Lacey was not one to plumb the depths of her own psyche with too great a vigor, and yet there was one question she returned to each night, lying in her twin bed, eyes on the constellation of plastic stars stuck to the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. That question being: was she dating Aidan only because of the allure of his two mothers?¹
She had met Aidan via Hinge, where his profile had been blessedly devoid of any posing-with-a-dead-fish portraits. He claimed to be five foot eleven, an admission that seemed vulnerable and therefore honest. Pictures showed him at a college football game; in front of a vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains; petting a dog. But the element of his profile that had drawn her attention was his answer to the prompt “What’s something surprising about you?” to which he had replied: “i have two moms!” The exclamation point at the end was endearing. So was the thought of what kind of sensitivity a double dose of feminine influence might have bestowed on him. Surely such a household, and his emphasizing it, signaled some unusual ounce of emotional intelligence, some deviation from the trappings of conventional masculinity. Surely he was trying to tell her something—her and all the girls in the empty expanses of the app, riding the currents of the algorithm like hawks on a high-altitude breeze.
For a first date, it was coffee. The greeting: a hug. Second date, an art museum, at which point Lacey felt it prudent to allow him to kiss her goodbye, though he did not make the attempt. By the third date, a movie, she felt more motivated to keep things trundling along, and spurred the kiss herself; thus, she could mark this off the internal checklist she maintained, and be comforted that the relationship was progressing and, as a result, that her time was not being wasted. By the fifth date, however, the checklist indicated sex, and this realization was concurrent with another: that she did not find Aidan at all interesting, despite her valiant efforts. His interest in her was inscrutable, given how little they seemed to have in common, and yet without fail he followed up every date with a suggestion for another, leaving her with the question always on the tip of her tongue: you enjoy this? This actually does something for you?
But she didn’t ask, because she was behind schedule. It was August, and the summer romance she had planned between her freshman and sophomore years of college had to happen now if it was to happen at all. Her deflowering was necessary; ideally it would have happened in high school, but circumstances outside of her control had curtailed her pre-college social life, and she had time to make up. She was ready to fall in love, or fall enough—falling only slightly, actually, might be best, since she wasn’t interested in the vagaries of a long-distance relationship, and in September she and Aidan would be departing their hometown for different out-of-state colleges. As such, she was making do with Aidan’s shortcomings, nodding enthusiastically when he explained that he’d chosen to major in psychology because he'd taken AP Psych in high school and found it “kind of cool to get in people’s heads.” She made sounds of appropriate shock and awe at each beat of a long story about an adventure he’d had at sailing camp. She cooed on command at pictures of his cousin’s lap dog, whom he adored despite its damp and bulging eyes.²
By the sixth date, her patience was wearing thin, despite her commitment to the timetable, but she was finding it easier to populate their increasingly thin conversations with her own interests. “Air France flight 447,” she said, “crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009. Why?”
What followed was her best run-through of the events leading up to the crash and the investigation that followed. She dwelled happily on the details she found most compelling—the confusion in the cockpit in the absence of the captain, who was on a break, the frozen pitot tubes giving faulty airspeed indication, the failure to do the one thing that would have saved the aircraft from encountering the spot where black night met black ocean. The stall warning unheeded. A flight crew’s worst sin: distrust of the instruments, of each other, of themselves. “A failure of sight,” she said. “No one saw the big picture. No one was looking in the right place.”³
Aidan nodded, eyes blank. Then said, “Do you want to have dinner with my parents next week?”
She feigned consideration and replied yes, she would like that, she supposed. Next Friday evening he picked her up in his used CRV—a cast off from one of the moms—and her delight felt near orgasmic as they turned the corner and she saw the splendor of his street, his yard, his house. He said they called the house next door the Death Star because of its enormous gray facade, but she only had eyes for his home: that tidy bungalow of white brick and mild green siding, the slate path bordered by mondo grass from the sidewalk to the broad front porch. In front of the house an electric car was parallel parking, its unobtrusive little engine emitting an ethereal whine, and from it emerged one of his mothers. Leigh was short-haired and square-built, wearing a paint-speckled t-shirt commemorating some corporate volunteer event at a homeless shelter. She wore cargo pants, a carabiner on her side belt loop. Lacey felt herself twitch with the urge to run into her freckled arms: a feeling like fascination, or else love. She wrangled her smile under control and said, “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”
Inside, the house was half-restored to the Victorian origins denoted by the brass plaque next to the door marking it as an official member of the town’s historical house registry. The walls were adorned with period-accurate wallpaper, the doorknobs all crystalline and finicky. Lacey, ecstatic, ran her hand along the wainscotting, inspected the accumulation of dust at the threshold of hundred-year-old wood flooring. Her own family home had only been built, along with her entire neighborhood, a mere fifteen years before—the dust of decades had had no chance to accumulate with such elegance as here. Aidan’s other mother, Holly, stood at the kitchen island, and Lacey somehow knew, instantly and deliciously, that the clothes she wore were cut for a man—the slacks loose and straight, the button-up shirt crisp and broad in the shoulders.⁴ On her belt was clipped a patent leather phone case. She pulled the airpods out of her ears, pausing NPR, when she saw the three of them arrive in the doorway. “Just in time to light the candles,” she said, motioning toward the breakfast nook, where a glistening challah loaf awaited.
Lacey watched the rituals, entranced. The flames lit, Kiddush recited. The sun dipped down orange, latticing through the windows looking out onto the backyard with its red brick patio and immaculately landscaped corners. They ate and the mothers asked her questions. What was her major? Aeronautical engineering. How exciting, how unique. You must be good at math. Lacey was smiling, answering dexterously. She had always been good with other people’s parents: she was marked by tragedy but noticeably resilient, thus clear-eyed and responsible where their own children were not. She could impersonate an old soul with ease—could appear uncomplicated, released from the mysteries of youth. She looked like she managed spreadsheets well, and did.
The mothers were asking Aidan, now, how his work day had gone at the public pool, appearing rapturously interested in all the complicated political machinations that went into scheduling shifts for a bunch of nineteen-year-old lifeguards. Then the conversation turned to Holly’s latest trip to Costco. “I saw the most amazing thing. Perfect for fall,” she said.
Leigh eyed her with amused trepidation, as if intuiting what would come next.
“A big, blow-up black cat for the front yard,” said Holly. “And its head turns! We’ve got to get it for Halloween.”
Leigh, laughing, shook her head in disbelief and said to Lacey, “She’s the tackiest classy person you’ll ever meet.”
The tenderness so inlaid in Leigh’s teasing tone made the blood rise in Lacey’s face. The flush stayed for the entirety of the meal. After, Aidan drove her home, and she rolled down the window until her cheeks began to cool. Everything they passed stood out to her as singularly beautiful: the tenderness of a woman waiting for an elderly dog to sniff a stump, a Little Free Library brimming with charity and knowledge, the lone couple in their own personal twilight on a wraparound porch lit only by ambient light trickling out from inside the house. She closed the window only once Aidan made the last turn into her subdivision.
“Do you ever get lost in here?” he asked, innocently curious. “With all the houses looking so similar?”
She decided on an answer. “Never.”⁵
********
Lacey’s mother had died when she was fourteen, of a cancer that she had struggled against for more or less all of Lacey’s conscious life. The shadow of her impending doom still occupied the house, even after her death, and it was in this half-light that her father moved, skulking cat-like and quiet, as though becoming spectral himself was the only way to avoid awakening a ghost. He was a grim little island, so obviously in need of caretaking that her siblings, and now Lacey, took it on without conscious resentment. Often, in her mind, he appeared in spotlight, beneath the lamp that hung over the dining table, his long, careworn face cut into lines by shadow. Always, the rest of the room would be dark. Beneath his hands, some paper—permission slips and medical bills and bank statements, too small in his large, inept fingers. It was her older brother and sister who had done the heavy lifting of everyday care while Lacey finished high school, and now they were off—Amanda blundering through community college with her boyfriend in Alamance, Danny working construction in Charlotte—leaving Lacey to manage what remained of the household this summer. She knew that in a Disney movie with the obligatory dead mom plot premise, she’d be pluckier, her father sadder and more grateful, but as it was she performed stolidly the cooking and cleaning as necessary and her father slipped through doorways on silent feet, into dark rooms without turning on the light. ⁶
Since her plans for an internship had not panned out this summer, her duties were unavoidable. She texted friends from college as they interned and vacationed in various exotic locales, salivating for updates: how are you??? how is it out there???? omgggg that’s amazing!!! so glad you’re having a good time & making friends & stuff. Important to keep such solicitations and praises all in lowercase, so that her enthusiasm was fun and informal rather than overwhelming and cringy, the way a parent’s might be. She replied to her friends’ inquiries about her own activities with a similar impenetrable cheerfulness. In her childhood bedroom, which was painted pale pink and still had one wall plastered with the posters of the bands she’d been devoted to in middle school, she told them she was seeing someone, and it was getting kind of real, actually. Tho you know me hahahahahaha.
In her free hours, of which there were many, she tread the nondescript corridors of the tract house bought just before her mother’s death, taking in its off-white carpeting, the neutral colors on the walls, the inelegance of its standard crown molding. She thought of Aidan’s home, inevitably—the framed art, the sagging bookshelves, the low-slung coffee table with its collection of glossy photography books. She felt as if some new color had just been revealed to her, her visual spectrum lengthened to accommodate a heretofore unknown category. But it wasn’t quite as foreign as it seemed: hadn’t she always known there were those who woke into different kinds of rooms than she did? Whose primordial palate of images and sounds and textures varied so greatly from her own?
What a delight to be submerged in Aidan’s umwelt ⁷, though, even if just for an evening. What a greater delight to be invited back. On Tuesday, he texted her to suggest watching a movie on Netflix in the doldrums of the afternoon, and she stopped mid-meal prep to respond with enthusiasm. Given that it was a week day she figured that the mothers would not be home, and this deflated her, though not entirely—their essence would remain in every angle of the furniture, every sprig of lavender in the bathroom, in the tastefully ironic slogans of the refrigerator magnets. Secondarily, she contemplated her virginity, her checklist, how an afternoon alone might move up events in the timeline, but such thoughts were already beginning to feel perfunctory beside the beauty of the house and those that owned it. Her own body quickly made itself irrelevant in a way that felt euphoric—that euphoria perhaps an indicator of how she had managed to avoid romantic entanglement for so long. Lacey enjoyed sublimation, that downward pull into intense thought. Somewhere in the liquid nothingness of the sky she might find herself, working on a physics problem set, distant from bodily needs and the demands of others, distant from any desolations in the past or the present. Her new interest in sex was a method of broadening her horizons, encountering the tangible world, trying to make sense of the way others waxed poetic about sensation. Already she could feel her curiosity waning, the searchlight of her attention drifting elsewhere.
Pulling up in front of Aidan’s house, admiring the clean lines of the broad front porch, she thought maybe she did have at least some understanding of the allure of the physical. Emerging from inside and waving to her was Leigh, the carabiner on her hip jangling ⁸, and instead of disrupting the cleanliness of the image, it was only made more sublime—again, that desire to run into Leigh’s arms, to feel the coarse cotton of her t-shirt against her cheek.
In the foyer, Leigh was trying to corral two tabby cats while they circled each other warily. “They don’t get along,” Leigh explained. “That’s why they have those little purple collars on—pheromones. It apparently smells like a mama cat and is supposed to chill them out.”
“Does it work?” Lacey asked, catching a whiff of musky sweetness in the air.
“No,” said Leigh, just as the cats took off down the hall, yowling. She shrugged, smiling, and led Lacey toward that haven of a kitchen. “Something to eat or drink? We probably have leftovers, or I could make sandwiches—”
“Mom, please,” Aidan said, appearing in a doorway, arms folded. Unconvincingly, he aped displeasure at her doting. “Leave her alone.”
“Sorry, sorry,” said Leigh, hands raised in surrender. “The basement’s all yours.”
Reluctantly, Lacey allowed herself to be escorted downstairs, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the figure of Leigh, illuminated by a cut of afternoon light, rinsing out a bottle, neatly refolding a denim dish towel, organizing the row of spices in jars along the spotless backsplash. ⁹ In the basement, a loveseat basked in the silvery light of the TV. If she had dated in high school, Lacey wondered if this was what it might have been like: the demure afternoon appointment, the arm around her shoulders, the nearby puttering of a parent. She felt sunk into nostalgia for an imaginary time. At fifteen, she would have been embarrassed, hyper aware of Aidan’s proximity, but now her focus was tuned to the movement upstairs—the creak of Leigh’s feet across hardwood floors. The whole house shook when she opened the back door, the air pressure changing. At some point, she noticed Aidan playing with the split ends of her hair, and thought of the haircut she needed, of Leigh’s prim cut, the fade up the back of her neck.
********
And so it became a habit, in those last few weeks of summer, for the invite to be extended once or twice a week for her to come over to the bungalow. Never did she reciprocate and allow Aidan into her own home, and he showed no interest in coming in. Sometimes, they drove out to some place together—a museum or a concert or a food truck rodeo—and Lacey drove her Volvo, expertly employing its groaning manual transmission, and feeling very pleased with herself to be doing so. She hoped Aidan found her confidence in the driver’s seat sexy—she, at least, found it sexy, when she hovered somewhere outside of her body and watched the smooth motion of her wrist, the exquisite multitasking of arms and legs and eyes. ⁱ⁰
There she went, turning a brisk right on red on an incline without the car abruptly shutting off and rolling back down the hill, and yet Aidan made no comment, his eyes on the traffic ahead while he chattered inanely about work.
More often, they occupied his basement until dinnertime, kissing perfunctorily when it could not be avoided or when a movie started to drag. A few times, he reached for her breast, but the moment his fingers collided with the skin of her chest she involuntarily felt herself disengage in surprise, as though shocked that this should be a place his hand might be inclined to rest, to explore. Sometimes they talked, if she’d read an interesting NTSB incident report recently and wanted to discuss a runway incursion at JFK. ¹¹ Aidan nodded along and said, “It’s cool that you’re passionate about something.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked, as if she didn’t already know the answer. She wondered what she could get him to admit.
He shrugged. “I guess.”
It appeared that she and Aidan shared an aversion to introspection. Happy to sidestep that confused internal sea. If Aidan didn’t know why he chose to devote his time to psychology or the lifeguard schedule, perhaps it was better not to ask himself a question he couldn’t answer. Lacey knew that she loved aviation, its complicated but solvable problems, its reliance on formulas and statistical analysis and clean-lined diagrams and inalienable procedures. Beyond that, she had decided nothing else mattered. Her limited investigation into the possibility of sex with Aidan was becoming less and less interesting with each passing day, and the closer they neared to the beginning of the semester the less urgency she felt to go forward with the checklist. Soon she would be back in the cocoon of her schoolwork, problems laid out on a page, and her meager adventure in the pleasures of the flesh forgotten. And yet here she was, eating dinner with his family once again, asking Holly about her work at a German chemical manufacturing corporation. Being asked, in turn, whether she’d like to join the family for one last summer beach trip that weekend.
She thought: god, yes. She said: “Yes, I’d love to.”
At home, she cornered her father in the pantry, standing in the doorway to block his exit. “I’m going out of town with a friend this weekend.”
“What friend?” he asked, without removing his eyes from the expiration date on a can of creamed corn.
“You don’t know him.”
Her father looked up. “Him?”
“I’m going with his family,” she said. “His moms. And him.”
An expression of mild confusion moved across his face, then resolved into disinterest. “Oh.”
“There’s lasagna in the freezer,” she said. “You should eat it with the salad on the second shelf of the fridge.”
“You know this guy well?” he asked. Somehow, during the course of the conversation, he’d stepped around her and was inching toward the door to the living room. Her time was running out.
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Good family?”
“For sure,” she said. “You’d like them.”
Was that true at all? She hardly cared. Her father slipped from the room and she stood in the kitchen, smiling, picturing the weekend ahead of her. ¹²
********
The house they’d rented was not one of the gaudy wedding cakes perched along the dunes, but was instead a cottage a few streets back from the beach. Clad in cedar shingles and trimmed in white, it was a neat little Cape Cod, partially nestled in switchgrass and azalea. On the way into town they’d stopped at Whole Foods and now carried bright reusable shopping bags full of minor delicacies. In the store they’d asked Lacey her food preferences and in the second before she spoke she realized how much of her grocery choices were determined by convenience: minimum prep time weighed against her father’s pickiness, an equation always in the process of negotiation. Now, she found herself expressing a desire for fresh vegetables—a desire that seemed to spring forward like a snake from beneath a rock. The shock was at the size of her want as much as its presence: who would’ve thought such a large thing lay concealed beneath so small a stone.
Her room, on the second floor, was populated by dark wood furniture beneath its sloping ceiling. Aidan’s was next door; it was considerate, Lacey thought, to offer her her own space, and avoid any awkward logistical questions regarding where she wanted to sleep. Still, that first night, out of some vestigial sense of duty to the checklist, Lacey padded silently down the hall carpet to Aidan’s room and found him surprised to see her.
“Oh, are we—? Okay,” he said, when she climbed into bed beside him. He recovered, and they indulged in a little cuddling, so chaste as to make her feel much older than she was—as if they had already bypassed youthful passion and moved straight into middle-aged companionship. Aidan did not seem to know what to do with his hands, what he should touch or not touch, and Lacey had no guidance for him, no interest in exploring the boundaries of her own body or his. They lay, loosely linked, beneath the brushed cotton sheets, listening to the night sounds of the house and the beach, and at some point Lacey wondered whether she could live like this, whether this was a life that would be tolerable if it came with the tincture of Aidan’s mothers in her life. She could play this out to its natural conclusion and they would become her in-laws and that would be enough, she thought. There was school and there was home and there was this other world where something, a collection of things, fell into place that she could not acknowledge, could not even quite see. Deep beneath her skin, she felt movement. Things were shifting, aligning. She reiterated to herself the importance of avoiding introspection. Indulgent, distracting. When she returned to her studies there would be no time for soul-searching. Better to outlaw it, to contemplate the moment she was in and nothing else. ¹³
Behind her, Aidan was dead to the world, his arm slack across her waist. She rose from the bed, careful not to rouse him, and crossed to the open suitcase he’d left at the foot of the bed. Leigh did his laundry; Lacey knew this from her time spent languishing in their home. The smell of the detergent was familiar and flowery. She fell to her knees and inhaled, pressed a shirt to her face. This must be how his mothers’ laundry smelled too, where it hung in closets and lay in drawers. Moving slowly and deliberately, Lacey lifted out a pair of khakis from his luggage, then a square-cut button-up shirt with a tasteful bird print. The room was strangely bright—the light of a full moon rebounding off the white siding of the next house, fluorescing everything, but she couldn’t see the moon itself out the window, which suggested that it was directly above them. She felt momentary gratitude for the roof, for the protection from observation it seemed to afford her. ¹⁴
On the corner, the orb of a vintage streetlight, like the kind she saw on her faux-Gothic college campus, was lunar-adjacent in color but dim and distant. She shimmied out of her pajama bottoms, pulled her top over head. She seemed to fall into Aidan’s clothes—one moment they were on the ground beside her and the next moment she was in them, squatting, running her hands over her legs where they were engulfed by his too-big pants. She stood and moved her hands over her chest, stroking downwards, as though brushing away dirt. In the full-length mirror on the back of the door she saw her figure and, when she pulled her hair tight against her head, it was almost indistinguishable from Aidan in the incomplete dark. They were not so physically dissimilar—she was smaller in some places, wider in others, and yet in the image she now saw they had become one, had morphed into a creature that could be either or neither of them. She stood there for a moment, spellbound by the image, taking one breath after another, and in the next moment she was in the hallway, moving silently through the house, running her hands, Aidan’s hands, along the walls and down the bannister. Her mouth was open and she heard the whistle of her breath past her teeth, louder and quick. The mothers had taken the downstairs master suite and as she passed their door she listened until her breathing synchronized with theirs, leaving her lightheaded and giddy. The little animal of her heart ran and jumped. She wanted to wake the moms up, present herself as him and be embraced. Claim a nightmare and crawl into their bed. Lie down like a dog at their feet. In the dining room she moved to the sliding door onto the patio and pressed her face against the cool glass. She decided—she would go back and knock on their door. They would keep the lights off and she would be invited in and they would be sleeping naked, waiting for her. And then: something from outside. The far away drone of an aircraft, low enough to be on approach for what was probably the first flight of the day. The high whine of the engine suggested to her that it was an A320. Her breathing evened out; inside her, a pressure equalized. She looked around the darkened room and found the decor recognizable, even in the dark—the shining spines of the beach reads on the bookshelf, the throw blanket shabbily draped over the couch end, the art on the walls sprinkled with starfish and conch shells. She found her feet moving over the sandy carpet, toward the stairs. Back in the bedroom, she consulted a flight tracking app on her phone and saw that the flight was actually an ERJ-175 coming from Charlotte. Yes, an A320 would be too large for such a short hop, probably. She knew better. She did. ¹⁵
¹ To be clear: this is probably a story about gender, or maybe just about hot lesbians.
² The dog’s named Margarine. I’m deciding this now. Maybe it’s even true.
³ AF447: too on the nose? I guess this sort of supposes that gender and sight are tied together—a question of how one “sees” themself. But one knows one’s body in the dark, in sleep. It’s a question of perception on a more atomic level. A feeling, about a body in space, its orientation toward or away or totally separate of something. The pilots of Air France 447 saw nothing, and felt even less.
⁴ A question of attraction or envy, do you think?
⁵ I find landscapes of homogeneity underrated. Something a person can do: search on Youtube for compilations of car crashes and close calls recorded by dashcams across the country. In every clip, those long ribbons of gray road, those same curling ramps and turn offs, those green highway signs, immemorial and looming. Every intersection with its collection of boxy stores and swaying power lines. It snows, it rains, the sky is big and the sky is small. Palm trees and evergreens and skyscrapers all at once. Ignore the accidents and enjoy your commute, which is everyone’s commute, which is no one’s, because it’s inside a screen and it’s all already happened and will continue to go on, digitally, forever. It’s nice to feel part of a continuity. To make your own.
⁶ You might be wondering: is this a story about me, the author? Is this the kind of story where everything really happened? My mother’s still alive and totally fine, if you even care.
⁷ From the German: “environment,” apparently. I mean it more in the Uexküll-Sebeok-semiotics sense. I encountered the concept of umwelt at the exact moment I needed to. It appeared before me, like a four-leaf clover at my feet in an otherwise unremarkable breadth of greenery. It’s not Lacey’s word. It’s mine.
⁸ Yeah! No notes.
⁹ Its own kind of homogeneity. Good taste sandblasting down all opposition. Eclecticism just as rigid as an HOA’s commitment to taupe. Those are all words you could say about these kinds of details, I guess.
¹⁰ I learned to drive a stick two months ago at the time of my writing this. Everybody clap.
¹¹ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/runway-incursions-near-misses-airport-runways-whats-happening/
¹² It’s interesting to think about the concept of “ahead” in a piece of fiction written in the past tense. It never happened, but if it did happen, it would have already happened. I think already Lacey knows what will happen at this point, and what won’t. Anyone can see the future. It’s just another form of self-knowledge. Or maybe it’s just this: I know everything Lacey knows, and she knows everything I know. This isn’t real, and I’m not her, but we’re the same. You try to get out of your own head and you only manage to go further in.
¹³ No comment.
¹⁴ I’m still here. I’m looking. Isn’t this nice? For us to be able to read this story together? Maybe this time the ending will be different. Maybe I’ll forget the ending, and that will change it. But it’s already happened so many times, and always like this. There’s a power to repetition. It can cross things over from the realm of the unreal to that of the real. I think truth is blueshifting here. I think. Regardless, I’m happy you’re here. It’s nice to not be alone.
¹⁵ I do.
Marguerite Alley (she/they) is a writer and translator from Durham, North Carolina whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Carve, Ninth Letter, Pithead Chapel, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, The Louisville Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and has been awarded scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference. They received a BA in Spanish and Portuguese from NYU in 2022 and they're now at work on a novel.
IG: marguerite.alley
Photo by: courtney coles