A Slow Cartography
an excerpt

The next morning Penny oversleeps, and gets up in a pale grey light which makes her entire apartment look cold and harsh. It washes out the spines of all the books on her shelves, and glares off the front of the refrigerator and the drinking glasses in the dish drainer. For whatever reasons, she finds herself in disconsolate and snappish mood, and when she goes outside she discovers that it is too warm, a kind of muggy and undesired heat that she is overdressed and unprepared for.
She waits for the bus, frowning irritably down the street. The bus comes late, with its extraordinary ability never to be on time when it would do the most good. She wedges herself into the corner of a seat, and stares out the window, thinking about all the things she would rather be doing than going to work. With all her luck, Eric will probably be cheerful and chatty, and she will snap at him so that he spends the rest of the day sulking.
When she gets off the bus again, just down the block from the bookstore, the unseasonably warm air curls around her cheeks, and she feels feverish. She is the first one there, which pleases her with a kind of viscious satsifaction. The bookshop is dark and quiet, the barely-there light from the windows falls across the floor, the books and fake cobwebs in the windows casting shadows. Penny closes the door behind her, and steps to the counter, stowing her purse on the floor beneath it and unlocking the till. She sinks to the floor between the counter and the shelf behind it, drawing her knees to her chest and burying her face in them. She needs to begin the day again, needs to stop, start over, and get up to work. She stares at the floor between her knees, and brushes her finger along the edge of a floorboard.
Penny doesn’t realize Eric is there until he is stepping out from between the shelves. The rattle of the back door chain is muffled by the distance and the books, and she is too distracted. “Hello?” she hears him say from over head, and hears his footsteps as he crosses to the table and takes off his coat. “Anybody here?”
“Yes,” Penny says, lifting her head so her voice is not muffled in her knees. More footsteps. She looks up, and sees Eric peering down at her through his glasses, mouth quirked and eyebrow raised.
“What are you doing down here?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says, and jumps up hastily, brushing off her backside and going around the other end of the counter to flick on the light switch.
“Are you all right?” Eric asks, his voice hesitant. He leans on the counter and watches her straighten a stack of books on the table.
“Yes, fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she snaps.
“Well, happy birthday.”
“What?” Penny’s head swings up, and she stares at Eric.
“You forgot?” he asks, both amused and slightly apalled.
Penny sinks into one of the chairs at the table. “Yes,” she says. And then, “Oh, damn, James said he’d take me out for dinner on my birthday.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Penny shrugs, and does not speak. She stares at the postcard picture of Cornwall that is taped to the end of one of the shelves, and tries to figure out how she managed to forget her own birthday. True, she has never been particularly enthusiastic about birthdays, but it feels as though she should at least have noticed it. She is thirty-three. It is an age that feels like it should mean something. But that’s silly, Penny thinks. If you want it to mean something, you have to make something happen.
That’s the trouble. Penny has never been able to reconcile herself to the fact that she has to make things happen, do things for herself, if she does not want to go through life lonely, miserable, and disappointed. There have been and will be again moments of brief, bright happiness, flaring fireworks that fade in the sky and leave quickly disappearing traces, but these are few. And they only happen when she does things, follows whims.
She gets up, clasping her hands together, and edges behind Eric to grab the phone. “James, hi,” she says when it stops ringing. “Are we having dinner tonight?”