And a scruple was a pebble you couldn’t quite shake out of your shoe
**
Standing over her grandma’s suitcase, she surveys the wreckage
Her clothes are intermingled with packets of peanut butter cheese crackers that have been squashed into an orangeish film. Some of the packets have been punctured by the shards of glass resulting from the picture of her family she now extracts from its former frame and folds up into a rectangle and tucks into her passport. The frame, and the broken glass, she throws away. It doesn’t bother her: it had not been her idea.
All but one of her cans of Dr. Pepper have exploded. She had been told you could not find it in Europe. From above, nearly all of her clothing appears to have been affected—everything but the balled-up socks and underwear packed separately in Ziploc bags. Now she wonders how she’ll clean the Dr. Pepper off the stairs.
Amy picks what glass is left out of the suitcase. Next the cracker packets. She bends down and scoops up an armful of shorts and t-shirts and carries them out into the hall, looking for the laundry room. She finds another bedroom just like hers, a little cubicle with just a toilet, and then a kitchen, and then a living room. The living room must also be the dining room because it has a table with a bottle of champagne on it and a note Amy suspects is from the tenants who just left. For now she leaves these things alone. In the innermost corner of the living room she finds a narrow spiral staircase made out of glossy light brown wood.
Downstairs it’s too dark to find the light switch. She turns around and sets the clothes down on a step at about waist-level and palpates the wall. Finally her fingers encounter a gigantic plastic square.
To her left, past a set of glass doors with a golden handle shaped like half a mustache, there is a big bare bed and a television. On the walls there are two big paintings in very thin wood frames. Above the bed the painting is the same smooth pink you’d find inside a seashell; over the TV it’s a soft blue-green. Amy turns the golden handle and glides into the center of the room. As though at a museum she contemplates the paintings, one by one. The paint is like a mist in texture, fine and fragile. On tiptoes, she strains to distinguish the canvas’ pores.
When she is done she looks down at the mattress, tracing its seams with her gaze, which rises and falls with the pearlescent undulations of the slick fabric she lets her fingertips just graze. In her head her grandma ask her if she’s never seen another bed before; Zoe laughs and says how Amy must have been adopted from the pack she’d been born into; Amy snarls and rolls her eyes but does step back.
On the other wall there is a square the same size as the paintings that looks like blinds, except it’s solid. Still dazed after her family’s unexpected interruption, Amy starts to fiddle with this square. She finds a trick flap alongside it, which she pries open, revealing a flat strip she pokes at and then makes a fist around, gripping tight.
The beige square gives, disappearing band by band as Amy tugs. Then it gets stuck. Amy tries harder and then quits, squeezing in between the head of the glossy wood bed frame and the wall, crouching down and angling her body so that she can peer through the opening she made, leaning out over the wide sill as though offering up her head to the guillotine.
She is at street level; right across the street there is a bakery with tiny, brightly colored cookies in the windows, and larger, slippery-looking discs she can’t identify, and a line of people that continues out the door. Up the street there are apartments; she flips her head around and sees a bookstore and a place she thinks sells fish.
A couple in between her parents’ and grandparents’ age emerges from across the street and spots her. She retracts her head and straightens up and scoots over into the corner and stays like that for a second, her whole body pressed against the wall. She sees her pile of clothing, and a pair of plain white underwear that’s fallen through the space between the steps onto the floor. She maneuvers out from her hiding spot and darts across the room to scoop her things back up. Since she can’t find the laundry room, she decides instead to rinse her clothes in the bathtub. But in the bathroom behind the stairs there is no bathtub, so then she sets them on the ridged person-width square of plastic at the base of the shower booth.
There are multiple knobs inside the shower; Amy selects at random, and with one swift twist of the wrist she has turned it all the way. She springs back but still gets sprayed in the face. The head bucks its holder and clatters down into Amy’s pile of clothes, writhing with its silver body, soaking the bathroom floor. Amy lunges forward and yanks bank what she thinks is the same knob as before, but this only alters the temperature. She fumbles, eyes shut against the freezing stream of water shooting up her dress and neck and chin, and finally she finds it and the water stops. Dripping, she shifts her weight back and slowly lifts her wet right leg out of the shower, licking the water off her lip with the tip of her tongue. Her eyes flutter open. She considers for a second and then slips her socks off and adds them to the pile. She considers for another second and pulls her dress up over her head, taking it in one hand and squeezing it into a marbled gray ball she slams down hard onto the rest of her clothes. Standing up straighter and straighter she takes her bra off. She holds it out by one strap and dangles it over the rest of her things. It’s two flat beige triangles, both ever so slightly stretched in the middle where her breasts go. She lets it drop and brings both arms in tight to her sides. Her skin is clammy. She doesn’t look in the mirror. She just bends down and takes off her underwear and tosses them onto the pile.
Naked, she tiptoes up the stairs. She gets goose bumps all over. She rifles through the other batch of clothes in the hopes of finding something that’s not stained, but there is nothing. She heaps it all onto the base of the shower. She restores the showerhead to its silver handle, which she works into just the right position to make the water hit her clothes, and then she slowly turns both knobs. A gentle stream of lukewarm water makes contact with her clothes. She steps back and surveys her handiwork. It occurs to her now that you use soap wash things, so she scans the shelf behind the silver fixture, grabs the bottle of shampoo, and drizzles it liberally over her clothes. Then she steps back again, closes the shower doors, and very carefully she raises a thick moss-green towel off the rack beside the toilet and wraps it tight around her body, like they do in the movies, tucking the sharp top corner in under her arm.
Amy has never been openly naked before
The shower doesn’t count, and she doesn’t count sex because she still gets covered up. Now she tosses her towel onto the couch and prowls the upstairs like a lion, sweeping spaces with her imperious gaze, insisting in the corners.
She becomes a ballerina: her back snaps straight and her arms fly up into position, the left above her head, the right before her, hands ever so slightly cupped.
She does a plié. In first position. She is surprised her body guides her into second, after a decade of no ballet. The word decade brings her satisfaction: saying you have done or not done something for a decade makes you sound like a permanent person—like an adult. Her right arm drifts downwards as her body descends between her legs. It is not the same to plié naked. She holds the position as long as she can.
As she straightens up she realizes the word plié, which she accepted as a technical term when she learned it in ballet class, is actually just an ordinary French word, with an ordinary meaning that extends beyond dance: plié is the past tense of plier, to bend, and you can use it with anything that can be bent. How many more things will there be like this?
She clambers around the scaffolding of her brain, like a riled-up monkey leaping in and out of trees, her body falling back onto the outspread towel on the faded purple couch. She leans back into its decrepit cushions and lets her legs fall open like a man’s. She peruses her flesh, watches the skin of her thigh spring back after she presses into it with her index finger, with just a tiny crescent moon from the nail. What other memories will she swoop into now, with these new powers, to break them down and make them into something better?