Losing It. Emma Rathbone

red and she had a bustling and helpful way about her. I wondered if that’s how she’d be in bed—cheerfully helping things along in a brusque and no-nonsense manner, like a fishwife who’d seen it all. She would probably just want to get to the next thing and it wasn’t that complicated. I wondered if she was married and thought about how the right man could have a lot of happiness with a woman like that. She wasn’t what you would call attractive in a conventional sense, but now and then she shrieked with laughter and seemed to find mischievous humor in everything and you could probably have a kind of ribald joy with her of the kind that wasn’t seen in movies or porn.

      I watched Diane massage the back of her neck and tilt her head serenely to the side while talking to someone. She was sort of beautiful in a strategically tousled way. She had a self-consciously throaty manner, like she wanted the world to know how deeply she felt things. I imagined she was really theatrical in bed and had deep, oaky orgasms and saw herself from the outside the whole time and threw a bunch of colored scarves into the air when she came.

      Then there were people you couldn’t imagine having sex. I studied a woman sitting on the couch whom I hadn’t been introduced to. She had the prim face of a prairie schoolteacher and was irritably rummaging through a lime-green bag. She pulled out a bunch of receipts and pawed through them in her hand. I noticed middle-aged women like that sometimes. They’ll be wearing a hand-crafted vest over a turtleneck or something and pretty much expressing to the world that sex or the idea of sex was generally not on the table. But I couldn’t tell if, this lady for instance, if she had done this to herself or if everyone else had done it to her.

      My thoughts were interrupted by Karen. We got into a conversation about how her father had been a door-to-door salesman in Nevada.

      “‘It’s a forgotten art,’ is what he always used to say,” she said.

      “Gosh,” I said, thinking about walking around hot, flat, gridshaped neighborhoods wearing a business suit.

      “How long do you think you’ll be staying with your aunt?” she said, turning back to me and reaching for an olive. We were now standing in the kitchen, where some snacks had been laid out.

      “A few months, until the end of summer.”

      A wistful look came over her face. She looked into the distance. “You’re lucky.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “To get to spend so much time with Vivienne. She’s such an adventurous soul.”

      “Yeah,” I said, somewhat confused.

      “We were all so impressed when we heard about Bora Bora.”

      “Bora Bora?”

      She nodded, popped a cube of cheese into her mouth. “You know, not that many people would do what she did—just go and live there by themselves for a year. It takes a lot of guts. She’s hilarious about it, too. The coconut pantomime? You should ask her about it. I wish I could have gone.”

      “Yeah,” I said, impressed. “I will.”

      Someone came up to us and said it was probably a good time to start thinking about serving the cupcakes and our conversation ended.

      I talked to a few more people, and then wandered around a little with a cup of juice. I was studying some framed pressed flowers when I happened to look over and see Aunt Viv talking to a group of the women. She was holding up a decorative crystal goblet—the light glinted through it—and telling a story. She was talking quickly. Her hair was coming out of her braid a little, and her face was flushed. It was something funny; the people listening were giggling and paying close attention. I could see that in this context, with these women, she had a kind of power. She was presiding, divvying out attention and eye contact while they all stood around with open faces. Everyone burst out laughing at the same time, and she looked around in a happy, calculating way.

      Later, in the car, I asked her about it.

      “So you went to Bora Bora?”

      “What?” she said, looking over at me, bemused.

      “Didn’t you live there for a year?”

      “Me?”

      “Yeah. Karen said—about the coconut pantomime?”

      “Oh.” She reddened. She became visibly flustered. She started messing with the radio dial and accidentally hit the turn signal, which started clicking.

      “This thing,” she said, annoyed, poking at it, and then the windshield wipers came on.

      “So you went there?” I said, prompting her again, once she’d turned them off and a few moments had passed.

      She nodded quickly without looking at me. The atmosphere in the car became warped and strange. We sat in silence the rest of the way.

      It was only later that night, thinking back on the incident and trying to decipher her behavior that I realized what had happened. Aunt Viv had acted exactly like someone caught in a lie. She’d never gone to Bora Bora. She’d made up a story and then forgotten about it until I brought it up. I thought of the imperious way she presided over her friends at the party, how she basked in their admiration; her obvious pleasure as she conducted the moment, and the look of triumph on her face when they burst out laughing. I could see embellishing a little bit, but what kind of person would make up a story that outlandish completely out of nowhere? What did Viv want the world to think of her?

       Four

      I stared at a colossal man named Ed Branch. He was like a mountain in a swivel chair. His huge face appeared to be melting, his cheeks sagging, the shiny skin under his eyes dripping down in two wide, flat drops. He was smiling at me in a jovial way. I took a sip from a glass of water on the heavy mahogany desk in front of me. There was a framed picture of an equally robust person—his wife, I assumed—caught unawares and laughing with a watering can, her face plump and happy, and I imagined they regularly had bawdy, baseboard-pounding sex, and then every once in a while she would watch him doing little boyish things, and her heart would burst.

      And then there was Wes, sitting next to him. Wes seemed like a nice guy, too. He was young, grave, and ex-military. He had a knee-jerk politeness about him, old-fashioned and Southern. I wondered if that meant he’d be the same in bed, attentive to your every need with perfect decorum. Or maybe that consideration could turn cold and sharpen into cruelty. I wondered if this was something you could tell about a person.

      “What was it you said you did at this Quartz Consulting?” said Ed. His hand absently wandered over to a nut bowl.

      I was interviewing with them for a job at a firm called Kramer Branch, a week after I’d arrived in Durham. My third day there, with Viv gone again, the house quiet, I was stretched like a piano string. Everything had sputtered out—the essay I started writing; it was too hot to go for a walk. I tried reading in different rooms, but I couldn’t get into a book. I ended up in the sunroom, feeling half deranged, looking at a dusty craft manual on weaving. Finally, in defeat, I pulled over my laptop and started looking for part-time work. Plus, I thought, how was I ever even going to meet people? I needed to get out of this house and into town.

      This job, part-time afternoon receptionist, was the first thing that had come up for which I looked remotely qualified, and I’d only have to come in after one o’clock every day.

      “I facilitated communications by sourcing available online assets about solutions on higher education and applied them to a dynamic Web portal,” I said. “I was the social media pulse of the entire company.”

      Wes and Ed looked at each other uncomfortably.

      “Well,” said Ed, “what we really need here is someone to answer the phones for the afternoon shift. Run the odd errand.”

      “I think I would thrive at that,” I said.

      Two days later I was in