Every time I mentioned these things to Leo, he had the same answer delivered in the same tone, the gentle, slightly impatient voice of a man explaining something obvious to someone who is making it complicated.
“You’re overthinking it. You’re stressed. Drink some water.”
And Freya told me, with a straight face that suggested she had no awareness of irony, that young women these days simply had no stamina. This from a woman who took a fifteen-minute seated rest after carrying a bag of dinner rolls from her car to the front door.
I was trying, that Saturday. I want that on the record. I was carrying a platter of smoked brisket from the good place on Madison Avenue, the one that charges prices that suggest the beef was raised by monks, across the driveway toward the backyard gate, and halfway there my legs simply quit. Not a stumble, not a slip. They switched off the way a light switches off when someone cuts the power. I went down hard, the platter first, then my knees, then my face, and I lay there on the hot concrete with brisket grease soaking into my blouse and I could not move my legs. Could not feel them. I tried to wiggle my toes and received nothing back. Absolute zero below my hips.
