Purses

Alice Kinerk

He leaves you, and your apartment that always felt too small now feels even smaller, but how can that be when he took the TV and speaker system and guitar and all his clothes and stuff?

You never really dreamt before, but you do now, the same claustrophobic dream over and over, in which you do an Alice-in-Wonderland, expanding until your arms and legs squeeze out the windows and your head goes up the chimney. Except there is no chimney in your apartment, so it's off with your head!

In the dream they are reluctant. “We don’t want to cut off your head, but there’s simply nowhere for it to go.”

“Do what you have to,” you say. You are always agreeable, even in dreams.

You have lost the ability to entertain yourself. You have lost your rhythms, your go-tos. You have become as indecisive as your cat. You walk in and out of rooms, trying to remember what you went in for, trying to remember how you fill your time.

One day you purchase a pair of sneakers. At home you run your fingers over their clean soles, admire their sharp rubber edges. You lace them up to go for a walk. Why not? It is a beautiful day and you can’t sit around with your arms and legs hanging out the windows forever.

On this day you aren’t enticed by cute coffee shops. You walk toward the port. There is nothing cute about the port. There is no chance you will round a corner and come upon him. Or the two of them. Thinking about it makes you queasy.

You walk past warehouses. Empty lots. Tent city. The food bank. A pile of lumber as wide as a city block, reeking of creosote. A parking lot. Another parking lot. A third.

It is under a bush, behind a chain link fence, alongside another forgettable parking lot where you spot it. A bit of blue, just visible alongside windblown trash underneath a pricker bush. It is baby blue, the color of a robin’s egg.

Once, as a child playing in your backyard, you’d found a robin’s egg lying on the ground. There had been a weight to it, and no hole chipped out. A baby bird was dead inside. So you’d held a funeral for the poor creature, buried it in the backyard under a shovelful of dirt, something you’d seen on an afterschool special. You tried to feel sad, but you couldn't. Sadness, once upon a time, had been foreign to you.

Now your eye lingers on the little blue thing. You have always wanted to find another robin’s egg, one with a hole in it signifying success. You step closer, off the sidewalk onto the yellowed grass. You squat down and touch the thing.

It is not a robin’s egg. It is a woman’s purse. It seems to be what they call a clutch. Small and very soft leather. Inside is a wallet and tissues. In the wallet is a library card and an insurance card, that is all.

You take the purse to the police station a few blocks away.

“Thank you for bringing it in,” the woman at the front desk says, getting out a form and a ballpoint pen. “Where did you say it was found?”

Back at the apartment, you unlace your new sneakers, turn them over and look again at the soles. They look new, but not perfectly new. There is dirt. Some of the sharp edges have become oh-so-slightly curved. This feels like an accomplishment.

The next day you are waitressing, and again the day after that, but then you’re off, so that morning you put on the sneakers and walk by the port again. You find a purse again! This one is on a different street, under a different bush. Made of green canvas, a lovely shade, the color of moss. It isn’t as nice as the blue leather one from the other day, but also it isn't as easy to see. Inside is a worn-down lipstick, a school photo labeled Jenna, and a wallet with absolutely nothing in it.

You bring the green purse to the police.

“You found another one?” The front desk woman has the ability to raise her eyebrows very high. You know she has to write down where you found it, so this time you wait until she’s got the form out before you say.

In the following days, you take more walks without finding any purses, but then, a week later, you find a third. This one is black and shiny, with a hardshell clasp that snaps together with a click.

You are lucky to have found this one at all. It was in an alley, behind a garbage can, all but invisible. Inside there is a customer appreciation card for the bagel place in town with seven holes punched out of eight. Also a gym membership card with the name Amanda Meyer on it.

You yourself do not use a purse. Never have. Just a thin wallet in your jeans pocket. You prefer to keep important stuff close. Carrying the black purse down the street feels weird.

At home, you set the purse on the windowsill where your cat sometimes sits. He hops up, sniffs the purse, and then purrs and rubs against it, as if he is just that desperate for a friend.

Then, for days afterward, you find no more purses. You are walking every day now. The same ugly, empty streets. And it’s not like you aren’t looking. You are actively looking. Kicking over plastic bags, peering behind dumpsters, wandering parking lots, squatting to peek under shrubs.

As for your cat, he’s lost interest in the purse. You consider keeping it, for that formalwear occasion that might come one day, but no, the thing to do is return the purse to Amanda Meyer.

Google is no help. It can’t find a local Amanda Meyer.

You go to the bagel place, order a bagel, and give the boy the card. “Free bagel,” he says, and drops one in the slicer.  

You eat with the purse on the table. Even as you do you wonder why. What are you expecting, that Amanda Meyer will walk in and recognize her own purse? And understand that it was not you that stole it, but that you are simply carrying it around, hoping to meet up with her? And you’ll hand it over, and she will be grateful, even though all her money is gone, and everything will be happily ever after? 

Yes, that is exactly what you are expecting.

After the bagel, you walk to Amanda's gym. It is a hot day. It is a long walk, made even longer because you have to reroute to avoid The Restaurant, and by the time you arrive you are weary.

“Hi! Welcome!" The guy at the desk is aggressively cheerful. He sees you looking around. "First time?”

You shake your head. You open the empty purse, pluck the gym membership card from where it’s wedged itself in a seam, and wave it at him.

“Don’t you recognize me?” Your voice has a hard tone that it never had before. “I’m here all the time.”

He glances at the card, then tilts his head, as if you are some inscrutable work of art. “Okay. Yes. We have a lot of members.”

You return the card to your purse and walk into the gym. The air conditioner feels right, then too cold. There is the wheeze of machines, the clang of weights. Did you really think you’d see Amanda here?

You have to do something, so you duck into the women’s locker room, strip naked, and shower. You don't have shampoo of course, but the soap dispenser in the shower stall is foamy and smells like plums.

Now you’re clean, and putting your dirty clothes on again feels wrong. There is a stack of white towels with the name of the gym embroidered in script. No one else is in that part of the locker room, so you wander over stark naked and dripping. You stick your face in a towel and inhale bleach. You have always loved the smell of bleach. It reminds you of that all-cleaned-out feeling after crying. You wrap yourself in a bleachy towel and tuck the corner under to secure it.

It is a fact that when a woman is wearing a towel in a locker room, every other woman will avoid looking at her. You don’t have to look at the other women in the locker room to know they’ve pointed their faces away. This provides freedom.

The walls are lined with lockers. You stick your finger under a silvery clasp, try to open it. It's locked. Doesn't matter. You try the whole row. All open and empty, or else locked. Still, no one is looking, so it doesn't matter. You try the next row.

It isn’t until row five that you try a clasp and it pops open. Inside are clothes and a purse!

You rifle through wallet and keys for a second, heart racing. You still, even now, don't know what it is exactly that you want to do.

Then you do know. You put on some other woman’s jeans, her clean but too-big Lycra top. Your own sneakers with their lightly worn soles. The new purse hangs from your arm. You feel hopeful and up.

But then, back on the gym floor, your purse strap slips off your Lycra shoulder, and when you reach down and stand up again panic blares briefly, but nothing happens. The front desk guy is engaged in a telephone conversation. The gym pulses on.

So you walk. First to the stationary bikes. Eyes look at you and then away, as if what’s of interest is forever distant. Same at the elliptical trainers. Stairmasters. Treadmills. The rowers sit knee-high, so no one even notices.

You look out the tall wall of windows, up at the looks-like-rain sky, and wonder if the clouds obscure an ocean view. They do, you feel certain. And that upsets you; it’s stupid, but it does.

Traffic has stopped. You think about those anonymous drivers alone in their cars, together at the intersection, all wanting to be somewhere else. You think of the last time the two of you fucked. Back then you had suspected maybe, but not known for sure. You remember the empty reps. The false way it felt with the love all drained away.

Then the traffic light changes, the drivers move on predictably, and you think, Why couldn’t he have done that, just moved on? Why did he have to go smashing, literally smashing, into that harlot of a hostess, that bitch Beth, then lie about it and expect you would not know?

You turn back to the gym, but in your mind you are in that night, in the underwater light of early dawn. You stoned on sorrow and sleeplessness. Him unable to explain why. “One thing led to another,” he said. As if infidelity was a law of physics. Inevitable and blameless.

How you flew at him then. How he cowered. How he looked back when he walked out the last time. When you had expelled him. 

You smell of plums. Everything, for a moment, feels right. You leave.