Marilyn Abildskov
Fiction
A Clothes Line was named a finalist for the 2026 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose, judged by Lucy Ives.
it starts in late summer. Early evening. Outside a lecture hall, everyone waits. He’s in Levi’s and a white t-shirt. She’s in a loose black skirt and a cream-colored linen shirt.
They met through mutual friends. In this, a university town full of lookalike students and lookalike professors, everyone knows everyone. And if they don’t know everyone yet, they will soon enough. Everyone becomes a friend of a friend or a friend here or something more than a friend.
Standing outside, the two exchange small talk. Then, as the last trickle of August light disappears, an underwater feeling begins. She feels drops of sweat dripping down her neck, so when the doors open, the air-conditioning shocks.
Without discussion, they take side-by-side seats.
* * *
Before the black cotton skirt, before the cream-colored linen, there were others. Other skirts. Other shirts. A cream cotton sweater with fine lines of purple. A pair of beat-up khaki pants. A brown silk tank top. A long tweed coat worn with black leather gloves. Plain. She tried to keep it plain.
* * *
As the lights dim, the man leans over and touches her vest.
Nice, he whispers.
Over her linen shirt, she’s wearing a vest, whose front is made up of mirrors and pieces of shells hanging from slivers of red and yellow threads. (So maybe she’s not as plain as she thinks she is?)
Where is it from?
* * *
She remembers what the men wore, the boys too, their baseball caps, their worn-out running shoes, their silk ties, their pleated pants, their faded Levi’s, their Coca-Cola sweatshirts, their Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirts, their wrinkled denim work shirts. Plain. They kept it plain, too.
* * *
The second time she sees him, he’s in Levi’s again. A plaid cotton shirt. It’s late September. The weather has cooled. She’s wearing boots and tights and a crinkled black skirt, which she likes because it relieves her of trying to pretend to be something she’s not. Polished. Ironed. Put together. Even when she ironed her clothes, she wasn’t an ironed person. This is the great divide among women: the ironed and the unironed. Over her skirt, a pale green sweater made of rayon and cotton whose tag says HANDMADE IN TURKEY. Twenty-two slender buttons line the front, buttons the color of tiny bones.
* * *
Once, when she was an undergraduate, she sat in another auditorium next to a young man she sort of knew. Were the two enrolled in an introductory course in art history? In geology? In anthropology? He smelled of eucalyptus and weed. In front of them was a dark-haired woman.
Before the lights dimmed and the lecture began, she stared at the young woman’s neck and saw a tag sticking out of her sweater. SMALL, the tag said.
The young man stared too. She could feel heat rising from his skin. It’s hard, she thought then, to resist what’s in front of you, what’s just within reach. It’s hard, she thinks now, not to fall in love with the small.
* * *
Beginning graduate school, she’s thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. She’s from Washington State. South Dakota. Utah. Maine. She studies literature. Art history. Geography. Anthropology. She waited tables before graduate school. She tutored. She taught little kids how to swim. She expects to wait tables again. To ask, how do you want your eggs? To tutor high school students, teaching them that the weaker assertion makes the stronger argument. To show little kids how to doggy paddle. How to float, saying, Just pretend you’re dead.
He’s twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-five. Thirty-nine. He’s from Iowa. Kentucky. Massachusetts. Maine. He recently finished a master’s degree. In philosophy. Sociology. Economics. Computer science. You can always find work in computers, he says. He worked in a warehouse before. As a lifeguard. As a waiter. As a mechanic, specializing in fixing heaters and air conditioners, he says.
So you ran hot and cold? she says, adding, I’m sorry. That can’t be the first time you’ve heard that, right?
* * *
The third time: Levi’s, a pink Oxford button-down shirt and tweed coat for him, dark-washed boot cut jeans and a black sweater and navy peacoat for her.
One dresses for comfort, the other to blend in. One’s on his way to work, the other killing two hours before her next class.
He buys her coffee.
Is this when he mentions a wife? Two kids? A baby’s a girl. The toddler’s a boy.
He tucks everyone into conversation like laying a new baby into the crib. Carefully. Trying not to wake anyone.
She asks if there’s sibling rivalry yet, if the brother wants his baby sister gone. She keeps her voice measured.
Her coffee’s turned cold. The shop is full of fresh-faced undergrads wearing oversized jeans and threadbare plaid shirts. Outside, leaves the gather themselves into cliques, whispering among themselves, wondering which team will win.
No, he says. No murderous vibes yet.
The coffee kicks in. A wife. Two kids.
She laughs. She’s awake now. Awake.
* * *
The next time they meet, it’s outside a movie theatre, one that specializes in arthouse films. On the marquee, The King of Comedy, on the poster, Rupert Pupkin, arms extended, holding a crown, a figure within a Joker card. They chat about films when he asks, spur of the moment, does she want to grab a quick lunch?
It’s late afternoon, October, the air sharp and snappy.
He needs to get a haircut, he says as they walk toward a cheap Chinese place. His brother-in-law is getting married over the weekend. His wife has said he can’t go looking like a shaggy dog.
They order plates of chow mein and Diet Cokes. He asks her questions. How many siblings does she have? Where did she live before here? What are the big, famous books she’s never read? Does she have a favorite knock-knock joke?
She answers, wondering who’s going to pay the bill. Two sisters. A small city in the mountains. The Age of Innocence. No, why?
When the waitress brings the bill, he says he’ll pick this up. He pays in cash, leaving behind two cookies in plastic on the small black tray.
Outside, the wind blows theatrically. She buttons her coat like a stupid young woman in a stupid movie even though she knows she’s not even young anymore. She wishes she’d worn gloves. He asks how his hair looks. His long hair’s blowing straight up, cartoon-like. He looks like the lead in a Hollywood comedy.
Your hair looks fine, she says. Put plainly? Better than fine.
* * *
In December she finishes her last paper, then cleans out her closet, organizing her clothes according to type: sweaters, shirts, trousers, and so on. Then she organizes those piles by size. Small. Medium. Large. Extra Large. There are clothes in sizes ranging from six to sixteen.
All winter she wears an oversized barn coat from a discount store.
See this? a man at a party asks her one night in January. He taps the side of his nose. Frostbite, he says. I can’t feel a thing.
* * *
In March she sees him from a distance with his wife on a Saturday morning at Hy-Vee’s. She looks pretty in black leggings under an oversized sweater.
Just like me.
* * *
In April she sees the whole family downtown, the wife pushing the baby girl in a stroller, the married man carrying their young son on his shoulders. The boy pulls at his father’s diminishing hair. The wife smiles. She’s wearing a gray cardigan over a loose sundress, yellow, sleeveless. Very thin. Very pretty.
OK. Nothing like me.
* * *
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Beets.
Beets who?
Beats me.
* * *
In May she opens the windows of her second-floor apartment and listens for sirens.
* * *
In June she closes the windows and prays the clunky air conditioner works.
* * *
In August she goes to a party thrown by a graduate student from her department. The usual mix of university folks are there, including the man with the shaggy hair. His hair is short now. Turns out, it’s the host’s next-door neighbor.
Where is your wife? the host asks him.
She’s feeling under the weather, he says. Maybe a summer cold. She’s home with our daughter. But here, he says, lifting his son, is our other one, a little madman.
She watches him from the corner of her eye as she sips on warm beer. He fills up a paper plate with squares of cheddar cheese and an assortment of crackers, taking bites and handing cubes of cheese to his son. The boy drops the cheese. The man laughs and hands him more.
After a few minutes, the boy runs into the living room and crawls onto a woman sitting on the couch. He’s carrying a storybook. Something about a giraffe with a short neck. Or an elephant missing a trunk. Or a dog who has lost its bark.
Read! he screams.
The woman’s sitting cross-legged in a blue halter top and linen shorts. The child pulls her shirt down, grabbing at her breast. She laughs nervously and swats at the child’s hand.
Her man rushes over, picks up his son up, and says, Hey, there Little Man. I know where you’re coming from but you’ve gotta wait till we get home.
* * *
All fall she burns bayberry candles. She makes salmon for dinner. She goes to classes. She studies. She worries about her thesis and soothes herself by buying a corduroy jacket on sale, a membership at the rec center, pretty notebooks from the university bookstore she decides are too pretty to write in.
* * *
She remembers the clothes of her past, not just the plain but the ridiculous. The bright red floral dress. The too-short leather bomber jacket. The green beret. The purple suede pumps.
The green beret would be retro now, back in style. Doesn’t everything eventually come back into style? Even cheating. Now it’s called polyamory.
* * *
She buys a Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt. Olive green cargo pants. A black camisole. At a novelty shop she finds a Donald Duck Pez, a gift she plans to give him.
* * *
One afternoon, he sits on the edge of her bed, lacing up his work boots.
He’s sorry, he says. He has to go home.
He’s worried, he says. I think you left scratches on my back.
* * *
When the following spring comes, she meets a poet who’s twenty-six but looks forty-four. A geologist who says, Hiking is my deal breaker. A special education teacher who says, I don’t understand why you swear so much.
She thinks of The Wizard of Oz. A flying house. Dorothy in her too-tight gingham dress. What was the moral of the story? To hold onto a good pair of shoes?
She sits on the edge of her bed in a gray cotton robe, eating Pez alone.
* * *
Sometimes she sings to herself. A grown-up, melancholy rhyme. Nothing to have, nothing to hold. No one to own, we’re all all alone.
* * *
Where is it from? he asked that first night when they waited for the lecture to begin, their bodies adjusting to the air-conditioned auditorium. She knew what she was supposed to say. Some faraway place, a country across an ocean, someplace more exciting than here. Here meaning a university town. Here meaning in a flyover state. Blink and you miss it. Blink and you miss her.
But she didn’t follow the script. She answered honestly. Was that her first mistake?
Target, she said.
She’d bought the vest at Target.
Later, she thinks she should have said Bangladesh because it was true. If she purchased the vest from Target, some girl in Bangladesh probably made the vest for a pittance, working in a sweatshop. Maybe the girl sewed a note inside the seams. Help me. Please. Maybe she scribbled her address. A plea as the first step to escape. Maybe she dreamed of a place with rolling hills, someplace more exciting than here.
Every state, she thinks, is someone else’s flyover state.
* * *
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Alpaca.
Alpaca who?
Alpaca the trunk, you pack the suitcase.
* * *
She remembers a girl from third grade rumored to be the ninth daughter of polygamists. The girl was quiet. Brought small sack lunches to school in plain brown paper bags. You could see green stems protruding from uncut carrots as she unpacked her lunch. She wore old-fashioned clothes. Long cotton dresses. The fabric looked eternally marked down. She came one year, then disappeared.
By high school, all the girls wore long cotton dresses—prairie dresses, though there wasn’t a prairie in sight.
* * *
All her friends said, You’ll be the one who pays, you know. And, He’s kind of an asshole, you know. And, They’re all alike, these married men, you know. And, At least he’s not one of your professors. Then, He’s not one of your professors, right? And, You’re not his first, you know.
Which she knew.
But knowing had already fallen out of style.
* * *
One friend said, Tell me everything. She was the one you’d least expect to ask. She was the one whose husband had cheated. She was the one who had been the last to know. It’s funny now, she said. But it wasn’t funny then. Anyway, tell me everything. Even the romantic parts. Especially the romantic parts.
* * *
The romantic part happened at a bar that looked like all the other bars on a night that felt like any other night.
What if you’re my Ellen Olenska? he asked.
A small question.
And if it had ended there?
* * *
She wears elastic waist pants now, Eileen Fisher sweaters, a lightweight, belted black wool coat. She teaches Writing at the College Level, The Basics of American Art, Introduction to Physical Geography. Her students say, Do you always wear black? Aren’t you hot wearing black? You remind me of my aunt. She wears a lot of black.
The students sound alike, scorning romance publicly, saying they feel for older women who bought into such a narrow script. That’s the phrase they use: “a narrow script.” But in private, they cry when she asks what’s going on. They’re sorry they’ve missed so many classes, they say. They’re struggling, they say. They didn’t see it coming, this breakup, that breakup, the guy they met on Tinder, the girl they met in class. I think she might have been your student last year, they say. I don’t know why I’m crying, they say. I just feel so dumb, they say.
* * *
(And if Ellen Olenska got a sequel? If she managed to steal the flower of life? If The Age of Innocence became The Age of Something Else?)
* * *
She lives alone now. Grades papers at night. Watches Netflix. Netflix knows her better than anyone. She likes to study her students on Instagram, watching them grow up and graduate, posting photos of their besties on Galentine’s Day. She follows them as they get engaged and get married and have babies, posting pictures when the babies learn to crawl. Their babies grab the old storybooks. The owl who wasn’t wise. The cat who couldn’t meow. She loves Instagram for its babies and its cat videos. Kittens sleeping. Kittens waking. Kittens wearing orange knit caps. She loves Instagram for other things too: images of street style in Paris. In Berlin. In Tokyo. Women in red wool coats and black combat boots and pink crop tops over barrel-legged jeans.
Everything old, from flared jeans to bomber jackets, appears to be new again. The nineties are back with a vengeance. Slip dresses. Ankle boots. Jacquard coats. She wishes she’d saved more—not just the high-waisted jeans or the statement suits but all of it: the purple pants from grade school, the rainbow shirt from high school, the striped railroad overalls she wore in college, the navy peacoat she wore afterward. She wishes she’d saved all those black linen shirts. All those black skirts of many sizes. Even the vest of many colors. Especially the vest of many colors. She should never have given it away.
* * *
Sometimes she wonders where the polygamist girl lives. If she’s married. If her husband is married to her plus other women. If the wives sew. If the wives have daughters. If the wives and their daughters all wear prairie dresses, look alike. If the wives and their daughters read Proverbs together some nights, by candlelight, after making a pot of stew.
* * *
“There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”
* * *
Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I know such wickedness, you cannot know. I dress plainly in an effort to forgive myself. I strive for nakedness now. I strip myself of all but books. I know the jokes. I am a cliché, living alone, which is no longer a sin.
* * *
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
No one.
No one?
No one answers.
* * *
Once, she stood stirring canned minestrone soup in her light and airy kitchen, thinking about what he’d told her the night before about his wife. How they’d met when they were young. How she was loyal. How it would be too hard to leave someone that loyal.
Are you sure? she had asked.
She’d meant was he sure his wife was loyal, not was he sure it would be hard to leave his wife.
He was sure, he’d said, and unbidden she’d thought, He’st a fool. What a joke.
* * *
At lunch, that first time, she’d worn a brown topcoat that looked, she’d believed, almost sophisticated—the kind of coat you’d see on women running through airports, in a hurry to get somewhere or be somewhere else.
That lightweight coat was a good choice, perfect for all weather, hot and cold, ideal for any occasion. She was, after all, a young woman, wide awake, in transit, running late, leaving one place, bound for another, crossing a line, as all women do, thin as thread.
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.
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