4.

The afternoon has turned grey in a wintry fashion, the world seemingly coated in a faint layer of soot. The bare trees, the crisp grass, and the decaying leaves are all a miserable brown color. It is cold, too, although the wind has died down since the morning. Claire cannot place what the air smells like, but it reminds her of being young again, of spending one last moment by the stove in her kitchen before the walk to school at dawn.

They are walking along a dirt path carved into the side of a hill. The exposed roots of trees protrude into the path, snarled with dead foliage. Well below the trail, down a steep embankment, is a wide, shallow creek that slowly and silently curves its way through the woods. They walk single file for a ways, Claire in front, and do not talk. Claire tries to listen for the water but cannot hear it. She only hears the muffled sound of Erin behind her, her toes kicking the hard earth and breaking loose twigs.

“So I was thinking maybe I might try another dance class,” Erin says, surprising Claire out of her movements.

“Ballet?”

“Of course. I miss the grace of it in my life. All this yoga stuff, it’s such static bullshit. It’s glorified stretching.”

“But people will pay for it.”

“Maybe they’ll pay for ballet this time around,” Erin says.

“You think so?”

“It’s been a couple of years since I’ve offered one. There are a few new people in town. Some young girls have grown old enough they might want classes. And I can make them cheaper now, too. One of these years, the people in this fucking town have to wake up, right?”

Claire smiles half heartedly. She’s heard this rant before. No one in the whole damn town has culture, according to Erin, though they all act like they’re the most worldly, cultured fucks on the face of the earth. In her words, of course. And, Claire admits, she is not entirely wrong. But it seems pointless to complain when she makes so much money from the yoga and tai chi classes. Still, she might sign up for a class if Erin offered one, and show up as often as her feet permitted. Which, she thinks, might not be very often.

“I know you miss dancing, or at least dancing with other people,” Claire says.

“It’s not much fun by itself,” she says dryly, almost meanly.

Claire lets it go, and they keep walking quietly. As they move closer to the creek, which the trail gradually does in a series of switchbacks, the air smells more and more like murky, stale water. It smells like a load of laundry forgotten in the washer for a few days.

“So what happened with Laurie? I suppose I never asked,” Claire says. She is tired of walking in silence.

Erin shrugs, brushing hair away from her eyes. “I think she wanted to be more serious. I guess it was a matter of commitment. She wanted more than I did right now.” She looks down, finding her step amongst the fallen, wet leaves. “She wanted to get married, and all that wonderful sanctimonious stuff.”

Claire smiles, for a step or two overwhelmed with a feeling of warmth, of being alone in a cold place with Erin’s body. It passes, and she shivers, for the first time feeling the cold. She tries to reconstruct the inoculating warmth of her previous steps, but it’s already too far gone.

“Maybe I’m just not one for long relationships,” Erin says. “Or at least not since Rose. Twelve years was long enough. All my other friends worry I’m lonely, but they’re all miserable in their marriages and relationships. They have all kinds of stresses I don’t have, and move so cautiously with everything they do.

“Besides, I know what it’s like when that ends, how long it takes to pull your life back together. I’m getting too old for that. Love is for young people. And idiots.”

She turns to Claire and laughs, though her face is loose with concern. She must sometimes find herself brought back to Rose, must take a breath and emerge in some private, long forgotten intimacy. It is likely she has suddenly found herself there, Claire thinks.

“Am I a coward?” Erin asks, rather lightheartedly.

“Maybe a little.“ Claire says teasingly. “But probably not so much. It’s defensive but practical. I kind of like it.”

“I imagine you would.”

“Being practical and careful is not a sin, no matter how much you and my husband make it seem like one.”

“Do you ever think what the world would be like without people like you, dear? Without people that like working, and being busy all the time? Do you think how pleasant things would be?”

“We wouldn’t be here at all.”

Erin smiles. “It was a joke, old lady. Lighten up.”

Claire remembers the first time Erin called her old lady. They’d showered together one morning when David was taking Luke on college visits, and Erin had sat on her bed’s edge, watching Claire dry herself and get dressed. Look at my old lady, all spider veined and turning grey, she had said. Claire had turned to her, somewhat upset, and for a moment stood moronically with her mouth open. Finally, she walked into the bathroom and closed the door, calling out to Erin that the proper term was varicose veined. Then, she had looked herself in the foggy mirror for a very long time, mulling over the phrase old lady.

By now, it had become a loving nickname, one Erin jokingly applied from time to time whenever she grew impatient with Claire’s relative stoicism and literalness, which were traits Erin associated with the very old and dour. They were church going traits, she always said. Claire was the kind of woman who belonged in church.

The trail ascends a series of hillocks, and then darts back away from the creek for a stretch of woods. From here, a few houses are visible distantly, built into the hillside of the valley they are walking in. They follow the worn dirt path (how do such thoroughfares come into existence? She wonders) silently for a bit before it begins curving languorously back to the water, descending steeply out onto a little finger of rock perched over the creek. The water, a muckish brown color that swirls with eddies of dead leaves, tumbles past the promenade of rock in a series of minor falls.

“Luke has a really nice picture of this in his room,” Claire says.

Erin smiles. “How is he doing at Temple?”

“David’s convinced him to study photography. Which is ridiculous. He’s so brilliant at math.”

“But who likes math?”

Claire laughs. “It doesn’t matter. He’s good at it. And there’s a lot he could do with it. He could photograph on the side. He doesn’t have to make a living out of it. David just expects everyone to find someone to support them. He’s made Luke and Matthew so damn unrealistic.”

“Oh, there are worse things in the world.”

“Sure. But it’s frustrating.”

“They’ll figure it out eventually. Or they won’t. But I think they’ll be all right. Luke’s quite a charmer, too. He’ll find a rich woman if that’s what he needs.”

Again, Claire laughs. “Well at least David managed to do something right in him then.”

Erin moves sideways, turning to face her from the side.

“I don’t mean that,” Claire says, mostly to herself. “He did a lot right.”

“I don’t much care about David, to be honest,” Erin says.

Claire laughs.

“How are you?” Claire asks. “I’m sorry. I’ve talked about myself so damn much.”

“We’ve talked plenty about me. I’m fine. I’m really doing fine. Except for I’m sleeping later it seems, with all this dreary greyness. It makes no sense to me why the fuck Rose ever wanted to come out here when we had such wonderfully yellow and orange weather out in L.A.” Erin has always referred to her weather in colors. Winter is usually grey, but on good days she calls it blue. Fall, which is still in its tail end, though it certainly does not seem like it, is red or gold. If it rains, fall is brown. Claire has spent years combating adopting this habit as her own, especially when she is with David. Once in a while, she’s found herself calling a particularly nice spring day green or pink.

“Though I haven’t left, for whatever reason, and Rose is even greyer than me out there in Seattle. What a grey place that was. Have you ever been?”

“No. I haven’t. You know this.”

“I must have forgotten. It’s very forgettable. It must have extended to you, too.” She smirks while she says this. “It’s so funny that a person named Rose prefers places so colorless.”

She begins to walk away from Claire, down a steep incline. Then she stops. “God, it’s funny how much this reminds me of her. We would go swimming down here in the summer, and the smell of the mud, the wet rotting of it…” she trails off. “It’s funny isn’t it, how many scents and places people accrue in your memory, right?”

Claire simply smiles. She agrees, but it is not something she thinks about often. People fade in and out of her memory, but she mostly wants to keep them from lingering and spilling into her life as it is now. Her past, any past, has its virtues and its uses, but they are rather narrow qualities. But today, she cannot seem to escape looking backward. Normally, getting away from David gives her a reprieve. However, the cold and the pale light seems to clarify the relative murkiness of the past, and not just for her.

“For instance,” Erin says after a long pause. Claire knows how much Erin likes to draw her into things, and for at least a bit, she will resist. “When I was a girl doing gymnastics, I remember going to the gym so early in the morning, sometimes before it was light. And anytime I smell exhaust, or disinfectant, it’s like I’m sitting in the gym’s annex while my mom ties my hair back for me. And I get this fluttering in my stomach, anticipating going out and practicing.”

She looks to Claire. “You know that feeling? That weird one where you feel all warm and lucid, like something big is coming, even though you know it’s not. I still get that on cold mornings, like today’s. And I always think of my mom.”

“I know the feeling,” Claire says. “I always got it right before school let out on days that it snowed. Or on Thanksgiving, when I‘d wake up and smell sweet potatoes.” It is a feeling she associates exclusively with Wisconsin, and dead, open fields buried in drifts of snow. It is a feeling that makes the insides of her nose sting with dryness.

Erin smiles. “Isn’t it bizarre all the things you end up missing?” she asks. “And at this age, I find it’s so hard not to expend all my energy missing all sorts of people. It must be terrible for you, being ancient and all.” She says this, grinning fiercely into the cold in Claire’s direction. “We get old and wonder how we ended up losing so much.”

“Not really. If you think of it that way, sure. But that’s a pointless way to think of things. I’ve never had a problem with it. I feel like it’s a wonderful way to be overly sentimental and feel bad for yourself. We all romanticize the past too much.”

“Oh, but isn’t that what it’s for?” Erin says, and only partially sarcastic, Claire thinks.

Claire looks at her, somewhat in dismay, unable to keep from smiling even though she knows, deep down, that Erin is not actually this much of a romantic. At least, she isn’t on most days. Claire’s face is hot for some reason, and she feels rushed. Erin laughs.

“You sound like David!” Claire bemoans, not knowing how else to defend herself.

“So what? There are worse things than being sentimental, you know. Like being a curmudgeonly old maid who rues looking too soft.”

Claire laughs loudly.

“You’re in some kind of mood today,” Erin says. “This should relax you. You wanted to take a walk. I would have gladly stayed in. This is too cold for me.”

“I know. And thank you. This is relaxing.“

“Then act like it.“

“Sundays are weird days,” she says. “And it’s weird having Luke gone. My house is so quiet.”

“Well isn’t that supposed to be the nice part about your kids moving out?”

“I thought it would be. But it’s just strange. After so many years of having lots of noise, you get used to it. And it’s almost louder once it’s gone. It had become like white noise,” Claire says.

“So you are feeling old and useless now that your last kid is out of the house?” Erin says, mockingly.

“Don’t do that,” Claire says. “Sure, whatever you say,” she says dismissively. She is not going to bandy back and forth. She had no intentions of talking about anything serious on this walk, but Erin insisted on drawing her into one of her reminiscent discussions in which she wanted Claire to bare her soul. She is not in the soul baring mood.

Erin slows, and the muscles of her face soften. She takes Claire’s hand.

Claire glances away, across the smooth, grey water to the steep bank on the other side. Of course the emptiness of home has thrown her off. She knew it would, and prepared herself for it. Change is not an unfamiliar thing in life, and there is no reason she can’t surmount this by patiently adapting. But it has taken longer than she thought it would. The stillness has gotten worse, too, and slowly she’s felt more uncomfortable in other parts of her life. She is anxious. This very fact accentuates her unease.

“I’m just trying to say that these things happen,” Erin says. “I don’t have to deal with it myself, but many other people have. And they figure it out.”

Claire walks and looks ahead on the path, the exposed roots of trees creating small caverns in the hillside. “I’ll handle it,” she says. “It’s just I don’t quite know what to do with myself all the time. And for whatever reason, work feels wrong all of a sudden. I don’t want to deal with the research, and the time it takes to figure out numbers and salaries. I’d almost like to quit and spend my time doing something charitable. I worry all the time that I haven‘t been terribly generous, and that I‘ve been far more self absorbed with my life than I should have been.”

“Well I think it would be ok to quit and do that,” Erin says. “Although I think you’d go crazy without the work.”

Claire smiles at her, lost and suddenly overwhelmed with the kind of listlessness she hasn’t felt in years. She is uncertain where to go, and wants to run somewhere, to flee farther and farther until she ends at a place she knows nothing about, where she is nothing. Strongly, she feels like an adolescent again, with so many choices ahead of her that it almost feels the opposite is true: that she’s circled in, with no place to grow.

“I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I’d like to move back into Philadelphia,” Claire says as she looks over to Erin, who averts her eyes to the ground. “I haven’t told anyone that.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” Claire says. “It kind of came to me while we were down there a few weeks ago for that Mozart sonata. We were walking around afterwards, and I just thought ‘I kind of miss this. Maybe I’d move back here.’ And I’ve been thinking about it since then, and I guess it just seems like the right thing to do.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being rash. I don’t actually know why the hell it would be a good idea. I just think about it, and it feels like something to do.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“That’s not helpful. You wanted me to talk, and I am. So help me out a bit here,” Claire says. She keeps walking, though she feels Erin stop.

“Hey,” Erin says after Claire has taken a few steps away. She takes two more, then stops. She turns with the most indignant sigh she can muster, though she already feels herself growing tired and ready to acquiesce.

By the time she turns around, Erin is already on top of her. Erin cradles her head with her hands, kisses her forehead, and coaxes a smile out of Claire.

“Why do you, the least rash person I’ve ever met, suddenly want to move into a city you’ve never much cared for?”

Claire pushes Erin’s hands down so they are on her waist.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know.”

They stand semi-interconnected and in complete silence for a long while. It is a strangely awkward position, Erin with her hands on Claire’s hips as if they were about to start a slow dance, but Claire is rigid and unresponsive. She looks past Erin, down the grey-brown trail, listening for sounds of life around them but can only make out the distant rumble of a highway. She’s heard, multiple times, about how quiet these woods were way back before the highway was built. Some of her friends tell her about missing the escape the woods once offered. Slowly, she thinks, we are pinching our way into every nook of the world.

“Can we get out of here?” Erin finally says. “It’s just cold.”

“Ok.”

“How about we get some pizza? I’m kind of hungry.”

“Sure. I’d like that. But can we take it back to your place? I’m not in the mood to be around a bunch of people.”

“Of course, old lady. Whatever you want.”