back to Issue 16
by Natasha Soto
I ran into my ex’s mom at the grocery store.
At first, I thought, Oh god, but then, Should I say hello?
I read somewhere that your first thought is what you are socialized to think, and your second is how you actually feel. For example, society wants you to have a negative, knee-jerk reaction to anything ex-related, but in truth, I always liked Geneen. She was very kind to me. She let me use her espresso machine. She was interested in what I had to say. She had a sunroom full of beautiful paintings that she had made herself decades ago and a pilates reformer that gathered dust. When she sat in her Adirondack chair on the deck in the afternoon light, tipsy on gin and tonics, she tended to overshare. Some of the family gossip she revealed during these moments was so wildly inappropriate and informative that I would never dream of stopping her.
She appeared to me as a bit of a cautionary tale, a relic of the past—a woman with a fancy degree she never used who lived with her husband, a successful man, in a massive house with too many rooms. There was a room that contained old skiing gear, one for purses bought on vacation, one for exercise equipment, one for books, one for a piano, and one with a big clawfoot tub full of scarves. Geneen often spent her days doing nothing at all, kind of like a beautiful old bird in an ornate enclosure.
Besides work, Geneen’s husband seemed to have two main hobbies. The first was ordering things off of Amazon—massagers, Epsom salts, head-scratchers, and other gadgets that came with the promise of easing tension. The second was speaking with contempt. I became weirdly protective of and close to Geneen whenever he was around. I recognized that the blurry way I was bonding with her was probably similar to how her son, my ex, grew up with her. I think I was his replacement. I say this because he was careful not to get sucked in again. Whenever we visited, he avoided his mother like the plague.
That was a decade ago. With time, her son retreated from me as well. But I always wondered if she missed me.
So, what the hell. “Hi, Geneen,” I called out.
As she turned around, her face morphed with delight. “Hello! Sweetie, it is so nice to see you.”
We went for a walk along the canal where we used to walk when I was dating her son. I was in college back then. In those days, I thought I would grow up to be a woman who did it all: the breadwinning, the cleaning, the cooking, the eventual child-rearing. And I wouldn’t complain about it, just as my mother never did. Hyper-independence, my therapist labeled it. I smiled as if receiving a compliment. But she shook her head no. It’s burning you out, she warned.
And then? I complained about everything. I needed help with it all. I married a kind man who bankrolled my listless lifestyle. I believe in you, he would say, talking about my art, but the art began to dry up. Would our love dry up someday, too? The generations of women who came before me worked hard so that I could do anything, yet now, all I wanted to do was nothing. Nothing was what I was up to.
I asked Geneen what she was up to.
“I’m taking a class about Angels at The Angel School,” she said.
That was kind of random, I thought, but we all needed to do things to fill our time.
“What should I know about angels?” I asked.
“They’re everywhere. And it’s their job to help us. Like that’s how they get promoted up the ranks, so don’t feel bad about asking for help. It’s reciprocal. And sometimes, they’ve had human lives before. And they get assigned to humans with issues similar to what they experienced in their lives.”
“So, what do I do with this lack of meaning?”
“What lack of meaning?”
“The lack of my own house and a stable job, the thing to get me up in the morning, the markers of meaning.”
“Whose meaning?”
“I guess it’s not my meaning. Not entirely.”
“It’s gotta be your meaning.”
“Right. It’s gotta be my meaning.”
“You know, we were both falling off a cliff when I knew you.”
“You were about to be an empty-nester. I was entering work-life.”
“Changes. But that’s all. I just thought you should know. It’s important. It’s gotta be your meaning.”
Then she said she had to go. She had some meat in the car that she needed to get into the fridge. The sun was beginning to set, casting long, golden shadows across the pavement. We hugged goodbye. All this time, I was convinced I had been doing nothing. But whose nothing? I thought. Whose nothing?
Natasha Soto is a writer and illustrator from New York City living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. Her work has been published in Rejoinder Journal, Dominican Writers Anthology, Siren Magazine, and elsewhere. More of her writing can be found at natasha-soto.com.