SARAH M. BALCOMB

CARE SECRETS

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I had written myself a note: replant guy in new pot. I was referring, of course, to my fichus, Guy, but when my boyfriend found the note, used as a bookmark in a discarded volume of poetry, he assumed that he was the guy in question.

We had recently moved to a new city, and now he sensed a master plan. There was none. The move had, in fact, been his idea, or rather, his boss’s. All expenses paid by the corporation, I hadn’t thought twice about replanting myself and all my stuff in a new place. But now I was the isolated one, four thousand miles away from everyone I knew and loved, except my boyfriend, of course.

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My boyfriend worked 80 hours a week, on average, as it turned out.

I was in between things, as I was phrasing it. Transitioning was another word I often used. Whatever I was doing, I had a lot of time to do it.

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Our new backyard, mostly deck, was my refuge. I’d never had a yard of my own before, and I turned to maintaining it with relish. I could see shades of green developing beneath the surface of my skin. I researched local graduate programs in horticulture.

When I came out into the yard each morning, there was always something amiss. Soil from my boxed herb garden dotted the railing around it. The cilantro was most often uprooted. A lemon from the upper branches of the lemon tree had fallen to a splattery death among the rocks. There were always stray leaves that needed to be swept back to the corners and strands of spider web to be removed for safe passage from the upper to the lower deck. I relegated an old plastic spatula for use in this last task.

It occurred to me, one day, that I wasn’t so much gardening, if I were to use the correct verb, but that I was cleaning the deckyard, as we’d started calling it.

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Were I to use the word refuge aloud to describe my yard, one might wonder what exactly I needed a safe haven away from. No one was around long enough to pose such questions. The answer, of course, would have been reality.

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Our new city was a car city, and I hadn’t driven in years. Although I had enough money to live without working for a while, I couldn’t afford a car. Instead, I affixed a basket to the front of my bicycle and relegated errands involving larger items to the weekends when my boyfriend wasn’t working. Unfortunately, he worked most weekends and always late into the evening.

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On Wednesdays, I went to see the cheese guy. We talked about the weather, my garden, local politics, which I was learning, wine, cheese, of course, other foods, all of it languidly while I sampled his latest wears. Languid, I thought, was a good adjective to associate with the consumption of cheese. Also, sensuous, of course.

I imagined the cheese guy bending me over a cool aluminum counter in the back room of his shop. I could come just picturing his thick hands hovering between my thighs. This wasn’t an exaggeration. I had become such a skilled masturbator that I hardly ever had to use my own hands.

I made the mistake, once, of telling my boyfriend that when I lived alone during grad school, I would get into bed to read at around four o’clock every afternoon, and within half an hour, I was asleep – a post-masturbatory nap, drooling on the pillow. Whatever the subject, I was turned on by good prose, I explained, and I only ever read good prose.

Now I worried that he assumed I did this every afternoon while he was away at work. The notion of me quietly masturbating while he was hard at work probably didn’t seem fair. Also, while most men might appreciate the notion of single women, or porn stars, masturbating alone, girlfriends were supposed to reserve such passions for evenings of coupling. This was my assumption, anyway, not that it kept me from my daily practice.

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One Sunday afternoon, my boyfriend was out back sanding down the top to an old oak desk we’d found at a local flea market while I was raking, pruning, weeding, and otherwise tidying the leafy detritus among the pebbly passages around the deck. The lavender bushes, I noticed, weren’t busy with their usual surfeit of buzzing bees. Oh, of course, I thought, it’s the weekend. They have the day off.

When I shared this thought, which I found amusing, with my boyfriend, he called me crazy.

He meant this affectionately, I think, though I didn’t take it that way.

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When we came back from being away for a week, the yard was in a frightful state of disarray. Dead leaves and decomposing pieces of lemon were scattered all around the pebbly places beneath and around the tree, some even reaching up onto the decks. The rosemary bushes and the aloe plant had been hit pretty hard, and the sweet basil was completely dead.

Before we left, I’d joked that bears might get into the yard, attracted by the discarded meat in the trash bin. I’m the closest thing to a bear you’ll find around here, my boyfriend had replied. But now I thought I might have been onto something. One of the lavender bushes looked like a bear had sat on it on one side. What else could account for that much devastation in a week?

After putting it off half the day, I got started with the cleaning out there, scooping up the worst of the lemon carcasses with a small trowel. Although they smelled freshly of citrus, they weren’t as pleasant to look at – green and brown with mold and age, covered in swarming ants and the occasional slug. I had to talk myself into not vomiting. Then it was onto sweeping and raking up all the leaves and dumping everything into the green bin.

By the time I got around to hosing the whole place down, the light was seeping out of the sky: a bluish-gray matte all above me, marked only by a single early star with the piercing brightness of the dead pixel in the upper left-hand corner of my computer screen. Such a star was probably a satellite, right?

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I had one friend in our new town. She was the twin sister of an old boyfriend, and we felt close immediately. We both appreciated order and strived towards a greater sense of self-awareness. We may have both been narcissists, but we were gentle narcissists.

Once a week we met for coffee, which usually turned into wine. She worked from home and seemed lonely, though not nearly as lonely as I was. More than once a week she drank her coffee, or wine, with someone other than herself.

She was also aware of the cheese guy. We agreed that while he wasn’t what anyone would call attractive, traditionally, there was certainly an attraction there. It was because of the cheese, no doubt, and how he smiled while you tasted some, waiting patiently for a response, which was usually guttural. Visceral was a word that also seemed appropriate in this context.

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When the rainy months began, I took to looking after the inside of our house. There were books to rearrange, clothes to mend, carpets to clean, prints to be matted and framed, and of course, the constant dusting and scouring of hard surfaces. These tasks involved a sense of order that couldn’t be obtained in my outdoor activities: the inherent formality of interiors. Also, they could not be undone so easily by wind or rain or beast, other than my boyfriend, of course. He did his best, in the time he was there, to wreak havoc on my sense of propriety and pride over a job well done, but to his credit, the maelstrom of his boyish being created enough projects to keep my idle hands occupied all winter long. The number of dirty socks and underwear he produced alone was an astonishing feat to keep up with cleaning.

Afternoons, the heat of the dryer in the next room kept my reading nook cozy. On particularly cold days, the windows would fog up. Adding to the steam, I took long, hot baths in the old cast iron tub upstairs. I couldn’t have seen outside our windows even if I’d wanted to.

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I discontinued my weekly visits to the cheese guy. In fact, my outdoor excursions ceased almost completely.

Whenever I padded up to the front of the house and gazed out through the warped glass in the old door, I grew frightened by the gray sky and wet ground. I feared a fatal bicycle accident on the slick pavement. I feared catching a cold. I feared the friendly faces at the local grocery store. I feared the way my voice stuck in the back of my throat. I feared the ringing telephone.

Two hours on the stationary bike replaced my daily rides around the neighborhood. I stopped washing my hair. I was too tired to masturbate. Insomnia was an issue, one which I blamed on my boyfriend’s snoring, although most days I slept past lunch.

For our dinners, I created new combinations from canned legumes, frozen vegetables and rice, and when those ran low, we ordered in mediocre Thai food and greasy pizza. My boyfriend gained weight. I was more lean and muscular than I’d been since high school.

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My boyfriend and I stopped talking to each other. Or rather, I hoped that my deployment of the silent treatment might make him a tidier housemate. I encouraged him to work longer hours and to generally leave me to my puttering.

I began cataloguing my correspondence, cross-referenced with my photography. This was important work, I insisted, mostly to myself. I needed to find myself here, that was all. And it was just taking longer than anticipated.

I contemplated taking a drawing class or calligraphy. Mostly, I counted the days until spring.

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On Thursdays I began taking the bus downtown to spend fifty minutes with a vibrant young Jungian named Stephanie. I liked the fact that she was about my age, although sometimes it made me feel guilty that the conversations were so one-sided.

I worked hard at convincing her that I was going to be okay. She encouraged me to give myself time to adjust. Really, I was just glad for the company. It was almost as if I had two friends in town now. I imagined I’d finally get to hear her side once I had a couple glasses of Sauvignon Blanc in her.

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In spring, I resumed my duties in the yard, eager to return order to the nature of things. My aloe plant was officially deceased, but the Japanese maple, which I’d pared down to a couple of slender brown stalks, was thriving. A dozen new branches were bursting with translucent red leaves that looked like they were just happy to be alive.

The strangest change out there was the cilantro. The original plant was a brown husk spread flat against the dry earth. At its center, a tall spindly wildflower had bloomed. The delicate white blossoms held their own against the sharp wind. I watered them individually from a medicine dropper and encouraged them with positive hand gestures.

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My boyfriend started spending more time at home. We bought a big Weber grill, cooked fresh food again, and ate on the new table in the deckyard.

Over dinners, we reminisced about the past and mused on the future. The present was no longer a taboo subject. I updated the address on my resume and began looking for work.

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SARAH M BALCOMB'S FICTION HAS APPEARED IN VARIOUS LITERARY MAGAZINES, INCLUDING 5-TROPE, BITE MAGAZINE, BOTH MAGAZINE, DRUNKEN BOAT, MCSWEENEY'S, PANTS MAGAZINE, AND PINDELDYBOZ, AS WELL AS A CHAPBOOK PUBLISHED BY EOHIPPUS LABS. AFTER RECEIVING HER MFA FROM COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, SHE SPENT A DECADE IN LOS ANGELES WHERE SHE WORKED ON INDEPENDENT FILMS, READ SCRIPTS, OWNED A BOOKSTORE, WROTE A SITCOM THAT WAS ALMOST FILMED, AND HAD A CHILD. SHE CURRENTLY LIVES WITH HER FAMILY IN LEXINGTON, VA, AND IS WORKING ON A NOVEL ABOUT SOCIETAL COLLAPSE DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.