An Evanescence

by Kimberly Crowley

It was one of those salmon and grey sunsets—the kind of hideous color combination seen in the bathrooms of those one-owner small-town homes advertised on the For Sale By Owner website since “The Boom’’ slacked and the flippers got desperate. Ellen rose from her knees and sighed, picking up the garden hoe. Sunsets were ineffably distressing for her. No matter how blazingly scarlet-orange or how subtly mauve-pink, no matter how they highlighted the buttes behind her house, they tried her patience, reminding her of how much was left undone. They clapped the day shut as finally as a cover seals a jar. As she stood up and stretched her neck to release the muscles she’d pinched working in the garden, she shivered and noted how much she still had to accomplish there. The evening chill was descending, and she could see the fog settling in on the grasslands to the north of the small barn, like smoke in reverse—steadily increasing, more and more visible as it writhed into the air. Ellen wended her way through the zucchini plants and the beets to the weathered chicken-coop-cum-toolshed built by some previous owner of the property generations ago. She leaned the hoe against the wall of the shed and sat on its aged stone threshold. She tossed her work gloves at her feet in a gesture of surrender.

Ellen leaned against the jamb, feeling its splinters on her back. She closed her eyes and let the chill sink in. Abruptly she twitched, flicking a boxelder bug off her hand. It tumbled over the cold slab threshold and, as all primeval creatures do, righted itself and continued on. Mesmerized, Ellen watched the tiny black and orange shell as it continued climbing ceaselessly over all the twigs and leaves she put in its way. She closed her eyes for a second and felt herself sliding back into last week, into her social persona, reflecting on how often she was prone to move mindlessly toward her destination, just like the leggy little being in front of her.

The party the previous Saturday had been crowded. Ellen found herself wedged between a man she didn’t recognize and Tammy, a woman from a book group Ellen sometimes took part in, at the buffet. Ellen was pretending to be interested in the fruit salad everyone was oohing over. Having exhausted the banalities she found so difficult to sustain, Ellen welcomed the appearance of Mona, another part of the same group of casual friends, carrying a cake redolent with cinnamon.

“Oh, I just love that cake,” Ellen gushed appreciatively, thankful for something to talk about.

“What? Have you had this before?” Mona asked, with sudden bird-like attentiveness. Her geometric earrings, an Island Park find from a Fargo girls’ weekend she loved to recount after a couple glasses of wine, swung and glittered as she cocked her head, waiting for Ellen’s reply.

“Yes, at your house. It was delicious,” Ellen vowed.

“But I’ve only made this once before. Tammy, you were there for dinner. Remember? We had to eat early to get to the movie on time and that stupid oven gave out, so we had salad and cheese.”

Tammy laughed. “But we devoured your cake. It really was the saving grace!”

“And you were there?” Mona quizzed gently, as if this simple elaboration would convince Ellen she was not present after all.

Ellen felt her throat tighten and quite inexplicably her eyes began to brim. “Yes, I sat next to Sarah,” she replied radiantly, a half beat too fast. “There were black olives in the salad, and we missed the previews at the movie,” she babbled, like a criminal confessing in a plea deal, providing details only she and the police would know.

“Oh, sure,” Mona smiled unconvincingly. “It’s been a while. Hey, we’re having another book group meeting this month. Ellen. You’ve got to come!”

Tammy quickly chimed in, “Of course you do! It’ll be fun—we’ll have dinner, some wine--it’ll be fun,” she reiterated awkwardly.

“Sure. Sounds great,” Ellen replied with as much conviction as she could muster. She smiled and turned to find a getaway, balancing her plate and cursing the fact that her eyes stung with tears.

Ellen sighed again, remembering that conversation. Now she could laugh morosely at it. The movie night Mona and Tammy were talking about was the first one Ellen had shown up at without her husband. Funny how quickly the divorcee becomes invisible, she thought wryly. Mona had been with her partner, Sharon, for almost 20 years. Tammy was divorced, but she had the social sense to quickly remarry. They were all part of a group of about eight couples who got together regularly for dinner parties, movies, and the occasional play at the college or concert at the Capitol. When she and her husband split, Ellen was awash in reassurances that she was still welcome even if the rest of the group consisted of couples. Her husband had been the lynchpin. He knew the group because they’d all grown up in neighboring small towns near Grand Forks. Ellen was an immigrant from the lakes country of Minnesota. While no one had ever made her feel actually unwelcome, she often felt like she wasn’t fluent in the lingua franca of the group. Gamely, she continued on, hoping she would somehow catch on.

Even before her divorce, Ellen had embarked on a quest of self-examination, which she quickly realized was ill-advised. One facet of that effort had been plumbing the past for insight into her relationships, romantic and otherwise. Her interactions with other people, the purely social ones, still puzzled her. This group of couples, for instance. She didn’t actively dislike any of them, but she also felt no real connection to anyone in the group, even after a decade of participation. Yet she had dutifully attended the monthly get-togethers, bringing an appropriately gourmet dish when required, and taking part in the post-movie (or book or play or game) discussions over aperitifs. When she got home, she inevitably felt as if there had been an inside joke she had not been in on; simultaneously she realized she was being overly sensitive and that her suspicion was probably unfounded. Not that the group had perpetrated any sort of fraud—Ellen realized it was more about her own reticence to engage. When faced with more than two or three people, her instinct was to become an observer rather than participant. She would dutifully follow along with the conversation going on around her and attempt a witticism or pithy observation, but even to her they came out a pulse too fast or too slow or, worse yet, she would blurt out an obscure reference and talk would halt while everyone waited politely for her to explain what she meant. Despite the self-imposed obstacles, she forged on, attending when asked and feigning a feeling of belonging. At least attending them with her husband had given her a familiar foil; going alone felt like the surviving member of a musical duo trying to sing both parts.

Ellen dolefully came back to the present. By now her boxelder bug had marched nearly out of reach. She grabbed the hoe, deflecting the dark little bug’s path with the blade. It climbed onto the stick she extended, walking round and round as she turned it like a treadmill. Ellen, bemused at this little creature’s stupidity, laughed out loud at herself, thinking of her own stupidity. She should give up on the Mona and Tammy style social events; Ellen was not a social creature, and her discomfiture at those sorts of things was like a chronic illness. Since the separation and divorce, she usually left them convinced people felt sorry for her, which was endlessly irritating. Worse yet, that irritation usually arose from the fact that she couldn’t quite decide who was right—them for feeling sorry for her or her for thinking they shouldn’t. Still, just like the boxelder bug, she kept on.

The night fog was thickening, by turns wafting pockets of clammy dampness and breathy warmth around her as it settled over the purple tall grass. Ellen wondered about this captive boxelder bug—did it know of daybreak and nightfall, warmth and cold, want and need? Of course, she concluded, but only by nature—a tiny, barely sentient prisoner of instinct. Ellen gazed into the hazy strata and stretched her right arm absently as another flashback rose like the fog.

She had been hosting the semi-regular meeting of the Book Club. The women were well into their third drinks, and the obligatory mention of the book had been dispensed of, which meant the conversation had turned personal. Of the five women attending that night, Mona was in a longterm relationship, Sarah and Tammy were married, Melanie was dating and hoping for an engagement ring, and Ellen was divorced. The married women were hungry for opportunities of vicarious escapades; Melanie was happy to provide the semi-salacious stories that gave them those opportunities, but Ellen was circumspect about sharing.

“Ellen, have you set up an account on match.com yet?” Melanie asked scoldingly.

Ellen exhaled carefully. “Mel, I told you,” she looked a warning shot at the other women, “I’m not going to do online dating.”

“But El, you’re never going to find a man out here in the middle of nowhere,” Sarah reminded her.

Ellen decided not to get angry; her friends only wanted the best for her, and to them that meant being part of a couple. Encountering a single person with no desire to be part of the mainstream of coupledom was an anomaly for her married and dating friends. Their unease made Ellen uncomfortable. She tried to reassure them; “I’m just not ready yet. When I’m ready, I’ll tell you and you can trot me out to all your single friends, okay? Just give me some time.”

Sarah chimed in, “I already have three guys in mind, and Neil has been asking me if I think you’d be interested in this guy he works with, so don’t you worry—we’ll get you set up!”

This seemed to mollify the other women, who were also ready with their offerings of male pulchritude. They toasted to Ellen’s eventual re-entry into the fold and asked her if it was time to eat. It was always a relief for Ellen to host the evening, since that meant she was able to remove herself from the discussions in the living room to fulfill some duty in another room. At the last meeting, as she sought shelter in the kitchen while staging a noisy search for a serving spoon, Ellen carefully measured one shot of Pendleton and poured it into her glass, then poured in the caffeine-free Diet Coke, stirring it with one of the big silver spoons from her great-grandmother’s silver service. Frowning, she poured another healthy, and unmeasured, dose of bourbon into the glass and stirred it again. In the living room, she could hear part of Sarah’s story about her tenth anniversary trip to the Turks and Caicos.

Her reverie was interrupted by another shiver. Summer was giving way to fall, and the fog coming up around her yard moved with purpose. In warmer times of year, it drifted lazily, weighted down with the humidity of the season. Ellen looked down from the fog to the boxelder bug. It was still making its way up the stick she held in her hand. No matter how she maneuvered the stick the bug adjusted, recalibrating its path. Ellen smiled mirthlessly as she moved the stick at awkward angles, watching the creature change its path, even as it headed for the same inevitable destination. She watched disinterestedly as it suddenly fell off the stick, stunned for a moment by the impact of hitting the hard earth. Idly, Ellen wondered if it realized what a sea change it had just experienced.

Ellen noted again the similarities between her and the boxelder bug, despite her dismissal of the tiny creature. She pondered her own sea change and how it had stunned her. After leaving her husband and their house, she had the great fortune to run across an old farmstead outside of town that was being sold for $38,000. Pouncing on it, she enlisted her father to help her renovate it. It was a fraction of the size of the house she and her husband had built, but she loved it largely for that very reason. She thought absently about how much work she had put into the marital house, both in its construction and its upkeep. Most of the upkeep came in the form of making everything look perfect— including the relationship that was crumbling inside the composite clapboard and synthetic fieldstone structure.

The boxelder bug had righted itself and once again found its way to Ellen’s lowered hand, crawling across it toward the fine brown hair on her forearm. She let it continue its course, across the left, onto the right. Bored with the insect’s relentlessness, she intervened once more, had it crawl over her left hand then over her right, repeating the maneuver over and over. Watching this miserable speck, Ellen felt a hardening in her as if something as yet unformed had turned to stone, and from it emanated a chill as penetrating as any the evening could muster. Ellen answered it. Cupping her hand, she picked up the bug and held it between her thumb and forefinger, neatly severing the head with her thumbnail. She watched the body move in slow motion, as one responding to a yawn. Then it lay still. Ellen gathered her gloves and hat, whistled for her Golden Retriever Clyde, and walked solemnly toward the house, the soft light from the kitchen diffused by the blurring fog.

When she and Clyde got into the house, Ellen padded over to the stove to warm up the morning’s leftover coffee for spiking. As she poured the creamy liqueur into the dark coffee in the stout ceramic cup, she thought about how her Austrian grandmother used to add heavy cream to her coffee, her gnarled hands holding the china creamer daintily as Ellen watched the whorls of white come to the surface of the blackness. Grandma Alice had taught her how to make good coffee, “Not that silly Mr. Coffee piss water your mother makes,” and she taught Ellen how to garden. Ellen looked at her own hands and thought of how foolish Grandma Alice would consider this evening’s mooning about. The kind of work Alice had to do around the farm, with five kids and no running water, crowded out any options for self-pity. Under her tutelage, Ellen learned how to make just about anything grow, as well as how to can and pickle her harvest. She felt more at home in the garden than anywhere else; working in it usually reenergized her, but tonight she felt oddly bereft. She sat down heavily in her favorite chair while Clyde stretched out on the couch. She took a sip of her coffee, swirling it absently in the mug, watching the liquid approach the top of the mug and recede. Ellen thought about the bug, feeling a surprising pang of remorse for her role in its demise. Taking another sip of coffee, she looked out the picture window at the fog that continued to form in the backyard.

Ellen levered herself up from the chair, stretching to address the stiffness that lingered from her work in the garden, and asked Clyde if he wanted to go outside. She threw open the French door, letting the cold air startle her one more time. She watched Clyde make his usual rounds, wondering what made him stand stock-still, head cocked, for a full minute before breaking hold and marking her hastas one last time for this day. After scanning the tree line that surrounded his back yard, he looked toward the door, saw Ellen watching him, and started his elderly gambol back to her and the house. Ellen thought absently about her own inexplicable actions, not so different than those of the ceaselessly toiling boxelder bug or Clyde’s homing instincts as he brushed past her and posted himself by the pantry door to wait for his treat.

Following Clyde up the staircase to the bedroom, Ellen pulled her sweater over her head and tossed it laconically at the hamper in the bathroom. It didn’t land squarely; one arm hung insolently over the side. She looked at it and fought her instinct to walk over and place the sweater neatly inside the wicker basket. Ellen crawled into her bed, wondering how many of the friends who so desperately wanted her to share it with someone secretly craved to sleep singly themselves. The aging blond retriever raised his head from her pillow and gave her a sympathetic look before exhaling noisily, repositioning himself, and settling into sleep.

KIM CROWLEY is an Associate Professor of English at Bismarck State College. Her favorite ways to experience all that is North Dakota are from inside a pair of hiking boots, atop a trail bike, and on the back of a motorcycle. She credits her father, a city kid who moved to small-town North Dakota and never went back, with instilling in her a true understanding of the importance of place.