Try Hard
You’ve wanted this for months, to hang out with the neighbors. They are your age, unless a little younger. No way, your boyfriend says, If anything a little older. You met them out on your adjoining balconies the week that you moved in; Ilse had chin-length hair, a warm smile, she was out there watering her potted herbs. Basilicum, munt, peterselie. She reached across the lushness of the plants to shake your hand—offered to take a walk, to show you both the neighborhood.
The next day you all did this, and her boyfriend Jeroen too, and your dog. Afterward you lingered talking in the street, agreed to meet for drinks soon, but then for months: nothing. To your boyfriend, you said, If we had new neighbors who had moved here from another country? We’d have tried way harder than they’re trying here.
Yesterday, still in your pajamas with your unbrushed hair, taking the dog out, you saw Ilse on her way home from a run. You looked away, but maybe she saw you, because then came her message, Free tonight?—and though you and your boyfriend had been planning on a movie, your unspoken agreement was easy: you would cancel and invite them over. Painstakingly you tidied the apartment. Vacuuming behind the sofa, you said: We’re being really try-hard, aren’t we?
When your neighbors turn up late, they make a joke that they got lost. Your boyfriend takes them literally, says, Oh no, did you? You feel it spiking like a fever: the prickly alarm that rises every time you catch him misinterpreting the world. Focus, you want to say to him, They live next door. But you just laugh too loudly at the joke, and take their jackets, and your boyfriend pours the wine with gentle concentration. When Ilse lifts her glass, you see a small ring on her finger. You wonder does it mean something? It’s not so common here, to make a thing of marriage. People buy a house, have kids—get married as an afterthought. You and your boyfriend, eight years uncommitted, sometimes say, We fit right in here, ha! At some point Ilse asks, And where’s your little friend? You’re joking when you say she’s banished—your dog is in the bedroom with the door closed, so she won’t bark at all of you, all night. But something is lost here in translation, and your neighbors only look concerned. Banished!
Later, when they’ve gone, before you fall asleep, you hold your hand out in the lamplight by the bed. You’re thinking of her ring and wondering, again, if you want one of these yourself, unless you never do, not ever. What’s wrong with your hand? your boyfriend says, tipsy, half-interested. You say, your voice a shrug: Just looking. You’ve turned off the lamp when he says through the dark—is he pleased?—When we first met them I was sure you had a crush on her.
You can’t believe sometimes how much he notices. You linger on the verge of saying it was true, at first. Before your hurt about their waning interest crowded out the feeling. But you can’t catch hold of what you want to say, so you just ask, What makes you think that?
Oh, he says—and you hear him rearranging pillows in the dark—Just the energy in the air, but it was fun. Between you in the bed, your dog sighs, honks a long breath through her nose. You are slipping right through your own fingers here. Disoriented, you say: I think this is a sober conversation, not a drunk one?
But in the morning, neither of you speaks of it at all.
Kate Doyle is the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once, published by Algonquin Books in the US and Corsair in the UK and longlisted for The Story Prize in 2024. Her work appears in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Split Lip, Joyland, Chicago Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in the Netherlands.