She’s never been on a date with someone who can’t smell a thing. That’s definitely new. She’s gone on dates with a memorable few — layers-of-makeup goth types, chunky former rugby players (guy and gal in the same week, actually — but they didn’t know each other, thank goodness), slick corporate lawyers with moral schemes just cold enough to warrant quick, punchy one-night stands.
“But never in my life have I met someone who straight up can’t smell.” It’s early in the night; Imani is nervous and, to help with this, flitting her hands like leaflets of paper in the low light of Maxie’s, an Italian-Mediterranean fusion concept on 5th and Weston that’s great for first dates. (At least that’s what Google says, so much so that the restaurant has begun to advertise it.) “Like, that must be frustrating…?”
“Oh, god,” Zarilyn laughs, tossing the thought away, flick. Imani sees this and thinks yes, wow, we’ve got gestures in common. “I got over it forever ago. There are worse things to live without. Plus, it means my other senses are all primed up.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh, yeah.” Zarilyn wiggles her shoulders back and forth, pretends to shiver. “My sixth sense is especially enhanced.”
“Which I’m sure is very helpful. Especially since I have no idea how well this date is going. But this! — ” Imani points to a waitress passing by in a cloud of steam, the serving tray she holds a radiant of eggplant, arancini, chicken cacciatora. She inhales, tracks the waitress with her nose like a fox, turns back to Zarilyn and winks. “Such a tragedy.”
“You’re an insufferable tease.” Zarilyn winks back, reaching for a slice of bread to dip in oil and pepper. The music piping through the restaurant — Italian R&B (?!), very unexpected — is turned up in some unseen, curtained chamber by a manager.
Imani is prone to instant gratification, and thus to wanting things more urgently than is necessary. Sometimes she is able to make them materialize through sheer force: her brawny build, her lack of restraint.
Example: She swings into the supermarket on her walk home, eager for a bag of grapefruit. After scouring the produce section several times over, she realizes the grapefruit are not only gone from their usual location, but gone altogether.
“What happened to the grapefruit?” she asks, bugging her way between a timid, teenaged clerk and a shelf of leafy greens.
He hesitates. “Um…I think we’re out?”
“You think? I was a produce clerk once, you know.” (This is true.) “If a crazy lady ever had eyes like these” — she points at her eyes, rife with an all-seeing glare — “I usually went to the back to check.”
Again, the clerk hesitates. “Um…”
Two minutes later, Imani emerges from the back room with a crate of grapefruit in hand and a flurry of confused, irate employees in tow. She sets the box down on top of the teenager’s cart, bruising some Vidalia onions, and then skips to the checkout lane.
Example: Two weeks before date night. Imani, who oversees public works projects for the city of Bellwether, accidentally walks into a meeting of school support staff at Bellwether High. She is there to talk to the principal about a water main replacement that will definitely disrupt school. Because she is Imani, neither the closed door to Principal Andrews’ office nor the roundtable gathering happening inside — at which a struggling kid is hiding in their sweatshirt and sending swear words to the moon, mind you — are enough to tell Imani to stop and wait. Instead she barges right in, makes the associate principal jump with fright, and spends about thirty seconds taking stock of the situation. Even the kid halts their tirade to peek up and out at the square-boned force of nature that has silenced the space.
“Ope. Sorry,” Imani says, blushing. “Mr. Andrews, I’ll just wait out here.”
She isn’t looking at Principal Andrews, though, as she exits. Instead, her eyes lock on the woman to his left — a long, wiry social worker with eyes hooded by eyeshadow and skin like Kalamata olives, visible where her wide shoulders bare out from the neckline of her blouse. “Wow,” Imani mutters more audibly than she knows as she closes the door behind her.
“See?” Zarilyn says to the kid, nodding toward the door. “It’s not just students that have trouble communicating respectfully, sometimes.”
Fifteen minutes later, when the meeting has dissolved and Principal Andrews has been informed that the water main fix will block off the parent pick up lane, Zarilyn is stopped before she’s even made it past the wall of mailboxes outside the door to the office.
“Hey, Miss — Miss — ” Imani stammers but keeps her frame open, her eyes pinned to a birth mark just below this woman’s left ear. Bold as ever, she steps close enough to catch the afterthought of Zarilyn’s cologne.
“I’ll help you. Zarilyn.” (beat) “Marks-.” (beat) “Belloit.” (beat) “But for the love of god, just call me Zarilyn.”
“Zarilyn.” Imani allows herself a slight grin. “You, uh, get things figured out with that kid?”
Zarilyn smacks her lips, shrugs. “For now. It’s always an ongoing process.”
“Sure, sure.” And here at last Imani takes on a produce clerk timidity, taps the carpet with the steel toe of her boot. “Pretty big job.”
A few empty seconds pass. Principal Andrews scoots between the two, nodding at them awkwardly.
“Tuesday night?” Zarilyn raises an eyebrow.
“Sunday, actually. I’d rather not wait.”
Zarilyn tilts her head and scans Imani over — her bright eyes, her wide frame, her forceful air. “You won’t take no for an answer, will you?”
“No — I mean, no. No.”
“Fine then. Maxie’s?”
“Maxie’s?”
“Maxie’s. I heard that’s a good spot for a date. That’s what Google says, anyway.”
“Okay, then. Maxie’s.” And off they go.
The water main replacement, which is urgent enough that it begins the next day, ends up being a real issue; the driver of the backhoe, unnamed in the email sent to Principal Andrews, “lost focus” and nicked something they shouldn’t have. The city, it adds, “will fix the issue and move on with the project as soon as possible.”
“Goodness,” Principal Andrews mutters, shaking his head as he leans on the reception desk.
“Goodness,” Zarilyn agrees, leaned on the desk across from him, burying her face in her collarbone to hide a knowing smirk.
The night at Maxie’s goes well enough to warrant a second date, and then a third. Imani and Zarilyn split their time between cocktail bars (Imani’s pick, she appreciates a proper Manhattan) and dive bars (Zarilyn’s pick, it all tastes the same to her anyway). They trade stories about childhood mishaps, bad luck at airports, Pistol Annie coworkers they’ve nearly clocked, meandering love affairs. Turns out they’ve both been on dates with both chunky rugby players — a small city layering of circles that makes them uncomfortable for a moment before they move on and change the subject.
A couple months in and they start leaving small things at each other’s apartments. A toothbrush beside the sink. A pair of printed Halloween socks underneath the bed — “or at least I think that’s where they ended up,” Zarilyn says over the phone, trying not to laugh.
What exactly Imani and Zarilyn are, in relationship terms, has not yet been broached; for all the ways they are different, they share a remarkable ability to avoid anything with a sharp edge.
Example: They both use butter knives to cut their steak.
Example: They are lying in bed one night, maybe three months in. Zarilyn is insisting that not staying the night “doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, or that I don’t like you, ya’ goose.
“I just feel a certain way in my own bed, and sometimes I need to have that to myself.”
“Really?” Imani stares at the ceiling, calmed by the run of Zarilyn’s fingers through her thin, wavy hair. “I suppose I’ve never been like that. I’ve always liked the thought of having a sleeping bag. Not that you’re a bag — you’re quite slim, eh — that’s not what I…”
“Shh,” Zarilyn assures her, flicking her on the nose. “I know what you meant.”
Imani goes for the wistful moment. “Have I told you about my father? He raised me, you know. Alone for the most part.”
“Alone?”
“Mom died when I was…two? Three? Some rare blood disease. I don’t have the disease, luckily. But anyway, that’s not the point. Point is my dad never slept well after that. Maybe that’s where it comes from — you know, my desire to have somebody here.” She puts her nose to Imani’s shoulder and draws a long breath. “Like, literally have some body here.”
Zarilyn raises her eyebrows and feigns a gasp. “Ah! Did you just use wordplay with me? You nerd!”
“Yeah, I did. Also — ” Imani wrinkles her nose and darts out of her own emotional pigeon hole. “You smell that? I’ll tell you what it is, since you obviously can’t smell. It’s you. You smell like shit!”
The ensuing pillow fight makes a snowy, feathery mess before it ends, anyway, in Imani’s dreaded anticlimax: she, alone in her bed. Zarilyn, alone in her bed far away.
Example: Zarilyn’s birthday rolls around andImani makes up a little gift bag for her. She doesn’t know so much about Zarilyn’s taste for gifts; she resolves to fill it with some mixed nuts, M&Ms, a bottle of decent wine she quietly hopes they’ll share. When she brings it with her to Zarilyn’s that night (unannounced, wanting to add an element of surprise) she can’t help beaming with a youthful pride as she knocks on her door. There’s a stretch of silence, then the sound of footsteps approaching from inside.
“Hey you. Happy birthday!” She holds the bag out and hopes for validation.
Zarilyn sighs, checks the dark hallway over her shoulder, smiles weakly. “You shouldn’t have.”
Not exactly what Imani was expecting. “No, I suppose not.”
It was a long day at school — another whirl of troubles and heartbreak, poverty and tirades. Zarilyn had thought an evening of nothing sounded nice. That’s her explanation for a lack of enthusiasm, anyway.
“But — well, come on in.” She caves to the circumstances and to Imani’s eyes, which look distraught. “I could use a drink.”
They spend a few hours together, drink the wine, barely smooch, and wave bye at the door.
She’s looking for other work, Imani writes that night in the leather-bound journal she uses to talk to herself, to understand things that go wrong. She keeps it in a kitchen drawer at home, tucked at the back between the wooden spoons and the tongs. Doesn’t think she’ll stay here, anyway. Maybe she’s avoiding roots?? What do I do about that??
She’s lit a sandalwood candle. Its scent twists into the shape of a question mark and wraps around her, taunts her, knocks the pen from her hands and puts her to sleep at the dining room table. From there it drifts out a drafty window by the stove. It drifts to the end of the block, turns left at Ravenwood Ave., and rides the night ten minutes north, tickling a cab driver’s nostrils so that he sneezes and nearly swerves off the road. (A father and his child in the backseat very quickly attribute the event to God.) The candle scent slows, turns right into a dimly lit apartment complex scattered with walnut trees and potted mums, works its way down a sidewalk to a garden-level entrance, slips through the screen on the storm door, goes inside, drifts down a dark hallway and wraps itself around Zarilyn, who can’t smell the sandalwood but feels the faint brush of trouble along her collarbone.
She’s wonderful, really, she writes in a spiral-bound journal she keeps between the pairs of boots in her bedroom closet. But I can’t help the feeling there’s something missing. I am missing something. She’s also quick to cling. Not the worst thing. But I’m right to want quiet. Right? Is that so selfish?
After a considerable pause — a considerable amount of staring into the void — she pens the dagger and lets her cursive tell the truth:
Quit dodging your shit. What if Martin finds out…?
It’s a bitten November morning — ice on the wind, ashy sky, twigs splintered in the road — when Martin finds out.
Going 2 the hospital, the text from Zarilyn reads. In comes another: Not me, for family.
O god. Imani is grabbing her coat and slipping on clogs as she types back. Who? I’ll come sit with you.
No… u don’t need to.
Want to.
That’s as close as they come to the truth ahead of time. Imani is driving like mad, weaving ribbons, yelling “EF YOU!” to the losers who still buy rear-wheel drive and the flurry patches on the road that will soon ice over as the wind courses across them. She careens into an open spot at the hospital; a pair of passersby, on a walk while their daughter is in surgery, figure there’s a birth underway but see they’re wrong when a square, stolid woman bursts from the driver’s side door and sprints to the hospital entrance.
The man at the information desk is haggard, with sunken cheeks and wisps of white hair tossing about in the air from the vent above him. When he sees Imani roil through the door, he sighs and presses his fingers into the sides of his thighs.
“Did a Zarilyn come through here? Marks-Bellacose, or something like that — ”
“Marx what? The communist?”
“No, you idiot!” The man is startled by the tenor of her voice. “I need to know what room she went to.”
“Marks-Belloit? Yeah, came in a while ago…”
“Yes, her. Wherever she is.”
“She went to see someone in 403.” He finds a pen and begins writing the room number on a sticky note, but by the time he holds it out over the desk the woman has already gone toward the elevators. The man is shaking his head, dismayed, when he overhears an aftershock.
“What are you looking at?” Imani interrogates the arrived elevator’s pile of guests, who take vague offense but say nothing as the doors close, lights blink, levels ding one, two, three. The car speeds up, then slows and settles. There is no question who gets off first.
In a familiar scene, Imani goes charging into room 403; it’s as if a water main replacement is going to disrupt the hospital’s services, and the nurses staffing this very room must know because it is their patient’s bathroom that will be rendered useless.
In the first moments after the door has been thrust open, setting forth a breeze, Zarilyn is charmed all over again by the force of this boundless woman: Imani Leiman, Queen of Recovery. A woman who sees no barriers to what she wants. By the time her breeze sweeps through the room, though, the moment has passed. The curtains settle; silence looms. Imani breaks it with a statement at once tactless, yet more profound, than she could ever know.
“It smells like something’s dying in here.”
In the room there is Imani, still clutching the door handle. There is Zarilyn, alive and well in a baggy t-shirt and gym shorts. Her face, Imani sees, is strained; a feather-bone vein is bulging in her forehead. Imani’s eyes find this vein and follow it around the side of Zarilyn’s head, behind her ear past that adorable birthmark, down her neck, along the shoulder and down a muscular arm all the way to the wrist, where it wraps around her palm and then her forefinger, where it leaps to the forefinger of another human hooked onto Zarilyn.
Another human.
The feather-bone vein spirals around this other human’s finger, then their pale palm, then straightens at their wrist and travails up a bloodied, road-rashed forearm, all the way up to a bandaged shoulder where it disappears for a length before emerging at the nave of their neck, then running over a shaved, stapled scalp before appearing on their forehead and heading toward the bridge of a long, beautiful, unscathed nose. It ends there. When Imani finds the set of eyes flanking that nose — a man’s eyes, eyes she has not seen before — the full force of the unknown becomes known. She’s just solved a mystery she wasn’t trying to solve.
And now, in the middle of this hospital room with flashbang walls, where there is a woman Imani really, really likes and someone else in the bed, disbelief is ringing in her ears. Not yet. Nope, not yet. That’s not the case, this isn’t the case, it can’t be the case. Where’s the proof? Where’s the proof?
“Hi. I’m…hey.” She can fix this. “Are you — ”
“Babe,” the injured man grunts, turning his neck as far as he can to face Zarilyn, who‘s grown stiff with terror at the bedside. “Who’s this?”
“Martin, this is Imani.”
“Your friend you told me about?”
Zarilyn looks at Imani. Looks away. Tries to bury her face in her birthmark, hoping it’ll grow into a void she can dive into, just dive into and away from the mess she’s made because it’s here, look, it’s here, it’s here. “Yes, a friend,” she manages, and then that’s it. She breaks. Her guilty, vicious cry crashes into the sterile hospital air. She rises, lets go of her husband’s hand and there she goes: running, running down the hall, a hazard to the whole facility.
Imani steps out and watches the object of her heart run like it’s the end times. She’s never seen her be so athletic; she’s reminded of her initial attraction to the fit, bare-shouldered social worker in the principal’s office. When Zarilyn’s disappeared from sight, Imani steps back into the room and locks eyes, again, with the man in the hospital bed.
“Ope, sorry,” she says with a smile, swearing she can make this work to her advantage. “So you’re her — brother? You can’t be her son, not at that age.”
The man looks as indifferent as he can, all slung up and patch-worked the way he is. For a minute there is only the beeping of the machine monitoring his vitals. When he finally speaks, the indifference gives way to a faint, helpless smile.
“It appears I’ll be in two accidents today,” he says. “I got the car out of the way, check. But you — sorry, not you alone — you and Zari are number two. And you’ve hit me more like a train.
“Imani, right? That’s your name?”
“You bet.”
“Imani, I’m Martin.” He sighs, his eyes heavy as his casts. “I’m Zarilyn’s boyfriend.”
Imani is prone to overlook things for the sake of gratification.
Example: As a child, she’d always beg her father to start harvesting their vegetable garden too early. Knowing it was too early, he’d refuse. Go ahead, pick a tomato, he’d say with a mocking, magical stroke of his hand through the air. See if it tastes any good.
Every year, she’d pick a tomato just beginning to go on red, with hints of yellow or green still visible in spots. She’d bring it inside, heave out her father’s massive walnut cutting board, pull a knife from the drawer and go slicing in only to find her father was right. She always regretted the bland taste of unripe tomato on her tongue.
He’d come into the kitchen, kneel down, wrap Imani’s shoulders in his lanky arm to pull her into his embrace. I know I taught you to never say ‘I told you so,’ but… He’d warm up his tone as gently moved the knife to the sink. I kinda’ told you so.
Example: All the nights Zarilyn didn’t want to stay over at Imani’s, or made sure Imani had a reason to leave her place.
Example: The two-bedroom apartment for an alleged one-woman show — and what’s more, Zarilyn is kind of a minimalist.
Example: Zarilyn’s reticence the night Imani dropped off the birthday bag. The look over the shoulder.
Example: The excess amount of leftovers Imani always saw sauced in Pyrex dishes in Zarilyn’s fridge.
Example: The weave of Martin’s fingers with Zarilyn’s at the edge of the hospital gurney.
When Imani and Zarilyn go for coffee just after the New Year, a few wintry weeks have covered the shards of their relationship with snow. Imani hears everything Zarilyn is saying: that she is sorry, that she wanted to talk about it so many times but didn’t think Imani would take it well, that she is struggling to define what she wants for affection, that she’s wondered about polyamory but was afraid to bring it up with anyone and hates little buckets with labels anyway, that Martin is genuinely good and she doesn’t understand why that’s not enough for her, that she’s so sorry, that she will buy the coffee and scones and knows that’s bullshit for compensation but let her do it anyway.
Imani hears all these things and she isn’t mad; actually, she empathizes with some of it. Imani hears loudest of all the part about “struggling to define what she wants.” She’s never been able to define it, so she goes barreling into rooms unannounced and makes up little gift bags and starts pillow fights and lights candles — such wonderful candles, with woodsy and sweet, baked goods scents to make her feel better, to cover up the sunburnt smell of the desert her romantic life has a tendency to be.
She wanders to the back her mind for a moment, where the reels of her youth flicker and fade. Her father had a tendency to overgeneralize or put euphemisms where he shouldn’t have, sure. But when it came to his daughter’s future as a romantic he was right all along. Kid, you’re a lover like your mother was, he’d always said as they picked tomatoes and zucchini. Little Imani had recovered, by then, from the heartbreak of the unripe tomato; he’d made her wait, and wait, until the harvest was truly ready. Your mom always wanted it all, and right away. Gave her everything I could, kid. Married her quick like she hoped. But you know…well, damn it kiddo — and he’d always stop picking for a moment when he said this — she was always a little naïve. Imani never cared to explore what he meant by that.
So while Zarilyn goes on explaining herself the way she needs to, Imani is, at the same time, coming to the same conclusion she always does in her head: that she is the way she is, that she cannot change it, and perhaps that’s not a good or bad thing but is just that: a thing. Reality. Whatever you want to call it. Maybe something she got from her mother. She is tidying up these thoughts when the space between her and Zarilyn stills and grows silent. It must be her turn to speak.
“Well? What do you think?” Zarilyn is red in the face and chest, trying to recover her anxious breath. Her olive shoulders still catch Imani’s eyes the way they emerge from her blouse — the same one she had on in Principal Andrews’ office at the start of their season together. Imani cannot help that she still likes this woman across from her a lot. She looks past Zarilyn and focuses on a lamppost outside the café window, then speaks without a hint of malice.
“Are you doing alright? Overall?”
Zarilyn looks concerned. She scans Imani’s face; the ask is honest. Okay, then. “Yeah, overall. Martin and I are still working it out, but…I’m good. I’m good.”
“Okay. So am I.”
“Really? Imani, you don’t have to — ”
Imani rises from the table, collects the little plates littered with scone crumbs, hooks their empty mugs in the crooks of her fingers. “I’m not pretending or anything. Really, Zarilyn. It helps to know you’re all good.” She smiles. “Also, you’re missing out. Those scones smelled great after they warmed them up.”
Zarilyn, with a roll of her eyes, follows Imani over to the bussing station. Imani sorts everything into its place before turning to Zarilyn and tapping the nub of her boot on the carpet. “Hey, uh. Take care, alright? I do have one request, though.”
“Sure, of course.” Zarilyn swallows, looks down and away. “What’s up?”
Imani waits to answer — closes her eyes, musters up a kind of courage that’s new to her. “Can I have Maxie’s to myself? Just for a little while.”
Zarilyn laughs. It’s the humility of it — the whole venture, suddenly so lightweight. She can imagine another Imani, a doppelgänger, barging into the shop and making something incredible of this mild, romantic wasteland. “Of course. I’ll stay away. That seems fair.”
“Not forever,” Imani says. “You don’t have to stay away forever. I just want it for a little while.”
Zarilyn shrugs. Something shy in Imani’s tone. “Can I ask why?”
“That was just a really good night is all.” Imani turns and begins leaving, the brawn of her filling up the doorway’s narrow frame. She put on perfume today; the scent of it lingers in the entryway and wraps itself around Zarilyn, who can’t smell it but feels something brush the birthmark below her ear.
“A really good night,” Imani says again as she steps into the parking lot. “Regardless of the rest of it.”
