IT’S FIVE DEGREES so I wear two pairs of tights and two shirts and a jacket that my mother bought me for Christmas that smells because I wear it almost every day. I wear a headband and gloves. There’s a hole in the index finger of my right glove and though every other part of me is covered up and warm my finger is raw and splotched and I have no feeling in my hand when I get home.
My husband slips in the shower as I stand underneath the spray, cold skin prickling with each drop of heat, my legs and arms bright red. I make a fist and then unfist it over and over, trying to get the feeling back. My husband pulls back the curtain and I have to step out from underneath the warmth to let him in. I put my hand along his back and he gasps and snaps at me and we both shampoo and condition and scrub our arms and legs and faces without speaking, without touching, until we’re out and dry and dressed.
At work, a woman whom I’ve always liked but don’t really speak to is putting on lipstick in the employee bathroom. How are you? I say, and her eyes angle toward her lipstick and she says, I’m hoping this will pick me up.
Will you teach me? I say, unable, it seems, just to smile. I blame my mother, I think, for my inability to not always try in some way to make conversation out of quiet. I point to her bag. Those bags remain one of the great mysteries of my life, I say.
She laughs.
You don’t need it, she says. She is younger than me, just like every other person who works here, and she is also trying to be nice.
I smile at her and shake my head. My poor daughters, I say.
I leave after the last class I teach with the twenty-four-year-old, in which he gives a fifteen-minute speech about Brita filters as a metaphor for making edits on one’s papers. Clarity, he says, and purity. The kids’ eyes glaze over and I catch a girl in the back playing pool on her phone but I pretend that I don’t see her and as soon as class is over I grab my bag and coat and take the escalator steps two at a time.
I keep checking my phone as I walk down Broadway, thinking Sasha might call or text me back. I don’t want her to call me. I use the magic credit card to get more gummy candy from the CVS and one of those tubes of goop meant to put underneath one’s eyes and walk over the Brooklyn Bridge—though I usually reserve the bridge for running—and the last three miles to our apartment as it gets dark and my ears are very cold.
2
IT SNOWED, THEN rained, and now ice has frozen on the sidewalks. I sit up in bed, scrolling through my phone and thinking myself through the pros and cons of going running. I won’t be able to breathe at work if I don’t go running. If I fall and break something, I won’t be able to breathe for months. I put on two pairs of tights and two shirts—one fleece and one thin insulate, both long-sleeved—and the padded jacket my mom got me that still smells. I put the band around my head and I put on my gloves, still with the single hole, and I pull a fleece tube around my neck so I can yank it up to just below my eyes in the moment when I start to lose feeling in my nose and lips. I run in the middle of the road so I won’t slip, as the sidewalks are still slick with ice and piles of snow, and cars drive slowly past the few times they drive past. I see one other person running, a woman, older than me, slowly climbing through the snow piled on the sidewalk, taking off.
At lunch, at work, my co–homeroom teacher shows me a YouTube video of a black woman prepping a wig and placing it, firmly, on her head. She cuts the hair and shapes it as it sits on a mannequin in front of her. She colors the scalp to match her skin tone with what looks like chalk but my co–homeroom teacher says is not. Her hair is held against her head in small tight braids and she slips the wig overtop and shifts it back, then right, then left until it sits perfectly on her head.
You do that every day? I say, setting down her phone, as she eats the mozzarella sticks that come with French fries that they serve on Tuesdays, neither of which I can quite bring myself to eat.
My friend laughs at me. I stay mostly quiet because I do not want her to stop telling me things like she did this morning: out of nowhere, holding my arm and whispering to me, as the kids filed into the classroom and we sipped our third cups of coffee, You know my hair’s a wig.
I did not, I said.
Now she shows me this clip and then another, a different woman, a different
