San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley on a rainy Friday night. I’m driving home from a coffee shop. Wet roads on autumn nights. Pungent orange. Bright, green wings. “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. What I remember from college. All I remember from college?
*
In the coffee shop a woman sat with a paper cup in front of her, a bulging suitcase at her side. At her feet rested a small cotton handbag. When she picked it up, the bag dropped two little calico legs. A dollar bill poked out of the top.
*
No, that’s not all. I remember the professor of an introductory literature class, the one who wore faded Levis, flannel shirts, thick brown boots.
*
A bucket bag. That’s what the handbag looked like. Two corduroy pockets on either side. Like two little calico butt cheeks.
*
Last month I asked students to make a list of questions. “Questions that matter,” I said, questions that dog them, questions that linger, questions serious and mundane. “Write the essential questions,” I said. We’d read a book where the author talked about the central question of his life. “What’s your purpose? What’s your never-ending fear?” Once I started posing questions, I couldn’t stop. “How do you live in your body? A body that’s young. A body’s that’s sick. A body that’s fat. A body that’s that’s frail?” I told students to write whatever came to mind. “But stay in the body. Any body, this body, my body, your body.”
*
The woman at the coffee shop smelled. I held my breath, not because of the stench but because I thought management might ask her to leave. Management was a young woman. She was kind. She was caught. She did not ask the woman with the funny handbag to leave. Instead she leaned in and asked, quietly, “Do you have somewhere to go?”
*
What’s for dinner? That’s my question. I realized after asking my students to articulate theirs. (Their questions surprised me. Moved me. They spent all semester for the writing class posing more questions that came from the first questions, each question producing more questions until whole villages of questions sprouted.) What’s for dinner? By which I mean: Why am I so lonely? And: Will you feed me? And: What can I do to soothe your hungers? And: Do you–do I?– have somewhere to go?
*
On San Pablo Avenue, before reaching University Street, I pass T-Mobile and the Sherwin-Williams Paint Store, the Tokyo Fish Shop and Everett & Jones Barbeque. Halal Food & Meat Market. Bing’s Liquor. Paper Plus. All these shops, all these places I never go. But I can imagine what might be inside: the burst of balloons and ribbons in Paper Plus, row after cheerful and colorful row. It’s dusk now. Elmwood trees line San Pablo Avenue. Stoplights shine. Red. Green. Stop. Go. An old rhythm.
*
After the manager politely asked the woman if she had somewhere to go, the woman said yes and when she didn’t move, the manager did nothing but continue with her work, grinding coffee beans, ringing up sales, telling one of her employees to take a break, to enjoy himself.
*
The mind, I am trying to say, is a small handbag, filled with oddities, ribbons, and small pieces of leftover string. The body? The body was once a child. The body did what it was told. The body was gift wrapped, comically, in blue dinosaur pajamas or a polka dot flannel nightgown. (As a child I wore a tiny cotton housecoat covered in quilted blue flowers.)
*
The mind wanders, searching for a balloon, a meal, a party, a coffee shop–somewhere to rest, somewhere to think, somewhere to sleep. Company, I mean. The body yearns for cotton. For silk. For a quilted housecoat. To be covered, I mean. Shelter.
*
Another day. Another coffee shop. Twenty-two essays graded now, forty-six more to go. All those questions. All those students. All those windows into other minds.
*
On the drive home on this day, static on the radio. Cold and rainy. A late day in spring. Memories wander on dirty calico legs.
*
Once, I lifted my young dress. (A floral skirt. A black leather jacket.) Reggae played. A young man did not apologize, exactly, but lingered, saying, let’s start again. (There is something to be said for starting again.) At the party, earlier, he’d told me he loved Camus. I lied and said, “Me too!” (It occurs to me now that much of the reading I’ve started, I’ve started in hopes of impressing someone, though soon after, that someone disappears and my interest in the book remains. And intensifies.)
*
Is that all? No, not all. There was the lonely body, the eager body, the collective body, the comical body, the tragic body. The body asks its questions. Where is home? Is anybody home? What’s for dinner? Who will love me? Anybody? Again and again.
*
The Shakespeare professor, my junior year of college, was a small woman who rode a bright blue bicycle. “Think of it like The Love Boat,” she said, but which play did she compare to The Love Boat? I don’t remember now. Only that I often saw her riding around town on that bright blue bike, her hair flying from underneath her helmet.
*
Who once said, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
*
For years I lived alone in apartments with hardwood floors, high windows, quiet neighbors. Now? Now there is someone. A husband, I would say, but the word sounds as if it’s trying too hard. So let’s just say someone.
*
Yesterday, on the last day of class, someone spoke of libraries. Another of loneliness. I thought of the bookmobiles of my childhood, the thrill of climbing the stairs of what seemed not quite room or truck but something in between and also the miracle of all those books piled on shelves in such a cozy space and the claustrophobia when more than two people crowded inside and the relief of descending the stairs with a bundle of books in hand, returning to fresh air. I lifted my small hand to shield my eyes from the sunlight, disappointed when the driver started the engine and drove the bookmobile away.
*
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Soup will be waiting.” I’d called to say I had just finished class. “It will just take a few minutes to heat it up,” he said.
*
“Sometimes I miss it, the old loneliness,” I told him once. He smiled. He understood. He did too. He too lived alone for many years and even when he didn’t live alone, he was alone. Which is another way of saying why we match.
*
At the coffee shop on Friday night, I closed my notebook full of questions, each question full of mercy. I packed my messenger bag, the one full of essays yet to read and yet to grade. I put on my coat, anticipating the drive home. It’s cold in Northern California. Often rainy. The woman with calico bag by her side warmed her hands around a cup of coffee. We take warmth where we find it. A drink. A question. A meal. A class. Home, will you stay? Love, will you leave? What will grieve me when the body no longer feeds? I call someone to say, I’m on my way.
Libraries. Loneliness. There are worse ways to end.
MERCY CONTEST FINALIST, 2023
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. She is the recipient of a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and a Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, The Sewanee Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.