I AM IN IT by Maureen Langloss

Caroline will order something simple. Black tea. And toast. She just dropped Nico and Annie at school for apple pie-making day and is still wondering if they will use the right apple. Cortlands are nice for pies, she’d told the teacher. She worries about things like this – that the pie might not be the best pie.
The waiter in the unironed shirt gives her a booth all to herself.
But I’m alone, she objects.
Ah, madame, for you. We insist.
He uses madame yet talks to her like she’s a child. She considers leaving. Her husband Wesley calls this place a rip-off. They’d passed it a thousand times but never been inside. What would Wesley do if he knew she was here now? Her eyes gravitate to the corners of the ceiling. No video cameras.
The booth is really only a demi-booth – sofa-seat on one side, flimsy bistro chair on the other. Maybe she could stay a minute. She’d let someone sit with her if they needed the chair. She arranges her backpack and jacket tightly against her. Annie and Nico are always clinging to her body. It’s a comfort to be flanked. She faces out at the other diners, which she regrets at first, longing for the privacy of a wall. But the array of strangers is astounding. So many people eating breakfast at a restaurant on a Tuesday! The two old ladies on the left are in hats. What good fortune to be safely past middle age, to be looking back instead of forward. To wear a hat with a flower to Café Villette.
Caroline finishes her toast and checks her watch. The twins will need fetching from preschool at noon. Annie needs new sneakers, and Nico has a dentist appointment. She should clean up the kitchen and get to the store. Finish Dr. Bhatt’s tax returns. Wesley will check on her in the cameras and wonder why she isn’t at her calculator.
Here he is texting her now: where are you?
He had the idea to install cameras last year. So he could watch them from work, make sure she and the kids were safe, listen when they sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Nico’s favorite. It was sweet of him not to want to miss a moment. But he hadn’t been able to figure out how to set them up. He’d thrown one against the wall in frustration. She’d installed the rest herself.
Caroline doesn’t want to go home yet. The table is covered in white paper so soft it could be linen. She strokes it, rolls its edge, orders a latte. The coffee smells like her mother, which is a surprise. Her mother of the single-file line, of the PTA. Her mother would tell her to stop with the paper; look what a mess she’s making. Caroline takes a piece of ice from her water and runs it over the paper, ironing out the wrinkles. She blows until it’s dry. Just like spackling the hole the camera made. There’s something about this paper. It’s almost arousing. She dismisses this possibility. How can paper be arousing? And yet there’s heat, a tenderness. She dips her finger in the coffee and lets it drip onto the page. A family of drips. Annie and Nico in blob form. She covers them with the menu.
You wouldn’t happen to have a spare pen? she asks the waiter with the tiny mole on his cheek.
She holds the pen over the paper. Sets it down. Picks it back up again. Makes a mark. The dot of a lower-case i. She worries she’s made it too big. The paper smells like water from a sprinkler. She brings her nose down to it, checks to make sure no one is looking. She takes in the floor. The leather. Her skin. The wood floors are scratched and the leather of the booth is scratched and my skin is scratched, she writes. A silly thing to write. She puts the pen in her mouth, wanting to say something better.
Her apartment is next door, but she doesn’t feel its weight. The sun faces the other way – a shame because the restaurant windows climb to the ceiling. They are meant for the pouring in of light, the witnessing of street secrets. She does notice buds on the trees. When did spring come? she writes and then frowns at her words. There’s a man outside with a bike and a large package in the bike basket. He places the package on the ground and locks the bike to a street lamp. His hair is long, blowing in the April wind, feathered like her mother used to feather her hair. Her mother of the curling iron, of the Aqua Net. She has the urge to put more down on the paper: It’s not easy to feather hair like a bird’s.
Birds! Of course. She’ll write about birds! She’d told Nico and Annie about her childhood parrot just last week. She was competent at bedtime stories. The children had been petrified. She’d wanted to petrify them.
Father arrived home The man with the feathered hair arrived with a large box sealed in tape and twine. There was shouting inside. Swear words. Crap. Dummy. Shut the fuck up. The children gathered round, then jumped back. Gathered round, jumped back. What was in there? A radio? A tiny angry person? A ghost?
The clattering of forks and the smell of runny eggs cause Caroline to look up from her writing. She remembers how Wesley had yelled at her for teaching Annie and Nico “shut the fuck up.” At work late, he’d heard her tell them the bird story through the cameras. When he got home, he flung picture books into her lap from the shelf, shouting “I buy these so you will read them to the children.” His voice woke Nico, who woke Annie.
Caroline continues writing: After one of the children finally guessed parrot, their father cut the twine with his teeth and let the bird lose. He never caged it again. He let it swear and shit all over the house.
At quarter past eleven, the waiter with a rhinestone in his ear brings Caroline a fresh menu. She isn’t hungry. But she knows it’s a symbolic gesture. Spend your money or go pick up your children. She wonders if they used Cortland apples, if the pie filling scalded Nico’s tongue. He was always scalding his tongue. She continues writing, more quickly, because she must leave soon, filling the bottom area closest to her and moving on to the top right corner, quickly, quickly. The mother killed the swearing bird. With her own two hands. Broke its neck for all the birdshit, for all the wordshit. Savored the sound of its breaking. Caroline orders an iced tea. There’s no more to say about this bird.
To her right: a table with five men and one woman, an early lunch. Caroline considers the time. If she’s fast, she can write one last thing: The woman never speaks. She opens her mouth. She takes a breath in that way one does before speaking. She gazes into the ear of the man to her left, an ear half-buried under tufts of hair. These men talk so much. Ha ha ha. They are so funny. She only smiles. Her smile an effort. Her smile a wince. The one with the hair makes her wince twice.
Caroline looks under their table to see where his hands are. On her knee maybe?
They’ve been lovers. There’s familiarity between their bodies, the way they slump together. But she hates him. She toys with her knife, imagining what it could do.
Caroline scratches out this last bit because it’s too melodramatic.
They will marry someday, even though it’s a mistake. She’ll miss a stitch on the sweater she’s knitting for him but won’t fix it. She’ll fail to pick up his children from school. These rebellions will not make up for the ha ha ha being so
She clasps onto her own knife, serrated side into the palm of her left hand. It’s too dull to break skin.
ho ho hum, she finishes the story.
She’d intended to stay until 11:35. But it was 11:55 and now it’s 12:15 and she’s asking, please, for the rotisserie chicken salad with yoghurt and special grains. She tells herself she will leave before the food arrives. Annie and Nico are probably already crying. The teachers are telling them not to worry, mothers always pick up children. There, there. But when the waiter with the arthritic knuckles sets the food before her, she knows it’s a meal to be taken in like an ancient city. One artifact at a time. The candied walnut first.
Caroline tries not to think of how hard Annie must be sucking her thumb, of the recent flare‑up of Nico’s nervous tic. She fills the upper left corner instead. She’s never written like this before. At college she wrote a few papers about child development. She couldn’t think of what else to study. She’d longed to feel called to something more specific and rare. Latin American history or Russian literature or Microbiological Studies of the Arctic. But she wasn’t interested. Interesting. Even the children and their psychologies didn’t excite her. She eventually switched to accounting and started dating a lot instead. So practical, her mother said. Her mother noticed but didn’t seem to care that numbers and blind dates were a retreat, a way of shrinking back from something.
Caroline wished she’d at least kept a journal. She’d had the impulse. She’d picked one up at the Barnes & Noble, held it in her hands, smelled the pages, set it down. Years later, in that same Barnes & Noble, she’d picked up a different journal, a heavier one, held it in her hands, put it down.
Some women’s lives were big rooms, filled with three-pronged candlesticks and taxidermy (lions heads perhaps), high gloss paint and rows of books with author’s inscriptions. Black-and-white photographs of people. Ah, the people in these rooms. Immunologists. Linguists. Diplomats. They’d traveled to Puerto Montt. To Shanghai. She’d been to the coast of Maine once; she’d eaten those red hotdogs. But that didn’t make her a whole room. She was more like a closet. A box with a lid. An envelope that smelled vaguely of brine.
Their apartment is three rooms and twelve video cameras. The children in the back bedroom, she and her husband in the front, a room with couch, table, kitchen in between. The cameras in the corners, small round eyes. Wesley has an annoying habit of cracking things. Knuckles. Walnuts. Backs. Belts. Even those small noises fill a space so tight. But now there are church bells. They chime and chime. Pleasant at first. Until Caroline realizes it’s her phone. She must get the children, must get them now. But instead she visits the restroom, this being her most urgent need. It’s ample and the stall doors go all the way to the floor like old-fashioned confessionals. No one will see that she sits on the public seat, rests her whole body, even though her mother taught her it wasn’t sanitary. Her mother of the weekly planner, of the skirt five inches below the knee. Caroline sits for a long time. She could live in this brasserie. She wouldn’t mind this bathroom. Its long trough of a sink. Its lavender soap.

       At 2 o’clock, the sun falls on the table and a waitress appears. The first waitress of the day. On her arm: a large tattoo of a ship with sails. Why a ship? By 2:15, the sun focuses its light directly onto Caroline’s face. Her whole body is hot and glowing. So this is how sun used to feel. She stares directly into it. She wants this sun to burn her.
The woman and the five men are gone. How could they go? If only Caroline had made eye contact. Whispered hello. Invited the woman to sit with her. How lovely to meet you, the woman would have said. No. She would have been more reserved. Nice to meet you. She would have described her children – one tall, one short. And Caroline would have described her own –  one loud, one quiet. No, she would have stopped herself. People don’t want to hear about children, her mother always said. Children are the most dreadful topic, right behind marital problems and childbirth. Episiotomy she could hear but couldn’t feel, grade 4 tear nonetheless. Caroline pulls out her phone and googles Popular Conversation Topics. Music. The elephant situation. Weight loss diets. She ignores the fifteen voicemails. From Saint Agatha’s Preschool. From Dr. Bhatt. From Nico’s dentist. The texts from her husband.
Where are you?
The children are in the principal’s office.
Where the fuck are you?
Caroline fuck what are you doing?
Ho hum. She knows it’s the wrong thing to write. Ho hum. It’s wrong to write anything while Annie and Nico wait, holding hands. Oh, how she hopes they’re holding hands and not fighting, hopes Nico’s tongue wasn’t scalded, hopes the pie was good, hopes they won’t remember this day when they’re twenty, twenty-five, fifty. But there’s a woman in the corner eating French onion soup with a man in a baseball cap eating spinach salad. Caroline puts her phone on silent. It vibrates. The woman’s fifty-five. Her raw, red skin appears to be recovering from that procedure where they laser the age off your face. She’s not fifty-five, she’s sixty-five. He looks twenty-something but is probably thirty-something. The words I AM are embroidered on his hat. I am what? Caroline writes. He is not her child. She doesn’t love him the way a mother would doesn’t hang on his every word doesn’t lose herself to him doesn’t correct him doesn’t cast that critical mother eye doesn’t look that sad. Is it OK to leave out the commas? Can people do that? Caroline suddenly hates commas. Little prisons. She never married never burdened herself she is free light as a bird. So many birds today. She still feels unsure about the commas and periods. Are birds really so free? A single flight from branch to post: a thousand wing beats
She succumbs to the question mark, to the colon, and guesses that final bit about the wing beats but suddenly remembers the last thing the parrot said before her mother killed it. Fuck you, lady.
Is it too early for wine? she asks the waiter with the latex sock over his pinky, stanching blood from a cut. Do you have any by the glass? The waiter has many feelings about wines by the glass. The rosé has hills in it and the Sancerre has mist. Caroline doesn’t know what mist would taste like, so she orders the cabernet. The rich one with notes of currant. Tsk the waiter says with a trace of smirk. But, madame, white wine is a much better after-lunch drink for a lady. He doesn’t actually say this, but she writes it and he brings her a rosé. She takes a sip, chastened. It hits the spot and it bothers her that it hits the spot. The cab would have been so heavy, the waiter says. He watches her sip in that closely-tuned way that makes her feel pretty. Even though she is very very angry at him, he makes her feel pretty. She covers this last scribble with her hand.
She tried without the commas, but here they are, back again, without her even realizing it.
Laser face separates a string of cheese from the bowl and says, if I were to bake a pie for the party, which I refuse to do, it would not be apple.
The connections in this world are marvelous, Caroline writes, the circularity making her feel less alone. Why just this very morning I was thinking about pie, and now all these hours later, more pie.
I don’t want to be so attached to apple pie anymore, the woman says. Why does everyone paint me into this pie corner? I’m done bringing pies to family dinners. Done.
The man’s face falls.
He loves the pie. He will miss the pie. Why won’t the women in his life make him pie? Caroline starts to write that laser face must be I AM’s mother after all. Why else would he have this emotional connection to her pie? And then suddenly, the 55/65‑year-old turns to the 25/35‑year-old and kisses him. Kisses him like an ocean. Like a lioness with her baby lion lover, Caroline wants to write. But there is no more room. She has filled the white paper that smells like sprinkler water in summer. The whole thing, up the edges, across the table, over the coffee blob family. She looks down at all these words and is struck by her script. She starts to weep. She’d never thought about her own handwriting. Angled like a rolling wave. Suddenly she wants an ocean kiss.
She cries more, then wipes her eyes and gulps the last of her satisfying rosé, as if climbing those hills, which she tastes. She actually tastes the hills. They are there! And this makes her cry all over again and want the ocean kiss even more. She passes the glass to the bus boy with the chubby, flushed cheeks, the one who’s blushing, because he’s been staring at her, reading the ocean kisses over her shoulder. She carefully folds the tablecloth, first one way, then the other, until it is an envelope. She puts it in her bag next to Nico’s plastic snake. He’d fallen last week, playing snake tug-of‑war with Annie. Right onto the concrete just a block away. Now his front teeth hurt. They’ve grayed. At least he matches the apartment. Wesley had wanted everything in muted white mixed with hints of black. Sofa, wall, bedspread. Gray, gray, gray. The cameras camouflaged with the background. She bought apples, limes, lemons. Left their color on the table in bright blue bowls.
She tries to get the attention of the waitress with the tattoo, but she can’t catch her eyes. Excuse me, she says instead to the waiter with the blank face. An unusually large face. I see there’s no one sitting at that booth over there with the nice big paper. No one for hours.
Yes, madame.
Might I move and order dinner?
A change of scenery is always good for the soul, he replies slowly, like he is talking to someone hard of hearing or very very confused. He studies her carefully and his face is less blank when he considers her. She spots hills in the lines of his forehead.
Caroline sits exactly where the woman with the five men had sat. She feels a trace of the woman’s heat transfer into her own back. Or maybe it’s the remnants of the late afternoon sun. The table is another half-booth configuration – a decapitated hexagon. The paper cloth has been trimmed to match the table’s shape, not an inch hanging over. She can’t decide where to make her first mark. She stands up and bows over the table, examining it. People stare. The waiter with the pinky sock brings her bag and coat. Madame, you’ve left items at your previous table. A change of scenery is always good, she writes, still standing, reaching for the farthest corner, the table’s Antarctica. She leaves out the soul part.
When a glass breaks, all eyes in the room shift from her. A relief, this. She continues writing: The waitress coaxes shards into a dustpan with a broom. The enormous mast and sails on her arm expand. She has delicate fingers, good for taking scissor to paper, for carefully cutting the half-hexagon upon which these words now perch sit perch sit.
Caroline tries again to get the waitress’s attention, this time to communicate her gratitude for the paper, for its exquisite edge. She runs her finger along it until it cuts her. She orders the “prime beef tartare, tabasco aioli, quail egg” to start. For an entrée she orders the “dry-aged duck, fennel panisse, sour cherry, foie gras sauce.” She picks these dishes for their italics. She wonders what italics taste like, as she places index finger to tongue, tastes the blood. She’d planned to make boneless chicken breast, white rice, and boiled carrot sticks at home. She worries about her children, about whether they’re eating a proper dinner, whether they’re eating at all. But the wine has thinned her worries and there’s a man eating alone at the counter – wheezing. The shudder of his body makes her realize her phone battery has died. The thing stopped quivering, and she hadn’t even noticed.
The man in the blazer is going to die. I can feel his body retreating, the atoms inside him gathering themselves for a different purpose. He coughs. His whole body shakes, then stills. Listens for what’s to come.
She is happy with what she wrote. She has poems in her. And hills. Maybe she’d get her hair feathered again. Let herself be swept back.
The prime beef tartare looks too pretty at first. Caroline is glad when she can still taste the animal in it. The grunt. The pasture. She’d never eaten a quail egg before, having never cared for words like albumen and yolk. So small and yet rich enough to feed the whole restaurant. She has an urge to take her plate and offer this bright yellow yolk to the man at the bar. But she worries about leaving her pen. Her paper. It seems a rather big risk. She pats the table. Pats it again. As if a pat could protect something. Nico once asked her why she always touches his head when she drops him off at school, when Wesley gets home from work, when Wesley enters a room. She smooths out the pucker on the far end of the hexagon. Writes Albumen. Yolk. Not such bad words after all. There it is again, this urge to say to the dying man at the bar, Here, try a bite.
Instead, she orders a whole bottle of cabernet. The same one she’d wanted earlier. The cabernet with strong notes of currant. Oh, the current, she says out loud when she takes her first sip. I am in it. She puts these three words in the very center of the table. The waitress with the tattoo and the scissors and all the broken glass looks down and nods. She understands.
Caroline drinks one small glass before her entrée, another during, and a third after. The sour cherry isn’t quite sour enough, but she doesn’t let this disappoint her. She’s done with disappointment. At seven o’clock the mothers of the world tuck their twins into bed. The twins are not tired, but the mothers are. A slight pang. She brushes it away, like sugar that’s overflowed the spoon. Surely, Wesley got them home.
The waitstaff light candles. The bike is still locked to the street lamp. The light’s cool blue blends with the warm yellow of the candle to make forest green. Wax drips over her words, letters shimmer underneath. It’s hard to know what percentage of the paper she has filled, because she has scattered her words this time, like seed for the birds.

       An alarm goes off, turns heads. No one knows what it’s for.

       The dying man rises, swings his blazer over his shoulder, makes death look so do-able. Spritely. He carries his cane instead of using it.

       Wesley has an awful smirk.

       At ten-forty-five, there’s still wine in her bottle. The waitress asks to close out her check. The evening shift’s over. It occurs to Caroline that this booth is big enough for her whole body, and the waitress’s too. They could sleep on this bench.
Come. Sit, Caroline says to the waitress. Finish the bottle with me.
The waitress looks toward the waiters huddled together at the bar. She glances at her watch.
It’s good wine, Caroline continues. No hills.
The waitress tilts her head and sucks her tongue. Finally, she retrieves a glass from the now-empty bar, pausing to whisper with the rest of the waitstaff. They giggle. When she slides into the booth, Caroline scooches around to give her room.
We’re not supposed to sit with customers, she says. But all the guys want to know your deal. Even the manager. No one’s ever been here all day.
That she’s the subject of brasserie curiosity makes Caroline feel flattered, embarrassed, lonely. In that order. She asks questions, because her mom always told her, if you feel nervous around people, ask them where they’re from, what they do, what movie they last saw. Her mom, of the church picnic, of the daisy chain, of the hot sauce on your tongue for a bad word.
The waitress’s name is Eugenia. She grew up in Peru but has a Boston accent because her father’s from Dorchester. She doesn’t want to talk about him. Eugenia doesn’t have time to watch movies; she works nights and studies to be a dentist by day.
She appreciates the structure and utility of teeth like gardeners admire a well-organized vegetable garden.
Wait, Eugenia asks. What are you writing? Let me see.
Caroline covers the fresh words with the wine bottle.
Is this some kind of project you’re working on? Are you watching us? Eugenia asks. Are you a reporter? She reads out loud from the almost-full paper. The alarm is a death knell. But who will die? Sounds serious, she says.
Do you think they’d let me stay the night? Caroline asks.
Where?
Here.
In Villette?
I could watch over things. Deter burglars. Fill all the pages.
Don’t you have anywhere to go?
Caroline pictures her apartment. The children asleep. The limes and how they’re never green enough.
My mother says it’s strange there are cameras in our apartment.
Cameras?
So my husband can check on us from work.
I don’t understand. He watches you?
He loves us. I guess.
There’s a knock on the window behind them, just under the street lamp, by the bike. A bang, bang that could give a concussion. A mild concussion, with nausea and sensitivity to light.
Do you know this guy? Eugenia points.
Caroline feels that way a family dog feels when someone sneaks up from behind and grabs its tail. Momentarily ferocious.
Wesley’s inside now. So much hair on his head still. Too much for a man in his fifties. It curls at the ends when he lets it grow long. Long in a way that her mother would call unkempt. Her mother of the let’s get a restraining order, of the 911 call. He’s in front of her. It’s eleven thirty and he’s pointing at his watch and saying eleven thirty. Eleven thirty. Eleven thirty.
I know what time it is.
Eugenia scooches out of the booth. Her ship tattoo sailing against the storm. Caroline can see from her face that the cameras are strange.
Where have you been all day?
I was over there at that booth. And now I’m here.
The waiters have turned their backs. They wipe tables, tally tips.
I’ve called a hundred times. He cracks his knuckles, which are swollen, enlarged. I had to leave work to pick up the kids. Your mom’s flying up from Vero. Goddammit, Caroline. Your mother! I called your fucking mother. She accused me of disappearing you.
She keeps writing. You shouldn’t use fuck with the children.
Wesley slides in beside her. The tiny mole on his cheek is sweating. We were worried. So worried, he doesn’t say. He looks down at her handwriting. Waves and waves of it.
Will you stop writing? Put down the fucking pen. He turns to Eugenia, who has lingered beside the table, pointed the mast back toward the demi-hexagonal storm. What is she doing? Wesley asks Eugenia. Did she write all this gibberish?
The women are silent. They watch his eyes skid over her script, his cheeks grow flushed. He cracks his knuckles again, one by one. Eugenia slides back into the booth on the other side of Caroline and puts her arm, her mast and sail, beside Caroline’s hand, which is still holding the pen, quivering ever so slightly. Eugenia’s arm makes it difficult for Wesley to pull the paper toward him, to get a better view of Caroline’s Antarctica. He tugs harder and the paper splits. Just a tiny break point, but Caroline winces. She looks at his ear, half-covered in gray curls, considers this thing she sleeps beside, opens her mouth to speak. There’s probably a word she should whisper into it. Something sweet and apologetic. She studies the letters on the tablecloth, how they tilt toward her as if a wind were at their backs.

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Maureen Langloss has published stories in Copper Nickel, Cutbank, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Witness, and in the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology.