The Wire Cabbage Restraint

I'm fifty-one years old and I still get a little proud glow when somebody at the depot says good job. Today the shift supervisor flagged me down by the reefer containers and told me my cord stowage reports were the cleanest he'd seen all quarter. Cleanest all quarter. I floated through the rest of my shift at the Villa Tunari truck depot, checking power cords on refrigeration units and humming to myself like an idiot.

After work I didn't go straight to my apartment. I drove up the gravel road to the old mountain unicycle track, because I'd promised Cleo I'd help her get ready for her workshop finale. The track sits in this alpine meadow that smells like cut grass and rain when the humidity rolls in off the slopes. There's a storage unit next to the track that Lawrence Scalia leases, this sixty-three year old guy with a temperamental unicycle track gear collection and more wire than a hardware store. He's the one who lent the space to Cleo for the week.

The plan was simple. Clear the boxes, sweep, stay out of the way. I'm awkward by nature. I've made peace with it. I paint abstract wire sculptures in my spare time, which is a hobby that involves a lot of standing alone in a garage saying hmm, so you can imagine my social calibration.

The clearing outside the unit was quiet in the best way. Just me, the boxes, and somebody's abandoned mint plant growing wild by the doorstep. I snapped off a sprig and rubbed it between my fingers while I worked. That's my thinking habit. Mint, or wire, or both.

I'd been hauling boxes for about twenty minutes when I heard Cleo's voice from inside the unit, back among Lawrence's track tools.

"Jessie? Is that you? Come in, watch the floor."

Cleo is fifty-two, a belly dance instructor and professional performer, and she moves through a doorway the way water moves through a funnel. We met three years ago at a storage-unit auction, back when we were both in our late forties and bored, and we've been friendly acquaintances ever since. She's the kind of woman who makes you feel like the most interesting person at the party even when you're holding a broom.

Inside, the unit was crammed with mirrors leaning against every wall, so there were about nine of everything, including nine of me looking sweaty and box-tired. The floor had been polished at some point and now it shone like a skating rink. I took two steps and my boots did a little uncomplicated slide. I grabbed a stack of mirrors for balance and immediately regretted it because now there were four Jessies grabbing four stacks.

"You look like a heron on ice," Cleo said, laughing from behind a rack of Lawrence's wheel truing stands.

"I feel like one. What is all this?"

She stepped out into the open and I saw she was holding a coiled bundle of wire. It looked like a cabbage made of fencing, loops folded over loops, and a sprig of mint twisted right into the weave like a garnish.

"Lawrence's wire cabbage restraints," she said. "He wraps his track gear in them for transport so nothing rattles loose. He's paranoid about tangling. This one's the master loop, everything else keys off it."

She held it out. I did the thing I do, which is hesitate, then lean in anyway. Curiosity always wins with me, I just like to make it look reluctant.

"Can I?"

"Go ahead. It doesn't bite. Lawrence might, but the wire won't."

I took it. The wire was cool and heavy, the twists tight and deliberate, and the mint was dried but still fragrant where it was twisted into the weave. Somebody had taken real care with this. I turned it over twice and my fingers kept finding the rhythm of the coils. I guess that's the sculptor in me. Wire talks to me.

"You like it," Cleo said. She wasn't asking.

"It's well made. The tension is even all the way around. Whoever did this was patient."

"That's Lawrence for you." She watched me a beat longer than was strictly necessary, and I felt it, that little static-shock awareness that something had shifted in the room. "Jessie, can I say something? You have the strongest legs I've ever seen on a woman who isn't a dancer."

I laughed, because that's my defense mechanism, but she didn't laugh with me. She just looked, calm as anything, fifty-two years of knowing exactly what she wanted written all over her face.

"I mean it. The way your calves curve when you crouch to lift a box. I've been watching you work all afternoon through the door."

"Oh," I said. Very eloquent. Fifty-one years old, professional cord stowage checker, and my entire response was oh.

"If that's unwelcome, tell me and it stops right there. I'd rather be told."

"It's not unwelcome," I heard myself say. "It's just new. Nobody's ever, um. Watched my calves before."

"Well, more fools, all of them." She smiled. And here's the part where I admit something I'd normally only tell my diary: I looked down at my own boots and thought, huh, so this is what wanting feels like from the inside when you're the wanted one.

The mirrors were making everything strange and doubled. Nine Cleos, nine me's, all of us standing in the humid afternoon light coming through the open door. The floor gleamed under it all.

"Your feet must be killing you," she said. "Those boots, eight hours at the depot, then hauling boxes? Sit. Please. On that crate, it's sturdy."

"I'm fine, really, I..."

"Jessie." Just my name, patient. "May I?"

I sat on the crate. I don't even remember deciding to. I unlaced my boots and peeled off my work socks and my feet were embarrassed to be seen, frankly, callused and tired and nothing like a dancer's. Cleo knelt on the slippery floor in front of me like it was the most natural thing in the world, and in nine mirrors I watched her do it nine times.

"May I touch them?" she asked, hands hovering.

"Yeah," I said. "Yes. Please!"

Her hands were warm and sure. She took one foot in both palms and pressed her thumb into the arch and I made a noise I will not be describing. She worked the heel, the ball, each toe, unhurried, and she was watching my face the whole time like my reactions were the performance she'd rehearsed for. Nobody has ever paid that kind of attention to my feet. I didn't know it was a thing a person could want until right then, and then I wanted it permanently.

"You have beautiful feet," she said, and I started to protest and she squeezed my arch and the protest died in my throat. "Strong. Honest feet. Feet that show up and do the work."

"You're very good at this," I managed.

"I've had practice. Breathe, Jessie."

At some point the mint came back into it. I'd set the sprig on the crate beside me, and I picked it up and crushed a leaf between my fingers, and the smell filled the whole mirror-room. Cleo looked up from my foot with her chin resting on my ankle.

"You smell like you belong in this meadow," she said.

I don't know what came over me. Something did. I slid off the crate, slow, careful on that