The tip of Angela Kane’s cigarette flickers as she dusts the stoop outside Kline. She savors a deep inhale as she bends down and takes a seat. Her nicotine breath becomes entangled with the sun’s golden rays. Fatigue drapes over her with each languid puff, weariness etched across her reflection in the dining hall’s tall windows. Poplar leaves beside the pathway are fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side.
Perched at the entrance, students ebb and flow. The lunchtime hustle and bustle has finally hushed, granting her a few stolen minutes of quiet. When Angie returns, she’ll swipe their cards, collect their cash, and send them on their way. While others cocoon themselves in thick winter jackets, Angie, with her one free hand, unbuttons her jacket, crumbs tumbling from her crimson exterior. A bronze-colored name tag adorns her right breast. Daylight falls into her as unto the night dew which lingered on thin blades of grass nearby. Puddles cradle small craters of wet: memories of rain, still on the surface.
She has dealt with marriages that had grown dull, the sudden arrival of illness, the intransigence of memory, swells of desire, weather-beaten friends and inadvertent intimacies, the will to change and the inability to change. So she takes fifteen and lights a cigarette.
She lets the new warmth of April settle in like a whisper or a secret. Spring unfurls slow and quiet along the shoreline of the Hudson. She could wait: she had waited, the unhurried pace of the seasons no match to Angie’s fifty-nine years in this town, a quarter of which she spent in this place. Miniscule buds on the trees accompanied precocious students’ big-worded conversations: “Sartre,” “Heidegger,” “panopticism.” Their nervous energy can be unsettling, like a bum knee and an eight-hour shift. She gently taps her cigarette, watching her breath curl up beside her. She taps her knee—slowly, methodically—as a therapist had once instructed.
You get used to things, she thinks, without getting used to things.
Angie runs her nails—a deep shade of purple, trimmed down to her fingertips—through her thin blond hair, tucking the loose strands behind her ears. Eyeliner and mascara conspire to create the illusion of eyes deep as weather. Dark folds linger beneath, immune to attempts at camouflage. A metallic cross drapes beneath a plump flap of excess skin which blends together her throat and her neck.
Easily afraid, always unsettled: she carries something that cannot be set down. Angie is severe, salty, proud, opinionated, and physically imposing (or at least she sees herself that way). She inspires fear and muted amusement from the students, who smile at her tender-hearted but comically incapable warmth. Inside, she is surging with feeling—fear; full and complicated love for her son and sometimes, her ex-husbands; tidal anger. The consequence of looking inward for so many years is her trademark lack of insight; she has the sensitivity of a tuning fork, and so she’s hardened herself against too much sensation.
Amidst the brisk student traffic, Angie takes another deep inhale. She has gotten used to the various bodies which run in parallel orbit around the college. Tweed-clad college professors, preoccupied and condescending; undergraduates, transient, anxious and absentminded and sometimes unexpectedly, unbelievably kind. Maintenance, B&G, Dining: all caught in the velocity of it all, continuously pulled inward. She observed their comings and goings; the students’ wide-eyed wonder in their freshman year, the pontifical wisdom they wore with honor as they walked with their diploma and she prepared lunch.
Angie is glad to have landed here. From crafting aircraft breaks to house cleaning and babysitting—it is this role that unexpectedly emerged from the shadows that clung to her. The rhythm of the job became magnetic: the aroma of simmering macaroni, the familiar beep of the register which preserved her sanity (that fragile thing). She resisted the tides that swept others away: the changes, the new jobs, the prospect of something better. Hope was a cancer, she thought, and she didn’t want it.
By thirty-two, Angie was married and had a daughter. Balancing the demands of work, motherhood, and her illness presented a challenge. Her first husband—and later, her second—didn’t understand. Relationships crumbled as swiftly as they formed, often when she found herself unable to step beyond her own doorstep, consumed by the paralyzing fear that gripped her. The simple act of grocery shopping became an insurmountable weight, and the mere thought of leaving her home sent her off-kilter.
It was like drowning in cobwebs, she thought, whose sticky maze was spinning about her. A darkness rumbled through her, her soul suffocating in tar. Every heartbeat felt like a seismic tremor that reverberated through the body. This turmoil again and again sent her adrift, tethered only to relentless worry. To come up for air seemed impossible.
There were days when it was excruciating. Years that seemed perennially rough. Unyielding. Blinding. Something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. Angie’s trepidation was a relentless specter, shrouding her in suffocating panic. She evaded anything that threatened to unleash her fear: public transportation, open spaces, closed spaces, standing in line, bustling crowds, empty rooms—everything, really. Angie’s anxiety held her in a relentless pull and cast a shadow over every move. She sought refuge at home, life remained stable even as it seemed to suffocate her.
It began in the high school at the end of a corridor, that central artery of the arts and sciences and P.E. During a mundane social studies lesson, an insidious panic emerged that constricted Angie’s breath. She felt the stain of some sadness make its way through her. A perceptive teacher sensed her unease and probed with a question, setting off a fire somewhere deep down within. She sought refuge in the girls’ restroom, where Angie huddled in a ball on cold tile, encircled by concerned onlookers who called for help.
The sequence repeated itself the following day and the next again. She withdrew two months shy of graduation. Her sanctuary became the confines of her home, where stepping outside was laden with dread. A profound worry took root, coercing her into a life of confinement and self-imposed exile. Within the walls she knew best was a fortress, or a jail cell.
Outside, Angie’s fear held her with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean. Meadows green and bright with sunshine; rivulets of melted snow that ran down craggy mountains, glittering like silver chains; revelations and memories; concrete walls and so many futures—all suddenly beyond her grasp. Time passed and Angie boiled under the surface. Clenched, off balance, prickly. As if pickled in a jar. Some days she shook as though an electric current ran through her.
I can do better, Angie thought. Look, she said, look how I want to live, look how I want to hold on. It was criminal to look out on all that color, all that joy in a world of sadness and misfortune, and not do better.
In due time she began to patch herself up, to walk down the street again. She found herself learning all the intimate ways that history works itself in, navigating tumultuous swings of antidepressants, experimental treatments, and other drugs. At times, she was a distant, shrouded planet, cloaked in the darkness of side effects and unrest, orbiting her own vexations. At others, her thoughts were a suffocating void where the weight of anxiety bore down upon her. Thinking became an elusive feat; every breath seemed a struggle as she gasped for a smoother, more gentle surface.
Eventually, a faint glimmer eventually began to pierce the darkness. It was like moving into a pocket of warm air. Gradually, the feeling began to wane, and when it returned, it did so only with a dull, medicated intensity. Shattered fragments of life unearthed themselves, and one by one, she picked them up.
As Angie reached smoother shores, she summoned the courage to attend an interview at the local liberal arts college. They were hiring a part-timer for the kitchen, and she made the leap. At first, she was terrified of the power of her wish—to have an anchor, something to hold onto, outside home—but with time, her nerves receded. Soon, the bustling dining hall, initially foreign territory, began its transformation into her daily routine, an extension of home.
The place etched its mark on Angie, where she served up routine as the temperamental chefs did meals. She found comfort in the predictable cadence of the job and in the occasional mischief of its occupants. One year, food fights were a daily ritual. Her eyes widened as she caught the sight of a student dashing through the hallway, stark naked. Another, she discovered a pig’s head in the servery. She loved complaining over roast beef and cigarettes almost as much as she loved the antics themselves.
The flow of life gave rise to good days and bad. Through routine, she navigated her little revolutions. When the sun shone, she smiled. Occasionally, her anxiety welled and turned into anger. Inside she was a tempest, a storm brewing as pent-up frustrations flashed—often unexpectedly—at minor figures, when no one could save the students who faltered, forgot their cards, or fell a few dollars short. Students glimpsed her moods, knew when the lights flickered and it was time to rush off. Sometimes even she was dizzy, spinning through the vastness of her emotions, their origin hidden behind the clouds.
Her lighter flicks on and off again as she lights another cigarette. Angie chews on her reflection: a solitary figure on a stoop, another cigarette smoldering between her thick fingers, trying to make her way and still reduced to a crawl. Doubt takes hold, as it often does, and she wonders if something is perhaps just inherently defective about Angela Kane, why this burden has fallen squarely upon her shoulders. Her notes half-broken, limbs creaking in resistance; weight stuck like a dense blanket of snow. A life churning with static. Doctors, lovers, kids and friends: they all seem to slip away through the cracks, out of grasp.
She thinks about that lost decade, when her world was confined to four walls. It’s gone now, those years swept up with the wind. Life, it seems, has always been like this: never easy. The dread stings as it finds the surface. For Angie time is as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it is like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean is so deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to.
Dinner’s prospects—like the fate of most things—are slim. Typically, the dining hall staff could bring home leftovers, those odds and ends that couldn’t find a place in tomorrow’s reheated menu or the dank basement’s cavernous refrigerators. She’d grown accustomed to TV dinners and the warmth of sloppy seconds. The fare, dripping with its fat and oil, is simple and familiar. But as she rests her wrist on her knee, the thought of lugging a hefty shopping bag feels like a recipe for pain. Her mind scans her freezer at home, its snowy insides with frostbitten meats and containers of pre-seasoned vegetables.
One more cigarette before she heads back in.
Angie’s always loved food: eating it, cooking it, smelling it, the last bite and the first. All facts laid bare, she just likes it, plain and simple. Perhaps in some other life, it would transport her back to some idyllic childhood, to simpler times that she could keep close. Everyone has one: an illicit affair, a shoe collection, a drinking habit, a full refrigerator. A thread that keeps you connected to the rhythm of life. Three meals, sometimes four: they anchor her. A refuge, where past and future fade out of the foreground and the present moment becomes some kind of relief. Fork in hand, she has control. As the food descends and kindles in her stomach, it fuels the fire, banishing the chill of frigid nights and enveloping her in the heat of summer mornings.
Those bites, the swallow, the exhale of a single drag. They’re hers.
Back in her one-bedroom in Tivoli, Angie stays busy. Her curtains sway gently in the breeze, every stitch her own. Amid snapshots of her daughter, her granddaughter, a dog long dead and buried, it’s every bit a gallery of those soft spots that still remain. It’s really all there is to life, she thinks, those photographs caught in the amber of the moment: family and nature, desire and death, stories made from love and joy and scratch. At night, the television flickers to life, casting its warm, mind-numbing glow across the room. Golden Girls. I Love Lucy. When she reaches an end, she just turns back the clock, rewinds and restarts the series over again. A lifeline to something continuous—that, even in the stillness of this small and lonely place, life continues in its beautiful and gut-wrenching hue.
Nights always close with The Andy Griffith Show because it reminds Angie of her father, whose time was cut short when Angie was twelve. She can still recall the mornings he’d return home from the bakery at the A&P, wet flour and an aroma of freshly baked bread clinging to his clothes. In the kitchen he’d craft velvety mashed potatoes, rich gravy, pork tenderloin in the oven. Flavors all so familiar.
Overnight, he vanished. In the quiet corners of her mind, Angie navigates her past, retracing the blurred lines between what was and what might have been. In the presence of revolving colleagues and each year’s fresh batch of young faces, she shares his stories: how her father, Richie, toiled as a pinsetter at a bowling alley when he was six; the night he gifted her mother a golden necklace and she threw it in the river; when she was little and they sat on milk crates and collected coal along the Hudson line, and they were happy.
Their shared moments exist together in delicate layers, like sponge cake or lasagna, fragile images sketched in parchment. A phantom crafted from loose threads of memory. She was so young when he left that Angie wonders whether she created him herself, whether any of what she tells is really true; whether her father is really just a tapestry of fragments and emotions that have emerged from the ether; the strokes of his existence, a dance of light and shadow.
Angie stamps out the memory, the longing, the fear, the butt of her cigarette, and heads back in.
Evan Kanouse is a writer, artist, and educator. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The New School. He has studied and written about belief systems in education (M.Ed. Educational Leadership, Boston College. M.A. Religious Studies, Fordham University. B.A. Religion, Bard College). He lives in southern Connecticut, where he works at an N-12 independent school and is co-founder of Outbox, a non-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ-inclusive education.
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