Anna made sure no one else was in the women’s bathroom before entering the stall nearest the window and latching herself in. She took a medium-point permanent marker from her jacket pocket and uncapped it, careful not to get any ink on her fingers. She’d already planned exactly what to write. Choosing the wall best illuminated by the afternoon light, she meticulously block-printed “Does Tony Bailin have a girlfriend?” in what she considered extremely readable letters. She broke the sentence into two lines and slanted them a little, as she’d practiced. It looked good, artistic even. Anna had always been fascinated by graffiti, especially the elaborately illustrated kind that you couldn’t read easily. She knew her bathroom stall effort did not technically qualify, since graffiti normally involved some kind of colorful imagery, but it did meet the criterion of the defacement of a public space. She flushed the toilet for effect and left the stall. Still no one else there. On her way back to her office, she tossed the marker into a garbage bin, as if it were a gun she’d just used in some hideous crime. She laughed to herself. Perhaps I should have wiped off my fingerprints, she thought.
Tony Bailin was one of the professors in the art department at the university where Anna worked as an administrative assistant in the library. She had a massive crush on him and thought that he’d flirted with her a few times, but she wasn’t sure. He was more or less her age and perfectly her type—tall, slender, mysterious, and just handsome enough to be interesting. She thought he looked a bit like a young Michael Caine, only with dark hair. She’d casually asked around about his romantic status, but nobody seemed to know anything. One of her friends said, “Him? God, I don’t know. He’s kind of weird, don’t you think?” Anna answered yes, but that was one of the things that intrigued her.
A few weeks after her graffiti escapade, Anna became distracted by another young man—one less mysterious but even more handsome. His name was Kenneth and he’d just been hired as the library mail supervisor, a job that sounded fancier than it was, and which required him to hand-deliver mail to all the other departments every morning. Kenneth made a point of engaging Anna in amusing conversations when he brought mail to the reserve desk where she worked, and quite frequently, later in the day, he would find some odd piece of mail somewhere that needed to be delivered to the reserve desk immediately. Her supervisor, Adele, an older, very meddlesome woman, commented that Kenneth seemed to be holding things back from the morning delivery so that he could bring them around later in the afternoon. Anna ignored her.
But Adele was highly intrigued by Anna in general. She invited her to have dinner at her home and play Scrabble afterwards with her and her husband, “who never lost.” Anna, who hadn’t held her job very long, felt she could not refuse. At dinner, Adele cross-examined her about every aspect of her life so assiduously that Anna became silently furious, and played after-dinner Scrabble with such ruthless concentration that both Adele and her husband were astonished. “Words are my friends,” she commented when Adele’s husband complimented her on her win. She feared retribution, but the next day at work all Adele told their coworkers was that Anna was very intelligent and good at Scrabble. This confused Anna, but she felt relieved.
Not too much time passed before Kenneth, who liked to be called Kenny, asked Anna out. She was pleased to say yes, since she’d discovered that they had quite a few things in common, and she was flattered by all the attention he paid her. She knew that a couple of the other female library assistants had their eye on Kenny, so that was satisfying too. All of this helped her forget about Tony Bailin, which was probably just as well, because someone had scribbled a reply to her bathroom message. “He’s gay,” was all it said, next to a little round frownie-face. At first she dismissed this, but on further consideration thought there might be some truth there. She decided to move on.
Anna and Kenny’s first date was a picnic along the riverbank near the university. He’d packed a basket with all sorts of things that a man might pack a basket with, forgetting essentials like napkins and glasses for the wine, but Anna thought it was all very endearing. When they’d finished eating, he asked her if she’d like to meet his housemate’s new puppy. Kenny was minding the dog for the weekend. “My god,” she said. “I love puppies.” They walked back along the river to the edge of the city, where Kenny lived.
Kenny had a room in a group house, which he told her had once belonged to a famous anti-war activist. She checked that out, and it was true. The house, an enormous Victorian, loomed over everything around it. Someone had spray-painted “Make Love Not War” and the iconic circular peace sign on the garage doors in red, white, and blue. When Anna admired it, Kenny told her the graffiti had been there since the ‘60s. She said she was always impressed with people who could paint something like that freehand without being afraid of making mistakes. Kenny laughed and said, “I guess there’s no way to know whether they were afraid or not.” Kenny’s attic room was huge and bright, though spare of furniture, but in the center of the floor was a doggie bed and on the doggie bed lay the cutest black Lab puppy Anna had ever seen. It had fallen asleep with a plushy toy in its mouth. “Meet Duke,” Kenny said, lifting up the dog and kissing it on the head before presenting it to Anna. “Apparently he’s worn himself out playing again.” Duke woke up, yawned, and licked Anna on her nose. They took Duke out for a stroll.
A year later, on their honeymoon in Zihuantanejo, Mexico, Anna had to fend for herself for the first three days, since Kenny had come down with a violent case of turista from eating a forbidden salad and was bedridden in their lovely, bamboo-walled, ocean-view room at the Hotel Elena. He was so sick that when he lay on his back in the big white bed, Anna could see his stomach churning violently up and down. She slept on the couch so he could thrash around as much as he needed to. The hotel doctor visited and said there was nothing to be done except ride it out and drink lots of bottled water. No more salad, he said, and brush your teeth with bottled water as well. Don’t open your mouth in the shower. He directed Anna to the small farmacia in town, where the main feature of the store was a huge display of Pepto Bismol. This helped a little.
On the first day of his illness, Anna stayed close by in case Kenny needed her, but he assured her there was really nothing she could do and encouraged her to stroll into town where there were lots of cool shops or go to the beach or the hotel pool. She did all three, really enjoying the spotlessly clean infinity pool and the hot, windy ocean beach with its raucous waves. She broke a branch off one of the nearby bushes and drew a heart containing “Anna & Kenny” in the soft damp sand near the water’s edge, then watched the waves swish it away. “I must be in a Hallmark movie,” she laughed to herself.
Walking into the town itself was quite an adventure, since the dirt road trailed along next to an elongated thicket that served as headquarters to a vociferous congregation of giant Mexican toads. The first of these humongous amphibians Anna came upon was resting along the side of the path, and at first she thought it was a football, it was that big. On some areas of the road, six or seven toads would spread themselves out in the sun, and they were certainly not in the habit of moving very fast—you had to walk around them. Anna imagined they were spelling out some kind of warning. The toads had a truly unnerving effect on Anna, and she found out later that, although harmless if left alone, they exuded a poisonous fluid if you picked them up. Not that she ever would have.
The town was really charming, full of small, intriguing shops as well as crafts that local artists set out in homemade stalls or on blankets, proudly accompanying their goods in riotously colored outfits and hats. Anna bought a couple of small painted plates and a carved wooden toad from a couple of giggling little girls. She knew they were laughing at her because she’d overpaid them, but she’d done it deliberately. She was irritated by the advice tourists were given that they must bargain with every seller. She was already richer than any of them would ever be; why try to get them to lower their already ridiculously low prices? She also purchased, much to her own amazement, a large beige woolen serape with intricate designs woven into the fabric in deep browns, black, and white. When Anna squinted her eyes, the designs looked like some kind of mysterious lettering, but she couldn’t make out what it said. It looked like a million repetitions of “no sé,” Spanish for “I don’t know,” but that was ridiculous.
The piece was somewhat expensive, and very large, and as she lugged it up the hill to the hotel, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. But Kenny said no, it was gorgeous, it was fabulous, she had wonderful taste, and that he was sure they could fold it up tight enough to fit in his duffle bag, since he hadn’t brought along that many clothes. She spread it out over two of the chairs in their room so they could admire it while Kenny rested.
After Kenny recovered, they spent the remainder of their time in Mexico City, where they consumed nothing but pizza, fries, beer, and Diet Pepsi, the only foods they didn’t distrust. Back in the States, one of the first things Anna did was unpack the serape and drape it over the swinging door between their living room and hallway so it could be admired from both sides. She and Kenny took up their lives where they’d left off, with one exception: Kenny had rediscovered his youthful love of sailing.
He’d been quite a jock in high school and college, sprinting and hurdling, Anna knew, but after college he’d met some guys who’d turned him on to sailing small boats called lasers. These pretty little vessels were about fifteen feet long and 150 pounds, making them easy to maneuver and transport. Kenny took lessons after work and on weekends, and before too long began regularly renting boats to take out into the harbor about an hour from where he and Anna lived. Anna encouraged him to pursue this interest because it made him happy, but she wasn’t at all interested in it herself. “You knew when you met me I wasn’t much for sports,” she told Kenny when he voiced his disappointment. He continued taking lessons and practicing in rented sailboats until one day he asked Anna if it would be okay with her if he spent about $1,500 on a used laser. He assured her it was cheaper in the long run to buy a boat than to keep renting them all the time, and she agreed. Also, he said, it would be easy for him to keep the boat in their storage unit in the winter, and he’d be able to get a roof rack for their car that would make it easy to take it anywhere he wanted to go. Anna felt this was an investment in Kenny’s happiness, and, she believed, if she ever happened to come up with any expense that would make her own life more fulfilling, Kenny would have been happy to let her spend the money.
One day Anna came home from work to find Kenny pounding nails into a large wooden structure on the living room floor. It was made of unpainted boards in a rectangular box shape about the size of a small kitchen table. Some metal pieces were nailed inside it, but she couldn’t tell what they were for. There were also some weights and long ropes attached to what might have been a seat in the middle of the box. Scraps of wood and nails and other debris and some printed papers that she assumed were directions were scattered all over the rug. “What are you doing?” she asked, as calmly as possible. Kenny told her his creation was called a hiking bench, and that it would enable him to train for all the more difficult operational movements he needed to acquire to race his sailboat, since he wasn’t able to go out to the harbor every day. This was the first time Anna had heard him talk about racing his boat, but she let that go.
“It’s awfully big,” she said. “Does it fold up or something?”
“No,” Kenny said. “I’m just going to keep it here in the living room for a while. It’s easy enough for us to walk around it, and if we’re going to have company, I’ll just take it apart and put it in my study.” He was barely looking at her while he spoke, and continued noisily wielding a hacksaw, spraying sawdust all around the room.
Anna was somewhat appalled by both the apparition of this gigantic box and by Kenny’s attitude, but she had promised herself to keep her cool, at least for a while. She and Kenny had been having more spats than usual and she didn’t want to start something up. She made dinner, and afterwards found that they were able to move fairly easily around the hiking bench to get to the television, so she thought to herself that maybe this was just a temporary thing. She went to bed around eleven, with Kenny promising to join her after he watched the news.
Anna didn’t fall right to sleep because the hiking bench had kidnapped her brain. After what seemed like about twenty minutes, when she was finally getting drowsy, she heard a loud grating, creaking noise coming from the living room, accompanied by rhythmic grunts from her husband. It sounded like he was rolling squeaky barbells over the floor while playing tennis with a grizzly bear. Anna tiptoed into the hallway and looked into the living room, where Kenny was perched on the seat section of his giant box, sliding back and forth as if on a rowing machine, and leaning way over from side to side while he made the grunting noises. Suddenly she got the picture. This activity was going to be going on quite frequently. She knocked on the wall to get Kenny’s attention.
“Honey,” she said, trying to sound rational and not homicidal. “I was just falling asleep.”
“That’s okay,” said Kenny. “I’ll join you soon.”
“But Kenny,” Anna said. “it’s too noisy. I can’t sleep. I have to get up early tomorrow.”
The noise stopped. Kenny looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, not sounding at all sorry, “but I work a full-time job just like you do, Anna. Except for the weekends, this is the only time I can practice.”
Anna could hardly stop herself from screaming at him. She closed the door between the living room and the hallway as much as she could, but it didn’t quite close because of the serape. She also closed the door to the bedroom. She put in earplugs, which she hated because they made her ears itch. She turned on the radio really low and set the timer so it would turn itself off in an hour. Eventually she got some sleep.
On the way to work the next morning, on the #12 bus, Anna listened to talk radio shows through her headset. “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be loved?” the smarmy woman pop-psychologist babbled. Anna wanted to punch somebody really hard, like maybe Kenny. Did he seriously think this noise machine of his was okay? Apparently he did.
Life creaked on. Anna and Kenny had more than a few words over the hiking bench, and also over the fact that Kenny had permanently scarred the roof and trunk of their car by scraping the boat and the boat rack over it. He did, however, agree to stop sailing in the living room by eleven p.m. and he did, without complaining, disassemble the hiking bench when people were coming over to visit. Anna tried to think about other things. He was very nice to her most of the time, she had to admit, and still as handsome as ever.
Then one day she came home and the hiking bench had been taken apart completely. All the boards and other pieces were stacked in the hallway. She walked all around the other rooms, but nothing else seemed different. Well, she though, Kenny will be home soon, and he’ll explain. Maybe, she thought, this will turn out to be a major blessing.
But he didn’t come home at all. Not that night, not the next day, not ever. There was no note. It didn’t appear that he had packed anything to take with him, and their car was still in its regular parking space. Anna was distraught and confused and first, and then almost inconsolable. She did absolutely everything one would do if a spouse disappeared, calling everyone, notifying the police, etc., but Kenny had left no trace. “He has sailed away,” she said to herself, “never to be found.”
One day, after months of moping, Anna decided to take her therapist’s advice and start getting back into things by cleaning the apartment. She started with the kitchen, leaving defrosting the freezer until last, since it was an old refrigerator and you had to chip away at all the ice unless you wanted to unplug it for days. As she unloaded all the plastic containers and frozen food boxes, she came upon a curious item hidden in the very back of the freezer. She pulled out a stout red plastic cup that must have been filled with water, frozen, and then inverted. It looked like a very small fez. She could see that several very small things were frozen inside it, but tapping the cup on the edge of the sink didn’t loosen the contents, so she upended it in a bowl to let it thaw.
Hours later, Anna pulled the red cup out of the bowl. Floating on top of the water were a bunch of tiny plastic letters of the alphabet, and at the bottom of the bowl lay a circular object that turned out to be Kenny’s thick gold wedding ring. Anna sat down at the kitchen table and stared into the bowl, lamenting that her effort to get back to normal had instead thrust her back into feeling terrible once again. She scooped the tiny letters out of the bowl and spread them out on a paper towel. There were ten of them, and for a while she couldn’t figure out what they were saying. Then it hit her: “I do not know.”
Two years later, Anna was putting together her senior exhibit at the art college where she’d enrolled for a master’s degree in graphic design. Her show consisted mostly of huge slabs of brick and wood onto which she’d spray-painted complex arrangements of lettering, screened photographic images, and text—some of which she’d written herself. She titled it The Fair Sex and the Unfair Sex, and she’d already received a lot of good feedback from her peers and professors. Her favorite part was one section of the brick area where she’d stenciled in a cartoonish depiction of one of the Mexican toads sitting in a sailboat. It was a private joke, but everyone seemed to find it amusing anyway. She was proud of herself for getting through all this schoolwork while still supporting herself at her old library job. She’d sold her wedding ring and Kenny’s (gold was at a premium that year) and taken out a small loan, too, so she could stay in her old apartment for a while, which, now that Kenny had disappeared, was really too big for her. This coming weekend, in fact, she’d be packing up to move to a smaller place; then she’d start looking for an art-related job in the city. She felt different, and certainly looked different, having indulged her long-hidden desires for a funkier style. Her hair was still blond, but with green and pink highlights, and her outfits were, well, artistic. She had multicolored fingernails. Things were good. She’d put romance on a back burner, taken in a neighborhood stray cat name Dewey, and gone vegetarian.
With her graduation behind her, Anna set about packing up the apartment she’d lived in for so many years, sometimes with Kenny, sometimes with just herself and Dewey. She’d gotten rid of most of Kenny’s stuff already and sold off some of her larger pieces of furniture, so the place seemed wildly spacious, full of possibilities. One of the last things she needed to pack was the serape from Zihuantanejo, which still hung over the swinging door between the living room and the hallway in all its gorgeous, portentous gravity. She squinted at it one more time, hoping to at last decipher its puzzling hieroglyphics, but to no avail. She smiled. Figuring it must be dusty on top after hanging there undisturbed for so long, she wrapped a dish towel around her broom and gently whisked it over the top of the door.
The entirety of the serape disintegrated at her first gentle touch. Every thread transformed into flakes and particles of dust, beginning where it was folded over the top of the door and delicately cascading like a silent, slow-motion waterfall into two elongated piles of wooly powder, one on each side of the door. Not a fringe or fragment remained. It happened in an instant, like something in a dream. Anna backed up against the hallway wall and stood there staring until she could catch her breath. Then she knelt down and examined the remains of her treasure. No insects, no odor, no clues. Maybe it had just dried out completely over the years? But, she thought, I must have bumped into this door scores of times, and I never saw any hint that it was in trouble. It had been so large, so important, she thought, and now it is so small, so immaterial. She picked up a bit of the dust and blew it into the air, then said aloud, “Oh, I should have made a wish.” Then she used the side of her hand to spread out some of the dust into a flat rectangular shape, and allowed her index finger to inscribe, very carefully, very steadily, “No sé, no sé, no sé.”