Libby

For as long as I can remember, I have been hot. Not in body temperature–though that is usually also the case–and not in physical appearance–though I would like for that to be the case–but inside. I feel this cactus-scorch prickling just beneath my skin, pebbling out like goosebumps, and there is no remedy.

I hate wearing pants. They make the heat worse, even when it’s cold outside, and always somehow make my legs look chubbier than they actually are. Mostly, though, they restrict me. When I wear pants, I feel something about me being reigned in, condensed into a sealed airtight bag where the heat still ricochets off of them and bounces against the cellophane like a swarm of gnats.

I was already hot when my computer at work buzzed with a pop-up notification. JUST ISSUED: Heat Wave, it informed me. It was then replaced by a pop-up ad for Chili’s.

“Heat wave? Are you kidding me?” Megan said from her desk. She shoved her spinning office chair back dramatically. “Do you have an extra pair of shorts in your car?” She teased. Megan, like most people at my big corporate job in Kansas City that I hated, wore pants to work. They were the wide-legged flowy kind that would really only look good with a tank top on top, but we weren’t allowed to wear those, so she settled for a high-neck white tee and a cardigan.

“Maybe. I’ll check at lunch,” I replied. I didn’t look up from my computer, pretended to be fascinated by quarterly reports on the profitability of different modes of natural gas transport; really, I was browsing the ELLE homepage, analyzing what could last and what would just be a microtrend and how my life would have been if I had followed that fashion design lead instead of ending up in this HR office.

“Okay. I’m about to take my lunch break, so I might swing by my house and grab some. We can circle back to those reports after lunch,” said Megan. Corporate was full of these little buzzwords, I’d learned over the past year. Swing by and circle back and low-hanging fruit and going forward. All spewing from our mouths like the words that clickity-clacked from our keyboards into databases.

I switched tabs and willed myself to narrow in on a few key figures to bring up and pretend like I’d researched during my meeting this afternoon, then called it for lunch once the boredom became an energy that twinged in my fingertips and caused me to nervously rattle them against the standing desk. It really was so hot.

I waited until I was just about to leave the building to clock out, not wanting to miss one of those precious thirty minutes that I could spend however I wanted. A dull cloud of heat had settled over the parking lot, bouncing off the blacktop and barreling against my bare legs. I opened my car door. The seat was probably hot enough to fry an egg.

Inside my car, the heat was a melting sort of heat, the kind that pins you in place and forces you to take a moment to bask in the warmth. I felt like a lizard on a sunny rock. I gave myself a few minutes to soak in it before turning on the engine, putting the AC on high, and pulling out of the parking lot. I could bask in heat; I couldn’t move in it.

There was traffic near the office, but the further I got down the road, the clearer it became. Buildings got further apart and stoplights got more spaced out, and a mirage twinkled between two yellow lines on the heat of the road. The air above it grew hazy and weepy, like you could smoke a sausage on it.

The bookstore lights were dim and the walls echoed a dry cold across the shelves. It was silent, but not in an offputting way; you could tell that everyone inside was lost in thought, contemplating something deeper than moving forward with this operation or getting the ball rolling.

It was my favorite bookshop because all of the books were together. They didn’t discriminate by genre, leaving the classics in the back near the bathrooms and the romance near the magazine section. The books were sorted alphabetically, so I could scan the spines myself to find out what I was in the mood for. Pages brushed against fingertips in the silence. Classical music was absorbed in the dense pages lining the shelves. The shuffling sound of me sliding books off the shelf. Once I had read the back cover and first two pages of every novel that caught my eye, I stepped up the sliding ladder to look higher, towards the tops of the shelves that were so often overlooked.

From atop the ladder, the bookstore warmed. Heat rises. It was a fervent type of heat, the kind that burned my cheeks and gave me so much energy that I wanted to leap down the ladder and run all the way home under the even hotter heat. Among the books, I felt like one of them, something born of an idea and raised of an impossibility, something to be dissected and analyzed for every layer there was. I felt like a book in that way that I felt too much. I was the type of book, I decided, that students would only pretend to read in school because it was too wordy, what if the curtains really are just blue? The curtains are never just blue for me.

Thirty minutes later, I was hot again, under-my-skin and this time in the conference room with the rest of the HR team. I picked up one of the courtesy water bottles from the middle of the table and began fidgeting with the cap and pressing the cold bottle to my wrists. There was a good type of heat, the type that rose and crept up ladders in bookstores, and this was not it. I was bored and I was tired and what does HR even do?

Had I been born forty years earlier, I would have been home with a baby, rocking the fruit of my affection down for a nap and placing it on cold sheets before dozing in a rocking chair. Perhaps a few years from then I would be leaving my distinctly female job for the day, a teacher or a nurse or an underpaid waitress. I would come home to a female nanny caring for my small child, four or five now–I am sure that it is a son–and read books to him until his father gets home to eat pot roast for supper and watch the evening news while I fold laundry.

This fantasy lied somewhere between my fashion week dreams and my corporate reality, and was a place I often went to when I could hardly imagine a world where I am valued, if not by my husband then by a child who loves me so much he wants to watch me even while I’m taking a shit. If, perhaps, my husband does not love me, then there was a love there once, and at the very least there was emotion in his absence. He wasn’t a cursor clicking a million times over before I started typing in the spreadsheet. He wasn’t a computer that got dark when I let my mind wander off-task.

Perhaps it was anti-feminist of me to think this way, daydreaming about a husband and a son while sitting in a corporate meeting that women fifty years ago would burn their bras just to sit in on. “She doesn’t understand her privilege,” they would tsk. Perhaps they are right; I shouldn’t want the very thing that women once ran from. And did I really want it? No. It was preferable to the office, seemed like a closer daydream and a safer place to land than the stage where I saw myself in my mind. We were hot either way, the mothers and I. But they would be hot from their own art, a crescent roll or perhaps a raspberry tart from the oven, and I would be hot from the office’s fluorescent lights. Let me be hot from the glowing spotlights of the runway; let the letters of the Hollywood sign burn me to ashes.

That evening, I drove home to the house that I share with my boyfriend Cade and picked up a cooked rotisserie chicken from the Kroger on the way home. We live in a little bricked-in neighborhood where all of the houses look similar but not the same, like brothers but not twins. My drive home is a hot one that has been glazed in a familiar shade of brown. Wheat stalks lazily brushing each other in the breeze. Dead grass even though it was summer. Rusted billboards telling me that Jesus is King! and Injured? Know your RIGHTS! Heat refracted through my windshield and warmed my skin like toast. I pulled into Cade and I’s brown house in our brown neighborhood.

Inside, it was hot. Cade likes to turn the fans off when we’re not home, so I could tell he just got home from his job at a trucking company’s logistics center. We both went to college, Cade and me, with dreams bigger than what the world had to offer. He was a bright baseball star hoping his scholarship could carry him to law school; I was a film and fashion merchandising major who gave into the corporate hustle. Together, we half-filled our fridge and took weekend trips to hotels but not resorts and talked of getting married once we could find a few weeks to take off from work.

“Hey, Libby,” he whispered. He helped me take my work cardigan off and kissed my head. My name is Olivia, but I wanted them to call me Libby when I was an actress or a model or a fashion designer. If I was a singer, I would have gone by Liv instead. But now Cade was the only one who called me Libby.

“How was work?” he asked.

I pulled away and took the grocery bag of chicken to the kitchen counter. “Hot. I’m hot.”

“I’ll turn the fan on,” said Cade.

The thing about Cade was, I loved him but I knew I could love him more if things were different. When I was this hot all the time, the two of us ate rotisserie chicken from the grocery store on the couch and watched Wheel of Fortune until we were too tired. I longed for a world where I came home from a photoshoot to Cade, sweaty from an afternoon baseball practice but cooling off from the fans in our LA apartment. Together, we would cook chilled tomato soup and chicken-pot pie and watermelon lemonade, only hot when we opened the oven too quickly.

Still, Cade shoveled the chicken into his mouth even when it was too hot and tried to guess a three-word phrase meaning “to inflate.” Perhaps he would love me more, too, if things were different. I am a little afraid of how much I might love him if he were better than this.

When the clock hit nine, Cade rinsed his plate in the sink and went to shower while the leather of the couch grew cool from the icy breeze of the fan. I soaked into it and changed the channel. Cade and I didn’t have any streaming services, so we were stuck with whatever they still showed on cable TV, and tonight, that meant a Western starring an actress that I had seen before but could not name.

In the movie, she is a Texan who turns seventeen and runs off with her best friend to chase the allure of the cowboy lifestyle. In the movie, they are perpetually riding their paint palominos into a dizzy, neverending sunset, because when you are a teenager all of your most important memories are under a sunset. In the movie, they meet a pair of cowboys and fall in love but end up riding off without them once they realize it’s time for them to giddy-up back home. Time for them to finish school or have children or move to a sienna-colored neighborhood or take the highway all the way to Kansas City or respond to an email or sit through an HR meeting about corporate reports. The West holds no more dreams for them.

Cade opened the bathroom door, and steam from his shower billowed out. The living room filled with dry heat.