72 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
the mattresses. Bev could feel Emily’s
body tensing beside her.
“That one!” the client reiterated, point-
ing. Dutifully, Bev climbed back into the
truck and gently carried the table down
to her waiting arms.
A
fter that, the run behaved better:
nothing obviously inexplicable, or
even out of the ordinary, occurred. An
old lady in public housing whose grand-
son had broken her coffee table; a talk-
ative Iraq War veteran living in a silver
trailer in somebody’s back yard on a grassy
hilltop, whose lumbar pain demanded a
new mattress. A young couple with twin
babies and only one crib. A lesbian cou-
ple in a converted hunting cabin who
needed kitchen chairs. Later, Bev would
have occasion to revisit these scenes, to
try to figure out where the anomalies
lay—she knew they were there, knew that
something was different. She could feel
the flaws in the day the way that, nearly
twenty years earlier, she’d sensed that her
water was about to break moments be-
fore it happened, ushering Celeste into
the confusing and hostile world. But the
flaws remained hidden. They couldn’t all
be for her—this world created chaos for
its own reasons, unknowable ones.
And, as they drove and lifted and
schlepped, Emily came to seem more
and more familiar to Bev, looked like
somebody she used to know: a nervous
flick of the tongue, fingers worrying at
a scar on her knee. A fleeting glance
from underneath the curtain of hair,
which ought to have been pulled back
for work but wasn’t, as though being
able to hide were more important than
seeing what she was doing. Bev wanted
to ask, “Where do I know you from?”
But the question would have been ri-
diculous, as the memories were certainly
from before the girl was born.
They arrived, at last, at their final
stop, where they were supposed to de-
liver a complete bed to a woman living
alone in the development behind the
Staples and the PetSmart. She would be
getting only a mattress and a box spring—
the frame intended for her was the one
that disappeared.
“I can’t believe we’re almost finished,”
Emily said, a rare unprompted remark,
as they pulled up on the cracked and
weedy asphalt apron that surrounded
the apartment block.
The spreadsheet read “Do not knock,
call instead.” Bev said, “You want to give
her a ring?”
The girl unlocked her phone, then
quickly dismissed the photos app, which
still displayed the bed-frame picture. She
keyed in the client’s number, held the
phone to her face, waited. Bev, meanwhile,
turned off the engine, jumped down to
the pavement, and heaved up the truck’s
rear door. No surprises: the bed lay alone
on the floor, slightly askew, the mattress’s
corner hanging over the box spring’s
edge. She pulled out the metal ramp and
greeted Emily as she came around the
passenger side of the truck.
“No answer,” she said. “It was, like,
‘This number is unavailable.’”
“Hmm.” Bev peered at the woman’s
door, fortuitously on the building’s ground
floor: No. 43. It was slightly ajar.
“Uh,” Emily said.
“Let’s see.” Bev approached, taking
note of a small face near the doorsill:
an orange tabby, sniffing the air. The
cat withdrew as Bev came near.
“Hello?” she called out, knocking.
Her knuckles pushed the door open by
another inch or two, and she was greeted
by a gentle gust of air, extremely warmand dry, that carried the smell of ciga-
rettes, wet cardboard, burned plastic,
and ammonia.
The apartment appeared quite dark
at first, and then, as Bev’s eyes adjusted,
clarified into dimness. She was standing
in a small living room. Its one window
had been covered by flattened cardboard
boxes held together with masking tape;
a single shadeless table lamp glowed in
a corner. If the room contained any fur-
niture, Bev couldn’t see it. Household de-
bris climbed in uneven piles toward the
ceiling and walls: bulging trash bags, dirty
clothes, plastic bins spilling children’s
toys, scratched and battered saucepans,
cereal boxes, aluminum-foil balls, baking
trays, half-dismantled old televisions with
shattered screens, plastic stereo equip-
ment herniating skeins of wire, grilling
utensils, and a dented hibachi bearing
the logo of a hockey team. Cats—more
than Bev could count—crept around the
base of the junk mountain and into and
out of gaps between the items.
It was very hot in here. Bev heard a
banging noise from around a corner—
the slam of a skillet against a metal sink.
Water was running.
“Hello?”TELEPHONE YEARS
There are gestures that have been lost.
One was picking up a desk phone
Using a couple of fingers
To snag it under the little shelf where the receiver
Rested when it was not in use;
You’d carry the phone with you if you needed to pace,
Perhaps with a studied restlessness that felt good:
You were removing a solid object from its position
And that had meaning. You gestured with it in hand,
Or held it against your hip. Something both possessive and
devil-may-care in it.The disruption of a ring, the caller unknown,
Was one of the day’s small dramas. We lived for them.
There were hours unaccounted for, pages turned.
Ticking of the heart between rings...A feminine variant was to wear the curling receiver cord
Sashed across your waist, over the elbow, up the arm
So the curls were stretched long, the receiver
Tight-tucked in the neck hollow and pinned to its job—
To speak and to hear, companion of both mouth and ear.
Maybe standing while talking, at a window.