In Which You Are Elizabeth Bennet in the Year 2020
by Tori Rego
You finally learn the proper method for salting a tomato. Your wrist turns like a ballerina, the salt flakes pressed between your fingertips. The salt’s structure is pyramidal. You read this in a book somewhere, and as you remember, you imagine each pyramid grain inhabited by the disembodied soul of a tiny, oceanic king. Your nails flash cornflower blue.
In this version, Darcy is a woman, and you argue over unemployment. Darcy is still proud and flawed and not at all beautiful. You still find her handsome and like to run your hand against the dark hairs on her chin. She slices the tomatoes and places them on paper towels. Her cuts are clean.
Your hand reaching back into the salt cellar, you ask Darcy what it would mean if everyone said exactly what they needed. For instance, if they needed oranges, or if they needed the lower part of their back scratched, or if they needed somebody else to make a decision around here for once.
The salt collects like sand in your cupped palm. Darcy says for that to matter, someone would need to listen. She says she admires your intellect, but to stop trying to be profound. She still doesn’t want to apply for unemployment. You have exactly $673 in the bank.
She goes silent and you know she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. And for your part, you don’t want to ruin the moment—with the breeze blowing through the window and aprons tied around your waists. You don’t know if it will ever feel like this again.
And you don’t know if tomorrow you will feel safe out of doors, or if you will acclimate to these inexhaustible midsummer days. You’ve stopped trying to think past tomorrow. Laid in neat lines over the paper towels, the tomatoes bleed. The juices color the flowered imprint pink.
So you bend silently over the kitchen counter, plotting revolutions you won’t live to see: a world without private property, or the NFL, or billionaires, or thick coats of wax on all the supermarket fruit. You imagine men playing accordions, their chambered music finding its way to alleys where children gather to braid each other’s hair, which is always shining. You imagine time to nap in the middle of the day, when your bleeding is heaviest, and the pain makes it hard to stand without clutching at your belly. How lovely it would feel to curl on the couch like a cat, sleep until womanhood is no longer a burden.
But Darcy is still mourning wilderness which will never be reclaimed, and Darcy has said before that if she’s being honest, she doesn’t believe in the future. You can’t decide if this is wisdom or resistance.
Together, you pull the sliced tomatoes from the towel with your fingers and take turns pushing them between each other’s open lips. They are cool and tangy and go down easy. Darcy says she is being radicalized faster than snow gathers on roofs, and you think to yourself that this is a beautiful metaphor, but metaphors do not stop pipelines from sectioning communities or give backpacks full with multicolored crayons to kids.
You eat until the tomatoes are gone and all that’s left are a few shining puddles of juice on the counter. You wipe them up with a biodegradable sponge. You throw away the paper towels.
She asks if you should feel guilty for using paper towels.
Guilty? You touch your temple, as if the answer can be found there, extracted like a poison. What about guilt? You tell her you feel guilty for loving mayonnaise. You tell her you feel guilty for occasionally calling yourself poor. You feel guilty for feeling guilty. You are guilty, Elizabeth Bennet. You are guilty. A headache begins. You swallow pills and look out the window. Soon, it will be dark.
Tonight, it will rain for hours and the roof of the apartment will keep you dry. As you lay on the couch watching Casablanca, this fact of the roof above you and your dry, safe body will feel impossible. When the movie ends you will feel weepy and tired so that the image of Rick Blaine and Louis Renalt walking together into the fog paused on the television, and the back-half of a headache nesting in your skull, stirs something in you and you will sit upright on the couch and tell Darcy you are not doing enough.
You will list all the lifestyle changes you need to make: vegan sandals, unsubscribing from Amazon prime, bail fund donations, and planting wildflowers for bees. You will say you need fresh loaves of bread and friends who don’t watch Disney movies. You will say you need to read James Baldwin and Herman Melville. You will say you need a future. You will say you need to sew. You still only have $673 in the bank.
Under the covers Darcy will whisper it’s okay, Lizzie, dearest. It’s okay. She will stroke your shoulders, your chest, your legs. Minutes or maybe hours pass, and her hands make your body into a river of calm. In the morning, she applies for unemployment. You imagine salt gathering like snow on the roof of your apartment.
Tori Rego is from South Carolina. She is a compulsive museum-goer and avid daydreamer. Her work can be found in Apt: A Literary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Fugue, and elsewhere.
