All Bee had read was the subject line, and already she felt saliva pooling in the declivities of her mouth. In the body of the email he’d pasted a photo of his back yard set up for an old party, and below it were a few words about finally coming together, with social distance of course. Clearly written to entice, there was also a list of probable menu items, the fantasy of which, after months peering in the window of her favorite still-shuttered breakfast spot, had taken on the dimensions of the divine.
At once she could almost see the champagne flutes spitting with pulpy mimosas, could almost taste the ‘patatas bravas with a rosemary tomato relish and poached eggs,’ the ‘bread pudding French toast made with homemade challah,’ and the ‘dark chocolate banana cannoli.’ The guy throwing this thing was a chef, after all. A chef with time on his hands. She didn’t know much else about him except that his last restaurant had closed before the pandemic, and that he was recently divorced at about forty to her thirty. She wasn’t interested, but they had a couple of mutual friends.
Picturing that mimosa must have made her nearly drunk already, for somehow she convinced herself that the whole thing would present minimal risk. And the weekend was going to be hot, and she’d been so good, had done everything she was supposed to: bringing groceries to an elderly neighbor, checking in on the Lord-of-the-Flies-turned kids she’d tutored on the side of her also-shuttered retail gig at Couture Clash clothing boutique downtown, online dating with zero luck and as many actual dates, and filling virtual tip jars for local bartenders, servers and haircutters with the dregs of her unemployment checks.
Besides, her roommate Cammy was breaking their pact quite openly now. At first she’d been sneaking around, coming home at night as though she was just at work, which for her had stayed open, but she must have fallen asleep at her new boy toy’s place one evening. Then she came clean: he had six roommates, they were bros, but he was sweet. Still, the exposure was significant.
There was also this flirty smoking thing Cammy had been up to with their newly-bearded neighbor on their stoop. They’d sit there for hours, fewer and fewer feet apart these days, smoke swirling in and out of their mouths, making visible the air, she thought, like the pink stuff you have to drink before a CT scan. You’d think it would be alarming seeing air do that, but its daily effect was one of etching away at the very possibility of social distance, at least with this roommate in this cramped city. For if she asked them to move, they’d just be putting someone else at risk.
If he isn’t careful, I’ll just bounce, she told herself, thinking again of the host. But as an accomplished chef, he probably would be. Of their mutual friends, Serena was her closest, but she just had a baby. Deidre would be there though. She didn’t see Deidre that often, but Deidre was fun. The night they met, a couple of years ago now, had bonded them forever. They’d been introduced at a show through Serena, and a handful of hours later they were all swimming naked in the ocean, untouched by the cold, as the sky began to glow. Anyway, Deidre had already replied to the email, ending with a string of party-hat emojis and her signature clinking-bottles emoji. A green light and a trigger if there ever was one.
***
The morning of, she felt like she was twenty-two again, tiptoeing out to buy champagne and fresh OJ on her way somewhere she knew she shouldn’t go. Cammy was still asleep, but even if she’d been up, making messes and shuffling around in her ridiculous balloon-size Hello Kitty slippers, Bee wouldn’t have said a word.
Masked the entire walk, she passed dozens of boarded-up businesses and navigated at least as many homeless encampments, with gloves and masks littering the streets. Seeing it like this month after month, after a partial reopening then shutting down again, her heart broke for the city, but also, more recently, two thousand miles from her mother, for her own broken place in it. Yet here she was in a tank top and a pair of stretchy jeans she hadn’t worn in months, toting a bottle of champagne she hoped wouldn’t be bubbly in the extreme. She felt her privilege in every exposed inch of her pale skin, even if her unemployment would run out soon, even if she didn’t have a fallback plan. She’d called her mother yesterday to vent about things, but she hadn’t picked up. Her mother was practically living in her backyard garden these days. And when she wasn’t gardening, she was sewing masks with prints of various flowers. In fact, the very mask Bee had on was one her mother had sewn with a print of red and yellow poppies. A splash of color for this city of cement and glass and now quite a lot of plywood too.
There was a standing offer to come live with her mother in her quiet widowed life, which was a kind of fallback plan, she admitted, but it wasn’t much of one, in a town she barely knew. Though her heart did swell whenever she saw pictures of that garden her mother had begun from scratch when she moved into her little cottage after Dad died.
Nearing the four-unit building, she was just feeling for her hand sanitizer when she saw the garage was open. It was below street level, so the descent was dark, but at the back of the cobwebbed space a purple balloon hung from a nail above a backlit door. She walked toward it, past three sedans and an oddly muddy SUV, then took three deep breaths like she was readying her lungs for a free dive. Just Brunch she repeated, elbowing open the door.
***
The first face she saw was the host. Daniel was his name. He was sweaty as he lifted his glass of what appeared to be rosé. ‘Bee! You found us,’ he shouted, smiling gamely under a partial canopy of giant ferns. It was the same smile he’d given her the first time they’d met, except now he was divorced. In the back of her mind she knew this could get complicated, even as she swooned over the long picnic table covered with bagels, lox, capers, fruit, bacon, the patatas bravas with poached eggs, his bread pudding French toast, a large French press, and a sort of meringue cake he’d called a ‘pavlova fruits rouges’ with a sprig of mint on top. Oh, and there were the cannoli beside a trio of sunflowers in a vase.
She held up the champagne as she neared the group. Deidre had turned and raised her glass too. Another guy, introduced as Iz, smiled rather sheepishly from the end. None of them had masks on. Quickly she pulled hers off too, but less out of self-consciousness for being the only person with one on, than as a kind of saying yes to finally seeing smiling faces with them off. For at once this warm space seemed the perfect sanctuary from the new way of things, as though the past had a locality inhabitable and complete. Deidre even stood with crow’s feet at her eyes, and wrapped her in an epic chest-compressing hug, which simultaneously dazzled her senses with the first real embrace she’d received in way too long, while it sent through her electric eels of alarm.
She opened the champagne quickly for an excuse to stand back and away. Immediately it bubbled over, to the delight and laughter of the group. And for the next hour the four of them clinked glasses, savored bites, and got loud in the way people cannot resist when a collective buzz takes over—and more so when no one has had much occasion to drink collectively in a while. There was a peculiar kind of release as well, as if the whole thing was over now that everyone was good and tipsy. And they were sweet people, each of them. They had joy in them, was the word that came to mind. And to be here like this was joyous after inhabiting such sadness and uncertainty for so long.
And the pandemic didn’t even come up. They talked at length about food, going around the table with stories of delicious meals that stuck out in their memories. Daniel, who said to call him Dan, went into elaborate detail about an evening of pintxos in San Sebastian—particularly a plate of freshly foraged horns of plenty, saffron milk caps, and St. George’s mushrooms sautéed in herbs and arranged around a single uncooked red-orange yolk that, as the sky glowed the same color over the azure bay, had come to rank in the top ten highlights of his life. She’d known he’d run a high-end restaurant, but she hadn’t known until today what esteem it had risen to, almost-but-not-quite garnering a Michelin tire, as he called it. ‘Because tires float like a life preserver when associated with your name,’ he said. ‘Even when the economy pulls others down.’
She was about to ask him his plans in this scary new world, but he continued on enchantingly about the dishes they used to produce, relying solely on two farms and ranches less than a day’s drive away. She felt herself beginning to be at least mildly pulled to him, his earnest grin, sharp nose, with strong hands and plucky forearms that looked like they could acquit themselves as well outside the kitchen as in. At some point, however, as they laughed after a story of calamitous failure during the ambassador to Andorra’s visit to his last restaurant, she glanced up at some movement in a neighbor’s window and saw a woman scowling down, her young child climbing precariously onto the sill to see as well, until she picked him up and spun around, away. Their bubble had been pierced. Dan had seen it too. ‘Oh, she’s always a pill,’ he said. ‘As if I didn’t endure two years of that kid wailing.’
***
The conversation then swung to children, of whom Dan had one, a fourteen-year-old boy who was staying with his ex-wife. Deidre said her daughter was on a pot farm up north. She’d just come back from up there herself after a few months. This wasn’t a surprise to Bee; Deidre had been there before. Looking at her though, it was easy to forget that Deidre had a grown daughter, as she was still in her early forties and did things like live on pot farms and swim naked in the ocean. When they first met, Deidre’s stories of parenthood made Bee feel young and free by comparison, but now, alone in this new world and still living with Cammy (ugh) as she aged like a barreled cheese, something vital seemed to be missing from her life.
‘Which reminds me,’ Deidre pulled out of her cloth bag a zip-lock with a single massive purple bud and a sizable tapered joint inside. ‘Any takers?’
As she fired up the joint, the twisted paper end flared up, and Bee felt her eyes getting big at the possible exposure from sharing such a thing. ‘Oh, and maybe more appropriate to brunch I have these little butter cookies.’ Deidre then opened another zip-lock and slid them out onto a plate. Bee did take one of those. They looked innocent enough, though she knew whatever Deidre made would pack a punch.
Afterward, she held up the plate to Iz, whose face was now a little flushed, though he’d been relatively subdued compared to the rest of them. He declined, preferring the joint, and reached across the table. As he did so, he caught her eyes lingering on him a bit more than was polite (where were her manners, she’d just been away from people for so long!), and cleared his throat in that way, she thought, that people who are disinclined to share much that is very personal, work themselves up to do so. But Dan cut in. ‘Your daughter is in India still, right?’
Iz sighed, looking at the joint without taking a puff. ‘Honestly, I can’t keep track anymore.’
‘Those artist types,’ Dan said with a wink, giving Deidre a quick look. If he was playing matchmaker between Deidre and Iz, it was working, for Bee had seen them making eyes at each other already. Maybe he was hoping they’d pair off.
Now he turned to Bee. ‘Did I tell you Iz is an amazing woodworker? His gallery show last year was really some of the most sensual sculpture I’ve ever seen.’
She gave an impressed look, but she was more concerned with how it had been having his daughter so far away right now.
‘You should tell her about where you get the wood,’ Dan continued to Iz. ‘You’ve been up there, what, six or eight months now?”
‘Well, it’s hard to leave,’ Iz said shyly. ‘It’s a pretty cool place.’
‘Pretty cool?’ Dan said. ‘It’s incredible.’
‘Why don’t you tell her about it,’ Iz said, finally taking a puff. He blew the smoke up, away from the table, then waved the excess with his hand. Bee couldn’t help but think of Cammy and her neighbor and the smoke that filled her lungs whether she wanted it to or not. But this smoke felt different, enveloping her in some other reality.
‘Okay,’ Dan smiled. ‘Well it’s over fifty acres with a house, a studio, a large duck pond, a vegetable garden, and a fruit orchard. Iz has taken care of it for years, and in exchange he’s gotten to hew fallen redwood and oak trees and walnut, right?’
Iz nodded, then spoke a bit about not taking from the forest but harvesting what it gives, and finding sculpture there, waiting. ‘The owner was one of these survivalists,’ he said. ‘So he had this property up near Fort Gregg just in case, with everything set up. But he died a year ago.’
‘And he left it to you,’ Dan said, flashing a look to Bee.
‘He did,’ Iz said. ‘It’s getting sorted out. Just slowly.’
‘Lawyers,’ Deidre huffed. ‘If I never meet another one in my life, maybe I can forget they ever existed.’ Bee remembered that Deidre once said her ex-husband was a lawyer as she went on about how far she’d felt from lawyers and lawyering up north in the redwoods and the blackberries just beginning to redden. She then described an experience on a kayak in a nearby river with her daughter recently. ‘It was an estuary, really,’ she said. ‘The longest undeveloped estuary in the state. You start by the ocean as the tide is coming up and you follow a light current on a finger of salt water that gets narrower and narrower. What paradise it was with the cypress and their hanging moss above a lone elephant seal on the bank and baby otters playing in the reeds, then dipping into a stand of towering redwoods with walls of blackberries in the clearings. Then, farther up, under these huge fluffy cottonwood, we saw the sweetest family of ducks among purple iris, wild ginger and leopard lily. But the best part was that there wasn’t a human soul around.’
‘Wait,’ Bee said suddenly. She’d been lulled by Deidre, could listen to her for hours, but had these two really managed to be away from the city for most of the pandemic? ‘So you both have been up north for months until… when?’
‘Actually, I just drove down early this morning,’ Iz said.
‘Me too,’ Deidre said, glancing at Dan.
‘Isn’t it sad to be in the city now, with all the masks and things closed?’ Bee asked, fascinated to think about these two people possibly just seeing the effects of the pandemic for the first time. Maybe that’s what the feeling had been about when she came into this little garden, the feeling almost of having gone back in time.
‘This city’s fucked,’ Dan said. ‘The lines, the tenuous food systems, the businesses gone under, but rents are still never gonna drop enough for real people to afford it.’
‘I’m not coming back,’ Iz said. ‘I can’t.’
‘Me neither,’ Deidre said. ‘It’s felt so good to be disconnected these past months. To just unplug and live simply.’
The three of them were nodding at each other, but Bee felt an awkwardness in the silence.
‘Do you ever think about getting out of here, Bee?’ Dan finally asked.
‘Sure,’ she said, but in truth she didn’t know where she’d go. ‘But I mean, this has been my life, and anywhere you go right now, isn’t it kind of fucked?’
‘Not this place,’ Dan grinned.
‘You mean that property?’
‘Okay,’ he said with deep breath. ‘We didn’t know how to approach this, but I’m going to level with you. The three of us have been up there since the middle of March. It’s true that Deidre was on the pot farm, but then I introduced them.’
‘We’re in love,’ Deidre exhaled, beaming at her, then at Iz.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dan continued. ‘We just didn’t want you to feel cornered. But this property’s so amazing. We’re ready to live there for the long haul. In fact, I’ve got to be out of this place by the first.’
‘I know we haven’t talked in a while, Bee,’ Deidre chimed in again. ‘But you’d love it up there. We just want to share it. And a few weeks ago I told them about the night you and I met. About the beach and the swimming, and,’ she nodded to Dan, ‘he got the idea that you might be spontaneous enough to come with us.’
Bee felt her head beginning to swirl. ‘So all this…’ she gestured to the table.
‘An invitation,’ Dan said.
‘But,’ she began, pausing to try and wrap her head around this. ‘Weren’t you worried about the virus? Coming here, hugging me and everything?’
‘It was a risk we were willing to take,’ Deidre said. ‘But you’re not working. You don’t have to take the bus anymore. Though I was a little worried when I saw your posts. The one thing is your roommate. She’s the risk.’
Bee thought for a moment. She had complained on social media about the smoking on the stoop, and the visits back and forth with her boy toy, knowing it was a private page. But seeing there was a hidden agenda behind this whole brunch, she couldn’t help feeling manipulated.
‘Remember that night?’ Deidre continued quickly. ‘Sharing that towel, watching the sun rise, talking about our lives? Bee, you were complaining about Cammy even then. And you’re still there? How long can you live like that?’
Deidre was right, she’d been unhappy with Cammy for a long time, but she hadn’t the faintest memory of complaining to Deidre then, to a woman she’d just met. Looking at her now, Deidre seemed almost as much a stranger as she did then. Who was this woman, really?
‘I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you right away, Bee,’ Deidre added, seeing her face sour. ‘But we wanted you to feel what it could be like with us, happy, unafraid, eating amazingly. We’re all about respect up there, without dogma or anything, and you fit the profile perfectly of what we want to create.’
‘Profile?’ Bee asked trying to maintain a polite mask while inside she was really beginning to spook.
‘I guess I don’t really mean profile. But you’re young, Bee. You can still have kids.’ Deidre glanced at the other two as Dan shook his head with a guilty look. ‘I know I’m getting way ahead of myself here,’ she scrambled, laughing uncomfortably, and shrugging Dan’s way. ‘But we thought it all out. We want to do this right, raise children close to the land, close to what’s essential, with art in their lives. You heard we each have kids already, so we see how it could be done better, away from all of–’
‘Do you have a bathroom I can use?’ Bee stood with her purse in her hand, breath quickening to panic. What were these people starting, some type of cult?
‘Of course,’ Dan said with that same look. ‘It’s the third landing, past the kitchen on your right.”
***
Without making eye contact with Deidre, she was able to fashion her lips into a smile as she made her way to the stairs, but her legs were shaky, her hands almost numb. Holding the worn wooden railing all the way up, it wasn’t until she was nearing his small peeling deck leading to his kitchen that she turned and saw the fishbowl of other apartment buildings facing a grid of slouching fences crisscrossing the interior of this block. She didn’t even have a yard to share, so seeing these made her at once envious and a little sad that such an interior was so divvied up, more fence than space, really. It also reminded her how many people surely touched this rail with neighbors packed like sardines, much like her place with Cammy. At that, she promptly lifted her hand.
Past the kitchen, she found the bathroom and scrubbed her hands. She then splashed water on her face, peering at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror. The champagne and the pot were competing in her for dominance, it seemed, along with so much else in her head. Maybe it was from being such a shut-in for so long, but for that first hour she’d felt so light, thrilled to be living like they used to, with that joy instead of constant fear and vigilance, with physical ease instead of the glitchy unease of online dating. One guy she’d met had actually sounded a little like Deidre just now, the way he seemed to be ticking down an off-camera list for the trajectory of his future life.
When she came back to the kitchen, she noticed two huge empty duffel bags and a stack of folded paper grocery bags on the floor. The counters were covered in pots and pans and cutting boards, and yet, because no one had been living here, the space still felt spare. The only sign of having raised a kid in here at all were some old stickers in the window of the open door to the porch. Outside, she could hear their voices. No one was laughing anymore.
Scanning the empty apartment, she saw Dan’s front door. She knew she could walk right out and put an end to this bizarre morning, but she couldn’t seem to move. And yet this feeling of immobility was exactly what Deidre was calling out—her willingness to hide and complain well before the pandemic came along. Suddenly it was clear how venting, on social media and off, had deflated her into a kind of torpor. In that sense, walking out now could be an act of empowerment, a way to take control of her life and set its new course. But she knew she couldn’t force Cammy out, so she’d probably have to move.
Into her hesitation came the sound of footsteps. The panic returned as she saw Dan slowly ascending the back steps with a frown. When he saw her he stopped below the landing, hands on both railings. He was about ten feet away with the open back door between them. That fishbowl flanked him on both sides, shaded by another small wooden landing above him with more stairs leading up.
‘I don’t know what she was talking about,’ he began. ‘Deidre has her own ideas, I think, maybe from her daughter being in whatever courtship she’s in. See, they’d always been so close.’
Bee felt herself nod, getting bit of vertigo seeing him beside a banister that looked quite low for his body on those rickety stairs.
‘Leaving the city for good is so freeing, I’ve discovered,” he said. “But it also brings a sense of loss. Of mortality, too, for whatever heyday of youth you had feels like its behind you. The highs seem higher, and the lows get romanticized.’ He looked at his feet. ‘That’s not a great pitch for coming with us, I know. I’m a terrible salesman, but I’m just trying to be honest. And the highs up there are something else. Seeing baby ducklings take to the pond for the first time, then watching them grow, along with the trout we stocked and the fruit on the trees—we’re just starting out, but learning to solve problems like any small farm or garden would have, and seeing things flourish—it’s unlike any feeling I’ve ever had.’
Bee flashed to her mother in her garden with a smile across her face like she’d never smiled before. Oh how she wished her Dad could’ve seen that.
‘All that fruit on the table,’ he continued more pointedly. ‘Those strawberries and nectarines on the pavlova, and more I didn’t even bring down–’ Now he motioned inside and she backed up as he dipped into the kitchen, his hand reaching toward a bowl. ‘We grew these,’ he said, holding up some blueberries. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never grown anything in my life before, anything I could eat anyway. All I did was chop things, heat things, kill them. It’s like I was living with one hand behind my back. Life was so limited here.’
‘I feel like I’ve had both hands behind my back these past months,’ she blurted, sighing.
He gave a short laugh as he leaned against his sink, fully in his element, yet seeming bewildered too. ‘Meanwhile first responders and healthcare workers have all had both their hands full,’ he said. ‘But if we can reduce density in these cities, and therefore the severity of this next wave, while putting less strain on the food system, on supply systems of all kinds, then we’re helping, we’re second responders by getting out of the way.’
She hadn’t thought of it like that. Except hadn’t there been frustration in rural communities from such an influx of new people these days? ‘I wonder how the Fort Gregg area feels about all that,’ she said.
‘Sure, there’s some moaning about people like us,’ he said. ‘But we’re really pretty self-sufficient, and we’re planning on bringing things to the farmers’ market when we’re more set up. You know, give back to the community, be a part of it.’
She considered his plan, surveying again all the effort he’d gone to. It was creepy for sure, but at the same time, in one of the most isolated moments of her life, a little endearing. ‘But why me?’ She had to ask. ‘I mean, why not throw a bigger brunch and see who’s interested?’
‘We did, Bee. We didn’t want to have too many people here space-wise, but there were two others we reached out to. And you were the only one to come. What does that say, that you were the only one to actually make the first step?’
What did that say? Still, she needed to gauge his response to something. ‘Were they both women my age?’ she asked.
‘I mean, yeah, give or take,’ he said with that guilty look again.
She thought of Deidre. This was all too weird. She needed air. She walked out onto his landing. In the row of backyards, several people were outside puttering or watering. Two girls were fighting over a hula hoop.
‘But that’s not why.’ He scrambled behind her. ‘They’re both already friends.’ But she was only half listening as she peered down at the table and saw the sunflowers gazing up. Her mother had sunflowers too, in her raised beds of squash, cherry tomatoes, climbing peas, lettuce, and mint for mint juleps. At once, an image seized her of her mother kneeling alongside. Now there was a woman in control of her life.
Peering down at the table again, she realized Deidre and Iz weren’t there anymore. But she couldn’t see the whole space. She started down the first set of five steps holding the low railing. At the turn she’d be able to see the whole yard, like that enticing photo in the email.
But frightening her nearly out of her skin were the two of them crouched low on the steps. Even as she put it together that they were only eavesdropping, her body recoiled as if attacked.
All she saw next was the table swollen with fruit, flowers, mimosas, the pavlova and the French toast she never got to try. The colors of it pinwheeled as her breath caught. Now they were the colors of her mother’s garden, with her mother smiling in it. Her arms went out, reaching, but there was only rotten wood, splinters, nothing to grab a hold of. As she floated above the space for a moment, she felt what it would be like to leave the city, the leap of it, the loss, the mortality, but also a shedding, the fresh naked power in facing whatever came next. Yet around her the city was closing like a mouth.
Just then she felt hands on her legs. She was being held by the ankles.
‘I’ve got you,’ Deidre hollered with Iz behind her. ‘Holy shit, I’ve got you.’
From Oakland, California, J.Z. Wyckoff holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in The Santa Clara Review, Art Practical, 90ways and elsewhere, and was recently long-listed in the 2019 Fish Short Story Prize. He used to haul art around the country for museums and galleries, but now he is a tutor and advocate for homeless and highly-mobile youth. He’s also beginning to shop around his novel about a city where rising seas, the tech industry, homelessness, and autonomous vehicles all collide.