She watches the movie from bed. It’s modern. It’s in technicolor, the way they used to be, and it’s one about a man who loves jazz and a woman who longs to be an actress. Everything seems to glitter, and she wonders if, out there somewhere, her jazz-loving ex is also breaking a woman’s heart on the highest overlook in Los Angeles, view of the horizon and its pink-blue lights flickering just beyond because – and he’ll admit it proudly – he loves jazz music more than he could ever love that woman.
The next day, she takes the bus to the grocery store, the red one, long and wheezing as though its last breath is near. It’s the last thing she expects to happen – running into her ex there in the chilly produce section, but it does. He must be in town for the holidays, or still there in the wake of them, as the living room parties have already passed and the gray aftermath of Christmas and New Year’s has begun. And he’s standing with his broad hands stretched beneath the cabbage misters. She thinks for a moment that “cabbage misters” would be an odd but valid way to gender produce but that surely someone has done it by now.
Vapor cold. She sees the veins on the backs of his hands – can they make a person seem still young? She walks closer to confirm it, pushes her empty buggy in his direction. Lights, incandescent and harsh. The air still.
I thought that was you, she says as she arrives behind him. What she means to say is, I knew with certainty that was you. It’s been just over 10 years. Her heart wobbles, but her feet are sturdy.
He turns around quickly because there is no one on either side of him and, in front of him, well, glistening chartreuse cabbages in beautiful rows, some of them purple too.
His face is confused, draws toward its center, his mouth just partly open, but yes, that’s him.
He knows who she is the second his dark eyes land at the side of her face. Despite looking head-on at her, that’s where he glances. Always did for some reason.
How many layers of skin would you have to unfold from a cabbage to get to its dense hard center? Hopeless. Don’t bother. He knows just who she is but pretends to be astounded when he begins to speak. His scarf is wool, or mohair, or both, but it’s such a pretty cornflower blue that she can’t help but feel as though she is twenty-three again, wondering whether he might be able to surprise her in bed. The scarf is wrapped twice around his neck. He’s formal, dressed like he’ll take the stage any minute and lift his patinated saxophone to his lips. To get cabbage, can you imagine? To go to the grocery store in their snowed-up hometown, beginning of January, and get cabbage, for what? Stew?
She still finds him handsome though she could never articulate why to begin with. When they were younger, she liked his body. He was strong and always faced life in a forward way. And she had liked his face, too, his freckles, the way he asserted his interests – books, candies, mythical creatures he deemed unworthy of legend. But mostly, she liked that he seemed to know something about her that she hadn’t yet discovered. Or at least pretended he did.
When she looks at him now, she pictures his face moving across the frames of the movie she watched the night before. She tries to superimpose him over the fictional musician, tries to see him before that same sunset, the same hills brushing the sky like candy.
The grocery store lights are harsh, though. His hair has not changed from before, except for a bit of recession. A decade will do that. Sigh. Excuses. His red curly hair, his saxophone, his obsession with watching horses race on dirt tracks and their body language – “their body language!” – he used to shout excitedly while they sat at cafes when they were an item about town, and sipped hot coffee, and waited for their stomachs to turn. You could tell so much from a Quarter Horse’s body language, he said. Those compact, tight muscles. The speed. And he knew it because of the book he’d been reading about it, studying the sentences as though they were images themselves.
If there were a book on cabbages, she thinks, how many pages? Realistically, how many paragraphs could you stretch to make a point about a fruit? Vegetable? Or was it a legume? He would know the answer, she thinks, because he believed that for every question, there was a book to answer it.
Nora! He finally says her name. His face falls naturally into a smile. Like a coda to follow his confoundment. The resolution, the revelation.
Yes, she says softly. Godfrey.
I go by Frey now, he says.
Not God?
Hmm?
He adjusts the loops of wool around his neck, stands a bit taller, though he already has 13 or 14 inches on her.
She clasps her hands together in front of her waist. All she says is, you look so much like you did.
Well, still me, he says. A look of obviousness. A fruit fly hovering just below his left ear. He lowers his head, strokes the handle bar of her buggy. Plastic scratched and old.
Behind her, a child in bright green denim overalls kicks at her heels. His sneakers are unbelievably small. They light up in neon blinks each time his toes strike her.
Lady, miss! He shouts from down there, short as a bug. Lay-dee!
She turns around but the child is already trailing away, being pulled by the magnetism of his mother. Hush, hush, she coos. She holds a yo-yo in her fist, and the child, his fingers clinging to its string, carries on, moving closer then further then closer again to his mother.
Nora feels she has changed so much in the past 10 years. She feels like an entirely new creature, fresh from the gunk of chrysalis. She no longer hesitates in a mirror, no longer feels her breath stutter before a big day. When she walks in a puddle, she accepts it. When she misses the bus, she adapts. Compared to the Nora that he knew before? And really, that is the only Nora he could possibly know, since he hasn’t seen her since then, unless of course you consider the Nora he has pieced together in his mind over the years, the versions of her imagined – some prettier than others, some less successful than others, some exactly the same as the version of her he knows by memory, save for a couple of altered details like having light brown hair instead of dark. In reality, her dark hair is one of the only exactly-same things about her.
She has become the painter she talked about becoming when they were together, which he supported, she’ll give him that. She has become better at parallel parking, an expert at cutting the wheel sharp and surely at the right moment. She has lost her migraines, nearly all of them except for the inevitable ones that throb in the hours before a thunderstorm or nearing cold front. He had never had a headache that lasted more than an hour or two. She used to like that about him because it might have meant that he had superpowers, and she loathed it and envied it too.
The one other major difference she sees in herself now, standing in aisle one, produce, the closest to the entrance of the grocery store, is that she doesn’t know him very well. She realizes this even as she stands there reaching for her buggy’s handlebar, where he starts to pull his fingers away.
What are you planning to make? She asks, nodding to the greenery behind him. The misters have sputtered to a stop. There is dew coating the waxy leaves, the shelves, the parsley on the display next to them.
He turns around slowly, grabs a cabbage and examines it in his hand. He turns back to her with a quick smile, excited, and says, Salad. We’re having grilled chicken salad at my parents’ tonight. It’s all they’ll let me cook. Chuckle. Well, Mom at least, won’t let me lift a finger further. You know how that is.
He tilts his head a bit to the side, so much like a puppy she expects his tongue to roll out of his mouth. He is still smiling, but now in a way that she remembers, which is like a pang of hurt, and it seems like he has more freckles than he did before. Or are they in different spots? She struggles to recall.
She won’t tell him he’s got it all wrong. She points to the green head in his hands, and she nods. Good choice.