Errands

For many years my brother and my mom and I did everything together. We lived together and ate our meals together, we went on extremely tedious errands together, and we traveled together. If my mom went to the tanning salon, we went with her and waited in the car. A vision sometimes comes to me now of the strip mall the tanning salon was in, which was mysteriously high off the ground, with a long staircase from the parking lot up to the shop-level walkway, making the people who went into the tanning salon look like they were about to do something momentous, like accept an award, or graduate from college. 

Just a few weeks after Jacob and I moved in together, I went with my brother and my mom to Mexico for her birthday, leaving Jacob alone in our barely furnished apartment. When we arrived we found the house we’d rented to be much larger and more beautiful than we had expected, and we spent most of our day just lying around in it and talking about it. It was a house with courtyards and terraces and a rooftop patio from which you could see other people’s rooftop patios, and if you lay on the edge of the bed in the bedroom I chose for myself you could see a sliver of sky through the ceiling. The room was painted yellow and I wanted it to smell like corn or something else yellow like a banana but instead it smelled like my mamaw, which made me think for the first time about what it was my mamaw had smelled like and I determined finally that it was fabric softener. I got used to the smell and I even began to see a way in which it was yellow. I was reading The Moviegoer and feeling very romantic in that particular way that only an asshole like Walker Percy can arouse. There was a small square interior window in my room that looked out onto the hallway, and when my brother walked by he would stand with his head and shoulders perfectly framed in the window and ask me where I was in The Moviegoer, which he had already read. My mom and my brother were both always very nosy about experiences that replicated their own and would both get mad at me if I didn’t like something they liked, so both of them already having read The Moviegoer was a dimension of drama added to my reading of it. The day I finished it we had lunch in a beautiful courtyard with huge, waxy green leaves hanging about and touching our faces as we got mad at each other about The Moviegoer. It was my mom’s birthday and on the way home we stopped at a bakery to buy a strawberry cheesecake. The cake had a bright red glaze and was very heavy, and I was chosen to carry it. Walking down the street holding the cheesecake I felt completely beyond reproach for the first time in my adult life. The next time I felt that way I was holding a baby.

When we got home from Mexico Jacob had bought me several pairs of earrings and displayed them in weird places in the apartment. Increasingly it began to seem that Jacob, and not my mom or my brother, was the figure in my life in relation to whom I was obliged to arrange myself. Jacob never went to the tanning salon and never expected me to accompany him on errands. At first this made me angry.