The Back Seat

I named my daughter after my dead grandmother. It bothered people, because it hadn’t been so long since she died and it made people feel uncomfortable to say her name like that, so soon after she died.

This morning I picked up an old friend of hers who needed a ride to the store. Mrs. Solberg’s a proper lady, with a heavy European accent. She’s eighty years old and wears a corset. She dyes her hair platinum blond. From a distance, she looks like Marilyn Monroe, but up close you can tell she’s old.

Mrs. Solberg climbed into my car and looked at me with watery eyes before she turned to address my daughter, strapped into a child-seat in the back. She hesitated before she said, “Hello Augusta.”

I don’t think she knew she hesitated, but I could hear the silence smacking between her lips, along with all those old memories of petty quarrels and attempts at one-upmanship. I knew she hesitated because she was thinking about my grandmother and how she was dead.

Last year they drank coffee together and raised their eyebrows in unison. And that made her think of her own daughter who was also dead, but not yet commemorated by a wide-eyed three year old in the backseat of someone’s car.

I didn’t ask Mrs. Solberg to use the seatbelt, but she buckled herself in anyway before we left the driveway.

Negatives

It is the picture of the bride and groom in black and white that holds Juliet’s attention. She stares at it in the art museum, her eyes wandering over the scene again and again. She chooses it over the pictures of the Tattooed Lady, the Human Pincushion, the shirtless midget smoking in his bed with a half bottle of brandy on the bed stand. The groom in his wool suit presses the bride in her fluffy, white gown against the hotel lobby wall. The wallpaper is cheap. The doorjambs are chipped and broken. The groom presses the bride in this narrow, cheap hallway, his lips jamming against the side of her face. Her eyes are wide, pure white like the tulle veil that attaches to her stylish black hair. Her eyes are made up with perfectly lacquered eyelashes and kohl eyeliner.

The portrait reminds Juliet of the cardboard box left behind the dumpster near her brownstone apartment on Franklin Avenue. It had a company’s logo on the side – something about freshness and fruit written in cheery, orange ink. She didn’t think it had been there too long because the sides weren’t rain soaked from the drizzly, gray rain of autumn. Sitting on her radiator, she spied the box from her third story window that looked over the alley, and the metal dumpster filled with her neighbor’s trash. She knew their trash but never their names.

The box looked out of place. It wasn’t the first or the last of the month. She couldn’t see the familiar torn armchairs or broken television sets left behind by renters escaping to another part of the city. The urge to look inside forced her to run barefoot down three flights of stairs lined in cheap apartment carpet that scratched the soles of her feet. She stood on the damp disorder of the alley without fear of broken glass or sharp stones. Juliet thumbed through stacks of magazines neatly placed in the fruit box – Popular Mechanics, Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle. She pulled each one out and laid them out in the center of the alley like a quilt. All the address labels had been torn off. Underneath a National Geographic from the 1970s, she saw a magazine with a black and white cover. It looked like a Russian Futurist painting with a large black square lined in white. It was untitled.

She pulled back the cover. The spine was weak, suffering from the spidery lines and creases of wear. Pictures were lined up like film from the old photo booths at the mall - a succession of black and white snapshots, one on top of another. She saw a van, some men, a street not unlike the one she lived on with parking meters and paper bags balled up into the gutter. She thumbed through the pages, watching the strips come to life like a film or the flip animation books she used to play with as a kid. Men. A conversion van. Meters. Bricks. A woman. A woman being grabbed by the men. A struggle. An empty warehouse. A naked woman tied with ropes that hung from a rafter. A naked woman with burns on her wrists from struggling to break free. Suspended above the dusty floor, her weight pressed down towards the ground like an exclamation mark. Her mouth was covered in thick slices of duct tape that reflected the heavy, overhead shop lights. It was the bound woman’s eyes that burned their image onto Juliet’s memory. Her eyes that looked to the left, towards the steel barred door. Her eyes wide and stark white, but colored with fear.

Standing in the museum, Juliet sees the black and white photos perfectly framed and hung at eye level. Little squares lined up just like in a photo booth. And at the end of the strip, hung up in corner, is the bride in white whose eyes mirror the anonymous girl staring at the coldness of a barred, metal door.

five year plans

"Don't you want anything out of life?"
Out of life? What was she talking about? Why this, why now?

"I want Cosetta's for breakfast. I want a giant slice of pepperoni and one of those chocolate milk things, I think they're Nesquik, but I suppose any chocolate milk would do."

The look she shot across the double bed was exaggerated, designed to make sure I understood this conversation was of greater significance than mid day meal plans. She wanted more five-year plans, more motivation; this wasn't the first time she had attempted to get me to think about the grand scheme of things. On previous encounters, I had been more or less successful in changing the subject, ducking to the bar for another drink, or complimenting her new shoes. This time though, she had outmaneuvered me. We had just finished a lazy Sunday morning lovemaking session, nowhere to be, no hurry, my favorite. As far as I was concerned, nothing existed outside that small double bed in that small apartment in St. Paul. As far as wanting anything out of life, I was already content.

Now she had me trapped in that small content world. We both knew this. She was however, nothing if not subtle, and so she changed tactics on me. She shifted so that she could rest her chin on my chest and gaze up at me with those beautiful dark eyes,

"Tell me your dreams baby." A little softer this time, but the insinuation was the same, maybe I could bluff her.

"My dream is to someday live on a beach, a beautiful, unspoiled beach. Miles away from anything except sand and water and you, and I want to write. I want to write like Kerouac and Bukowski and Hemmingway. I want to listen to good music at full volume and I want to learn how to cook for you. I want a little dog, a mutt. And someday, just maybe, I want a little boy and a little girl. I want to teach them to surf and to write and to listen to good music and to just appreciate the beauty in life."

Her eyes closed slightly, a playful smile across her face. I just might get out of this after all, so I continued.

"We'll walk the beach every morning holding hands, watching our mutt chase seagulls. We'll lead our own lives during the day, but I'll think of you constantly. I'll make you fresh seafood for dinner, afterwards we'll gaze at the stars, snuggled close on our hammock as the waves crash onto the shore…"

* * * * * * * * *
In the next room, a roommate lays on her bed listening through thin walls as a boy describes his beautiful dreams to his dozing girlfriend. Though their love making earlier sounded enjoyable, the roommate stares sadly at the ceiling thinking of the naïve boy, the dreamer. The dreamer who has no idea his girlfriend is also sleeping with her old high school boyfriend, a successful investment banker with a nice car and a solid five-year plan. The roommate sighs and goes back to being the girl on the other side of the wall.

Disappointment

Let me start this story by telling you precisely why Marsha was disappointed. If I simply stated the plain facts as they were born, you might come to the rather straightforward conclusion that she was jealous. Indeed, most people find themselves in such a position when confronted with infidelity; most people writhe in pain when the face of betrayal plants itself within their notice. Most people would advertise themselves as wronged lovers, faithful recipients of a tragic romance, brokenhearted angels with rapscallion husbands.

But not Marsha.

In the first place, she was too sophisticated to be married. She had politely declined Alan’s offer in their second year of courtship and had instead proposed that they initiate a contract of cohabitation, made official before the landlord when their nine-month lease was signed and dated at a point in time which was, in fact, a total of nine years ago. Marsha felt that marriage was not only an impractical, bourgeois ideal, but also a rather thin pretense for the ownership of sexual and domestic labor. Alan went along with her plan, not because he felt strongly about the principle, but because he found it easier than the amount of thought objecting to it would require.

In the second place, Marsha was too sophisticated to be jealous. Jealousy, she felt, was one of the baser human emotions that had its roots in cooperative farming. In the context of industrialized society, there was no place for jealousy. She felt with great certainty that jealousy had become a cultural phenomenon entirely propagated by fundamentalist groups interested in maintaining classical divisions of labor and a highly stratified social order. To feel the heat and anger of jealousy, she truly believed, would be to accept one’s designated place in the social order. Jealousy was a device for making people cry to have their chains put back on.

And so, when Marsha did encounter evidence of Alan’s infidelity, she had only a split second to decide upon and label that sensation which seemed to sink into her gut.

“Disappointment,” she called it.

By then, Marsha and Alan had had a child together. In the interests of keeping her son out of the public schools (which would ultimately try to brainwash him), Marsha had quit her job as an editor with the local communist paper and had been homeschooling the child for the past three years. The sinking in her gut, called “disappointment,” accompanied her sudden and thorough realization that she and her child were quite dependent on Alan for survival.

Had she been less tired or perhaps in more of a secure position, Marsha would have taken the time to think through her dilemma. However, as she began pouring through the instant messenger transcripts she had accidentally pulled up on her home computer, a generalized panic seemed to overtake the sinking feeling. “Thinking about you…” she read, “wish you were here.”

And so, that afternoon, she made two telephone calls.

The first call, emitted in one harsh and menacing breath, included the simple statement, “You keep away from him, bitch!”

The second call required less thought, read softly as it was from the transcript lying in front of her, “Just thinking about you…wish you were here. Let’s do something special tonight...I’ll put on something silky….”

And then Marsha hung up the phone, reflecting silently on the historical significance of silks in class bondage and female objectification. She spat once onto the floor and stared glumly ahead of her. Her son was still napping in the next room. The theme song for the Maury Povitch Show was playing on TV. Beneath that was the hum of construction off Lake Street.

Marsha was disappointed.

Nina's

She comes to the coffee shop to flirt. She comes to see and be seen, all indirect and discrete. Twenty laptops for eighteen people aged nineteen to twenty eight, and the other two look a lot like grandparents. Count those two out, they’re not part of the game. Thirty six eyes pretend to be working, pretend to be deeply engrossed in their classes, their presentations, their excel sheets, their own lives. Thirty six eyes dart towards the heavy oak door every single time it creaks as it swings open. Thirty six eyes very easily distracted from eighteen very important tasks.

That heavy door creaks and she walks in, sashays in is a more accurate description. She sashays with a hint of strut into a world of coffee and computers and wandering eyes. She walks as if she were in a nightclub and she knows all of the eyes are on her. She scans the room quickly, because she knows it just won’t do to stare. Not on the first pass. She pretends to be looking for a seat, but she’s actually looking for that cute boy with dark hair and sad eyes. She has him pegged for a college student, a lover of wine and alternative pop. She has this feeling that he’s into the Strokes, her favorite band. She doesn’t see him, and so she looks for a seat. The corners are key, optimum viewing with maximum discretion. Second choice are the small tables along the wall, preferably with a view of the front door. Heaven help the poor soul who gets stuck at one of those tables in the middle. That shop over on Selby and Western, by the Cathedral, is her favorite as it has a very small upper balcony with one table high above the crowd. It’s very similar to VIP seating at her favorite club downtown. Above the crowd, removed, it allows her to see everyone and almost no one to see her.

Everyone is dressed up tonight, it’s a Wednesday, and it’s peak night at the coffee houses. The night where the respectable people of the world are definitely not at the bars, but still feeling social in a reserved sort of way. There is very little obvious outward flirting, but on this night, this shop is full of young people searching for someone to hold onto.

Tonight she is lucky, she found an oversized chair in the back. She can curl up feline, the height of indifference, while maintaining direct eye contact with the front door. She can pretend to be bored, read her Kundera, and wait for him to show. Maybe tonight is the night they’ll get past their stolen glances and quick smiles to actual words. She is not optimistic, as there are rules to coffee shop flirting, and the verbal threshold is seldom crossed. There is a strong chance he won’t show at all.

But it is Wednesday night, and she’s always been one of the lucky ones. Thirty-eight eyes dart toward to the heavy oak door as it creaks open, and a youngish student type with dark hair and sad eyes comes in from the autumn night. He scans the room quickly as if looking for a seat, she smiles into her book.

Single Construction

She finds Frankie’s dirty, white socks balled up near the bathtub that drips rust tinted water. Claire knows she’s getting laid by the number of white socks she discovers around the house. All the men she knows wear white socks – Dean, Shane, Billy, and now Frankie. The more time Claire spends with a man trapped beneath the weight of her ratty quilt, the more linty, strips of cotton she discovers scattered around the floor, underneath her double bed, bunched up behind the headboard. Even when the men start leaving their shit over at some other woman’s house, she finds the leftover remnants from their affair in the form of a lone sock without a match. She keeps them in an empty paint bucket under the stairs. Claire swears she’ll make an art project out of them someday, construct a shadow box or large scale montage highlighting the number of failed attempts at relationships by hanging single, dirty socks of men whose lips and limbs she used to feel.