Calamity and Other Stories Read Free Page B

bridge. She arrived late for her classes and— because she wasn’t supposed to carry anything—without books, notepads, or pens. Sometimes she borrowed pencils and paper to take notes that she then tossed into trash bins, since she couldn’t carry them home. It didn’t matter; she had a photographic memory. That was how she had graduated at the top of her class at Bryn Mawr.
    Amazing, Annie had thought as she stood there across from Ben on the warm, littered sidewalk. Amazing that she could now be thinner and happier than she had been when she was thirty, stronger and more confident than when she was twenty-five. Perhaps because he was a full thirteen years older than Annie, Ben had always treated her with a certain authoritative judgment, and even as he stood there on Bleecker Street, he did that thing he always did, letting his eyes quickly scan her, head to toe, giving an approving nod. Eight years ago she would have found it annoying, offensive even, but now that she no longer had to admit to the public that he was hers, it was simply flattering. Annie could be a liberated woman and still accept compliments from an asshole like Ben. It had taken her—and so many women—all of the 1970s to figure that out.
    Ben looked basically the same as before, with a firm build and healthy tan, though his face was older, almost dignified. He had wrinkles in places Annie didn’t usually think of as wrinkling: at the tops of his cheeks, and across his nose when he smiled, which he was right now. When he cocked his head, the afternoon sun highlighted where the skin between his ear and neck sagged. Annie wondered what changes the sun revealed about her. All she knew was that it felt wonderful on her bare shoulders, on her scalp, heat being absorbed through her dark hair, her dark jeans. The tube top hugged her lovingly.
    Ben said that he was in town for just two days, since he lived in Chicago now, had for the past four years. He told Annie things that she didn’t even hear; she was busy being amused by the fact that she had once believed—truly believed—that she would be with this person for the rest of her life.
    They proceeded into a bar with windows that opened out onto the street. While panhandlers and drug dealers did their business a few yards away, Annie and Ben had three margaritas each, since summer was finally here and it was that kind of evening—especially in the city, where June was really the only truly enjoyable month of the season. Then Ben offered to walk her home and, when she told him she had moved back to Brooklyn, asked if he could “see” her “place.” They both knew what that meant, and so Annie broke another of Caleb Crantz’s edicts and, taking Ben with her, rode the subway home.
    Though she’d had sex with him many, many times before, doing so yet again made clear to her that even a photographic memory could not fully recall a person’s body, or the things he liked, or the way the parts of him worked, or any of the important information, really. She had to figure things out all over again, and so the episode was something of an ordeal and hardly satisfactory. And now she had to lie here on the still-moist sheets and listen to him bellowing a Hall and Oates song in her shower.
    Well, she reasoned to herself, pulling the sheet up across her waist, the last time we did this I was a completely different person. Back then I was angry all the time. I barely had my own life. Now I have a job I like and a schedule that suits my needs. I’m studying for a Ph.D. I have my own runty little apartment, without a roommate, without a husband (without proper heating or insulation—but that was another issue). Back then I’d never slept with anyone else; now I know what all is out there.
    She had made it through those first awkward throes of women’s liberation, survived the confusion and the fury. This was a new decade. Annie placed a pillow behind her neck and gave the curls of her perm an encouraging