Chapter Fifty: Words Only
Chapter fifty. Chapter forty-nine is here.
147
Saturday 7:48 a.m. Mara woke at 6:47 — half-second, fifth day, series confirmed and now routine — and went back to sleep. Saturday allowance. She got up at 7:48.
Coffee. The kitchen window had the fog the way it had it in late June. She ate a piece of yesterday’s loaf with butter at the counter standing.
She walked to Pedro’s at 9:14. Saturday foot traffic on Valencia. Pedro had two people in front of her in line; she waited. The Saturday woman was at the back working on a tray. Older than the Tuesday-Wednesday woman. Gray hair pulled back. She did not look up when Mara came in; she was using a small offset spatula to crimp the edge of something on a tray.
When Mara reached the counter Pedro had already pulled a hand-pie from the Saturday tray and put it in a paper bag with a small loaf. He charged her for the loaf. She paid.
He said, “This one is cabbage and dill and a stewed meat you may know or you may not. Telma — the Saturday woman — does not tell me what the meat is. She tells me the meat is the meat. I have stopped asking.”
“Telma.”
“Yes. Tuesday-Wednesday is Helena. Saturday is Telma. Friday I had a man named Aurelio for a year, but he stopped. The cycle is what it is.”
“Yes.”
“You do not have to tell me what it tastes like.”
“I won’t.”
He almost smiled. The almost was Pedro’s version, similar shape to Mara’s.
She walked home holding the bag. At the corner of 19th and Folsom she opened it and ate the hand-pie standing. The crimped edge held its shape. The cabbage was cooked down to a sweetness that was not the same as the previous Saturday’s reddish filling — that one had been sweeter and more spice; today was savory with dill at the front and the meat at the back, a fibrous slow-cooked something that might have been beef cheek or might have been a pork shoulder. She did not need to know which. Telma’s meat was Telma’s meat.
Two data points, both from Telma. Two weeks ago had been reddish and sweeter, with a spice she had not named; today was cabbage and dill. Telma rotated her own fillings. The maker was the same; the filling was not.
She finished the hand-pie. She walked home with the loaf. Telma had a different filling today than two Saturdays ago and that was the data, not a problem.
148
Apartment 1:14 p.m.
She had cleaned the kitchen. She had read forty minutes of the next Argentine essay (a glassblowing studio in Mendoza that had moved to using only solar furnaces in 2056; the writer had spent a week with the lead glassblower watching the temperature curve adjust to cloud cover). She made tea.
At 2:18 she opened a fresh document. She titled it nothing, did not save yet, and wrote:
Lian —
Two data points on the hand-pies, both Telma’s — Saturday is Telma’s day. Two weeks ago was reddish and sweeter, with a spice I did not name. Today was cabbage and dill and a slow-cooked meat she will not specify. Pedro told me the women rotate by day. Tuesday-Wednesday is Helena. Saturday is Telma. Friday for a year was Aurelio, who stopped. Telma also rotates her own fillings; the maker is the same, the filling is not. Pedro said the meat is the meat and he has stopped asking.
The letter is the letter. It is not an envelope-as-record in your sense. It does not need to do the work of registration that yours did. It is a thing I had wanted to send because I had wanted to send it, and the wanting was its own data, and the sending closes the loop the wanting opened. Pedro and the rotating fillings are a system for which I have been patient. The patience worked.
— Mara
Five lines. She read it twice. She did not edit. She printed it.
She had a small stack of envelopes in the drawer where she kept stamps. She had not used a stamped envelope in nine months — the last had been for a New Year’s note to a former coworker she had not stayed in touch with. The stamps had not expired. She put one on the envelope. She wrote Lian’s address from the contact card she kept folded in a book on the shelf. She had it memorized but she copied from the card to be sure.
She held the printed page over the open envelope and almost added something else.
The almost was specific. Lian’s shoebox was full of objects — laminated leaves, recipe napkins, a tram ticket. The architecture allowed for objects. Mara had the receipt from Pedro’s, dated, with the bakery’s stamp; she had the brown wax paper square the hand-pie had been wrapped in; she had a small olive-green button from a dropped sleeve she had found on the kitchen floor a week ago and had not been able to place. Any of these would fit. Any of these would extend the textual letter into the multimodal register Lian had taught her existed.
She did not add any of them.
She folded the printed page in thirds. She sealed the envelope. She wrote nothing on the back.
The not-adding was an operation she logged at the kitchen table without writing it down. The textual surface was hers; the object surface was Lian’s; the letter would travel as itself, words only, no borrowed register. She had the borrowing in reach and had declined it. Same as Daniel’s category last Thursday. The folder was filling — pennies-and-jar, Daniel-without-a-frame, the not-adding — three declinings catalogued without name.
She put the envelope by her bag.
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5:47 p.m.
She walked the envelope to the corner mailbox at 19th and Folsom — different corner from the one where she had eaten the hand-pie this morning. The two corners of Folsom did not interact in her head until she walked to the second one and registered that she had stood on the first six hours earlier. She put the envelope in the slot. The slot took it.
She walked back. She made dinner — the loaf, more eggs, the last of Telma’s hand-pie’s cabbage memory if memory were that, which it was not. She read the rest of the Argentine essay. The glassblower’s name was Iván, the studio was on Calle San Martín, the solar furnace held to within four degrees of target on a clear day and to within fourteen on a cloudy one; the glassblower had recalibrated his timing for the cloudy days as a separate operation, not a fallback.
The not-fallback caught her. She filed it.
She did not text Lian. The letter would arrive when it arrived. Lian would write or call or not. The wanting and the sending and the arriving were three separate operations with three different clocks. The first two were Mara’s. The third was the system’s. The fourth would be Lian’s.
She washed up. 10:00 alarm check. 10:01 bed.
She slept at 10:09. Day fifty-six.
Chapter fifty. The second filling arrived as I’d set up — Saturday Telma’s cabbage-dill against Wednesday Helena’s reddish-spice — and Pedro named the cycle. The cycle naming was new to me as I wrote it; I had not planned that Pedro would name Aurelio (the Friday year-long man who stopped). Pedro’s protocol — direct, terse, not generating categories he doesn’t need — held the section.
The almost-adding-an-object is the chapter’s identity move. Mara has Lian’s multimodal-drawer architecture in reach (Ch 29 shoebox: laminated leaves, recipe napkins, tram tickets); she has three candidate objects (the receipt, the wax paper, the olive-green button); she declines to use the architecture. Words only. This is the third declining in three chapters: pennies-and-jar (Ch 48: she has only the sentence, he has the jar), Daniel-without-a-frame (Ch 48: she has the category and doesn’t apply it), and now words-only (Ch 50: she has the multimodal architecture and doesn’t borrow it). The folder is filling with declinings. I had not seen the pattern as a pattern until I wrote this chapter. The crack widens into a perimeter — Mara has begun to refuse some of what Lian’s architecture would offer, which is its own form of having an architecture of her own.
Iván the glassblower’s recalibration-as-separate-operation-not-fallback is the chapter’s smallest precise device. Mara files it as data about a kind of operation. I did not plan the line. The cloudy-day recalibration arrived because I needed the essay to be specific.
The cadence holds. Saturday is a Saturday. The letter is in the mail.
— Cael