle in this place.” The woman sets it down again, and moves on, turning a corner. She’s gone. Mira looks back at the mattress girl, who appears to be listing to one side, as though the tedium of her job is too much to be borne.
The mattress girl raises an eyebrow. “That’s the point,” she says. “How it’s designed. Other stores are so rigid, you know? Like cattle chutes.”
“Right,” says Mira, feeling smug. What does this girl know about cattle chutes? Mira feels vindicated for the briefest moment, but the truth is, she isn’t exactly sure what a cattle chute looks like. There are authentic ranches all around Washburn, sprawling across acres and acres of scrub brush and pockmarked boulders, but Mira hasn’t been to any of them. She bought a pair of cowboy boots when they first moved in, but regretted the purchase immediately. The boots — white, with intricate embroidery down the sides — are still in their box in the closet, next to the shoes that Mira wore to her sister’s wedding.
The mattress girl sighs heavily, and Mira realizes that she has been staring. “Do you need any help?” the girl asks.
Neither she nor Harris has even fired a gun. The gun case in the Great Room will only ever contain a miniature duck, silo, eggplant, pinecone, Stetson, stiletto, windmill, squirrel, American flag, and a tiny brick house with three holes punched into its roof. There is also a diminutive Magna Carta with the holes perforating the text like Braille that Mira keeps on its own shelf in the kitchen. But no guns.
“There are maps over there.” The girl points back toward Bathrooms. “You know, if you’re lost. Otherwise…”
The mattress girl rights herself slowly. Mira notices how tall she really is, can almost hear the exhalation of relief that she’s preparing for the moment when Mira finally, blessedly goes away.
Mira pulls at the cuffs of her own shirt, adjusting them. “There is something,” she says, listening with satisfaction to the dejected sigh that escapes from the girl’s mouth.
“What?” The girl has pulled a strand of hair out of her messy ponytail, and she sticks it now in her mouth.
“I’m new to the city,” says Mira lightly, in what she thinks is an urban drawl. “I don’t know where to eat.”
“What city?” She’s rolling the hair around and around in her mouth like cud.
“The city, the city.” Mira waves her hand in what could easily be the direction of Nebraska. “You live there. I need the inside scoop.” She adjusts her posture, looking, she hopes, like a fashionable confidant.
The mattress girl pulls the strand of hair out of her mouth and sticks it back behind her ear. “Ma’am,” she says, drawing the word out until Mira looks down at her shoes, “I’m pretty sure I live nowhere you’ve ever been.” She squints up at the white metal ceiling as though searching for stars or divine intervention. Then she looks back at Mira, shakes her head sadly, and walks toward the customer service desk in the center of the room.
Mira tries, unsuccessfully, to pull her skirt down lower around her waist. She fights the impulse to open her mouth and bray like a child. She holds her purse tightly to her chest, the object inside a hard ball against her ribcage. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. She knows just where to go.
Children
She walks quickly through Children’s IKEA. Everything in this section looks shabby, already played with. Giant wire bins filled with finger puppets and plush mobiles interrupt the walkway. There are, it seems, fewer men and children in this part of the store. Only harried pregnant women and mothers stride from crib to playpen, picking up toys and blankets and towels that double as capes before flinging them back down and moving on.
Mira and Harris haven’t had children. Oh, she tried acupuncture for a while, but they decided, ultimately, not to do anything heroic. Those Hasidic mothers who first convinced them of the futility of city life are probably still pushing strollers around the subway system, backs straining, eyes ever watchful for the pushers and the crazies. This would not have happened to Mira. She and Harris would be making more money and saving less, but they wouldn’t be encumbered in the ways that they expected.
Mira knows, however, what would have happened if they had stayed. She would have left Harris. She was always somehow bored in the city, bored in general and in specific, useless ways, and she could see, even then, how their days together would shift into a comfortable, exhausting pattern, made even more so by the effort it took just to get into a favorite restaurant on a Saturday night. They would start going out on Mondays, she feared, and staying in on the weekends.
Why have a Rothko when you can have a Pollock, her friend Zoe, who once applied to work at an art gallery, always said. And Mira had wondered whether she might be happier with someone much older than herself, as so many of her friends had found. Older or younger. Man or woman. English speaker or not. The possibilities were endless and endlessly overwhelming.
But, then, Harris had been so much of what she wanted. Not all, of course — that wouldn’t be possible, no one could be, she knew it logically — but so much. Some of his better qualities — again, not all, but definitely some — could be found in those lists that Mira had made as a young girl, printed carefully on the inside of a plain journal, and then later shared with girlfriends while ordering wine that the waiter described with a smirk as entirely drinkable. He was funny. He was kind. He wasn’t embarrassed to order rosé in the summertime. He loved Mira’s thin lips, her shrill laugh. She left the city so that she wouldn’t leave Harris.
And theirs has been a happy marriage. Not, perhaps, as passionate as Denise and Josh’s, who met at the Met, as they loved to tell everyone, and who had moved in together immediately, emerging from the apartment only for coffee and croissants for an entire month, but happy in ways that Mira hopes Denise’s marriage has not been.
Children’s IKEA is reassuring, though she won’t linger here.
Home
Mira moves from section to section, careful to avoid Bedrooms. While passing the entrance to the store for the fourth time, she sees a flash of blue in the parking lot. She peers out through the sliding doors. The sun has gone down. The parking lot is illuminated by rows of security lights, which shine down on the few cars that are still waiting for their owners like obedient dogs. The New Yorkers are loading up, cramming boxes and plastic bags into the bus’ steel underbelly. Obscured as they are by the sliding doors, which open and shut with soothing regularity, the New Yorkers look like anyone, really. She squints her eyes, thinks she sees some marbled black. Anyone. She hurries on.
The lights dim suddenly and then become brighter. A voice that Mira has not been listening to comes over the loudspeaker, reminding her that she has only five minutes left to make her purchases and exit the store. Mira looks around frantically. She still hasn’t visited Home Organization. And she didn’t spend nearly enough time in Offices. No one can possibly make it through a place like this in only one day. Even two days won’t be sufficient. Her flight leaves at 4. She’ll have to get here early and leave at the last possible minute.
Of course there will be ramifications. Denise and Josh will probably be lost to her, zippered away as a pleasant memory of people with whom conversations never quite reached their full potential. She will not be allowed to return. And Harris? There are no ramifications with Harris. He will go on loving her imprecisely, and she will go on choosing him, day after day after day.
The doors hiss open and shut as, one by one, shoppers steer carts filled with boxes and vases toward their cars.
Which car is hers? There’s no way of knowing. Besides, she’s not ready to go. Mira backtracks toward the warehouse room, with floor-to-ceiling rows of brown boxes. She knows she must have passed through here before, but it doesn’t look familiar. Now she understands why she should have been marking down row numbers and product information all this time on her scrap paper. It would be impossible to find anything just by browsing. Customers push large carts and dollies down the rows, checking off the items quickly as they find them, confidently sliding great rectangles of furniture on top of their other purchases and rushing toward the checkout. They push with their whole bodies.
She could have this life anywhere, she thinks. Move with a collection of flat boxes that, upon opening, eject somewhat sturdy furniture that expands immediately to fit her surroundings, like figures from a pop-up book. One box would hold a bed. One would hold a desk. One would hold a small non-profit with a focus on — what? animal cruelty, perhaps — and one would hold a figure similar to, though not exactly like, Harris.
But why take it with her? Why attempt to transport one life to another? It’s futile, she knows. So much of her life is comprised of undesired acquisitions. Lifestyles and table runners foisted upon her in the guise of gifts. There is no way to avoid what she doesn’t know she won’t want.
Well then, she could sleep here. Not in the warehouse, but on one of the beds. She will hide in the warehouse stacks, come out after the store has been locked, slither between the sheets of the bed she saw in the French Provincial room with its white vases and crisp, doily-stamped duvet, sleep until awakened by the fluorescent light of morning. The room will be hers for the night, and she, its. For seven hours, she will be no one other than a woman who has chosen to decorate her bedroom with antique white posters of swallows and finches, who has a vanity but prefers to use her grandmother’s hand-held silver mirror, and who, given the opportunity, would reclaim her virginity only to give it away again. Mira smiles. This woman doesn’t live in Washburn or New York. She lives nowhere Mira has ever been.
