Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Actually it was not so bad as that. Worse too, but also not so bad, in that it hadn’t been totally Simon’s fault. Because there, on the elevator bulletin board, where the co-op posted its newsletters and petitions against nearby construction sites, where tenants pinned lost socks from the laundry room, tacked there, for all to see, was a piece of paper, slightly creased.

Across the top, in red pen, like a bad mark from a teacher, the words: PLEASE do NOT drop TRASH into the SHAFT.

Simon didn’t know how the page got wherever it had been, or who had found it, but he knew what it said, approximately. Approximately, he knew the words.

So he hadn’t had to look at it very carefully, not like the mom from 16B, who’d smiled at him before leaning close to the board and squinting to read. She bent further forward in the stretchy pants she always wore, purple and made of something like crushed velvet, gloving her body in a way that embarrassed him.

Simon hung back against the wall, squeezing the elevator rail behind him, and watched as her features crowded together in the middle of her face. Her size and her boy’s haircut made her elfish. He thought of a Peter Pan they’d seen one summer on a family trip to the Berkshires.

“God,” she said. “Gosh, that’s horrible. They shouldn’t have that up in here.” She sucked the air between her teeth and tried to share a cringe with him.

Simon stared blankly back and watched her become awkward about the words they’d been confined with, she and this person who was still more boy than man. Her eyes clocked the door, though it was closed, had been closed, the floor already lurching up beneath their feet. “So, you must be all done with classes.”

“Almost.”

“Bet you’re pretty excited.”

“Uh-huh.” Simon paused. “Actually I haven’t thought about it too much, since my parents have been splitting up? I don’t know if you—? No no, it’s totally fine. I mean things got pretty rough but, it is what it is. Better this way.”

As he spoke the neighbor woman did too. “Oh,” she said, “No, I,” “Gosh, I had no,” and “Well.” She spoke to bridge the gaps, to keep him going. She could not have stopped him anyway; Simon could build his own bridges. Or could sink his own ship. Whatever the expression.

“Happens, right? We’ll probably be packing and moving all summer, so but that’s fun. I wasn’t going to go to camp anyway, this year.”

“I’m sorry.” New light fell on her face, light from the hall. The elevator had stopped. They’d reached his floor. “I’m going to write to your mother,” she was saying, the moment that Simon, one leg out the door, lunged at the board, tearing down the page and sending the tack flying.

He watched 16B’s face, all surprise, as the elevator closed. His mother could probably not expect any note.

In the hall he reread the message along the top of the page. The S in “SHAFT” was the fancy, curling kind. And “TRASH” was clever, how it could mean two things. Someone had taken the time.

He took the page to his room and closed the door, though it was not yet three — he’d skipped his last two periods — and no one else was home. These were the words that he guessed had embarrassed 16B: Spread. Tits. Cum. Also, maybe: Open. Fingers.

He folded it five times, bent it a sixth, and buried it in his underwear drawer. Hard to say why he’d taken it at all. Not to protect his parents, their privacy. And Simon’s words to 16B shouldn’t have meant much, shouldn’t have reverberated very far. Shouldn’t have but would; he knew they would, enough for their next-door neighbors to hold vigil for signs of cardboard boxes in the stairwell, to wonder where the support beams were, to calculate the dimensions of new living rooms when their two apartments became one.)

In most of them, Jerry and Elaine fell in love. More recently, Elaine and George had been falling in love, and that had been more interesting. Elaine and Kramer would never fall in love. Kramer was not a very well-rounded character. He was not very dimensional, as her father would sometimes say about art. Kay’s middle name, Ellen, was very like Elaine’s name, Elaine, a fact that Kay liked about herself.

She didn’t know how it started, only she was sure she didn’t know it was a thing until later, when she found the forums. By then she’d seen all the episodes, which were on every day after school, sometimes two at the same time on different stations, and she’d already written a few herself, though she had recently learned that her formatting was not yet in the standard way. But in the beginning she thought she’d invented it. And in a way, hadn’t she? Invented it to herself. The best was that she could write them anywhere, whenever she was bored, and become not bored.

She wrote them in the back row of math, or she wrote them in the back row of history, or she thought up new stories on the bus ride home with her head bouncing off the window that rattled and her knees pressed against the fake leather seat in front of her, torn in places and patched with tape.

Now in her room after dinner, while her brother played Xbox in the living room and her mother did dishes, Kay wrote ideas in the notebook where homework was supposed to go.

• Kramer goes to a foreign country (Turkey?) and Jerry promises his apartment to Elaine and to George. Fight. Or: they move in together? Love?

• Elaine buys a vintage dress that is white and she doesn’t realize that it is a wedding dress until she goes outside and everyone on the street makes jokes like: Where’s the groom? She likes the attention and she thinks it makes boys imagine marrying her. This backfires somehow.

• Kramer dies?

There was a crashing sound in the kitchen, a plate breaking. “Shoot,” Kay heard her mother say.

• Elaine has an unbreakable dinner plate that breaks and that she has been trying to return to Bed Bath & Beyond. But the guy behind the counter looks at the bag with the pieces of plate in it and says they can’t take it back because she dropped it on too hard a floor. The guy says: “Sorry, your floor’s too hard.” Elaine makes a face at him like, what?

Kay went to bed without finishing her homework. Deb came, as she had been doing these last few nights, to sit with her daughter in case she cried, which mostly Kay didn’t. She’d been going to bed earlier each night because it was taking her longer to fall asleep.

For her mother Kay had always been the more difficult, difficult because she would not make herself so. She would not speak up as Simon did, and so it was impossible to know what she thought and felt, how much she understood. Deb knew that adults were always underestimating what an eleven-year-old understands, but she was too far from that age to remember how much.

She had tried. “It’s okay,” she’d said that first night after Simon had gone to his room (part of his prerogative, those days, to be always the first to leave). Sometimes a married person meets someone new, someone they think is nice, or exciting, and sometimes they’ll make a mistake. Lots of married people, women too, but mostly men, lots of them do this. “But it doesn’t mean anything. And it isn’t about you.”

And Deb left her daughter to sleep, not knowing that she’d said the wrong thing — so easy to do when you are a parent. Where she’d gone wrong, it was just a word, how could she have known. What she should have said: It doesn’t mean everything.

Instead she’d said that it didn’t mean anything, and Kay had lain awake picking paint blisters off the wall, trying hard to believe that the things her father had done were okay. If this was the world that was waiting for her, it would be a good idea to stick a toe into it now, let her body adapt to such a future, which was cold, not at all a place she wanted to be.