She googles cumin and sweat, scans comments on various forums, people expressing puzzlement at each other. Nothing scientific.
The lights in the restaurant are buzzing at the usual 60 hz, between B-flat and B-natural. The tires of the last bus at cruising speed on asphalt were mostly A-flat, while the concrete of the bridges brought out the harmonic at E-flat. Household timers and alarms all use a chip that emits a high B-natural, about 2000 hz, which is curiously close to, but not exactly, a multiple of 60. For some reason most trucks back up beeping either C-sharp or D-sharp. She tries not to notice these things, because once she does, she can’t get the pitch out of her head. She might start humming, and then people will side-eye her instead of minding their own business, and anyway it’s so fucking classic, isn’t it?
She eats her saag and poori, rotely writing down doublings of 60.
Is she humming?
She stops.
She, she, she! Hey everybody, I’m a girl! You can’t see what I have between my legs, but you know it’s there!
Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish use gender-neutral pronouns. Truth be told, she kind of dislikes the use of “they,” since it gets confused with the plural. She likes the Turkish terms, o and ona. O goes on a date with ona. O runs screaming from ona.
There’s a sentence in Wishner that has stuck in her head ever since she read it a decade ago. “Pumpkinseed excavated a simple burrow and failed to reappear from it in the spring.”
She returns to the station, gets early in line for the new bus, boards. Witching hours are over, the bus is nearly full. After everyone has settled, four empty seats remain, one of them next to her.
To excavate a simple burrow and simply—
The bus takes off, a mere five minutes late. It retraces her path to the Indian restaurant—a small man and bundled child entering through the door at this very moment—then turns west toward I-90. Ramp, river of humanity.
In the cold night she let Alex turn her to the right, and it turned out that Alex lives in a spacious upscale apartment, filled with things that are probably beautiful and probably expensive. Alex probably makes good money, but Alex’s family must have money, too. She had just enough time to register this, sitting on the ample couch and taking her first sip of the cognac Alex poured, before they came at her, kissing and fondling. She tried to fight down her panic and Alex seemed to want to help, repeating, “Relax.” She had previously been coaxed into removing her sweater along with her anorak (the apartment was warm) and now they were unbuttoning her shirt while kissing her neck. They still were wearing one of their baseball caps, the purple one, the bill reversed so that their mouth could get at her, and a phrase came to her, Alex is batting a thousand. An image also came—her naked and supine on the couch, Alex still clothed on top of her, her gender obscenely revealed while Alex’s was still mysterious. Was she supposed to think in those terms? Was it only mysterious if one was still stuck on binary ideas? She doubted herself in every way. Maybe all dates went like this. How else could sex happen, unless clothing was removed? Was agreeing to have a date the same as agreeing to have sex? Her shirt was open now and Alex was murmuring approval of her unshaved armpits as they nosed there.
“I’m . . . um . . .” she said.
“It’s all right,” Alex said, their nose zigzagging down her stomach, something tugging at her pants’ zipper, which must be their fingers, though she couldn’t see past the purple cap, so maybe it was their teeth. Alex is swinging for the fences.
She found strength in logic. It couldn’t be all right, because one of them was distressed. “No, please.” She sat up, closing her shirt around her.
“Am I going too fast?” Alex asked. Their adorable freckles, their snub nose, their large wondering gray eyes. Her unshaved armpits, her unshaved legs. Was that weird? Why else would Alex comment? How clean was she supposed to be? What was she supposed to want?
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m just so attracted to you.”
She put Alex in a mood.
Alex got up to get more cognac. They lit a candle on the coffee table. Alex sat crosslegged on the couch facing her. They talked about conservative parents in Chicago, a dyke sister. They asked about her family. She mentioned the mother at home, the father in cyberspace.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What about them? What’s their deal?”
“They’re fine.”
“That’s all?”
“I have no complaints.”
“You’re a woman of mystery.”
Alex went back to talking about their family. Father, banker, mother, homemaker. Christian. Heartbrokenly loving the sinners they’d birthed, praying for them. Then Alex talked about work colleagues, and she added a comment, and the two of them laughed about a couple of things, and she gradually relaxed, as Alex had suggested all along that she do. Alex stroked her hand and that was nice, then kissed her gently and that was okay, and then their hands were everywhere again and buttons were back to springing open. Spring season.
She popped off the couch.
“What’s the matter?” Alex asked, as she retrieved her sweater and anorak, pulled on her shitkickers. “I’m sorry,” they repeated. “I’ve been misreading.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
She fled down the stairs, she scurried north through dark streets.
Was she a freak?
Alex’s single-mindedness—was it right to call it that? The direction. The goal. The whole point. So then, the humor the two of them shared, the programming issues discussed, the talents admired, the considerateness, the coffee, the expressed interest in past and family and feelings—was all of that a ruse?
Was she wrong?
Don’t understand me too quickly. Did Alex want to understand her at all? Did nothing matter but a momentary paroxysm? As though the only reason they were interested in programming was to make the computer explode. Or the
