Chapter_3

Smashed between morning commuters on the Q train later that week, Rosie held a disconcertingly warm subway pole and scrolled through an Instagram account featuring old houses across the country that somehow cost only $100. The houses were dilapidated but charming, providing an imaginary venue for Rosie’s growing collection of theoretical interests. She pictured stocking the cabinets with pickled vegetables she’d grown herself—okra, kohlrabi, and daikon. Her loom would be stationed by the woodstove. As she scrolled, the fantasy shifted. Sometimes the pickles were tea blends from her herb garden. Sometimes the loom was a poetry chapbook or pair of shearing scissors. Maybe she would have her own writing room. She knew the thought was ridiculous; she’d taken a couple of creative writing classes at NYU, but her poems were not good enough for that sort of luxury and seriousness. Her workshop leader—a popular, scruffy poet—had been mildly encouraging but clearly preferred other students in the class. He quoted lines from their craft assignments, but never Rosie’s, and during a one-on-one meeting with him, he confused her with a deeply untalented writer in the class who always used the word “soul” in her poems. Still, Rosie felt that if only she surrounded herself with authentic beauty, she could unearth a latent talent.

As the train pulled into Canal Street, she tapped on the Instagram account’s most recent post: a former apple cider processing plant with a sagging roof. sold was stamped over the image. The former cider plant now had its own hashtag, which detailed its conversion into an inn that the new owners planned to use for artist residencies. Envy gripped her. She scrolled through months of posts and saw that most buildings had sold. A general store, a barn, a tannery, all gone.

A pack of young campers in matching T-shirts boarded the train and began shrieking about a rat in the car. Only distantly aware of the pandemonium, Rosie lifted a foot and continued scrolling. She scrolled as she climbed the Union Square subway steps, all the way to her station at the northwest corner. Reluctantly she pocketed her phone, put on her vest, and singled out a commuter: a man in a three-piece suit who strolled toward her, both hands in his pockets, no AirPods that Rosie could see, nothing to claim his attention. “Do you care about the future of LGBTQIA+ people?” she said brightly. He blinked at her. “No,” he said politely. “I’m afraid I don’t. But you are incredibly attractive!”

“OK, thank you!” Rosie said, already scoping out her next targets: two students—New School, she thought—holding hands walking toward her. They stopped in front of her to kiss goodbye, either apathetic or oblivious to her. Their kiss was a drawn-out preface to a long embrace. Rosie checked her watch, then smiled in a random direction, waiting for the hug to end. Students either didn’t have money or they pretended not to, but she would try. Finally they separated. One of them descended the subway stairs, and the other continued toward Rosie, who stepped in to make her pitch. “Hi,” she said, smiling. “Do you have—”

“No.”

Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten a donation before 10:00 a.m. She once brought this up with her boss, suggesting he could improve morale by dispatching canvassers later in the day, but he told her that half the job was brand recognition. You have to see something seven times before you buy it, he said, digging a pinkie into his ear.

Rosie knew this was not true. She could not get commuters to care, no matter how many times they saw her. The longest conversations she had were with men who asked for her number, thinking they were original, and who became hostile when she declined. One man told her he would donate on a recurring basis if she let him take a photo of her bare foot. But mostly, she was aggressively avoided, which made her feel lonely. The rare person unable to escape her opener (“Do you care about the future of the LGBTQIA+ community?”) looked trapped and desperate when she recited her script. She was well-versed in the fugues of lies people told, most popularly, “I’m already a monthly contributor.” Some days she thought about not approaching repeat commuters, as there was no use, but her boss showed up unannounced at a random time each day to check on everyone’s progress. He had once caught her sitting down while she finished her morning coffee and had gestured grandly with both hands for her to stand, as though he were an orchestra conductor.

By 11:00 a.m., new parents were out pushing their babies around in strollers. Rosie sometimes had luck with them. They were nicer than the commuters, or too tired to fully resist, and she had an easier way to start a conversation.

“Cute baby,” Rosie said to one mother. She peered into the stroller. The baby had an overheated face and a tuft of brown hair. He looked up at Rosie blankly and bounced a socked foot on the stroller handle.

“No,” the baby’s mother said, pushing past her.

Canvassers were allowed two fifteen-minute breaks plus a lunch break, and because they were required to be on the street during the lunch rush, Rosie and Alice took theirs in the late afternoon.

Rosie brought her bagged lunch to a loading dock on Sixteenth Street. While she waited for Alice, she reopened Instagram to look at the remodeled cider house. The owners had turned a storage room into a “summer kitchen,” which was bright and airy. A heap of freshly cut flowers sat on the countertop. She swiped to see a close-up of a woman’s hands cutting a stem at an angle, then the final arrangement, bursting forth from a beautiful ceramic vase. The couple had salvaged the original cider press, which they displayed like a sculpture on a wooden platform against the far wall of the kitchen.

“Rosie?” Alice called, rounding the corner, panic coloring her voice. She shaded her eyes and looked around.

“Hey,” Rosie said. “I’m right here.”

Alice’s expression turned from relief to exasperation. “OK, could you have picked a sketchier location? I thought you got kidnapped.”

They had been tracking each other’s locations for years, ever since a man hinted he would be taking Rosie home with him after he signed his monthly contributor paperwork. Alice put her palms flat on the loading dock to hoist herself up next to Rosie. “Oh, ew!” she cried, shaking liquid off her hand. “Is that pee? It smells like pee!” She let out a low wail, her face a mask of disgust.

“Just calm down and let me find a napkin,” Rosie said, trying not to laugh. She looked into her lunch bag.

“Not funny!” Alice cried, and Rosie bit her lip. She couldn’t find a napkin.

“OK, here, how about this?” she said, taking off her vest. She poured some of her water over Alice’s hand and used the vest to dry it off. “And here,” she said, riffling through her backpack. “I have sanitizer.”

“I hate this city,” Alice said, rubbing the sanitizer into her hands. “If there were a bingo card for coming into contact with strangers’ bodily fluids, I’d fucking win. Why do we live here?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Rosie said, opening her lunch: an overpriced, soft turkey sandwich from Pret. “Do you ever think about moving?”

“Like where, LA?” Alice unscrewed the cap of her water bottle. “If you move to LA and leave me alone with the Egg I’ll have to kill you.”

“No,” Rosie said. Someone began laying on their horn, and she had to shout. “More like, I don’t know, the country.” She was trying to sound casual, as though the thought hadn’t been preoccupying her for weeks.

“The country?”

“Look at this,” Rosie said, handing her phone to Alice. She felt like she was giving Alice something as fragile and precious as a robin’s egg. She took a bite of her sandwich and watched Alice swipe. The honking briefly stopped, and the two drivers emerged from their cars and began shouting at each other, leading to more honking from surrounding cars.

“OK, yes, this is better than Ativan,” Alice said, swiping. “Tin roof, check. Woodstove, check. Yes, this is exactly what I need.” She closed her eyes and inhaled theatrically. “I’m in Rhinebeck; I’m growing vegetables; I’m wrapping myself in a wool blanket; I’m stepping on a crunchy leaf; I’m pulling an apple pie from one of those old ovens that you’re not allowed to turn off; I have unlimited money and yet few worldly possessions; I’m trading kombucha mothers with a neighbor; my hand is not covered in human pee.”

She handed back Rosie’s phone. “You’re right. Let’s do it. Let’s leave. We can be neighbors. You can bake pies and leave them on the windowsill for me. And I’ll... I don’t know—”

“You’ll open a ceramics studio in town!”

“We could have a little compound. I know a queer polycule that went in on a fixer-upper Victorian mansion in the Poconos and now they mill all their own grains.”

They finished their sandwiches, and Rosie tried to focus on what Alice was talking about—something about a slip-casting course she had signed up for—but her thoughts kept yanking her back to the Hudson Valley.

Back at her station, she was charged with possibility. Her phone buzzed in her pocket: a text from Alice. She’d sent three apple pie emojis and an Instagram post of a real estate listing for a two-bedroom saltbox near a creek, three hours north of the city. The bathroom tiles had been hand-painted by a local celebrated children’s book illustrator.

The sun was relentless that day, and there was no cloud cover. In the last hour of her shift, Rosie was damp with sweat, her shirt clinging to her. Fragments of the listing sustained her as she approached strangers with manufactured enthusiasm. “Do you care about the queer community?” she asked a young woman jogging by. The woman slowed her pace and took out one of her AirPods. She looked Rosie in the eyes. This was a good sign, Rosie knew, and she’d learned to double down on her message quickly. A window like this only lasted a moment.

“I do, I just—” the woman said, looking guilt-stricken, jogging in place. “I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s not that I don’t—I just can’t really afford it right now. I mean, I could, I guess. I guess I just don’t want to. But I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person because—because I volunteer sometimes and do mutual aid. And my half brother is gay and I really love him. It’s just, like, this isn’t—”

“It’s OK,” Rosie said, desperate for the interaction to end. “Really, don’t worry about it.”

She sent a listing to Alice for an A-frame cabin with a Smeg refrigerator and skylights that bathed a lofted bedroom in sunlight. Alice sent back a heartbreak emoji.

She caught the eye of a silver-haired man in a tracksuit who seemed eager to talk to her about recently passed anti-LGBTQ legislation. “I just don’t see how those motherfuckers can sleep at night,” he said.

“I know, it’s terrible. For just ten dollars a month you can—”

“I mean, what do they think they’re going to accomplish? They’re evil, evil people,” he said.

“I hear you,” Rosie said. “Believe me. Together we can stop—”

“Sick,” he said. “They’re sick.”

“I know how powerless you can feel. But what if I told you you weren’t? That you could take one small step today to make a difference?”

“They need to be punished,” the man said.

“Punished” was a strong word, Rosie thought.

“You need to punish them.”

It wasn’t until then that Rosie noticed his erection pressing against his track pants.

“Do you want to sign up for a monthly donation?” she said flatly.

“I already contribute,” he said, walking away.

Rosie’s phone buzzed and she opened another text from Alice. It was the best listing she’d seen yet: an 1800s farmhouse in a town in a Hudson Valley hamlet called Scout Hill, a hundred miles from the city. The house was so gorgeous that she sat on a bench to look it over, angling herself so that her shadow fell over her phone. According to the listing, the house was a historic stone building set on thirty acres. The property included several outbuildings, which had served as utility structures for the farm and living quarters for groundskeepers. The smaller structures dotted the landscape in varying levels of charming disrepair. One of them could be a studio, where she’d make knitwear or beeswax candles. Her heart pounded. She thought of the vegetable peeler and opened a text to Jordan.

Did any packages arrive for me?

Yeah, a tiny box from Japan?he responded. What is it?

Rosie’s fingers trembled over the keys.

Then another text appeared on her screen. Phone away, please and thank you!

She looked up and saw her boss across the park, smiling at her tepidly. She held eye contact with him as she stood. A bead of sweat dripped down the side of her face. Her water bottle was empty. She saw herself from above, a magnet repelling every person around her. She looked at the listing again. Another text arrived from her boss. Not sure if you saw above text? Thanks!

He raised his hands in the air in a display of helpless bewilderment.

I’m done, Rosie texted, her face flushing. I quit. She pulled off her vest, stuffed it into the nearest trash can, and descended into the subway.