Berthe Morisot, On the Sofa, ca. 1882. Public domain.

In the months in which death swooped down on my father, circling on some days, and on others, its talons gripping the bars of the hospital bed where he lay dwindling, I found myself caught, as if on a Möbius tarmac strip, driving between Manhattan, where I live, New Haven, where I was teaching, and Long Island, where my father was dying. His death had been precipitated by a fall, but for years he had been kept alive by a series of red blood cell infusions; these had stopped working, and at almost ninety, one by one his faculties, until then intact, had one by one begun to fail. I had loved my father, but our relationship had not been an easy one, and his dying did not mitigate those complications nor make things easier between us. He was not a man who approved of my many casual arrangements and rearrangements or who participated in the give-and-take of ordinary life. He without fail believed he was right, but he also believed in portents and he was afraid of the dark. When I was a child his father died of the same blood disease that would kill him fifty years later, and early on the morning of that first death a flock of mourning doves alighted on the terraced lawn behind our house. Come and see, my father said. I was twelve, in my nightgown. A decade later, after my grandmother died, my father refused for the next ten years to sit in a darkened movie theater.

That fall, the autumn that turned into the winter of my father’s death, was for me more than usually fraught. A love affair had ended, or hadn’t—all that remained to be seen—but it meant that, as we were not speaking, he did not know that my father was dying, and I did not break our silence to tell him. A beloved dog, belonging to my middle daughter, a beautiful white Pyrenees, had developed epilepsy, which had resulted in seizures; during one seizure, the dog had badly broken her leg running into a tree; the decision was to put her down; my daughter, too, had a broken heart. I had an allergic reaction to my COVID booster, which resulted in a virulent raised rash all over my torso. And so on. Every Tuesday I drove eighty miles to New Haven from my house in Harlem, up the Saw Mill past Spuyten Duyvil and over to the Merritt Parkway, where the autumn leaves were so beautiful it was like driving up the bloodstream of a unicorn, and then from New Haven the next day one hundred miles to Long Island, over the Whitestone Bridge. My father had gout; he had pneumonia; he had dementia. He recognized me, or not. Afterward, I drove back over the Triborough to New York. The bridges were sutures over the bays and rivers. At the end of these trips I would park the car or put it in a garage a few blocks away from the house, climb up the stoop, go through the crowded little vestibule where steam hung in the air from the radiator, and then sit, still wearing my coat on the little sofa that was pushed against the wall. Sometimes I sat there for a few minutes, but more usually, I sat there for hours.

The sofa is a family relic. When I was first married, we found, in the attic space of a friend’s old chicken coop, the skeleton of a sofa. We were living in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue; the appeal of the forlorn sofa was that it was small. We brought it back in pieces tied to the roof of the car, and a few weeks later I had it re-covered with seven yards of pale silk twill embroidered with a pattern of pale red stripes and pink and yellow flowers: the choice of a person who has not yet had children or cats. A decade later the sofa moved to a larger apartment overlooking Morningside Park. By then I had acquired three children and a second husband, who conceived a deep dislike of the sofa, which he said was a Victorian copy of an early eighteenth-century design. There was a baby on the way. The brocade flowers unraveled. Laundry piled up on the sofa. When we moved to a drafty house down below the park, the sofa, now shreds, as the children liked to pick at the embroidery, was put between the windows at the end of the dining room until, in a frenzy of domestic renovation, it was shoved against the wall by the front door.

A peculiarity of the house to which we moved is that it is only fifteen feet wide. Sitting on the sofa in my coat, still as a figure hacked from stone, I looked almost directly into a corner formed by the back of another sofa, the curve of the piano, and the dim recess of the fireplace, encased in black slate. A space of no space. Before my father’s fall that summer, I was in Rome, walking almost every afternoon from Monti, near the Colosseum, east through the Porta Pia and then down to the Via delle Quattro Fontane and then to the river. The Italian architect Francesco Borromini, who often built in almost impossible configurations and made the air in those spaces eddy as if awhirl with swallows, was a master of liminal space, of small bivouacs, places to secret the self. Standing across the street and gazing at the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, it is difficult to see the entire facade from the street, jammed in the intersection of four streets. The visitor enters through a green door into a tiny elliptical anteroom that shudders open to the small nave; above, an oval full of light, punctuated by embossed diamonds and hexagons, lifts up the space of the church like a kite held aloft by the sky at the end of a string. Often there are students drawing in the pews, their necks craned upward. Sometimes I would sit there, too. My father was not a handy man, but one of the things he did make for me were kites out of newspaper, and I could imagine those kites swooping above the nave as they had swooped and veered over Riverside Park, the newsprint too far away to read. When I first came to Italy, when I was very young, I lived in Perugia, down one of the streets winding from the piazza, and every night we came to sit by the fountain, where at dusk the starlings spiraled above it like a column of ash and then flitted back down to eat the crumbs of bread we left for them.

Each week, I drove in the spiral, north and east and south and west, and returned to sit on the small sofa. As winter drew in, I let myself into the house and sat in the dark. Once in a while the phone rang, and after a time a friend who often called would ask—since I had told him—if I was sitting on the sofa. There is a passage in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth in which the prodigal son, Henry Antrobus, returns home after an absence of a thousand years (it is an inventive, excoriating play) and says, “Get it into your head. I don’t belong here. … I have no home,” and his father retorts: “Then why did you come here?” What was I doing, sitting on the sofa?

It is a mystery how things come to belong to us and even more why from certain things it is impossible to part, but I see now, thinking back on that time, that the sofa provided, for me, a kind of liminal space, a place that marked, that autumn, where I was—in between things—between being the daughter of my father who despite our periods of estrangement had towered over my childhood, a man who was soon, so mysteriously, not to be; the sofa, with its plucked-out embroidery, like a bench in a train station waiting room, where I sat, turned to stone, waiting for a silence to reverberate.

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is Two Cities, a collection of essays on Venice and Rome; a novel, Inverno, and Next Day: New and Selected Poems are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Knopf Doubleday, respectively. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University. 

Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman.

One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her.

“Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup.

We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four.

And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already.

I had been aware that he paid more in rent than I did. But my thoughts, as I left Stefanie and made my way inside, turned instead to the way I’d had of judging Alex, privately, for giving up his lease on what was truly a nice place … so that it only later occurred to me to investigate my feeling that out of all of us in the building, a converted Victorian that has eight units, each neighbor had a different curiosity, or jealousy: an opinion about which apartment is the best. Or worst—built out of the irregularly shaped old house, they are all different.

I called Vernon, my downstairs neighbor.

For Vernon, a cellist born in Nebraska and raised in Richmond, Virginia, a curiosity about the contents of the other apartments, and about the people they contained, was much on his mind; this had led him to investigate, one day. “There was a woman,” he said, “who worked at UMass, I’m forgetting her name now, and she never went out, she only went out to teach her class and come back. She was very fair-skinned, blond and fair-skinned, and she actually had a witch hat. And she was kind of attractive in a strange way. From far away she wasn’t, but up close. And I thought that was mysterious, too.

“That one that Alex had,” he went on, “I’ve been in there, long before your time. I saw that. And I’ve seen yours because I was checking out the plants, doing the plant thing. But that one on the very top floor—when the woman moved out and they were working on it, I went and looked.”

Visiting her apartment, my apartment, or apartment four had not made Vernon jealous—on the contrary. “In some ways, because of the layout and the windows, I kind of fantasize that mine is one of the better apartments,” he tactfully explained. I had my opening to let him know the one that had been Alex’s had a dishwasher.

But there was a lot of noise from the street, I added. “I feel like he was getting hung up on it,” I said.

“You have to wonder,” said Vernon delicately. “He might have been getting hung up on it, or he had other reasons for wanting to leave and he was thinking, I’m focusing on the traffic now.”

Next I called up Allie, my shy neighbor who’d taken the time to show me a third pilot light, all the way at the back of the stove, when I first moved in. She did not need to be told about any dishwasher. “Hank’s and apartment four are good,” she said, “because they both have dishwashers.”

Allie used to live in a first-floor unit; Chris, that unit’s current occupant, recalled having had the opportunity, before moving in, to view still another on “one of the upper floors”—too big for just him. “That’s apartment four,” I said, as Chris began his description; a garage space that went with it had been of special interest. Ben, who lives on the third floor but used to have my unit, on top of his other preferences—like the one, with its bitter meaning for me, that that move had signaled—ventured that apartment four, though too expensive, was the best. (“I felt more secure in my situation, it’s just a nicer apartment, sorry,” he said. “I will tell you that when I moved upstairs my allergies suddenly got a whole lot better.”)

Which left only Megan—our most recent arrival. Though I asked her repeatedly, the current tenant of apartment four said she didn’t feel “any desire to live in any other than the one I’m in,” saying, “I like mine.”

There is, just inside the front door of our house, a black-and-white photo that shows the house. The image, mentioned by several of these tenants, is easy to love, I think for its suggestion of infinity. One day, before another move, I had the bright idea to “journal” about each “chapter” (“epoch”? “era”?) of my time where I’d been living: rooms I rented, my young men, every factor that gave texture to that period of my development. This was interesting as an idea, a good “idea” and not a “good idea,” not an idea that lent itself to execution. Still, if I were to do one of those for here—the Massachusetts town where I moved to be a student—I would be sure to make a note of the woman I saw approaching on foot, very close, where, at the side of my building, I happened to find her. I asked if I could help her. She was holding and all at once, with a flick of the wrist, liberated a brief length of already peeling blue-green paint. “Pretty color,” she said.

So there I was another evening, out on the porch with Vernon, my friend even if, as we discovered recently, each of us has long harbored in parallel, but paradoxically, a suspicion the other’s apartment is smaller; he called mine one of “the tinier ones.” A spring rain articulated smells of soil, wilted azaleas just outside the porch light’s focus barely lavender as dark fell. We were going to drink the last of the pastis I’d brought him the previous summer—a thank you for watering my plants—but it was cool and rainy and Vernon provided, instead, Pinot Noir. That sunset still was visible, in flashes, in Hank’s windows. “These are pretty solid plaster walls,” Hank, when I’d interviewed him, said; as he spoke I’d heard, loud and clear just over my left shoulder, Hank’s grandfather clock—like a plucked bow, not a plucked string, tolling some hour.

So it was that later, playing back the tape I’d made of Vernon describing a sort of distance that housemates did well, he thought, to calibrate in forming friendships—“to protect ourselves”—I was, strangely enough, surprised to hear a real roar of passing cars. I knew how loud the road could be where we all lived. I guess I had been able to forget.

Why had Alex moved away? I couldn’t ask him now.

But this was more or less what some of us did like about our building—in Megan’s words, “the intimacy of being around people without sharing deep knowledge of them.”

Jacqueline Feldman, a writer living in Massachusetts, is moving out.

Photograph by Nicolaia Rips.

When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”

The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.

My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.

He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.

“What are your dreams for the future?” Don’t know. “What did you want to be when you were small?” Taller. “Where does the door in the nook go?” Not sure. “Have you ever opened it?” Never. “Never?” Never ever. From my bed he would stare at it, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more he pushed. “What if there’s something amazing up there?” And what if there isn’t. Here we are in my bed, I thought, no point in fantasy.

He believed doors were made to be opened. I believed, firmly, that some doors should not be. Locked basement doors, closed bedroom doors, the door to a safe, the attic door in a horror flick, a patio door on a burning summer day when the AC is on, the seventh door in Bluebeard’s Castle. He argued for letting in the elements; I, for the threat of a draft. I could unleash a spirit or an alien or a doll left up there imbued with the spirit of a child born during the Depression or of some creep who studied acting at an Ivy League. A ghost is like a pet or a child, and I’m not responsible enough to handle a poltergeist.

Unfortunately, my refusal to deal with the door rendered the whole nook a lost space. There, above my head, was a nook the size of a rich child’s tree house, and I was neglecting it. It was large enough that I imagined I could stand in it fairly comfortably. Being raised in Manhattan, I started to obsess about the nook. I could rent it out as a fourth bedroom. I could use it as off-season storage for several lumpy hand-knit sweaters I felt too guilty to get rid of. I could build a library in it for books I’d stolen and borrowed. In fact, he was upset that I’d never read any of the books he’d lent me. He noticed I was using his favorite book as a coffee coaster.

Our relationship, like most organically sweet things, rotted. When he dumped me, he said there was a disconnect. He said maybe we’d find our way back to each other, and I said we would not. A classic door-half-open divide: he tried to keep it open, but I bolted it shut.

A few days after we broke up, I propped a chair against the wall and scrambled upward. Halfway into the nook, my arm strength dissolved. I dangled, my tush protruding from the wall, wiggling stupidly. I considered shouting for my roommate. Then, I considered her laughing at me. Maybe, I thought, I should just allow myself to be stuck. It’s fine to be stuck. I continued up. There I crouched, panting, in the crawl space, jamming at that ungiving door. With a crack it broke.

From the waist up I stuck out through the ceiling. I could see over Brooklyn. Brooklyn could see over me—a ghoulish, dust-covered, and bizarrely grinning woman escaping from an attic. I wedged myself up further. Suddenly, I was on the tilted roof. The door was open and there was nothing to be scared of. When one door closes, God opens a trapdoor.

Nicolaia Rips is the author of the memoir Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel.

Photograph by Claudia Ross.

A sign on the dried grass in front of my apartment building named it the Isles of Charm, a label that suggested—correctly—the irony of the complex’s eventual decay. I moved in on a COVID-era deal, meaning I could afford a studio unit in Los Feliz, though only the kind with communal laundry machines that smelled like Tide pods and urine. The walls were thin, and that was how I met my neighbors.

I shared a hallway and one tiled wall with Brian and Luciana. Brian and Luciana kept their door open all the time, to let the wind in. The distance between their lives and mine was a door screen and the stuttering hum of my air conditioner. I heard everything. They were older than I was, in their mid-thirties or forties. It wasn’t sex, though their arguments occasionally seemed to have an erotic fervor.

“I never loved you,” he would scream.

“You’re a garden-variety narcissist,” she would yell back.

They made up quickly. The morning after a catastrophic meltdown, Luciana would reappear, bouncing down the stairs with their neatly trimmed terriers in tow. They both had matching bumper stickers on their Volkswagens that read WHO RESCUED WHO? with a paw print next to the text. He worked freelance in movies and bought nice leather sneakers. She drank green juice and spoke lisping Barcelona Spanish on the phone. They captivated me. I didn’t understand them at all.

There wasn’t much else going on. It was 2020 and I worked admin for an artist just south of Los Angeles proper. At the office I made batches of bad, overly strong coffee. I coordinated shipping, also badly. Everything was always held up at customs, which felt telling, an international referendum on my abilities. When the boxes arrived at their destinations, I was envious. I imagined myself inside cardboard, headed to Paris or Shanghai.

It was a good job—regular bonuses, champagne at Christmas—but my boredom felt existential. My neighbors were more compelling. At night I came home and lay on the vinyl floor of my studio, my feet touching my fridge, my ear at the doorjamb. Then I waited for Brian and Luciana to start fighting, and they did, like clockwork.

Over time, their arguments grew repetitive. There were more versions of the phrase “I wish I had never met you” than I thought possible. It was a sign, I assumed, of an imminent breakup. It couldn’t go on like this. Soon Brian would move out, and I would buy HBO, or whatever, to entertain myself after work. I would finish that short story. Outside my window, in spring, I would watch the jacarandas bloom.

Instead my landlord cut the jacarandas down. One March night I lay on the floor and heard a door open—their door. Luciana told Brian that it was over. This wasn’t anything new.

“I’m done,” she said.

“I need you,” Brian said.

I heard the two phrases repeat once, and then again, word for word, inflection for inflection. This was abnormal: an exact playback of their conversation. Finally another voice came, interrupting the exchange. The voice was deeper than Brian’s. I briefly contemplated the idea that they had a third—that they were a throuple, a polycule. An exciting twist in the plot. The other man spoke again, more clearly.

“Cut,” he said.

Curious, I staged a trip down the hallway, pretending to check my mailbox. Through their screen door, I saw them: two enormous desktop computers. On each of them was the same frozen, paused image of Brian and Luciana, both crying. Below the images were editing timelines, filled with clips and audio files. Brian clicked play. All the real, raw confessions of feeling I thought I’d heard—they were just bad dialogue.

I took a couple more walks by Brian and Luciana’s apartment in the next months, confirming what I already knew. The demise of their relationship, the one I’d witnessed—or thought I’d witnessed—was actually the rough cut of the movie they were making together. Eventually I saw part of the credits, peeking through their screen, which listed Brian and Luciana as codirectors-writers-actors-producers. Their fights weren’t evidence of suffering. They were a part of what everyone in Los Feliz had but me: “a feature.”

Listening to them lost its Rear Window thrill. I learned instead about the surprising number of home soundproofing options on Amazon. None of them worked very well. I duct-taped foam to the wall above my stove and asked Brian, politely and then not so politely, to shut their door. I finished the short story. I still don’t know what the movie was called or if it even came out, but I don’t need to see it; I already know what happens.

Claudia Ross is a writer from Los Angeles. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, ArtReview, Joyland, Forever, and others. She is working on a novel about archives, television, and gynecology.

Photograph by Jago Rackham.

Jago Rackham is a writer and cook. His book about hosting, To Entertain, will be out in 2024. You can see his food @ecstasy_cookbook on Instagran. 

Photograph by Mitchell Johnson.

Mitchell Johnson is a writer living in Chicago.

Photograph by Christopher Chang.

Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life.

The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust.

LA is a dusty town, and in the century that my building has been around, it has only gathered more of it. The once airtight caulk around the windows has loosened its grip, and the drywall has eroded into Swiss cheese. It doesn’t help that I’m two blocks from an especially busy intersection, and it definitely doesn’t help that I have filled my home with secondhand objects that bring with them their own histories of dust. I clean constantly, with nightly touch-ups and a deep clean that eats up half of an honest weekend. I sweep, Swiffer (dry and wet), and vacuum, but really I am just displacing the dust. As I clean, I kick up more dust, and, betrayed by my own body, I make even more new dust by shedding dead skin cells throughout the process. There is no end in sight, because there is no end to the dust.

I encourage the dust even further by leaving my windows wide open during the day. This is an attempt to cycle out the stale air for fresh air, but who am I kidding? LA is famous for having some of the worst air in the world. But to me it smells good. It smells like everything it has ever touched. It smells like the elements and it smells like argan oil. Sometimes it smells like jasmine, sometimes like wildfires, and, if you try hard enough, it smells like nickels, and the dream of a sweaty handshake from some producer that made moving across the country all worth it, because that handshake is going to change your life. I have knowingly created ideal conditions in which dust thrives, but what’s the point of California if you’re not going to blur the line between indoor and out?

Still, in vain, I clean, because I’m supposed to. I clean because it makes me feel necessary in my own home, and because I come from a long line of people who clean. Even as I clean, on some level I accept defeat. I may be stupid, but I am not dumb. I know I cannot control the dust; it is bigger than me. It was here before me, and it will be here long after I am gone. I am but a guest in a world covered in dust. It’s everywhere—not just in my apartment or at that intersection, or in California but everywhere. Between all the space where there is oxygen, look a little harder—there’s dust. You can’t see it until you do, and what you call it might depend on how long your hair is: dead space, vibes, the ether. Between enemies, it might be called animus; between two lovers, it might be the Fourth of July. But it really isn’t any of that. That which separates your face from mine is just dust. In death, I will become dust, when in reticence I’ll accept that I can’t beat ‘em, so I join ‘em. You, me, and everyone else—we’re all dust that just hasn’t formed yet, but until I am dust, I will continue to move it from one place to the next.

In many ways my life is exactly how I want it to be. I love my small conveniences, I love my creaky little apartment, I love my books covered in other people’s dead skin cells, and I love coming home to sheets that smell like the sun. Dust is an active part of all these luxuries, and dust affords me a life better than I could have ever imagined. I am rich in dust, and I am taxed in dust. What a small price to pay for such an exceptional life on this dusty earth.

Christopher Chang lives in Los Angeles.

Mirror piece, 1965. Art & Language. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0.

My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies. I would, in short, live up to my potential. All my life I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye the other me, the one who rises early, sleeps well, spends responsibly, works hard, shines with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and never lets anybody down, the bitch. Well, no longer.

Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road. If it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for me. Being simply human I didn’t expect a dove from heaven—just a little self-actualization, a shimmer of success, a whiff of recognition. Nothing big. In retrospect, it might have been better to dwell on the how of Jesus reaching his potential (i.e., death) and not so much the when. But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have made a difference: almost precisely a month after reaching this momentous age, I was throwing up a yellow substance I didn’t like the look of into every available receptacle. Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did.

***

My domestic situations have always had this problem: I buy things for the other me, who has great taste, but then I don’t know what to do with them, because they’re not my things, they’re hers. Other me—McClay A, let’s call her Alice—likes delicate coffee serving sets that would turn the humdrum act of sipping coffee in the morning into a small, beautiful ritual; real me habitually buys cheap iced coffee before going to sleep, placing it on the nightstand for the morning. What happens to the coffee service? Who knows. I look at it and am as charmed as ever. I’d buy it again, I’m sure.

And yet for a little over half a year this hasn’t been much of a problem. Not because Alice and I have harmonized but because my vomiting spell landed me in the hospital for two weeks, before I was discharged in a state so weak I could not walk to the corner of my block. I couldn’t feed myself and working was impossible. So I bowed to my fate and to my bank account, moved in with my parents, and went to the hospital two more times over the next few months as one of my organs necrotized. (It goes without saying, but these things never happen to Alice.) Unable to do anything, I listened over the phone as my long-suffering mother and boyfriend took care of all the things in my apartment one way or another. “You did kind of die,” he mused to me later, reflecting on his experience of disposing of my possessions. “I mean, it had a certain kind of resemblance.” I don’t know where these things went—some went into storage, I’ve been told, but the rest is just gone. Are the remainder my things, or are they Alice’s? Who knows—not me.

I cannot fill the home of other people with my own delusions. Not even if these other people are my parents. I can wishlist as many cunning little coffee contraptions as I desire, but there is no reason to buy them, no place to put them, and not even a little bit of a belief I would have any reason to use them. But being sick is, above all else, incredibly boring, and so it’s not surprising that I developed fixations. When I was actually in the hospital these fixations ran along practical lines: I would like not to be in pain, I would like to get out of here, I would like to take a shower, and so on. Out of the hospital, however, I had to pick something else. It couldn’t be furniture, cookware, or dishes. It couldn’t be anything that required me to do anything, like watercolors or yoga. So it was clothes.

With clothes, there’s always the trouble of what you want to wear and what you’ll actually wear. An office-appropriate and quite flattering sheath dress hangs in my closet but has little place in my officeless life. I bought it as if to say, It won’t always be this way. It’s still that way, but nevertheless, I research swimsuits late into the night . I haven’t been to the beach in years and the swimsuit I eventually settle on is ridiculously expensive, too expensive to impulse-buy. Once a week or so I go to the website and make sure it’s still there. It represents—what? The possibility of a carefree future, I suppose.

Brightly colored shoes, too, give me trouble. I feel, when I wear them, like a very delusional prey animal, bringing myself to the attention of every lion on the savannah. I do not fear real human predators, mind you, just bad luck. Long ago I remember reading a dubious study about shoe color, the findings of which were that people who wore predominantly black and brown shoes tended to have avoidant personalities, and taking stock of my black and brown shoes with resignation. What can you do? So I order sweaters and dresses that I’ll actually wear while lying around, and feel a little nicer lying around, and it works out rather well, most of the time.

And while the purchase of these clothes is motivated a hundred percent by personal vanity, they are plausibly practical: most of my old clothes are gone, and many no longer fit. You’ll always wear clothes. Still—there’s an issue.

***

How do you know how you look? You look in a mirror. Well, I have a mirror—one that shows my reflection from the waist up. But a full-length mirror—the kind that lets you really see how your clothes look—a useful thing to have, if your world has narrowed down to clothes—this, I do not have. Nor can I solve this dilemma by copping to my vanity and sneaking shame-faced, as I did as a teen, into my parents’ bathroom. They don’t have one now either. There isn’t one in the house. This is not, I should say, because of some ideological opposition to mirrors; my neuroticism about mirrors is entirely mine. There are plenty of mirrors. But there aren’t any built into this house, into which they recently moved, and they don’t feel the lack terribly much.

In my old life, full-length mirrors were not a problem, because people were always leaving them on the curb. Even when I smashed a mirror—you should believe all the stories about the consequences thereof, by the way—I found another one on the street just days later. But now, if I want a full-length mirror, I have to pay some amount of cold hard American cash for it. That is to say, I have to admit I want a mirror, which means admitting I want to look at my reflection in a mirror, and I have to go to the trouble of selecting a mirror to suit my needs (or wants, I suppose).

Like all vain people, I have a horror of seeming vain. And my vanity is the real thing. When people dab their faces with concealer, put on makeup, get some Botox, or thread their eyebrows, they’re confessing to a certain kind of humility. They could do with a little assistance, they’re saying. They’re making concessions. They do not think they are perfect just the way they are. But I don’t do any of this—I go about barefaced and let my eyebrows stay furry, not out of indifference, but because I like my face. That’s real vanity. It’s a misunderstood vice. So I am too vain, in fact, to admit that what I really want is not to check how I look, but just to look at myself; for my actual purposes, the bathroom mirror works perfectly well, particularly since I am rarely able to leave the house and thus never wear shoes.

A full-length mirror! Sometimes I think: No, I won’t pretend to be better than I am, I’ll take the plunge. I click around and add the cheapest one to my shopping cart. Then I see the future unfold before me: after an expenditure that would live in my records forever, I’d have to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Day by day I’d check its status. I’d worry that it would break. Upon its arrival, I’d probably need help maneuvering the package. To the inevitable comment that I’d purchased something large, I’d have to confess—yes, I have. A mirror. You know, in addition to the one I already have.

Oh, a mirror? says my interlocutor, who is no longer anybody I know but simply myself—not Alice but another self. This one’s a prosecutor; her name’s Simone. People are dying and you’ve bought a mirror? You could have given that money to a street urchin, but you bought a mirror? Standing on a chair to get a better look at yourself is just too hard for little old you, eh? Well, don’t let me interfere with your mirror. By the way, who made that mirror? Were you too cheap to get anything made in halfway decent labor conditions?

Click click click—the mirror comes out of the shopping cart. I purchase a book instead. Or maybe a sweater. Or shoes.

Would Alice buy a full-length mirror? That’s the trouble—I don’t know. She’d have one, obviously, but acquired through some mysterious means, maybe from a beautiful antique wardrobe, already intact. Or maybe she would buy one and set it up in some open area, smiling: “Darling, it’s simply courtesy to others just to give yourself a once-over in the mirror.” If I knew she’d buy one, then it wouldn’t be so fraught. My better self did it, so I will too.

A full-length mirror! What if I purchased one simply to prove that I didn’t have to look in it? It would be casually put in a corner, maybe with a sock hanging over it: Oh, a mirror? Yes, I suppose. I really forget it’s there, you know, I never use it. (My audience, sotto voce: And yet she’s always so well-dressed. And so brave!) With the mirror resolutely ignored, I would refine my vanity into something so much a vice as to be almost a virtue.

One thing’s for sure: if I had one, no matter what I did, it would bring everything to a resolution. I’d stop buying clothes. I would heal to become a better, stronger person than I was before I got sick. I’d never go back into the hospital. I would not require other people to pack up my apartment for  me. I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies, I would rise early and sleep well, I would shine with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and I would never let anybody down.

A full-length mirror! Suppose one did simply appear—a good mirror, generous. I would look at the woman looking back at me. Who would be me, who would be Alice—it would be an irrelevant problem, because in that moment, as she blinks and I blink, as our mouths curve together in identical smiles, we would be at peace, the real disappointment and the unreal paradigm. Deep, deep we’d go, Alice and I, until we’d emerge in some other world, a perfect and complete being at last.

B.D. McClay is an essayist and critic. She has written for Lapham’s Quarterly, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

Photograph by Sarah Miller.

My bathroom is ugly. My bathroom is so ugly that when I tell people my bathroom is ugly and they say it can’t be that ugly I always like to show it to them. Then they come into my bathroom and they are like, Holy shit. This bathroom is so ugly. And I say, I know, I told you.

Let me list the elements of my ugly bathroom: the sink has plastic handles and it’s impossible to clean behind the faucet. Or, you can clean behind it but it’s difficult, so it’s always grimy. The sink itself, the basin, is made of some sort of plastic material that probably used to be white and is now off-white.

The water pressure in the sink is almost nonexistent. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the sink itself but when your bathroom looks like this you don’t think, Oh wow, I really want to improve the water pressure, because bad water pressure goes with the decor.

The textured ceiling looks like a birthday cake that was frosted with canned white frosting by a person who hates whoever’s birthday it is.

The shower is maybe the worst part of the bathroom. When people come to visit us we have to tell them that the shower is disgusting and even then they cannot manage to remember not to look crestfallen when they see it. It too has fairly poor water pressure and is really tiny and the inside of it is cracked and the shelves in it are too small to fit bottles of shampoo and they are always falling down when you are taking a shower and if you have your eyes closed you think you are being attacked.

The floor is linoleum and cracked all around the edges.

I have left out the most important detail which is that this bathroom has redwood paneling that goes up to about four feet and then the rest of the bathroom is painted the same color as the ceiling. One tiny window looks out onto nothing. The curtain on it is the same curtain that was here when we used to rent this place. We lived here for a long time before we purchased it from the owners. It’s one of those two-part curtains that has a small shade across the top of the window and a smaller one that hangs below it. I can’t even tell you what it looks like, which should embarrass me, but I am always too tired to think about it.

I am glad that it is there because we used to live next door to this real asshole and I didn’t want him to see me naked for my sake, and we are about to live next door to some nice people and I don’t want them to see me naked either for their sakes.

We have a new kitchen. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you that I don’t really love our new kitchen. When I was growing up my parents never redid our kitchen. It wasn’t a very efficient space for cooking or hanging out in. It was annoying. I was like, You guys both have jobs, let’s fix up the damn kitchen.

I like having a beautiful kitchen that’s really easy to cook in. I appreciate the original placement of tiles that my partner did, which I consulted on, and I like how the garbage can pulls out  from under the counter and you can just sweep scraps into it, and I like having a dishwasher, which I have never had as an adult until just a few months ago and which has changed my life. So I don’t want to say I don’t take pleasure in comfort and beauty. But I want my shitty bathroom to stay the way it is.

I get so sick of everyone thinking that everything they use has to be nice. Can’t some stuff just be crappy? Why do we have to get rid of perfectly functional stuff just so that every corner of our vision can twinkle with magic and possibility?

I don’t think having an ugly bathroom makes me a good person. It just makes me someone who is able to feel satisfaction with one specific place that is far from perfect.

There is much that I want. Some of it would make people think I am shallow and self-serving, and some of it would make people think I am deep and caring and full of desperate hope. My bathtub is nice in the sense that it is large and porcelain. It is the bathroom’s best feature. When I am in this tub I can pretend that I don’t want anything at all, that I am perfectly satisfied. If the bathroom were nice, I would start thinking about all the things that aren’t. This sounds absurd, but as a very tense person, I know exactly what conditions can relax me. It is necessary for me to protect these conditions. I do not have a good job right now, so there is no present danger of the bathroom being renovated. But I will be vigilant when there is.

Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in California. She writes a Substack.

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. 

The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him.

It was not a good situation. The next morning, there was a large man in my apartment. It was the Fourth of July. The man was wearing a hazmat suit. He was going to do what he called a radical intervention re: the bugs. It involved a breakthrough in technology. He had come from New Jersey in a Sprinter van. He met us at an ATM on Newkirk Avenue so we could pay him in cash. My roommate tried to blame the whole thing on me. And why wouldn’t she? She had a nice boyfriend in medical school who liked to cook her dinner. I told her that she was insane, to make me pay for the whole thing. This was New York City. Nefarious individuals could have come into our home during the night and sprinkled the bedbugs on our sheets. We had to at least get the landlord involved. The landlord called us gullible idiots and then said she’d split it three ways because the exterminator we picked was too expensive. The man left our house. I still was not itchy. On the internet it said not everyone was allergic to bedbugs. I liked this fact: I was some kind of biological miracle? I did not want to spend any more time in the bedbug apartment so I went to my boyfriend’s DIY venue and poured a bottle of Bailey’s into an XL Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup, and then we took the subway to Far Rockaway. 

After a few weeks, the bedbugs were physically gone, but I continued to see them everywhere. In my clothes. In my backpack, which I had taken to ironing at least twice a day just to be safe. I had given them to everyone at Vogue, probably. There was this thing where my boyfriend told me that a woman he used to fuck also had gotten bedbugs, not long before we started dating. I started flipping over the mattress on his cot to inspect it every time he went to the bathroom after sex. I would crawl around on the floor completely naked, aiming my iPhone flashlight at the ground, like a coal miner. I was subsisting on a lot of Cool Blue Gatorade and really cheap Thai food. Around this time I was attacked by a cat in a bodega. It became clear to me that my boyfriend was probably addicted to smoking marijuana. I had basically stopped letting people into my apartment, including myself. 

I decided I was being punished, Old Testament–style. I would sit at my desk at work and think of how I had been affected by each of the biblical plagues:

(1) Water turning to blood: I had been menstruating for almost a decade at this point.
(2) Frogs: I had seen frogs in various ponds. 
(3) Lice: I had been spared from this one, so far.
(4) Flies: I am from upstate New York and they are always talking about black fly season there. I had personally experienced this—a swarm of them around my head in the High Peaks Wilderness.
(5) Livestock pestilence: I used to eat semi-rancid deli meat when depressed.
(6) Boils: To this day I am a hormonal acne sufferer.
(7) Hail: Again, from upstate New York. There is a joke among locals that is like, What are the seasons in upstate New York? Winter, winter, winter, roadwork. Ha ha ha.
(8) Darkness: Constant, neverending.
(9) Locusts: This was the bedbugs.
(10) Slaying of the firstborn: A false positive from a pregnancy test purchased at a pharmacy near the Jules Joffrin station in Paris. The father would’ve been this guy Antoine, who used to pick me up from school at La Sorbonne and then have sex with me while we watched music videos by the artist Micachu and the Shapes on the television in his apartment in Belleville. He was a decade older than me. He was one of the first people that I’d ever had sex with. If we’d had a daughter she would’ve been so pretty. 

By the start of the fall, I had completely lost my mind. It was comical. I started seeing a therapist and was swiftly diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. My boyfriend had made it clear to me that even though I loved him, he did not love me. I was tired of being punk. I was tired of walking around in a bikini as a shirt. It was all such a weird season. In January 2020, after a long breakup—far overdue—I moved to a small but stunning apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone. There were no bedbugs there. My new roommates were nice. I pushed my bed into a corner and sat on the fire escape and drank wine out of a mug. The plagues were over (or so I thought). A few months later, I realized that all my clothes were infested with moths. 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published non-fiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.