Turn 3 of 44

You say some communist lady. She gasps in shock and starts saying that’s bad, you agree as your voice starts changing to a 50s housewife’s voice. You notice her orange nails. You look at everything and start questioning your life as a communist writer. You say you like your career, but you don’t. You start to think of your miserable life so far and decide that it’s time to change.

"Oh, you know — Ruthie Kessler, mostly," you say, spooning couscous onto two plates. "She runs the book club. Some communist lady, honestly, but people worship her." The gasp across the counter is genuine enough that you look up. Vivian's hand has flown to her pearls, fingers splayed, orange nails bright as traffic cones against the white strands.

"A *communist*?" she breathes. "Oh, honey, that's bad. That's real bad. Right here on your street? A gal who'd tear down everything good and decent if folks gave her half a chance?"

"Right. Bad," you hear yourself say, and your voice comes out wrong — higher, softer, smoothed at the edges like something sanded down. You stop. You try again.

"I mean — I've always thought her politics were —" and it happens again, that pleasant, agreeable lilt sliding over your words like fresh paint over old wood. Your own voice, but a demonstration model of it. You notice everything at once, the way a room notices a dropped glass. The orange nails. The red mouth. The diamond throwing its little cold sparks.

Your linen shirt suddenly feels like a costume you forgot to take off, your bare feet embarrassingly unarchived, your kitchen — you see it now — a mess of scattered intentions, spice jars not squared, a life not squared. Twenty years of deadlines and committee emails and causes you can't remember starting. You have written four hundred stories and been invited to dinner by almost nobody. You open your mouth to say that you like your career, that you chose this life — "I like my career," you say, in that new voice, and hear it land flat as a lie on a polygraph.

Because you don't. Sitting there under Vivian's attentive, warm, waiting smile, you turn over your whole miserable ledger — the exes who got tired, the bylines nobody read, the association meetings where you do all the work and take all the complaints — and something in you quietly, decisively, changes its mind.

"There now," Vivian says, and reaches across to pat your hand once, cool fingers, kind as a nurse. "I knew you'd come around. Now let's get that dinner on the table, huh?

A girl works better on a full stomach." She still hasn't eaten a bite of the chicken she brought. Her eyes are on you, pleasant and patient, watching you the way a gardener watches a thing take root.