I arrive to an empty driveway and linger on the doorstep to see if someone else pulls up. They don’t. I’m unlucky enough to have arrived first and I berate myself for wanting to arrive on time, though I’m still ten minutes late. I knock and when my colleague, Eileen, answers, I step into her home as the door slams shut behind me.
Eileen, thrilled to play hostess, greets me and shows off her “freshly painted!” orange walls, her alpaca rug. I blink twice but on second glance, the walls are are just as bright.
Eileen’s chatter wanders as I look at her paintings. She does this at work too, speaks so long you have no choice but to listen. After two months, I know how young her ex-husband is, how old she is, how he left with their child in the night. She doesn’t know anything about me. She doesn’t ask. After our first week of working together she walked up to hug me, her head resting briefly on my chest as I froze with discomfort and surprise.
Vomit. That’s what the walls remind me of. They are the precise color of Eileen’s puke after she drank too many mimosas at the Christmas brunch last month. I held her hair, felt like I was ten years younger and back in University. Eileen had gripped my arm, tears speckling her cheeks, and confessed that she still loved her husband.
Eileen rubs her custom dining table and tells me the cost and how handsome the woodworker was and how she’d always wanted a nice dining table but didn’t want to pay for it knowing a child could ruin it, but I’m not listening. I’m fixated on the pile of oranges sitting in a white bowl at the center of the table. One has a hole. Does she see it? Dark as oblivion, round as the sun, it could fit a finger and as I watch, it moves.
Wriggles like a fly caught in a web and as Eileen twirls, Vanna White showing off her basil plant, which is impressive, it’s alive, mine would be dead, an insect crawls out, body of interlocking squares snaking behind. Iridescent wings twitch twice, and it flies.
My gaze sharpens.
Eileen is in front of me, rose lipstick glinting beneath incandescent light. She holds up an orange. “Would you like one?”
I want to refuse her infested orange, but I grab and inspect it. This one is hole-less, complete.
“Thanks,” I say.
It can’t be easy living in a home so full of sudden quiet, sudden space.
