Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Even before the door opens, Maya is accosted by the smell of garlic, onions, and grilling meat. Caitlin grabs hold of Maya before she’s fully through the door. She’s lambent, of fire , Maya thinks, as Caitlin leans toward her, so fresh and full of life. She’s begun to grow her hair out and has it pulled back with a neon scarf; large chunks fall around the scarf and stick to Caitlin’s neck and ears, curling at the ends. Her full round cheeks are flushed and there’s a film of sweat above her upper lip. She’s always had a defiant sort of doughiness that has, while maintaining nearly all its substance, gotten somehow firmer in the months since Maya saw her last. Her breasts heave freely beneath a smocked beige linen dress with intricate dark green embroidery and her feet are bare, with matching green toenails.

The door opens into the kitchen. There are three pans working on the stove. Everywhere, the remnants of Caitlin’s cooking sit: clear glass bowls coated with the last bits of spices and finely chopped cilantro, colorful plastic measuring spoons, onion and garlic skins, cutting boards, and knives still wet from work.

It’s freezing outside, but warm in the apartment. The smallness of the space and with the oven and three burners going, Maya’s quickly peeling off her coat. The bed’s pushed against the wall between two tall windows. Maya can see the staggered lines of projects across the street along the river and a large covered-for-the-winter community pool. Caitlin has set up a card table beside the bed and surrounded it with a hodgepodge of chairs — one yellow and thinly stuffed, one folding, one simple straight-backed wood — and a wooden bench along one side. The bench’s seat is covered with pillows from the bed that Caitlin’s tied down with some silk ribbons that look as if they might also serve as belts. An old red sheet serves as the tablecloth. The walls are all the same thick beige paint of nearly every New York apartment that has seen too many occupants, layer after layer of not quite white that seems to come out from the walls and hang just over the moldings, threatening, at any moment, to come down in dusty, spackled chunks. There are crooked plywood built-in bookshelves and the books are doubled up, balancing precariously close to the edges; Maya stands near to one of the shelves and runs her hand along the spines. The apartment is hastily ordered, but the remnants of prolific mess remain. Maya can make out piles of clothes underneath the bedframe, maybe a bowl and at least one plastic water bottle, balls of dust still lurking in the corners of the room. Books are piled on the small table by the bed and on each windowsill, and on the desk piles of paper sit slightly askew.

“It’s my first dinner party,” says Caitlin, watching Maya’s eyes scan the room and settle on the table, set for five: wine glasses and simple white flatware, a sweating-in-the-warm-air water pitcher, filled with a bottom layer of mint and fruit.

“I had to improvise,” Caitlin says, motioning toward the table. She has a wooden spoon in her left hand and is sautéing kale with onions and garlic. A pile of steaks, left to rest and slathered in what looks like some kind of cilantro pesto, sits on the last bit of counter space.

Maya hands her the bottle of Sangiovese she’s brought. Caitlin holds it a minute, then grabs a wine key and passes the bottle back to Maya. “Perfect,” she says. “You want a glass?”

Maya tears the foil slowly. She turns the screw into the cork and pops it out. Caitlin passes her a glass and Maya’s careful with her wrist, twirling the bottle up in order that no drops fall.

“Thanks,” says Caitlin. She looks expectant, her eyes staying on Maya as she sips her first glass.

“How are you?” Maya asks.

Caitlin shrugs. “Okay,” she says. She stops, as if the room, or something just outside the window, will tell her how she really is. “Good, I think,” she says.

Maya smiles at her, watching her hands deftly work the spoon, then cover the steaks with a white dish towel while they rest. “How’s the writing?” Maya asks.

Caitlin shakes her head, but there’s a smile forming on her lips. “Okay,” she says. “You know.”

“I don’t,” says Maya. She can’t imagine the courage it must take, stories all her own. “Tell me.”

“Well, there’ve been some big life things happening,” says Caitlin. Her palm rests on her stomach briefly as she says this. Maya wonders. There’s no sign of a partner in the apartment. She’s noticed that Caitlin has so far left her wine untouched.

“Of course,” Maya says, excited suddenly. She lets herself imagine it a moment, a child forming inside Caitlin. A whole new life from scratch.

“I started tutoring a few months ago.” She moves back and forth between the pans with her wooden spoon and stirs and flips. She turns back to Maya. “It’s better, you know? I’m so happy to be teaching again.”

Maya nods. “Of course.” She sips her wine again and tries to make out Caitlin’s shape beneath her dress.

“Even if it’s mostly standardized tests.”

“Can I do something?” Maya asks as Caitlin pours herself a glass of water. It would be too forward to tell her to sit down.

“No. No, tell me about you. How’s school? How’re Ben and Ellie?” Maya stops breathing a minute. She watches Caitlin’s face to see if she knows.

“Well,” she says, “Ben’s in his second year, but he might. .” She wonders where the rest of the guests are. If maybe it could just be the two of them. Maybe she could just sit here quietly and Caitlin could help her to make sense of everything. “He might take a semester to figure some things out.”

Caitlin nods. “I wish I’d been smart enough to do that at that age.”

Maya smiles. She’s so glad to be with Caitlin now.

“And Ellie?” Maya’s been quiet too long, she realizes. She looks out at the pool across the street, wants to ask Caitlin to promise to have her over to go swimming in the spring.

Another time: Caitlin had come crying to Maya’s office after class, distraught. It was her second year. Maya thought school, at first, that she was overwhelmed suddenly by too much coursework. It was what she was meant to advise students on, but then they ended up dissolving over so much worse once she had them all alone. It turned out, with Caitlin, to be much messier than her middle-ages obligations. There was a boy, apparently, a man, as Caitlin said, but when Maya looked at any of them, mostly all she saw were boys. Caitlin said he was a friend in the department. She’d made advances. He’d snubbed her. “Never in my life,” she said, “have I actually tried to act on something like this.” She was twenty-four then, Maya knew. The idea that she’d never pursued a boy until then, it both shocked Maya and made perfect sense. And now this.

“He’s my only friend here,” Caitlin said. “He’s allowing me to blame the alcohol, though I’d hardly had a beer. He’s trying very hard to act as if we’re all just fine being friends.” She gave no names. There was another girl involved, a friend of Caitlin’s, with whom she thought the boy might be in love. “Of course, she has no use for him,” said Caitlin. “She has no idea.”

She was one of the strongest students Maya had ever taught, the brightest. Maya wanted so much to scrape all of the hurt out of her life and tell her just to focus, to show her somehow that the only certain satisfaction would come from her own mind. She wanted her not to be felled by so predictable a situation, to be a little less just like every other girl. “I don’t have anyone but the two of them,” said Caitlin. You have me , thought Maya, but that was different. She was too far away, too old. She reached across her desk to grab hold of Caitlin’s hand. “Honey,” she said.