This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

Alice thought about lying in the grass in Central Park in the summertime as a teenager, letting her closed eyelids feel the warmth of the sun, when she and her friends would stretch their bodies out on rumpled blankets, waiting for JFK Jr. to accidentally hit them with a Frisbee. These lights didn’t feel like the sun. They were too bright, and too cold.

It was just that many neighborhoods of Leonard’s body were falling apart in a great, unified chorus: his heart, his kidneys, his liver.

Alice understood now, as she never truly had before, how the body was a Rube Goldberg machine, and every time one domino or lever got knocked sideways, the whole thing would stop.

Alice saw it now: all her life, she’d thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparation. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait—his

It could only end one way, and it would only happen once.

The only surprise left would be when it happened, the actual day, and then all the days that followed, when he did not push away the boulder or stick his hand out of the ground.

sometimes she felt okay with it, it being the way of the world, and sometimes she was so sad that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. He was only seventy-three years old.

She would feel immeasurably older whe...

The three men who worked the front desk were the most consistent caregivers, insomuch as they were friendly and remembered the names of people like Alice who visited over and over again, because they understood what it meant.

His eyes stayed closed. Every so often a lid would open, and Alice would watch him search around the room, not focusing on anything, not seeing her. At least she didn’t think so.

It felt like hanging up on him, or changing the channel.

She’d lived alone since she was in college, and truly sharing space with another adult every single day—kitchen, toilet, and all—was a level of commitment Alice did not aspire to. She’d read a Modern Love column once about a couple who kept two apartments in the same building, and that seemed like the dream.

Everyone was on a committee of a cultural institution.

It was a farce, the contortions that rich people would make so as to appear less dripping with privilege.

In the real world, and in her own life, Alice had no power, but in the kingdom of Belvedere, she was a Sith Lord, or a Jedi, depending on whether one’s child got in or not.

paeans

It wasn’t just the dying, of course, that made marriage appealing, but that was part of it.

Alice didn’t know if she wanted to have children, but she knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision.

Almost none of the younger staff smoked anymore—they didn’t even vape! They smoked pot but could barely roll joints. They took edibles. They were babies.

One of her friends, a woman whose mother had died a few years earlier, had told her to record her conversations with her father, that she’d want them later, no matter what the conversations were about.

it was a real street inspired by a novel-turned-play about a small town in England. It was a facsimile of a facsimile, a real version of a fictional place, with two rows of tiny houses that looked straight out of “Hansel and Gretel,” locked behind a gate.

People who didn’t love New York could just fuck all the way off. Look at this place! Look at these benches, at these cobblestones, at these taxicabs and horses side by side!

It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you’d been given.

It was true—she had always been just fine. So fine that no one ever checked to see what was happening underneath.

When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.

Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.

on the whole, she’d felt exactly the same as she had when she was a teenager. She’d been wrong.

“I look like a fucking cherub angel baby,”

Her chin was as sharp as a knife. Why had Alice never written poems about her chin, taken photos of her chin, painted portraits of her chin?

Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job—by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen.

Alice wasn’t sure—she hadn’t been sure then, and even decades later, she thought she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives. Sometimes she felt like everyone she knew had already become whatever they were going to become, and she was still just waiting.