Our Time Is Up Clare Sestanovich

The mirrors reveal when it’s time to clean again. A thin layer of dust on the one in the bed room, toothpaste and fingerprints on the one in the bathroom, which doubles as a cabinet door. All the windows become mirrors at the end of the day, when it takes a subtle adjustment of the eyes to look through yourself instead of at yourself. But the windows will never be cleaned; the most that can be hoped for is a hard, purifying rain. There’s a yellow streak of bird shit on the glass in the living room, crusted over now, and the kitchen window still bears the ghostly pattern that Angela once traced on the fogged-up surface while waiting for something on the stove, she can no longer remember what: a pot to boil, a formless egg to acquire edges and turn opaque, a single drop of oil to escape its pan and scald her out of her thoughts.

Since when does Angela care about cleaning? The other day, at dinner with a friend, she found herself extolling the virtues of a certain type of mop. She recently learned several methods for removing stains from supposedly stainless steel. She has even wished, on occasion, that she owned an iron.

An iron! More symbol than tool at this point, and Angela doesn’t like what the symbol stands for. She’s not a housewife. For one thing, she rents. True, she’s married, but there wasn’t really a wedding, because she’s opposed to weddings. She’s employed. In theory, empowered.

The thing about the mop is that it’s satisfying. Under the supervision of a therapist, Angela and Will have been talking a lot about satisfaction. How to define it, where to find it, whether they can feel it—have it—at the same time. Each swipe of the mop proves its usefulness, a glistening arc on a floor that a second ago looked O.K. but now is revealed to have been dusty and dull all along. The water in the bucket turns gray.

Angela doesn’t like the therapist. Why are they talking about satisfaction when they could be talking about happiness?

When I was your age— Angela has heard this sentence completed so many times, in so many ways, that by now she can line up her mother’s entire life beside her own entire life (thus far) and compare them year by year. She can try on the other life as you might try on a dress forgotten at the back of the closet: with no hope of it fitting, and yet with some perverse desire to see exactly where the seams stretch or the zipper catches, where two pieces of fabric refuse to meet.