The Bell Jar

The bell jar thing sounds fancy but it isn't. It's just glass. You can see everything through it. The game on the TV. The tip jar with the climbing bolted to the front of it. The woman pouring whiskey behind the bar. You just can't touch any of it.

Two years since Dale died. Five since the wedding. I did the math the other night and it made me laugh, which is its own kind of problem. I'm twenty-nine. I clean the rec center at the university. Mop the floors, wipe down the machines, sweep the chalk out from under the climbing wall every night like it's snow that never stops falling.

I go home. I sleep. I come back.

So on a Thursday in October I found myself at The Pit & Piton instead. I don't even know why. I passed the door a thousand times on my walk home and one night the door was just there and my hand was on it. The place smelled like chalk dust and cheap whiskey, which sounds made up but it's true, they must chalk up in the back or something. Old rope hung on the walls like decoration. A woman my mother's age was pouring drinks and calling everybody sweetheart.

I sat at the bar and ordered a ginger ale because I don't drink, never have, and I didn't want to explain that to a stranger. I didn't want to explain anything to a stranger. That's the whole appeal of strangers, really. No explanations.

I sat there maybe twenty minutes. And here's the strange part. I wanted to be there. First time in I don't know how long I wanted to be anyplace at all. The glass was thin but it was thin in a different way than usual. Like maybe somebody had propped the jar open a crack.

"Marsha Paterson."

I turned. A guy my age was three stools down, big shoulders, forearms like bridge cable, a short beard going a little gray at the chin. He looked familiar the way a face from a hallway looks familiar.

"Cliff," he said. "Robbins. We graduated together. Same year. We ran in the same crowd, sort of. Edges of it anyway."

"Hey," I said. Because that's what we'd ever said to each other. Hey.

"Hey yourself." He slid off his stool and moved down two, leaving a stool of space between us, which I noticed and appreciated. "Can I buy you that refill?"

"It's ginger ale."

"I know. I watched you order it. Bold choice."

I laughed. It came out rusty. "Sure. Thanks."

He flagged Edith, the bartender. "Two more of whatever she's having."

"Ginger ale twice," Edith said. "Live dangerously, Robbins."

"You've been telling me that for years."

She set my glass down and looked at me a beat longer than bartenders usually look, then moved off. Cliff turned on his stool to face me and I got the feeling he was one of those people who could just sit and be comfortable in his own skin. I envied that. I've never once been comfortable in mine.

"You still at the rec center?" he asked. "I saw you there. Sweeping under the bouldering wall. Last week maybe."

"You climb there?"

"I own a gym across town. The Chalk Bag. And yeah, I climb at the rec sometimes because it's cheap and the routes are bad in a fun way." He grinned. "But mostly I saw you because you were doing that thing where you sweep a whole area with like four strokes. Efficient. Somebody taught you to sweep right."

"Nine years of practice will do that."

"Nine years. Damn." He sipped his drink. "You like it?"

Nobody asks that. People ask what you do and then they ask something else. I thought about lying and didn't see the point.

"No," I said. "It's fine. It's a job. It's quiet. That's about all I can say for it."

"Fair enough. That's more than most people can say." He turned his glass around on the bar a couple times. "Can I tell you something without it being weird?"

"That's usually how people introduce the weird part."

He laughed. Big, easy. "Okay, fair. So. I have a side business. I make climbing rope. Actual ropes, in a shop behind the gym. Splicing, sewing, testing. It started as a hobby and now it pays for itself and then some. Retired from guiding mostly, so it's what I do."

"You make rope."

"I make rope."

"Like a rope factory?"

"Like one guy, two machines, and a dog that sleeps on the rope scraps." He shrugged. "Anyway. The reason I mention it. I've watched you sweep around that climbing wall for, hell, I don't know how long you've been there. Months at least. And you never once look up at it. Most people can't help looking. It's a wall. You look."

"It's a wall," I agreed.

"Yeah, but it's also forty feet of problem solving and you get to the top and your whole brain goes quiet. Or so I'm told by everyone who's ever topped out." He finished his ginger ale. "Look. I'm not selling anything. But I teach knots. Saturday afternoons, my shop, free, because I like teaching and because my dog likes company. First lesson is the figure-eight follow-through. The knot that holds your whole life on a rope. Takes twenty minutes to learn and about a year to stop double-checking."

I stared at my glass. I should say here's the thing, but the thing was simpler than that. I hadn't made plans with a person in two years. Not dinner, not coffee, nothing. My calendar was a mop bucket.

"Why me?" I asked.

"Because you asked why. Most people say oh I couldn't." He stood, dropped a five by the tip jar, patted the little climbing hold mounted on it like an old dog. "And because you sweep like somebody who finishes what she starts. That's most of climbing, honestly. Finishing what you start, and checking your work."

"When?" I said. Which surprised me. My mouth just went ahead and did it.

"Saturday. One o'clock. Behind The Chalk Bag, on Delancey. There's a sign." He shrugged into a jacket that had seen some years. "No pressure. If you don't show, the dog will be mildly disappointed and I'll survive."

"Maybe I'll show."

"Maybe you will." He paused. "It was good to see you, Marsha. For real."

And then he was gone, out the door into the October dark, and I sat there with my ginger ale going flat and my heart doing something it hadn't done in a while, which was just beat faster than mop-work beating.

Edith came back down the bar and refilled my glass without asking.

"That man," she said, "has been trying to get people to tie knots with him since I've known him. Which is a long time."

"You know him well?"

"Known him since he was twenty-five and stupid and I was old enough to know better." She smiled at something. "We dated two years. Ended clean. Some things do, you know. End clean."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"Most people don't." She wiped the bar in front of me in one long stroke. Efficient. Like somebody taught her to wipe right. "He's a good one. Bit church-of-the-rope about it, but good. You should go Saturday."

"I said maybe."

"You did." She shrugged. "For what it's worth, and it isn't worth much, you sat here for half an hour and looked at that door like you were deciding something. And then a man you barely knew asked you to learn a knot and you said maybe instead of no. That's progress, sweetheart. That's how it starts."

I walked home under the streetlights and my hands kept doing a thing. Curling. Like they already knew what a rope felt like and were mad at me for making them wait till Saturday.

Saturday I showed up. Of course I showed up. I'd washed my hair and everything, which for a Saturday is basically a marriage proposal.

The shop behind The Chalk Bag was smaller than I figured. Two machines, a long table, coils of rope hanging on pegboard like weird yellow hair. The dog lifted his head off a pile of rope scraps, looked at me, and put his head back down. That was the whole welcome committee.

Cliff came out from behind a curtain wiping his hands on a rag. "You came."

"You said maybe I would."

"I did say that." He grinned. "Coffee's on. Dog's name is Juniper. Juniper, this is Marsha. Be less rude."

Juniper thumped his tail once without raising his head. Fine. We understood each other.

The lesson part was real. He taught me the figure-eight on a rope end while I sat on a stool and my fingers did the thing they'd been doing all week. I tied it wrong. He showed me again. I tied it right. He made me tie it six more times with my eyes shut. Then he made me tie it upside down, rope hanging off the table, because "that's how it happens when you're tired and scared at the same time."

"You're a weird teacher," I told him.

"I'm a thorough teacher. Different word for the same thing."

Somewhere around the third upside-down knot he got quiet. Rubbed his jaw. Picked up a length of thick white static rope off the table and held it in both hands like he was weighing it.

"Okay," he said. "There's a second half to the lesson. Only if you want it. Say no and we eat cookies and call it a day."

I looked at the rope. It looked back. "What's the second half?"

"It's rope on skin. Wrists, body, weight. Tied and untied. It's the thing that actually made me fall in love with this craft, and it's the thing most people never get shown." He set the rope down. "It's also intense in a way knots on a table are not. Your body takes it personal."

"Personal how?"

"Like being held. Or like being caught. Depends on the person and the day." He shrugged. "I can't tell you which it'll be for you. Nobody can."

I thought about my hands. Two years of hands that touched a mop and a toilet handle and a gas pump and nothing else. Two years of nobody's weight on anything of mine.

"Okay," I said. "Show me."

He nodded, slow, like he wanted to make sure I meant it. "There's a room upstairs. Mats on the floor, and a door that locks, and it's soundproofed because I used to have neighbors with opinions about the sewing machine at midnight. Anything we do stays in that room. Nothing happens you don't say yes to first. Every step. I'm serious about that. It's not a mood, it's a rule."

"Every step," I repeated.

"Every step." He picked up the rope and the rag again. "Come on. Stairs are behind the machines."

* * *

The room upstairs was plain. Blue mats, a low bench, bolts in the ceiling with carabiners hanging off two of them. A little window with a curtain. It smelled like hemp and laundry soap.

"Sit," he said, and pointed at the bench