The sign in my window says “Card Reader.” It is small, fuzzy, and lit up in a shade of 1960s pawnshop neon that implies my lack of card-reading expertise as well as a dwindling interest in the so-called future of my business. Still, people knock on my door and come inside. And come back. And ask me for the kind of giveaway they receive at espresso drive-throughs: one free session for every ten.
Nothing, it seems, is more trustworthy than irrelevance.
Except to a landlord. Today, mine is waiting for me at the end of our driveway. I hobble toward her, my knees swollen into fat, black spiders of bone on nerve. She is new to the property. She does not know about my arthritis and she struggles with her own discomforts. By the time I arrive, breast milk is leaking through her puffy down jacket. Her daughter grabs at the stains, balls them up with her baby fingers, and sucks on the wet warm fabric.
The three of us stare up at my home of the past four decades. It stands on the far edge of her two-acre lot, behind a clump of wizened spruces. Even considering the few remaining meth houses on our street, the last of the Latvian dating services, and the one remaining classic isolationist cabin—bedecked with rooftop garlands of barbed wire—my backyard shack is fantastical. Tar paper flaps off the façade, full-grown alders sprout from the foundation. Anytime I flush the toilet, the front door bangs open and hits the wires dribbling off the eaves, releasing a lively shower of blue sparks.
“It’s quite cozy,” I say, “inside.”
My landlords sighs. I hobble in a little nearer. She smells of crisp white vinegar, soft brown shit, and the bulk rotting apples that she stores in the Arctic entry of her much larger, almost renovated house across the driveway from mine. It is astonishing what she has accomplished in just six months of hammering and sheetrocking, often with her daughter strapped to her chest in a sling.
Now that the weather is too cold for home improvement, she whizzes through her kitchen, pureeing and baking and fermenting blueberry mead in casks she bought off the internet. In the yard, her just-washed clothes dry in rows of frozen cloth dolls, clipped by their shoulders to the line. To my mind you can’t help but admire her work ethic, the new-to-Alaska idealism that radiates off her like a vapor of vitamin C.
Her name is Violet. Her daughter’s name is Michael—the idea being, I think, to give the baby an edge with the boys to come in school. Not that Michael needs it. She clamps her legs around Violet’s midsection, gives me an appraising stare. Her eyes are the color of winter. She rarely blinks.
“The thing about the sign is,” says Violet. “It’s obvious. It’s a lot.” “Agreed,” I say, “though not so obvious as LUCKY ORIENTAL GIRL MASSAGE.”
This was the sign in front of her house, until the previous landlord—a paranoid hydroponic pot dealer named Reggie—cut it down and left it in the backyard to rot. My eleven years living next to Reggie were long ones, mostly due to his fear of DEA drones and radioactive mosquitoes, both of which he believed had been released throughout Alaska by ex-members of the KGB.
Imagine my relief when he retired to Wasilla to play video games, selling the property to Violet and her husband, Daniel. They laughed when they discovered the sign, then hung it over their couch. Until they decided it was racist and dragged it off to the Anchorage dump. LUCKY ORIENTAL GIRL MASSAGE was painted, not neon, and a quieter kind of advertisement than CARD READER. Though equally misleading. None of the girls who lived here were lucky. Or Asian.
“All I’m saying,” says Violet. “Is that you have your profession, we respect that. We’d never undermine your income. But we maybe can’t sustain a lot of traffic coming in and out—a lot of people. You can see people, of course. But not stranger-in-a-car people. Not with a baby in the house.” She hitches Michael up on her hip. “You understand, I hope?”
I lean into Michael, drink in her baby musk, so faintly discernible under her mother’s herbal diaper potions. “You should come by for a session.”
“She can’t talk,” says Violet. “Though she does have lots of deep thoughts.” She nuzzles Michael’s neck. “Don’t you, Michael?” “I meant you,” I say. “Babies and I don’t communicate.” Which is true, even if I expressed it incorrectly. Children are a silent mystery to me, as are dead people and anyone outside a twenty-five-foot radius of my person.
Everyone else I know the way clairs have known nonclairs for centuries. That is to say, with an intimacy that nonclairs both long for and fear, depending on the moment.
“Are we good with no sign?” says Violet. “Can Daniel come by after work to help you take it down?”
“I thought he was staying late,” I say. And give her a minute to think about his staying late. “Can’t you put Michael in front of the TV? A quick session can be quite . . .” I search for a word in her vocabulary. “Refreshing.”
Violet smiles at me—a firm, kind no. On the way up the driveway, she stops to fiddle with the lid on my trash can. It doesn’t fit. She knew it wouldn’t but still enjoys the pleasure of confirming such small, reliable irritations. She will buy me a new one tomorrow, she decides. With a moose-proof latch.
—
Back at my window, I try to lift CARD READER off the sill. The sign is too big, the tubes too hot and sticky with frizzled bits of dead insects. I could unplug the cord, but the plug is hidden behind a bookcase that is too heavy for me to pull out from the wall, unless I remove all the books, then move the bookcase, then unplug the cord, then move the bookcase back and put all the books back.
My whole body throbs at this idea.
The two white towels I drape over the neon smother the legibility of the words, but still allow its dusky orange glow to seep through. Perhaps Violet will think of this as comforting, like holiday lights left up a few weeks into February. Though I do suspect that my clients will feel slightly betrayed. The sign has been up since before my arrival in the early 1970s, when my predecessor, an Armenian clair, worked on the property.
At the time, the services it advertised were a rarity in Anchorage, and the reason, people say, why Lucky Oriental Girl Massage became so successful. The city was overwhelmed with lonely, overpaid men working on the pipeline; escort shops outnumbered schools and supermarkets. CARD READER’S neon lent the establishment a certain cachet.
In our present era, new clients use real estate as an excuse to knock on my door, claiming they are browsing nearby houses. The area, they say, is on the up-and-up. Spenard a family neighborhood? Who would have thought it? They are too polite to ask if I have ever witnessed a Spenard Divorce on the property—“Spenard Divorce” being a distasteful local expression that refers to the formerly rampant executions of drunk wives by their drunk husbands in nearby homes and bars, usually by a shotgun blast to the face. They wonder if I’ve ever thought of selling. Then they say, as if the idea had never occurred to them until that second, “Are you open for a . . . ?”
I point to the sign.
“. . . reading?” they say.
“Reading,” I suppose, is the closest word. But by “reading,” I think what the clients mean is seeing, believing as they seem to, that a clair watches prerecorded episodes of their lives inside her head. If only this were so, as I can’t afford cable and, with my swollen knuckles, can hardly punch the buttons on the DVD remote. Imagine the friends and admirers I would have, if I had such visions. “You put your car keys in the refrigerator!” I would announce at the end of our sessions. “Don’t trust that co-worker who brings in all those pumpkin muffins!”
The word “voyant” was only added to the word “clair” in the eighteenth century. Clear seer, the combined terms translate as—a word invented, I believe, to distract the public from our true abilities. We do not see any differently from nonclairs. We are not soothsayers, mediums, or mystics. We do not hallucinate, speak in tongues, or hear voices.
All we do is know—in flashes of exhausting clarity—the thoughts muddled inside another person’s mind, especially those thoughts too upsetting to fully consider.
Children have traces of this ability. As do the mentally ill. Adults have residual vestiges they resist. Take Violet. My lack of healthcare, my lack of children or friends who might take care of me—she knows all this, though I’ve never told her. And yet she is going to try to evict me—which she also knows and can’t admit to herself at this particular moment. The Card Reader sign is just the start. She has spent the past six months fussing away her irritation about my clients parking in the driveway with imaginary anxiety regarding her paint chip selections and sourdough starter.
“Our family fortune-teller,” she calls me on the phone to her friends. She says this with affection that, in the moment, she almost believes. As in: “Our family fortune-teller gave my daughter a Cheeto!” Then she laughs, with even more affection.
What she doesn’t know is that rubbing a crunchy extruded corn puff against your gums is soothing to teething babies. I learned this not through my abilities as a clair—as I said, I am shut out of Michael’s mind and that of any child—but through King Charles, my former employer, who bought bag after bag of these electric-orange snacks for the younger escorts when their wisdom teeth came in.
Despite his swashbuckling, frontier charisma, King Charles had a sensitive nature. He behaved with empathy and even understanding about my isolation. He bought me every book on my shelves—biographies, cookbooks, mysteries, self-help manuals, historical novels about the rise of the Roman Empire or the fall of Japan—and sat at my feet while I read to him aloud, staring up at my face as if to commit it to memory along with the chapters that he often recited back to me, sentence by sentence.
It took me longer than it should have to understand he was illiterate. That I fell in love with him, that I ruined it, that he paid me in poker chips or clothes with the price tags pinned to the shoulders should not in any way diminish his achievements. He managed his escorts—and me—with an understanding that bordered on genius. No one needs a clair more than a woman who has serviced a party of ten drunk Teamsters with a fetish for empty beer bottles. And no one needs an escort more than a clair, sitting alone in her backyard shack, exhausted by the darkness of other people’s thoughts.
Escorts, in my experience, are some of the most hopeful people on this earth. The real house they will live in one day, the Shetland pony they will own, the mothers and stepfathers and uncles who will beg them for their forgiveness when they finally go back home for a visit—they don’t just think all this, they believe it, so much so that it coats their fragile minds with a layer of ironclad fairy tale that comforted even me.
How I miss them, even now—their junkie lapses in conversation, their unexpected presents: chocolates, charm bracelets, tiny pink and blue glass animals purchased from the Avon lady once a month. Unicorns and seals, mostly, some of which still stand on the top of my dresser and shoot a faint dazzling circus of color over the ceiling when the sun comes through the window. “Tell me more,” they used to say. “Tell me about the time when I almost won that dishwasher for my mom in the radio contest.”
—
Long ago, I learned that a clair can’t tell her clients that she’s going out of business. They will just show up and try to convince you otherwise. Considering the conflicts to come with Violet over the “stranger-in-a-car people” in our driveway—I have only one option. Every client comes with a list of questions they forget as soon as they arrive. There is only one real question they need answered. The question is never what they think it is and the answer they already know. And yet, during that last agonizing minute of a session when they ask this question, it always surprises us both.
Whether they come back—or not—depends on how I respond. After my meeting with Violet in the driveway, I begin to answer it incorrectly. On purpose. I tell the hairdresser he really does want to move in with his partner and buy a condo that he can’t quite afford. I tell the college dropout her father will support her need to pursue pottery. Off they go into the world to make the most regrettable decisions in their lives, never to return.
It is tiring, however, fighting your professional ethics. When my best, oldest client shows up for her weekly session, I give up on driving her away. She is middle-aged, the mother of two teenagers. She has wonderful taste in nail polish and this week has picked a fanciful powder blue that conflicts intensely with everything else about her: her ironed hair, her pointy features, her incapacity to smile.
“I’ll sit here,” she announces, swiftly pulling out a chair. She glances at my bed. The quilt is filthy. She can smell the dust from here. “If you don’t want mites,” she says, “you really need to change your pillow every other season.”
“You’re right,” I say, as I almost always do. The response calms her. She knows she has a problem with telling others what to do and how to do it, but she is unable to stop herself, especially when her job requires that she do exactly that. My best, oldest client is the CFO of a small, local corporation that peddles opiates to people with imaginary back problems through a chain of legal “pain-management” clinics. She is excellent at her tax strategy and increasing profits, but often finds herself in heated conflicts.
In her mind, people don’t like her because she refuses to dumb down, which led to a vicious fight at the neighborhood book club with Candace Mackie over the genius or not-genius of Stephen King. In my mind, her need for authority undermines her ability to make friends. Both of us agree that the landing strip she constructed on Diamond Lake last winter—to help her husband land his plane more safely on the ice—did not help her situation. The bright, orange cones were butt-ugly and ruined everyone’s view.
While I chop onions, she tells me I really should consider a mandoline. They are easier than a knife and just as sharp.
I look down at the counter, my gnarled grip. “Todd’s confused again,” I say.
She puts her face in her hands. Not to look at me. Clients never want to look at me. As we both know, her son, Todd, has a gun problem. And a girl problem. He got kicked out of Diamond Lake High for scratching the word “slut” with his key on the girl’s car. Then kicked out of the fundamentalist academy he attended—due to the sizable donation that my best, oldest client made—after he threatened the school librarian with a fork.
When my best, oldest client would not kick him out of the house, her husband threatened to leave her and take their daughter. This led her to give Todd twenty thousand dollars in emergency money and house him in a condo she owns through a shell company.
The boy is now nineteen. He has a trunk under his bed with a significant amount of automatic weaponry inside, as well as a smartphone he keeps duct-taped to the back side of the tank of the toilet, which he uses to harass the girl via texts, as well as to comment on a Reddit thread called IncelMetalheadMindmeld that attracts both fans of Motörhead and young lost boys who think that girls will never sleep with them because girls are fucked-up cunts. Or Jewish.
My best, oldest client is heartbroken about this. She knows who her son really is: the little boy who picked fireweed on his way home from school to give to her, the boy who used to lie in bed at night, describing the cabin he was going to build when he grew up, a cabin with bunk beds and a swimming pool. On a mountain. She could live there too one day. As long it was only her and him.
“If you don’t want to cry,” she tells me, “you have to rinse off the knife with warm water. Lighting matches doesn’t work.” She then advises me to cut the onion crosswise and lengthwise, so the whole bulb will fall into little precut pieces.
I do as she suggests, which she also likes. Not enough people in her life listen to her, she thinks. Not even her own husband, an anesthesiologist whose medical license allows them to lawfully operate their clinics. Even though the idea for the business was hers. Including the app they have created for home delivery.
My hips begin to ache from standing. And my tailbone. I chop more slowly. Despite her lucrative success in pain management, she doesn’t seem to notice the way I hold on to the other chair for support, waiting for her to think about her son again.
She studies the table, tapping her nails, considering if she should still keep coming here. I am expensive. I am probably some kind of highly skilled fraud.
My best, oldest client is not the first to have this thought. How I know what my clients know always happens too quickly to believe. They long for some struggle on my part, some pageantry. For a few years, I tried to placate them with tea leaves and tarot—both techniques I could not seem to execute without laughing. Toward the end, I even stooped to macramé, hinting that the disastrous tangled knots I created were somehow products of their inner lives. Then King Charles gave me a biography of Sigmund Freud. The famed doctor cooked for his patients, I discovered, and served them elaborate, multicourse meals. Doing so, he claimed, inspired deeper levels of intimacy. The same holds true with my clients—even if the meals I usually prepare for them are canned ravioli, sloppy joe sauce on noodles.
The onions came from a mesh bag of vegetables that Violet left by my door. Fresh food in the winter this far north still arrives by plane or barge. It is excruciatingly expensive. In addition, Violet shops at the one gourmet grocery store in town, run by a Japanese family that stocks the seafood tanks with edible purple urchins. She feels bad about these urchins and also bad about the nonorganic potatoes she gave me, which like all root veggies just sit in a groundwater bath of pesticide. She is worried about my ability to care for myself in general—and whatever advantage my sorry physical state provides her in our owner-tenant conflict, you cannot fault her logic.
I know all this because she is not puttering around in her own house, twenty-five feet away, but right outside my window, shoveling snow. Two feet of heavy drifts have built up over my walkway. Somebody is going to slip, she worries. And possibly sue.
Onions, I tell myself. And toss the transparent bits into the pan, waving off the fumes. At this moment, my best, oldest client thinks that I am a cold unfeeling bitch and that I do not care about her or her son. “You keep looking over at that woman,” she says. “Can you ask her to hold off until we’re finished?”
“She’s anxious about her marriage,” I say. “Outdoor work helps her. When’s the last time you got any sleep?”
My best, oldest client sits up straighter. But even her thoughts are ragged and exhausted. She lent her son her hybrid SUV, then followed him around town in a rental Kia. His first stop was Target for duct tape and contractor bags. His next was various pull-outs along Seward Highway, where he got out and looked around as if judging which one was most desolate. His last was the girl’s house—the girl whose car he keyed and who he threatened in front of the principal—where he parked across the street and watched the windows even after the lights went off.
I tell her what I know: She knows she should call the girl’s parents. I tell her what she knows: She doesn’t want to get Todd in trouble. And what evidence does she really have? You’re allowed to buy duct tape if you want. And park on a street where you don’t live.
The smell of hot, buttery onion is seductive, and I drift off for a minute. I had forgotten this smell. It is the smell of families, of lamplight, the hour left before the children playing on the dining room rug must come to the table. The effect on me is swift and surprising: My family. My mother. My childhood. The child I didn’t have.
She was a girl, I like to think.
Even now I wonder if she had been born, would she have inherited my clair abilities? Would she have had my red hair, my skin that seems to freckle even in the dark? Would she have slept with me in my bed, the way that Michael does with Violet?
King Charles gave me a small velvet bag of pills to end the pregancy, which I did. To do otherwise was inadvisable, considering his draconian punishment policies, but not impossible. He had a violent allergy to bees, a fear of water. Both conditions I was aware of and yet didn’t use to protect her. I have never met another clair, but if I did, I think she would tell me that I was never afraid of King Charles hurting me or limiting my freedom, only worried that if I didn’t do as he asked, he might stop loving me.
Even though I knew—far better than he—that he had already stopped loving me.
This is the thing about being a clair that I learned far too late, mostly because there was no one to explain it to me: Clairs can’t ever love nonclairs. When this happens, all we want to know is what our beloved knows. Other clients turn suddenly boring. Food is boring. Sleep a waste. Our one impulse is to stay as close to that nonclair as possible, siphoning off his or her every thought—all of which, no matter how dull or pedestrian, glitter through us like bits of tiny, frozen brilliance.
More upsetting is our need to share what we discover. At night, I lay beside King Charles, unpacking every gorgeous facet of his flaws, every exquisite detail of his personality, explaining his own mind to him, proving that I understood him the way no one ever had—a connection that humans supposedly long for but, in reality, do not like. At all.
By the end of our intimacy, he not only loathed me, he loathed everything about himself that I had dissected and glorified: his need to joke about his childhood in Atmore, Alabama, his fear of spiders, his reliance on his lucky gold-nugget belt buckle as a talisman against bank tellers and bail bondsmen and anyone else who might ask him to fill out paperwork.
Deluded by my affections, one night I even offered to teach him how to read and write, which was also the only time he ever hit me with that belt buckle. My mouth healed, after a while. I learned how to chew with my back molars. I forgave him and begged him to accept my forgiveness, but he knew better. He realized what I didn’t. Love, even self-love, requires some degree of mystery.
—
Snow begins to fall, layering the branches of trees outside my windows. My best, oldest client looks out the window at Violet, shoveling, and wonders why she can’t be more like her: fresh, energetic, with a baby in a snowsuit.
There is no way to help her with this, except to set the table with my least cracked plates. And a stub end of a candle. She has been such a devoted, reliable client, for so many years. Ever since King Charles died and the mayor’s citywide sanitation movement closed down all the escort establishments in Anchorage, she and other mothers like her have been my one economic constant.
I should despise them, I often tell myself. They have what I most wanted and threw away. But mothers seem to need me more than any other kind of client. They pay the most and struggle the most and never, ever cancel a session. Nothing, I have noticed, makes you long to be wrong about what you know to be true more than your own children.
Unlike violent offenders—quite a few of which have slunk into my shack—a mother is not there to be who she is in secret. She is there to find out who she is and who she might have been and who she almost was and if the pasty, angry, frowny face in the mirror is really her or maybe just some fucked-up version of how she sees herself ?
This is a question I never can fully address, hidden as it is under a thick, tangled layer of thoughts about her husband or ex-husbands, her kids or stepkids, her father, her mother, her childhood friend, her boss, her neighbor, the waitress who served her unmelted nachos at Las Margaritas, the babysitter, the teacher, the tutor, the soccer coach, the lice lady, the camp counselor, her work friends, her doctor, her breast doctor, her ob-gyn, the sad lady at the checkout at Carrs, the fish who is so lonely, he perks up even when she doesn’t shake the fish-food can, the dinner-party mother who for some reason doesn’t invite her to dinner parties, the PTA mother who does invite her but only to ask her to run the school benefit, the therapist who should not be her friend but is. Just not real friend. Because she costs two hundred dollars an hour and doesn’t take insurance.
Granted, I minister to a segment of the population that hands down cashmere sweaters, as well as manages a lobotomy’s worth of household employees. But I have, on the occasion, taken on a pro bono mother without such financial resources and found that the mental load on them—and me—was the same, if not more excruciating, because the broke, single mom living in her car had to rely on a lot more people just to survive. All without the ability to pay them.
Sometimes I think all this churning insight and worry has spread from these women’s minds into my own and, from there, into my joints—leaving me hunched and unable to run away from them. Especially when they show up at my door, seeking confirmation that they have failed or they are to blame. Once again.
What can I say? I know only what they know. Which is, yes, you are accomplished and behaved heroically about your daughter’s math quiz, but about the 5.8 earthquake that hit Anchorage this morning and knocked your Chagall lithograph off the mantel . . . it’s all your fault for the following reasons: (1) You did not use the heavy-duty picture-hanging kit even though you knew better; (2) Your son, Todd, left the poker leaning against the fireplace, pointy end up, a gesture you said nothing about because you didn’t want him to get mad, start trashing furniture, and leave; (3) You were asleep when the earthquake hit when you really should have been up, sending emails about your daughter’s school benefit in the living room, where you could have caught the Chagall before it fell directly onto the poker.
Here is a detail you will never tell anyone other than me and illustrates exactly why I have such affection for you, my best, oldest client, despite my envy and repulsion: You bought that lithograph knowing that Chagall made thousands of such lithographs and that this one—of a happy, plump green woman holding her little child under a half-moon—was no more than a horrifically overpriced poster. Still, it was yours. It was the one thing you would take with you if your husband finally divorced you over Todd. And now it has a ragged, ash-flecked hole in the center as if someone had punched it in the heart. Right below the moon.
—
Warm glazed onions, it seems, can revive even the depressed and discouraged. My best, oldest client seems as astonished as myself by the buttery, crunchy slop on her plate, none of which, fortunately, conflicts with her Paleo Diet. It has been years since I have eaten real food—decades. We sit at the table. We spoon and smile, chew and smile.
“Delicious,” she says. “Next time, you might consider a little salt.”
“You’re right,” I say.
My best, oldest client smiles. It’s not that she doesn’t know that I always give her the same answer or that it shouldn’t make it her feel good—but it does make her feel good.
If only that feeling would last. Tomorrow, my best, oldest client is going to start reorganizing two of the pain-management clinics into nonprofit status, which will allow the clinic to circumvent yet more taxes and inflate her husband’s salary to 90 percent of the revenues. Then search the internet once again for an art restorer, specializing in Chagall lithographs. And buy a Glock.
The girl that her son, Todd, is fixated on—and “fixated” is the word my best, oldest client always uses—is named Annie. Annie is a cross-country skier. Annie is training for the Olympics. Annie is black and the first real athlete of color to dominate Nordic trials in the history of the sport. Everybody loves Annie. And nobody loves her son. Except my best, oldest client.
I tell her I can’t wait to see her next week. I will think about that mandoline. And the new pillows. She gathers up her purse. Then turns to me and says, “He would never hurt me, would he?” The last question. The Glock. My heart withers. Neither of us knows the answer—and this is why the last question with any client is so tricky. Your response means everything and nothing, nor will it save them unless they take some kind of action in their lives. “From what I have read,” I say, “if you keep a gun in the house for self-protection, you usually end up shooting someone in your own family by mistake.”
—
The snow that Violet shoveled has left a winter’s worth of ice exposed. She doesn’t believe in salt or chemicals and sprinkled sawdust down my walkway. Three fresh inches fell over the sawdust—then melted, then refroze—leaving a slick white coating flecked with wood bits. I can try to pick my way down to check my mailbox, but if I slip, I’ll throw my hands out to stop my fall and break my wrists. This is not a prediction. It is a reality that every woman over fifty living in a northern climate knows merely as a matter of survival.
Through the window, the spruces lean against the bluish sky like weary, old stragglers. Somewhere in that stand of trees lies the backyard grave of the clair who I replaced on the property. She was Armenian, King Charles told me, and an excellent dancer, her life ended by knife wounds from a jealous client. Even now I wish I could have met her. There are still so many questions that I have: Why can’t I know my own mind, the way I know my clients’? What if I met another clair? Would I know her thoughts? Would she know mine? Could I care about her without her feeling repulsed and overwhelmed?
It is a kind of self-punishment, probably, to fantasize about a life with another person. I have been alone for most of my life. My mother sold me to King Charles after a single meeting at a gas station in downtown Dearborn, Michigan. I loved her the way I loved him, perhaps even more so. As a young child, I followed her from room to room, touching her hair, stealing the sash of her bathrobe, explaining to her why my father had left us, why she didn’t love me, and why it didn’t matter, not really. I would not eat or go to the bathroom unless she came with me. At night, I slept under her bed, and in the morning, I recounted her dreams.
Her dreams, I believe, were my greatest violation. Every dream, no matter how beautiful or terrifying, always sounds foolish when you describe it to someone else. And in her case, she didn’t even choose to describe it. I chose for her—a willful, besotted child.
—
There is an uptick in visits from my best, oldest client. Todd rented a chain saw at Home Depot and never returned it. Todd got into an altercation at a dispensary parking lot. My best, oldest client is now my only client, but she comes every day.
Her Audi infuriates Violet. Not only is it an SUV that just hogs up space on the driveway, it’s also simply a more tasteful Mercedes. If you spend that much money on a car, Violet believes, you need to spend a little more time volunteering at the food pantry. Violet drives a Subaru, which she knows is less expensive and better in the snow. But what really makes her upset is that despite her best efforts, she lusts after that stupid, gas-guzzling Audi. That panoramic sunroof. That gleamy forest green.
She glances over at it while collecting eggs from the hutch, veering closer to me than I prefer. Her thoughts swarm through me like fresh, dark snowflakes. My shack, she has just begun to think, would make an ideal guest cottage. Daniel could help with renovations, maybe while she visited her family in Minnesota next summer. Besides, she tells herself, the place can’t be safe to live in at this point. Mold. Asbestos.
I unplug the Card Reader sign. And lock the door. And yet my best, oldest client turns up that afternoon. Todd has been arrested. This time for real, not just a summons and deferred time for community service. Her fear, her rage come at me in waves from the other side of my door. She knocks and knocks and knocks. She looks in the window. I cannot make it under the bed to hide. Not in time. “Are you there?” she yells through the glass, staring right at me.
I creak up, hobble over, and let her in. She sits at the table. Her nails are brown this week. A glossy chocolate brown. But for the first time since I have known her, she is missing lipstick. Her eyes are bloodshot and the skin around her nose is papery and chafed.
“He didn’t do it,” she says.
Todd, as we both now know, is facing a charge of possession of narcotics with intent to distribute. Someone phoned in an anonymous tip. The troopers searched his condo and in addition to finding two hundred patches of fentanyl in his oven, they discovered a perfectly legal cache of automatic weapons, a perfectly legal backpack filled with a perfectly legal roll of duct tape, contractor bags, and a hacksaw, as well as a perfectly legal diary with graphic drawings that illustrated—perfectly—what he planned on doing to an unidentified female.
I rummage through the mesh bag of vegetables and find something that looks like a potato crossed with a root. A parsnip. I put the pot filled with water on the hot plate.
“Be careful of that cord,” says my best, oldest client. “If you get it wet, it will short out your electricity.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I forgot.”
She does not bask in the pleasure of my response. She is too terrified, too angry, too betrayed. It was her husband, she knows, who phoned the police and who placed the two hundred patches of fentanyl in Todd’s oven. Two hundred patches are a felony charge. If convicted, Todd will spend the next ten years in prison.
The water bubbles. I watch the parsnip bob along in the boiling water.
“He thinks he is protecting me,” she says. What she will not say is that she still loves her husband. She has always loved him. It is just that he doesn’t need her the way Todd does and, sadly, some part of her wonders if her husband is less concerned with the safety of his family and that girl Annie and more concerned with his lifestyle. His freedom. “Todd eats up all the energy,” he said last year, during their fight over whether or not to send Todd to a wilderness school in Utah. “Todd craps on every goddamn bit of happiness we have.” The irony of her husband’s actions seems to escape her.
Through his pain clinics, her husband peddles opioids to half of Anchorage, many of these so called patients my former clients—mothers with achy backs or blown knees, mothers who are his neighbors on Diamond Lake and nod off in the afternoons, allowing their teenage kids to sneak a few pills for their parties on the weekends. Until finally those mothers wake up and discover that because their kids can’t go to his pain clinic to satisfy their addiction, they are snorting heroin off the marble counter of the guest bath.
Or so I used to hear from my other clients, one of whom came to me through my best, oldest client’s book club and who arrived after having taken an eighty-milligram Oxy. The slow, swoopy blandness of her thoughts did require some acclimation: She liked my hair. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to touch the Card Reader sign. It was so warm, so orange. A little campfire made of fuzzy, fuzzy neon.
Even more disorienting was her euphoria—and how it seemed to infect me, so much so I forgot Violet, I forgot my arthritis, I forgot to cook. Nor did she need me to. Everything for the length of that session was wondrous, painless, honeyed with chemical bliss. For weeks afterward, I waited for her to come back, just to taste her thoughts again—in all their gauzy vapidity. But she never returned. Perhaps because I didn’t help her. Perhaps because she was bewitched by something far more powerful than my abilities.
“You sit down,” says my best, oldest client, taking my spoon from my hand as if she has just noticed I have trouble standing. But she hasn’t. She is just too upset to sit there, watching. She needs to do something. Anything. Though she tries not to take over, she does know significantly more about cooking than I do. Just as she knows how to prove what her husband did to his only son—and to her.
It was my best, oldest client who set up all seven of her husband’s pain clinics, including the security systems, compliant with federal regulations. All she has to do is sit down and watch a few hundred hours of video until she finds the footage where he removes a few extra patches from the pharmacy distributor each day. What is unfathomable to her—even maddening—is that her husband knows she has the pass codes for the cameras. He knows she is not stupid and will arrive at this conclusion. And yet he did it anyway, as if he believed she would choose him over Todd.
“Believed?” I say. “Or hoped?” She stirs away at the pot. “There is a difference,” I say.
She looks at me and sighs. “You should have peeled the parsnip first.” As she knows all too well, a parsnip is not a potato. You roast, not boil, them. And why does it feel, she wonders, as if I am on her husband’s side? She realizes what she must do: report him, divorce him, and liquidate as many assets as possible for Todd’s bond before her husband realizes what she has done. She doesn’t know how much bond costs. Or a lawyer. It is a Saturday. There is nothing to do but wait until Monday. She is not very good at waiting. She will go home and pack up her ruined Chagall and send it to the restorer in New York. In a double box, just in case.
She stabs the parsnip with a fork and cuts it into two equal pieces—one for me, one for her. Both halves look wrinkled and grotesque, somehow medieval. Neither of us eats. “Isn’t there something wrong with you if you don’t love your own child?” she says.
The last question. And, sadly, she thinks she is talking about her husband.
“You have a daughter too,” I say. “I wonder who she would choose: Todd or her father?” My best, oldest client looks at me with the kind of hate that always bubbles through the last few sessions with a client before she decides to never return.
She picks up her purse. She smooths down her sensible, colorless sweater. She whisks out the door, shaking with realization and fury—and slips.
The break is deep in the femur. My best, oldest client refuses pain medication—as any person familiar with opiates would—and screams every time the EMTs touch her. I would like to go out there and apologize or offer her a blanket, but Violet has the crisis handled. She is quite upset: Sirens are blaring all over her house; the ambulance knocked over her moose-proof trash cans; and Michael’s sleep schedule is officially ruined.
Also, it is traumatic. The bone. Violet still feels a little sick. Only after my client is loaded into the ambulance does she show up on my doorstep. “Do you understand the jeopardy you have put us in?” she says. “Legally? That woman is going to sue.”
“She has other problems,” I say. “Is Michael napping?”
“I just think,” she says, “that we should sit down and talk—openly—about what’s going on. Maybe all three of us? With Daniel?”
“Let’s have a session. How do turnips sound? I can mash them.” “I don’t think you’re listening. I’m not the bad guy here.” “No,” I say. “You’re really not.”
“You like Daniel better,” she says. “But it’s him, not me, who wants to tear this place down. He needs a home office.”
Her husband, Daniel, as she knows, does not want a home office, or to be at home at all.
“Just one session,” I say. “It won’t hurt.” Though it will hurt, badly, and the pleasure I will take from this is disconcerting. Violet has already called Daniel six times today. My shack is more than twenty-five feet from her house, constructed there by King Charles expressly to keep me ignorant of his thoughts, the exact distance marked by the birch sapling he planted. And yet all day long she
wanders through the yard with her phone closer and closer, her mind tearing me out of a nap or crossword puzzle. First she calls Daniel to tell him that Michael said an actual word, “Papa.” A lie. Then to tell him that Michael bumped her forehead. True, but an injury that went down with ice. Then to tell him they are having squash casserole for dinner or vegan sushi. After which she stops calling because she knows it is demeaning. Daniel never picks up. And never comes home before two in the morning.
We can go through all this episode by episode. Or I can just say, the way I decide to finally say, “It’s not that Daniel is afraid to be a father and having an affair. It’s that you wish you had married that woodworker from college.”
Her mouth opens slowly. The last question, how I dread it every time. Even this one.
But a cry interrupts us: Michael’s voice from the monitor in Violet’s pocket. Off Violet goes up the icy walkway to her house. Furious, but vindicated. She never could quite believe I didn’t have internet. And now she is sure that I not only have it somewhere in my shack, but also know how to use it. Fucking Insta. Jesus Christ.
—
At last, I am at the bottom of Violet’s bag. Beets. I try to make them for myself. They are too tough, too slippery for me to grab hold of. I bite into one as though it were an apple, hit a rotten molar, spit out the bloody mouthful in the sink.
How I long for a can—the soft, salty slop, the jerky progress of the opener as it trundles around the lid. Violet isn’t the first to try to woo me with fresh, nutritious foods. Confined as I was to Lucky Oriental Girl Massage, I never got to see the Russian Jack River, where King Charles fished every summer. Or the crowds of Alaskans that gathered on its banks. But during the brief time he adored me, he showed up on the doorstep in the evenings with king salmon after king salmon—presenting each one the way some men might present flowers, lifting them up by the gill cover until his arm shook from the weight.
King Charles, I began to call him—a name soon adopted by all the escorts on the property. Though flattered by his gifts, I was also twenty years old with a full-time job and a hot plate for a kitchen. I did not know how to cook a fifty-pound fish, or what to do with the head, the entrails, that glittering eye. My idea of a vegetable was duck sauce or ketchup. My idea of love was to keep the person you loved from getting upset—and sending you away.
I threw his salmon into the dumpster behind the nearby Paradise Inn. Never realizing I was too valuable for King Charles to ever send away. After our intimacy ended, the girl he found to replace me in his affections was a nonclair, a Latvian. He kept her in the main house, too far from my shack for me to know anything about her, save for what I glimpsed through the kitchen window—the tilt of her head as she opened up the freezer, the easy, graceful way she leaned against the refrigerator door.
As the years passed, I retreated deeper and deeper into my room, lying in my moldy bed, staring at the wall where in my mind, I saw so clearly their happiness together as if I had acquired new abilities, the very abilities that clients want clairs to have. The children they would have, their marriage, their old age spent on the property—I envisioned it all, too isolated and ignorant to understand that these were the kinds of meaningless daydreams that everyone has when the future they have built their lives on has disintegrated.
Around this time, my joints had just begun to swell, my fingers to curl. King Charles sent out older escorts with my meals and jugs of drinking water. One fall afternoon, however, right before he died, he appeared in the backyard, standing beside the birch that by then had grown into a tree. I opened my door, but he came no closer than the twenty-five feet. What did he want? To say goodbye? To let me know that however slightly, he still loved me? To know, all I had to do was walk toward him. But I didn’t. I stayed in my doorway. The look in his eyes was the same as the look in mine—ailing, bewildered, clouded with regret.
Eventually, he returned to the house. Two weeks later, when he collapsed in his bathroom due to a pulmonary embolism, it turned out that he had named his Latvian the legal heir to his business. She evicted the remaining escorts, sold the entire property to the hydroponic pot dealer, and ran off with a bouncer from Exotic Escapes, our neighboring competitor.
—
I have a radio. Bland, official fuzz from NPR informs me of Obamacare, Social Security, the new Section 8 housing the city is building. I do not know how to do any of this: what forms you fill out, what website will prove you were alive before you blew off the edge of the world into human vapor. I am fifty-six, and no official trace of me exists.
The beet smiles up at me on the counter, the dark, meaty red of candied liver. My hand beside it is a ragged claw with knuckles. I will beg Violet, I realize. Just let me stay here, Violet. I will be helpful. I will be quiet as dirt.
There is a knock. I hobble over to the door and, for the first time in years, do not know anything about who is behind it. Except that it is not my best, oldest client in a cast, leaning on crutches. It’s a girl, wearing fantastically form-fitting leggings, a high-riding shirt, and a splash of belly button. Why teenagers in Alaska dress as if they live in California I will never know. Literally. However old they may appear to be, they are still young enough to resist my abilities.
Under the girl’s arm is a framed, dreamy picture of a woman and a baby. The woman and her breasts overflow from her open gown. She is green, the baby is white, its hands outstretched. Above them dangles a dark half-moon. Below them, where a rosebush blooms, the glass lying over the picture is broken. Jagged cracks radiating out from a hole in the woman’s leg. My best, oldest client’s Chagall. My best, oldest client’s daughter. “Does your mother know you’re here?” I say.
“Aren’t you supposed to know that?” says the girl. She leans the lithograph against the wall, glances over at the beet massacre on the counter.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I don’t take artwork as payment.” “Todd stole all my babysitting money,” she says. “Last week when he came over.”
“I don’t work with children either,” I say. “Especially not my clients’ children.”
“I’m not a child,” she says. Underneath all her makeup and arrogance, something loosens in her expression, something needy and possibly even desperate. What does she want to know? Though I have no way to help her, I sit down at the table, take a breath, and improvise: Todd hogs up all the attention? Todd did something to her? He hurt her? Physically?
Her face crumples. “I knew it,” she says, wiping tears off her face. “You’re total bullshit.”
“Look,” I say. “You’re too young. I only work with grown-ups.” “You don’t even like my mom,” she says. “You think she’s a
drug dealer.”
I shrug. Because, yes, I do think her mother is a drug dealer.
“You think you’re the first one to kiss up to her?” she says. “You’re just like everybody else: You let her boss you around. You keep telling her that Todd loves her. Just so one day you can ask for a script. Or maybe just a sample pack, under the table.”
The idea has never occurred to me—not fully. But it’s also not unfamiliar, as if it has been there all along, smudged at the back of my brain. The mindless, blissful thoughts of my book club client. The agony that shoots down from my tailbone into my heels. Yes, I would like an Oxy. I would like a big, fat handful of Oxy, followed by another handful of Vicodin, capped off with a nightly drip of ever-flowing morphine. But how does she know this?
I sit down at the table. I try not to look at her—and it occurs to me that this is how my clients behave around me. As if a lack of eye contact might protect them.
On the girl goes: I do not tell her mom that she is a bully. I do not tell her mom that she is a bitch. Or that it is partly her fault Todd acts the way he does—just to fuck with her, trick her, and laugh behind her back. “You want her to think she can fix him,” she says. “You want her weepy, coming over all the time so you can say: I’m old, my bones hurt, I need a little something, just to think straight and help you with your precious headcase son.
I tell myself that my best, oldest client bosses her daughter around. And this is how the girl knows how my best, oldest client treats me. Just because a young girl may understand my motivations does not mean she has my abilities. Still the idea that she might be clair sirens through me—terrible and beguiling.
All my life, I have longed to meet another of my kind.
It is almost a relief when she stops speaking and wanders through my shack, rearranging the glass animals on my dresser, adjusting my pillow until the dust makes her cough. She is like her mother, unable to sit still. At last she finds her way to the counter and picks up the knife. “I thought you’d be different,” she says. “Like powerful. And wise.”
Her arm comes down, the blade slicing swiftly through the beet. “Not just some broken-down old lady,” she says. “Sitting around in the dark, thinking about how you have nobody.” Slice, slice, slice. The knife moves so quickly, the beet seems to evaporate into a pile of whisper-thin red circles.
“Please,” I say. “Stop.”
But she goes on: Her brother is a royal asshole. She knows I have almost told her mother this a thousand times, but maybe I don’t understand royal assholes. Maybe I was one of the women who never figured out that when a guy doesn’t love you, it’s because he wants to fuck somebody else. Not to end up with you and another little royal asshole.
End of beet. I laugh, lightly, but even I can feel the wince behind it. Some part of me reminds myself that my life is not that unique, that this is why she can name my losses with such accuracy. Some other part of me wobbles on the words “royal asshole.” What a clever leap it is from King Charles. If she is a clair, she is so much wiser, so much better at disguising it to protect herself. Her mother did not sell her. Her mother did not sleep in her car to get away from her.
“You can stay here,” I said. “If you feel lonely and don’t want to go home.”
The girl looks up, sets the knife slowly down on the counter. Her expression curious, but not confused. With a swoosh of frozen air, the door bangs open. It is Violet. She has Michael with her, clinging to her hip. It occurs to me what a disadvantage I am in, to be in range of three people and know only one of their thoughts: Violet’s.
Violet has really had it this time. That goddamn woman with her goddamn Audi has side-swiped the Subaru. Violet has already called the police and the insurance company. She blames the entire episode not just on the entitled parking that has gone on since she bought this house but on me. She will find me someplace else to live. She will help me move even. But I have to leave. Possibly by the end of the week.
She is so furious, so livid, really that it takes her a minute to see the girl sitting at the counter instead of the mother with the broken leg. Wait, she thinks. Who?
“She’s not a client,” I say. “She’s my guest.”
Violet shifts Michael up on her hip and studies the girl. Her braces. Her leggings that expose not just her lack of a thong but her need for somebody, anybody to notice she does not shave or wax.
I force myself upright, make my way over to the hot plate. I fill a pot with water, take out the powdered milk. The girl will get my favorite mug, the one with the daisy on the side. By now, if she is a clair, she must know that Violet pities her—a dangerous scenario with any teenager. But even more so with someone of my abilities. “Hey,” says Violet. “Maybe we should call your mom. And talk about what happened with her car. You know, calmly. Honestly. Zero drama.”
“Nothing happened,” says the girl. “I drive the Audi all the time.” “Okay,” says Violet. “But there’s my car too at stake. The broken side mirror?”
“Do what you want,” says the girl, not with anger. “She won’t pick up. Not if I call.”
Violet thinks of how she has tried to phone her own mother back in Minnesota and tell her what is going on with Daniel. How her mother avoids the topic. How her voice goes tight and bright and midwestern. “It’s easy to be married when you’re happy,” her mother says. “But nobody’s ever happy all the time.” All of a sudden the doorbell rings or she feels the need to share her cousin Ginger’s recipe for mayonnaise-less chicken salad.
“Well,” she says to the girl. “I’m sure she’s just busy. Moms do get busy.”
“I’m fine,” says the girl. “It’s not like I’m in jail like my brother.”
Violet tilts her head, smiles. Inside, however, she is worried. Very worried. This girl is at risk. This girl needs her parents. “You’re supergood at veggie prep,” she says. “YouTube?”
“TikTok,” says the girl. “I cook all the time. My dad eats out, and my mom doesn’t eat—not really.”
Violet wonders if she made a mistake by calling the police. She left her phone in the kitchen. She could always call them back and explain it was a mistake. She can claim the dents on the car as her fault for running into a mailbox.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Or the troopers will make you press charges.” Violet blinks, then looks at me. Wait, she thinks. I didn’t—
Just as Michael gurgles. It is a deep, soulful gurgle, the sound of a baby who has been adored for all of her short, plump, wholesome life. Violet nuzzles her. Then tells herself that one day Michael will be this girl’s age—but that she will be different from her, different from Violet too. Michael will be listened to. Michael will be respected. She will be strong and independent, not because she was forced to be, but because she was taught to be. She will never need to show up and pay for answers from some lying, manipulative—Violet wants to use the word “bitch” but as a feminist, she can’t, it’s an awful word, a man’s word. There is a long, dizzy silence in her thoughts. Then there it is: “crone.” A lying, manipulative crone.
Hate rolls through me—bleak and unrelenting.
I can’t say anything, but I beg the girl in my mind to tell Violet everything she knows about her: That Violet was not forced to be strong and independent. She was not listened to, yes. She was not respected, yes. But she did not learn from any of it. Underneath her frosting of self-improvement, she is weak and clingy and afraid—so afraid that instead of confronting Daniel about why he never comes home, she sent her old woodworking boyfriend a suggestive text.
All afternoon, while feeding the chickens and shoveling more snow, she has worried that he will not text her back. And worried that he will text her back, because she doesn’t really know how to sext or have an affair over FaceTime or whatever, because she is too old and never goes to see music anymore and just sits home with Michael. Waiting for Daniel to call back or come home.
The girl is picking at her nail. She has no reason to protect me. But can’t she understand what I can teach her? How long I’ve waited to find another clair? How lonely she will be too one day if she doesn’t find another of her kind?
I shuffle over to the counter and try to take her hand—my fingers bent and distorted, hers long and slim and tipped with the same brown polish her mother wore on her last visit. “Please,” I say. “Help.”
The girl pulls away. The look on her face obvious: disgust. I stumble backward and sit down on the bed. I am weeping, the tears runny and rheumy in my throat.
“Hey now,” says Violet—not to the girl, to me. She feels terrible. “Maybe I should make us some tea.”
“Don’t let her suck you in,” says the girl.
Violet straightens up, adjusts Michael. “Young lady,” she says, just the way her own mother did. “Have some respect.”
The girl’s face goes white. For a minute, I think she is finally going to go after Violet, to tell her about the woodworker, to send her fleeing out of here, sorry she ever barged in. But she doesn’t. She looks down at the floor. A child. “I’m sorry,” she says. Now she is crying.
“Oh dear,” says Violet. She clucks. She actually clucks. She is her mother, and maybe that isn’t so bad, maybe that is who she has been all along. “You’re having a rough time, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine,” says the girl, still crying.
When Violet tries to rub her back, Michael reaches over and grabs a loose strand of the girl’s hair. She pulls it. She laughs. The girl laughs too. “You could hold her,” says Violet. “If you want to.”
“What if I drop her?” says the girl.
Violet is also concerned about this. But if she wants to help this girl, she must earn her trust. “Don’t be silly,” she says and deposits her daughter into the girl’s arms. “She likes you.”
Michael looks up—and gurgles, as if on command.
The girl crinkles her face into goofy, exaggerated expressions: Oh no! Yum yum! Peekaboo! Michael laughs again and rubs her forehead against the girl’s shoulder. The girl laughs and continues. I shut my eyes. All this means nothing. A clair can like a baby. Everybody likes babies. Except royal assholes.
“Hey,” says Violet. Not to the girl. Or to Michael. To me. “I just made a banana bread. With almond flour. If you’re not into gluten.”
The girl is gluten free. Who isn’t?
“Maybe you need a little time to yourself,” says Violet. To me. She is worried. I don’t look so good. I am underweight actually. That happens to old people.
Time to myself ! I laugh and it sounds the way I want it to, like a crone, like a miserable, bitter, old crone. Violet feels just a little uncomfortable. Maybe I am losing it. She has always been judgmental about my situation, she realizes, and maybe even smug. She will work on this. She will invite me over for tea—soon—but now she just can’t leave the girl here with me. Not in my condition.
Off she goes through the door. She will feel out slick patches on the ice. The girl and Michael will follow behind her, so that nobody slips. I turn over, my back to them. I stare at the wall, listening to the girl tickle Michael, snuggle Michael. I forgive you, I tell myself so the girl will know and I won’t have to say it out loud. I love you. Please come back.
The door shuts. Then opens only a minute later, the girl rushing in without the baby.
She has come back! I sit up. I was not wrong. She is a clair! I am so happy I almost whimper. She leans over me close. She smells of bright, fruity shower gels and toothpaste. I take her hand. She lets me. Then she says, “Does my mom know? What I did to her Chagall?”
A branch bangs against the window. A load of snow tumbles off the eave. I sit there with her last question, and my extinguished hope. No clair would ever risk asking something so revealing, even from a fellow clair. Not because we don’t long to be understood, but because we know the long, brutal cost of such understanding.
The lithograph leans against the wall where the girl left it. My eyes follow the curve of a crack in the glass up to the dark halfmoon where a smudged angel that my best, oldest client has never noticed or mentioned is fleeing across the sky. What a fool I am—and have always been. I will never meet another clair. And I have no answer for the girl that isn’t guesswork of the kind that caused her to mistrust me from the start.
The title of my best, oldest client’s lithograph is Mother and Child. “You think it’s Todd,” I say to the girl. “In the picture. But it’s you, your mother sees in her arms.”
The girl looks away—almost disguising her pleased, young smile. I lie back down and face the wall, unable to watch her leave, listening only for the snap of the door, the tumble of tiny icicles off the gutters.
Leigh Newman‘s collection Nobody Gets Out Alive, which includes this story, is forthcoming from Scribner on April 12, 2022. Other stories from the collection have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories 2020, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Electric Literature. Her memoir about growing up in Alaska, Still Points North (Dial, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize and her story “Howl Palace” was awarded both a Pushcart prize and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ fiction prize. In 2020, she received The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura.”