Hopscotch

by Sarah Terez Rosenblum

The week had been rough even before Laura climbed the stairs to her mother’s top floor apartment. 

On Sunday, she’d purchased a plant with waxy leaves that puffed like tiny couch cushions. She wanted to sit at the kitchen table and look past the plant through the open window at kids playing hopscotch on the street below. But the only kids on her street were pre-teen twins—a brother and a sister. They passed a cell phone between them and cast Laura suspicious looks while she waited for the bus. 

By Monday morning, most of the plant’s leaves looked deflated, like someone had pricked them with pins as she slept. She rummaged her purse for her Swiss Army knife. Maybe if she sliced off the dead parts, the plant would revive. 

The plant was part of a plan to become the sort of person content to watch night fall through an open window. Even Covid hadn’t kept Laura from the dark clubs that bloomed along Hudson street. In the first weeks she’d resisted the gauntlet of velvet ropes and pulsing interiors. Instead, she’d stood under streetlights vaping, thinking how unromantic a femme fatale seemed sans cigarette. But in June when it became clear the two week shutdown the government forecast was an air castle, she’d found herself tangled up on the dance floor with a sinewy man whose erection pressed the small of her back.

“I miss AIDS,” she’d told her friend Melissa.

Melissa delivered groceries for Instacart. “Disagree. It’s easier to fuck with a mask than a condom,” she’d said.

But even with a mask, Laura had wound up with Covid. The mild kind, apparently. Though all these months later, buttered popcorn still tasted like soil. 

Laura’s problem wasn’t drugs, though she let Melissa think that. She drank a little and when she drank, occasionally she’d crave cocaine or a cigarette. Some days, she was certain that if the right twelve step program existed, she’d avail herself, but she couldn’t imagine one primed for her kind of need.

Monday evening, Laura took the bus to Walgreens. The driver wore his face mask beneath his chin; a hospital-blue beard. In the store, she stood staring at the sheet masks for so long that someone with ice-purple hair and eyes widened by thick liner sighed and reached around her. 

“Smooth skin waits for no man,” they said.

On the ride home, Laura rummaged her plastic Walgreens bag. People Magazine and a lavender bath bomb. The Making of a Modern King, the magazine’s headline read. Even through its wrapping, the bath bomb’s scent nauseated Laura. Her apartment was tiny. The whole place would smell like a Victorian’s sachet. 

After the bus disgorged her, Laura straightened her coat and prepared to walk past the twins. Their apartment loomed across from the bus stop. Partner to all her comings and goings, they wore down coats in winter and went barefoot in spring. She’d seen them once or twice at four a.m. as she and that night’s man tumbled from an Uber, her breath a swamp of alcohol beneath her mask. They were like one of those haunted house paintings that watched you. She felt their eyes now, as she tossed the bath bomb in a garbage can and fit her key into her lock. 

The sheet masks had been a coworker’s suggestion. ExCo’s core values were Building Community, and Team Satisfaction. As far as Laura could tell this meant encouraging employees to lay bare their personal lives on Slack. Before landing in #SelfCare, Laura had scrolled past channels devoted to #LGBTQ+representation and #PetsofExCo. Nikki from customer service was vocal in all of the channels, organizing Zoom happy hours and encouraging straight cisgender whites to “shout their ally-ship," but wasn’t that just stealing focus from the people they claimed to support? Laura was too old, probably; certainly too judgmental. Probably she’d feel happier if she were more of a joiner, or at least of the generation that formed special clubs for people who didn’t belong. Or perhaps her problem was the money she made as a software developer. If she thought to spend it on a sensible car and a mortgage, maybe she’d be less driven to strap on heels and press between bodies until sunlight threatened the sky. But each month when her paycheck hit her bank account, Laura’s immediate thought was, Great now I have to deal with this. 

“I didn’t go anywhere,” She told Melissa on Tuesday night. “I just sat at my kitchen table, wearing a halter neck bodysuit and high-waisted jeans.” 

“Did you plan on going out and just stop yourself?” Melissa’s glasses were frosted from the picked-over freezer section. Supply chain issues, a worker had said.

“I wanted to know I could do it.” 

At three a.m. she’d descended from her apartment to stand in the threshold, an alcoholic ordering a drink to see how it feels in her hand. From two buildings down, the twins voices carried. Something in Korean she’d heard them say before. 

“Would you accept DiGiorno as a sub for Tombstone?” Melissa asked.

“Do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior?” Laura leaned against the cool of the freezer case. “Can’t you chat the customer?”

“It’s a man. I don’t want it to turn sexual. The last guy I chatted to ask about orange juice ended up waiting in his driveway to show me his shlong.”

Just like Melissa didn’t probe too deeply into Laura’s nighttime activities, Laura never asked whether Melissa missed teaching. She knew she’d been pushed out for something to do with trigger warnings. After whatever incident, she’d changed her policy to require them, but the damage was already done according to a former student who claimed PTSD. (“That’s what teaching is in the 21st century,” Melissa said as events unfolded, “giving up on your beliefs in an attempt to keep your job.”)

Laura had thought briefly that if she cultivated a closer relationship with Melissa, she’d feel less unanchored. On a weekend trip the summer Laura’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, they’d gotten drunk and gone skinny dipping. They sat in Adirondack chairs and roasted marshmallows and talked about how adulthood didn’t hold up to childhood expectations.   

“When my mom was my age we had all these Le Creuset pots,” Melissa said, and Laura rubbed her back while she cried.      

The next day, Laura awoke queasy from intimacy. On the drive home they both wore sunglasses. When Laura dropped Melissa off, she leaned in the rental car window. “Let’s go back to mostly talking about movies,” Melissa said. 

“Could I come with you again?” Laura asked now. In her pocket she fingered her Swiss Army knife. The grocery store seemed a good replacement: music and lights and a purpose. Even if that purpose was some suburbanite’s frozen food. 

“Sure, if you want to.” Melissa checked her phone. “I’m going with Red Baron. Will you hand me one that’s plain cheese?”

Laura pulled a box from the freezer. Probably the shelves were black to showcase hyper bright packaging, but empty of products, they seemed boundless; inky and deep like a well. 

Wednesday night, Laura attended a French cuisine Zoom class someone in the #ExCoGotCulture Slack channel had recommended. When Laura’s mom went into remission, she’d sworn it was due to Laura’s cooking. Laura had haunted Mexican markets, picked through piles of chicken feet, simmered stock until her hair stunk of onions and her skin was slicked with grease. She’d made bone broths and kale smoothies and ground up the herbal concoctions the stooped acupuncturist in Chinatown wrapped in cheesecloth. Her cooking was purpose driven; not for pleasure. She’d donated her immersion blender, and packed away her mortar and pestle when her mother’s luck changed.  

Now, on Laura’s screen, a jowly man talked about the purpose of bouquet garni. Her eyes drifted to the kitchen window. She didn’t care about butter or rues or flaky pastry. She closed her laptop on his gesturing hands. Outside, soft rain made patterns on the sidewalk. The last of the sunlight seeped from the sky. When she leaned to press her head against the window’s glass she could just make out the twin’s feet on their porch steps. Both wore sneakers, vivid white in the falling dusk.

Maybe there was illness in the twin’s apartment. Or a neglectful parent. She’d never seen a caretaker. Only the paper doll pair of them, hair cut into pageboys, black framed glasses beneath. Last time she’d passed by, she’d heard familiar phrases in their whispers. She wanted to ask if they were talking about her, but that seemed at best self-centered, at worst a step toward claiming her neighbor’s dog spoke to her, demanding the blood of young girls. 

Later, she seated herself at the kitchen table. The microwave clock read 12:14. Midnight was nothing. She could breath through it. The real problem was three a.m. 

Ray Bradbury wrote that “three in the morn is living death. Women, never wake then.” But three a.m. brought men cheek to jowl with the limits of their souls. Laura had been the twin’s age when she read that, and she’d done the minority math of substitution: the women Bradbury referenced were stand-ins for unthinking people content with their inside life. And by men, he meant his readers; those in-the-know few who felt the bare soil truth of it: death was a constant, the price of a limitless world. 

Laura couldn’t have been reading that passage when her mother offered the bargain, but that’s how she remembered it.                                             

“Promise to stop telling me to quit smoking, and you can read during dinner,” her mother said.                                                                                         

Weeks before, Laura had learned in school that cigarettes caused cancer. Her mother kept hers in a crystal bowl on the kitchen table. Whenever her mother reached for one, Laura recited a statistic (“Last year, 418,690 U.S. deaths were attributed to smoking.”). She made protest signs and chanted slogans. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t stop until her mother came around. But in Laura’s book that evening, the boys were poised to slip from their homes and meet at the traveling carnival. Since her father left, dinner had been silent—no sound save the kids playing hopscotch on the street below.  

“I’ll stop telling you.”

“Promise.” Her mother watched her.

A promise, Laura knew, was forever. “I promise,” Laura said.

“Good girl.” Her mother reached for her pack of Virginia Slims and Laura bent over her paperback, free to run with the boys down late summer streets swept with wind.

That was how she learned she could shoulder the burden of someone else’s mortality. She’d feel weighted down and guilty, but ultimately she could survive.

Thursday morning Laura sliced off another few leaves and dumped People Magazine unread into her kitchen garbage. In a Zoom call about quarterly earnings, Nikki from Customer Service told a story about how her grandfather had body shamed her at a family barbecue.

Laura looked from one Zoom square to another. In one, the CTO's cat walked circles around a vase of flowers, but most were black like the freezer case shelves, a few peopled with faces she hardly knew.

Beneath her camera’s eye, Laura texted Melissa. Can I shop with you tonight?

I’m driving, Melissa’s phone texted automatically. I’ll reply when it’s safe to write back.

Thursday night, Laura paced the length of her apartment. She’d tried seeing a psychiatrist once, and he’d told her, “as children we think our parents are godlike; therefore, if something goes wrong we must be the cause.” Laura knew he meant she hadn’t actually killed her mother. Still, some nights the certainty drove her from her apartment. Bars and summer music fests, and, when she wandered near the college, the occasional house party might have been enough to soothe her, if one night the first man hadn’t followed her home. When he demanded her wallet, she turned fast and he stumbled backward. Standing over him with her pocket knife, she knew she should run but the guilt beat like a second heart in her chest.

After that she’d understood it could work that way; when you had a song stuck in your head you listened to another to dislodge it. Guilt over a stranger was tolerable, and for nearly six months, one stranger was all she required.

In her closet now, Laura’s sharp-healed boots shone silver. Her feet clacked across the kitchen tile. Downstairs, she stood poised in the wan light from the hall behind her. Beyond the threshold, rich sky swept with pale stars. The twins faces were an accusation. Illuminated by the sweep of headlights. The neon sign in the front window of a car.     

Friday after work, Laura dumped the deflated plant in the garbage can. Dirt covered the faces of the Royals, sinking the magazine down. She drained the sink and the soapy water receded, melting snow revealing each objects’ true form. Her yellow coffee mug and her lunch plate and silverware. She sifted through suds to find her pocket knife. Snapped it open and made sure the blade had rinsed clean.

On the way to the bus stop, Laura tightened the belt of her trench coat. The whispering twins drew together as she passed. Five p.m. and the bus sighed with weary workers. This time the bus driver wore his mask just under his nose.

Soon, she was climbing the stairs to her mother’s old apartment. It had gone condo sometime after her death. The stairwell no longer smelled like stale cigarettes and curry. The new owners had rehabbed the windows and ripped out the carpet. Sun slanted through in thick strips and wood flooring gleamed. When she was a child she’d sat like the twins on these steps reading. Had she judged their downstairs neighbors the way the twins judged her?

At the base of their porch, she’d smoothed down her trench and summoned her courage to confront them. “I hear you talk about me.”               

The boy had peered through his fringe of soft bangs, his lips moving.

“What’s he saying?” Laura asked his sister.

The girl hauled her brother to his feet and herded him toward the entryway. “He says, we know all the bad things that you do.”

The floorboards in her mother’s stairwell muttered as Laura climbed higher. She was no threat to the young couple who occupied her mother’s apartment, though they’d begun to act like it. Still, maybe this time they’d welcome her. Maybe they’d listen. She ran her hand along the banister. All she wanted was to sit once more at her mother’s kitchen table. She wanted to look past the hanging plants and see kids playing hopscotch on the street below.

Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Hopkins Review (forthcoming 2024), The Normal School, Prairie Schooner (shortlisted for Prairie Schooner’s Summer 2020 Creative Nonfiction Prize), Diagram, Brevity, Carve, and Third Coast. In 2023, Sarah was a finalist for Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest, and Sarah’s new novel manuscript, The Idea of Heat, was a semifinalist for Black Lawrence Press's 2023 Big Moose prize. Sarah has written for sites including Salon, The Chicago Sun Times, The Satirist, and Pop Matters. A two time Pushcart Prize nominee, Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sarah is a Creative Coach and Developmental Editor and teaches creative writing at Story Studio, where Sarah was voted 2022 Teacher of the Year, and at The University of Chicago Writer’s Studio, where Sarah was the 2022 winner of The Innovation in Teaching Award. Sarah’s novel, Herself When She's Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending" by Booklist.