Manywhere by Morgan Thomas

Author:Morgan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

In my sixth month, Julie did throw me a surprise office shower with lemon cake from the corner grocery store and reusable bubble letters strung together to spell “Congratulations.” I wore the second, larger bump. My coworkers navigated around the bump to hug and congratulate me. I was happy there, with them. It didn’t feel like pretending. We might have been celebrating anything.

ALTA’S PLACE

In Sharyn Gol, Alta told me, she blamed the cold. And it was cold. On the steppe, herdsmen wrapped the tails of their cattle with wool to keep them from stiffening and snapping in the wind. In her apartment, mare’s milk froze solid in old soda bottles. Cooked rice congealed in the steamer before she could serve it. Her heating had not been turned on.

She rolled shortbread as she spoke. I drank milk tea and listened.

Alta told the landlord in Sharyn Gol that the cold caused her to sleep with the other woman on a single cot. The cold explained the blanket of camel hair, and the cold explained their closeness under the blanket. Cousins, she said. This is what the women had said when they rented the apartment.

The landlord must have suspected them. Why else come for the rent at dawn and on a Saturday? Why else open the door without knocking, with one key from his ring of keys?

When he entered, Alta wrapped the camel blanket around herself and rose from the cot to make tea. The other woman did not rise. The other woman did not offer explanation. She sat on the cot in her undershirt.

The landlord watched the woman in the camel blanket. The landlord accepted the rent money and a cup of tea. When Alta asked about the heating, he said the heaters would come on in two weeks, on the first day of winter, as they did every year. He finished his tea. He left.

The next month, the landlord left a notice on her apartment door. The landlord’s daughter and her new husband required a place to live. There was no longer an apartment available for the two women.

Of this much, at least, Alta managed to convince the adjudicator at the asylum office in Arlington, Virginia. She did not have the notice to show him. She’d been just nineteen then, not yet in the habit of keeping things.

“Now, I keep them,” she said when she told me this story. She gestured to her filing cabinet, where she kept copies of every lease, every credit card statement, every Costco receipt and bus ticket stub.

The landlord gave them time to sort their belongings, to find another place. But he must have spoken about them to the woman who owned apartments in the Hedde District and the manager at the Arig Complex, because when Alta called there were no vacancies. So she slept, again, on the couch in her parents’ three-room apartment, on a pillow stuffed with her baby clothes. Above her bed, her grandmother’s wedding deel was pinned to the wall for luck.

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