Susan and Andrea are marriageable young ladies

Susan and Andrea have no dining table. Susan and Andrea eat microwaved dinners leaning against the kitchen island, or bent over the sink, or, other times, in bed—plastic trays warming their laps, plasticky grains of rice embedding into floral sheets. 

In the beginning Susan and Andrea circled each other, got used to one another’s scent. They furnished the apartment with enough half-considered decor to adequately approximate a place where two people might live. Above where Susan placed a dull, olive loveseat, Andrea hung an unobtrusive tapestry. On the windowsill where Susan positioned a plastic, oblong statuette, Andrea placed a fake fern. Where there wasn’t direct communication—Susan and Andrea kept to their bedrooms—there was courtesy. Susan shortened her showers out of consideration for Andrea. Andrea muted her rom-coms while Susan slept—reading instead the sounds of love in subtitles, from the pristine mouths of the fortunate. 

Susan and Andrea had written online advertisements, something to the effect of: seeking young professionals, tidy, twelve months. It was unsaid, but mutually agreed, that their relationship would not extend beyond the bolded date on their lease. At the realtor’s office, they signed their maiden names with flourish and finality. In every curlie-cued letter, they issued private farewells to their lives as bachelorettes: the roommates, the desk jobs, the horror of it. 

Beneath their apartment, the city’s perpetual churn. Each morning, before Susan and Andrea had so much as wiped the crust from their eyes, the construction workers of the world had already risen. In the still pink hours, the men, honest and muscled, huddled at bus stops and train platforms, sipping deli coffee and giving their seats to the elderly and calling their mothers. The girls, unaware, tossed in their beds. 

The variables, to review: A sterile unit in which two young women graciously avoid one another. Speedy commutes towards glass walls and blue light and looping in and circling back. Ecosystems stirring under, always. 

The thought appeared first in Andrea’s mind, that it was no accident that Susan had still not initiated the purchase of a dining table—that behind her inaction was specific and political intent. The thought appeared second in Susan’s mind. 

Susan believes that, by enduring this daily inconvenience, she is proving that she possesses the qualities necessary to sustain long term partnership—like sacrifice, and resilience in hardship, Andrea thought. 

Andrea would starve before stooping to go halfsies with me on some mass-produced monstrosity, Susan thought, Her dining table will be as lovingly designed and artisanally crafted as the ring that will soon hug her finger. 

Susan thinks she is more deserving of a husband. 

Andrea is a bitch. 

The women, preoccupied, failed to respond to the buzzer. The mailman outside their building, who has a pension and practices calisthenics and babysits his nieces, waits thirty seconds before leaving Susan’s shipment of contact solution on the front step. 

On its axis, the earth turned indifferently, spinning the city along with it. 

***

Saturday. Air of palpable hatred in the apartment. 

Andrea is going out. She is slipping into something skimpy and southward. Susan, solitary, sweats, speculates: will she be swept, seduced, spoken for? 

(The boys in the unit downstairs don’t feel a change in the temperature at all.)

Andrea on her way out, chin proud in a hairspray haze, gives Susan a look like: There is a thumping on the concrete, don’t you hear it? The streets are thickening with the prowling young, and tonight, I am joining their march. 

Susan gasps awake between visions of Andrea twirling with a Duncan or a Thomas. The song of the city wafts into her bedroom, the various tones of its mating call. 

Andrea returns alone in the barely-gold of morning. Through the stripe in her door, Susan gives her a look like: As if one could find true love in the underbelly, under neon’s green, her fair skin turned all toxic. 

Susan vindicated. Andrea ashamed. 

***

One must take advantage of the city’s opportunities, one must open themselves up to the world. In a perfume plume, a young woman must strap a novel under her arm, and, under a pastel awning, sample confections crafted from lavender and cardamom and frosting florets. But on the patio of a buzzing bakery, she might find too sunny a seat—encircled by gnats, wind whipping the pages of her book, she might conclude that this Sunday is no more serendipitous than any other. This, she will think, is the great beauty of the city, that each day, each moment, leaks with equal significance. 

Yes, today like any day, happy birthdays are sung over primal wails in the hospitals and bodies are going cold in rent-stabilized studios above her head. But one must not expect the world to bend toward them, one must assert themselves within the infinite everythingness. 

Ask a modern woman what she does and she will say project manager, a gross misreporting of what she is, which is water and stars, and what she does, which is nothing.

Take green little Susan walking down blocks brimming with men. They are practically tripping over one another, practically piled, men big and small their palms all outturned to Susan, and yet she walks—she could pass the Savior himself and still she would climb the steps of her apartment with her little beribboned box, perfectly content with her contribution to that Sunday. 

Such an extravagant pastry all alone? This is what Andrea’s eyes say to Susan as she picks baby’s breath from lemon glaze at the kitchen counter.

Andrea casually rearranges the cabinets near Susan’s post, deploying subtly disapproving glances at the sticky pads of Susan’s fingers. Susan sweating. Images of plastic newlyweds on platforms of white icing ping pong from Andrea’s head to Susan’s. 

Susan seethes: “Is refined sugar so strictly the domain of the coupled? Are you so above indulging in an occasional carbohydrate?” Ascetic Andrea quietly finishes her task, and retreats to her bedroom, accomplished. 

The key to psychic warfare: move in a way that convinces your opponent that they are the only one participating, whereas you are operating from a place of pure intuition that just so happens to coincide with your total dominion over them. 

Point for Andrea.

***

Pastry incident leaking into Monday. 

Susan and Andrea sworn to hunger at their respective workplace desks, coveting coworkers’ raisenets. The women forgo bumping elbows with bachelors in break rooms, content to sate themselves instead with ecstatic visions of Eventual Husband and Defeat of Roommate. 

You could compare the environment of the fast casual salad spots under the girls’ offices to a monastery due to the silence, the discipline, the apparent uniform of slim-cut suiting, if not for the intense erotic current piercing through them. At one such establishment, a saleswoman enters a state no less than transcendence when the young taxpayer in front of her adds kimchi to his grain bowl. She thinks this is a man who is stable but daring, and when their eyes lock across the assembly line, he thinks, Now here is a woman who will appreciate how stable and daring I am, and the deal is effectively sealed.

Meanwhile, Susan and Andrea waste away upstairs.

Meanwhile, a tanned personal trainer uptown, looking down at what he has sculpted thinks, The transformation of the body is futile to an uncaring God, all that matters is other people!

At home, under Susan’s watchful eye, Andrea folds over farfalle. Andrea makes a face like, Oh, damn the entire goddamned human race. 

***

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, made of hours and minutes and so on. 

Friday’s phase was obvious: deny all worldly possessions, lest you appear too comfortable in single life. 

They did not keep the Yankee candle, the plastic pothos, the faux ceramics. They did not keep the charcuterie board, the flat screen, the IKEA stool, the decorative coffee table book nor the decorative coffee table. They did not keep the particle-board dressers. They did not keep the fruit basket nor the flaking cylindrical ornaments held within. They did not keep the abstract beige art print, nor the one in clay, not even blush. Each artifact baking in the sun on the sidewalk. 

It is while Susan shimmies her queen size mattress through the doorway upstairs that two young men (one, responsible and astrologically compatible with Andrea, the other, possessing mild executive dysfunction redeemed by his warm and empathetic heart) come upon the pastel heap of mass production on the curb. 

On the horizon waits the next phase of their adult manhood, but, much closer than that is the olive loveseat discarded right there on their block, and by hauling it up to their unit, they can convert their hollow, transitory apartment into something of a home. The social scripts of the past were written by people who could afford mortgages, the men reason with one another. Maybe we stay another year or two. Heck, maybe we foster some disabled pets. 

It is after everything is effectively disposed of that the women realize—it occurs in Andrea’s mind first, and as it does, the boyfriends of the city suffer a brief and collective pang of inadequacy—that the only thing left to undo were their egos.

And so they undress one another there—in an empty apartment in a buzzing city in an ever expanding universe. Linear time is a fallacy, Susan whispers flirtatiously into Andrea’s ear. The illusion of choice exists merely to plant self doubt into us, Andrea enunciates into Susan’s soft belly. Fused together, they incant: We are specks of dust but ones that are swept by loving hands, and, its prophecy fulfilled, the Strange Authority lording over everything smiles upon them.