She wondered what it would be like to live on an island.
She’d work from home online, she could practically keep the same job, and in the afternoon she’d do something creative and restful, like gardening or painting, watercolors.
VERIFY YOU ARE HUMAN BY MIKE HEPPNER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 128
One day after work, Honey Lee came out of a Stonewall Kitchen to see an elderly woman in a pink rain slicker peering into her car, her face pressed to the back window and both hands cupped around her eyes. Honey Lee asked what she was doing, and the woman snapped upright.
“Oh, is this your car?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s my car. Why are you looking inside it?” Honey Lee said, trying to sound hard and unfeeling.
The woman looked caught, yet somehow affronted. “I just -- I thought I saw something move.”
“Sorry, no,” Honey Lee replied cooly, all but shouldering the woman away, keys in hand, also her bag of purchases from Stonewall Kitchen. “It’s rude, you know, to stare into other people’s cars. You’d probably call the police if you caught me staring into your car, wouldn’t you?” she added, but the woman had already moved away.
Struck by it, Honey Lee peered into her own car, wanting to see what the woman saw, or thought she did. But Honey Lee saw nothing extraordinary or out of sorts, just her briefcase in the back seat.
Driving home, she wondered what could’ve prompted the woman to peer into her car. It made her feel marked, singled out. It was rather like overhearing someone talk about you behind your back -- it gave her that same feeling of self-consciousness, of being judged.
--
Honey Lee at a business meeting: she sits in one of two chairs at the foot of a long conference table, pen in hand. There’s coffee and a carafe of ice water. Mostly she just listens and takes occasional notes. She twirls her pen between her fingers so that at one point it’s cap up and point down, then point up and cap down. By turn she’s asked to speak, and she does so, uninterrupted and without notes for three minutes. A man asks her a question, and she says, “I already told him. I’ll tell him again.”
--
Honey Lee was walking around her office building. She’d never walked around the building before, though she’d worked there for 17 years.
Behind the building, a wooded area declined down a hill, a creek at the bottom of it. This was the view from her office window, a view she’d seen many times without actually inhabiting it.
She hadn’t expected it to be so wild. The view from her office window was just that, a view. It might as well have been a painting or a digital projection with minor seasonal variations.
The grass was long and snarled and sharp, and there were piles of dead and rotting leaves. Her office building felt like an intrusion or a superimposition from some other, more urbanized place. It came right up to the edge of the woods, a solid brick and glass wall. The grassy tangle extended perhaps 20 yards before the steep and forested collapse down to the creek. There was no path.
She’d come some few dozen steps when she realized she must be standing directly beneath her window. Yes, there it was, on the third floor, second from the end. Not quite a corner office.
With its heavy blackish green tinting -- tinting that made the sky look perpetually glum and sickly from the inside -- her window was indistinguishable from the rest. Just one in a series, part of the whole anonymous corporate grid.
--
Hard to sleep, hard to stay focused. But there was nothing clinically wrong with her, at least that was what she’d been told. Still, you could be unhappy and not have anything clinically wrong with you. Maybe that was even worse, to have this constant unsettled sense without any reason for it, nothing neurological or biochemical. Being unhappy meant thinking too much, and Honey Lee definitely thought too much.
--
Honey Lee alone in her office: she looks at the grayly glowing screen of her laptop and thinks about rectangles, how they’re almost squares. The screen is a rectangle.
Her office is more spacious than most others in the building, and maybe she’s earned that. There’s some percentage chance she’ll die here one day, given the number of hours she spends here per week.
Looking out the window, she wonders if she looks her age. Her age is a number that makes a kind of leaden sense to her. On the window sill there’s a paperclip she must’ve forgotten days or weeks ago.
--
These days Honey Lee often felt restless. For years she’d wanted to take a cruise through the Hebrides without quite knowing why. The Hebrides, the Orkney Islands, those remote, northern locations she couldn’t quite picture on a map. Somewhere near Scotland.
She wondered what it would be like to live on an island, whether she’d love it or hate it. It had to affect one’s view of the world, even the way you thought about basic things like food and gasoline. Maybe she wouldn’t need a car. If she lived on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, she probably wouldn’t spend as much money on hair and skin care products, or on clothes. She’d probably leave the house in jeans and clunky boots and an oversized, fuzzy turtleneck sweater. She’d bundle up against the wind and rain.
There’d probably be a village nearby she could walk to for things like butter and eggs. She’d work from home online, she could practically keep the same job, and in the afternoon she’d do something creative and restful, like gardening or painting, watercolors.
It sounded nice. But the village people, the natives, probably wouldn’t accept her. She’d be an outsider, “the American woman”, on the leading edge of the coming invasion.
People on islands wanted to be left alone, or maybe they didn’t. When she was in her teens and early 20s, she used to go to Nantucket with her parents about once a year. They went to Nantucket because Honey Lee’s mother preferred it to Martha’s Vineyard, which was too big, too crowded, too touristy.
On Nantucket they could walk to the Whaling Museum and look up at the sperm whale skeleton hanging over the main gallery, then cut over to the Nantucket Hotel for a drink, spend an hour browsing books at Nantucket Bookworks, jog over to the Stop & Shop for groceries to take back to one of the themed cottages on Old South Wharf (they always stayed in the “Davy Jones”) where her father would man the grill and Honey Lee and her mother would sit out on the deck over the water in their sundresses and jeweled flip-flop sandals, sipping cold and frosty double-pours of Pinot Grigio and watching the translucent and glowing jellyfish cuddle up to the deck posts that faded gray into the green water. (Why was it so green? That was how she remembered it anyway, emerald green and glowing.)
One year she brought along a boyfriend and her parents were okay about them sleeping together in the bedroom across the short hall from the master, but they didn’t dare make love with her parents so close.
Her father slept through anything, but her mother’s antennae never went down. Not that she’d say anything. Honey Lee was an adult, and no-one could expect her to be a virgin any more, but there’d be an awkwardness between them all day. Her mother would make her pay for it one way or another.
What happened to that guy? Scott. She didn’t keep tabs on old boyfriends. And that was so long ago, almost 30 years. Scott was probably married, probably had a kid or kids. Kids with his wife. Whatever it was, Honey Lee wished him well.
For some reason, things like that never made her curious. People were important to her for a period of time, and then circumstances changed and she moved on. She didn’t want to know what people from college and high school looked like now. Start poking around on-line too long and she’d find out someone she’d gone to skating parties with back in the 80s had died of breast cancer five years ago.
--