Distancing
- Jul 31, 2020
- 4 min read
by Kim Magowan
Since quarantine, I’ve been taking long walks—they help me shake off the feeling of having my life suddenly compressed to 700 square feet. It’s been necessary to see birds in the sky, or even a green weed, and persuade myself that life does and will go on. The outside world is an unfurling vision board. And it was on one of these walks yesterday that I encountered Marjorie, a friend I had greatly wronged, and had not seen for nearly fifteen years.
My body recognized her before I did—I stiffened, my heart began to race, I wondered what the hell was going on, if I was having some sort of panic attack, before I processed who was standing before me. Then I tried to persuade myself that it was not in fact Marjorie. Her hair was gray at the roots, her face half covered with a jaunty sunflower mask. But there was no disguising Marjorie’s distinctive posture, which was both elegant and languid, like an art model posing as relaxed.
I lowered my head and considered escapes—crossing the street, though the crosswalk was behind me, or ducking into a store. I stood immobilized, and Marjorie looked straight at me, narrowed her eyes, and said, “Dora.”
“Marjorie,” I said, giving up.
When I last saw her, nearly fifteen years ago, we’d lived in Los Angeles, but I knew that she had moved to New York several years after I did, and perhaps she knew I lived here too. Even if one isn’t on social media, it’s not really possible to become fully lost. At any rate, she didn’t look surprised to see me, her former friend. She blinked in a way that struck me as exaggerated, meant to convey that she wished she could erase me from sight.
“Long time,” Marjorie said.
“Ages.”
There were conversations I’d wanted and intended to have with her, over the years, though I always chickened out. Those imaginary conversations were more fluent. In them, I apologized, and Marjorie would look at me coldly and nod, and I would feel, Well, at least I tried. Or in the more optimistic versions, she would forgive me. She would even pat my shoulder. Best of all, she would admit fault: she’d explain that she had reflected over the years and now understood ways she had contributed to what happened. That it had been unfair and risky, perhaps, to pull me constantly into her home. Even narcissistic, as if she needed an audience to confirm how perfect that home was, how truly matched she and John were. As if their happiness needed someone to authenticate it with an approving seal. She realized, she told me, in these hypothetical conversations, that she had made me feel like a third wheel, and it was understandable, in that position, that I would flatten myself into something more stable, converting this tricycle Marjorie had composed into a triangle. (That was a metaphor I’d come up with years ago in therapy. Douglas, my therapist, had smiled admiringly, making me more proud of the analogy than perhaps I should have been).
Marjorie and I looked at each other, maintaining double the six feet of social distance the CDC recommended. Even though I stayed perfectly still, my body felt like it was turning into liquid, or into a colony of darting fish. I was in entrenched if invisible flight response. Marjorie waited, and flummoxed, I said “I’m sorry.” Which was the last thing I had said to her, nearly fifteen years ago (perhaps with a “so” in it—“I’m so sorry”). At that, Marjorie shook her head disdainfully, which was not what she had done fifteen years ago. What she had done then was to say, “Fuck off.” Now she made a gesture with her hand, as if she were balling up and tossing aside my apology.
The cliché about this historical moment is that time has stopped, as time does in crises—World War I famously “stopped all the clocks.” But I felt that temporal dislocation more intensely yesterday than I had yet. The person I was carefully and conscientiously becoming for the past fifteen years (Isadora, professional, kind, and responsible; not the kind of woman who would fuck her best friend’s husband, destroy their marriage, who had to be told, first by Marjorie, hours later by John, as if even splitting up couldn’t entirely sever them from inadvertently speaking like twins: “Fuck off”), that person was unravelling. Pull the yarn off the knitting needle, and all the neat loops come undone. As Marjorie looked at me with her level, blue stare, I ricocheted back to Los Angeles in 2005: I was in my old yellow Mustang, John’s hand spider-climbing my thigh, speeding towards somewhere we could lie down, my hair whipping behind me in the wild and exhilarating wind.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
