Her husband thought she was shaking her head “no.”
“Now girl,” he said, pulling her into him. “Don’t get like that. They have the same rights to be out here as anyone.”
The woman who caught her eye had been wearing a sign that read USURY. As skinny as she remembered Sabine, for sure, and maybe as tall. Chanting her demands at the branch with the best of them.
Air flowed in through her nose, she held it, let it out, said ‘calm down Haylee’ in her mind until that became possible. That summer came up a lot, honestly. They all still called soda fizzy drinks, years later. They still called themselves her “clerks.” Whether she was embarrassed to see Sabine or to be seen by her was the question.
Neither one was relevant.
But strong personalities like that, they just make you remember. They take up space, but then that’s really all they do. It’s still clear as day to her: Sabine stomping down Bernal Hill, pigeon toed, stretching her leg against the railing at Café Sol as if it were a ballet bar. Carrying her lunch to the shop on a china plate: a buttered piece of wheat bread, a can of beer, and a carrot, washed but not peeled. Chewing out the side of her mouth as she lectured her three little clerks about things.
"Love," Sabine once told them, “appears as though it is a sensory experience, when it is in fact designed to be a sensitive experiment." Her German accent slowed everything down. "Push on love, my girl," she said, "Or it will push on you." She was six-foot-three, and browned, and thinner than any woman her age Haylee had ever met, with a line of bones rising where her cleavage would have been. She spent the summer instructing them. She argued they should each take many lovers, that hearts and groins alike need steady, varied work.
Her three clerks agreed vehemently.
Maybe a little abstractly.
They’d turned twenty that summer. They were all three shapeless and shy and still deep in their ugly stages. They had tits like cutlets, even Lou, and no real worries about how to handle some surplus of sex, not for a long time yet.
Still the three clerks leaned on her counters, cherubic, sweating the glass cases with their pink arms, holding to her words. They agreed, absolutely, that polyamory removed ill will from love and left us freer, all of us, as humans, kinder and distinct from the powers of capital. All marriage is ownership, they echoed, trimming stems, all property is theft.
They found that artificial limits on affection impart a great violence.
They found polemic to be the one remaining romantic form.
They found it really, really helped to talk like this.
A deficiency of love can be tempered, turns out, by at least locating that dull trouble on the better side of an argument. They had a lot of free time to think about how that free time should be spent. Pairs are for squares, they joked, in dead Midwestern earnest. They were done worrying about the nobody they’d dated. They aspired to the difficulty of the five body problem.
The very night they first drove into San Francisco, Sabine had welcomed them at the curb with kisses and tough muscled hugs. Their welcome party was already underway. She explained, walking backwards, she hosts a suckling roast every year on the night her summer clerks arrive and a nagashi somen dinner for their send off. In time they would come to understand the somen dinner was always planned, and always delayed, that Sabine had promised it to her friends for years but her delight in describing, in June, the restaurant in Kameoka where she had first caught cold noodles could never really match her exhaustion with the clerks by summer’s end. But that part comes later.
“To youth!” Sabine lifted her glass. “To youth!” the guests laughed back. They had their sleeves rolled up. They had children about your same age. Some of them helped themselves to a still red grilled salmon in cucumber gills.
“Haylee, tell us.” Sabine asked. “Your name, is it a family name?”
“Wha huh. Hmm.” Her mouth was full.
“It’s what my mom came up with.”
“But the spelling. Where does the spelling come from?”
“Oh.” I don’t know, she realized. Can I tell her I don’t know? The bread had turned back into dough in her mouth. “My mother read it somewhere.” It seemed these people would say mother, like that, and they would read.
“And Larissa? Is that a family name?”
“I don’t…. I’m not in her family. You could ask her?”
“Such interesting names. I always liked the name Eleanor.” said Sabine. “With an A. E- a.” Haylee stood nodding, rowing slowly forward into a sense that the conversation no longer had much use for her.
The back yard had aloes and roses instead of grass, and lots of hanging seats. She found a place in a hammock with a man who told her to call him Deep Sleeper, then laughed. He had been talking to a young Australian couple and they turned the subject politely from someone they didn’t agree with to mushrooms. They grow in the woods there, or on the side of the road. Haylee played it cool as though she’d met hundreds of Australians and sat listening until her eyes began to sting. She pulled her contacts out and wiped them on the chair cushion.
Hours later Sabine found her clerks leaning back against the driveway. She pulled them up by the arms and showed them how to work the combination on the door of the little garage she called their cottage.
“There’s torches,” she said, “and candles, until we get the wiring right again. And one bed, so you’ll be cozy. There’s a bureau for each of you. That one’s an Adler, that one’s a Frankl, that one, who knows. And you can’t speak badly of me, now, because I’ve stocked the bar very well.” The walls were painted orange and blue and a chandelier with dried moss hung low over the bed. Haylee caught Larissa’s eye. If they’d been home in Council Bluffs, she would have grabbed her and yelled.
Larissa smoothed her hands down the front of her jeans, caught Haylee’s eyes, dropped them like whatever, and smoothed her hands down the back of her jeans.
Sabine was the first woman the clerks met who wore her smell like that, on purpose, or who didn't shave. She was more interested in community than business. The store bled about two hundred dollars a day, but this loss was limited, as she only kept it open in the summers.
She ran it as a Marxist, she explained, not an idiot. She had thought this through. You have to live your life thought-through. She sold only things whose full taxonomy she knew: succulents, moss terrariums, perfumes from the real French houses, craft jewelry, tassels the size of a man’s fist, garden supplies. She had a philosophical approach to the practical. The shop had teal walls and upcycled medical cabinets filled with driftwood. The unexhumed life, she liked to say, is not worth living. Beauty and plants and living things are good for people. All living things are really people, she explained. Dead things, too. She saw the value of beauty, which is free, and of community surface. There are many more important things than the tall and mighty dollar.
While one clerk worked the morning shift the other two assisted her on salvage trips.
In the pick-up Sabine grilled them—what were their worries, their troubles, their parents’ situations, their relation to each other, their philosophies, what would they become. They watched her barter at estate sales and Chinese wholesalers, the flower market, the university surplus garages, the dump, the docks, the parts of the city where corner grocery owners might be willing to unscrew and sell her authentic hand-painted signs right off the awning. She drove a terrifying bargain. She made them each tell the story of when they lost their virginity. Haylee and Lou both invented something, and Larissa told the gospel truth—she hadn’t—which won her two months of advice about awakening her sexual core.
“Haylee, you’re the brains of the operation, yes?”
Haylee had laughed. As if in agreement.
“You have the air of an intellectual. Of a genius. Your studies have gone well so far?”
“Good enough.” She was glad they were alone.
“You’re a serious student?”
“I can tell. That’s good. That’s the right way. Already I know this about you. I have strong abilities to detect that in people, you know.”
Haylee was too flustered to say anything, but in a happy way. She tried to think of quotes about intelligence. There was something about Sabine’s face. The thinness of her skin, the way the light went through it and let those blue hollows under her eyes shine, the way her wrinkles were in fact beautiful.
How lucky Haylee was, to have such a spirit guiding her.
“Hay-l-e-e.” Sabine sounded out. “Is that a family name? Is that traditional?”
She squeezed their hands between thumb and forefinger—squeezed the webbing hard, so it hurt—and looked to see if their irises expanded. She checked their rising signs and lunar cycles and their natural abilities.
She told them about her ex-husband—he’d had a silver spoon, a literal silver spoon, with a matching double-handled sip-cup, and his father had been one of the first people in the world to privately own a pleasure aircraft and become an accidental terrorist. He’d been arrested in Cologne for flying donuts under and over the bridges, for fun. The framed newspaper photo of his arrest upon landing was hung in the shop in a Tiffany frame. There are three blonde children in the photo, pointy knitted caps tied down over their ears.
“That one,” she would say, tapping the face of a boy in an improbably miniature pea coat, “would grow up to run my heart.”
Her ex’s family money came from fizzy drinks. His mother never liked Sabine but had no problem instructing her to manicure his nails better. She like them very smooth, with no visible ridges.
The moral was that it is fine to marry a jerk so long as you don’t have any illusions. If you are zen about what you’re getting into you can’t possibly get hurt. Sabine had seen it coming a mile away, herself. That was the only reason, she explained, that it didn’t bother her, now.
What money came in was drawn by Sabine. Old gay couples in tank tops, young gay couples in ties, girls from startups, elegant moms—all of them thought they were her favorites. She could shill a hundred dollars worth of candles in ten minutes. She made change from her wallet, and went home with the cash. Neither the belled brass register nor the clerks served much clear purpose.
Once Haylee helped her lean an antelope head against a hydrant. Sabine inked “DO TAKE ME HOME AND MOUNT ME,” then tied the sign between the horns and sat back to watch it sell within the hour.
Mainly, they killed time. They read the sex advice columns in the free paper and went across the street to nag the sandwich artists for free cookies until they were offered free drinks. They sat out on the curb tanning their legs. But why not? Sabine needed for her shop to be the kind with an idle staff. Otherwise, who would give her the pleasure of sending them home early?
She’d roar in, flip the sign, dig spare bills from where she’d hid them in the jewelry cases or the curtain hems, then cut the lights.
“Walk with me, sweet. I need a mate.”
If the bench outside the coffee shop was taken she made her strategy clear. “You stand here and if those people leave you take that spot. Stand and watch. Be a brute if you have to. Be a brave girl. Now stay.” She’d dip inside.
Whoever was sitting there would insist, no, insist that you take the bench, honey. They were just leaving. Really.
At every silence Haylee tried to think what Sabine most liked to talk about.
“I remembered I meant to tell you.” Haylee said, her hand on Sabine’s wrist. “If you ever do make it to Omaha, there is a Korean restaurant you have to try. Like, divine.” Sabine shot her some look. Haylee quieted as the summer continued. She learned instead to ask about the revolutions: tell me again about Chiapas, about Italy, about France.
Her little clerks were visiting, Sabine joked, "from America." For five years they came from the community college in Council Bluffs, Iowa, always in trios, always passed down word-of-mouth from her cousin’s youngest daughter. Council Bluffs kids worked on detasseling teams growing up, or at Menards. They could not believe their good luck to stay rent free in a barely-converted garage and read all day in an antique shop, or smoke on the job and shower with a garden hose in the alley between the houses. Council Bluffs kids loved that you could walk around the city and smell little wet clouds of weed or see girls topless in Delores Park. They liked that you could drink in the streets at the festivals. You didn’t have to pay them very much.
“I have a ten-foot commute to work each day,” Lou told his dad on the phone. “What more could you ask in an internship?”
Lou didn’t tell his dad about the bed, although he should have, because everyone in Lou’s life pitied him for being gay and young and cute and wasting all of that on being closeted. But Lou wasn’t gay, more just soft and gameless, if pretty, with very black, damp hair and black lashes. He had a hopeless lean towards girls. They were, incidentally, the only kind of person he could not really stand to talk to.
He went after them with gentle punches to the shoulder, or extended campaigns of haughty silence. This didn’t ever work. Until, of course, it did.
They all three loved their new habits. They felt like true adults. Sabine had introduced Lou to liver sausages, in tubes or fat pink slices. It tasted like bologna whipped with ranch. Larissa had said it tasted like foie gras, the difference being a degree of force and violence—something worse happened to the animal, but this tasted like it—although she was the only one who had ever had foie gras. The sausages sat in the mini-fridge pressed against their neighbors and their celo cover. Celo was a Sabine word, too, like bird or pants or lino or ciggie or dick as a verb. A good dicking.
Gray-blue callouses grew over Larissa’s feet. She sat cross- legged, palming them. She had taken Sabine’s advice, started going for runs without shoes.
“I love it here,” Larissa said. The flagstones still held heat.
“Which of the three of us do you think loves it most?” Haylee asked.
“I think we all like it.” said Larissa.
“Oh, obviously.” Haylee said, “but just as an exercise. Just to think. Which of us loves it most?”
“You mean you think you do?” asked Larissa.
“No. I’m asking. I think the inverse, maybe, I doubt I do. It’s a very sensory experience, which I really appreciate. The sun. The micro-climates. But I’m a totally abstract person. Like I like to think and read; I like judgments. You can do those things anywhere. So therefore by that logic I’m excluded from loving it the most.”
“Yeah,” said Larissa. “Ok. I’m like, I like it here. It’s pretty here. I like the — the aloe things, and the lemons. I get homesick though. Is that funny?” She laughed. “Like babyish? ‘I miss my mommy?’ So it’s got to be Lou.”
“Yeah,” said Lou, “It is. I love it the most. The mostest.”
But then Lou had had the widest margin for surprise. The least expectation. He’d been invited at the last minute only because the girls realized he leased a car nice enough to drive out of state.
By the time Sabine invited them for dinner it had come to seem mysterious they’d never been inside her house. The clerks stuck there in the doorway, looking around. It smelled like a campfire. There were hard toadstool cushions and a blanket in the corner, but she sat on the floor with her legs in front of her, gripping her ankles, nose to knees.
Haylee sat, too, butterflied her legs. The dinner was wood bowls on a tray: salad greens, chopped cilantro, chopped purple carrots, black sesame seeds, white sesame seeds.
“Do you all know each others darkest secrets?” Sabine asked, half joking, and of course they said they didn’t. “You should tell me anyway. You could make them up, I’d never even know. How would I know? I wouldn’t know.” Larissa and Sabine and Lou talked about running for a while. They drank pinot and tequila and then, when they’d finished the bottle, beer. Haylee woke up on the wood floor, drooling.
The next weekend—the exact halfway point of the summer—the clerks started sleeping bare in their shared bed. They came home from the nude beach on Fourth of July with sunburns. Tired and dehydrated, the surf kept going in their ears. The springs pushed back against them from the bedframe. Reverting to pajamas Sunday night would only draw attention to the weirdness of Saturday, so all three of them did it again.
Simple happiness could become routine, thought Haylee, ruining it.
Sometimes Sabine did advice for the girls. She told them the hangover cures of all the different countries she’d lived in and the qualities Indonesian women seek in a husband. She gave them vinegar to cool their skin and told them cramp cures, like sitting with a blanket over cedar boxes of coals and eucalyptus, spooning water so that the steam would clean them from the inside. She knew that in the Philippines your passport indicates if you’re a legitimate child or a bastard, and in Poland lovers bleed their fingers on the sheets for fun. She told them about the Dance of Anger and De-Selfing and the neuroses of sibling order, that you should take a year of celibacy after every heartbreak. She told Haylee to take a garlic suppository and smelled her wrist the next day to see if it took. She did the airplane donut arrest story again and again.
She remembered her ex-husband throwing ice chips over the curtain as she showered.
“I screamed,” she told them, her accent digesting the words. “I screamed my head off. He had terrified me. He had a great sense. That sense of humor.”
When Sabine took Larissa and Haylee out looking for paving stones, they made it as far as Pescadero. She told them to lift with their biceps, like kettlebells, and stack them on a bed of sandbags. The wind was up so the girls felt filmic. They worked side by side while she scouted.
“Do you think Sabine is sad, about the divorce?” Larissa asked her.
“You mean she says it was her idea.”
“It was. Her ex-husband sounds like a complete asshat.”
“Sure. But do you think she misses him?”
“People grow apart in a marriage of eleven years.”
“Ha. Forgot what an expert you are about the institution of marriage.”
That night Larissa and Lou were already asleep in their underwear when Haylee came in from reading. Larissa even had a bra on.
Haylee didn't have like, an objection to them sleeping together. She laughed, a delighted sounding laugh. Bell-like. “Uh Oh,” she could have said, or “Whoopsie-daisy,” but they were asleep, they wouldn’t hear her.
She put underwear and a t-shirt on and fell in next to them thinking, Unremarkable. Completely. Really if there’s anything surprising it was more to do with how they found the time, given Larissa’s stupid running schedule, or the privacy. There’s nothing wrong with them getting together. It’s perfectly natural and probably even a good omen but Larissa is likely to get really weird. She is weird around guys. There’s still something girlish about her. She hasn’t learned how to have confidence, yet.
“What’s so sad about the human animal,” Haylee said, “is that it doesn’t matter what it loves. Everything is so biological. We react to anything.”
“Wait what?” They still had to go to the bar together, because they didn’t know anyone else, and they weren’t going to sit around wasting their weekend.
“Its like, when you’re deer hunting. You can get this powdered deer urine and put it on everything and then the deer pursues it and it seems like its some successful hunter tactic. Like the hunter is so smart. But we’re all like that.”
“Sure,” said Lou. “It’s a logical fallacy.”
“It is not a logical fallacy. That is not what a logical fallacy is. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Did he want to talk about this? Haylee would talk about this, sure.
“Tell me what a logical fallacy is.”
Lou looked over at Larissa. “I’m not sure I really care enough to answer that question?”
“It takes a white man, it really does, to give that kind of non-opinion with that degree of confidence. You know? Want someone to tell you what to care about, find a white boy. It never fails. It does.”
Lou laughed, and then he looked at her. He was waiting. He can wait, she thought.
“Oh, seriously, Haylee.” Lou sounded like a tiny boy when he was mad. “You are making zero sense. None.”
Her grip on the table was slippery. She shook it a little too hard while she was standing up, and Lou snorted.
“No. Oh, no. I don’t have to be talking about this with you.”
Larissa looked up at them both, eyes blinking.
“No.” Haylee took her tote bag. She left the bar through the back gate and walked in the alleys, then the streets. She walked almost to the Sunset. For a three block stretch on Market, the driver of a Hummer-limo had slowed down to her pace and followed her, asking, “Where do you live, honey? Why won’t you tell me, my love?” Her body hurt in distinct chunks. At home she would choose to sleep on the floor, out of principle, and in the morning her shoe soles were studded with glass.
Remember they were not even twenty-one. They were very serious people, but they hadn’t had much experience brawling and it took everything out of them.
From this distance it’s hard for Haylee to put together what happened next, exactly, or why, but it definitely did not resolve itself. They went at it whole hog. For days. There were long walks—Haylee and Larissa, Haylee and Lou—grinding through what it means to be dependent, to be generous, to give more than you had, to participate in an ethics of antiausterity, to queer your attachments, to align your values, retain sovereignty, to work it out. To love in friendship.
She really thought it mattered, then.
That what you did was choose a way to be, then be it.
Sabine was open to exploring the questions that arose. She made herself wholly available, lent opinions and self-help books. For the first time she asked Haylee to her house alone. They discussed conflict aversion and conflict desire and Haylee cried her face redder than usual and Sabine cooed over her, acupressured her palms, told her to take a shower.
The shower had glass walls on three sides and beach rocks in piles on the floor. She ran Sabine’s Argan oil through her hair and stood in the steam feeling very certain.
Haylee had entered a new stage of her life, she was sure. She would not go back the same. It was terrible to see that her best friend hadn’t, but this is how growth works. When you move forward you pass the scenery. That’s what makes it scenery.
The one priority Haylee wouldn’t budge on was her discomfort sharing a bed with anyone who had disrespected her. She was really clear about this need. When the others tried to test her on it she repeated it loudly, enunciating every word.
“I am trying to establish some boundaries here,” she said, sing song. he third time she repeated it Lou put a dent in the door with his bare foot. He slept on the cottage floor, then on Sabine’s couch, and finally flew to visit his biological dad in Milwaukee until school started. The girls drove his jeep back in silent shifts.
When they returned to Council Bluffs they gave each other a wide berth. Haylee talked plenty of shit, planned never to speak with them again, but there was only so much resisting—they were a constellation now.
Later that fall they moved into an apartment with three identical bedrooms and textured ceilings. The next year Larissa and Lou moved across the state line to Omaha, then, following a brief breakup, got engaged. They married quick, with Haylee joining as a roommate a few months later when the mortgage on their condo was too much. Omaha took a hit from a tornado, then a recession, then another tornado.
They melted into place. It’s hardly surprising that ten years on it feels a little too close, of course, and Haylee wonders what the younger her would think about such stuckness. But she had no regrets, not really. The girls both stopped talking to their moms, which made this kind of family matter, and the music they got into when they came back home set them apart in a way that was hard to explain. When Larissa ruined her credit Haylee lent her SSN for job aps, and that is the only way, really, she got work at the bank branch in the first place. Lou got them prescriptions in his own name, and later stood up as best man at Haylee’s wedding. With the babies it was hard to take seriously those friends of theirs that didn’t run the same kind of interference, the exhaustion and static. Later on, in their separate houses, Haylee learned about the trouble her husband had been getting up to, all that boredom, and they worked it through it together. Larissa handled the cut when she split her knuckle and Lou handled the wall. Haylee was principled and direct about her decision to leave him. Later, she announced that they were back together, and her friends gave each other chewy smiles and moved her in again, no questions.
They hadn’t expected such relief from living so close, or from getting older. Like a sigh cut in a bag. That give that came with being wrong about each other: all three of them wrong so many times in unison, all the sharp turns that flip-turned back within a year.
DENISE DOOLEY studied at University of Iowa, Newnham College, Cambridge, and with the Next Objectivist Workshop. She works in Chicago and reads fiction for Chicago Review.
