The Clay and the Catch

The trouble with selling blood pressure pills to tired people is that after a while you start to feel like one of them, and by the middle of that November I had been feeling it for months. Eighteen months, to be exact, since the moving truck dropped me and my sad little sofa in Port Shimmer, Oregon, a town where the wind comes off the water hard enough to make you reconsider your whole life and then keeps blowing until you do. I was twenty-eight years old and I sold pharmaceuticals to a coastal clinic and a handful of doctor's offices scattered up the highway like beads on a wet string, and I was supposed to be gunning for regional manager by spring.

Most nights I got home from the road after dark, kicked off my heels in the hall of the rental duplex, and ate whatever was in the fridge standing up, which is a habit my mother would have slapped me for. The town was mostly shut down for the season, the storefronts along the main drag salt-crusted and shuttered, boards over the ice cream place and the taffy shop, and the pier empty except for one old guy who fished off it every day whether the weather deserved it or not. I liked it out here more than I probably should have, given that it was killing my social life. You can't exactly meet people when the whole population has gone gray and quiet for the winter.

I had tried, mind you. I'd been casually dating women since college, nothing serious, and in Port Shimmer that meant the dating app served up the same six profiles on rotation like a carousel at a mall that closed in 1998. There was the dental hygienist from Newport who talked about her ex for ninety minutes and then asked if I wanted to split the check on a forty dollar salmon. There was the woman who ran the bookstore, sweet as anything, who I took out twice before we both admitted over chowder that we were better as friends, and honestly that one stung a little because she made a great chowder. None of them stuck. None of them even left a smear. I'd come home from each date and stand in my kitchen rinsing the wine glass and thinking, well, that's another one for the pile, you know how it goes when every night out ends the same flat way.

What I didn't say out loud to anyone was that the job was starting to taste stale too. I'd lost out on a promotion once before at my old company, back when I was twenty-six, because my numbers were soft and my manager said the word "soft" to my face like she was doing me a favor. So this time I had my quota circled on a whiteboard in my kitchen in red marker, and the clinic contract, the big one, the one with Seaview Family Health, was the piece that would make it all click. Land that and I was the regional manager candidate. Miss it and I was a twenty-eight year old woman with a sad sofa and a whiteboard, which is not a sentence I enjoyed saying to myself in the mirror.

The duplex next to mine was rented by a potter named Colette, thirty-six, who I mostly knew from waves across the driveway and the sound of her wheel going at odd hours, a low hum through the wall like the building had a heartbeat. She was divorced, I'd learned from the landlord, and she sold her work at a co-op in town and online, and I knew she got nervous about rent the same way I got nervous about quota, which made us neighborly in a way that never needed saying. She had clay on her hands more often than not, and once, when I complimented a row of mugs drying on her porch, she laughed and said her hands were ruined for anything delicate. They weren't ruined. I thought about that more than a woman probably should think about a neighbor's hands.

So there I was on a Monday night in late November, hair still damp from the shower, eating cold leftover rice standing at the counter, when my phone buzzed on the counter and lit up the whole dim kitchen. Email from Stacy. Stacy was my regional director, forty-two, fifteen years with the company, and I want to tell you she did not like me. Not in a vague way, in a documented way. Two years earlier at the holiday party in Portland she'd had too much champagne and told me, with her hand on my arm, that she could "open doors" for people who knew how to be friendly, and I had smiled and said no thank you and moved to the other side of the room, and she had never forgiven me for it. You don't forget a thing like that, and neither does she.

I opened the email standing there with a fork in my hand, and I read it twice, because the first time I read it I mostly read the word Friday over and over.

"Mabel," it said, in that brisk corporate voice she used even in writing, "a reminder that the Seaview Family Health decision is due this Friday. Given the importance of this account to the region, I trust you understand what is at stake, both for the company and for your own trajectory here. I have committed to presenting our Q4 promotion slate to leadership on the 30th. I would hate for your name to be absent from it. Please confirm your status by Wednesday noon. Stacy."

I read it a third time, standing in my socks with the wind rattling the kitchen window like it wanted in. Confirm your status by Wednesday noon. She'd sent it at 9:47 on a Monday night, which I knew was deliberate, because Stacy did everything deliberate, and the "I would hate" was doing more work than a load-bearing wall. She wanted my name off that slate. She'd wanted it off since the holiday party, and Friday was three days away, and the clinic administrator, a careful man named Dr. Duffy who asked good questions and hated being rushed, had told me last week that he'd have an answer by the end of the week. The end of the week. Friday. Her math was mine.

I set the phone face down on the counter and looked out the window over the sink at the dark, where the water was somewhere out there making its noise against the pilings. Three days to close the biggest contract of my career, with my boss openly rooting against me, in a town with one bar and a co-op gallery and a pier with one fisherman on it. I did the arithmetic in my head and the arithmetic did not come out friendly.

And that was when I heard the hum of Colette's wheel start up through the wall, that low steady turning sound that meant she was working late too, chasing her own version of Friday, her own rent math, her own quiet worry nobody else could see. I stood there a minute longer with my fork still in my hand and the rice going colder, and I thought, you know what, I am not spending this night alone in a kitchen reading that email again. I rinsed my plate, I looked at the red circle on my whiteboard, and I went and knocked on her door before I could talk myself out of it.

She opened the door in a flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved up and wet clay smeared across one forearm, and she looked at me like I was the last thing she expected on a Monday night, which fair, because I was.

"Mabel," she said, and then she looked past my shoulder at the dark street, and then back at me. "You okay?"

I was holding a bottle of whiskey I'd bought at the one bar in town, which also sold liquor, because Port Shimmer is efficient like that. I held it up like a white flag. "I got an email," I said. "It felt like a thing you should have a bottle for. Do you want company or should I take this back home and drink it alone in a dishonorable fashion?"

She stepped back and opened the door wider, and that was my answer. "Come in before the wind does. It's got opinions tonight."

Her place was warm and smelled like woodsmoke and wet clay, and I'm counting the woodsmoke and the clay as one smell because they've fused in that house over years and you can't pull them apart anymore. There were shelves everywhere, most of them holding things that were half-finished or finished but wrong, and a wheel in the corner with a bucket beside it full of gray water. She took the bottle from me and read the label.

"This is the cheap one," she said.

"I have a quota and a whiteboard," I said. "The whiskey budget reflects my circumstances."

She laughed at that, a real one, and went to the kitchen for two glasses, and I sat on her sagging chair by the window while she poured, and I told her about the email, all of it, Stacy and the 30th and the Wednesday noon deadline and the fact that Dr. Duffy was a careful man who hated being rushed and wouldn't decide before Friday. I told her about the afternoon too, which I hadn't told anyone because there had been nobody to tell it to, how I'd driven back from the clinic with my slides still in my bag and seen her out in her driveway hosing clay off the concrete, how I'd lifted one hand off the wheel in a terse little wave because I had a rejection sitting in my chest and didn't trust my own face.

"I saw that wave," she said. "I thought, well, that woman's day went badly. You wave like you're swatting a fly at a distance."

"Thank you," I said. "I work on it."

* * *

We drank the cheap whiskey and it was actually fine, smoky and a little sweet, and somewhere in the second glass she asked me the question that undid the whole evening, and she asked it plain, the way she does everything.

"What do you want, Mabel? Not the job. The job's a job. What do you want?"

And I sat there with the glass in my hands and realized I did not have an answer, which was a strange feeling for a woman who spends her whole life reciting numbers at people. Eight years of dating women, a hygienist, a bookseller, a carousel of the same six profiles, and I could not, sitting in that chair, name one thing I actually wanted.

"I don't know," I said, and it came out smaller than I meant it to. "I know what I'm supposed to want. The promotion, the numbers, the slate. I lost a promotion when I was twenty-six because my numbers were soft and I've been chasing that ever since. But you asked what I want and I genuinely don't know. That's an embarrassing thing to admit out loud to a neighbor on a Monday."

"It's not embarrassing," she said. "Most people don't know. They just don't say it."

"Well. Now it's said."