The Elbow – David Bingham

August 9, 2024

Grace and the other staffers are gathered around the computer. One of them, Doug, reads aloud: “Once a new representative is elected, they have sole discretion over whether to retain or replace any staff who haven’t moved on.” Doug shivers. Doug is pop-eyed and friendly and, Grace has noticed, almost always has pit stains by 3 PM. After spending her first week in close quarters with him, Grace made a little remark in her head that really when it came down it to it there were just far too many parts of California. It was the kind of thing her mother used to say. She likes Doug and doesn’t really think he’s from the wrong part of California, but Grace’s mother is dead and being mean is a way to feel closer to her. Doug withdraws his hands from the keyboard and starts to massage his neck. To Grace it looks like he is slowly choking himself. Grace returns to her rowhouse. Pay is frozen a day later.
        At the funeral, in a narrow section of the field that has been carved out for her and the other aides, everyone is drinking red wine out of chinet crystal cups. It reminds her of the juice. Barbara, which was the dead Senator’s name, stubbornly refused to do any work unless there was a glass of cranberry juice near her. She rarely drank from it, but could always tell when it hadn’t been refreshed. Now Barbara’s casket is closed, and from somewhere underneath it Grace can hear her mother saying, whatever is in that box couldn’t be so much worse than what you were following down those halls, could it? Why hide her now? Grace looks around. She feels she has the wrong shoes. That night when she is brushing her teeth in front of the mirror, she finds the automatic quality of the act has gone. She nearly forgets to spit. Before she falls asleep she gets a call from Michael, her father. “I saw your picture in the news,” he says, “on my tablet!” Michael is a doctor of Geology.
        The next day is cold and clear. From out her window Grace can see little white lines in the sky, but no planes. She makes some half-hearted passes at the job sites, sends an email to her alumni network, and then goes on a date. She had already scheduled the date, but would have gone anyways if the boy had asked her in the middle of the street when she was in her funeral dress.
        They meet in a new bar in a crummy part of town. The bar has exposed pipes and brick walls but everyone inside looks like they are from Virginia. There are barrels all over the place and the wood looks very fresh, still alive almost. While the boy, Richard, is asking her questions, Grace is thinking about something she saw in CVS the week before. When she walked in to pick up a prescription, the counter-guy was having a kind of tug-of-war with a guy in dungarees over an armful of toilet paper. The counter-guy was yelling, “Get out of here!” and “Not your mother’s house!” and the guy in dungarees was yelling, “You can’t touch me! You can’t touch me!” 
        Richard, almost uncomfortably tall and wearing what looks like a diving watch, says he has been reading a book about habits. He says the book says you can stack one on top of the other. “Like,” he says, “for instance. Now every time I take a shower, I also brush my teeth. So it becomes one thing.” Grace suddenly smiles. She has two drinks and as an act of mercy she tells Richard that one time in high school she drank so many Vitamin Waters she got a kidney stone. After they leave the bar she lets Richard walk her home but on the way there she keeps stepping off of the curb and saying to him: “You can’t touch me, you can’t touch me.” Sometimes when Grace’s mother would say something she didn’t want anyone to argue with, she would put out these little half-sentences afterwards (“all the same”) like traffic cones, seeming to deny the world access to her. “All the same,” Grace says after she walks in the door, but the date wears off quickly, and soon she starts thinking about the next day and the day after that. A week goes by and she still has no leads.
        Grace’s roommate Nora wears rockabilly half-moon glasses and works at some kind of plant life NGO and is usually the one Grace goes to for advice, but Nora is in Vermont with her cousin. Next door to Nora is John, who Grace sometimes lets tease her in a brotherly way. She approaches John’s door tentatively. It is open. John is talking into his gaming headset. “It probably feels so good to uncoil as a snake,” he is saying. “Like unsticking your nuts on a hot day, but it’s your whole body.”
        Another week goes by. There is a text from Doug, who says he has landed at a Political Action Committee in Hyattsville. Nearly out of errands to do, Grace tries to remember what kind of person she was nineteen months ago in New Haven. Looking at old photographs on her phone, she realizes that somewhere along the line she has obviously made a mistake, or else she would not be falling apart so quickly. She had let the job become a drive, which has become a conviction that she knows how to deal with people, but maybe she just knows what kind of pull-up underwear is easiest to change out quickly. She is having trouble telling herself what to do. After she had been on the job six months, she remembers it was already so easy to tell Barbara what to do. To guide her by the elbow.
        Grace goes on a second date with Richard, and even though all he can talk about is some big party he just had at his house, she goes home with him. She likes seeing the inside of people’s homes. In the morning, she goes into the fridge and, poking around, finds some cranberry juice, which she pours into a mug with tits on it, which is the only one in the cabinet. When she hears the front door start to unlock, she walks into the bathroom even though she is fully dressed. She feels herself strangely empty of reflexes, like a child.
        When Richard’s roommate comes in he is singing, to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell: “They did not take our trash, they did not take our trash, I told you it was far too full they didn’t take our trash.” Grace was there when Barbara died, and the truth is it did not seem like such a big change. The end of things is like the shine on a metal fan that’s spinning. When the plug is pulled, the light concentrated by all the motion just kind of dissipates. Grace looks down into the cup. Down the hatch, she hears her mother say.