Skin Slip

Welcome back to 52 Stories! This week I’m sharing a story from the dead of winter, originally published in Narrative Magazine.

Our ending was boring and predictable: he had another girl, another city—far away from the matchbox apartment where we burned up days fighting about where I hid his drugs and who he was with last night. “At least I have friends,” he said in the kitchen before he left, “unlike you.”

I put the kettle on. “That’s not true.” But it wasn’t not true. I hadn’t made friends in Toronto because I hadn’t planned on staying. I was a college dropout trying to save enough to travel to Fez, Cappadocia, the Forest of Knives. Places I knew about only because I ripped pictures of them from library copies of National Geographic. I didn’t care where I went. I just had to believe I’d fit in better somewhere else.

I’d gotten a job at a bar, which is where I met the boyfriend, a line cook with a Janis Joplin tattoo. In the beginning he made scrambled eggs at midnight and gave me his jacket. Sometimes he bought me these waffles wrapped in foil. They were dark chocolate on one side with fat sugar crystals on the other. He knew I liked sweet things. Even if they made me feel terrible later.

“Who?” he said that last day. The kettle screamed. “Who are your friends?” I didn’t have an answer. But after we broke up, there was Curly.

Curly is a much more stable roommate. She doesn’t hide drugs or steal money or pass out on the bathroom floor. She doesn’t even use the bathroom because she’s a little white terrier who shits outside. Once in the morning, once at night. Afternoons are for peeing and a loop around the park. If not for the breakup, I wouldn’t have gotten Curly. I wouldn’t have gone to that park. And then, I would never have met them.

Their names were Howie and Nadine. They were loud. They were American.

“From Georgia,” Howie said without a Southern accent.

“But we moved here from New York City.” Nadine rocked in her hiking boots.

They didn’t look like city people. Howie had wild eyebrows and sandy Fitzcarraldo hair. Nadine wore a long silvery braid and a hunter’s hat. His coat had elbow patches, the coffee-stain color of last leaves that refused to fall. Her cheeks were Russian-doll red, maybe from the nip in the air. They had a dog too.

“CHAMP!” Howie shouted. A boxer trampled across the park.

“Champ looks scary.” Howie pried a stick from the dog’s teeth. “But he’s a lover.” It was the most anyone had said to me in days. When I wasn’t working at the bar, I was alone in my apartment, where even the neighbors were strangers. The masseuse downstairs. The crying guy across the hall. The girl with a moon face and high cheekbones. “You mean the hot girl?” my boyfriend used to say when he was still my boyfriend. Then he’d smile and watch me tick.

The only people I really talked to were dog people. I knew Max’s owner and Tilly’s person. Once I flirted with Elmo’s guy, touching my hair and giggling. I even let him keep one of Curly’s tennis balls. But the next time I saw him, he only spoke in “we.” I’d encountered these people before: We loved that movie. We’re not drinking this month. We are better than you. We meant someone made sure you ate dinner. Someone zipped up your dress and drove you home from surgery. Someone was making plans for you even if you couldn’t get out of bed. My last relationship wasn’t a We. There were two of us, but I’d never been more alone.

“And what about you,” Howie said after a few minutes of talking, “what’s your name?”

“Becca.”

Howie held up a mitten to shake. “Your hand!” he said. Mine was red and chapped.

“I lost my gloves.” Even they couldn’t stay a We for long.

“Here.” Howie dug into his pocket and pulled out a pair of mittens. They were school-bus yellow with Charlie Brown zigzags.

“Oh, I’m okay.” I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t afford gloves. I could buy my own pair but chose not to, hoping that by the dead of winter I’d be living somewhere else.

“Please,” Nadine chimed in. She’d been knitting mittens all fall.

“She’s a machine!” Howie said. They had pairs all over the house. “You’ll be doing us a favor.” He laughed big. “Believe me.” I slipped on the mittens.

“Thanks,” I said, and Howie shrugged like it was nothing.

“We like taking care of people.” He and Nadine had moved to Toronto a few months earlier. She was an herbalist and hobby photographer. He was an anthropologist. They lived in a bright little studio not far from the park. “Just off Kingston.” Nadine nodded in that direction. With her hands, she was undoing her one silvery braid and making it into two. She was that age—fifties, sixties—when women in braids look sage and mystic. But there was something girlish about her bright eyes and toothy smile that made her look younger than Howie, whose voice was gravelly and brash.

“That’s my boy,” Howie said when Champ dropped the stick. Howie’s girls were two adult daughters, twenty-eight and thirty, just a few years older than me. The girls had gone to Ivy League schools on full scholarships. They played the harp and built computers. “My youngest had her brain studied at MIT,” Howie said. The oldest had learned Spanish in a month. “She’s a whiz kid.” Listening to him, I hated these women. Not for who they were but for being the kind of people I would never be.

“They’re amazing.” Nadine gushed in a way that made me know they weren’t her kids. Howie had been married before. He and his first wife were both professors. For years, they’d lived all over the world: São Paulo, Moscow, Madrid, Kyoto.

“Me and my wife,” he said, still talking about his first wife, “we always lived on the east side of a town. That’s the way the good air blows.” Howie and his first wife had been into Chinese medicine and natural healing before it was trendy.

“But then the wife got stomach cancer,” Howie said. “And then there was no wife.” It was only a few years ago that he’d met Nadine, who, while Howie and I were talking, had drifted a few yards away with the dogs. Maybe she really liked playing with them, or maybe she didn’t want to hear Howie talk about his old life.

He’d raised those two girls on his own, and it wasn’t easy. “I wish I’d had a community,” Howie said. “People need people.” Then his eyes locked on mine like he could see right through me.

“You ready?” Nadine called out from across the park. She walked back over to where Howie and I were standing. They were going to the dog lake. Had I been there before? “It’s just inside the forest.” There was a big lake and space for Curly and Champ to run freely. I was tired and not used to talking to strangers for so long, but I couldn’t say no. They’d been so kind, sharing their mittens and stories. “Oh, you have to come!” Nadine said, like it would mean a lot if I said yes.

So the three of us walked together across the park, past the old church that isn’t a church anymore because people don’t really do that here. I think it’s a homeless shelter or maybe a meeting place for alcoholics and love addicts. People who also want to get saved.

I used to go. To church, not support groups. After my parents divorced, I’d go alone. I was ten, eleven. I didn’t pray for them to get back together. I was just following their example. My mom moved in with her boyfriend. My dad got a condo with a pool. I wanted a new home too.

“I hope you’re not turning into a Christer,” my mom said. “Those people are freaks.”

I joined the choir. And the youth group that didn’t have much to do with God but was still fun. We played freeze tag and dodgeball and went for sundaes after church on Sunday. At Christmas we made paper-chain girls. My girls always fell apart, and one of the youth group leaders, a redhead named Jewel, had to cut the paper for me so my girls held hands. The other group leader, a sunshine-haired soccer player named Conor, drove the white van on Sundae Sundays. We all rooted for Conor and Jewel to date and tracked their every hand brush, secret smile, tease.

One Sundae Sunday, after Conor dropped everyone off, even Jewel, he said I could sit up front. “If you want.” I climbed from the back and fastened my seatbelt, paralyzed with the fear and thrill of sitting next to the cute guy. At the stoplight, Conor reached toward me. The brown hairs on his knuckles scratched my neck. A man’s hand was an unfamiliar creature. It crawled from my neck to my chest, fumbling at the heart-shape buttons on my sweater and slipping into my training bra. “Mmm,” he said. The light turned green, and the van lurched. He didn’t say anything else until we pulled up outside my house and both his hands were back on the steering wheel.

“So see you next week,” he said through the rolled-down window. “God bless!”

I didn’t go back to church or youth group after that. “Guess you realized that was a waste of time,” my mom said at the kitchen table one night. She loaded her boyfriend’s plate with potato salad. I moved my food around to make it look like I’d eaten. I couldn’t tell the truth.

“Organized religion is a sin,” her boyfriend said between bites. They both laughed.

It had been a long time since I sat in a church. I never really wanted to go back, but sometimes I missed belonging somewhere and believing that life was more than a series of accidents.

When we stepped into the woods, Howie and the dogs walked ahead. His mustard backpack, which I hadn’t noticed back at the park, was a flash under the fir trees and padded marshmallow sky. Nadine looped her arm through mine. Her touch was warm and close. “How long have you lived here, darling?” Darling. I liked being called darling.

“A few months,” I lied. Sometimes I lied and didn’t know why. Sometimes I did know. I lied then because I was ashamed that I’d lived in Toronto for a year with nothing to show. No travel money saved up. No friends. No boyfriend. What a waste of time.

“You live by yourself?” Nadine asked.

I told the truth. “My boyfriend and I just broke up.” It had been three months since he moved out of the apartment with peeling paint and pipes that clanked and hammered in the night.

“Do you hear that?” I used to whisper.

“You’re imagining things,” he’d say. “Go back to sleep.” Then he’d cover his head with a pillow and turn away.

“I’m sorry, darling.” Nadine stretched out her arms like a paper doll in a chain, and suddenly I saw all of her: the hippie, the girlygirl, the tomboy, the teenager, the stepmother, the wife, the lover, the friend. She wrapped me in a hug. “I know heartbreak,” Nadine said as I stepped back. Before she met Howie she was a mess back in New York, newly divorced and not so newly depressed. Her family couldn’t understand. “They called me the crazy aunt.” A crow cawed. Nadine rested a hand on her hip and tilted her head toward the sky. Her skin was thin and papery, like the sun might burn through her.

“How did you and Howie meet?”

“Online,” Nadine said. She looked back at me, and the girlygirl lit up inside her. The one who crossed her legs. And tried on makeup at the mall. And couldn’t stop thinking about him at work. Which was true. She’d been a secretary for a lawyer in the city. “I was miserable, darling.” She tried very hard to get her head on straight but couldn’t. “I just needed someone to talk to.” She looped her arm around mine again, and we kept walking.

Before they ever met in person, Nadine poured her heart out to Howie in emails. She told him about her divorce. Her troubles with her family. Her boss who went into rages and regularly threatened to fire everyone. Howie used to email her Dilbert comics, only he’d edit them and give Dilbert eyelashes and braids to play the role of Nadine. “Once he made Dilbert wear a dress!” Nadine snorted like it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. I imagined Howie clacking away at his keyboard, using a crappy clipart program to edit the comics that would make Nadine pig-laugh in her cubicle.

“The craziest thing,” Nadine said, “is that I didn’t even realize I was falling for him.”

She waved to Howie, who was waiting for us at a bend in the trail. “I’m telling her our love story,” Nadine called out.

“What?” Howie said. We caught up to him and Nadine repeated herself.

“Did she tell you she was out of her mind back then?” Howie said. “I had to talk her down.” There was a bite in his voice that hadn’t been there in the park. “Think with your head, Nadine, I kept saying!” Howie laughed big again. “But women aren’t always rational.” I looked sideways at Nadine to see her reaction. She wasn’t laughing, but she didn’t say what I was thinking—that Howie sounded like kind of a jerk. I wanted to tell her I knew her kind of loneliness. I knew what it was like to feel misunderstood. But Howie kept talking about how he’d pulled Nadine to her senses. If not for him, Nadine might have never amounted to more than an office drone.

“And Nadine’s good at lots of things.” A wily smile crossed Howie’s face as he nuzzled her cheek. Nadine giggled forgiveness, which made me cringe, but maybe this was just how they were. Maybe this was what happened when two people had been a We for so long.

“Enough about us,” Nadine said as we fell back in step. “It’s so nice to meet a young person like you, Becca.” It had been a lonely season for them, being new to the city.

“At least you have each other,” I said.

“Yes.” Nadine patted my arm. “But we miss our friends.” Their friends were people Howie knew from his travels and some Nadine had met at herbalist retreats. “Open-minded types” who lived close to the land.

“We’re building our own place,” Howie said. It was a house for all their friends. Eco-living, totally off the grid. “In case something happens.”

“Like what?”

Howie and Nadine got quiet, like they hadn’t heard me. For a few minutes, we walked single file down the winding overgrown path. Branches snapped beneath our feet.

“Come on,” Nadine finally said, “tell her.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Howie walked faster.

“Darling, she’s interested.”

“But is she open-minded?” He cocked his head over his shoulder.

“What is it?” I asked, really wanting to know now.

Howie slowed down. Then he turned around and rested his arm on a tree. He squinted at me until he found something that made him smile. “Well,” he said, “are you open-minded?”

There was only one right answer, so I nodded, and before I could say more, Howie started in about the house off the grid. It was the only way to prepare for the impending disaster. A disaster that had happened before. “Just look at the signs.” Howie wagged a finger at me. “Let me ask you something.” He wanted to know how I could explain the pyramids at the bottom of the ocean. “Those aren’t manmade!” Or how every creation myth has a man flying from the sky. “Always a white man.” His eyebrows wiggled. “And what about those sand monkeys in Peru?”

I’d hoped that Howie and Nadine were just environmentalists. Or at worst, dedicated preppers. But Howie’s questions, which weren’t really questions, spiraled into a lecture about government drones and milk-bottled plasma, “coincidence theories” and the inevitable fall.

“It all comes down to something I call the Skin Slip,” Howie said. It was a theory he’d cooked up in his professor days. Every few millennia, Howie said, the earth lost its outer shell. To a meteor. Or nuclear war. Or a pandemic. Lakes dried up. Trees shriveled. Nearly all the creatures became fossils. “And the earth’s very skin,” he said, waving a hand in the air, “just slips away.”

Nadine squealed and grabbed my arm. “Doesn’t it sound scary?”

“It’s not scary.” Howie bristled. “It’s science.”

Besides, Howie said, there was no need to worry. He and Nadine would survive the next Skin Slip. They were building a house of glass in the desert. The location was out west, miles away from running water or the nearest cellphone tower. “Somewhere we can’t be tracked,” Howie said, “because as you can imagine, the government is behind the next Skin Slip.”

He stopped on the trail to look back at me, like he was making sure I was still open-minded. I stumbled into him. “Wouldn’t a glass house be kind of hot in the desert?” I regained my footing. What I really wanted to ask is when we would stop.

There might be other people at the dog lake. Or some kind of map or parking lot. I could break away from Howie and Nadine. But Howie kept talking about the lattice of grapes to sunproof the glass—which would resist 5G—“and the wives,” he said, who would tend the vines. Branches. Fir trees. How long had we been walking? And where? The sun hung low, burning the last of the day, and it was getting harder to see the path.

We kept going, with me wedged between Howie and Nadine. “Is there a train nearby the dog lake?” I asked. But they didn’t know anything about trains. “The government installs lasers in them,” Howie said. Then he looked over his shoulder. “Didn’t you know that, Becky?”

No one had called me Becky since I was a child, and it stopped me and hooked me all at once. Nadine stepped on my heel. Her boot dug into my ankle.

“Hurry, darling.” She gave me a push. “We’re almost there.” She told me there was no use looking for a train or turning back now. “Besides,” she added, “you might get lost.”

I didn’t want to keep getting lost. I was lost before we got into the woods. Before I met Howie and Nadine. Before the breakup. Before the relationship. Before Toronto. Before college. Before the youth group. And before the divorce. But this time felt different. This time, there was no one else I could blame. No one made me follow Howie and Nadine. I’d walked into the woods with them on my own.

Ahead, Howie rattled a chain-link fence.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to go in here,” I said, reading the sign. “You can get fined.” There was an edge in my voice, but Howie and Nadine didn’t answer. They found a gap in the fence and yanked it. Then weaseled through after the dogs.

“Come on.” Nadine hooked a mitten into the fence. Her cheeks were bright and full. “Curly’s already gone up the trail.” I didn’t want to lose her, did I?

This is why people say you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Because something might happen. After you slip through the fence that snags your jacket. After you totter behind them. After you enter a clearing beside a frozen gray lake. Howie might pull something from his yellow backpack. Matches. A Swiss army knife. Nadine might gather sticks and bark for kindling. They might sit you down on a log with your boots to the fire. They might make your lap heavy with blankets and scarves. They might hand you a warm thermos and tell you to drink it.

“It’s coffee,” Howie said, “with some cacao nibs.”

“They’re vegan.” Nadine tossed a braid and settled onto her own log.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a little bad about my edginess by the fence. But not bad enough to drink whatever was in the thermos.

Howie stoked the flames.

“I didn’t know you were allowed to build fires here.”

Howie didn’t answer. He sipped from his thermos and passed it to Nadine. We sat around the fire with the dogs at our feet. As the heat built, Howie turned back to the Skin Slip.

He told me not to get it confused with global warming, which was “all a big media sham.” The government, of course, didn’t want everyone to know about the next Skin Slip. “Most people aren’t going to make it.” But Howie and Nadine were confident they’d be among the survivors.

“We’re building a circle of friends,” Nadine said.

“Fifty men and fifty women,” Howie cut in. “All open-minded people.” The community would live together, grow their own food, and care for each other’s children.

“And have joyful, abundant sex.” Howie’s eyes locked on me. I looked down to break his gaze. Curly was at my feet, running in a dream.

“Where’s Champ?” I was desperate to change the subject. The fire had grown taller, and smoke got caught in my throat.

“Over there.” Nadine pointed at the brush near the frozen lake. “He’s hunting.”

Howie drummed a beat on his knees. “How does everyone feel about a spontaneous dip?”

He stood up from his log. “You like ice swimming, Becky?”

I forced a smile. “I didn’t bring a bathing suit.” A ridiculous answer to match Howie’s question.

“So,” he said, like he didn’t know what a bathing suit had to do with anything. The heat from the fire prickled my cheeks. I shoved a few of the blankets and scarves off my lap but kept my arms crossed.

Nadine slipped off her coat and sweater. She unzipped her jeans. I looked away. “I’m not shy, darling,” Nadine said. “Neither is he.” Howie took off his T-shirts—many T-shirts—until he stripped down, exposing a hairy pale belly covered in dime-size moles.

“You want to join?” Howie asked again.

“It’s a little cold for me.” I crossed my arms and looked at the lake. The key was to not offend. To blame the weather. To be tired and boring. Eventually, Howie and Nadine would stop trying.

With a limp smile, Howie loosened his belt. “It’s incredible for your health,” he said. “My wife and I did it every day.” I didn’t ask if he meant his dead wife or his live wife.

“Really.” I stood up, and the last of the blankets and scarves fell to the ground. “I’m good.”

“You’re good?” Howie squinted. “I thought you were open-minded.” Suddenly there was the click and flash of Nadine’s camera. I winced and stumbled back against the log.

“Oopsie!” Nadine said. She didn’t mean to spook me. She was standing on her log, naked except for her boots and a camera strap around her neck. “I just wanted to capture you in that light.”

I stared at her because it was better than looking at Howie. She was rolls and hair and dimples. She pointed her camera at me again and it flashed. Howie came to her side.

“She looks good here.” He jabbed a finger at the screen. Their bodies sagged and hunched over the camera between them. Even with the fire going it was cold, but they didn’t seem to care.

“Oh, Becky.” Nadine rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so uptight.” There was a bark in her voice now. She wasn’t in charge exactly but directing things. She shoved the camera in Howie’s hands and pulled me by the arm. This time, there was nothing warm or soft in her touch. “Look at yourself.” She pushed me between her and Howie and pointed at the camera screen. There were pictures of me in the park. Pictures I hadn’t seen Nadine taking, but here they were: Howie handing me the mittens, us shaking hands. In one I was with Curly by the fountain, where I was before I ever met Nadine and Howie. Before they brought me into the woods. Before we got to the frozen lake. Before I was stuck between them. Before I heard the dogs barking—and then coughing, louder and harsher. Before Nadine grabbed my arm, even harder this time.

“My god!” she screamed and when I turned around, I saw them. Flames, quick and bright, danced in hot yellows and oranges as they climbed up the blankets and scarves that had fallen to the ground when I stood up. The fire leaped and crackled, mocking Nadine and Howie as they tried to tame it. Between coughs, they yelled at each other to stomp it out and get water. Howie threw the rest of his coffee onto the pit. Nadine slapped the flames with her boot, but they weren’t in control now. The fire raged, hot and hungry, burning up everything that couldn’t stand it. Everything that surrendered to being consumed. I knew I wouldn’t stay there this time.

I picked up Curly and ran as fast as I could. Away from the lake. Back down the winding path. Through the hole in the fence. I ran until I lost the trail. Branches clawed my hair and whipped my face. I tripped over roots all the way to the edge of the wood that spit me out somewhere I hadn’t been before but somewhere familiar enough. There were streetlamps and sirens, smells of dinner and the sweet strains of manmade steel and sharp brakes. A train light glowed through the fog, and I walked toward it, through the sliding doors, and back to my apartment, where I was happy to be alone. I stripped off my clothes and ran a bath and soaked in the only skin I had.

For weeks after, I avoided the park. When I finally went back, there was snow on the ground, and the coffee-stain-color leaves were gone. I walked to where the park met the woods, looking for the path I’d gone down with Nadine and Howie. But I couldn’t find it. I went up and down the tree line and never saw it. Did it even happen? Had I imagined it all? Not just Nadine and Howie but all the things that kept me awake at night. The screaming pipes in the apartment. Conor and the heart-shape buttons. Doubt clawed a home in me and burrowed in for another season.

But winter melted, and a few months later I was sitting on a couch next to my neighbor. The girl with the moon face and high cheekbones. Small talk at the mailbox turned to her helping me build a dresser. To pizza and a bottle of wine. Smoking joints and painting my walls golden and calling the landlord to fix the pipes. And one night, when we were limp with summer heat but not tired enough to stop hanging out, we lay on the roof and I told her about that day in the park. I made it funny, though. I played up that moment when Howie undressed. How every shirt he wore was a different university. A striptease of Harvard, MIT, Yale. I told her how they looked like Neanderthals with the camera between them. About the way they leaped when they saw the fire, bellies jiggling. I waited for her to laugh, but in the dark, she touched my arm. “No,” she said, “they got you too?” And then she told me about the longest winter of her life, summers ago, when a couple stopped her in the park. There was a dog lake and a glass house and an icy feeling she carried with her after. They’d gotten her to strip down without putting a hand on her. They took pictures of her. She even agreed to meet them again before she could think about what had happened. “I’m still so ashamed,” she said. She felt stupid and naive. She’d wanted to believe strangers could be good. That people wanted to take care of each other. That she could belong. And I knew what she meant.

“I’ve never told anyone,” she said, but now she could. Now that she knew someone else saw the hunter’s hat. Now that she wasn’t the only one who had wild eyebrows question her open-mindedness. And for the first time, we both felt relieved enough to laugh. We laughed the kind of laugh that only comes after being alone. A laugh we could bear to laugh because we were doing it together. Because we were more than ourselves. We laughed until the memory got smaller. Until it stopped hiding. We laughed for our luck. And we laughed for each other.