Work and Play
by Cora Lewis
The first summer after college, I worked as a hostess in a restaurant. The place was open to the street at night, and—as with every place open to the street—rats would run in from trash-laden sidewalks, darting towards the kitchen with its smells. If one made it to the back room’s tables, close along the walls, a waiter would whisper in my ear, “Minnie at table seven,” or “Mickey—table five.” That meant I shouldn’t seat people there. When, inevitably, a diner did spot a rat, their meal was on the house. It happened from time to time.
Now I’m a reporter at a newswire, where I cover the economy and politics. At my desk (that is, my department), almost everyone else is a man in mid-life. Each morning, my coworkers lean back in their ergonomic chairs—grey-haired typists, somnambulant kings. The market opens, and they chit chat, they’re on the phone. They type while still at rest behind the eyes. Breaks for lunch: Cuban sandwiches, salads, soups; paper, plastic. More chit chat, their stories filed, last looks, speculation. The market closes, and home they go to New Jersey and their families.
I generalize. Sometimes, hard news does break. A bank will fail, or crypto exchange implode. On those days—less chatter, more talk. At our desk, per our lingo, the market is always an animal in need of taming or placation. Is the Dow skittish today? Jumpy? Will the Fed chair quiet its nerves? The CEO’s mea culpa?
The orthodoxies of reporting grate. Received wisdom, unquestioned levers. The coolness with which the labor market’s tracked. Numbers, crunched. But it’s my job, my byline. So far, I’ve always made the rent.
*
In the fall, I raise my hand for the campaign trail, volunteering for a stump speech in Montana. The farmer who picks me up from the airport moves a widemouthed plastic jar of pork rinds between us.
“I don’t know how they lived,” he says, of the first homesteaders this far north in the state. Palms a handful of rinds to snack on as he drives. “No heat, no running water, no plumbing, no phones.”
Then again, he says, (gesturing at me to partake of the rinds), he thinks the internet and television have homogenized the country.
“Everyone’s watching the same shows,” he says, rustling in the jar. “Reading the same stories, listening to the same hits.”
*
Back in New York, my friend Susannah invites me and old pal Leon over to meet her newborn daughter. She puts the tiny girl inside my arms.
“Did you know children are as hot as uranium?” she says as she does. “They’re always radiating heat.”
“Plus they’re hard to kill,” Leon says. “Conveniently.”
“It’s like they’re made of rubber,” she says. “Or Nerf foam.”
*
Restless in the city, I accept an invitation to an old friend’s family house on a lake. Alright, it’s true, more than a friend. Jake and I had gone out for years, in fact, but he’s seeing someone else now, and she’ll be there too. The first morning, everyone swims out to where the sunlight hits the water. Then we swim back through the shade.
At lunch, Jake’s mother tells us the French name for the husk cherries she picked up at the market. The words translate to "love in a cage."
“In English,” she tells us, “they’re ‘ground cherries.’”
The next morning, someone is scratched by the dog, swimming. When they get out, we see red ridges across their chest—also a shin, a shoulder. The swimmer won’t see the raised, torn skin till later.
Sound carries across long distances. Jake lowers his voice as he and I pick raspberries by the water, so the people canoeing can’t hear us talk.
There are loons, too, with their low, unusual calls.
"I've never been in love... with a person," an acquaintance, a musician, says to someone on the dock. I hear it from the porch.
At the lake, I’m attuned. There’s the column of light in the water Jake rows towards; Isabel—the girlfriend—in a white sweatshirt in a pale kayak at night; Jake ramming into her, nearly tipping her over, everyone stoned. There’s the way the lake holds the light in the darkness: it matches the light of the sky through the black trees.
"At some point, the clock of the body and of the individual became the narrative clock," says an acquaintance, who’s a critic. I can hear him from the dock. He keeps talking about “the prolonged adolescence of American life in fiction."
"This was after the loss of religious and nationalistic narratives,” he says, “which came after revolutions."
The whole long weekend, I can hear which of Jake’s laughs are sincere, which strained. I watch where his eyes go, and why.
*
When I fly back to the city, it’s cold but snowless. On the streets and sidewalks everywhere is salt—in case.
"The salt's like anti-snow," I tell Leon on the phone as I unpack. "So it puts you in mind of snow. Snow is its reason for being.”
"The way Catholicism makes one think of sex.”
*
The next day I get a drink with a stranger—a setup, via Susannah. The bar is cozy, yet there’s plenty of room. When the man appears, he has white paint on his hands and pants—he’s just come from painting the interior of a gallery, he tells me.
The setup trained as an architect, but isn't sure he wants to be one anymore. Quit his job at a construction firm, which oversaw the expansion of a museum I know well. He explains how the bar's low entrance creates the intimate feeling, then opens into something more capacious as you go. He has two of the six exams needed for his license still left.
The man defends the sharks in the Rockaways (he surfs), the way a guide at a wolf sanctuary I once visited defended the wolves: "Humans aren't on the menu.” He also tells me he boxes—calls it a dance. The man says it’s all about reading your partner, their predictability, their openings, and not letting them read you.
Before the setup bikes away, at the end of the date, we kiss. Politely. Just another encounter, another collision.
*
Now old pal Leon tells me about his romantic life at his local dive. He badly wants to find a partner—dating like a 9-to-5, scheduling his evenings. He has parameters, boxes to check. He asks me how my love life’s going.
I say I’ve been dating, yes, and, well, there are so many kinds of people. I say I find it overwhelming. Leon says, “It helps to have parameters.” I say, and then I’m sorry to have said it, and I wonder if I mean it, that that’s not the kind of constrained thinking I have in mind.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland, Epiphany, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and currently lives in New York near Sunset Park.
Website: coralewis.xyz
@cora on Twitter