Nicola Griffith - Always

“Embarrassment,” I said. “Self-consciousness.”

“Yes,” she said, “but why ?” She practically vibrated.

“Define for me the words feminine and ladylike and womanly. ”

Silence. Then, “Pretty,” Nina said.

“Soft,” said Suze.

“Kind,” said Jennifer.

“Sexy.”

“Nice. Well behaved.”

“Weak—” said Therese.

“Nurturing,” and “Motherly!” Pauletta and Tonya said together.

“—emotional, hysterical, and irrational.” Therese was breathing hard.

“Vulnerable,” said Christie, and looked it.

DORNAN AND I SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER AT A SMALL WOODEN TABLE BY THEwindow of Tully’s coffee shop in a neighborhood called Greenwood, sipping and watching the world go by as the sun sailed out from behind clouds, then hid again. The chairs were plain pine with a clear, polyvinyl varnish, a marvel of modern design and construction: cheap, comfortable for just long enough to drink a cup of coffee, easy to pick up and put down, durable, washable. Quite unlike the Wiram art chair I’d seen in Atlanta before I left.

“What’s the use of a chair you don’t want to sit in?” I said.

“To get your guests to leave early?” He wasn’t really paying attention. He was watching the growing queue at the counter, studying the customers, how the throughput worked. It’s how I’d persuaded him to come with me to Seattle in the first place: to discover the secret to coffeehouse empires. His café chain, Borealis, had seven outlets. He wanted more. We had already had latte and espresso and Americano and green tea at separate Tully’s in Capitol Hill, Wallingford, and the University District. I was now drinking something called Safari Tea, because it was caffeine free, and trying not to think about meeting my mother.

“I like the Tully’s layout,” I said. "I can sit almost anywhere and have a view of the door, and if I have to have my back to it, there are enough windows to see moving reflections if trouble heads my way. There are no hidden corners, no blind spots. No shadowed places by the entrance to deter customers.”

“Deter customers?” Now he was paying attention.

“I’ve told you this,” I said. “People are more comfortable if they can sit with their back towards a solid wall, even if they don’t know why.”

“I thought you were talking about design nonsense, about feng shui.”

“No.”

We were quiet for a while. I mused some more on the Wiram chair.

A man with a bad hairpiece came in, stood in line for thirty seconds, saw it wasn’t moving, and left.

“Jonie wouldn’t have let that happen.”

“No.” Jonie, his favorite barista, was always watching. I had seen her bring him a fresh Americano, just as the thought was forming in his mind.

“I wonder how she’s managing.”

“Fine,” I said.

“I’m having to pay her more,” he said.

“She deserves it.” I didn’t know why she stayed. We were quiet a minute, watching the young Tully’s barista begin to slowly fall apart. Dornan stirred; I could tell he wanted to go help.

But the Seattle customers remained unfazed. Someone said something that made everyone smile, even the barista, and Dornan relaxed. I wished I could. My mother might be in Seattle by now.

“Feng shui does, in fact, mention solid walls,” I said. “Good design is good for a reason. Did I tell you about the chair I saw in Atlanta just before we left? It was an art furniture exhibit at the Lowe Museum…”

The first item in the exhibit had been a two-drawered nightstand. From a distance its dark red wood looked top-heavy and unstable, as improbable as the skeleton of a T. rex. The catalogue told me it was a cubist-constructivist side table, and talked about its construction of sixty perpendicularly aligned rods, two hundred forty sides, and seventy-eight joints, all perfectly machined to within three one-thousandths of an inch—aerospace tolerances. It talked about Wiram’s early modern influences, about Fibonacci numbers, negative space, and Euclid’s harmonic proportions. It did not tell me what kind of tree the wood was cut from.

“…I looked at this furniture, and I thought what a cold life the maker had led, and how I could have ended up like that.”

“If you hadn’t met, well…”

“Julia. Yes. And it made me think about Luz.”

“I don’t know anyone else who thinks of a ten-year-old girl when she sees furniture.”

“She’s happy with the Carpenters—”

“Carpenters, ha, I get it.”

I stopped. Carpenters. Luz’s stepfamily. Their name had never really registered before. “Not that,” I said. “She’s happy there, or she was a few weeks ago, and they love her. But they’ve got no money, and they don’t know how to fight the kinds of things she’ll have to deal with. It would be easy to say, Oh, I don’t know anything about kids, here’s a big fat check every month, but I’m responsible. I should legally adopt her. I intend to legally adopt her. But what does that mean? Adoption is like marriage, it should mean something, it shouldn’t just be a piece of paper.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s no order in a child’s life, no clear goal. You can’t orchestrate the experience, things just happen. And when I was looking at this furniture, I knew, as clearly as I know this tea is disgusting, that no child ever ran into that man’s workshop at a critical juncture and made his chisel slip a hair and cut the ball of his thumb, spill the blood in a Rorschach spatter that pissed him off, but then made him go, Oh!, and gave him an idea. No. Here was a man who might notice a bloody and magnificent sunset over the city but not really see it, because he couldn’t see something like that unless he was on vacation, wearing shorts and sandals and with a glass of pinot noir in his hand. Am I making sense?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“It’s the difference between cold-blooded and taken-on-the-volley decisions. If you get your arm caught in a bear trap and then you see a hungry grizzly thundering down the trail, you have a choice: cut off your arm or die, right there. No time to think. Boom, you do it. But if you get caught in a trap and then nothing happens for a day you have to deliberately consider what it means to cut your own arm off. You have to worry about whether or not you’ve made the right decision. Even when you pick up your Swiss Army knife you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. When you lay the blade against your skin you wonder. Even when you’ve cut through the skin and fat and muscle, severed the first tendon, are unfolding the saw for the bone, you think, It’s not too late to stop.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t talk about things like that.” His head had pulled back, the way a cat’s does when you peel an orange. “And I don’t understand how adopting a child is like…” He flapped his hand squeamishly.

“It’s not about having kids. It’s about everything. It’s about the fact that with rescuing Luz, it was the bear trap and the bear, but with my mother, with adoption, it’s a deliberate choice.”

“Ah. Your mother.”

I moved my tea to one side.

“Love isn’t like losing an arm,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Except it’s your autonomy, not your arm.”

“It’s not the same. Look”—he tapped the table until I did, literally, look at him—“you talk about control and order and structure, but that’s not really who you are. No, let me finish. You do plan and prepare and practice, and you do like your life to be orderly, but—Okay. Think of it this way. You’re standing on a deserted road in Arkansas with a small child and suddenly a woman pulls a gun. You’re in someone’s house and the intruder turns out to have a knife. You’re driving down the street and the car in front of you hits black ice. What do you do?”