The Motions

Kristen Judd

Boyd is gone. His things are cleared out of the apartment when she returns. And she is returning, even though they didn’t think she would, even though they must wonder what is left for her here, in this apartment, in this old, cleared out life.
There was someone else?
So sad. Poor Lils. Already thirty five. She’ll never find another.

Lillian gave Boyd a week to move his things. Then she took a week of her vacation time, packed a suitcase, and fled to Europe that same afternoon. Better not to sit at home thinking about what you can’t change, she figured. Better to go away for a while. She used to dance, in the ballet, before Boyd, and she always wanted to see the Degas portraits of ballerinas stretching in their frames. So off she went.
Lillian has always trusted in positive thinking. Tragedy can be made into something. That’s why Lillian took her vacation, spent a week hurling herself into a chattering, tourist life—filled with scrambling plans and endless walking—coming back each night, so tired she fell right to sleep in those crisp, blank hotel sheets.
Positive thinking should be enough to save you. If you aren’t happy, you go somewhere, you do something about it, you try harder, and if you try hard enough then maybe next time he won’t leave you standing in the doorway, watching as he descends the stairs in a frame of golden light.
And so Lillian wandered the empty, foreign streets until she began to notice sets of lovers scattered along the banks of the Seine, and families clutching hands in the museums, and the crash of her own echoing footsteps, walking back at night. She thought perhaps she hadn’t traveled far enough. So she came back.

She returns and Boyd is still gone. His towel has abandoned the rack, his shaving kit deserted the bathroom shelf. His half of the closet is hollowed out, every article of clothing, those clinging, dripping silks, scooped from its insides.
He forgot to clean, of course. He never cared much about cleaning up after himself. This place, he used to say, I hate this stupid piece-of-crap place. And he was always wanting to move out, to forget everything and go, to leave the tapping pipes and listless drapes and shabby paint behind.
Well, thinks Lillian, I’ll show him.
She takes out the vacuum cleaner. Lillian has always cleaned the house, paid the bills, moved life forward. Boyd was too brilliant for that. And it comforts her now, the push of everyday, the simple motions.
Everything is going to be fine, Lillian is sure, as she mops the sticky floor, scrapes congealed bacon from a dish he left in the sink. She cleans the bathroom until the tiles sparkle and the mirror shines. She wipes the table, arranges the cushions, remakes the bed, alphabetizes the bookshelf. She is dusting the windowsill when she is hit by a wave of unease.
Maybe there is something you forgot, she thinks. Maybe this whole mess belongs to you.
Was it the book she bought him for his birthday? Not romantic, exactly, but the way he looked at it when he saw it in the shop window, he pined for it, she was so sure. Or her pudding, she made pudding that night, it was a new recipe—but that’s ridiculous, how could any pudding be so terrible? No, no, it must be some fundamental flaw in her nature. Her looks, maybe he grew tired of them. She was always precise, well-kept, but never quite pretty. Or it was her voice, maybe, or her personality, her shyness, her giggling deference, her bowing and scraping and perpetual terror of displeasing.
It’s suddenly too warm. Lillian strips off her rubber gloves and goes to open the window latch. It refuses to budge. She pushes and pushes but it will not budge and no. Lillian tries harder. She is going to force the window open. She wants to let the breeze in. It’s stuck, it’s jammed, swollen with the humidity, but she keeps pushing with all the strength in her trim, hard dancer’s body. When the window flies open at last, it bangs against the far wall, caught in the wind, swinging. The rotting wood of the latch falls off in Lillian’s hand, and the window, in the wind, slams shut on her fingers before flying wide open again.
A pigeon scuttles into the graying sky and she watches it anxiously, cradling her bruised knuckles, hoping it won’t come through the wide open window, will instead fly home where it belongs. It starts to rain. Sudden, summer, lightening-strike rain, pouring into her just cleaned living room and yes, she almost starts to laugh, of course this is going to happen, she cannot close it now.

Boyd will call. She knows it. And, miraculously, he does. She is not waiting by the phone when it happens, she has been busy after all, cooking, cleaning, going to her night-shift job at the café down the street. But she has been waiting—quiet and unobtrusive, like a book left open on a windowsill—for him to come to his senses.
He is calling. This is him, on the phone at last. For months she has rehearsed this conversation, but now she hardly knows what to do.
“I just wanted to see how you were,” he says. He’s eating something. She can hear it crackle, hear the chewing, crunch crunch.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she says. “I’ve been really busy, actually, so.”
“Okay. Sorry, I won’t keep you.”
“No! No, I didn’t mean, you know. I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m fine too,” he says, in that voice, low and dark chocolate, that used to fill in the corners of their piece-of-crap place. “And Jill, she’s fine.”
“Yeah, I’m sure she is,” says Lillian.
“Look, you don’t have to be like that, okay? I told you why. I just don’t feel that way about you anymore.”
“And are you calling to remind me?”
“No. Christ, Lils. I still care about you or whatever. I want us to be friends. We should have dinner or something.”
She can’t help hoping. She feels it pressing at the back of her throat, tears smarting, but they won’t fall over this. She busies her hands, arranges the flowers on the side table, but the old love is there, this faded thing, the sepia of it, all its edges worn away.
“Do you remember the night we met?” she asks, pausing in her busywork, pressing the phone against her cheek, her fingers curling around the fragile connection. You can’t love someone that much and never hope. “I gave up dancing for you.”
“So? Blah blah blah. Same old story. You can’t blame me,” he says, because she can, and he is sorry and embarrassed but what is he supposed to do, really. “What, did I hold you back? Did I tie you to a chair? No. It’s not like you could have danced for that much longer.”
“I got a job so you could write,” she says. But he does not want to hear it, and she doesn’t want to spoil her chances, so she bites her lip and says, “Never mind. You’re right. It was a long time ago.”
“Anyway, I didn’t call to argue. We should do something—with Jill. You remember her right?”
Lillian drops the phone back into the receiver. It isn’t a conscious motion, she doesn’t think about it, and it puzzles her afterwards, how could it have gotten there? But it’s better, she reasons, it’s better not to hear it. No point dwelling on things you can’t correct.
She will go dancing tonight. She will go dancing out of spite. And then she sits down, in her bright, just-refinished dining room chair, and she realizes that she isn’t going to go dancing out of spite, because it isn’t spite she feels, it’s despair. Despair doesn’t really put you in a dancing kind of mood.
Jill, the mutual friend with the same brown hair, the same failed ambitions, that hair, those eyes. Why her and not me?
Lillian gives herself a mental kick. Time to get up. She is not going to sit and wait. She has to do something, she has to go somewhere, she does not have to feel sad. Move, she thinks, come on, move.
She stands. She takes all the clean dishes out of the cupboards, rewashes them, puts them back neatly, and goes to bed.

The next day, she begins by running all her errands. Lillian has a lot to do. She has to deposit checks, and go to the drugstore, and buy bread, and then she has to pack her things.
The sky is sugary, a hollow, white-blue rind, and the day is still young and beautiful when she goes out to it. Yellow flowers crop up by the roadside but she does not look at them. She is intent and purposeful.
She very intently and purposefully does not think about Boyd. She concentrates on every step of glittering pavement until she reaches her various destinations. She buys some aspirin, and deposits her money at the bank, and finds her favorite kind of warm, crunchy baguette, fresh out of the oven at the bakery. Her hands are steady as money changes hands, and bags are carried, and shadows arabesque along the streets.
Then back to her apartment, which shines, every inch of it scrubbed and sanitized. All of it spotless, except for the window—the latch hasn’t been fixed, and so it hangs helplessly ajar. She tried to tie it shut with string, but that must have snapped, and when she gets home the faded curtains are spinning as the window knocks against its chipping frame in the breeze. She goes to pull it closed.
Peering out into the avenue, she sees a pigeon soaring up from the ground. It perches on a fire escape across the way, looking magisterially at her out of its beady black eye. Lillian takes out the remaining chunk of her baguette and breaks it into small pieces. She arranges it appetizingly on the windowsill.
For a horrible moment, she fears that not even this bird can be tempted back to her. But the pigeon flies across the gap between apartment houses, perches on the end of the sill and pecks with enthusiasm.
In this unguarded moment she remembers meeting Boyd after Giselle, sailing into the wings at the end of the show, she was flushed and high spirited with her success. She didn’t refuse when Boyd asked her to go dancing. She loved to dance, and he said, so handsome, “What have you got to lose?” and she laughed, and rushed to unlace her pointe shoes.
It’s a terrible pang—standing at the open window, with a pigeon for company and her dancing days long over—to remember being that happy. If she had said no, if she refused him then, she might have danced five years.
The light troops in with its company of late afternoon shadows. It twirls dutifully across the living room, it fades into evening, and Lillian shivers with the growing dark. She had everything to lose.
Her pigeon finishes with the crumbs, and looks up at her inquiringly. She shoos at it, and it takes off, the underside of its wing flashing green against the dull brown buildings.
“There’s nothing left,” she explains to its retreating form. “Sorry, but there’s no more.”

Lillian goes to pack her things. She takes out the moving boxes—still preserved in the storage room—and unfolds them carefully. Then she begins to fill them up.
As she gathers her possessions to her, she thinks how much easier this will be. Boyd and Jill can finally exchange their ideas, write their book, change the world. And it will be so much easier for Lillian, to do this, to take action. Not waiting—getting out and moving on.
It will be better for everyone, she thinks, as she pulls her clothes out of the closet. She and Boyd will both be out of this place at last. She puts away her kitchenware, wrapping the fragile plates in brown paper. She throws away the bathroom supplies. She labels the box of bed sheets in neat script. It’s all going to charity. She doesn’t want it anymore.
She gives the kitchen tiles another once over with the scrubbing brush. No need to leave the place in disorder. She cleans the toilet and bathtub, clears all the perishables out of the refrigerator, does a last load of laundry. She is moving out of here. She will never sit around being unhappy again.
From the kitchen, she hears the window banging against its sill—it must have gotten loose. She goes back into the living room to try and fix it, and catches a glimpse of the front hall, realizing that she forgot all about the hall closet.
She tugs open the closet door and a wave of dust rolls over her. Lillian sighs and peels back a layer of musty winter coats to reveal a pile of unsorted junk, forgotten on the closet floor—silly things she didn’t want to throw away. She looks through the pile, finds a bear Boyd won her at the carnival, her high school yearbook, and, peeking out near the back, a hint of something pink. Lillian shoves everything else aside.
She claws frantically, groping in the half-dark of the swinging light bulb. Her pointe shoes, from Giselle, from that night. She finds them, and she holds them against herself. The flash of understanding is like the time she twisted her knee and didn’t realize for two weeks. She suppressed so well that she did not notice any pain. Back then, when her toes were always on fire, she rewired herself, stepped, stepped, disciplined, until she learned not to feel it.
She left the ballet, she chose not to dance. She hasn’t allowed herself to think of it in so long. She could not have danced forever, that’s why. Maybe five more years. She turned to Boyd, and now he is gone, and she is still turning, correcting herself, turning. Stop, she thinks, stop now.
How far she has come to avoid this, the realization that she is thirty five, past her dancing years, and Boyd is gone. Lillian cries, finally, curled around her dusty hopes in a quiet halo of spilled closet light. She turns her shoes over, enjoying their familiar weight—careful fingers on crushed pink satin. They are nicely broken in. They could still take her anywhere. Maybe it’s better, she thinks, maybe it’s better, then, to go back.
Boyd is gone. Lillian is going dancing.

She walks up and down, and the streets 71are crowded with people and possibilities out for the evening. Music, any music she can find. She stops at the first club she comes to, trumpets blare, drums pound. She passes through beaded curtains into dim, smoky light. The dance floor is full of people, shifting, twisting bodies, so many that she can hardly press between them. Lights swirl, sequins glitter, the music finds her pulse and presses down. Lillian was always a good dancer. The white curve of her wrist arches into the song’s take off notes, and there is a wicked wink in the sudden twist of her whiplash hips. And oh, she thinks, this is even better than I remember it.
Come here beautiful, anonymous stranger. Let’s dance. Let’s step on each other’s toes. I am going to shimmy up close, and hold you too tight, and then I’ll let you go. I’ll find someone new. I’ll be out all night. I’ll twirl home. I’m going to dance under the starry lamps, up the streets, and through the town, and all the way back.