Free Loving Day by Mat Johnson Page B

you probably shouldn’t carry a spear,” Tal offers, looking up from her phone to watch me pace around with the stick. Besides that, she doesn’t seem tocare much about her decrepit surroundings. After Tal does a little unpacking, she doesn’t ask for a tour, or accept my offer of one. She doesn’t ask why it’s in a state of ruin. She doesn’t ask why there’s hardly any furniture. I try to explain to her too, start to tell her the story, but she walks around the room ignoring me, holding her cell in the air like it’s some kind of ghost detector.
    “There’s almost no reception in here. I’m getting, like, one bar. It’s true what they say about the ghetto,” and then she pulls her empty suitcase over to that one corner, sits on it, and goes back to texting.
    I have nothing to say to my daughter. I want to say,
I can’t believe you’re here
and
I can’t believe you exist
, and
I want to know all about your life
, but it’s impossible to hold a conversation when the person you want a response from is furiously typing away with just her thumbs. Instead I ask, “What do you want to eat for dinner?” and this gets her to pause, look up even.
    “I don’t eat red meat. I don’t eat meat that’s not organic, or at least kosher, and I don’t eat produce that isn’t locally grown. And I’m not eating anything that was frozen. I don’t play ‘reheated.’ ”
    I’ve got nothing in the house. My father has a little fridge in the kitchen, sitting about two feet out from the wall, and it’s a museum of beer and condiments. I look for take-out menus in the only full drawer in the pantry.
    “The best I can do is halal.” I hold the flier up. It says,
Still 2 Getha
in Arabic-styled letters.
    “Not exactly the same team, but whatever.”
    When the food arrives, the bag has napkins and plastic forks, so now we have toilet paper and silverware. Tal takes her chicken cheesesteak hoagie out of the bag, unwraps the foil, which she flattens out beneath the food as a plate. I watch her. The lettuce and tomato she takes off, and then makes a separate pile for each. Then Tal removes the meat from the bread, scooping it out with her plastic fork until it sits in a gray ball. She rips bite-sized pieces from the roll, then lays them down one by one until they form a pyramid. When Tal catches me looking, I turn back to devouring my own serving. I haven’t eatena cheesesteak in a decade, and many a drunken doner kebab has failed to fill the void. Mine’s gone before she’s even done her preparations. So I watch her.
    “I like to keep things organized,” Tal says without looking up. She says it and the words are lifeless and congealed together as if they’ve been recited on many occasions.
    “Your mother did that,” I tell her as I remember. It is one of the only things I remember about her mom. I don’t remember her face, but this bit I find within me. The time I went over there, I brought fried rice. I brought fried rice because I must have said I would bring her lunch, because she was sick, and it was the cheapest takeout I could find. And she took it on her plate, then separated the peas, then the carrots, then onions, till the rice was oily and naked. I’d never seen anyone else do that, and haven’t since. Now I’m proud of myself. I have remembered something, something about my time with Cindy, that isn’t horrible. But when I look at Tal, I see her staring back at me, her fork at her side, limp and hanging in her hand like she won’t be using it.
    There’s anger there and I know Tal’s going to curse me, for all I’ve done and haven’t done. But she only says, “Irv. He was a nutritionist. Before he retired and became a drunk. It’s not OCD; it’s about portion control. He taught me.” Tal pushes her foil plate away from her on the hardwood floor, sliding it carefully to nearly beyond her reach. Unfolding a napkin, she lays it over top like the sheet on a corpse. “And my mom.”
    “Do you