i will follow you north (pam/karen) pg13
title: i will follow you north (and south, east and west)
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): pam/karen
rating: pg13
word count: 3701
spoilers: none.
notes:
summary: au. karen was the one to start at dunder-mifflin, not jim. simultaneous evolution of pam, her art, and her love life.
west
Oblivion is white, she decides. White and perfect and endless. It doesn’t crowd, nor drown, nor live in a way that isn’t absolute truth. It’s the clear ring of the worker’s high-pitched pounding on the new bridge across town, singing through the half-nude trees; the lack of modesty in the branches’ barren bareness. It’s the curl of toes over edges, the haze below within the precipice.
It is naïve hope; it is the beginning of every story.
*
Pam begins to wonder if this is what going insane feels like. The light next to the entryway keeps flickering sporadically, florescent and pale and on and off and then on again. The faucet in the ladies room is leaky and she swears, however improbable, that she can hear it, constantly.
Plip-plop. Flicker. Plip-plop. Flicker.
She feels as if there is something she’s missing, some absent joy or swollen fulfillment that once was but had abandoned her without word or memory. Inside this void, days aren’t days, but tiny rubber bands that stretch and stretch then snap back at her viciously. She can’t say when the feeling began, or if she’d always felt like this, like she was tired in a bone-deep kind of way that no sleep could cure.
It’s a terrible feeling to need something you can’t name.
She feels discontent while awake and asleep her dreams are filled with blind horses that gallop over sand dunes then disappear over the horizon, the riders that saddle them dressed in grey with cloths draped over their faces.
Five-fifteen finds Pam buckling herself into the passenger seat of the truck, listening to the ornery engine start with a nostalgic smile pulled taut across her lips. Roy backs out of the parking space as the cab hums and purrs, and she pretends her head is pressed to the soft, warm belly of a great wolf.
Autumn leaves scrape against the pavement as they drive past, miniature tornadoes swirling them into chaos. The traffic light up ahead will only blink open one of her three, multicolored eyes at a time, and Pam anticipates with which shade she will look upon them.
This is where the beginning sprouts, when even the earth cannot feel the stirrings.
*
She stares at the blank canvas, and though she sees opportunity and revelation there, she has no idea where to start.
north
The whole of her palm is stained black, inked dark with charcoal smoothing over the lines and creases there, her future suddenly faceless and unreadable.
The valleys under her nails are choked with soot.
*
Pam tugs a sweater over her shoulders, burying inside the folds of the thick fabric as if they were the arms of a lover. The clock ticks against the insides of her skull.
She often feels as if she’s sinking and is merely peering up through the tangle of seaweed and dirty aqua blue, slowly growing cold.
“Hey,” comes a soft voice from above the ripples, and she surfaces to mauve lips bowed gracefully upward and straightly chopped bangs. The lips part. “I’m looking for Michael Scott?”
Pam blinks three times before plastering on her receptionist smile, politely plastic, and spinning her body sideways to angle toward the woman.
“Are you here to interview for the new sales position?”
She expecting a curt head bob, or maybe a cheery yes, but instead the woman scoots her forearms to rest against the desk, her head dipped low and her body slouched and looming.
“Well according to your boss I already have the job, as long as I quote ‘bring the twins along with me every day.’ I’m assuming that was a reference to my breasts, one that I hoped was a tasteless joke made ironically, but from your expression I’m guessing not?”
She hadn’t realized her face had twisted in morbid delight, her brow furrowed but her grin wide and amused. She’s suddenly very aware of the expressive shapes her muscles form under the skin of her face, the angle of her jaw, the set to her lips. What it’s saying to anyone who might look at her; if it’s giving her away.
This is when she realizes she hasn’t felt this spark of humor in two years.
“Afraid not,” Pam chokes out.
There’s a commotion as Michael comes barreling out of his office, accusing Pam of keeping the hot new girl to herself. He disappears with a misplaced word and a grumble just as quickly as he had appeared, and Karen looks over at Pam with wide, startled eyes.
“Any advice?”
Pam pops her lips, considering.
“The key is sarcasm. He can’t tell the difference, so you can insult him back as much as you want.”
Pam surreptitiously eavesdrops on the interview from the corner of her eye and an “accidentally” pressed conference call button on the phone in Michael’s office. She spends the next hour ducked low and guilty in her chair with the receiver cradled closely between a hunched shoulder and her ear.
And later:
“Hey,” Karen calls from the coat rack and Pam fakes a startle, as if she hadn’t been spying the whole time. She’s suddenly very aware of the other woman’s presence behind her left shoulder, like a devil perched there whispering all her darkest secrets.
Pam cranes her neck instead of spinning in her chair, deciding it appears more nonchalant. Karen walks into her direct line of sight, offering a suddenly timid smile.
“I was wondering. If, um, you’d like to go get a drink after work sometime.”
She tilts her head, considering the offer instead of knee-jerking her way into a polite response. The bud of a genuine smile begins to bloom on her lips, her mouth opening to respond, when a gruff voice crops up from the doorway.
“Ready to go, Pammy?”
Her eyes dart to Roy, and finds that guilt is a deciding factor in the press of her lips. But for what?, she questions herself, as she nods dreamily.
Awkward introductions are made. Pleasantries are exchanged.
Pam becomes aware, not all at once but in tiny increments, that Roy can’t stop looking at Karen, Pam refuses to stray her gaze from Roy and Karen can’t take her eyes off of Pam’s ring finger.
Strange.
“Maybe sometime,” Pam answers belatedly, as she winds a scarf Roy’s mother knitted for her tightly around her neck, tucking the frayed ends into her puffy coat. Off Karen’s confused look, she clarifies, “That after-work drink?”
Karen picks at her cuticles, shifting from foot to foot, as if she’s not sure what she’s still doing here and is hoping gravity (or perhaps teleportation) will take her somewhere else if she wills it hard enough.
“Sure,” she offers a tight, polite smile, “Anytime.”
And later still:
“So that new chick seems pretty nice.”
Only the lilt to the way he says nice sounds more like hot.
“Yeah,” Pam agrees from the inside of the refrigerator, the cool air soothing her burning cheeks, “She is.”
-
The vague shape of a dark, ominous thing arises on the butcher paper, heavy shadows and bright, unrealistic highlights making it appear distorted and strange. She still can’t bring herself to smudge the edges and pull some grey from the background, to give it depth.
It could be an airplane, she decides, sitting back and sipping a long-gone-cold cup of tea. Or the interior of the beat-up car she owned in high school. Anything that could take her away.
east
A faint, verdant vine grows under the steady pressure of a similarly-colored pencil, weaving through the intricacies of fuchsia and sky blue and violet already budding tentatively on the page.
Colors bloom and recede, knuckling under beneath bolder colors, fuller petals, and a more confident hand.
-
The sun rises like an Easter egg paint palate, with melted, dripping colors and translucent clouds.
Sitting cross-legged on the lacquered floors of an echoic living room, Pam spreads the Sunday paper out flat before her, as if to replace a carpet she has yet to buy. This is too early for her, even she knows that, but there’s a promise to the cracking of a new day, the chilled, spring air causing her bare toes to curl on her new front stoop as she retrieves said paper. It is hope, and it is exactly what she needs.
She drags a rapidly darkening fingertip down the line of ads, searching for a couch and two chairs to keep watch over the first home she’s ever owned alone, the way Roy’s lay-z boy and rabbit-ear antennas used to in her old house.
She doesn’t regret it. Not the fact that Roy got the house, or that she spent her share of the wedding money on a recent model of a used car and a modern apartment, or that she split with her ex-fiancé in the first place. It was time, she’d explained gently over dinner one night a month ago, and they both knew it. Pam could tell that Roy hadn’t realized this yet, that he was still in a holding pattern of blaming all their problems on her absence, and not the other way around. The hardest part was always letting go; once that was done, the joy came from rediscovering all the other things you can do with two free arms that you’d forgotten while you’d spent all that time holding on so tight.
Three, quick knocks rap against her screen door, and it’s only then that Pam notices the time.
“Come in,” she calls to the visitor, and Karen’s head peeking inside follows the squeaky sound of the door being opened.
“You’re not ready,” Karen states matter-of-factly, resting a shoulder against the wall.
Pam looks down at herself; yoga pants, a holey t-shirt bearing the growling lion of her high school mascot and a loose pony tail.
“Yeah, no, I’m sorry. I lost track of time,” she apologizes with a guilty expression, and jogs over to her bedroom. “Just give me a few minutes to change.”
“’K,” the other woman calls out to her retreating back, “I’ll just wait here, make myself comfortable.” She looks around pointedly at the empty room. “Oh, wait.”
Pam tugs a blouse over her head and her reply is muffled by the fabric stretched over her face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it.”
She emerges a few minutes later in a more respectable outfit of jeans, a colorful blouse with puffed sleeves and open-toed flats. This isn’t a special occasion, just a Saturday afternoon. And, despite a nagging thought in periphery of her mind, this is not a date.
She’d be lying if she tried to say that all of the growing and blooming she’s been doing the past few months has been without Karen’s help. It was Karen who suggested that maybe marriage couldn’t solve all their problems; Karen who encouraged her to pick up a couple art classes a few months from now; Karen who answered her telephone in the wee hours of the morning, Pam’s voice small and scared on the other line when she decided to leave Roy; Karen who stayed with her that first night in a strange, new apartment. She also doesn’t want to say that she couldn’t have done it on her own. She probably could have, eventually. But it would have been slow like carriage rides and full of just as many halting stops, and she’s made peace with that particular trade off.
Pam takes a last, evaluating look around the apartment before she locks up, and she’d be a fool to pass off the shiver that runs through her as Karen’s hand lingers on her elbow as she walks out the door as a chill.
She is not a watercolor any longer.
-
An imaginary garden inspired by the real-life blossoms of the park burst forth from Pam’s sketchbook, the small, rectangular page barely able to contain it all. The edge of the wooden bench digs into her thigh as she kicks her legs this way and that, patient with the artistic process but longingly eying the wide expanse of the mowed field. The world seems to have so much more color these days, and she can’t decide if that’s due to the tumult in seasons or the new way she looks at everything now.
Karen flips another page with a papery shuffle beside her, and Pam smothers a sly smile by pressing the end of her pencil to her lips. With the warm, steady pressure of another’s thigh against her hip, the jungle on her paper continues to intertwine.
south
A dramatic, scarlet arch sweeps under the pads of her fingers, blended soft by her warm skin and the steady press of confidence. Red prints leave a kind of trail from the undersides of her knees to the hem of her thin, make-shift bathrobe, up to the tip of her already freckled nose, impatience and contemplation leaving its mark everywhere.
The shadows form slow and dark on the shape’s underbelly and the creeping reach of its silhouette against hardwood; highlights follow, stinging the shiny, patent bow and a miniature gold buckle with a white white glimmer.
-
The office is sluggish in the July temperatures, despite the air conditioning’s exorcism of the heat from their midst. Pam finds that she doesn’t mind the dull tick of the clock or the click of Kevin’s nail clippers or Angela’s prim cough when Pam curses at a paper cut, so long as she remembers both the death of this workday and the salvation waiting just beyond it. She raises her eyebrows at Karen from across the room, telepathically communicating both a promise for later and amusement at Michael’s antics.
They haven’t mentioned the evolution of their relationship to any coworkers, both dreading their reactions and wanting to retain their little bubble of joy as a private matter. Pam’s nearly positive that the camera crew knows; when the producers arrived with their equipment and questions and red, steady lights nearly a month ago, they were worried that their sole purpose would become outing them on national television. But that’s not the type of footage they take; they’re more concerned with quiet moments and smiles hidden inside euphemisms as a break from Michael’s loud, obvious antics. They need balance, softness, and if Pam and Karen haven’t become the unspoken poster couple for non-relationship relationships, then they have no idea what they are. Pam had always been frustrated by the ‘will-they-or-won’t-they’ plot; this is more a game of finding plastic babies in king cakes.
It’s strange, the way she has to wrestle with her lips to keep them from smiling constantly. How she struggles with the decision every morning over whether to wear a turtleneck to cover up the reddish, purple mark in the oval of Karen’s lips, or draw a big, bright circle around it in felt tip and tie her hair back. She’d trying hard not to imagine the way Karen’s legs looked in that dress last night, or how she had eyed the dipping expanse of Pam’s collarbone. She has a lot to be happy about.
Pam’s taking a new set of art classes, this time in pastels. Warm shades always seem to color her hands, as if the tips of her fingers are perpetually on fire, catching light switches and keyboard keys like lit matches.
Her life is beginning to feel not like work and pleasure; not divvied up and cut with a serrated blade down the center into two, neat halves, but as one life. She begins to notice the splashes of color on the planes of grey-ish white supply shelves, and she calculates how much red, yellow and blue would go into transferring them to paper.
And in her budding relationship with Karen, she wonders over a careful cataloguing of her feelings like indexed folders, adoration and gratitude and frustration stacked next to a tiny one labeled ‘love’ that is just beginning to thicken.
She is one person who lives, one heart that loves, one mind that contemplates, one woman that desires. The richness of beauty is everywhere, she’s discovering; not only in the slickness of pastels on her fingertips or the smoothness of Karen’s caramel thighs, but in the sweep of blinding light inside the copier and the murmur of voices in an otherwise quiet room.
She is uncovering the fullness of life and she will never let it go again.
-
Pam’s back presses into the meager cushion of the rocking chair, the buttons of someone’s work shirt digging just barely into her skin; whether it’s hers or Karen’s is up for debate. She eyes the pair of shiny red heels on the hardwood floor of her bedroom, and looks back at the pad of paper in her lap, the shoes partially rendered. She tries to place the moment of disposal last night, the sound of them hitting the floor - clack, clack, one right after the other - but the sensation of Karen’s hands on her waist, warm breath on the slope of her neck, hazy words slurred carelessly into air spooled tight, all rushes her and she can’t remember.
Karen stirs across the room, the covers shifting over the sinuous movement of her shoulders, and Pam finds that the moment of impact, the second leading up to this sprawl of red patent leather and askew, fashionable bows is far from the most important matter.
center
The paint under her nails could almost be mud, could almost make her a gardener of flower bulbs and roots instead of one of ideas, one of form and color and negative space. But the brown tint is too citrus and gummy to be dirt.
The angled brush catches around a scalloped shape, the interruption of a rounder one, then the divots in each. A warmer brown emerges on her palate with the addition of a touch red, maybe a bit of blue; the folds and large billows of a background shape come into being with that particular color.
Careful not to touch and dirty the photograph, Pam squints and adjusts, capturing absolute perfection with the accuracy of her faults.
-
“We’re lost.”
“Nope. I refuse to admit it. We’re just… directionally challenged.”
“Which is fancy speak for ‘we’re lost’.”
Pam squints down at the map spread out like a papery ocean in her lap, then out at the road, trying to discern North and South and 21st Street versus 21st Avenue. She isn’t having much luck. The darkening sky moves closer and the thunder seems like it’s chuckling at her inability to navigate. Smug bastard.
“Wait… I think I’ve got it.”
Pam manages to sort out the grid of streets, matching passing signs to the map and synthesizing them into a small, imaginary you-are-here dot in the paper city.
Karen pulls into a metered spot in front of a quaint boutique with French vintage and pink tulle in the window, taking the keys out of the ignition without making a motion to exit the car. Her hand snakes over the center console and squeezes Pam’s knee.
“You ready?”
She nods jerkily, still in a heady daze, and jumps out the passenger door before she can think better of it.
No tiny bell above the door announces their arrival and she suddenly feel like she’s intruding, like she’s somewhere she doesn’t belong. Pam swallows down the insecurities and hopes they’ll stay there instead of haunting her like an expired lunch; she distracts herself by glancing around the gallery. Art clings to the walls in neat tidy rows, some with ragged edges, others framed in black cherry, installations suspended from the ceiling over echoic wood floors.
Gertrude emerges from the backroom like she has a sixth sense about her art studio’s comings and goings, fluttering around them with little wings of “it’s so good to see you” and “nice to meet you” and “did you find the place okay?”. She adjusts the black plastic frames of her glasses with a single finger and lays her palms flat against the counter upfront, as if it’s the only thing that will calm her down.
“So… what do you think? Are you on board? We’d love to have you!”
Pam wishes she was talking to someone who could use periods at the ends of her statements once and awhile, and her stomach gives a nervous little wiggle, but maybe excitement is what she needs. This is a big step after all. She could use a fluffy, pompom laden cheerleader. They always seemed so confident at pep rallies; that’s part of why she hated them so much.
Karen, sensing her discomfort, places the steady warmth of her palm in the small of her back, letting her fingers graze up and down her spine. Pam breathes.
“How soon should I bring in my pieces?”
-
Pam nudges the photograph of Karen napping on their flee market couch, tilting it into the stream of sunlight. She traces the hills of Karen’s tucked knuckles, curled just beside her pillowed cheek. She wishes she could be rendering this painting from life, that Karen was really asleep beside her instead of this vacant furniture, but unfortunately one of them still keeps an office job.
The scarred leather of the sofa brings out the coffee tone in her skin and the mocha of her hair, each just a shade or two different. But certain items stand out starkly from the otherwise monochrome painting: the buttercream of her sleeves, the burgundy of her parted lips, and the gleaming gold of the ring circling an aptly named finger.
Pam can’t even remember all the times the clock had struck 11:11 and she’d found herself wishing for another life, or more courage, or a bolt of creativity. Now she only prays for things to stay just as they are, to hold onto the goodness that she’d found.
She feels whole.
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): pam/karen
rating: pg13
word count: 3701
spoilers: none.
notes:
summary: au. karen was the one to start at dunder-mifflin, not jim. simultaneous evolution of pam, her art, and her love life.
west
Oblivion is white, she decides. White and perfect and endless. It doesn’t crowd, nor drown, nor live in a way that isn’t absolute truth. It’s the clear ring of the worker’s high-pitched pounding on the new bridge across town, singing through the half-nude trees; the lack of modesty in the branches’ barren bareness. It’s the curl of toes over edges, the haze below within the precipice.
It is naïve hope; it is the beginning of every story.
*
Pam begins to wonder if this is what going insane feels like. The light next to the entryway keeps flickering sporadically, florescent and pale and on and off and then on again. The faucet in the ladies room is leaky and she swears, however improbable, that she can hear it, constantly.
Plip-plop. Flicker. Plip-plop. Flicker.
She feels as if there is something she’s missing, some absent joy or swollen fulfillment that once was but had abandoned her without word or memory. Inside this void, days aren’t days, but tiny rubber bands that stretch and stretch then snap back at her viciously. She can’t say when the feeling began, or if she’d always felt like this, like she was tired in a bone-deep kind of way that no sleep could cure.
It’s a terrible feeling to need something you can’t name.
She feels discontent while awake and asleep her dreams are filled with blind horses that gallop over sand dunes then disappear over the horizon, the riders that saddle them dressed in grey with cloths draped over their faces.
Five-fifteen finds Pam buckling herself into the passenger seat of the truck, listening to the ornery engine start with a nostalgic smile pulled taut across her lips. Roy backs out of the parking space as the cab hums and purrs, and she pretends her head is pressed to the soft, warm belly of a great wolf.
Autumn leaves scrape against the pavement as they drive past, miniature tornadoes swirling them into chaos. The traffic light up ahead will only blink open one of her three, multicolored eyes at a time, and Pam anticipates with which shade she will look upon them.
This is where the beginning sprouts, when even the earth cannot feel the stirrings.
*
She stares at the blank canvas, and though she sees opportunity and revelation there, she has no idea where to start.
north
The whole of her palm is stained black, inked dark with charcoal smoothing over the lines and creases there, her future suddenly faceless and unreadable.
The valleys under her nails are choked with soot.
*
Pam tugs a sweater over her shoulders, burying inside the folds of the thick fabric as if they were the arms of a lover. The clock ticks against the insides of her skull.
She often feels as if she’s sinking and is merely peering up through the tangle of seaweed and dirty aqua blue, slowly growing cold.
“Hey,” comes a soft voice from above the ripples, and she surfaces to mauve lips bowed gracefully upward and straightly chopped bangs. The lips part. “I’m looking for Michael Scott?”
Pam blinks three times before plastering on her receptionist smile, politely plastic, and spinning her body sideways to angle toward the woman.
“Are you here to interview for the new sales position?”
She expecting a curt head bob, or maybe a cheery yes, but instead the woman scoots her forearms to rest against the desk, her head dipped low and her body slouched and looming.
“Well according to your boss I already have the job, as long as I quote ‘bring the twins along with me every day.’ I’m assuming that was a reference to my breasts, one that I hoped was a tasteless joke made ironically, but from your expression I’m guessing not?”
She hadn’t realized her face had twisted in morbid delight, her brow furrowed but her grin wide and amused. She’s suddenly very aware of the expressive shapes her muscles form under the skin of her face, the angle of her jaw, the set to her lips. What it’s saying to anyone who might look at her; if it’s giving her away.
This is when she realizes she hasn’t felt this spark of humor in two years.
“Afraid not,” Pam chokes out.
There’s a commotion as Michael comes barreling out of his office, accusing Pam of keeping the hot new girl to herself. He disappears with a misplaced word and a grumble just as quickly as he had appeared, and Karen looks over at Pam with wide, startled eyes.
“Any advice?”
Pam pops her lips, considering.
“The key is sarcasm. He can’t tell the difference, so you can insult him back as much as you want.”
Pam surreptitiously eavesdrops on the interview from the corner of her eye and an “accidentally” pressed conference call button on the phone in Michael’s office. She spends the next hour ducked low and guilty in her chair with the receiver cradled closely between a hunched shoulder and her ear.
And later:
“Hey,” Karen calls from the coat rack and Pam fakes a startle, as if she hadn’t been spying the whole time. She’s suddenly very aware of the other woman’s presence behind her left shoulder, like a devil perched there whispering all her darkest secrets.
Pam cranes her neck instead of spinning in her chair, deciding it appears more nonchalant. Karen walks into her direct line of sight, offering a suddenly timid smile.
“I was wondering. If, um, you’d like to go get a drink after work sometime.”
She tilts her head, considering the offer instead of knee-jerking her way into a polite response. The bud of a genuine smile begins to bloom on her lips, her mouth opening to respond, when a gruff voice crops up from the doorway.
“Ready to go, Pammy?”
Her eyes dart to Roy, and finds that guilt is a deciding factor in the press of her lips. But for what?, she questions herself, as she nods dreamily.
Awkward introductions are made. Pleasantries are exchanged.
Pam becomes aware, not all at once but in tiny increments, that Roy can’t stop looking at Karen, Pam refuses to stray her gaze from Roy and Karen can’t take her eyes off of Pam’s ring finger.
Strange.
“Maybe sometime,” Pam answers belatedly, as she winds a scarf Roy’s mother knitted for her tightly around her neck, tucking the frayed ends into her puffy coat. Off Karen’s confused look, she clarifies, “That after-work drink?”
Karen picks at her cuticles, shifting from foot to foot, as if she’s not sure what she’s still doing here and is hoping gravity (or perhaps teleportation) will take her somewhere else if she wills it hard enough.
“Sure,” she offers a tight, polite smile, “Anytime.”
And later still:
“So that new chick seems pretty nice.”
Only the lilt to the way he says nice sounds more like hot.
“Yeah,” Pam agrees from the inside of the refrigerator, the cool air soothing her burning cheeks, “She is.”
-
The vague shape of a dark, ominous thing arises on the butcher paper, heavy shadows and bright, unrealistic highlights making it appear distorted and strange. She still can’t bring herself to smudge the edges and pull some grey from the background, to give it depth.
It could be an airplane, she decides, sitting back and sipping a long-gone-cold cup of tea. Or the interior of the beat-up car she owned in high school. Anything that could take her away.
east
A faint, verdant vine grows under the steady pressure of a similarly-colored pencil, weaving through the intricacies of fuchsia and sky blue and violet already budding tentatively on the page.
Colors bloom and recede, knuckling under beneath bolder colors, fuller petals, and a more confident hand.
-
The sun rises like an Easter egg paint palate, with melted, dripping colors and translucent clouds.
Sitting cross-legged on the lacquered floors of an echoic living room, Pam spreads the Sunday paper out flat before her, as if to replace a carpet she has yet to buy. This is too early for her, even she knows that, but there’s a promise to the cracking of a new day, the chilled, spring air causing her bare toes to curl on her new front stoop as she retrieves said paper. It is hope, and it is exactly what she needs.
She drags a rapidly darkening fingertip down the line of ads, searching for a couch and two chairs to keep watch over the first home she’s ever owned alone, the way Roy’s lay-z boy and rabbit-ear antennas used to in her old house.
She doesn’t regret it. Not the fact that Roy got the house, or that she spent her share of the wedding money on a recent model of a used car and a modern apartment, or that she split with her ex-fiancé in the first place. It was time, she’d explained gently over dinner one night a month ago, and they both knew it. Pam could tell that Roy hadn’t realized this yet, that he was still in a holding pattern of blaming all their problems on her absence, and not the other way around. The hardest part was always letting go; once that was done, the joy came from rediscovering all the other things you can do with two free arms that you’d forgotten while you’d spent all that time holding on so tight.
Three, quick knocks rap against her screen door, and it’s only then that Pam notices the time.
“Come in,” she calls to the visitor, and Karen’s head peeking inside follows the squeaky sound of the door being opened.
“You’re not ready,” Karen states matter-of-factly, resting a shoulder against the wall.
Pam looks down at herself; yoga pants, a holey t-shirt bearing the growling lion of her high school mascot and a loose pony tail.
“Yeah, no, I’m sorry. I lost track of time,” she apologizes with a guilty expression, and jogs over to her bedroom. “Just give me a few minutes to change.”
“’K,” the other woman calls out to her retreating back, “I’ll just wait here, make myself comfortable.” She looks around pointedly at the empty room. “Oh, wait.”
Pam tugs a blouse over her head and her reply is muffled by the fabric stretched over her face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it.”
She emerges a few minutes later in a more respectable outfit of jeans, a colorful blouse with puffed sleeves and open-toed flats. This isn’t a special occasion, just a Saturday afternoon. And, despite a nagging thought in periphery of her mind, this is not a date.
She’d be lying if she tried to say that all of the growing and blooming she’s been doing the past few months has been without Karen’s help. It was Karen who suggested that maybe marriage couldn’t solve all their problems; Karen who encouraged her to pick up a couple art classes a few months from now; Karen who answered her telephone in the wee hours of the morning, Pam’s voice small and scared on the other line when she decided to leave Roy; Karen who stayed with her that first night in a strange, new apartment. She also doesn’t want to say that she couldn’t have done it on her own. She probably could have, eventually. But it would have been slow like carriage rides and full of just as many halting stops, and she’s made peace with that particular trade off.
Pam takes a last, evaluating look around the apartment before she locks up, and she’d be a fool to pass off the shiver that runs through her as Karen’s hand lingers on her elbow as she walks out the door as a chill.
She is not a watercolor any longer.
-
An imaginary garden inspired by the real-life blossoms of the park burst forth from Pam’s sketchbook, the small, rectangular page barely able to contain it all. The edge of the wooden bench digs into her thigh as she kicks her legs this way and that, patient with the artistic process but longingly eying the wide expanse of the mowed field. The world seems to have so much more color these days, and she can’t decide if that’s due to the tumult in seasons or the new way she looks at everything now.
Karen flips another page with a papery shuffle beside her, and Pam smothers a sly smile by pressing the end of her pencil to her lips. With the warm, steady pressure of another’s thigh against her hip, the jungle on her paper continues to intertwine.
south
A dramatic, scarlet arch sweeps under the pads of her fingers, blended soft by her warm skin and the steady press of confidence. Red prints leave a kind of trail from the undersides of her knees to the hem of her thin, make-shift bathrobe, up to the tip of her already freckled nose, impatience and contemplation leaving its mark everywhere.
The shadows form slow and dark on the shape’s underbelly and the creeping reach of its silhouette against hardwood; highlights follow, stinging the shiny, patent bow and a miniature gold buckle with a white white glimmer.
-
The office is sluggish in the July temperatures, despite the air conditioning’s exorcism of the heat from their midst. Pam finds that she doesn’t mind the dull tick of the clock or the click of Kevin’s nail clippers or Angela’s prim cough when Pam curses at a paper cut, so long as she remembers both the death of this workday and the salvation waiting just beyond it. She raises her eyebrows at Karen from across the room, telepathically communicating both a promise for later and amusement at Michael’s antics.
They haven’t mentioned the evolution of their relationship to any coworkers, both dreading their reactions and wanting to retain their little bubble of joy as a private matter. Pam’s nearly positive that the camera crew knows; when the producers arrived with their equipment and questions and red, steady lights nearly a month ago, they were worried that their sole purpose would become outing them on national television. But that’s not the type of footage they take; they’re more concerned with quiet moments and smiles hidden inside euphemisms as a break from Michael’s loud, obvious antics. They need balance, softness, and if Pam and Karen haven’t become the unspoken poster couple for non-relationship relationships, then they have no idea what they are. Pam had always been frustrated by the ‘will-they-or-won’t-they’ plot; this is more a game of finding plastic babies in king cakes.
It’s strange, the way she has to wrestle with her lips to keep them from smiling constantly. How she struggles with the decision every morning over whether to wear a turtleneck to cover up the reddish, purple mark in the oval of Karen’s lips, or draw a big, bright circle around it in felt tip and tie her hair back. She’d trying hard not to imagine the way Karen’s legs looked in that dress last night, or how she had eyed the dipping expanse of Pam’s collarbone. She has a lot to be happy about.
Pam’s taking a new set of art classes, this time in pastels. Warm shades always seem to color her hands, as if the tips of her fingers are perpetually on fire, catching light switches and keyboard keys like lit matches.
Her life is beginning to feel not like work and pleasure; not divvied up and cut with a serrated blade down the center into two, neat halves, but as one life. She begins to notice the splashes of color on the planes of grey-ish white supply shelves, and she calculates how much red, yellow and blue would go into transferring them to paper.
And in her budding relationship with Karen, she wonders over a careful cataloguing of her feelings like indexed folders, adoration and gratitude and frustration stacked next to a tiny one labeled ‘love’ that is just beginning to thicken.
She is one person who lives, one heart that loves, one mind that contemplates, one woman that desires. The richness of beauty is everywhere, she’s discovering; not only in the slickness of pastels on her fingertips or the smoothness of Karen’s caramel thighs, but in the sweep of blinding light inside the copier and the murmur of voices in an otherwise quiet room.
She is uncovering the fullness of life and she will never let it go again.
-
Pam’s back presses into the meager cushion of the rocking chair, the buttons of someone’s work shirt digging just barely into her skin; whether it’s hers or Karen’s is up for debate. She eyes the pair of shiny red heels on the hardwood floor of her bedroom, and looks back at the pad of paper in her lap, the shoes partially rendered. She tries to place the moment of disposal last night, the sound of them hitting the floor - clack, clack, one right after the other - but the sensation of Karen’s hands on her waist, warm breath on the slope of her neck, hazy words slurred carelessly into air spooled tight, all rushes her and she can’t remember.
Karen stirs across the room, the covers shifting over the sinuous movement of her shoulders, and Pam finds that the moment of impact, the second leading up to this sprawl of red patent leather and askew, fashionable bows is far from the most important matter.
center
The paint under her nails could almost be mud, could almost make her a gardener of flower bulbs and roots instead of one of ideas, one of form and color and negative space. But the brown tint is too citrus and gummy to be dirt.
The angled brush catches around a scalloped shape, the interruption of a rounder one, then the divots in each. A warmer brown emerges on her palate with the addition of a touch red, maybe a bit of blue; the folds and large billows of a background shape come into being with that particular color.
Careful not to touch and dirty the photograph, Pam squints and adjusts, capturing absolute perfection with the accuracy of her faults.
-
“We’re lost.”
“Nope. I refuse to admit it. We’re just… directionally challenged.”
“Which is fancy speak for ‘we’re lost’.”
Pam squints down at the map spread out like a papery ocean in her lap, then out at the road, trying to discern North and South and 21st Street versus 21st Avenue. She isn’t having much luck. The darkening sky moves closer and the thunder seems like it’s chuckling at her inability to navigate. Smug bastard.
“Wait… I think I’ve got it.”
Pam manages to sort out the grid of streets, matching passing signs to the map and synthesizing them into a small, imaginary you-are-here dot in the paper city.
Karen pulls into a metered spot in front of a quaint boutique with French vintage and pink tulle in the window, taking the keys out of the ignition without making a motion to exit the car. Her hand snakes over the center console and squeezes Pam’s knee.
“You ready?”
She nods jerkily, still in a heady daze, and jumps out the passenger door before she can think better of it.
No tiny bell above the door announces their arrival and she suddenly feel like she’s intruding, like she’s somewhere she doesn’t belong. Pam swallows down the insecurities and hopes they’ll stay there instead of haunting her like an expired lunch; she distracts herself by glancing around the gallery. Art clings to the walls in neat tidy rows, some with ragged edges, others framed in black cherry, installations suspended from the ceiling over echoic wood floors.
Gertrude emerges from the backroom like she has a sixth sense about her art studio’s comings and goings, fluttering around them with little wings of “it’s so good to see you” and “nice to meet you” and “did you find the place okay?”. She adjusts the black plastic frames of her glasses with a single finger and lays her palms flat against the counter upfront, as if it’s the only thing that will calm her down.
“So… what do you think? Are you on board? We’d love to have you!”
Pam wishes she was talking to someone who could use periods at the ends of her statements once and awhile, and her stomach gives a nervous little wiggle, but maybe excitement is what she needs. This is a big step after all. She could use a fluffy, pompom laden cheerleader. They always seemed so confident at pep rallies; that’s part of why she hated them so much.
Karen, sensing her discomfort, places the steady warmth of her palm in the small of her back, letting her fingers graze up and down her spine. Pam breathes.
“How soon should I bring in my pieces?”
-
Pam nudges the photograph of Karen napping on their flee market couch, tilting it into the stream of sunlight. She traces the hills of Karen’s tucked knuckles, curled just beside her pillowed cheek. She wishes she could be rendering this painting from life, that Karen was really asleep beside her instead of this vacant furniture, but unfortunately one of them still keeps an office job.
The scarred leather of the sofa brings out the coffee tone in her skin and the mocha of her hair, each just a shade or two different. But certain items stand out starkly from the otherwise monochrome painting: the buttercream of her sleeves, the burgundy of her parted lips, and the gleaming gold of the ring circling an aptly named finger.
Pam can’t even remember all the times the clock had struck 11:11 and she’d found herself wishing for another life, or more courage, or a bolt of creativity. Now she only prays for things to stay just as they are, to hold onto the goodness that she’d found.
She feels whole.