Sledding

It was a cowardly time to try to tell Agnes. We were in the bathtub, and she was delighted because she was finally starting to show. “Now people will give me their seat on the subway,” she said. We had a candle in the soap dish and the wax was starting to drip and its scent (apple crisp) was too strong.

“Agnes,” I said. “Listen. I should have told you this before.”

My foot was on her shoulder and she was washing my leg. She stopped, wringing the sudsy cloth over my knee.

“It’s the weekend, Zuzu,” she said. “No stress on the weekends.”

“I know, but.” I sat up. Water sloshed over her rounded belly. Water sloshed onto the floor.

Agnes held out a hand, and though she did not reach my mouth, the effect was the same: she wanted silence. She had what she called “low stress tolerance,” which she managed by refusing to plan, sort, budget, or reflect, unless it was in the service of an immediate goal. We paid ninety-nine dollars a month for a storage unit in Jersey City, for instance, because she didn’t want to spend a Saturday digging through boxes full of her flared-leg jeans, essays on Virginia Woolf, camping equipment, and back issues of Rolling Stone—things we’d agreed not to bring to our sublet near the law school.

We had been paying ninety-nine dollars a month for almost three years.