Madonna in the Rain

As the survivor of twenty-four foretold apocalypses, I abhor the moment the sun’s paws creep over my body to remind me of my continued existence. The noise of my seven-thirty doomsday clock makes it worse, but coffee usually helps.

Kevin makes it black and correct, meaning: there is nothing in it that doesn’t need to be there.

“I see you’ve come without an umbrella again, Victoria,” he says, sliding the cup across. It is as if the sky has been meaning to bring it up for weeks and is about to lose its composure. “You know what they say about people who don’t carry umbrellas.”

“That they enjoy free showers?”

He laughs. Kevin laughs at things I say without looking surprised that I said them. “Have a good one,” he says, and I say, “You too, Kevin,” because I was raised to be polite to people who get my name right, which is a smaller group than you’d think.

I put my headphones on and walk to the office. No meetings today, so it’s just work and Madonna. She’s telling someone she has a secret and she’s learned to hide it well.

The elevator smells like cleaning products and the particular brand of cologne that men in finance wear as a substitute for personality. On the eighth floor I round the corner towards my desk and catch the tail end of a sentence from the cluster near the copier: “—that arrogant bitch. Thinks she’s too good for us.”

That voice belongs to Dana, who organizes the office birthday cards and has never once spelled my name correctly. She has a head of white hair that she sheds like a cat. I find her hair on my chair, in my keyboard, and once even in my coffee. She is omnipresent without being useful, like upper management, though in fairness to Dana she at least brings cake.

They see me approach. Smiles appear. “Hey, Vicky! How’s your morning?”

I smile back. Fine, thanks. The smile costs me something.

Arrogant. The word follows me back to my desk. I am not arrogant. I am private, which is a different thing, though from the outside they look identical, the way a locked door and a wall look identical if you never try the handle. I sit down and pull my chair forward and my feet don’t quite reach the floor the way they did yesterday. There is a long white hair on the seat that isn’t mine, and Dana’s desk is only three feet away, and I think: she’s been sitting here again. I pick it off, adjust the lever, plant my feet, and open my laptop.

There’s a posting for a team lead position on the internal board. I bookmark it. I built the system that the entire department runs on. It saves the company a million a year. My salary is not a million a year, though. But I don’t think about this. I just work. Madonna is getting into the groove and so am I.

At noon the others collect their coats and umbrellas to go to lunch in groups, the way they always do, talking about places I have not been invited to and do not want to be invited to. I wait. I wait for the floor to thin, for the hallway to empty, and for the rain to start. The real October rain, the kind that sends everyone indoors. Everybody except me. October is the best month because October empties the park. By twelve-thirty, it’s just me and the rain and the bench.

The bench is mine in the way that certain public things become private through repetition. It is damp and paint-flecked and positioned between a bin and a tree whose roots have buckled the path. I chose it for these reasons. Undesirable real estate is the only kind you can keep.

The rain is on my neck, in my collar, cold on the skin where the office air sat stale and warm all morning, and it feels like the first clean thing that has touched me since I woke up. Other people eat lunch indoors, performing sociability in the break room, trading small talk like currency in a market I was never invited to join. I am here instead. Madonna is telling me she’s a material girl and I am moving—not dancing, I don’t dance—but my shoulders do something and my head does something and my feet, crossed at the ankles on this rain-slicked bench, tap against each other in a way that would mortify me if witnessed by any living creature except possibly a pigeon. A pigeon is watching now, in fact, from the bin, with the expression of a food critic at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I stop. It stays. We regard each other with mutual suspicion.

The music fills the space where the world was. I am alone with Madonna in the rain.

A figure appears on the path, holding a paper bag and an umbrella. James. He sits down next to me without asking, the way he does, and the bench accommodates him because it is a generous bench and because I have, without realizing it, been saving the other half for someone who would not comment on the rain.

“Bagel,” he says, handing me the bag.

“You brought an umbrella?”

“I brought it for me. I’m not insane.”

He tilts his head toward the sound coming from my headphones that are around my neck now. My armour. “You always listen to Madonna. Don’t you get tired of that?”

“You always stir your coffee exactly seven times. Don’t you get tired of that?”

“Touché.” A moment later: “Wait. You counted?”

I take a bite of the bagel.

He is now sitting on a bench in the rain holding an umbrella exclusively over himself while the woman next to him gets soaked, which from a distance must look like a man with no manners and a woman with no sense. He sighs and looks at the umbrella and looks at me and then at the umbrella again.

“You know this makes me look terrible.”

“And who’s going to see?” I say. “The pigeons? They’ve seen worse.”

He laughs and closes the umbrella and we sit there in the rain sharing a bagel, and he doesn’t ask about work and I don’t tell him, and for a few minutes the bench is big enough for two. We make plans for the weekend. He kisses my wet hair and leaves and I watch him go and the bench feels slightly too large for one person, which is a problem I have never had before.

Kevin is out. I know this because behind the counter there is a woman I’ve never seen, with black eyeshadow thick enough that any light entering forfeited its return policy, and because my cup says “Vic”. Kevin writes “Victoria”. As it should be.

“Cheer up,” the woman says, handing me the cup. “It might never happen.”

What a thing to say to a person. As if unhappiness is always anticipatory. As if the woman standing in front of you with exact change and a please and a thank you is not already inside the thing that might never happen, living in it, paying rent on it, and the only evidence you need is that her face at rest does not resemble an advertisement for toothpaste. I take the cup. “Vic”. Two-thirds of a name.

At home I put on Madonna—she’s singing about dressing someone up in her love—and pull a sweater from the drawer. The sleeves cover my hands. It fit when I bought it a month ago. It must be the humidity. I am almost certain humidity stretches fabric. I do not look it up. The trousers are the same: pooling at the ankles, cuffs dragging on the floor. I roll them and belt them and make it work because that is what I do. My shoes, though. My shoes are the same size they’ve always been and my feet are sliding around inside them like passengers in a taxi three minutes from the end of shift.

James comes over on Saturday. We cook. He opens the wine and says, “You should smile more. At work, I mean. You’ve got a great smile, you just don’t use it.”

I smile. He means it as a compliment. But I file it next to every other compliment that is actually an instruction. You should smile more. You should speak up more. You’d be so pretty if you just. If you just. The sentence never ends because the project never ends. The person you are is always a rough draft of the person they’d prefer.

In the bathroom later I notice that the top of my head no longer aligns with the cabinet where it used to. I’m looking at the second shelf instead of the third. I straighten up. It doesn’t help. Posture, I think. I’ve been sitting too much, hunching over the laptop, carrying tension in my shoulders the way my mother carries grudges: permanently and with full commitment. I go back to the kitchen where James is doing the dishes and hasn’t noticed anything, and why would he, so I pour more wine and the evening continues.

The subway has always been an exercise in pretending that the distance between your body and the bodies of strangers exists. But it is getting worse in ways I cannot attribute to the MTA, which is saying something.

The turnstile catches me at the hip now. It used to catch me at the thigh. The coat is bulky this time of year. That’s all. I push through with both hands and a man behind me sighs the way people sigh in New York: loudly and with the full conviction that their inconvenience is the most important thing happening on the continent.

On the train, I am at chest height to the other passengers. A woman’s elbow settles on the top of my head as if it were an armrest. She does not look down.

At my stop the crowd carries me off the train. The current of legs and briefcases deposits me on the concrete the way a wave leaves a shell on the sand.

I walk to work after that. The subway is not an option anymore.

My manager has a motivational poster behind his desk that says “Excellence is not an act but a habit” and I have spent eleven months wondering if he knows it’s Will Durant’s and if the late Will Durant would sue. He should. His desk is sixteen feet from mine. And yet he sends the annual performance review by email.

“Hi! Solid year. The system you built was a nice piece of work. Rating: Meets expectations. Keep it up!”

The system. The one I designed and built from scratch. The one that nobody in the department thought was feasible. The one that processes in minutes what used to take nine people the better part of a week and saves the company a million a year. And it still wasn’t enough.

I reach for the lever and it is already at its lowest setting. I have not left this seat all morning. Nobody has been near it. There is no white hair. I sit there with my feet dangling and the email still open on my screen. For the first time I cannot explain the chair.

The gossip from Dana’s end of the floor is loud enough to penetrate my headphones, which is hard to do. It’s not the words, though. It’s the frequency. But I don’t want to know if it’s about me. I get up and walk to the kitchen.

A woman from accounting is making tea. She glances at me and says something.

I lift the left earpiece, the international sign for “say that again, please.” Apparently she likes my headphones. I thank her as I pass her on my way back to my desk, and the world goes away again, which is all I need.

I walk everywhere now, and walking everywhere means I eventually end up at the DMV, because my licence expires this month.

The clerk has her hair pulled tight against her skull and red fingernails, a neon sign advertising how slowly her fingers are about to move. She asks my height.

“Five seven,” I say.

She looks at me over her glasses. “Honey. Five seven where?”

I don’t answer because the answer is “here, in my body, which has been five seven since I was fifteen,” but the woman at the counter is looking at a person who is not five seven and my driver’s licence is looking at a person who was, and between these two moments there is a gap I could explain if I understood it, which I don’t, but I am not going to examine now. She holds the stamp. She owns the facts.

“Five two,” I say.

Her red nails click against the keys. The new photo prints next to the old one on the screen and the same face looks back from both, only there is less of it now.

Outside I put my headphones back on. They are loose. I have to hold them with one hand.

James calls while I am making pasta, which requires a pot that is becoming difficult to lift, but I am doing it because the day you break the routine is the day you admit something is wrong, and I am not doing that.

I tell him about the performance review. I read the email aloud in my manager’s voice, the chirpy exclamation marks, the “nice piece of work,” the way a million-dollar system gets the same enthusiasm as a potluck sign-up. I do Dana’s voice, the fake friendliness, the way she says “Vicky” like she’s peeling a label off a jar. James laughs the real laugh, the one that comes from the chest.

“You?” he says. “Arrogant? You’re the funniest person I know. You’re the funniest person most people know, they just don’t know it.”

I hold the phone and I am, for four seconds, the full Victoria.

There is a silence on the line. Half a breath. The kind of silence that means someone is about to say the thing they came to say.

“Anyway,” I hear before he says it.

He thinks we should talk about where things are going. The explanation is kind and I am holding the phone with both hands because it is heavy now, extraordinarily heavy, the weight of a thing that connects you to a person who is leaving.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

I put the phone on the counter. When I reach for it again it takes both arms and I cannot lift it. I catch my reflection in the oven door. The person looking back is half the person who answered the call.

The pasta water is boiling. I can hear it roar, from below. Steam rises from the pot in clouds and I cannot reach the stove knob to turn it off. I stand in the kitchen in a fog that smells like salt and think: the water will boil away and the pot will sit empty on the flame and the smoke detector will go off and a neighbour will come and find an apartment with a pot on the stove and clothes on the floor and only half a person inside them.

I turn it off. I don’t remember how. I don’t remember being tall enough.

The posting. The team lead position, the one I bookmarked weeks ago. I applied. I don’t know why. Habit, maybe. The belief that if you keep filling in forms and showing up, sitting in chairs that are too big for you, eventually the world will notice that you’re competent.

In the elevator I jump to reach the button for the twelfth floor. I jump three times. The second time I miss. Nobody is watching, which is the only reason I try a third.

The interviewer has the complexion of someone who has never seen what the city looks like after the streetlights come on, and a suit to match. He looks at my resume and says, “We’re looking for someone with a bigger presence.”

The word “bigger” sits in the air between us like a fact about my body, and I shake his hand and my hand disappears inside his grip. He says, “Thank you, Vanessa,” but I don’t correct him.

I go to the bench. It takes me thirty-five minutes to walk a distance that used to take seven. The sidewalk is a terrain now: each crack a ditch, each curb a wall.

The bench is there. It’s always there. The seat is at my shoulder height. I put my hands on the edge and try to pull myself up. The wood is wet and my fingers slip and I try again. I get a grip on the slat where the paint has peeled, the rough patch I used to run my thumb across while I was listening to music, a habit I didn’t know I had until now, when my thumb finds it and my body remembers the motion before my mind catches up. I pull. My arms shake. My feet scrape against the leg of the bench, the same leg I used to press my boot against when I was thinking. I get one elbow over the seat and hang there, half on, half off, with the rain hitting the back of my neck, my coat dragging beneath me.

From here I can see the spot where he sat. The paint is worn on that side, a pale patch where his hand rested. He always sat on the left. He always brought the bagel in a paper bag from the place on 91st that doesn’t toast them. He knew I didn’t like them toasted, a preference I mentioned once, in passing, months before, and he remembered. He also remembered I don’t like umbrellas and that my name is Victoria. My arms give out. I drop back to the ground. I don’t weigh enough for the ground to notice.

I jump and catch the edge and hang and my fingers are white and the rain is in my eyes and I can feel the bench above me, and yet I cannot get up. I am not enough.

I let go. I stand beneath the bench and the water hits the slats above me and I am sheltered by the thing I used to sit on. My headphones are around my neck now, too loose to stay on my head, and Madonna is singing about rain, about feeling it on her skin, about wanting it, tinny and far away. I want it too. But the rain at this size is not a shower. Each drop hits like a hand. Each gust is a shove. I press my palm flat against the underside of the seat, the cold wet wood that has held me every lunch break for four years, and I stand there with my hand on it the way you stand with your hand on a door you know you are not going to open again.

The stairs are too tall. The door handle is above my head. The lobby echoes and the elevator button for the twenty-fifth floor is beyond my reach. Last week I could jump for it. Now I cannot jump high enough and must swing my headphones at the button.

Mrs. Patterson’s poodle from 25F, a creature I used to find ridiculous, now watches me from the end of the hallway with the still attention of something deciding whether I am prey.

The coffee jar lives on the second shelf. I can no longer reach it. The tap in the kitchen has been dripping for months. The super never fixed it. I used to find this annoying. Now each drop falls in a column as wide as my body and hits the basin like a wave.

My clothes are on the floor. A sweater, a pair of trousers, arranged in the shape of a person who is no longer that size. I wear a sock. Just one. Belted with a rubber band.

The headphones are on the floor. I press my palms against the padding and push. It’s like pushing a wall and the wall does not care. I walk around them. Each earpad is the size of a room. I step inside one and stand in the padded hollow. Madonna is still playing because the battery lasts forty hours, and the sound is huge and distorted, and I can feel it in my teeth and my ribs, and it is not mine anymore.

My mother calls. The phone lights up on the counter, miles above. The buzzing vibrates through the floor. I stand there feeling it in my feet and I know it is her because she calls on Thursdays and today is Thursday and she will call again next Thursday and the Thursday after that and I will be here, below, unable to answer, and she will think I am busy, and then she will think I am rude, and then she will think something is wrong, and by then it will be too late.

The door opens. The draught catches me and throws me sideways. I grab at the carpet fibres and hold on while the air rushes past, warm, indifferent hallway air, and I press my face into the weave and wait for it to stop.

A child from down the hall. She is returning the sugar her mother borrowed. She sets the jar on the small table by the door. There is a note stuck to it in her mother’s handwriting. From where I am, on the floor, I cannot read it.

She crouches down. She looks at me the way children look at things: without the filter that tells adults to pretend they are not seeing what they are seeing.

“Why are you so small?”

I open my mouth. No sound.

She reaches down and touches my shoulder with one finger, the way you touch a moth.

“Are you okay?”

She stays for a minute. Then she stands and leaves, closing the door gently, and the draught pulls at me again but I hold on.

The apartment is a landscape. The floorboards are fields. Dust in drifts. Light from the window falls in a shaft that is warm when I stand in it and cold when I step out. This is now the entire weather of my life. I have become a thing of the undergrowth, navigating by baseboard and chair leg.

I make my way to the small table by the door. The sugar jar is above me, enormous. I climb. The table leg is rough wood and I pull myself up the way I pulled myself up the bench, hand over hand, gripping the grain. At the top I walk across the surface toward the jar. The note is stuck to its side, in her mother’s handwriting: “V— thx 4 suga.”

From somewhere across the apartment, the headphones. Bass. I feel it before I hear it. The floor shakes. The table shakes. Madonna. She is telling someone she has a secret.

The bass hits and I am lifted. For a moment I am airborne, weightless, and I am back on the bench, rain on my face, the music mine, the thirty minutes mine, the right size for the space I am in.

The air conditioning hums. A current catches me. Through the vent. Into the dark. Among the dust and the hair and the dead skin of people who are still the right size for the world.